I know plenty of people who have money and bad credit. Credit reports have been used for more than a decade to analyze risk in situations like employment. This is nothing new. You don't have to be rich to avoid having bad credit; you merely have to honor your financial obligations. Granted, there are some cases where you can be in good shape and something like sickness appears and the next thing you know, you're in financial trouble.. and this is more of a testimony to the neglect the government has towards the problem with healthcare. If this is the only ding you have on your credit report, employers can note the distinction between a medical related debt and something like consistently missing your mortgage payment.
The sad part is that we're all going to lose because the media control public opinion and they can spew lies and lobby for whatever is in their interests.
I fear the only way to protect peoples' rights is to create some sharp-toothed PAC that is modeled after the NRA that goes after politicians who threaten to take away neutrality rights and promote media consolidation, not unlike how the NRA fights tooth and nail against any form of gun control.
This is just one of many, many issues of privacy violations that have happened in the last year. And the feds seem mainly interested in letting states regulate and report on security breaches. So far only a few states have legislation to notify consumers of database compromises, which is a shame. The sad part is many people may have had their information stolen and they will never know until the information has been exploited, all the while the corporations have been aware of this for a long time and choose not to reveal the violations in fear of a negative PR.
"There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed."
- Bill Gates, 1995
"Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that."
- Bill Gates, 2001
"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operation system, and possible program, of all time."
- Bill Gates, 1987
"There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft."
- Bill Gates
In addition to the other dubious honors, it hasn't been mentioned that Ted Stephens was a principal architect of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which paved the way for the insane consolidation of news, network, print and radio communication companies. The eradication of the Fairness Doctrine and the 1996 Telco Act are to blame for the sorry state of affairs with mainstream media right now, and why things will not get any better until those two laws are corrected.
I'm an independent software developer. My advice to you would be to go independent. There is good money to be made because the larger companies just aren't innovative. Why become a cog in that machine? If you can afford to hang out for many months without a job, you could use the same time to set up a consultancy or get contract jobs or form your own venture. There are lots of possibilities if you're willing to stray from the flock.
I got a question for you... you have a degree in Physics and you've been unemployed for four months. So you sit on your ass and play WOW?
Don't you have anything better to do? With your science knowledge did it ever occur to you to try to use those skills to do something more productive than lose yourself in endless hours of fantasy roleplaying? (I know what it's like; I used to do it and I wish I could take back all the time I pissed away playing Everquest). So can you do us a favor and maybe spend some time coming up with clean energy sources and stuff like that? After we reduce our dependency on foreign oil, chances are you'll have more time to play computer games... it's just a thought. What do you think?
Eve demonstrates the reality that would bite Libertarians on the ass hard if they ever got their way. Think about this the next time you see some dweeb from the CATO institute barfing rhetoric out on news or talk shows.
I think you make a great point. As these MMORPGs become more complicated and begin to mimmick the complexity and social needs of reality, you start to see where the inherent design of the game breaks down.
What's interesting is whether or not those involved in the scam would have just as easily perpetrated it face-to-face with players, whether if something of this nature happened in real life, it could have gone as far, and what that says about people and their virtual lives. Do you trust more in your fake world than you do in your real one? Do you expose the dark side of your nature more in your fake world than the real one? Are these games turning into training grounds where people can fine tune behaviors and social patterns that have legitimate reasons for being repressed?
It's way, WAY premature to start talking about where emphasis is being placed in the rebuilding effort. At this time, virtually nothing is being "rebuilt" - we're still in the tearing down, deciding-what-we're-going-to-do phase. Most of my friends are still trying to get their insurance settlements... they aren't even sure whether they can afford to rebuild, or whether tearing down will be a better option. I know of no area of the city where there is any sanctioned "rebuilding effort" in place, so I don't know what you're talking about.
At this time, the only large scale building going on involves repair to certain areas of the levees where they breeched, and some pumping station work (there's actually no observable efforts to strengthen the already flawed existing system -- and I toured the city only a few hours ago taking pictures).
Let's hope the Telco's equipment also works underwater - or is at least water-proof. Because one thing is sure: New Orleans is going so sink into the ocean rather sooner than later. Just the people (left) living there haven't caught up to the reality, it seems.
Why are ignorant responses like this getting modded up?
New Orleans is not "sinking" by any significant measure. The coastline and wetlands of South Louisiana are eroding, that is true, but all things considered, New Orleans being a few feet (IN SOME AREAS) below sea level is not the precarious dance-with-disaster that some idiots on Fox news may tell you.
If it weren't for the faulty levees built by the Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans would have been fine. The Corps killed the city through their incompetence, and that was before they let things get worse by not acting sooner once the damage had been done. There are levees all over the world that, if they failed, would flood many areas. Rivers swell and man beats them back with levees. Whether you're above or below sea level is moot.
What reality do people living there need to catch up to? Moving into an earthquake, tornado, tsunami, avalanche, mudslide, forest fire, or volcano zone? Boneheaded responses like yours really piss me off. There are natural dangers everywhere, and the people living in New Orleans are no less irresponsible in their choice of where and how to live than any other place in America. In fact, I'd rather have 48 hours warning of impending disaster than wake up in the middle of the night to a 9.0 earthquake!
I can also concurr. I was in the city before, during and after the hurricane. We lost a lot of business post Katrina. Ironically, about half was due to people deciding not to re-open their businesses, and the other half, relocating outside the state. What's interesting is that every client of ours which relocated outside the state didn't take much damage -- they merely availed themselves of the opportunity to jump ship from the state.
The city is a completely different city now. At least 20-30% of the population appears to be permanently gone. I expect New Orleans to look more like Houston in a few years time, with a substantive Mexican population (which was basically non-existent before). And ironically, even with all the immigrant labor around here, half the restaurants and shops are still not open.
As far as tech wiring... during the hurricane, Nagin's technology adviser, Craig Meffert, whom I know to be a very capable guy, set up a very impressive WAN on-the-fly downtown to keep city officials online (I was particularly amused listening to press conferences from Nagin's temporary base downtown in a hotel, with the sound of an APC UPS going off in the background). Ray Nagin, Mayor of New Orleans was previously the president and general manager of Cox Communications, so these weren't typical "politicians". They had their shit together despite what the mainstream media may claim. Even before the feds had anything up and running, the locals had technology deployed and were in communication with critical areas. New Orleans had been working on citywide WIFI long before Katrina, but like everywhere else, the telcos got their panties in a bunch over the prospect.
Also since the city is below sea level, most of the infrastructure wiring, from cable to telephone and fiber was actually run above ground, so it wasn't as difficult to restore after the flood as it would have been if there were more buried cables. I shudder to think how long the communications system would be out if it were all buried -- some areas of New Orleans east were wired below ground, and they're unlikely to get services for a long time, while most areas of the city now have power and communications (even though there may not be many residents there).
I just can't fathom why people are investing IT infrastructures in a sinking city, extremely susceptible to flooding because it's below sea level. Eletronics under several feet of water don't perfrom very well.
I can't fathom why someone would invest in any technology in Silicon Valley or San Francisco, where at any moment with no notice, a huge earthquake would destroy the place. Electronics under several tons of debris don't perform very well.
Every place on the planet has inherent risks. As an ISP in New Orleans, we were affected by the hurricane, but ONLY because the transfer switch malfunctioned. Our servers never lost power the entire time. The truth is, errors by people causesmore problems than "acts of god."
The destruction in New Orleans was caused by the Army Corps of Engineers, not Hurricane Katrina. Most ISPs and other shops were still online after the hurricane passed. It was the failure of substandard levees that was the responsibility of the Federal Government that did the city in. Improper building of any structure, in any location on the planet can cause similar results, above or below sea level.
It seems to me that a better approach is to poison the well. Develop a resident program that sits on the client and randomly initiates background searches on random phrases. This would not necessarily be detectable by Google whatsoever, and would end up making their profile of your search history relatively useless. If enough people used such clients, there wouldn't be much value to them maintaining a database of search query history.
Writing a program of this nature is probably very easy to do. Any takers?
What's interesting now is that we're seeing more spam which seems to imply their market is shrinking. The barrage of penny stock scams only need a handful of morons to participate to drive up the price to a point where they can dump the stock and make money. So when you spam to 100 million e-mail boxes, the law of averages says at least a few dozen idiots might bite and you can take their money via their portfolio.
Date, Mail recieved, Blocked spam Aug 2 00:00:00, 5080, 25147 Aug 3 00:00:00, 4596, 24733 Aug 4 00:00:00, 4243, 27209 Aug 5 00:00:00, 1904, 24784 Aug 6 00:00:00, 2269, 24360 Aug 7 00:00:00, 4725, 32358 Aug 8 00:00:00, 5011, 33012 Aug 9 00:00:00, 5361, 33811
If you look at the stats over the last week for one of my servers, you note that anywhere from 85-91+% of the mail received is spam. This is a huge noise-to-signal ratio, and this doesn't even include a certain percentage of spam which escapes our relay blacklists (we're not using content based filtering so the whole notion of spammers misspelling things to bypass these controls is moot for us).
The point is, spammers use up your resources; your ISP's resources, and your ISP's ISP's resources. All of this translates to higher costs to do business online and reduced efficiency. Any entity that consumes this much resources, at some point, has to find a leak somewhere where the money can flow back in some form to them.
It's kind of like the world's worst band. Even though their music sucks, if they can get enough "airplay" they will always find someone to buy their crap. Since, in the world of spamming, the cost of operation is so cheap (due to stealing, computer tampering and law enforcements apathy towards tracking them down and prosecuting them), there's a good enough margin so that there's money to be made.
Most people don't realize how much traffic on the internet is "noise". I'd estimate that at least half -- half (maybe more like 70-80%) of all internet traffic is completely unsolicited crap consisting of spam e-mail and automated http and port scanning traffic. It's mostly e-mail, but if you look at logs from any web, ssh or ftp server, you'll see a never ending stream of port scans as well. If we could eliminate this bogus traffic, the Internet would be 3-10+ times faster without any infrastructure upgrades.
Contact your local attorney general. Tell them you demand that they take action against spammers and people who tamper with others' computers. This is a felony. Why the feds aren't prosecuting, who knows? But there are plenty of perpetrators that are easily tracked down in domestic jurisdictions.
This is what happens when you hire programmers who don't know the best tool for the job. It's everywhere in the tech field today unfortunately. People design applications, not after a search of what technology is best suited, but based on what narrow area of expertise they have.
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite is:
Digg: Hey, cool, someone wrote an article about Digg!
I'd add to that also, "btw, here's a story from three years ago on the front page!"
I know plenty of people who have money and bad credit. Credit reports have been used for more than a decade to analyze risk in situations like employment. This is nothing new. You don't have to be rich to avoid having bad credit; you merely have to honor your financial obligations. Granted, there are some cases where you can be in good shape and something like sickness appears and the next thing you know, you're in financial trouble.. and this is more of a testimony to the neglect the government has towards the problem with healthcare. If this is the only ding you have on your credit report, employers can note the distinction between a medical related debt and something like consistently missing your mortgage payment.
The sad part is that we're all going to lose because the media control public opinion and they can spew lies and lobby for whatever is in their interests.
This was done with the Fairness Doctrine and the 1996 Telco Act which paved the way for even more corporate control.
I fear the only way to protect peoples' rights is to create some sharp-toothed PAC that is modeled after the NRA that goes after politicians who threaten to take away neutrality rights and promote media consolidation, not unlike how the NRA fights tooth and nail against any form of gun control.
This is just one of many, many issues of privacy violations that have happened in the last year. And the feds seem mainly interested in letting states regulate and report on security breaches. So far only a few states have legislation to notify consumers of database compromises, which is a shame. The sad part is many people may have had their information stolen and they will never know until the information has been exploited, all the while the corporations have been aware of this for a long time and choose not to reveal the violations in fear of a negative PR.
"There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed."
- Bill Gates, 1995
"Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that."
- Bill Gates, 2001
"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operation system, and possible program, of all time."
- Bill Gates, 1987
"There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft."
- Bill Gates
In addition to the other dubious honors, it hasn't been mentioned that Ted Stephens was a principal architect of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which paved the way for the insane consolidation of news, network, print and radio communication companies. The eradication of the Fairness Doctrine and the 1996 Telco Act are to blame for the sorry state of affairs with mainstream media right now, and why things will not get any better until those two laws are corrected.
I'm an independent software developer. My advice to you would be to go independent. There is good money to be made because the larger companies just aren't innovative. Why become a cog in that machine? If you can afford to hang out for many months without a job, you could use the same time to set up a consultancy or get contract jobs or form your own venture. There are lots of possibilities if you're willing to stray from the flock.
I got a question for you... you have a degree in Physics and you've been unemployed for four months. So you sit on your ass and play WOW?
Don't you have anything better to do? With your science knowledge did it ever occur to you to try to use those skills to do something more productive than lose yourself in endless hours of fantasy roleplaying? (I know what it's like; I used to do it and I wish I could take back all the time I pissed away playing Everquest). So can you do us a favor and maybe spend some time coming up with clean energy sources and stuff like that? After we reduce our dependency on foreign oil, chances are you'll have more time to play computer games... it's just a thought. What do you think?
Eve demonstrates the reality that would bite Libertarians on the ass hard if they ever got their way. Think about this the next time you see some dweeb from the CATO institute barfing rhetoric out on news or talk shows.
I think you make a great point. As these MMORPGs become more complicated and begin to mimmick the complexity and social needs of reality, you start to see where the inherent design of the game breaks down.
What's interesting is whether or not those involved in the scam would have just as easily perpetrated it face-to-face with players, whether if something of this nature happened in real life, it could have gone as far, and what that says about people and their virtual lives. Do you trust more in your fake world than you do in your real one? Do you expose the dark side of your nature more in your fake world than the real one? Are these games turning into training grounds where people can fine tune behaviors and social patterns that have legitimate reasons for being repressed?
It's way, WAY premature to start talking about where emphasis is being placed in the rebuilding effort. At this time, virtually nothing is being "rebuilt" - we're still in the tearing down, deciding-what-we're-going-to-do phase. Most of my friends are still trying to get their insurance settlements... they aren't even sure whether they can afford to rebuild, or whether tearing down will be a better option. I know of no area of the city where there is any sanctioned "rebuilding effort" in place, so I don't know what you're talking about.
At this time, the only large scale building going on involves repair to certain areas of the levees where they breeched, and some pumping station work (there's actually no observable efforts to strengthen the already flawed existing system -- and I toured the city only a few hours ago taking pictures).
Let's hope the Telco's equipment also works underwater - or is at least water-proof.
Because one thing is sure: New Orleans is going so sink into the ocean rather sooner than later. Just the people (left) living there haven't caught up to the reality, it seems.
Why are ignorant responses like this getting modded up?
New Orleans is not "sinking" by any significant measure. The coastline and wetlands of South Louisiana are eroding, that is true, but all things considered, New Orleans being a few feet (IN SOME AREAS) below sea level is not the precarious dance-with-disaster that some idiots on Fox news may tell you.
If it weren't for the faulty levees built by the Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans would have been fine. The Corps killed the city through their incompetence, and that was before they let things get worse by not acting sooner once the damage had been done. There are levees all over the world that, if they failed, would flood many areas. Rivers swell and man beats them back with levees. Whether you're above or below sea level is moot.
What reality do people living there need to catch up to? Moving into an earthquake, tornado, tsunami, avalanche, mudslide, forest fire, or volcano zone? Boneheaded responses like yours really piss me off. There are natural dangers everywhere, and the people living in New Orleans are no less irresponsible in their choice of where and how to live than any other place in America. In fact, I'd rather have 48 hours warning of impending disaster than wake up in the middle of the night to a 9.0 earthquake!
I can also concurr. I was in the city before, during and after the hurricane. We lost a lot of business post Katrina. Ironically, about half was due to people deciding not to re-open their businesses, and the other half, relocating outside the state. What's interesting is that every client of ours which relocated outside the state didn't take much damage -- they merely availed themselves of the opportunity to jump ship from the state.
The city is a completely different city now. At least 20-30% of the population appears to be permanently gone. I expect New Orleans to look more like Houston in a few years time, with a substantive Mexican population (which was basically non-existent before). And ironically, even with all the immigrant labor around here, half the restaurants and shops are still not open.
As far as tech wiring... during the hurricane, Nagin's technology adviser, Craig Meffert, whom I know to be a very capable guy, set up a very impressive WAN on-the-fly downtown to keep city officials online (I was particularly amused listening to press conferences from Nagin's temporary base downtown in a hotel, with the sound of an APC UPS going off in the background). Ray Nagin, Mayor of New Orleans was previously the president and general manager of Cox Communications, so these weren't typical "politicians". They had their shit together despite what the mainstream media may claim. Even before the feds had anything up and running, the locals had technology deployed and were in communication with critical areas. New Orleans had been working on citywide WIFI long before Katrina, but like everywhere else, the telcos got their panties in a bunch over the prospect.
Also since the city is below sea level, most of the infrastructure wiring, from cable to telephone and fiber was actually run above ground, so it wasn't as difficult to restore after the flood as it would have been if there were more buried cables. I shudder to think how long the communications system would be out if it were all buried -- some areas of New Orleans east were wired below ground, and they're unlikely to get services for a long time, while most areas of the city now have power and communications (even though there may not be many residents there).
I just can't fathom why people are investing IT infrastructures in a sinking city, extremely susceptible to flooding because it's below sea level. Eletronics under several feet of water don't perfrom very well.
I can't fathom why someone would invest in any technology in Silicon Valley or San Francisco, where at any moment with no notice, a huge earthquake would destroy the place. Electronics under several tons of debris don't perform very well.
Every place on the planet has inherent risks. As an ISP in New Orleans, we were affected by the hurricane, but ONLY because the transfer switch malfunctioned. Our servers never lost power the entire time. The truth is, errors by people causesmore problems than "acts of god."
The destruction in New Orleans was caused by the Army Corps of Engineers, not Hurricane Katrina. Most ISPs and other shops were still online after the hurricane passed. It was the failure of substandard levees that was the responsibility of the Federal Government that did the city in. Improper building of any structure, in any location on the planet can cause similar results, above or below sea level.
You don't understand. A "Microsoft year" is different from a regular year. So it's all good.
...Fox announced that their news network was "Fair and Balanced".
If you're running norton you've got bigger problems than this worm.
I think it's time we "brought freedom" to China.
I know a lot of scientific instruments that need minesweeper running concurrently.
It seems to me that a better approach is to poison the well. Develop a resident program that sits on the client and randomly initiates background searches on random phrases. This would not necessarily be detectable by Google whatsoever, and would end up making their profile of your search history relatively useless. If enough people used such clients, there wouldn't be much value to them maintaining a database of search query history.
Writing a program of this nature is probably very easy to do. Any takers?
What's interesting now is that we're seeing more spam which seems to imply their market is shrinking. The barrage of penny stock scams only need a handful of morons to participate to drive up the price to a point where they can dump the stock and make money. So when you spam to 100 million e-mail boxes, the law of averages says at least a few dozen idiots might bite and you can take their money via their portfolio.
Here's my last week's stats:
Date, Mail recieved, Blocked spam
Aug 2 00:00:00, 5080, 25147
Aug 3 00:00:00, 4596, 24733
Aug 4 00:00:00, 4243, 27209
Aug 5 00:00:00, 1904, 24784
Aug 6 00:00:00, 2269, 24360
Aug 7 00:00:00, 4725, 32358
Aug 8 00:00:00, 5011, 33012
Aug 9 00:00:00, 5361, 33811
If you look at the stats over the last week for one of my servers, you note that anywhere from 85-91+% of the mail received is spam. This is a huge noise-to-signal ratio, and this doesn't even include a certain percentage of spam which escapes our relay blacklists (we're not using content based filtering so the whole notion of spammers misspelling things to bypass these controls is moot for us).
The point is, spammers use up your resources; your ISP's resources, and your ISP's ISP's resources. All of this translates to higher costs to do business online and reduced efficiency. Any entity that consumes this much resources, at some point, has to find a leak somewhere where the money can flow back in some form to them.
It's kind of like the world's worst band. Even though their music sucks, if they can get enough "airplay" they will always find someone to buy their crap. Since, in the world of spamming, the cost of operation is so cheap (due to stealing, computer tampering and law enforcements apathy towards tracking them down and prosecuting them), there's a good enough margin so that there's money to be made.
Most people don't realize how much traffic on the internet is "noise". I'd estimate that at least half -- half (maybe more like 70-80%) of all internet traffic is completely unsolicited crap consisting of spam e-mail and automated http and port scanning traffic. It's mostly e-mail, but if you look at logs from any web, ssh or ftp server, you'll see a never ending stream of port scans as well. If we could eliminate this bogus traffic, the Internet would be 3-10+ times faster without any infrastructure upgrades.
Contact your local attorney general. Tell them you demand that they take action against spammers and people who tamper with others' computers. This is a felony. Why the feds aren't prosecuting, who knows? But there are plenty of perpetrators that are easily tracked down in domestic jurisdictions.
This is what happens when you hire programmers who don't know the best tool for the job. It's everywhere in the tech field today unfortunately. People design applications, not after a search of what technology is best suited, but based on what narrow area of expertise they have.
It's also worth noting that according to the reports, the now "un-supported" Win98/ME OS is not vulnerable to these exploits.
Fatassia has a nice ring to it.