I originally had my board set to the applicant doing a medium CAPTCHA and verifying an email. I'm not sure if there were people on the other end authenticating to get in and post spam, or if there was an exploit with SMF that let them bypass part of the login authentication with a hack.
I've had probably 50 people try to register on my message board in the last couple of weeks, mainly from RIPE in Amsterdam and LACNIC in Montevideo. I've considered banning RIPE's IP addresses entirely. The ones that I have approved have been posting your typical porn and Viagra links, I'm not sure if this is exactly the same as I won't follow their liniks to see if it's to blog posts.
I wasn't sure if there'd been a compromise for SMF boards or if there's a list of low-activity boards that spammers share where my site got listed recently and thus people are trying to post there or what, but I've had to turn on administrator-approval of all memberships, which really ticks me off. I'm thinking about reinstalling my board to change the directory but haven't had time to mess with it.
I thought I got the quote for my sig from the McCarthy Hearing transcripts, but I can't source it right now. I have no problem extending sympathy to people, but it's easy to extend that sympathy into empathy and get mired in idiocy without knowing it.
Here's the joy of my treatment: infusions. Twice a week. Four needles in my abdomen for two hours per infusion. Probably for the rest of my life. I won't mention the increased risk for interesting forms of cancer and other joys.
Simply put, it pretty much sucks. But I am alive, and I semi-forced my employer into letting me telecommute 90%+ of the time. And overall I feel fine, but sometimes it can be VERY depressing. I haven't been sick since I recovered from my last pneumonia in June, and though I'm not a religious man, I do count my blessings.
I hang out on a message board for people with primary immunodeficiency, and a woman related a story of an H1N1 clinic they had somewhere in Canada. Women saying they were pregnant to get the shot, people claiming to be immune-compromised to get the shot, they were so overwhelmed by the turnout that they finally opened the doors to anyone who was there.
I have a medalert card in my wallet, and I could probably get a letter from my doctor, heck: I could show them the bottles of Vivaglobin that I've been collecting for props for a PSA video, but it's not going to help me if the vaccine doesn't make it down south here.
This year I was diagnosed as being immune-compromised after having had pneumonia four times from February to June. They haven't shipped very much H1N1 vaccine to New Mexico, and it doesn't seem like any of it has made it to the southern part of the state where I live. Fortunately people like me with immune disorders have been recategorized as being in the priority group when vaccine does become available.
If we're past the peak, then maybe people won't clamor as much for the vaccine and I'll have a better shot at getting inoculated as I must have the shot, can't have the nasal vaccine.
Exactly! I went Mac over two years ago with little regret. I do run virtual environments for the rare occasion that I need Windows, but I'm not going to play games in such a setup, and I'm not interested in doing Bootcamp as I don't have much disk space.
BTW, City of Heroes is available in Mac now, no idea if they're going to do or did Champions Online that way.
Can't say I'd be surprised if it's supported: a certain number of people won't build antibiodies. My wife and I found out this year that I am immunodeficient: I've had pneumonia four times from February through June, fortunately I didn't require hospitalization and suffered no lung damage because of it. I'm sure there's a fair number of people out there who are immunodeficient and don't know it. In my case, we didn't know until June, and we were talking about getting me a pneumonia immunization to prevent further episodes. It would have been wasted vaccine as my body wouldn't build antibodies at that time, we don't know if it will now, now that I've started treatment: that's the next set of tests.
I do know that, of the last five winter flu seasons, I didn't get a vaccine the first year and got really sick. Same with my wife. I've gotten the vaccine each subsequent year and not gotten sick, same with my wife. We don't know right now if I'll be able to get it (or swine flu or pneumonia or tetanus) this year, we'll wait and see.
They wanted to set up an IT wiki for information sharing (procedures, config info, etc) and were told that a LAMP/WAMP stack with Wikimedia was unacceptable because it was insecure. They tried SharePoint and found that it didn't allow structuring documents or anything remotely resembling the flexibility of ?AMP/Wiki and eventually replaced it with a closed-source system requiring annual licensing and a dedicated developer.
Her boss finally left, a more flexible one came in, and now all of their old servers have been replaced with *nix with a growing rollout of PostgreSQL and life is much happier there.
Given mortality rates being the highest for drivers 16-24, what would be a better alternative?
Actual driver training that might reduce the accident rate rather than just attempts to apportion blame better ?
...I'd love to require a course like ours for all new drivers before they get a license, and perhaps an occasional refresher for all drivers, period (even us instructors!)
This is the idiocy that strikes me about "drivers license for life". Arizona instituted a drivers license that lasted for over 20 years! Traffic laws change, reaction times and skills change, yet heaven forbid we restrict someone's unalienable right to drive far past the point where they can reasonably control 3,000 lbs of steel.
Personally, I think the easiest way to reduce the mortality rate of the 16-24 group is to not let them drive until they're 25.
I have so much MS crap that wants to run as admin on my MS SQL Server boxes that it's ridiculous! MS and everyone should not allow any developer to log on as admin, it would clean up so many problems.
I recently sat down to re-read the 5-book trilogy. I first started reading the series before book 4 came out, I don't remember quite when (late 70's, early 80's, something like that). And at that time I loved them. It's probably been over a decade since I read all 5.
But here's the sad part: I really don't like them too much any more.
There are parts that still make me laugh, and I still think the 1st and 4th books are the best (or at least my favs), but I just don't find them funny anymore.
I'm sure that I'll pick up #6, but I don't really have high hopes.
I guess all that remains is to re-read the two Dirk Gently books. I liked the 1st, don't remember what I thought of the second.
Take a look at http://www.freebasic.net/, they sort of continued in the original BASIC path with some modern enhancements. I use it at work for the occasional quick and dirty job.
Customer service Epic Fail. I find it interesting that people aren't mentioning that this is actually Cingular, AT&T cellular died years ago and was bought out by Cingular, who later re-branded as AT&T because they thought that had better name recognition. AT&T flubbed a CRM install and it tanked their customer service, and they died. It just happened that the two companies used the same cellular technology (GSM or whatever) and a merger was possible. Sadly, Cingular's customer service was really no better than AT&T's, so you're still dealing with a sad and lonely monster.
I use Alltel. Driving to work a week ago I got a text message saying that my account had high usage and I needed to call them. My wife had just spent a week on the other side of the country, her cell is an additional line on my plan. We spent a lot of hours playing WoW and talking while she was gone, and I didn't know she was roaming. $600 worth of charges. Alltel saw the problem, contacted me, and offered me a plan upgrade for $20 a month that gave me unlimited nation-wide roaming, and that by doing it, it would be retroactive and I wouldn't be hit with a $600 phone bill.
THAT is customer service. I don't know what AT&T provides, but it ain't customer service. Cellular service in the USA has always been hideously monopolistic compared to a lot of the world, and somehow they get away with it. Hopefully that will change some day, probably the same day that I can easily buy an iPhone from an Alltel store and not have to deal with AT&T.
Uh, not exactly. My wife's father (he wasn't my F-I-L at the time) was diagnosed with prostate cancer. When they operated, they found it had spread to his liver and lungs. A month later they found two or three tumors in his brain. He died eleven days after our wedding.
Maybe prostate cancer is slow, but if it spreads, the others might get you first.
The vaccine is designed for the viral forms of pneumonia, what I've been getting is the bacterial form, but it would offer some protection. I mostly haven't been well enough to get the shot, sadly! But right now I'm doing better, and it looks like a possible source may have been found for what's been causing my ills: a lovely thing called hypogammaglobulinemia. If confirmed, it looks like my body isn't producing enough gammaglobulin to support a healthy immune system, thus I get sick lots.
I've had pneumonia four times since February, and we don't know what's causing it, first bout was in February, last bout was last week. That's a loss of almost six weeks of work and gross wages of almost $6000. But we're doing a bronchoscopy Friday and have numerous immunological tests being conducted, so hopefully we'll come up with something soon. All bloodwork, thus far, has said is that I have an infection. Well, DUH!
Yeah, a lot of medicine is played by the numbers. Though it's a lousy book, Travis Taylor's Warp Speed has some interesting observations on the non-science of modern medicine, which strongly corresponds to the statistical medicine that you describe.
My wife found me on an online dating site. I was signed up on several and got several dates, but she lived 500 miles away and I wasn't searching that large a radius. She lives in pretty rural New Mexico and wasn't finding people who were smart enough (she has a PhD in astronomy, as seen on MythBusters) or at least not stupid. After some horrible dates, she expanded her search area and found me.
It was well worth the drives back and forth: Thursday is our 4th anniversary.
FYI, the observatory that she works at is mostly Unix/Linux/Mac. Some of the instruments work off of Windows as the controlling hardware/software for the instrument is entirely dependent on the team that made it. They also have some strange stuff, like a Dec Alpha running Lisp.
It is a place of extreme coolness to get to hang out at and wander around, partly because it's at 9200'.
Actually, my GF, now wife, was a Mac user long before I switched to Apple from Windows about two years ago. I'm still stuck with it in my day job (SQL Server DBA) and working on my dad's PC, but them's the breaks.
But it was most gratifying when my brother called me up to complain that he couldn't browse the internet with IE or Firefox on his new(ish) Vista laptop. "Sorry, dude, I don't know Vista." Turned out it was pre-installed Symantec crapware firewall. I'm SO glad I live 400 miles from my brother and dad and only have to perform tech support when I'm in Phoenix!
Including the US Championship and a huge one held in Vegas every year. I'd love to see how this is done and would really like to attend one of these. Gotta dig in to the site and see the rules for draws: if the machines can offer them, or if only the operators. IIRC, when Kasparov was playing Deep Blue, it was up to Blue's operators to decide whether to accept an offer. The current leader has one draw and is up against #2, who has 2.
That was one thing that fascinated me when I started working high-level events: the number of draws was very high.
I'm not a great player, but I do enjoy watching the greats play.
I'd have to agree with you about Bladerunner. I don't know how many times I've seen it, saw the super deluxe director's cut last year. The thing that grabs me about the movie, though, is the visuals. Scott did such an amazing job with the visuals that I'm blown away every time that I see it, and since he was able to show some of the early footage to Dick before he passed, that's double-plus good.
Thanks for the mention of Skyfire! I bought a Dell Axim as my final abandoning of Palm and was looking for a good browser. Now if I could find a replacement for CryptoPad, I'd be a happy man.
That's funny. A friend of mine has a job that takes her inside Hoover Dam on a fairly regular basis. They flew up to Vegas and down to the dam then tromped around the site all day, then when they returned to Vegas to fly out, her shoes tested positive for explosives. Everyone else laughed at her as they'd thought to change their shoes before flying. It wasn't a problem as her travel companions explained their jobs and had government ID and vouched for her, but it was still kind of mortifying for her.
There was a recent article about medical records being available on torrents from people installing P2P software on computers in doctor offices, not realizing that they were sharing documents on said computers.
I absolutely agree with your point that if credit card companies can't keep your data private, how do they expect medical records will stay private.
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I originally had my board set to the applicant doing a medium CAPTCHA and verifying an email. I'm not sure if there were people on the other end authenticating to get in and post spam, or if there was an exploit with SMF that let them bypass part of the login authentication with a hack.
I've had probably 50 people try to register on my message board in the last couple of weeks, mainly from RIPE in Amsterdam and LACNIC in Montevideo. I've considered banning RIPE's IP addresses entirely. The ones that I have approved have been posting your typical porn and Viagra links, I'm not sure if this is exactly the same as I won't follow their liniks to see if it's to blog posts.
I wasn't sure if there'd been a compromise for SMF boards or if there's a list of low-activity boards that spammers share where my site got listed recently and thus people are trying to post there or what, but I've had to turn on administrator-approval of all memberships, which really ticks me off. I'm thinking about reinstalling my board to change the directory but haven't had time to mess with it.
I thought I got the quote for my sig from the McCarthy Hearing transcripts, but I can't source it right now. I have no problem extending sympathy to people, but it's easy to extend that sympathy into empathy and get mired in idiocy without knowing it.
Here's the joy of my treatment: infusions. Twice a week. Four needles in my abdomen for two hours per infusion. Probably for the rest of my life. I won't mention the increased risk for interesting forms of cancer and other joys.
Simply put, it pretty much sucks. But I am alive, and I semi-forced my employer into letting me telecommute 90%+ of the time. And overall I feel fine, but sometimes it can be VERY depressing. I haven't been sick since I recovered from my last pneumonia in June, and though I'm not a religious man, I do count my blessings.
I hang out on a message board for people with primary immunodeficiency, and a woman related a story of an H1N1 clinic they had somewhere in Canada. Women saying they were pregnant to get the shot, people claiming to be immune-compromised to get the shot, they were so overwhelmed by the turnout that they finally opened the doors to anyone who was there.
I have a medalert card in my wallet, and I could probably get a letter from my doctor, heck: I could show them the bottles of Vivaglobin that I've been collecting for props for a PSA video, but it's not going to help me if the vaccine doesn't make it down south here.
This year I was diagnosed as being immune-compromised after having had pneumonia four times from February to June. They haven't shipped very much H1N1 vaccine to New Mexico, and it doesn't seem like any of it has made it to the southern part of the state where I live. Fortunately people like me with immune disorders have been recategorized as being in the priority group when vaccine does become available. If we're past the peak, then maybe people won't clamor as much for the vaccine and I'll have a better shot at getting inoculated as I must have the shot, can't have the nasal vaccine.
Exactly! I went Mac over two years ago with little regret. I do run virtual environments for the rare occasion that I need Windows, but I'm not going to play games in such a setup, and I'm not interested in doing Bootcamp as I don't have much disk space. BTW, City of Heroes is available in Mac now, no idea if they're going to do or did Champions Online that way.
So it has not yet completed peer review.
Can't say I'd be surprised if it's supported: a certain number of people won't build antibiodies. My wife and I found out this year that I am immunodeficient: I've had pneumonia four times from February through June, fortunately I didn't require hospitalization and suffered no lung damage because of it. I'm sure there's a fair number of people out there who are immunodeficient and don't know it. In my case, we didn't know until June, and we were talking about getting me a pneumonia immunization to prevent further episodes. It would have been wasted vaccine as my body wouldn't build antibodies at that time, we don't know if it will now, now that I've started treatment: that's the next set of tests.
I do know that, of the last five winter flu seasons, I didn't get a vaccine the first year and got really sick. Same with my wife. I've gotten the vaccine each subsequent year and not gotten sick, same with my wife. We don't know right now if I'll be able to get it (or swine flu or pneumonia or tetanus) this year, we'll wait and see.
I also started blogging about it at http://pneumoboy.blogspot.com/
They wanted to set up an IT wiki for information sharing (procedures, config info, etc) and were told that a LAMP/WAMP stack with Wikimedia was unacceptable because it was insecure. They tried SharePoint and found that it didn't allow structuring documents or anything remotely resembling the flexibility of ?AMP/Wiki and eventually replaced it with a closed-source system requiring annual licensing and a dedicated developer.
Her boss finally left, a more flexible one came in, and now all of their old servers have been replaced with *nix with a growing rollout of PostgreSQL and life is much happier there.
Given mortality rates being the highest for drivers 16-24, what would be a better alternative?
Actual driver training that might reduce the accident rate rather than just attempts to apportion blame better ?
...I'd love to require a course like ours for all new drivers before they get a license, and perhaps an occasional refresher for all drivers, period (even us instructors!)
This is the idiocy that strikes me about "drivers license for life". Arizona instituted a drivers license that lasted for over 20 years! Traffic laws change, reaction times and skills change, yet heaven forbid we restrict someone's unalienable right to drive far past the point where they can reasonably control 3,000 lbs of steel.
Personally, I think the easiest way to reduce the mortality rate of the 16-24 group is to not let them drive until they're 25.
I have so much MS crap that wants to run as admin on my MS SQL Server boxes that it's ridiculous! MS and everyone should not allow any developer to log on as admin, it would clean up so many problems.
I recently sat down to re-read the 5-book trilogy. I first started reading the series before book 4 came out, I don't remember quite when (late 70's, early 80's, something like that). And at that time I loved them. It's probably been over a decade since I read all 5. But here's the sad part: I really don't like them too much any more. There are parts that still make me laugh, and I still think the 1st and 4th books are the best (or at least my favs), but I just don't find them funny anymore. I'm sure that I'll pick up #6, but I don't really have high hopes. I guess all that remains is to re-read the two Dirk Gently books. I liked the 1st, don't remember what I thought of the second.
Take a look at http://www.freebasic.net/, they sort of continued in the original BASIC path with some modern enhancements. I use it at work for the occasional quick and dirty job.
Ah, I hadn't heard about AT&T buying Cingular. Thanks for the info.
Customer service Epic Fail. I find it interesting that people aren't mentioning that this is actually Cingular, AT&T cellular died years ago and was bought out by Cingular, who later re-branded as AT&T because they thought that had better name recognition. AT&T flubbed a CRM install and it tanked their customer service, and they died. It just happened that the two companies used the same cellular technology (GSM or whatever) and a merger was possible. Sadly, Cingular's customer service was really no better than AT&T's, so you're still dealing with a sad and lonely monster.
I use Alltel. Driving to work a week ago I got a text message saying that my account had high usage and I needed to call them. My wife had just spent a week on the other side of the country, her cell is an additional line on my plan. We spent a lot of hours playing WoW and talking while she was gone, and I didn't know she was roaming. $600 worth of charges. Alltel saw the problem, contacted me, and offered me a plan upgrade for $20 a month that gave me unlimited nation-wide roaming, and that by doing it, it would be retroactive and I wouldn't be hit with a $600 phone bill.
THAT is customer service. I don't know what AT&T provides, but it ain't customer service. Cellular service in the USA has always been hideously monopolistic compared to a lot of the world, and somehow they get away with it. Hopefully that will change some day, probably the same day that I can easily buy an iPhone from an Alltel store and not have to deal with AT&T.
Uh, not exactly. My wife's father (he wasn't my F-I-L at the time) was diagnosed with prostate cancer. When they operated, they found it had spread to his liver and lungs. A month later they found two or three tumors in his brain. He died eleven days after our wedding.
Maybe prostate cancer is slow, but if it spreads, the others might get you first.
The vaccine is designed for the viral forms of pneumonia, what I've been getting is the bacterial form, but it would offer some protection. I mostly haven't been well enough to get the shot, sadly! But right now I'm doing better, and it looks like a possible source may have been found for what's been causing my ills: a lovely thing called hypogammaglobulinemia. If confirmed, it looks like my body isn't producing enough gammaglobulin to support a healthy immune system, thus I get sick lots.
I've had pneumonia four times since February, and we don't know what's causing it, first bout was in February, last bout was last week. That's a loss of almost six weeks of work and gross wages of almost $6000. But we're doing a bronchoscopy Friday and have numerous immunological tests being conducted, so hopefully we'll come up with something soon. All bloodwork, thus far, has said is that I have an infection. Well, DUH!
Yeah, a lot of medicine is played by the numbers. Though it's a lousy book, Travis Taylor's Warp Speed has some interesting observations on the non-science of modern medicine, which strongly corresponds to the statistical medicine that you describe.
My wife found me on an online dating site. I was signed up on several and got several dates, but she lived 500 miles away and I wasn't searching that large a radius. She lives in pretty rural New Mexico and wasn't finding people who were smart enough (she has a PhD in astronomy, as seen on MythBusters) or at least not stupid. After some horrible dates, she expanded her search area and found me.
It was well worth the drives back and forth: Thursday is our 4th anniversary.
FYI, the observatory that she works at is mostly Unix/Linux/Mac. Some of the instruments work off of Windows as the controlling hardware/software for the instrument is entirely dependent on the team that made it. They also have some strange stuff, like a Dec Alpha running Lisp.
It is a place of extreme coolness to get to hang out at and wander around, partly because it's at 9200'.
Actually, my GF, now wife, was a Mac user long before I switched to Apple from Windows about two years ago. I'm still stuck with it in my day job (SQL Server DBA) and working on my dad's PC, but them's the breaks.
But it was most gratifying when my brother called me up to complain that he couldn't browse the internet with IE or Firefox on his new(ish) Vista laptop. "Sorry, dude, I don't know Vista." Turned out it was pre-installed Symantec crapware firewall. I'm SO glad I live 400 miles from my brother and dad and only have to perform tech support when I'm in Phoenix!
Including the US Championship and a huge one held in Vegas every year. I'd love to see how this is done and would really like to attend one of these. Gotta dig in to the site and see the rules for draws: if the machines can offer them, or if only the operators. IIRC, when Kasparov was playing Deep Blue, it was up to Blue's operators to decide whether to accept an offer. The current leader has one draw and is up against #2, who has 2.
That was one thing that fascinated me when I started working high-level events: the number of draws was very high.
I'm not a great player, but I do enjoy watching the greats play.
I'd have to agree with you about Bladerunner. I don't know how many times I've seen it, saw the super deluxe director's cut last year. The thing that grabs me about the movie, though, is the visuals. Scott did such an amazing job with the visuals that I'm blown away every time that I see it, and since he was able to show some of the early footage to Dick before he passed, that's double-plus good.
Isn't that Sprint that will be the network for the Palm Pre in the US, not Verizon?
Thanks for the mention of Skyfire! I bought a Dell Axim as my final abandoning of Palm and was looking for a good browser. Now if I could find a replacement for CryptoPad, I'd be a happy man.
That's funny. A friend of mine has a job that takes her inside Hoover Dam on a fairly regular basis. They flew up to Vegas and down to the dam then tromped around the site all day, then when they returned to Vegas to fly out, her shoes tested positive for explosives. Everyone else laughed at her as they'd thought to change their shoes before flying. It wasn't a problem as her travel companions explained their jobs and had government ID and vouched for her, but it was still kind of mortifying for her.
There was a recent article about medical records being available on torrents from people installing P2P software on computers in doctor offices, not realizing that they were sharing documents on said computers.
I absolutely agree with your point that if credit card companies can't keep your data private, how do they expect medical records will stay private.