Lets see, given all of 1 (one) sample of a species, I think that they are close enough (see size distribution within the following species: crocodiles, sharks, armadillos and turtles). What I'd like to know is this: Who (that has any interest in the story at all) doesn't know that they are roughly close enough for this purpose AND would find that bit of info useful for any purpse (such as making a museum quality display case, sight unseen, with no other measurements)?
I can't really comment on 'best', but our users have found that squirrel works pretty well for them. We use it as a frontend to IMAP. The one area it seems to fall flat compared to native clients is for those users that make regular use of drag and drop for sorting messages into folders.
As in the world of trucks (there is always someone with a bigger one), on Slashdot there is always someone with a lower ID, and amung geeks there is always someone older that was running flight simulations on a slide rule. Wait... is that what you ment by geek pissing contests or were you talking about golden showers?
While I agree that carefull, aware, regularly updated wetware can avoid most of the bad problems, I have to take issue with a few of your points (understand this isn't to nitpick just to nitpick, but to point out that absolutes like this aren't realistic):
1) While you may be happy using email strictly as a n ASCII text communications method, many people are not. Specifically, for Average NonTechie Joe to Average Techie Joe, an email attachment is simply the easiest way to get a file from A to B anywhere further than across the office. While it is true that 'never download an email attachment' can be useful as a method of blocking certain infection vectors, the fact is that for many people, this is equivalent to 'fundamentally break email'.
2) While I agree that almost anything would be better than IE, if you really want to go whole hog and avoid the chance of infection, don't you think lynx is better than Firefox? Seriously, I'd phrase this bit simply as 'anything other than IE is better than IE from the standpoint of avoiding infections'.
3) There are many MUAs, and the situation is similar to above - nearly anything is better then Outlook/OutlookExpress. Ideally using an MUA that has no scripting available anywhere as an option would be even better - note that from an infection standpoint, I'd say Pine may be a better choice thank Thunderbird for this reason.
4) Aside from a website that I've created, and the website for my OS vendor (they already own me anyway) and my browser vendor (they already own me anyway), how do I determine that a site is untrustworthy (or the reverse - trustworthy, hence safe to visit) BEFORE I visit it? Honest answer: you can't.
5) So I'll be ordering the Foxfire/Thunderbird/Mozilla CD online using what? IE? And of course I'll never download anything from windowsupdate.microsoft.com. I'm sure you don't mean that only Tucows and download.com can have suspect software, right?
6) And in order to compare zone alarm and sygate I'll buy both via phone or BestBuy and test them out and then just throw away the one I don't use. I've really got to take exception to your last bit on this item - the concept that network level security will keep you safe from infection (NOT what you stated, but what Average NonTech Joe could easily infer from what you did state), is exactly the kind of attitude I have to fight nearly every week at work. Proper network level security does indeed close ONE of many possible vectors for infection. Unfortunately when you say 'guaranteed' some non-trivial portion of the non-techs out there are going to think 'Ok, I can relax now and do whatever I want'. Realistically, for the Average NonTech Joe, I'd just go with the hardware firewall/router/accesscontrol/etc [almost none of them are technically firewalls, even though many of us use that term].
7) Easier said than done. While this is certainly critical to do, and when done right can be transparent, the last time I did this for someone (6 months ago) it was decidedly in the category of 'easy if you know how, but way too easy for a non-tech to break everything during the process'.
8) Aside from the contradiction with #5 (unless you really think a MSDN subscription is appropriate for home users, or that home users are really going to order patches on CD from MS), there can be landmines here (recentish examples: EULA changes, new vectors opened up by the use of newer versions of Windows Media Player, patches that break your system -- not rampant problems, but they do crop up from time to time) . At some level, for the Average NonTech Joe, the simplest practical approach is to just install everything from windowsupdate and cross your fingers that you don't get burned. There isn't a trivial way to know when it is safe to install windowsupdate patches and when it isn't; and mostly the security patches do more good than harm. The hard part is that not everything that says 'Security Patch' really is limited to just that, and not everything that doesn't say 'Security Patch'
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you can't really see any way this can work:
Image representation that is more space efficient than the source. For example, someone uses 2000x2000 GIF file but sets the size on the IMG to be 200x200 (There are people that do this to 'precache' in case you want to look at the full sizes - no it isn't very helpful, but it happens) - resampling that down before sending it will send a lot less data. Also, on a page full of JPGs, if I am willing to waste CPU cycles, I can always recompress them to lower quality. I may, as the viewer, be willing to make the quality tradeoff, but others on a full speed connection don't have to suffer with it (as they would if the page author down-sized)
Bloated HTML. There can be tons of junk - either intentionally (think spammers attempting to get around word matching) or accidentally (certain HTML writers are really much more verbose than they need to be - for example, explicitly listing out every option to a tag even when the defaults are what you want; also it isn't unknown to see two or three different blocks of scripting to handle different browsers)
Significantly long pages. If a page contains 30 screenfulls (yes, poor design, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen - remember that you have no control over the source) but everything I need is on the first two (or first and last), there is no real reason to send all 30 pages to me.
Other reasons where the source material is significantly more data than the resulting rendered text
Obviously this doesn't always work, but in many cases it can work very well.
You aren't to blame for being misled on this issue. NASA, like many other entities, has from time to time felt a need to justify its continued funding. In doing so, they will often bring up the issues of 'spinoffs', but what they tend to do is use a definition of 'develop' that includes 'bought a bunch of and promoted'. While the letter of the law might be satisfied, it is one of those things that is easily misleading for the average citizen.
NASA of course learned this trick from Congress, who tends to define plain English phrases with very specific meanings that are somewhat different from the way the average citizen would read them. Cumulatively this can lead to very misleading laws, when read out of context [the context being the entire body of the law]. This is a bit of a doublewhammy, as the definitions of those phrases can be widely dispersed throughout the body of the law, and are not often backreferenced when they are actually used. There may be rules about how far away the definitions can be, but I don't know what those rules might be.
Re:Antartic...Space?
on
Space-Age Houses
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
NASA developed Tang? That's funny, I thought General Foods developed Tang in 1957 (original USPTO trademark registration #0670697, filed Oct 16, 1957, renewal [current?] #1974439), and NASA was signed into law in 1958.
Re:Sounds perfect for Florida...
on
Space-Age Houses
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The main problem with most plastics is that they have no part in the natural recycling process. That doesn't mean they are structurally intact for ages. Just take a peek at an old car with a cracked plastic dashboard if you think that all plastic is always long lived. Mind you, when you get specific, there are plastics that have a long life - but in and of itself, "as used in construction, plastic is more durable than wood or concrete" is not an open and shut case.
By the way, I want to watch you shuffle on the walls!
space bar and Enter the most used keys? Perhaps on your keyboard. Perhaps on everyone else's keyboard. Not on mine. I'm one of those people that types enough and/or has acidic enough skin oils that I produce noticable wear on any keyboard I use. My Sony laptop keyboard is a bit more than a year old, and suffers mostly from polish [originally matte finish] and print wear. In a few months it will start to show ridging.
Enter and Backspace have about the same level of polish. Space has two areas of polish (interestingly, more on the right thumb than left). Home-row and E-O have more polish than Enter. Interestingly, left Ctrl and Alt are polished, along with right Shift, but their various matching pairs are basically untouched.
So for me, the common letters are more heavily used than Enter - space bar could be a tossup, as it has a larger wear surface, though is not as highly polished.
I was curious about your statement... so I followed the ID-SA link you gave, along to the residential fixtures section. Lo and behold, quite a number of the items there are listed as available at Home Depot and Lowes. Not everything, certainly, and HD & Lowes will have plenty of items that fall into your 'all crap' category I'm sure; but from my desk it would seem that there are choices out there, even without going to a specialty shop.
I don't know the details of Bill Joy & RMS - however I think it is quite unlikely for the GPL to have been created without person X screwing over person Y somewhere along the line, and person Y deciding that 'something must be done about this'. In the long term, I wonder if the GPL or something very similar wasn't inevitable given enough time brewing up in the chaos of a free market of programming work. This doesn't lessen my appreciation of the GPL - after all, just because sunflower seed packing fill a particular niche doesn't mean the pattern is any less elegant.
Shh, you are going to give away the surprise ending, dag nabbit!
Unlike you, I'd be delighted to be decimated - if I get to pick which 10% and the procedure itself doesn't have any side effects. Being a computer geek that's on the road too much, I could even stand to be decimated twice.
Are you actually in IT or just a savvy user that got stuck with "here do this" duty? If it is the second, there is no shame in the error of what you've talked about. Otherwise...
In a very small business (for my purposes, single server, everyone on it, computer support is a part-time job [could be part of a full-time person's responsibility or it could be 'service contract' or it could be an actual part-time position]) - it's quite unlikely that decent security will be in place, even though it is needed just as much as any other business. With larger companies, there will be lapses as well, but that reality doesn't mean that these issues aren't important. To trot out a tired old horse: Just because everyone else does something stupid doesn't per se make it smart to do the same yourself.
with no real incidents - let me rephrase this: you probably mean "no known incidents". The error here is the assumption that only known incidents matter. What users consider to be "a real incident" and what actually can cause loss are two very different things. In my book it is an IT responsibility to deal with/anticipate/cover the gap between those two while minimizing the burden placed on users.
everyone pretty much has equal access anyway Two problems here: First of all, please note the size of the gap between "everyone" and "all current employees of the company". Secondly - it would surprise me to see a company bigger than one person where every employee was truly a peer with a genuine need for equal access (both read and write) to every piece of information in the company.
if something really needs to be "kept away from prying eyes", it's not going on the file server in the first place - If some data/file meets this requirement then it usually also satifites two other conditions: 1.) complete loss of the data is relatively expensive, and 2.) when the person that usually uses that data is on extended vacation/illness then someone else will need to fill that role. All three of those are very strong reasons why the data should be on a server in the first place (backup, network access, better than workstation-level security).
Overall, I hear a lot of arguements similar to this: "We haven't had a problem before, why should we go to the effort to accomidate some security?" and the related "We don't have anything that we really need to secure anyway". There are a few very specialized enviroments where state really doesn't matter - where you could have the entire staff running off CD only machines. For just about every other office, it matters.
Just a handful of things (tasks/files/processes/data/whatever-you-want-to-c all-them) to think about - especially in the context of 'every current employee' vs. 'every human on the planet': payroll, employee reviews, customer payment info, taxes. Nearly every company needs to track (some or all of) these things. Nearly every company must keep these things from being public (readable by everyone on the planet) information. Nearly every company with more than one employee has at least one employee that should not be able to change every single one of those things.
Given all of that, do you really want to suggest that the lowest common security stance amung all employes is really the responsible approach In many cases?
Unlike, of course, my Mom and the parent of just about everyone else I know that the subject as come up... "those" baby pics. Baby nudity in photograph form (please note I didn't say baby or kiddieporn - there is a difference) is (or at least was) a pretty common thing.
Just how many teens can remain peer-cool when Mom brings out "those" baby pics every damn time a friend is over for dinner?
I'm pretty sure that this is the core reason for spammer's obsession with penis length, MILFs and Viagra.
Next you are going to try and convince me that the reason for keeping my (film) camera back on is that all the dark will leak out if I don't. Everyone knows that dark is very sticky and won't leak as long as you use the correct side of the duck tape to keep it in. If you use the shiney side in, however, you will end up with... you guessed it... an over unity magnetic rotary wankle overthruster oscillator! *queue the sound of Zombie Space Pixies eating my brain*
I think this is the dreaded Space Pixies Syndrome - caused annually in the United States by the IRS (no, you don't really need to pay taxes... just tell them so!).
I don't quite understand why there have been half a dozen comments panicing about magnets near harddrives on this story. Maybe that's why people fall for perpetual motion machine hoaxes? Space Pixies confuse them.
I can't say much about the best way to destroy CD-R or CD-RWs, but for hard drives you are wrong.
The smaller (physically) and the bigger (data capacity) that magnetic media gets, the harder it is to destroy (by magnetic field).
Vastly simplified (and too heavily parenthesized) explaination follows: All things being equal, if you pack bits closer together on a magnentic substrate they are more likely to smear into each other causing data loss. To combat that, when increasing bit density, you need to raise the strength of (applied) field required to cause a change in (media) field orientation. This is done primarily by changing the chemistry of the media. In order to overcome this increased resistance to change, you generally will need to either increase field strength in the write head (in most cases this means making the head more massive - as generally you've already used the strongest [field strength to mass ratio] design you can find) -- OR moving the head closer to the media (the usual solution - often this also means making the head smaller {which by the way, makes it more robust in terms of shock resistance not less, contrary to common assumption}).
What all this means is that you generally can't afford to buy an electromagnet capable of erasing a laptop hard drive. You would likely be looking at an industrial power feed from the electric company. In short, a chipper/shredder ment to be fed hard drives is a much cheaper/easer way to do it.
Why do I know about any of this? When we switched from 1600dpi to 6250dpi reel-to-reel tapes for backup, we found that our handheld "bulk tape eraser" wasn't doing anything any more - so I did some reading on why. Now, the hard drive in my laptop isn't much special (Toshiba MK4018GAS) - Toshiba's tech spec for this (pg 11 under General Description) lists a density of 35.1Gbit per square inch. Our reel-to-reel tapes had density listed as a liner spec, not area, so if I take the square root of the drive density -- coming out with a guess of ~187K dpi linear density (this is not quite the right way to go about it, but will do for now). As you can see - roughly a hundred-fold density increase over where the threshold of "bulk tape eraser" will do you much good. I do not know the formulas to calculate the field strength you need to erase at that density - hence the actual size of the electromagnet you would need.
Since you've made idiot plural, I'd suggest you strike the an in order to remove the purality disagreement in the following snippet:
"Never argue with an idiotS... they"
Mind you, I've intentionally salted my own post with 423521 (margin of error: +/- 500,000) errors, just to keep you from knowing which errors are by sheer intent of affrontery and which are genuine mistakes.
Thieves generally (not always) target/exploit low-risk victims. Rich people are not the only ones that are low-risk, though it is fair to assume they are on average higher-reward. Additionally, a non-trivial number of thieves are opportunistic - and if you appear to be a low-risk victim standing next to an opportunistic thief and the conditions are right (feels safe to the thief), then your rich/not-rich status is not likely to make much difference.
Hmmm... mind you that could very well describe the whole human-run expoits (v.s. purely automated ones) relationship between Windows and Linux too.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know AC got mod points. Ya learn something new every day.
Lets see, given all of 1 (one) sample of a species, I think that they are close enough (see size distribution within the following species: crocodiles, sharks, armadillos and turtles). What I'd like to know is this: Who (that has any interest in the story at all) doesn't know that they are roughly close enough for this purpose AND would find that bit of info useful for any purpse (such as making a museum quality display case, sight unseen, with no other measurements)?
I'm not hip, and you are higher numbered than I. What does that say about you?
I don't see why you can't use it when you COPY his car without paying him instead of renting it from him.
I can't really comment on 'best', but our users have found that squirrel works pretty well for them. We use it as a frontend to IMAP. The one area it seems to fall flat compared to native clients is for those users that make regular use of drag and drop for sorting messages into folders.
As in the world of trucks (there is always someone with a bigger one), on Slashdot there is always someone with a lower ID, and amung geeks there is always someone older that was running flight simulations on a slide rule. Wait... is that what you ment by geek pissing contests or were you talking about golden showers?
While I agree that carefull, aware, regularly updated wetware can avoid most of the bad problems, I have to take issue with a few of your points (understand this isn't to nitpick just to nitpick, but to point out that absolutes like this aren't realistic):
1) While you may be happy using email strictly as a n ASCII text communications method, many people are not. Specifically, for Average NonTechie Joe to Average Techie Joe, an email attachment is simply the easiest way to get a file from A to B anywhere further than across the office. While it is true that 'never download an email attachment' can be useful as a method of blocking certain infection vectors, the fact is that for many people, this is equivalent to 'fundamentally break email'.
2) While I agree that almost anything would be better than IE, if you really want to go whole hog and avoid the chance of infection, don't you think lynx is better than Firefox? Seriously, I'd phrase this bit simply as 'anything other than IE is better than IE from the standpoint of avoiding infections'.
3) There are many MUAs, and the situation is similar to above - nearly anything is better then Outlook/OutlookExpress. Ideally using an MUA that has no scripting available anywhere as an option would be even better - note that from an infection standpoint, I'd say Pine may be a better choice thank Thunderbird for this reason.
4) Aside from a website that I've created, and the website for my OS vendor (they already own me anyway) and my browser vendor (they already own me anyway), how do I determine that a site is untrustworthy (or the reverse - trustworthy, hence safe to visit) BEFORE I visit it? Honest answer: you can't.
5) So I'll be ordering the Foxfire/Thunderbird/Mozilla CD online using what? IE? And of course I'll never download anything from windowsupdate.microsoft.com. I'm sure you don't mean that only Tucows and download.com can have suspect software, right?
6) And in order to compare zone alarm and sygate I'll buy both via phone or BestBuy and test them out and then just throw away the one I don't use. I've really got to take exception to your last bit on this item - the concept that network level security will keep you safe from infection (NOT what you stated, but what Average NonTech Joe could easily infer from what you did state), is exactly the kind of attitude I have to fight nearly every week at work. Proper network level security does indeed close ONE of many possible vectors for infection. Unfortunately when you say 'guaranteed' some non-trivial portion of the non-techs out there are going to think 'Ok, I can relax now and do whatever I want'. Realistically, for the Average NonTech Joe, I'd just go with the hardware firewall/router/accesscontrol/etc [almost none of them are technically firewalls, even though many of us use that term].
7) Easier said than done. While this is certainly critical to do, and when done right can be transparent, the last time I did this for someone (6 months ago) it was decidedly in the category of 'easy if you know how, but way too easy for a non-tech to break everything during the process'.
8) Aside from the contradiction with #5 (unless you really think a MSDN subscription is appropriate for home users, or that home users are really going to order patches on CD from MS), there can be landmines here (recentish examples: EULA changes, new vectors opened up by the use of newer versions of Windows Media Player, patches that break your system -- not rampant problems, but they do crop up from time to time) . At some level, for the Average NonTech Joe, the simplest practical approach is to just install everything from windowsupdate and cross your fingers that you don't get burned. There isn't a trivial way to know when it is safe to install windowsupdate patches and when it isn't; and mostly the security patches do more good than harm. The hard part is that not everything that says 'Security Patch' really is limited to just that, and not everything that doesn't say 'Security Patch'
- Image representation that is more space efficient than the source. For example, someone uses 2000x2000 GIF file but sets the size on the IMG to be 200x200 (There are people that do this to 'precache' in case you want to look at the full sizes - no it isn't very helpful, but it happens) - resampling that down before sending it will send a lot less data. Also, on a page full of JPGs, if I am willing to waste CPU cycles, I can always recompress them to lower quality. I may, as the viewer, be willing to make the quality tradeoff, but others on a full speed connection don't have to suffer with it (as they would if the page author down-sized)
- Bloated HTML. There can be tons of junk - either intentionally (think spammers attempting to get around word matching) or accidentally (certain HTML writers are really much more verbose than they need to be - for example, explicitly listing out every option to a tag even when the defaults are what you want; also it isn't unknown to see two or three different blocks of scripting to handle different browsers)
- Significantly long pages. If a page contains 30 screenfulls (yes, poor design, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen - remember that you have no control over the source) but everything I need is on the first two (or first and last), there is no real reason to send all 30 pages to me.
- Other reasons where the source material is significantly more data than the resulting rendered text
Obviously this doesn't always work, but in many cases it can work very well.You aren't to blame for being misled on this issue. NASA, like many other entities, has from time to time felt a need to justify its continued funding. In doing so, they will often bring up the issues of 'spinoffs', but what they tend to do is use a definition of 'develop' that includes 'bought a bunch of and promoted'. While the letter of the law might be satisfied, it is one of those things that is easily misleading for the average citizen.
NASA of course learned this trick from Congress, who tends to define plain English phrases with very specific meanings that are somewhat different from the way the average citizen would read them. Cumulatively this can lead to very misleading laws, when read out of context [the context being the entire body of the law]. This is a bit of a doublewhammy, as the definitions of those phrases can be widely dispersed throughout the body of the law, and are not often backreferenced when they are actually used. There may be rules about how far away the definitions can be, but I don't know what those rules might be.
NASA developed Tang? That's funny, I thought General Foods developed Tang in 1957 (original USPTO trademark registration #0670697, filed Oct 16, 1957, renewal [current?] #1974439), and NASA was signed into law in 1958.
The main problem with most plastics is that they have no part in the natural recycling process. That doesn't mean they are structurally intact for ages. Just take a peek at an old car with a cracked plastic dashboard if you think that all plastic is always long lived. Mind you, when you get specific, there are plastics that have a long life - but in and of itself, "as used in construction, plastic is more durable than wood or concrete" is not an open and shut case.
By the way, I want to watch you shuffle on the walls!
space bar and Enter the most used keys? Perhaps on your keyboard. Perhaps on everyone else's keyboard. Not on mine. I'm one of those people that types enough and/or has acidic enough skin oils that I produce noticable wear on any keyboard I use. My Sony laptop keyboard is a bit more than a year old, and suffers mostly from polish [originally matte finish] and print wear. In a few months it will start to show ridging. Enter and Backspace have about the same level of polish. Space has two areas of polish (interestingly, more on the right thumb than left). Home-row and E-O have more polish than Enter. Interestingly, left Ctrl and Alt are polished, along with right Shift, but their various matching pairs are basically untouched. So for me, the common letters are more heavily used than Enter - space bar could be a tossup, as it has a larger wear surface, though is not as highly polished.
Radagast (sp?) the Brown
I was curious about your statement... so I followed the ID-SA link you gave, along to the residential fixtures section. Lo and behold, quite a number of the items there are listed as available at Home Depot and Lowes. Not everything, certainly, and HD & Lowes will have plenty of items that fall into your 'all crap' category I'm sure; but from my desk it would seem that there are choices out there, even without going to a specialty shop.
I don't know the details of Bill Joy & RMS - however I think it is quite unlikely for the GPL to have been created without person X screwing over person Y somewhere along the line, and person Y deciding that 'something must be done about this'. In the long term, I wonder if the GPL or something very similar wasn't inevitable given enough time brewing up in the chaos of a free market of programming work. This doesn't lessen my appreciation of the GPL - after all, just because sunflower seed packing fill a particular niche doesn't mean the pattern is any less elegant.
Unlike you, I'd be delighted to be decimated - if I get to pick which 10% and the procedure itself doesn't have any side effects. Being a computer geek that's on the road too much, I could even stand to be decimated twice.
Are you quite sure 'decimate' means what you think it means?
In a very small business (for my purposes, single server, everyone on it, computer support is a part-time job [could be part of a full-time person's responsibility or it could be 'service contract' or it could be an actual part-time position]) - it's quite unlikely that decent security will be in place, even though it is needed just as much as any other business. With larger companies, there will be lapses as well, but that reality doesn't mean that these issues aren't important. To trot out a tired old horse: Just because everyone else does something stupid doesn't per se make it smart to do the same yourself.
with no real incidents - let me rephrase this: you probably mean "no known incidents". The error here is the assumption that only known incidents matter. What users consider to be "a real incident" and what actually can cause loss are two very different things. In my book it is an IT responsibility to deal with/anticipate/cover the gap between those two while minimizing the burden placed on users.
everyone pretty much has equal access anyway Two problems here: First of all, please note the size of the gap between "everyone" and "all current employees of the company". Secondly - it would surprise me to see a company bigger than one person where every employee was truly a peer with a genuine need for equal access (both read and write) to every piece of information in the company.
if something really needs to be "kept away from prying eyes", it's not going on the file server in the first place - If some data/file meets this requirement then it usually also satifites two other conditions: 1.) complete loss of the data is relatively expensive, and 2.) when the person that usually uses that data is on extended vacation/illness then someone else will need to fill that role. All three of those are very strong reasons why the data should be on a server in the first place (backup, network access, better than workstation-level security).
Overall, I hear a lot of arguements similar to this: "We haven't had a problem before, why should we go to the effort to accomidate some security?" and the related "We don't have anything that we really need to secure anyway". There are a few very specialized enviroments where state really doesn't matter - where you could have the entire staff running off CD only machines. For just about every other office, it matters.
Just a handful of things (tasks/files/processes/data/whatever-you-want-to-c all-them) to think about - especially in the context of 'every current employee' vs. 'every human on the planet': payroll, employee reviews, customer payment info, taxes. Nearly every company needs to track (some or all of) these things. Nearly every company must keep these things from being public (readable by everyone on the planet) information. Nearly every company with more than one employee has at least one employee that should not be able to change every single one of those things.
Given all of that, do you really want to suggest that the lowest common security stance amung all employes is really the responsible approach In many cases?
Just how many teens can remain peer-cool when Mom brings out "those" baby pics every damn time a friend is over for dinner?
I'm pretty sure that this is the core reason for spammer's obsession with penis length, MILFs and Viagra.
Next you are going to try and convince me that the reason for keeping my (film) camera back on is that all the dark will leak out if I don't. Everyone knows that dark is very sticky and won't leak as long as you use the correct side of the duck tape to keep it in. If you use the shiney side in, however, you will end up with... you guessed it... an over unity magnetic rotary wankle overthruster oscillator! *queue the sound of Zombie Space Pixies eating my brain*
I don't quite understand why there have been half a dozen comments panicing about magnets near harddrives on this story. Maybe that's why people fall for perpetual motion machine hoaxes? Space Pixies confuse them.
The smaller (physically) and the bigger (data capacity) that magnetic media gets, the harder it is to destroy (by magnetic field).
Vastly simplified (and too heavily parenthesized) explaination follows: All things being equal, if you pack bits closer together on a magnentic substrate they are more likely to smear into each other causing data loss. To combat that, when increasing bit density, you need to raise the strength of (applied) field required to cause a change in (media) field orientation. This is done primarily by changing the chemistry of the media. In order to overcome this increased resistance to change, you generally will need to either increase field strength in the write head (in most cases this means making the head more massive - as generally you've already used the strongest [field strength to mass ratio] design you can find) -- OR moving the head closer to the media (the usual solution - often this also means making the head smaller {which by the way, makes it more robust in terms of shock resistance not less, contrary to common assumption}).
What all this means is that you generally can't afford to buy an electromagnet capable of erasing a laptop hard drive. You would likely be looking at an industrial power feed from the electric company. In short, a chipper/shredder ment to be fed hard drives is a much cheaper/easer way to do it.
Why do I know about any of this? When we switched from 1600dpi to 6250dpi reel-to-reel tapes for backup, we found that our handheld "bulk tape eraser" wasn't doing anything any more - so I did some reading on why. Now, the hard drive in my laptop isn't much special (Toshiba MK4018GAS) - Toshiba's tech spec for this (pg 11 under General Description) lists a density of 35.1Gbit per square inch. Our reel-to-reel tapes had density listed as a liner spec, not area, so if I take the square root of the drive density -- coming out with a guess of ~187K dpi linear density (this is not quite the right way to go about it, but will do for now). As you can see - roughly a hundred-fold density increase over where the threshold of "bulk tape eraser" will do you much good. I do not know the formulas to calculate the field strength you need to erase at that density - hence the actual size of the electromagnet you would need.
Since you've made idiot plural, I'd suggest you strike the an in order to remove the purality disagreement in the following snippet:
"Never argue with an idiotS... they"
Mind you, I've intentionally salted my own post with 423521 (margin of error: +/- 500,000) errors, just to keep you from knowing which errors are by sheer intent of affrontery and which are genuine mistakes.
Hmmm... mind you that could very well describe the whole human-run expoits (v.s. purely automated ones) relationship between Windows and Linux too.
Yep, by the same logic that a very empty beach has more people on it than an empty beach does.