you can always send email to your home network, and have your home network relay through your home ISP. Since you are on that network, they will accept it.
You can access your home network securely on the road in several ways, through squirrelmail, getting your current ip address and make an exception in your sendmail access files long enough to send mail by sshing in if you prefer to use pop, etc.
If you don't want to use squirrelmail, but have a web server up, it would be easy to get a perl script that would mail it locally. Very easy. The only disadvantage is having to use "sendmail -f name@isp.com" which triggers a point or two in spam checks on the receiving end. You will have to password protect the directory (.htaccess) or program, also.
Me, I would just write my email in a text program, then ssh in, use sendmail locally, and paste the message. Its not that hard. But then again, I just leech space and a dedicated IP on the work T1 so I don't need to bother.
There are other ways as well, but they are more complicated, and probably not an option.
Gas prices havn't personally effected me, but I know it increases the cost of shipping items, and other services where gas is often used. These prices are passed onto you in higher cost for other goods, our economy is definatly effected by gas prices. So don't assume a gas price only effects you at the pump.
I wasn't arguing your first point, but I will argue this one for one simple reason: Inflation.
Inflation at the gas pump is much less at $2 a gallon than it is in the economy in general. Gas prices have risen even slower than wages. (hense all the outsourcing, and all the "made in china" tags).
Obviously fuel prices do affect prices (which was not the purpose, goal or content of the post or parent post) but fuel has affected prices less over time than just the price indicates. Much much less.
Another note: We have enjoyed productivity gains over the last 20 years that dwarfs the rise in gas prices, by a long shot.
When I ship an entire truckload of products 600 miles (from plant to distribution center) it costs me about $800. Thats 100 gallons of fuel (6mpg avg. tractor/trailer). A $25 difference in gas, like we have seen, means the cost would be $25 more if they passed it on. We have around $100,000 in merchandize (which is quite low) so it would add.00025 to the price of the product. Most trucks would have 5+ times that amount of dollar value, we just have a very low $ per cubic foot in our product. This means an increase of price of 25 cents per thousand for us, and closer to 5 cents per thousand for others. That is based on actual sale price to you, NOT wholesale price.
I can go on, but people dramatically overestimate how it affects shipping, until they look at the numbers. We pay more for the driver than the gas. So sure, it affects price some, and obviously some products more than others, but for the vast majority of products, its still well under 1% of the price. Inflation is 3-4% by itself.
We also ship thousands of products from the former Soviet Union via truck/ship/ship/truck and the results are the same, as is the per unit price difference.
I wish gas prices were lower, but if prices were $5 a gallon, it would not affect my driving habits. I know lots of people who complain about gas prices, gas mileage, etc. but the majority of the complainers I know make more than $100k a year and still drive cars that get less than 20mpg. I finally showed the boss the math, and he quit bitching about it.
A vivid example: 50 miles per day at 20mpg = 2.5 gallons per day x 20 days a month (1000 miles typical) = 50 gallons per month. The price difference of $1.50 and $2.00 comes to $25 per month. For someone making $100k a year, this difference represents a grand total of.00406 of their BRING HOME income. (less than 1/2 of 1%). This is trivial. * Even someone making 1/3 of that amount, $33,000 would see a 1% increase (lower taxes), which is almost trivial. And its still cheaper than buying a new car that gets better mileage, by a long shot.
Most of the users on slashdot spend more than this on porn.;) If $325 a year is going to make or break you, you need a better job, NOT a better car.
*(Based on income of $100k, tax of $20,000, [typical] 52 weeks / 4 = 13 cycles x $25 per cycle = $325 yearly / $80,000 bring home = 0.0040625)
Have you ever noticed that when they widen a road, the traffic doesn't tend to get lighter?
On the same note, if you make cars that get 50 mpg and are affordable (less than 20k) then yes, more people would buy them, and drive them instead of using public transport, since it would be a price advantage to drive your own. Not counting the fact that your own car is more convenient, etc. This would mean even more traffic because it would be cheaper, more pollution because many individual cars make more smog than one bus/train, and more traffic problems, PLUS we would have to build yet MORE roads to support all the new econo-boxes, all in a vicious cycle brought upon us by the people who are demanding high mileage cars.
My solution is everyone buy a new truck that gets 13mpg avg. like my new Chevy 2500HD. This way we won't be tempted to drive so much, and be forced to suffer all the problems that good gas mileage brings.;)
I'll take your word for it. My last RedHat install was 5.1.
I have a basic AMD 2500/512mb/gforce4 box with two swappable ata drives frames (not hot). I have tons of old 10,20,30gb drives, and have 12 trays loaded with them so I can install and check out all kinds of OSs, xp, debian, slack, rh, suse, fedora, 98, bsd, etc. Even have one with win 3.1 (1.6gb drive). Just uses one CD bay. I bought the trays/frame combos for less than $10 each from computergate.com. I have the spare frames in several other computers as secondary masters (sec. slave also on that box) so I can transfer files to/from the drives from different systems.
Its kinda nice to be able to check out all the distros by only rebooting and loading a fresh drive, in about 2 seconds. Works better than dual booting because I can take chances and fully trash the drive and its no big deal. Got most of the drives from pawnshops, dead computers from work, trade, etc. so it was pretty cheap to assemble.
So far, I'm most impressed with SuSe 9.1 for the desktop.
oh, i believe you, and appreciate the tip, worthy of a mod point or 3. I just couldn't resist starting a vi/emacs war;) Since I have no dog in this fight, its just fun to watch. I DO like new tips, however.
I write my own crappy perl scripts, myself. Very ugly, but effective. For instance, I have my home box make an invalid request of the DNS server every hour so I can grep through the logs (cron) and capture the IP address of that request, then compare to the current IP, and rewrite/var/named/domain.com and restart NAMED if its different. Combined with a 30 minute TTL, this keeps the subdomain for the home box pretty up to date. There are probably easier ways to do this (and certainly ways that are not as butt-ugly) but its fun to write garbage code and have it work.
If they were too lazy to change ip addresses when they were going to switch ip addresses, they should have used private ip addresses and nat. Then, the only place addresses would need to be changed would be at the border routers.
Um, you miss the point. I believe they have software that is hard coded to those IP addresses and they dont have the source so they can't recompile it using DNS or new IPs. Not that it matters, that is the companies problem, not the ISPs.
Some companies actually spend millions for software, you know...
People can take their cell phone numbers with them so now they want to take everything with them.
If I get divorced, can I keep the pussy? I mean, it would be really inconvenient to find new, and quite expensive, especially after the expense of a divorce. I already paid for it several times over the years, and I only need it a few minutes a week, so my request should considered quite fair considering the alternative.
Offensive, yea, but it still makes the point. Or as my wife would say "You're old enough for your wants not to hurt you."
I don't use my ISPs DNS server, since I have one at work. But even before I had my own, I was smart enough to leech off another DNS besides my ISPs, mainly because at the time i had att/worldnet and DirecPC and for some reason the ATT dns servers were quite slow to respond. adding a significant amount of time to surfing. Wasn't the dish, since switching/leeching cleared it right up.
<flame> Dude, use vi, its much better! Emacs sux0rz! </flame>
Actually, I don't use either or even care. This just looked like a great place to start a troll/vi/emac flamefest. Its been a few days since the last one.;)
if you actually read his comment, he wanted a command line environment, not bash. Bash is just one of many command line invironments. _I_ suggested bash, not fully understanding he wants something that will run on 8088s, which bash is not likely to do since Linux is not easily ported to anything less than a 386. (mmu)
I have developed many systems running in DOS. A TSR will do pretty good when task scheduling isn't a big problem. But I do miss a good command interpreter. It's much quicker to write "ls *", rather than setting up the structures and calling the functions that read a directory in C. Wait... Is there Perl for freeDOS?
Then just use Linux, or if you strongly prefer Windows, use Cygwin. I use both equally. Perl is a standard package in Cygwin (have to select it, tho) or you can install Perl in Windows with several different binary ports.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with Cygwin (cygwin.com), its a Unix like environment for Windows. It takes up one directory and if you put the../bin directory in your path, you can use the utilities in a Win9x/XP command prompt. Its called as a batch file, and its like SSHing into your own machine. it has a virtual directory structure that gives you full access to your whole drive or its own / structure under its windows path (safe), and most of the useful Unix utilities.
The setup program lets you install Perl, GCC, plus other languages and compilers, and even an Xserver, although my luck with that is not so good. Even if you are a Windows only user, its a great way to get introduced to a fairly powerful shell, with several options like tch and bash, without the problems of a dual boot.
It is NOT "Linux in Windows", its a set of APIs to be able to compile and run many Linux programs from source, with just a few mouse clicks to install the most common programs. Find it here. It's Free.
As much as I admire the clam folks, it's just not there yet.
I would agree. I use in on the mail server ( Fedora/MailScanner/Spamassassin/Squirrelmail box) and it lets a couple through a week. Its a great program, granted, and its about 95% effective, but not quite up to speed. Part of the problem with any free "as in beer" program will always be keeping up since you can't just sell a few more copies and hire someone else, and AV is one of those tasks that require a lot of keeping up.
I certainly don't bitch because its a great piece of software, but I realize its limitations. Even with the limitations, it still lets me sleep a little better at night. Now if I can get the damn users to understand to NOT open attachments that "sound cool", even tho they have been warned and punished many times over.
I wrote this little app in C++ (so it's very efficient) that pops up a box every 5 minutes saying "all is well", regardless of what the relationship of that message to reality. Makes me feel very secure.
Now THAT sounds like something you should port over to Windows. Then again if you sold it, MS would just include it free in their next version...
Hailing a conviction rate over 90% means that the vast majority of people do not end up in court unless they are guilty.
I would rather see someone guity go free than an innocent person get convicted. If we had a 50% conviction rate, that would indicate that we were simply trying to persecute rather than prosecute.
These 3 strikes laws are retarded. Someone got 25 years for stealing a pizza.
Absolute FUD. 3 strike laws apply to felonies, not petty crime, so you are full of it. I would agree that there are problems with any mandantory sentencing, but your example is simply false.
The problem however, is that the American judicial system (or perhaps more clearly, the American criminal system) does not have a single perspective on the goal of the system [and in all fairness, no other nation in the world has a single perspective either].
All other points aside, I would wholeheartedly agree with you. I would also add that there is a huge problem with the system in that a criminal detainee can demand cable TV, but can't be protected from being raped. Our priorities in the penal system are quite messed up.
but i recommend scepticism towards these bogus statistics.
They are not bogus, they are statics that indicate the conviction rate of the cases brought to court. Read.
And make no mistake: a right taken from a "suspected terrorist" is a right taken from YOU. Just wait until your name shows up on some computer-generated list of (probable) suspects.
You are absolutely paranoid. There is a big difference in taking rights from someone, and someone being wrong about having a "right" to begin with anyway.
The statistic was just that: a simple snapshot that says that of the cases that go to court, the vast majority result in conviction. Why you draw all these other conclusions from it (aside from a possible Troll) is beyond me.
I hope the jury showed some humanity, realized that he should get a serious punishment but not a life sentence, and handed it an annulment.
Then what exactly *IS* the purpose of the law if you think everyone on a jury should bypass it? I don't share your opinion on this matter.
The purpose of putting someone in jail is NOT to rehabilitate them, its to remove them from the rest of us who do not go around committing crimes, in the hopes that they will not want to do that again. If they keep doing it again and again, then permanant removal *IS* the answer.
and the guy who rubbed fresh lemons on his face before robbing a bank because someone told him that if you did that, the cameras could not pick up your image. True story according to "news of the weird", a syndicated feature found in many independent newspapers here in the US. They have stories like this all the time.
News of the Weird can be found here. Its a very good weekly read that has tons of these exact type of stories.
Really? Is there some statistic on how many crimes remain unsolved?
The vast majority of non-cyber crimes are solved. This is due in part to many crimes being "crimes of opportunity" (no planning) and the fact that most really smart people can get good jobs and understand that most crimes are solved. Also, most crimes that go to court result in conviction (well over 90%).
I worked in the criminal defense field for a while, and from first hand experience, I can tell you that most criminals are not only very stupid, but they seem to think that everyone else is stupid, too. Incompetent people don't realize they are incompetent. There was a British study that demonstrated this a year or two ago.
Slashdot Mirror
you can always send email to your home network, and have your home network relay through your home ISP. Since you are on that network, they will accept it.
You can access your home network securely on the road in several ways, through squirrelmail, getting your current ip address and make an exception in your sendmail access files long enough to send mail by sshing in if you prefer to use pop, etc.
If you don't want to use squirrelmail, but have a web server up, it would be easy to get a perl script that would mail it locally. Very easy. The only disadvantage is having to use "sendmail -f name@isp.com" which triggers a point or two in spam checks on the receiving end. You will have to password protect the directory (.htaccess) or program, also.
Me, I would just write my email in a text program, then ssh in, use sendmail locally, and paste the message. Its not that hard. But then again, I just leech space and a dedicated IP on the work T1 so I don't need to bother.
There are other ways as well, but they are more complicated, and probably not an option.
Gas prices havn't personally effected me, but I know it increases the cost of shipping items, and other services where gas is often used. These prices are passed onto you in higher cost for other goods, our economy is definatly effected by gas prices. So don't assume a gas price only effects you at the pump.
.00025 to the price of the product. Most trucks would have 5+ times that amount of dollar value, we just have a very low $ per cubic foot in our product. This means an increase of price of 25 cents per thousand for us, and closer to 5 cents per thousand for others. That is based on actual sale price to you, NOT wholesale price.
I wasn't arguing your first point, but I will argue this one for one simple reason: Inflation.
Inflation at the gas pump is much less at $2 a gallon than it is in the economy in general. Gas prices have risen even slower than wages. (hense all the outsourcing, and all the "made in china" tags).
Obviously fuel prices do affect prices (which was not the purpose, goal or content of the post or parent post) but fuel has affected prices less over time than just the price indicates. Much much less.
Another note: We have enjoyed productivity gains over the last 20 years that dwarfs the rise in gas prices, by a long shot.
When I ship an entire truckload of products 600 miles (from plant to distribution center) it costs me about $800. Thats 100 gallons of fuel (6mpg avg. tractor/trailer). A $25 difference in gas, like we have seen, means the cost would be $25 more if they passed it on. We have around $100,000 in merchandize (which is quite low) so it would add
I can go on, but people dramatically overestimate how it affects shipping, until they look at the numbers. We pay more for the driver than the gas. So sure, it affects price some, and obviously some products more than others, but for the vast majority of products, its still well under 1% of the price. Inflation is 3-4% by itself.
We also ship thousands of products from the former Soviet Union via truck/ship/ship/truck and the results are the same, as is the per unit price difference.
I will tell you like I tell everyone else:
.00406 of their BRING HOME income. (less than 1/2 of 1%). This is trivial. * Even someone making 1/3 of that amount, $33,000 would see a 1% increase (lower taxes), which is almost trivial. And its still cheaper than buying a new car that gets better mileage, by a long shot.
;) If $325 a year is going to make or break you, you need a better job, NOT a better car.
I wish gas prices were lower, but if prices were $5 a gallon, it would not affect my driving habits. I know lots of people who complain about gas prices, gas mileage, etc. but the majority of the complainers I know make more than $100k a year and still drive cars that get less than 20mpg. I finally showed the boss the math, and he quit bitching about it.
A vivid example: 50 miles per day at 20mpg = 2.5 gallons per day x 20 days a month (1000 miles typical) = 50 gallons per month. The price difference of $1.50 and $2.00 comes to $25 per month. For someone making $100k a year, this difference represents a grand total of
Most of the users on slashdot spend more than this on porn.
*(Based on income of $100k, tax of $20,000, [typical] 52 weeks / 4 = 13 cycles x $25 per cycle = $325 yearly / $80,000 bring home = 0.0040625)
Have you ever noticed that when they widen a road, the traffic doesn't tend to get lighter?
;)
On the same note, if you make cars that get 50 mpg and are affordable (less than 20k) then yes, more people would buy them, and drive them instead of using public transport, since it would be a price advantage to drive your own. Not counting the fact that your own car is more convenient, etc. This would mean even more traffic because it would be cheaper, more pollution because many individual cars make more smog than one bus/train, and more traffic problems, PLUS we would have to build yet MORE roads to support all the new econo-boxes, all in a vicious cycle brought upon us by the people who are demanding high mileage cars.
My solution is everyone buy a new truck that gets 13mpg avg. like my new Chevy 2500HD. This way we won't be tempted to drive so much, and be forced to suffer all the problems that good gas mileage brings.
I'll take your word for it. My last RedHat install was 5.1.
I have a basic AMD 2500/512mb/gforce4 box with two swappable ata drives frames (not hot). I have tons of old 10,20,30gb drives, and have 12 trays loaded with them so I can install and check out all kinds of OSs, xp, debian, slack, rh, suse, fedora, 98, bsd, etc. Even have one with win 3.1 (1.6gb drive). Just uses one CD bay. I bought the trays/frame combos for less than $10 each from computergate.com. I have the spare frames in several other computers as secondary masters (sec. slave also on that box) so I can transfer files to/from the drives from different systems.
Its kinda nice to be able to check out all the distros by only rebooting and loading a fresh drive, in about 2 seconds. Works better than dual booting because I can take chances and fully trash the drive and its no big deal. Got most of the drives from pawnshops, dead computers from work, trade, etc. so it was pretty cheap to assemble.
So far, I'm most impressed with SuSe 9.1 for the desktop.
and I just used up my last mod point... the sig at the bottom was pretty funny. actually very high quality ascii art as well.
oh, i believe you, and appreciate the tip, worthy of a mod point or 3. I just couldn't resist starting a vi/emacs war ;) Since I have no dog in this fight, its just fun to watch. I DO like new tips, however.
/var/named/domain.com and restart NAMED if its different. Combined with a 30 minute TTL, this keeps the subdomain for the home box pretty up to date. There are probably easier ways to do this (and certainly ways that are not as butt-ugly) but its fun to write garbage code and have it work.
I write my own crappy perl scripts, myself. Very ugly, but effective. For instance, I have my home box make an invalid request of the DNS server every hour so I can grep through the logs (cron) and capture the IP address of that request, then compare to the current IP, and rewrite
If they were too lazy to change ip addresses when they were going to switch ip addresses, they should have used private ip addresses and nat. Then, the only place addresses would need to be changed would be at the border routers.
Um, you miss the point. I believe they have software that is hard coded to those IP addresses and they dont have the source so they can't recompile it using DNS or new IPs. Not that it matters, that is the companies problem, not the ISPs.
Some companies actually spend millions for software, you know...
People can take their cell phone numbers with them so now they want to take everything with them.
If I get divorced, can I keep the pussy? I mean, it would be really inconvenient to find new, and quite expensive, especially after the expense of a divorce. I already paid for it several times over the years, and I only need it a few minutes a week, so my request should considered quite fair considering the alternative.
Offensive, yea, but it still makes the point. Or as my wife would say "You're old enough for your wants not to hurt you."
I don't use my ISPs DNS server, since I have one at work. But even before I had my own, I was smart enough to leech off another DNS besides my ISPs, mainly because at the time i had att/worldnet and DirecPC and for some reason the ATT dns servers were quite slow to respond. adding a significant amount of time to surfing. Wasn't the dish, since switching/leeching cleared it right up.
Use emacs to edit your zone files
;)
<flame>
Dude, use vi, its much better! Emacs sux0rz!
</flame>
Actually, I don't use either or even care. This just looked like a great place to start a troll/vi/emac flamefest. Its been a few days since the last one.
I was just giving you some google food.
;)
All I want to know is this: If dogs eat "dog food", and cats eat "cat food", what the hell eats "cheese food"?
if you actually read his comment, he wanted a command line environment, not bash. Bash is just one of many command line invironments. _I_ suggested bash, not fully understanding he wants something that will run on 8088s, which bash is not likely to do since Linux is not easily ported to anything less than a 386. (mmu)
Is CUPS so ubiquitous that we should assume thats what he is running?
He is running RH9, so its a pretty safe bet since CUPS is the default.
I have developed many systems running in DOS. A TSR will do pretty good when task scheduling isn't a big problem. But I do miss a good command interpreter. It's much quicker to write "ls *", rather than setting up the structures and calling the functions that read a directory in C. Wait... Is there Perl for freeDOS?
../bin directory in your path, you can use the utilities in a Win9x/XP command prompt. Its called as a batch file, and its like SSHing into your own machine. it has a virtual directory structure that gives you full access to your whole drive or its own / structure under its windows path (safe), and most of the useful Unix utilities.
Then just use Linux, or if you strongly prefer Windows, use Cygwin. I use both equally. Perl is a standard package in Cygwin (have to select it, tho) or you can install Perl in Windows with several different binary ports.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with Cygwin (cygwin.com), its a Unix like environment for Windows. It takes up one directory and if you put the
The setup program lets you install Perl, GCC, plus other languages and compilers, and even an Xserver, although my luck with that is not so good. Even if you are a Windows only user, its a great way to get introduced to a fairly powerful shell, with several options like tch and bash, without the problems of a dual boot.
It is NOT "Linux in Windows", its a set of APIs to be able to compile and run many Linux programs from source, with just a few mouse clicks to install the most common programs. Find it here. It's Free.
As much as I admire the clam folks, it's just not there yet.
I would agree. I use in on the mail server ( Fedora/MailScanner/Spamassassin/Squirrelmail box) and it lets a couple through a week. Its a great program, granted, and its about 95% effective, but not quite up to speed. Part of the problem with any free "as in beer" program will always be keeping up since you can't just sell a few more copies and hire someone else, and AV is one of those tasks that require a lot of keeping up.
I certainly don't bitch because its a great piece of software, but I realize its limitations. Even with the limitations, it still lets me sleep a little better at night. Now if I can get the damn users to understand to NOT open attachments that "sound cool", even tho they have been warned and punished many times over.
I wrote this little app in C++ (so it's very efficient) that pops up a box every 5 minutes saying "all is well", regardless of what the relationship of that message to reality. Makes me feel very secure.
Now THAT sounds like something you should port over to Windows. Then again if you sold it, MS would just include it free in their next version...
Hailing a conviction rate over 90% means that the vast majority of people do not end up in court unless they are guilty.
I would rather see someone guity go free than an innocent person get convicted. If we had a 50% conviction rate, that would indicate that we were simply trying to persecute rather than prosecute.
These 3 strikes laws are retarded. Someone got 25 years for stealing a pizza.
Absolute FUD. 3 strike laws apply to felonies, not petty crime, so you are full of it. I would agree that there are problems with any mandantory sentencing, but your example is simply false.
The problem however, is that the American judicial system (or perhaps more clearly, the American criminal system) does not have a single perspective on the goal of the system [and in all fairness, no other nation in the world has a single perspective either].
All other points aside, I would wholeheartedly agree with you. I would also add that there is a huge problem with the system in that a criminal detainee can demand cable TV, but can't be protected from being raped. Our priorities in the penal system are quite messed up.
but i recommend scepticism towards these bogus statistics.
They are not bogus, they are statics that indicate the conviction rate of the cases brought to court. Read.
And make no mistake: a right taken from a "suspected terrorist" is a right taken from YOU. Just wait until your name shows up on some computer-generated list of (probable) suspects.
You are absolutely paranoid. There is a big difference in taking rights from someone, and someone being wrong about having a "right" to begin with anyway.
The statistic was just that: a simple snapshot that says that of the cases that go to court, the vast majority result in conviction. Why you draw all these other conclusions from it (aside from a possible Troll) is beyond me.
I hope the jury showed some humanity, realized that he should get a serious punishment but not a life sentence, and handed it an annulment.
Then what exactly *IS* the purpose of the law if you think everyone on a jury should bypass it? I don't share your opinion on this matter.
The purpose of putting someone in jail is NOT to rehabilitate them, its to remove them from the rest of us who do not go around committing crimes, in the hopes that they will not want to do that again. If they keep doing it again and again, then permanant removal *IS* the answer.
and the guy who rubbed fresh lemons on his face before robbing a bank because someone told him that if you did that, the cameras could not pick up your image. True story according to "news of the weird", a syndicated feature found in many independent newspapers here in the US. They have stories like this all the time.
News of the Weird can be found here. Its a very good weekly read that has tons of these exact type of stories.
Really? Is there some statistic on how many crimes remain unsolved?
The vast majority of non-cyber crimes are solved. This is due in part to many crimes being "crimes of opportunity" (no planning) and the fact that most really smart people can get good jobs and understand that most crimes are solved. Also, most crimes that go to court result in conviction (well over 90%).
I worked in the criminal defense field for a while, and from first hand experience, I can tell you that most criminals are not only very stupid, but they seem to think that everyone else is stupid, too. Incompetent people don't realize they are incompetent. There was a British study that demonstrated this a year or two ago.
This reminds me of two other cases:
The guy who robs the bank but drops his wallet (with ID inside)
The guy who writes a bank robbery note on the back of his own checking account deposit slip.
And yes, both are true stories. Its probably a Good Thing(tm) that most criminals are incredibly stupid.