Years.. no, decades ago, everyone was scared shitless of boot sector viruses. Today it's rootkits. This isn't rocket science, it's about friggin time these things hit the mainstream. It's obvious that today's software relies on many layers of abstraction provided by the OS. Infiltrate one of those layers and you've fooled the entire system. It's no different than the men with wires going to their ears saying "You didn't see anything, move along", except your software's too dumb to see that the man is lying. There is no ultimate solution to this, software is software and no matter how well you try to secure the OS, all it takes is a little patch to disable all your security. The closest thing to a secure OS would be some sort of read-only boot device, and I really mean READ-ONLY, not just "mount -o ro". Boot off the DVD-Rom.. even then, just one glitch in the programming could open up the whole system to in-memory patching.
What we CAN do to relieve this plague is take away the motivation behind viruses. They don't exist just for fun, they serve a purpose.. DDoS is a lucrative racket. If we can somehow make an infected PC less valuable to the attacker, to the point where it's not even worth infecting, the virus threat will slow down to a crawl. Why don't we have more Linux viruses ? Because it's a high-risk, low-potential target. If Microsoft could accomplish the same level of security with the average Windows PC, virus authors would have to go out and get real friggin jobs for once.
Hate them as you may, I often find myself recommending Dell to people I don't want to be supporting for the rest of their life. Their PC's aren't bad, as well as their notebooks while staying fairly cheap. The best part (for me) is I tell the lusers to get the 3 year big-big warranty option so they don't bug me for 3 years, after which I tell them their PC is old and "worn out" *giggles*, so they buy a new one with a fresh warranty:D
Sony.. shmeh. I used to have Sony audio toys, now there's a company whose support is a nightmare. I usually had to take my gear directly to the authorized repair shop to get any quality of service, as the Sony Store itself would send it out, screw up the work order and my gadget would come back 6 weeks later still not fixed. That was about five years ago. Recently I had to send in a car deck too, same story, five weeks later they send it back. I plug it in, no power. I bought a replacement (non-Sony) deck in the meantime, and sent the Sony back AGAIN with a two-page detailed letter of what I expect a 600$ cd player to do when supplied with adequate power and proper sound connections. They actually fixed it within two weeks this time but when it came back I tested it once and put it back in the box to sell. To me, Sony pretends to market to the high-end segment, but they're really just relabeling the same cheap taiwanese crap with a higher price tag. They don't know what they're doing.
Now on to Bose. Excuse me while I giggle my friggin' head off! lol.. Bose sells speakers that sound nice to people who don't know what nice speakers are supposed to sound like. Can you tell I've been rehearsing that line for years ?:) There is even a distinctive "Bose sound" that consists of exaggerated mids and harmonically distorted bass. They mangle the mids to make things sound omnidirectional, since the sound bounces off the walls and generally messes with your brain. They chew up the bass to make their small, hopeless speakers sound bigger than they really are. In a nutshell, if you play old country or Beatles albums on a Bose system it will sound as live as it did in the 1950's. If you play new music on a Bose systems it will also sound as live as it did in the 1950's. Highly compressed, lacking detail, these are things you want in a mall or restaurant sound system so that it doesn't drown out normal conversation, NOT what you want in a quality home stereo you might actually listen to. I haven't had any experience with their customer service, but my guess is they must have the best ass kissers in the industry to make up for their counter-designed products.
Avoid any proprietary formats - MD Disc, Blu-Ray, DVD-Audio. These never work out in the long run.
Of course, next year's format never works out in the long run ?!?!?! Minidisc came from the chocolate starfish that is Sony, no surprise there. DVD-Audio suffered from requiring a unique (and extremely rare) playback device, it's far easier to release a video DVD with high-bitrate AC3-encoded audio (or DTS if you're "that kinda" special).
The very concept of disc storage is getting old already. Many people would like to move to pure network storage. If hard drives keep dropping in price I'm going to end up building a ginormous file server to house everything and toss the original discs into storage. I already stream most media over the LAN, to a media center terminal. I haven't seen the Xbox 360, but if Microsoft plays their cards right they could have one kickass media center. Make it so we can buy or rent movies right from the console, and preview albums a-la iTunes, maybe tie it in with online pizza ordering. Just make it so I can not leave my couch all weekend (except for bathroom breaks).
Who wants to fumble with fragile discs, or drive out to the video club to rent a stinkin' movie ? Our lives have grown too busy to piss time on physical transportation. A lot of us don't even really need an office to do our jobs, we could do them just as good (if not better) from home. All these factors are pushing technology in new directions and it's much too soon to tell how exactly this will affect us.
This isn't even funny anymore. I actually recommend most of my dumber users to run two anti-virus suites, because modern viruses will purposely disable or sneak past one or the other. The redundancy makes it that much closer to bulletproof.
I'm talking some really dumb lusers here.. the kind who take investment advice from their schizophrenic neighbor
A movie is still a standard date- it is so easy, dinner and a movie, and it is still cheaper than dinner and a theater show...
What ever happened to the standard "Dinner and a wet spot on the back seat ? There are few "dates" worse than the movie date, because you just sit there watching a movie and not getting to know the other person at all. Shieeeeet I'd rather be used than ignored.
Even better: I've been downloading HDTV rips of the Lost tv series and they look better on my non-HDTV than the original cable broadcast, not to mention the 5.1 dolby digital:D Some of these mighty pirates actually know what they're doing (but they are a minority)
Why does phishing work ? Because people are f'ing ignorant, that's why. If I showed up at your door claiming to be from Shitibank or that I'm the long lost prince of southern Iowa with 15 million euros "trapped" in a swiss bank account.. are you going to believe me and fork over your banking info ? No. Hell, even the real company reps take tons of flak doing door-to-door operations. So then why is it that entering someone's home by email is suddenly "okay" and they'll immediately fork over their vitals ? I could be canvassing the neighborhood promising free money to people and still they will slam the door in my face.
Of course I won't be using my mouse from afar, but why couldn't we just have low-power WiFi devices instead of a wholly different standard ? It just seems like so much work just to keep up with the status of Bluetooth for what little it does, and even when it works, it's such a pain in the butt to get different devices to cooperate on the same host.
I think I've found the solution to my income problems: I'll move to the states and sue every company that's ever made any product I've ever used for any whimsical reason that comes across my amphetamine-enhanced cranium.
First I'll sue Ginsu for that time I cut the tip of my thumb while stabbing into a can of beans, and lost sensation in part of my finger. It's Ginsu's fault that I was being a dumb alpha male, of course!
Then I'll sue Microsoft for that time I smacked my laptop onto my forehead in frustration. It's their fault my hacked custom theme DLL crashed the UI, of course!
And then I'll sue Sony for selling me a TV that lets me watch reality shows. It's their fault I don't like reality shows, of course!
But I certainly won't sue Apple for making me hard of hearing. That's nobody's fault, I'm proud to be a music-loving stereophile!
Why can't tech companies let the crippled die a peaceful death ? Bluetooth was a neat idea like ten years ago when I first read about it in Byte magazine!!!1! Why can't we just turn 802.11 into a general-purpose wireless data scheme that encompasses Bluetooth functionality ? Why must all 802.11 devices be strictly for networking ? Why can't a stupid mouse or remote control send its blabber over WiFi ?
Funny, I overclock my Athlon X2 rig by a substantial margin thanks to slightly better quality components. Since they don't yet make a 2.7ghz dual-core Athlon, the closest thing being a 1000$ FX-60 at 2.6ghz. My components cost significantly less than that chip alone, I consider it a win.
I do see the benefit of running 35% faster, since I do lots of CPU-intensive processing. Encoding jobs and compilations take 1/4 less time to do, which for me equates to 2-3 hours saved each day. This also means my PC consumes 1/4 less energy, the slight increase in core voltage is negligible compared to the constant power requirements of the disk arrays.
Hell, six or seven years ago I was probably one of the first nuts to break the Ghz barrier while everyone else was trucking along at 450-500 mhz. I even went dual-cpu at that time. My PC from six years ago outpaced today's new 299$ systems, how sad is that. Overclocking has been and will be a way of life for me, for the foreseeable future.
Hey that's just brilliant: take a bunch of young people full of potential in excellent health and turn them into crippled vegetables. It's okay, we're giving them money!
Sheesh.. how much money is the rest of your life worth ? We should be doing these tests on people who are worthless to begin with.
That's okay, I encourage the practice of tying up their call center employees with bogus calls and empty threats. I figure one of the clerks will eventually go postal and kill everyone and/or burn down the building, and that's a win for everyone (except the telecom).
That brings me back to my original statement: why fork if both are pursuing similar goals ? Integrate each others' differences and wherever two modules collide, let the users choose which one they prefer on a per-user basis.
Hell, I see KDE vs Gnome the same way. If we could have one grand unified desktop that handles every app and allows you to mix & match UI features, everyone would be happy and development could be greatly simplified. It seems like for every OSS project, there exists one or more analogs that accomplish the exact same thing, only with a different API or one extra feature that wasn't really needed in the first place. Freedom of choice is nice, as long as there's a justifiable reason for that choice.
Did it ever occur to him that maybe his bosses don't like DND geeks ? Uniforms are what the minimum-wage monkeys wear at McDonalds and Walmart. Shirts and ties are what salaried people wear. Choose your income, choose your attire.
Yeah, it sucks and its stupid but I'd rather look good than be a bum.
If, for example, you worked with HIV-positive people you couldn't trust
Errrr you mean those wackjobs who run around with syringes of their own blood so they can infect you if they don't like your attitude ? Those freaks are even more dangerous than gun-toting psychopaths.
Is there any place where I can find a concise list of meaningful differences between Mambo and Joomla ? Most of the time a project is forked over political reasons or simply because some lame coder wants to make some useless changes and call it his own. Seeing as this is a CMS, I can't personally see why they would need diverging feature sets that can't be merged back into the main tree. They're both doing the same job, no ?
What part of the solar system are you from ? 180k for a programmer ? Man, I wish I were stuck in the 90's too! More like 50k if you're lucky nowadays. Game programemrs especially take it hard up the ass, as if it was a privilege to be a game developer (because we're clearly not doing it for the money!).
Quite the opposite actually, tapes are brittle by nature. Have you ever tried to restore something older than a year or so ? Backups work great, it's the restoration that is prone to failures. Tapes dry out, rot, stretch/deform and all sorts of nasty things. Hard drives are sealed and will work great as long as you treat them with respect (i.e. don't drop them, don't microwave them, don't ship them by UPS).
Hell, most DAT tapes crap out on me within 2 years. Crap, if I could revise history I'd spend my money on hard drives instead of giving money to some whoring tape drive manufacturer. Those freaking drives cost thousands and really don't do all that much.
I thought what made the internet so great was its borderless nature. I couldn't even start to list all the non-US people who have contibuted to my online experience, whether it's from collaborating on open-source projects, or just offering insight on the ways of the world and divergent philosophies that are mostly inexistent (or wholly censored) in western society. Even worse: I'm in Canada. Does that mean I'd only see Canadian sites ?
The whole concept is absolutely ridiculous and a huge leap backwards. The only downside to having an intercontinental internet is that some people are finally realizing they're getting fucked over by their government. That's only a downside if you're one of the vicious tyrants misleading the population to begin with.
Where I am, we already have this service available from the phone company: it's called privacy filter and it basically means you pay 1.99$ per month per number you want to block, which means your ex-wife, psycho cousin, and all those crazy old ladies who are unqualified to dial a friggin touch-tone phone.
A computer store where I once worked had almost the same number as an assisted transit service (free bus for the elderly and/or mentally challenged). I'd answer with the store's name, which includes "cyber" and "PC" and not much else, and these people would ask for a ride. Then I'd give them the correct number. Sure enough, they called right back, sometimes 3-4 times calling me all sorts of nasty things. In the end I was taking their information and calling the REAL company for them. Boo old and/or retarded people!
It's cute how these little troublemakers go around acting like mobsters with their techno threats. If we can send them money via wire transfer, then why isn't it possible to track that transaction and nail the collector ? Then you just go up the food chain and find his buddies. Sure, it doesn't solve the problem of botnets, but if you're able to take down enough of these kids to scare the others it could cause a significant reduction in frequency of DDoS attacks.
I think we can agree that a self-respecting thief won't build their career around robbing convenience stores for 100$ a pop. If you're going to risk your neck, go for the big payouts. Same thing with online terrorists; make it dangerous enough so the little boys will shy away, and those who are left standing will try to attack the big boys: those who have the resources to fight back. Hell if some chump tried to extort money from me, I'd do all I can to find where he's going to collect the ransom and smack that boy till he cries uncle!
Is it at all possible for anyone that's interested in either Apple Computer or Apple Records (or both) to get them confused, ever ? I don't think someone looking for Beatles records would visit Apple.com and buy a Powerbook by mistake.
Hey here's an idea: Why doesn't Ringo and his lads go to sue Fiona Apple because she's actually IN the music recording business! Oh how I'd love to hear her lyrically rip them to shreds on her next album.
"Don't you plead me your case, don't bother to explain. Don't even show me your face, 'cuz it's a crying shame. Just go back to the rock from under which you came. Take the sorrow you gave and all the stakes you claim - And don't forget the blame."
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Years.. no, decades ago, everyone was scared shitless of boot sector viruses. Today it's rootkits. This isn't rocket science, it's about friggin time these things hit the mainstream. It's obvious that today's software relies on many layers of abstraction provided by the OS. Infiltrate one of those layers and you've fooled the entire system. It's no different than the men with wires going to their ears saying "You didn't see anything, move along", except your software's too dumb to see that the man is lying. There is no ultimate solution to this, software is software and no matter how well you try to secure the OS, all it takes is a little patch to disable all your security. The closest thing to a secure OS would be some sort of read-only boot device, and I really mean READ-ONLY, not just "mount -o ro". Boot off the DVD-Rom.. even then, just one glitch in the programming could open up the whole system to in-memory patching.
What we CAN do to relieve this plague is take away the motivation behind viruses. They don't exist just for fun, they serve a purpose.. DDoS is a lucrative racket. If we can somehow make an infected PC less valuable to the attacker, to the point where it's not even worth infecting, the virus threat will slow down to a crawl. Why don't we have more Linux viruses ? Because it's a high-risk, low-potential target. If Microsoft could accomplish the same level of security with the average Windows PC, virus authors would have to go out and get real friggin jobs for once.
Hate them as you may, I often find myself recommending Dell to people I don't want to be supporting for the rest of their life. Their PC's aren't bad, as well as their notebooks while staying fairly cheap. The best part (for me) is I tell the lusers to get the 3 year big-big warranty option so they don't bug me for 3 years, after which I tell them their PC is old and "worn out" *giggles*, so they buy a new one with a fresh warranty :D
:) There is even a distinctive "Bose sound" that consists of exaggerated mids and harmonically distorted bass. They mangle the mids to make things sound omnidirectional, since the sound bounces off the walls and generally messes with your brain. They chew up the bass to make their small, hopeless speakers sound bigger than they really are. In a nutshell, if you play old country or Beatles albums on a Bose system it will sound as live as it did in the 1950's. If you play new music on a Bose systems it will also sound as live as it did in the 1950's. Highly compressed, lacking detail, these are things you want in a mall or restaurant sound system so that it doesn't drown out normal conversation, NOT what you want in a quality home stereo you might actually listen to. I haven't had any experience with their customer service, but my guess is they must have the best ass kissers in the industry to make up for their counter-designed products.
Sony.. shmeh. I used to have Sony audio toys, now there's a company whose support is a nightmare. I usually had to take my gear directly to the authorized repair shop to get any quality of service, as the Sony Store itself would send it out, screw up the work order and my gadget would come back 6 weeks later still not fixed. That was about five years ago. Recently I had to send in a car deck too, same story, five weeks later they send it back. I plug it in, no power. I bought a replacement (non-Sony) deck in the meantime, and sent the Sony back AGAIN with a two-page detailed letter of what I expect a 600$ cd player to do when supplied with adequate power and proper sound connections. They actually fixed it within two weeks this time but when it came back I tested it once and put it back in the box to sell. To me, Sony pretends to market to the high-end segment, but they're really just relabeling the same cheap taiwanese crap with a higher price tag. They don't know what they're doing.
Now on to Bose. Excuse me while I giggle my friggin' head off! lol.. Bose sells speakers that sound nice to people who don't know what nice speakers are supposed to sound like. Can you tell I've been rehearsing that line for years ?
Avoid any proprietary formats - MD Disc, Blu-Ray, DVD-Audio. These never work out in the long run.
Of course, next year's format never works out in the long run ?!?!?! Minidisc came from the chocolate starfish that is Sony, no surprise there. DVD-Audio suffered from requiring a unique (and extremely rare) playback device, it's far easier to release a video DVD with high-bitrate AC3-encoded audio (or DTS if you're "that kinda" special).
The very concept of disc storage is getting old already. Many people would like to move to pure network storage. If hard drives keep dropping in price I'm going to end up building a ginormous file server to house everything and toss the original discs into storage. I already stream most media over the LAN, to a media center terminal. I haven't seen the Xbox 360, but if Microsoft plays their cards right they could have one kickass media center. Make it so we can buy or rent movies right from the console, and preview albums a-la iTunes, maybe tie it in with online pizza ordering. Just make it so I can not leave my couch all weekend (except for bathroom breaks).
Who wants to fumble with fragile discs, or drive out to the video club to rent a stinkin' movie ? Our lives have grown too busy to piss time on physical transportation. A lot of us don't even really need an office to do our jobs, we could do them just as good (if not better) from home. All these factors are pushing technology in new directions and it's much too soon to tell how exactly this will affect us.
This isn't even funny anymore. I actually recommend most of my dumber users to run two anti-virus suites, because modern viruses will purposely disable or sneak past one or the other. The redundancy makes it that much closer to bulletproof.
I'm talking some really dumb lusers here.. the kind who take investment advice from their schizophrenic neighbor
A movie is still a standard date- it is so easy, dinner and a movie, and it is still cheaper than dinner and a theater show...
What ever happened to the standard "Dinner and a wet spot on the back seat ? There are few "dates" worse than the movie date, because you just sit there watching a movie and not getting to know the other person at all. Shieeeeet I'd rather be used than ignored.
Even better: I've been downloading HDTV rips of the Lost tv series and they look better on my non-HDTV than the original cable broadcast, not to mention the 5.1 dolby digital :D Some of these mighty pirates actually know what they're doing (but they are a minority)
Why does phishing work ? Because people are f'ing ignorant, that's why. If I showed up at your door claiming to be from Shitibank or that I'm the long lost prince of southern Iowa with 15 million euros "trapped" in a swiss bank account.. are you going to believe me and fork over your banking info ? No. Hell, even the real company reps take tons of flak doing door-to-door operations. So then why is it that entering someone's home by email is suddenly "okay" and they'll immediately fork over their vitals ? I could be canvassing the neighborhood promising free money to people and still they will slam the door in my face.
Man, people are too dumb to be true nowadays.
Of course I won't be using my mouse from afar, but why couldn't we just have low-power WiFi devices instead of a wholly different standard ? It just seems like so much work just to keep up with the status of Bluetooth for what little it does, and even when it works, it's such a pain in the butt to get different devices to cooperate on the same host.
I think I've found the solution to my income problems: I'll move to the states and sue every company that's ever made any product I've ever used for any whimsical reason that comes across my amphetamine-enhanced cranium.
First I'll sue Ginsu for that time I cut the tip of my thumb while stabbing into a can of beans, and lost sensation in part of my finger. It's Ginsu's fault that I was being a dumb alpha male, of course!
Then I'll sue Microsoft for that time I smacked my laptop onto my forehead in frustration. It's their fault my hacked custom theme DLL crashed the UI, of course!
And then I'll sue Sony for selling me a TV that lets me watch reality shows. It's their fault I don't like reality shows, of course!
But I certainly won't sue Apple for making me hard of hearing. That's nobody's fault, I'm proud to be a music-loving stereophile!
How high do these things fly above ground ? Are then within rifle range ? :) Skeet shooting could take on a whole new perspective!
Why can't tech companies let the crippled die a peaceful death ? Bluetooth was a neat idea like ten years ago when I first read about it in Byte magazine!!!1! Why can't we just turn 802.11 into a general-purpose wireless data scheme that encompasses Bluetooth functionality ? Why must all 802.11 devices be strictly for networking ? Why can't a stupid mouse or remote control send its blabber over WiFi ?
Funny, I overclock my Athlon X2 rig by a substantial margin thanks to slightly better quality components. Since they don't yet make a 2.7ghz dual-core Athlon, the closest thing being a 1000$ FX-60 at 2.6ghz. My components cost significantly less than that chip alone, I consider it a win.
I do see the benefit of running 35% faster, since I do lots of CPU-intensive processing. Encoding jobs and compilations take 1/4 less time to do, which for me equates to 2-3 hours saved each day. This also means my PC consumes 1/4 less energy, the slight increase in core voltage is negligible compared to the constant power requirements of the disk arrays.
Hell, six or seven years ago I was probably one of the first nuts to break the Ghz barrier while everyone else was trucking along at 450-500 mhz. I even went dual-cpu at that time. My PC from six years ago outpaced today's new 299$ systems, how sad is that. Overclocking has been and will be a way of life for me, for the foreseeable future.
Hey that's just brilliant: take a bunch of young people full of potential in excellent health and turn them into crippled vegetables. It's okay, we're giving them money!
Sheesh.. how much money is the rest of your life worth ? We should be doing these tests on people who are worthless to begin with.
That's okay, I encourage the practice of tying up their call center employees with bogus calls and empty threats. I figure one of the clerks will eventually go postal and kill everyone and/or burn down the building, and that's a win for everyone (except the telecom).
That brings me back to my original statement: why fork if both are pursuing similar goals ? Integrate each others' differences and wherever two modules collide, let the users choose which one they prefer on a per-user basis.
Hell, I see KDE vs Gnome the same way. If we could have one grand unified desktop that handles every app and allows you to mix & match UI features, everyone would be happy and development could be greatly simplified. It seems like for every OSS project, there exists one or more analogs that accomplish the exact same thing, only with a different API or one extra feature that wasn't really needed in the first place. Freedom of choice is nice, as long as there's a justifiable reason for that choice.
Did it ever occur to him that maybe his bosses don't like DND geeks ? Uniforms are what the minimum-wage monkeys wear at McDonalds and Walmart. Shirts and ties are what salaried people wear. Choose your income, choose your attire.
Yeah, it sucks and its stupid but I'd rather look good than be a bum.
If, for example, you worked with HIV-positive people you couldn't trust
Errrr you mean those wackjobs who run around with syringes of their own blood so they can infect you if they don't like your attitude ? Those freaks are even more dangerous than gun-toting psychopaths.
Is there any place where I can find a concise list of meaningful differences between Mambo and Joomla ? Most of the time a project is forked over political reasons or simply because some lame coder wants to make some useless changes and call it his own. Seeing as this is a CMS, I can't personally see why they would need diverging feature sets that can't be merged back into the main tree. They're both doing the same job, no ?
What part of the solar system are you from ? 180k for a programmer ? Man, I wish I were stuck in the 90's too! More like 50k if you're lucky nowadays. Game programemrs especially take it hard up the ass, as if it was a privilege to be a game developer (because we're clearly not doing it for the money!).
To quote the first poster: Die Sony Die!
Quite the opposite actually, tapes are brittle by nature. Have you ever tried to restore something older than a year or so ? Backups work great, it's the restoration that is prone to failures. Tapes dry out, rot, stretch/deform and all sorts of nasty things. Hard drives are sealed and will work great as long as you treat them with respect (i.e. don't drop them, don't microwave them, don't ship them by UPS).
Hell, most DAT tapes crap out on me within 2 years. Crap, if I could revise history I'd spend my money on hard drives instead of giving money to some whoring tape drive manufacturer. Those freaking drives cost thousands and really don't do all that much.
I thought what made the internet so great was its borderless nature. I couldn't even start to list all the non-US people who have contibuted to my online experience, whether it's from collaborating on open-source projects, or just offering insight on the ways of the world and divergent philosophies that are mostly inexistent (or wholly censored) in western society. Even worse: I'm in Canada. Does that mean I'd only see Canadian sites ?
The whole concept is absolutely ridiculous and a huge leap backwards. The only downside to having an intercontinental internet is that some people are finally realizing they're getting fucked over by their government. That's only a downside if you're one of the vicious tyrants misleading the population to begin with.
Where I am, we already have this service available from the phone company: it's called privacy filter and it basically means you pay 1.99$ per month per number you want to block, which means your ex-wife, psycho cousin, and all those crazy old ladies who are unqualified to dial a friggin touch-tone phone.
A computer store where I once worked had almost the same number as an assisted transit service (free bus for the elderly and/or mentally challenged). I'd answer with the store's name, which includes "cyber" and "PC" and not much else, and these people would ask for a ride. Then I'd give them the correct number. Sure enough, they called right back, sometimes 3-4 times calling me all sorts of nasty things. In the end I was taking their information and calling the REAL company for them. Boo old and/or retarded people!
Slashdot just wouldn't be the same without trolls :)
It's cute how these little troublemakers go around acting like mobsters with their techno threats. If we can send them money via wire transfer, then why isn't it possible to track that transaction and nail the collector ? Then you just go up the food chain and find his buddies. Sure, it doesn't solve the problem of botnets, but if you're able to take down enough of these kids to scare the others it could cause a significant reduction in frequency of DDoS attacks.
I think we can agree that a self-respecting thief won't build their career around robbing convenience stores for 100$ a pop. If you're going to risk your neck, go for the big payouts. Same thing with online terrorists; make it dangerous enough so the little boys will shy away, and those who are left standing will try to attack the big boys: those who have the resources to fight back. Hell if some chump tried to extort money from me, I'd do all I can to find where he's going to collect the ransom and smack that boy till he cries uncle!
Is it at all possible for anyone that's interested in either Apple Computer or Apple Records (or both) to get them confused, ever ? I don't think someone looking for Beatles records would visit Apple.com and buy a Powerbook by mistake.
Hey here's an idea: Why doesn't Ringo and his lads go to sue Fiona Apple because she's actually IN the music recording business! Oh how I'd love to hear her lyrically rip them to shreds on her next album.
"Don't you plead me your case, don't bother to explain.
Don't even show me your face, 'cuz it's a crying shame.
Just go back to the rock from under which you came.
Take the sorrow you gave and all the stakes you claim -
And don't forget the blame."
Man, she saw it coming YEARS ago!