In the "theoretical limits" section, several times you have too much in the superscript in your calculations. (This looks like a pure TeX typesetting error, not an error in your calculations) Also, for the final result I believe you meant:
Does't Microsoft Visual C++ have a restriction that the licensee can't make a competitor to Microsoft Word/Office?
It's not quite that bad.
The restriction is only on certain libraries shipped with the compiler, and even then the restriction only applies if you wish to redistribute your product. (The restriction is placed on the "you may redistribute these libraries, or stuff linked to these libraries, without paying us royalties as a part of your product" clause)
If you want to make a Microsoft Office clone, it "just" means that there are a few libraries which you might use freely in other products which you'll have to reimplement yourself. You're still perfectly free to use either the C or C++ compiler.
I'll note that people who sell proprietary code libraries often have restrictions on redistributing their code or programs made with their code. For example, the people behind WinZip might sell a general-purpose decompression library with the condition that you don't make a WinZip competitor. In essence, with the Microsoft VC++ compiler, you get a standard compiler license plus a fairly standard proprietary code library license. (And note that to the extent that it is ever standards-compliant, the compiler is standards-compliant without the particular libraries covered by this non-compete clause)
Sun has a similar (though less restrictive) license on java - there, it talks about "significant added value" before you can ship java with your product. (So you can't create a new programming language called "avaj" just by changing some directory names and then charge for the result)
I'm just a bit curious - the last time I looked the only way to get any kind of business account was to purchase a t1 line (or similar) to your property - although the local cable company implied that there was this mysterious "business class" service over cable available, they wouldn't actually sell it to you.
Or is this business class DSL? (Which I've only ever found available if you have a "business" phone line, which gets hit with all sorts of extra fees that residential phone lines don't get)
Bayesian filters are the current hot technology on spam-fighting.
They are at the moment effective against most spam out there.
However, I still see stuff get through. I'm even starting to see spam get through at my work, where spam has to evade both spamassassin's (run on the mailservers) and mozilla's (run on my desktop) filters. (And yes, I tell mozilla to mark as spam everything that spamassassin flags, after manually reviewing the subject lines) Single word Bayesian filters are now being evaded by the smartest spammers. As AOL, Earthlink and other large ISPs implement similar systems, the evolutionary pressure on spammers will increase and the proportion of spam that is written to evade Bayesian filters will go up.
Those amazing accuracy rates? They'll go down. Single word Bayesian filters can be defeated; it's just difficult to do at the moment. I understand penicillin also used to kill a very large percentage of harmful bacteria...
If they're above you, try finding out why, and get the skills you need to get to that level.
This assumes that one is inside a rationally run organization, in which people obtain their position for some reason that makes some vague kind of sense, or at the very least is not massively unfair. I would conclude from the level of rage in the grandparent post that the poster is not in such an organization. I would go further and state that the rationally run organization is an exceedingly rare beast.
True, I won't deny that there are some people who make bad managers and that it is, ceteris paribus, more useful to get along with your coworkers than not. However, in my experience the idea that someone's "people skills"(*) are the prime determiner in who advances to upper management is not supported by the evidence. Also, although I am in an organization where lower- and middle-management promotions seem to make sense, I have been in ones where they don't make any sense either. And, frankly, it's hell to work for one of those people.
On that note - why is management a promotion? That is, why is the reward for doing a good job a different job at which one may not do as well? Why do managers need to be paid more than the people they manage - we've already suggested in several places that managerial skill and technical skill are two different things; why then must the pay between managers and the techies they manage be linked in this fashion? If managerial skill were sufficiently rarer than technical skill, of course I grant that the market would presumably ensure this result. However, consider the case where an underling is more valuable to the company than some middle manager above him in the org. chart. I think it can be assumed that this case, while perhaps not overly common, is not vanishingly rare. What happens in this case? Is the manager ever paid less than his subordinates, or is the manager's pay bumped up enough to cover the horrible embarrassment that would result if it were discovered that someone he directs makes more money than he does? How does one reward valuable programmers without making them not programmers?
(*) I'd like to see a definition of this - does it mean the ability to manipulate people into doing what you want? Does it mean an ability to get people to like you personally? I ask because supposedly these "people skills" are related to the "social skills" that one picks up by being herded together at a young age with all the other local children who happen to share a similar birthyear: that is, how to bully, redirect the bullies onto others, or take the abuse.
See, I know you read my post because you were able to find the "reply" underneath it.
I also know that my post explicitly mentioned that one of the queries looked like a US phone number.
Look, I live in the US. I know what US phone numbers look like. What I asked was: "So why do searches that might fit US telephone conventions not trigger calculator?" Telling me that the second query looks somewhat like a US phone number, while true, is about as relevant as replying to remind me that I am posting in English.
It's not as though my post were long. It's not as though I obscured the font of the question making it harder to read.
And yet, this reply was not the only one that stated this (at least two other replies say essentially the same thing). So tell me, what am I missing in basic written communication that causes this misunderstanding? What causes this misunderstanding?
Note that this is my question: "what causes this misunderstanding?" I just want that to be clear.
Another thing - what triggers the calculator?
on
What's Wacky with Google?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I realized the other day that although searching for 13 - 867 - 5309 causes google to go into calculator mode, searching for 123 - 867 - 5309 does not cause google to use calculator mode.
All sorts of odd things will both pull up an answer from google's calculator and also do a search - for example, searching for avogadros number or hbar.
So why do searches that might fit US telephone conventions not trigger calculator? Is it because some design decision makes it impossible to trigger both calculator and their phone lookup service. (Yes kids, google is a reverse phone directory, albeit with old data)
There is one good reason to have a lossless audio format available: when the lossy encoding that you have your listenable audio in isn't supported. Then, you either suffer the pain of transcoding or go with a lossless format.
For example, suppose I want to listen to all the presentations given at linux.conf.au 2003. Now, on the CD they're all in Speex format.
This format, I'll note, isn't terribly well supported by hardware players. Also, although some of those presentations are a bit long, I doubt that the entire conference is going to come close to filling up one of these huge players, even when converted into FLAC.
However, if you actually do have a lossless source (CD rip, recorded FLAC file, etc.) I'll grant you that FLAC support at that point is a bit silly.
Actually, looking at the headers you get when you ask for / (using HTTP/1.0, so with no Host: header), the server claims to be an Apache 1.3.27 install running mod_perl and mod_gzip.
My personal guess? They've got some sort of mod_perl-based request rewriting engine active on almost the entire site that has gone haywire, and is producing requests that Apache can't handle.
There's also the added wrinkle that simultaneously implementing a technological solution allows you to go the lawyers and say "installing the technical measures to work around this took X hours of people paid an average Y $/hour."
It's from little tidbits like that that lawyers construct damage figures.
Look at the graph that shows attacks per day of week. (page 7 on the PDF) Notice the distinct drop on Thursdays. It's almost enough to make me think "data collection error", but the numbers from Wednesday and Friday seem to correlate.
From this and from biased speculation based on no facts at all, I'm going to conclude that the contributions to numbers of attacks are being made mostly by US-based script kiddies who can't stay up doing stuff on a school night. (Consider the time zone difference between the US and Japan - actually, now that I look at it, the 7-8AM time spike is right for the trouble source to be European. Hrm...)
Somehow the other people responding to this post were able to overlook this:
However the big thing at many companies today is 'do you have a web front end?' No, oh were going to someone who does. Why cause its considered 'cool and new and in and hip'. Yeah okay that's crap, but talk to an exective and that is what many want for some reason. My companies president is just this way. He wanted a java web application front end. He didn't know what he was asking, but he wanted it anyway. What a dumbass huh?
I think what you meant to say was:
However, the big thing at many companies today is "Do you have a web front end? No? Oh; we're going to someone who does." Why? Because it's considered "cool and new and in and hip".
Yeah okay that's crap, but talk to an executive and you'll find that that is what many want for some reason. My company's president is just this way. He wanted a java web application front end. He didn't know what he was asking, but he wanted it anyway. What a dumbass huh?
The niceties of spelling and punctuation aren't around simply so that people can flame you, or to give grammar teachers something to do. They're there so that people can read your post quickly. When you spell things and omit punctuation like this, you slow the reader's reading speed down close to the speed of speech. It feels a bit like hitting a speed bump while driving at 60 mph.
Please, have a modicum of consideration for people who would read your post; otherwise, you are saying that you don't care enough about what you've said to make it legible. If you don't care enough about the writing of the post, I don't see why I should care enough to read it.
And yes, I know that this post is better than some that end up here - "one" in place of "won" is the worst reading speedbump I've seen lately - but it's still painful on the reader.
My source for public domain-sourced ebooks. Now, they are missing some stuff I'd like to see, but they really do have a ton of goods there. And, even if your reader of choice isn't plucker, all of the books are available in very simple HTML markup for conversion to your format of choice.
Prisoner rape will remain relevant as long as society - and, most importantly, police and district attorneys - view it as part of the accepted reality of prison life. So long as a cop or DA can threaten prisoner rape as part of the consequences of prison life, (i.e. "plead guilty now and we'll make sure your prison sentence is unlikely to put you in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, but in a minimum security place with conjugal visits") it is still relevant.
(This does not imply that it ceases being relevant the instant DAs and police stop using its existence as a coersion tactic - only that so long as rape remains evan an implied threat during plea negotiations, its existence is still relevant to the question of whether the workings of our justice system can be trusted)
Remember when slashdot posted a few links to sites selling the famous swingline stapler?
Well, it turned out that in the spot where you entered how much you wanted of each color, you could type in negative numbers as well - I got all the way to the page that asked me to enter my credit card number for 100 red swinglines and -100 black ones for the cost of shipping. I didn't actually go ahead and place the order, but I wonder if it wouldn't have gone through...
Only if you've installed the dreaded "outlook security patch".
Which, by the way, also makes it impossible to read attached email messages, meaning that most things forwarded to you by someone else are completely useless. (Sorry, we deleted the attached email, even though it just contained plain text, for security concerns. Have a nice day)
This and other problems has led most places to avoid this particular security patch. (There's also the fact that uninstalling it is next to impossible)
All it requires is that someone VPN in with their home machine. You don't need the delay of physically transporting the virus so long as you deliberately open holes in your firewall for people you "trust". (which may keep out script kiddies, but not worms)
As it turns out, this was essentially what happened in this case (it got in through a contractor's T1 line; how the contractor's office was infected isn't known, but I'm willing to bet that the contractor has machines directly connected to the internet).
You probably don't want to grant SCO any kind of blanket permission to do anything, so I'd reword that last sentence to say:
Nothing in this letter should be construed to interfere with the use of [[software project]] internally within SCO.
That way, you're only limiting the scope of this particular letter, not your potential future rights in general.
Also, I'm not certain (IANAL, so take this as cargo-cult lawyer immitation only), but I'd replace the words "right away" with "immediately". This is just based on my observation that documents from lawyers tend to use the word "immediately" when they mean "now, before you go file papers in court and wait for a judge to say something".
And of course the standard punctuation/spelling mistakes, but I assume you'd correct those if you actually were sending this to SCO.
Casinos want you to lose. Most of the time, this means they want you to keep playing and keep betting large.
Since a good blackjack card counter can in fact make money (albeit more slowly than they probably could elsewhere - card counting can only nudge the odds of the player winning to something like 53%), casinos do want to catch them, and will get nasty about it. This makes casinos much less friendly places to people who look like they might be working with a system than places like pari-mutuel based betting parlors, where the house's cut is almost always a fixed percentage of the amount of money bet - there, the house doesn't care if you have a system that works; it's no skin off their nose. (Though they do begin to care if you demoralize other players enough so that the total amount bet goes down) Casinos, though, can get downright nasty if they suspect that your winning streak is anything other than dumb luck. (And, depending on the locality, they have the local law enforcement at their beck and call)
Yeah, and in Pennsylvania the lottery money supposedly helps "older Pennsylvanians".
Bullplop. All this is is a regressive tax that the legislature can use as an excuse to not spend as much as they normally would on some particular service or other. It doesn't increase the total amount spent on that service, it just changes the tax profile so that a larger percentage of the burden falls on the poor.
As far as I'm concerned, the only conceivable justification for a state-run lottery is that it removes the "numbers racket" as a means of funding organized crime. All use beyond that - pretending that the money does some good, pretending that the lottery is a "fair" tax, or pretending that there's nothing wrong with encouraging and promoting the sale of lottery tickets - is unjustified.
For what it's worth, I don't see gambling itself as immoral, and I certainly don't see why pari mutuel systems shouldn't be allowed at most private sporting events. However, like cigarette smoking, I see gambling as unhealthy. When the state engages in a system that encourages its own citizens to engage in unhealthy behavior (such as when state money is used to advertize the lottery), this crosses the line; it becomes both immoral and short-sighted.
Let's face it: a lottery ticket (except for rare instances where payoffs rollover to the point where they're worth the odds) is a bad investment. As it stands, the lottery is a bad-at-math tax. Now, while I'm not likely to get hit by such a tax myself, this doesn't mean that I support it. Especially in a state which has well-known education problems (such as Tennessee), enacting such a tax is more dubious. I'm sorry that the citizens of Tennessee have chosen to step on each other in this manner.
I'm pretty certain that this site is already being operated from a rooted box - it's running Apache 1.3.9 and the Redhat default install page is 4 years old.
Scammers like this rarely use their own machines. Surely this is just yet another easily exploited box sitting somewhere in China...
Ah, the "Well, it worked fine for me so you must be a complete fucking idiot" line. Because of course we know that all software components work them same way for everyone, every time, regardless of the surrounding software environment.
Might I suggest that the evidence is now relatively clear that: 1) this patch was visible on windows update only to systems which had the right number of service packs applied, and 2) even then, subsequent patches could undo the fix this patch contained?
I'll grant that you probably spend much of your time in a position where PEBKAC is a valid initial working hypothesis. However, might I suggest that slashdot is a slightly different environment, and therefore it might make sense to modify the initial hypotheses you employ?
Slashdot Mirror
In the "theoretical limits" section, several times you have too much in the superscript in your calculations. (This looks like a pure TeX typesetting error, not an error in your calculations) Also, for the final result I believe you meant:
t = \log_{(r+1)} n_t - \log_{(r+1)} i
Not, as you have there,
t = log_{(r+1)} n_t
The restriction is only on certain libraries shipped with the compiler, and even then the restriction only applies if you wish to redistribute your product. (The restriction is placed on the "you may redistribute these libraries, or stuff linked to these libraries, without paying us royalties as a part of your product" clause)
If you want to make a Microsoft Office clone, it "just" means that there are a few libraries which you might use freely in other products which you'll have to reimplement yourself. You're still perfectly free to use either the C or C++ compiler.
I'll note that people who sell proprietary code libraries often have restrictions on redistributing their code or programs made with their code. For example, the people behind WinZip might sell a general-purpose decompression library with the condition that you don't make a WinZip competitor. In essence, with the Microsoft VC++ compiler, you get a standard compiler license plus a fairly standard proprietary code library license. (And note that to the extent that it is ever standards-compliant, the compiler is standards-compliant without the particular libraries covered by this non-compete clause)
Sun has a similar (though less restrictive) license on java - there, it talks about "significant added value" before you can ship java with your product. (So you can't create a new programming language called "avaj" just by changing some directory names and then charge for the result)
I'm just a bit curious - the last time I looked the only way to get any kind of business account was to purchase a t1 line (or similar) to your property - although the local cable company implied that there was this mysterious "business class" service over cable available, they wouldn't actually sell it to you.
Or is this business class DSL? (Which I've only ever found available if you have a "business" phone line, which gets hit with all sorts of extra fees that residential phone lines don't get)
Bayesian filters are the current hot technology on spam-fighting.
They are at the moment effective against most spam out there.
However, I still see stuff get through. I'm even starting to see spam get through at my work, where spam has to evade both spamassassin's (run on the mailservers) and mozilla's (run on my desktop) filters. (And yes, I tell mozilla to mark as spam everything that spamassassin flags, after manually reviewing the subject lines) Single word Bayesian filters are now being evaded by the smartest spammers. As AOL, Earthlink and other large ISPs implement similar systems, the evolutionary pressure on spammers will increase and the proportion of spam that is written to evade Bayesian filters will go up.
Those amazing accuracy rates? They'll go down. Single word Bayesian filters can be defeated; it's just difficult to do at the moment. I understand penicillin also used to kill a very large percentage of harmful bacteria...
True, I won't deny that there are some people who make bad managers and that it is, ceteris paribus, more useful to get along with your coworkers than not. However, in my experience the idea that someone's "people skills"(*) are the prime determiner in who advances to upper management is not supported by the evidence. Also, although I am in an organization where lower- and middle-management promotions seem to make sense, I have been in ones where they don't make any sense either. And, frankly, it's hell to work for one of those people.
On that note - why is management a promotion? That is, why is the reward for doing a good job a different job at which one may not do as well? Why do managers need to be paid more than the people they manage - we've already suggested in several places that managerial skill and technical skill are two different things; why then must the pay between managers and the techies they manage be linked in this fashion? If managerial skill were sufficiently rarer than technical skill, of course I grant that the market would presumably ensure this result. However, consider the case where an underling is more valuable to the company than some middle manager above him in the org. chart. I think it can be assumed that this case, while perhaps not overly common, is not vanishingly rare. What happens in this case? Is the manager ever paid less than his subordinates, or is the manager's pay bumped up enough to cover the horrible embarrassment that would result if it were discovered that someone he directs makes more money than he does? How does one reward valuable programmers without making them not programmers?
(*) I'd like to see a definition of this - does it mean the ability to manipulate people into doing what you want? Does it mean an ability to get people to like you personally? I ask because supposedly these "people skills" are related to the "social skills" that one picks up by being herded together at a young age with all the other local children who happen to share a similar birthyear: that is, how to bully, redirect the bullies onto others, or take the abuse.
See, I know you read my post because you were able to find the "reply" underneath it.
I also know that my post explicitly mentioned that one of the queries looked like a US phone number.
Look, I live in the US. I know what US phone numbers look like. What I asked was: "So why do searches that might fit US telephone conventions not trigger calculator?" Telling me that the second query looks somewhat like a US phone number, while true, is about as relevant as replying to remind me that I am posting in English.
It's not as though my post were long. It's not as though I obscured the font of the question making it harder to read.
And yet, this reply was not the only one that stated this (at least two other replies say essentially the same thing). So tell me, what am I missing in basic written communication that causes this misunderstanding? What causes this misunderstanding?
Note that this is my question: "what causes this misunderstanding?" I just want that to be clear.
I realized the other day that although searching for 13 - 867 - 5309 causes google to go into calculator mode, searching for 123 - 867 - 5309 does not cause google to use calculator mode.
All sorts of odd things will both pull up an answer from google's calculator and also do a search - for example, searching for avogadros number or hbar.
So why do searches that might fit US telephone conventions not trigger calculator? Is it because some design decision makes it impossible to trigger both calculator and their phone lookup service. (Yes kids, google is a reverse phone directory, albeit with old data)
There is one good reason to have a lossless audio format available: when the lossy encoding that you have your listenable audio in isn't supported. Then, you either suffer the pain of transcoding or go with a lossless format.
For example, suppose I want to listen to all the presentations given at linux.conf.au 2003. Now, on the CD they're all in Speex format.
This format, I'll note, isn't terribly well supported by hardware players. Also, although some of those presentations are a bit long, I doubt that the entire conference is going to come close to filling up one of these huge players, even when converted into FLAC.
However, if you actually do have a lossless source (CD rip, recorded FLAC file, etc.) I'll grant you that FLAC support at that point is a bit silly.
Actually, looking at the headers you get when you ask for / (using HTTP/1.0, so with no Host: header), the server claims to be an Apache 1.3.27 install running mod_perl and mod_gzip.
My personal guess? They've got some sort of mod_perl-based request rewriting engine active on almost the entire site that has gone haywire, and is producing requests that Apache can't handle.
There's also the added wrinkle that simultaneously implementing a technological solution allows you to go the lawyers and say "installing the technical measures to work around this took X hours of people paid an average Y $/hour."
It's from little tidbits like that that lawyers construct damage figures.
Look at the graph that shows attacks per day of week. (page 7 on the PDF) Notice the distinct drop on Thursdays. It's almost enough to make me think "data collection error", but the numbers from Wednesday and Friday seem to correlate.
From this and from biased speculation based on no facts at all, I'm going to conclude that the contributions to numbers of attacks are being made mostly by US-based script kiddies who can't stay up doing stuff on a school night. (Consider the time zone difference between the US and Japan - actually, now that I look at it, the 7-8AM time spike is right for the trouble source to be European. Hrm...)
Please, have a modicum of consideration for people who would read your post; otherwise, you are saying that you don't care enough about what you've said to make it legible. If you don't care enough about the writing of the post, I don't see why I should care enough to read it.
And yes, I know that this post is better than some that end up here - "one" in place of "won" is the worst reading speedbump I've seen lately - but it's still painful on the reader.
My source for public domain-sourced ebooks. Now, they are missing some stuff I'd like to see, but they really do have a ton of goods there. And, even if your reader of choice isn't plucker, all of the books are available in very simple HTML markup for conversion to your format of choice.
And there's always the venerable Project Gutenberg; most of their stuff is in plain, portable, ASCII. They also have a CD of some of the best stuff available.
Prisoner rape will remain relevant as long as society - and, most importantly, police and district attorneys - view it as part of the accepted reality of prison life. So long as a cop or DA can threaten prisoner rape as part of the consequences of prison life, (i.e. "plead guilty now and we'll make sure your prison sentence is unlikely to put you in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, but in a minimum security place with conjugal visits") it is still relevant.
(This does not imply that it ceases being relevant the instant DAs and police stop using its existence as a coersion tactic - only that so long as rape remains evan an implied threat during plea negotiations, its existence is still relevant to the question of whether the workings of our justice system can be trusted)
Remember when slashdot posted a few links to sites selling the famous swingline stapler?
Well, it turned out that in the spot where you entered how much you wanted of each color, you could type in negative numbers as well - I got all the way to the page that asked me to enter my credit card number for 100 red swinglines and -100 black ones for the cost of shipping. I didn't actually go ahead and place the order, but I wonder if it wouldn't have gone through...
That many mirrors don't have 2.4.22 yet.
Really - I'm trying to be good, but if the mirrors don't have it...
He would have noticed if he's trying to load the kernel.org page that shows him the mirrors...
For what it's worth, those of us in the US should probably start with this list.
Or better yet, the google cache of the top mirrors page and the
google cache of the US mirrors page.
Remember that images on those pages (little flags) are still sucking up the main kernel.org bandwidth.
Only if you've installed the dreaded "outlook security patch".
Which, by the way, also makes it impossible to read attached email messages, meaning that most things forwarded to you by someone else are completely useless. (Sorry, we deleted the attached email, even though it just contained plain text, for security concerns. Have a nice day)
This and other problems has led most places to avoid this particular security patch. (There's also the fact that uninstalling it is next to impossible)
All it requires is that someone VPN in with their home machine. You don't need the delay of physically transporting the virus so long as you deliberately open holes in your firewall for people you "trust". (which may keep out script kiddies, but not worms)
As it turns out, this was essentially what happened in this case (it got in through a contractor's T1 line; how the contractor's office was infected isn't known, but I'm willing to bet that the contractor has machines directly connected to the internet).
You probably don't want to grant SCO any kind of blanket permission to do anything, so I'd reword that last sentence to say:
Nothing in this letter should be construed to interfere with the use of [[software project]] internally within SCO.
That way, you're only limiting the scope of this particular letter, not your potential future rights in general.
Also, I'm not certain (IANAL, so take this as cargo-cult lawyer immitation only), but I'd replace the words "right away" with "immediately". This is just based on my observation that documents from lawyers tend to use the word "immediately" when they mean "now, before you go file papers in court and wait for a judge to say something".
And of course the standard punctuation/spelling mistakes, but I assume you'd correct those if you actually were sending this to SCO.
Casinos want you to lose. Most of the time, this means they want you to keep playing and keep betting large.
Since a good blackjack card counter can in fact make money (albeit more slowly than they probably could elsewhere - card counting can only nudge the odds of the player winning to something like 53%), casinos do want to catch them, and will get nasty about it. This makes casinos much less friendly places to people who look like they might be working with a system than places like pari-mutuel based betting parlors, where the house's cut is almost always a fixed percentage of the amount of money bet - there, the house doesn't care if you have a system that works; it's no skin off their nose. (Though they do begin to care if you demoralize other players enough so that the total amount bet goes down) Casinos, though, can get downright nasty if they suspect that your winning streak is anything other than dumb luck. (And, depending on the locality, they have the local law enforcement at their beck and call)
Yeah, and in Pennsylvania the lottery money supposedly helps "older Pennsylvanians".
Bullplop. All this is is a regressive tax that the legislature can use as an excuse to not spend as much as they normally would on some particular service or other. It doesn't increase the total amount spent on that service, it just changes the tax profile so that a larger percentage of the burden falls on the poor.
As far as I'm concerned, the only conceivable justification for a state-run lottery is that it removes the "numbers racket" as a means of funding organized crime. All use beyond that - pretending that the money does some good, pretending that the lottery is a "fair" tax, or pretending that there's nothing wrong with encouraging and promoting the sale of lottery tickets - is unjustified.
For what it's worth, I don't see gambling itself as immoral, and I certainly don't see why pari mutuel systems shouldn't be allowed at most private sporting events. However, like cigarette smoking, I see gambling as unhealthy. When the state engages in a system that encourages its own citizens to engage in unhealthy behavior (such as when state money is used to advertize the lottery), this crosses the line; it becomes both immoral and short-sighted.
Let's face it: a lottery ticket (except for rare instances where payoffs rollover to the point where they're worth the odds) is a bad investment. As it stands, the lottery is a bad-at-math tax. Now, while I'm not likely to get hit by such a tax myself, this doesn't mean that I support it. Especially in a state which has well-known education problems (such as Tennessee), enacting such a tax is more dubious. I'm sorry that the citizens of Tennessee have chosen to step on each other in this manner.
I'm pretty certain that this site is already being
operated from a rooted box - it's running Apache 1.3.9
and the Redhat default install page is 4 years old.
Scammers like this rarely use their own machines.
Surely this is just yet another easily exploited
box sitting somewhere in China...
And the compromise itself happened in March.
Ah, the "Well, it worked fine for me so you must be a complete fucking idiot" line. Because of course we know that all software components work them same way for everyone, every time, regardless of the surrounding software environment.
Might I suggest that the evidence is now relatively clear that: 1) this patch was visible on windows update only to systems which had the right number of service packs applied, and 2) even then, subsequent patches could undo the fix this patch contained?
I'll grant that you probably spend much of your time in a position where PEBKAC is a valid initial working hypothesis. However, might I suggest that slashdot is a slightly different environment, and therefore it might make sense to modify the initial hypotheses you employ?