I don't know what most carriers use these days for a failover solution for collecting usage data records, but as recently as 10 years ago it was not unusual (probably typical) for switches to export CDRs directly to tape. So if the switch was up and connecting calls then all you needed was enough tape and you wouldn't lose any calls. The tapes were read off-line and processed through reformatters, filters, and then on to billing.
And this story breaks the evening after I notice that a large bank that I shall not name, but instead refer to "Bank of America", changes their SiteKey/Login page so that it now loads Javascript from a domain other than bankofamerica.com : "liveperson.net".
I only noticed this because my "NoScript" Firefox extension started showing the "Script partially allowed" message.
Now, I'm no expert, but I do know that Javascript has a bit of a spotty history when it comes to security. Having looked into liverperson.net it appears to be legit ; but in any case, I did not allow it access.
But my question is this : why on earth do BofA think it makes sense to link off-site during the login process ? Surely this is completely nuts ?
Are you seriously suggesting that segregation was brought to an end because of the moon program, and not because of the work of MLK and the civil rights movement ? That is an interesting and, in my experience, unusual point of view.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my first post. Fundamentally, I have no problem with India spending their own money how they want. But while they are accepting international aid, I do.
If you reread my original post, you'll see that I don't advocate massive infusions of cash, so I don't know where you got that idea from. What I'm saying is that India should spend their OWN money more wisely. And I agee with you that money isn't the answer, it's down to rooting out corruption, building infrastructure, education, and inspiring people. But moonshot addresses only one of those four items.
When a country starts doing stuff like moonshots and nuclear missiles, they've well and truly joined an elite club of nations. As far as I'm concerned at that point ALL aid should be cut off.
and in particular read the last two paragraphs, and you'll see what I'm getting at : India is moving in the right direction, and rightly so, but they are doing it somewhat at the expense of leaving basic infrastructure behind.
That's what I see as being a mistake.
Once India stops accepting ALL international aid, then they can truly say that they are on their own. In the meantime though, it's a case of talking the talk, but not walking the walk.
But all said, no, I don't pay taxes in India, but some of the taxes I do pay DO end up in Indian coffers via aid, so I don't give I flying fuck whether any Indians, or you, give a flying fuck what I think.
Judging by your username I'm guessing that you are Indian. If so, I'm wondering how much international travel you have done. Have you been to places like the USA, Canada, UK, Western Europe, Australia ? If you did go to those places did you actually open your eyes and look around. I ask this because I have been to all those places, and many others, including India ; based on what I saw, I say that to even begin to compare the level of widespread poverty in India to any of the aforementioned places is simply dumb. Even the poorest people in those countries are, in a materialistic context, orders of magnitude richer and comfortable than a very significant section of the Indian population.
Sure, relative levels of poverty and prosperity may indeed be greater on other "developed" countries, but when you are talking about world issues (i.e. internation aid) then you really do need to talk in absolute terms.
It's OK to have dreams and it's OK to step a little ahead to give people inspiration, but a moonshot ? Come on ! Pumping billlions of dollars into a moonshot while you have millions of people without access to clean water is, quite frankly, offensive to me. Yes, I know this is subjective and you could draw parallels in other countries, but you have to draw the line in the sand somewhere, and that's where I've drawn mine.
Walk before you can run. When you can walk, try skipping and hopping and maybe a handstand or a cart-wheel. But right now, trying to fly is a little premature.
Did I read this correctly ? They paid their lawyer 38 grand to get this pointless, invalid, and unenforceable judgement ? What a bunch of dumb-asses.
Linhardt also shows us what an amazing knucklehead he is when he says "Spamhaus.org is a... organization that operates in the United States". Um. No it's not. But at least he demonstrates that his grasp of world geography is on a par with the average US high school "graduate".
>> So what if these sentinnels of "guardian angels" themselves have some flaws which these viruses exploit.
A valid point but the rest of your points don't hold water. It would be nice if they did, but I think you're being a bit idealistic.
>> How about spending some money on training developers to practise safe coding.
Many developers are stupid and not well trained, and hence cheaper than good coders. Many big businesses always go with the lowest bidder. Therefore bad coders will always be around.
>> How about educating average joe to not click on the Britney's image and let him know that she is not going to blow him?
Joe Average is pretty gullible when it comes to these things. That's something you just can't change. You might be able to raise the level of awareness but you'll never eliminate irresponsible or risky behaviour.
>> How about lobbying to pass laws to force software companies to pass a higher standard?
OK pass a law in the USA. Pass a law in the EU. Now try enforcing that worldwide. It's not going to happen. In any case, all you'd achieve is driving business away from USA and EU where companies don't have to comply and can do their work with less regulatory interference, and hence at a lower cost.
>> Heck even children toys have certain standards that the companies have to adhere to.
Yes, you can enforce consumer laws on a country-wide basis, but you can't enforce this with software in what is an essentially open network that crosses international borders.
There is no magic bullet for fixing the problems we have today - fighting viruses and spam is a journey, not a destination. That said, personal computers need to be much easier to use in a safe manner. I like to say that a PC should be as easy to use as a radio : you turn it on and it works ; if you don't like something you change stations, but it can never do anything bad to you.
>>You can use the Sony rootkit itself to bypass their own DRM!"
Isn't that a DMCA violation ? Sony had better do something about this by suing... uh... Sony.
Apparently their new business model is something like this : (Cue Underpant Gnomes)
1. Release rootkit into the wild, including ability for it to bypass your own copy protection. 2. ? 3. Sue self into oblivion. Wait, shouldn't item 3 be "Profit" ?
>> BUT evolution, based on fossil evidence is a soft science at best. YOU CAN'T DO EXPERIMENTS
"You can't do experiments"... oh really ? I can only assume that you have a very poor understanding of evolution. It's actually quite easy to do experiments. A popular beast used in evolutionary experiments is the fruit-fly, largely due to it's short life cycle.
>>First of all, i'm talking about Qwest here. Not some random shady company.
Irrelevant, and in any case the vast majority of telemarketing calls do not come from a "random shady company", they come from well established multinationals and well established local neighborhood companies.
>>I'm talking about people who follow the rules.
Oh really. You don't say anything about that when you say when you say things like "Messing with telemarketers does not get them to stop calling you. No matter how many times you call them a fag or ask them what they're wearing or hang up on them or ask them how they'd like it if you called them during dinner, they're still going to call back. JUST TELL THEM TO TAKE YOU OFF THEIR FUCKING LIST.". That pretty clearly says that the problem lies with the recipients of the calls, and says nothing at all about "people who follow the rules". In any case, if everyone followed the rules then it wouldn't be a problem and this wouldn't be on slashdot in the first place.
>>And if you read my post, sharpest knife in the drawer, you'll see that Qwest only calls people who are already their customers. So the business relationship has already begun.
You clearly still don't get it. Here is the point : if you piss-off people, be they current customers or potential customers, then they are less likely to do business with you.
I return to my bricks-and-mortar example : if I insult only my existing customers, does that make it any more sensible or good for my business ? Obviously not.
Your point about profitability is only somewhat valid. By looking at profit statistics churned out by bean counters you are only seeing one side of the equation : it is pretty easy to measure the profit you make by doing telemarketing, but it is totally impossible to quantitatively measure how much business you lose by annoying all the folks who would have done business with you, since they are already existing customers, but now don't, because you called them at home six days in row in the middle of The Simpsons. You can only estimate how much profit you lose, ultimately it is unknowable. But they probably didn't teach you that at The University of Telemarketing.
Here is the bottom line : annoying your customer base, especially your established customer base, is bad for business in the long term. Telemarketing falls into that bracket : if it did not then we would not be seeing so many people sign up for DNC lists. Just because it is legal, and makes some profit, and *looks like* good business, does not mean it really is good business.
You pretty much ignored my comment about the fact that some companies ignore your instructions to put you on their DNC list ? Oh wow, look at that, a telemarketer ignoring what the other party says : now that's a big shock. Not. Go and get deprogrammed, they did a good job on you.
That's our first clue. You're not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, are you ?
>>I realise we were bothering them...
OK. Pause for a second there and think : YOU are BOTHERING them. Is that a good way to attempt to begin a business relationship ? Clearly not.
>...or how incredibly simple it is to get us to stop calling back.
You must be one of the very few people who have never told a company to not call and been ignored. Many companies just ignore what you say. I had to report one company to my state DNC three times before they got the message through their thick skulls.
>>... you're on the DNC list, but we're still legally allowed to call you.
You dickhead. Just because it is legal does not mean it is good business.
If I own a bricks and mortar business, I am legally allowed to insult people who walk through the door to buy things from me. Come to think of it, I could go out on the sidewalk and yell derogatory comments at people walking by, in the hope that they will enter my store and buy things from them. What a brilliant plan ! So, what do you think : by insulting them, am I going to increase or decrease my sales ? If they ask me to not insult them and I then do it again, is THAT going to increase or decrease my sales ? Do you get it yet ?
>>Messing with telemarketers does not get them to stop calling you. No matter how many times you call them a fag or ask them what they're wearing or hang up on them or ask them how they'd like it if you called them during dinner, they're still going to call back.
OMFG, you really are a numb-buts aren't you ? Look, if the called party doesn't want to speak to you, that means they don't want to do business with you. And they will want to do business with you even less the the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th times you call.
I don't get many solicitations these days, but when I do the company goes into a black book, and I never do business with them again.
For most folks there is a simple answer to the cost of inkjet cartridges : don't buy them. Instead, buy a monochrome laser printer. Lasers are much cheaper to run. The toner might cost more, but lasts long enough that you actually spend a tiny fraction of what you would have spent on inkjet cartridges. For color photo prints, have those done by a warehouse club - it is cheaper than printing your own, and you generally get better results and spend less time on it.
Even if you ignore the issue of the 3 mile versus 12 mile territorial water, and the fact that any company using them would be exposing themselves to massive risk (e.g. what happens when the company runs out of money / ship sinks due to hurricane etc) there is still the problem of letting the staff visit the USA for shore leave. Most of these folks would be coming from countries that do not have visa-waivers (do those still even exist post 9/11 ?), such as the UK. This means they would either have to get a visa for every time they wanted to visit the USA, which they're not going to get, or get a multiple entry visa, which again, in a lot of cases, they're not going to get. So it would be extremely difficult for the vast majority of the staff to visit the USA... unless they chose to enter via Mexico of course...
You can overcome the 100 foot limitation by tunneling it over traditional phone lines, or even VOIP lines, although you may require a speakerphone at the other end. Another tunneling option might be this http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt, but I suspect there may be some latency issues.
BBC Radio 4 has a wealth of excellent radio covering everything from geeky things like history, science, medicine, to less geeky things such as comedy and the arts, and much more.
1. Look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/
2. Figure out how to get the audio saved to your hard drive (it's easier than you might think)
Two minutes after seeing this story I picked up an old copy of New Scientist magazine from August 21-27 2004... on page 22 (of the US edition) there's a reference to a CD player designed specifically for the visually impaired : "Symphony Radio" from Roberts.
It has an audible radio tuner, and keeps bookmarks for CDs. The downside is that it's not at all cheap by today's prices, especially for US consumers having to deal with the poor exchange rate with the British Pound. Also it would have been nice if it played MP3s too. Still, I expect that many visually impaired folks would find this a big improvement over regular players.
Let's hope that in future there will be an improved version of this that plays MP3s and also allows flash memory cards to be plugged in.
Disclaimer : I'm not in any way involved with Roberts Radio, The British Wireless for the Blind Fund, or any other interested parties.
Slashdot Mirror
Just wait for systemd-geditd
Never rebooting eh ? Make sure you are using ECC memory...
http://lambda-diode.com/opinion/ecc-memory
I agree.
I don't know what most carriers use these days for a failover solution for collecting usage data records, but as recently as 10 years ago it was not unusual (probably typical) for switches to export CDRs directly to tape. So if the switch was up and connecting calls then all you needed was enough tape and you wouldn't lose any calls. The tapes were read off-line and processed through reformatters, filters, and then on to billing.
And this story breaks the evening after I notice that a large bank that I shall not name, but instead refer to "Bank of America", changes their SiteKey/Login page so that it now loads Javascript from a domain other than bankofamerica.com : "liveperson.net".
I only noticed this because my "NoScript" Firefox extension started showing the "Script partially allowed" message.
Now, I'm no expert, but I do know that Javascript has a bit of a spotty history when it comes to security. Having looked into liverperson.net it appears to be legit ; but in any case, I did not allow it access.
But my question is this : why on earth do BofA think it makes sense to link off-site during the login process ? Surely this is completely nuts ?
Totally agree.
I don't think cutting off aid will make them spend more on sanitation, you're right - it just won't happen.
Are you seriously suggesting that segregation was brought to an end because of the moon program, and not because of the work of MLK and the civil rights movement ? That is an interesting and, in my experience, unusual point of view.
I suggest you go and read a few history books.
Or start online here http://www.thekingcenter.org/
Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my first post. Fundamentally, I have no problem with India spending their own money how they want. But while they are accepting international aid, I do.
: www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2003/0708india.ht m+international+aid+to+india&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&c d=1
If you reread my original post, you'll see that I don't advocate massive infusions of cash, so I don't know where you got that idea from. What I'm saying is that India should spend their OWN money more wisely. And I agee with you that money isn't the answer, it's down to rooting out corruption, building infrastructure, education, and inspiring people. But moonshot addresses only one of those four items.
When a country starts doing stuff like moonshots and nuclear missiles, they've well and truly joined an elite club of nations. As far as I'm concerned at that point ALL aid should be cut off.
Take two minutes to read this :
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:jDa-SrO-6sYJ
and in particular read the last two paragraphs, and you'll see what I'm getting at : India is moving in the right direction, and rightly so, but they are doing it somewhat at the expense of leaving basic infrastructure behind.
That's what I see as being a mistake.
Once India stops accepting ALL international aid, then they can truly say that they are on their own. In the meantime though, it's a case of talking the talk, but not walking the walk.
But all said, no, I don't pay taxes in India, but some of the taxes I do pay DO end up in Indian coffers via aid, so I don't give I flying fuck whether any Indians, or you, give a flying fuck what I think.
Judging by your username I'm guessing that you are Indian. If so, I'm wondering how much international travel you have done. Have you been to places like the USA, Canada, UK, Western Europe, Australia ? If you did go to those places did you actually open your eyes and look around. I ask this because I have been to all those places, and many others, including India ; based on what I saw, I say that to even begin to compare the level of widespread poverty in India to any of the aforementioned places is simply dumb. Even the poorest people in those countries are, in a materialistic context, orders of magnitude richer and comfortable than a very significant section of the Indian population.
Sure, relative levels of poverty and prosperity may indeed be greater on other "developed" countries, but when you are talking about world issues (i.e. internation aid) then you really do need to talk in absolute terms.
It's OK to have dreams and it's OK to step a little ahead to give people inspiration, but a moonshot ? Come on !
Pumping billlions of dollars into a moonshot while you have millions of people without access to clean water is, quite frankly, offensive to me. Yes, I know this is subjective and you could draw parallels in other countries, but you have to draw the line in the sand somewhere, and that's where I've drawn mine.
Walk before you can run. When you can walk, try skipping and hopping and maybe a handstand or a cart-wheel. But right now, trying to fly is a little premature.
In British English, the use of -ise rather than -ize is more popular, but both are valid.
p elling/ize
American English uses -ize as a standard.
http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/abouts
Did I read this correctly ? They paid their lawyer 38 grand to get this pointless, invalid, and unenforceable judgement ? What a bunch of dumb-asses.
... organization that operates in the United States". Um. No it's not. But at least he demonstrates that his grasp of world geography is on a par with the average US high school "graduate".
Linhardt also shows us what an amazing knucklehead he is when he says "Spamhaus.org is a
>> So what if these sentinnels of "guardian angels" themselves have some flaws which these viruses exploit.
A valid point but the rest of your points don't hold water. It would be nice if they did, but I think you're being a bit idealistic.
>> How about spending some money on training developers to practise safe coding.
Many developers are stupid and not well trained, and hence cheaper than good coders. Many big businesses always go with the lowest bidder. Therefore bad coders will always be around.
>> How about educating average joe to not click on the Britney's image and let him know that she is not going to blow him?
Joe Average is pretty gullible when it comes to these things. That's something you just can't change. You might be able to raise the level of awareness but you'll never eliminate irresponsible or risky behaviour.
>> How about lobbying to pass laws to force software companies to pass a higher standard?
OK pass a law in the USA. Pass a law in the EU. Now try enforcing that worldwide. It's not going to happen. In any case, all you'd achieve is driving business away from USA and EU where companies don't have to comply and can do their work with less regulatory interference, and hence at a lower cost.
>> Heck even children toys have certain standards that the companies have to adhere to.
Yes, you can enforce consumer laws on a country-wide basis, but you can't enforce this with software in what is an essentially open network that crosses international borders.
There is no magic bullet for fixing the problems we have today - fighting viruses and spam is a journey, not a destination. That said, personal computers need to be much easier to use in a safe manner. I like to say that a PC should be as easy to use as a radio : you turn it on and it works ; if you don't like something you change stations, but it can never do anything bad to you.
Just a post to remove a fat-fingered moderation to this perfectly good comment. Doh !
>>You can use the Sony rootkit itself to bypass their own DRM!"
... uh ... Sony.
Isn't that a DMCA violation ? Sony had better do something about this by suing
Apparently their new business model is something like this : (Cue Underpant Gnomes)
1. Release rootkit into the wild, including ability for it to bypass your own copy protection.
2. ?
3. Sue self into oblivion. Wait, shouldn't item 3 be "Profit" ?
>> BUT evolution, based on fossil evidence is a soft science at best. YOU CAN'T DO EXPERIMENTS
"You can't do experiments"... oh really ? I can only assume that you have a very poor understanding of evolution. It's actually quite easy to do experiments. A popular beast used in evolutionary experiments is the fruit-fly, largely due to it's short life cycle.
>>First of all, i'm talking about Qwest here. Not some random shady company.
Irrelevant, and in any case the vast majority of telemarketing calls do not come from a "random shady company", they come from well established multinationals and well established local neighborhood companies.
>>I'm talking about people who follow the rules.
Oh really. You don't say anything about that when you say when you say things like "Messing with telemarketers does not get them to stop calling you. No matter how many times you call them a fag or ask them what they're wearing or hang up on them or ask them how they'd like it if you called them during dinner, they're still going to call back. JUST TELL THEM TO TAKE YOU OFF THEIR FUCKING LIST.". That pretty clearly says that the problem lies with the recipients of the calls, and says nothing at all about "people who follow the rules". In any case, if everyone followed the rules then it wouldn't be a problem and this wouldn't be on slashdot in the first place.
>>And if you read my post, sharpest knife in the drawer, you'll see that Qwest only calls people who are already their customers. So the business relationship has already begun.
You clearly still don't get it. Here is the point : if you piss-off people, be they current customers or potential customers, then they are less likely to do business with you.
I return to my bricks-and-mortar example : if I insult only my existing customers, does that make it any more sensible or good for my business ? Obviously not.
Your point about profitability is only somewhat valid. By looking at profit statistics churned out by bean counters you are only seeing one side of the equation : it is pretty easy to measure the profit you make by doing telemarketing, but it is totally impossible to quantitatively measure how much business you lose by annoying all the folks who would have done business with you, since they are already existing customers, but now don't, because you called them at home six days in row in the middle of The Simpsons. You can only estimate how much profit you lose, ultimately it is unknowable. But they probably didn't teach you that at The University of Telemarketing.
Here is the bottom line : annoying your customer base, especially your established customer base, is bad for business in the long term. Telemarketing falls into that bracket : if it did not then we would not be seeing so many people sign up for DNC lists. Just because it is legal, and makes some profit, and *looks like* good business, does not mean it really is good business.
You pretty much ignored my comment about the fact that some companies ignore your instructions to put you on their DNC list ? Oh wow, look at that, a telemarketer ignoring what the other party says : now that's a big shock. Not. Go and get deprogrammed, they did a good job on you.
Who on earth modded this up to 5, it is idiotic.
...
...or how incredibly simple it is to get us to stop calling back.
>>I also worked as a telemarketer for a year.
That's our first clue. You're not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, are you ?
>>I realise we were bothering them
OK. Pause for a second there and think : YOU are BOTHERING them. Is that a good way to attempt to begin a business relationship ? Clearly not.
>
You must be one of the very few people who have never told a company to not call and been ignored. Many companies just ignore what you say. I had to report one company to my state DNC three times before they got the message through their thick skulls.
>>... you're on the DNC list, but we're still legally allowed to call you.
You dickhead. Just because it is legal does not mean it is good business.
If I own a bricks and mortar business, I am legally allowed to insult people who walk through the door to buy things from me. Come to think of it, I could go out on the sidewalk and yell derogatory comments at people walking by, in the hope that they will enter my store and buy things from them. What a brilliant plan ! So, what do you think : by insulting them, am I going to increase or decrease my sales ? If they ask me to not insult them and I then do it again, is THAT going to increase or decrease my sales ? Do you get it yet ?
>>Messing with telemarketers does not get them to stop calling you. No matter how many times you call them a fag or ask them what they're wearing or hang up on them or ask them how they'd like it if you called them during dinner, they're still going to call back.
OMFG, you really are a numb-buts aren't you ? Look, if the called party doesn't want to speak to you, that means they don't want to do business with you. And they will want to do business with you even less the the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th times you call.
I don't get many solicitations these days, but when I do the company goes into a black book, and I never do business with them again.
This is similar... not _quite_ up to the same standard though.
http://www.panoramas.dk/fullscreen3/f29b.html
For most folks there is a simple answer to the cost of inkjet cartridges : don't buy them. Instead, buy a monochrome laser printer. Lasers are much cheaper to run. The toner might cost more, but lasts long enough that you actually spend a tiny fraction of what you would have spent on inkjet cartridges. For color photo prints, have those done by a warehouse club - it is cheaper than printing your own, and you generally get better results and spend less time on it.
Even if you ignore the issue of the 3 mile versus 12 mile territorial water, and the fact that any company using them would be exposing themselves to massive risk (e.g. what happens when the company runs out of money / ship sinks due to hurricane etc) there is still the problem of letting the staff visit the USA for shore leave. Most of these folks would be coming from countries that do not have visa-waivers (do those still even exist post 9/11 ?), such as the UK. This means they would either have to get a visa for every time they wanted to visit the USA, which they're not going to get, or get a multiple entry visa, which again, in a lot of cases, they're not going to get. So it would be extremely difficult for the vast majority of the staff to visit the USA... unless they chose to enter via Mexico of course...
You can overcome the 100 foot limitation by tunneling it over traditional phone lines, or even VOIP lines, although you may require a speakerphone at the other end. Another tunneling option might be this http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt, but I suspect there may be some latency issues.
BBC Radio 4 has a wealth of excellent radio covering everything from geeky things like history, science, medicine, to less geeky things such as comedy and the arts, and much more.
1. Look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/
2. Figure out how to get the audio saved to your hard drive (it's easier than you might think)
3. Burn CDs or download to ipod/whatever.
Two minutes after seeing this story I picked up an old copy of New Scientist magazine from August 21-27 2004... on page 22 (of the US edition) there's a reference to a CD player designed specifically for the visually impaired : "Symphony Radio" from Roberts.
h tml
I googled for the website, and found it here https://secure.virtuality.net/blindorg/catalogue.
It has an audible radio tuner, and keeps bookmarks for CDs. The downside is that it's not at all cheap by today's prices, especially for US consumers having to deal with the poor exchange rate with the British Pound. Also it would have been nice if it played MP3s too. Still, I expect that many visually impaired folks would find this a big improvement over regular players.
Let's hope that in future there will be an improved version of this that plays MP3s and also allows flash memory cards to be plugged in.
Disclaimer : I'm not in any way involved with Roberts Radio, The British Wireless for the Blind Fund, or any other interested parties.
Not true for national figures.
m
http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/unemploy.ht
If you've been unemployed for more than 6 months, you drop off the charts because you're considered a lost cause
Not so.
That *may* be the case for state and local unemployment figures, but it is not the case for national figures : http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/unemploy.htm
I didn't realize that. Makes sense. My bad. Thanks.