According to some folks, the only thing down here in Florida are spammers, which is not accurate.
Not to rub it in your face as a non-spamming Floridian- and I do understand that most Floridians are not spammers and use email responsibly- but I had to share an interesting anti-spam idea I once saw in a Bugs Bunny cartoon of all places. Bugs was angry that the penalty for shooting a rabbit out of rabbit season was two cents, you see, so he went a little nuts and he started doing some very bad things. One of the things he did was take a saw and physically saw Florida right off along its border so that the entire state floated away to sea, presumably taking a large portion of the world's 180 or so spammers with it and severing their connectivity to the mainland.
Now I know there are problems with this approach. Here are the appropriate spam-form objections:
(*) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (*) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (*) The police will not put up with it (*) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
Specifically, Bugs Bunny's idea fails to account for
(*) Laws expressly prohibiting it (*) Asshats (*) Jurisdictional problems
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Similar ideas are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical (*) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (*) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
and especially
(*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
The idea has additional flaws that aren't on the form. But, it's important to "think outside the box" when attacking a persistent problem like this, and to remember that solutions might be found in unconventional places. Maybe, if we lower the rabbit-season penalty to two cents, some smart rabbit will show up with an idea that actually works!
Your math agrees with mine- you're calculating something different (the effects at 1 AU). I was calculating how close you'd have to be to the sun for it to be as bright as this star- roughly 0.1 AU. (You should round 88192 to 100000 since you start with less than one significant digit from "1e40".)
If the sun was only 10 kilometres from your house, a mass extinction might occur. Seriously, this has to be the most bizzare astronomy story tagline I've ever read. I figured this was the submitter's quote, or possibly the article writer - nope, it was from one of the physicists.
Why is it bizarre? When I read it I understood what he meant and why he said it. Light years are big. For anything ten light years distant to have a measurable effect on the Earth is pretty amazing!
The radiation intensity at the surface of the Sun is 63,000,000 watts per square meter. (Your 10 km makes no real difference.) The intensity 10 light years (10^17 m) away from a 10^40 watt source would be approx. 100,000 watts per square meter. So you'd have to be 25 solar radii away from the Sun for its radiation intensity to be equivalent to this magnetar if it were ten light years distant. (For comparison, mercury orbits at about 86 solar radii.) Nitpickers may note that the Sun is mostly radiating UV through IR, and the magnetar's energy is brief and in the gamma ray spectrum, but this is still impressive.
Ya know, IANAPOAPOA (I Am Not A Physicist Or AstroPhysicist or Astronomer) but I'm willing to bet that if I were 160,000 kilometers from this object, or even our sun, I might be worried about other things than my credit cards getting wiped.
That's why YANAPOAPOA. I can imagine the interview. "If you were 160,000 kilometers from this black hole... we'll, you'd be in space, so you'd be dead! So don't go there!"
Magnetic fields are difficult to characterize. What are you going to do, tell people the field is 1000000000000 Tesla? (Yawn, what's a Tesla?) You can't compare magnetic fields to hens eggs or Libraries of Congress. The only thing you can really do is compare them to a field strength that people are intuitively familiar with- like a refrigerator magnet's field, an MRI field, or a field sufficient to wipe magnetic cards. Refrigerator magnets and MRIs come in a variety of field strengths. Plus, smartasses would make comments about refrigerators and magnetic imaging machines in space.
I have to agree with the other guy who responded to this... I can't make out what your position is or is based on, other than "California FAILED us" somehow, for which no supporting evidence is offered. And looking at your posting history, you seem to have had a very short posting career during which you have been puzzling other peopleas well.
Are you a human being or did some clever coder write you as a fun side project?
What are you telling us for? Why aren't you writing your senators instead?
Seriously- all of you who have been making this same complaint on Slashdot- have you also been complaining to your elected representatives? (I haven't, but I have an excuse- I live in the "People's Republic of California". No letter from ChoicePoint in my mailbox yet!)
This is really amazingly egregious that they shouldn't be required by law to contact you if they realize they sold your mother's maiden name to mobsters. I can't believe how shit happens in the rest of the country sometimes.
Yes...what scientist wants to come out against the indoctrinated religious pontification and make an anti-environmental blasphemous statement that although humans are likely to blame in part for the warming, that this could be a natural trend.
You'd think a lot of them would, given the economic incentives to do it. If an American scientist denies global warming, or says that the evidence is still inconclusive, he's far more likely to receive his research grant than a scientist who tells the truth.
Should we reduce emissions yes....but let's get off the fanatic religious belief of mass scientology...
I would have posted this anonymously if I were you. You don't want to piss off Scientologists.
Um. Several studies into dirty bombs have been done. They all showed that the most dangerous part of a dirty bomb is the conventional explosive.
Then don't use a conventional explosive.
Drop the Pu in nitric acid and make a plutonium nitrate solution. Fill an open container with it and put it in the back of a pickup truck. Drive the pickup truck into a city reservoir. This last part is quite possible; I've seen it done on COPS.
Nobody put a gun to your head and forced you to reuse a library. You could always code it yourself (at higher cost and risk of bugs).
This sort of ignores reality. In a weird twist of "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft", GPL software is more and more being seized on by the market to define implementation standards that all other code must comply to.
It reminds me of something that happened at a place I used to work that wrote scientific software for analyzing data [of a type that is unimportant to the story] and one of the things it has to do is normalize the data as it came in. A novel normalization algorithm, correcting for a specific (tiny) source of systematic error, was developed by some researchers, and they described it in a paper. They also released a small library which implemented it, released under the GPL.
Our customers seized on it- the algorithm became the hot new fad. Everyone just had to throw away their old straightforwardly normalized data and renormalize it with this new algorithm, to see if their results came out "better". And people started screaming at us for not supporting it. So we assigned a developer to it, he read the paper, did a straightforward implementation based on the paper, and the numbers did come out a little better after normalization- we considered it a success and released a beta to some customers.
Immediately the verdict came back- Not Acceptable. "Your numbers aren't the same as the numbers that come out of the GPL library! You have a bug! Fix it!" But we obviously couldn't have the developer involved looking at the GPL library to see what it was doing differently. In fact he was scared his eyes might accidentally see GPL code, for fear of having to spend the rest of his career in the industry working for Free-with-a-capital-F.
So he recruited a non-programmer (a statistician who wasn't very skilled at reading code) to help him figure out what the GPL code was doing, without actually looking at it himself. This made for a very convoluted compile-debug-test cycle, since it involved running to the statistician to ask for advice. It was actually quite a spectacle- with the statistician squinting at the code, occasionally having shocked revelations about it, and then horror and puzzlement all around- "they're doing what?!? That's not right!" The numbers wandered around but refused to agree with the GPL package- which they had to, period. Not a single customer would tolerate anything otherwise.
Gradually it became apparent that the algorithm described in the paper was not at all the same algorithm that was actually implemented in the GPL library. The authors seemed to have no idea what they were doing. They were tossing every sort of normalization step that they could think of at the data. They corrected for everything they could think of. They corrected for some things twice. They made mistakes with log and linear scales. They included stuff that made no sense, or was redundant in combination with other things they did. All this actually introduced significant artifacts into the data. It became abundantly clear that nobody had looked at the code, despite the fact that it was open source.
But, we were stuck, because everyone was demanding the same results that came out of the buggy GPL code. But we couldn't really say anything about why the GPL implementation was incorrect, for fear of having to work for Free.
Eventually he ended up producing numbers identical to within roundoff error, after sabotaging his original code and working hard to reimplement the same bugs one by one. His code also ran faster and used less memory. He released it as a plugin under the LGPL, with an option to run the "improved" algorithm without the bugs. Nobody uses it, and the GPL library hasn't changed at all. It continues to mungle people's data to this day.
And when people release their code under the GPL, the 'payment' they want if you choose to use it is that you put your code under the GPL too. If you don't want that, then don't use the code. WTF is so hard to understand about that?
What is hard to understand is that people expect "payment" for code that they simultaneously proclaim as superior for being "free". Just stop bragging that your code is "free" if it's proprietary.
A while ago I wanted to use a standard library for parsing command line arguments (I'd been doing it myself with less than perfect attention to detail, causing confusion among users used to standard GNU command line conventions). I was prevented from doing so by the GPL, which seemed to be mindlessly slapped onto every stupid little library for parsing command line arguments that I came across.
There are some libraries for this available now under the LGPL. But I have yet to work at any company where they'll let me link to an LGPL library. In my experience most corporate legal departments don't seem to think much of the concessions in the LGPL, which is considered equivalent to the GPL.
My current employer is releasing some external plugin code as open source, and they were going to release it under an Apache or BSD license. They decided to switch to the LGPL, they said, in order to screw over competitors.
3 bottles! Wow! You must have gotten into the range where your bladder is bulging and painfully full but you can't seem to remember how to pee. Don't do it, kids- it puts pits and holes in your brain.
I was thinking he could use his vast conflicts of interest to power the vehicles.
The Hummer owners I see on El Camino are going to love per-mile taxing. Although the round trip consumes a little over a half gallon, it's less than 2 miles from Atherton to Stanford Mall.
This may actually be preferable to a class action. What you wouldn't want to happen in this case is for lots of people to sign their rights away (absolving ChoicePoint of future liability) in exchange for a check that arrives in the mail later to the tune of $53.47 or something that will seem inconsequential once your identity is stolen. Although depending on the egregiousness of the fault, the sum may be greater than that, and it may be in this case. But the point is moot- there will be no class action.
If this happened to me, I'd monitor my credit report closely and lawyer up personally on ChoicePoint's ass the minute anything weird showed up. Everyone complains that people sue too much. But when a corporation leaves your ass flapping in the wind like this, what other redress is there? We should be so lucky that individuals still have the right to sue corporations when they screw us over- things won't stay like this for long.
Remember, this is what "economic freedom" is all about. I don't want the government telling me what traffic I can and can't block with my Baby Bell. That would be communism- and we all know how that turned out.
A nice Slashcode feature might be for every story to appear with a small random number of several standard first posts added programatically, before the story even appears to subscribers- like from among the following:
First!
First Post!
In Soviet Russia...
And the server is toast...
Well it didn't take long for that to happen...
Nothing for you to see here, please move along huh huh huh
If a real first post arrives within a certain time limit, it should be preceded by one of these. And modding one down shouldn't cost you a mod point. Even if nobody but the first posters themselves know the difference, just spoiling the experience for them would make it worth it.
That is not an excuse. The fact that you happen to live in another state doesn't mean they have less of an obligation to you.
Of course it does. ChoicePoint's obligations in this matter extend only as far as set forth by state and federal law.
Now I've been told many times by people on Slashdot who don't live in California that I must be a pinko commie because I live in California. Us pinko commies here like to push corporations around with strange socialist-style laws, creating obligations for them that simply don't exist in more enlightened areas of the country that enjoy what the guys at CATO call "economic freedom".
For example, we make people print weird things on cans about stuff known to our state to cause cancer- a subject on which California appears to be some sort of an authority. (If other states know what's causing cancer, they're sure keeping it a secret.) And if ChoicePoint compromises your personal information, California forces them to tell you. Apparently in other states it's none of your damn business unless you're an employee of ChoicePoint. Or maybe a customer- if ChoicePoint is smart, they'll recognize the business opportunity here. I bet plenty of people in the other 49 states would be willing to pay to know whether ChoicePoint gave crooks their data or not.
If you don't live in California, there is always freecreditreport.com. It has a 30 day free trial./schadenfreude
Look at the bright side. If you don't live in California, you're far more likely to pay less than a half million for your house, so your credit doesn't need to be that shiny anyway. If a few Russian mobsters get your personal information, you're probably still better off than the average California home-buyer. And once you buy your non-CA house, you'll only pay your own share of property taxes- you won't also be paying them for all your neighbors on the street who voted to make themselves a landed gentry years ago with Prop 13.
Slashdot Mirror
According to some folks, the only thing down here in Florida are spammers, which is not accurate.
Not to rub it in your face as a non-spamming Floridian- and I do understand that most Floridians are not spammers and use email responsibly- but I had to share an interesting anti-spam idea I once saw in a Bugs Bunny cartoon of all places.
Bugs was angry that the penalty for shooting a rabbit out of rabbit season was two cents, you see, so he went a little nuts and he started doing some very bad things. One of the things he did was take a saw and physically saw Florida right off along its border so that the entire state floated away to sea, presumably taking a large portion of the world's 180 or so spammers with it and severing their connectivity to the mainland.
Now I know there are problems with this approach. Here are the appropriate spam-form objections:
(*) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(*) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(*) The police will not put up with it
(*) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
Specifically, Bugs Bunny's idea fails to account for
(*) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(*) Asshats
(*) Jurisdictional problems
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Similar ideas are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
(*) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(*) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
and especially
(*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
The idea has additional flaws that aren't on the form. But, it's important to "think outside the box" when attacking a persistent problem like this, and to remember that solutions might be found in unconventional places. Maybe, if we lower the rabbit-season penalty to two cents, some smart rabbit will show up with an idea that actually works!
I used to run it on my laptop until I realized it was slowly putting red burn marks on my lap.
Your math agrees with mine- you're calculating something different (the effects at 1 AU). I was calculating how close you'd have to be to the sun for it to be as bright as this star- roughly 0.1 AU. (You should round 88192 to 100000 since you start with less than one significant digit from "1e40".)
How many nanometers in a yoctoparsec?
Or just do a search for yoctoparsec. Some words only ever appear in link farms.
If the sun was only 10 kilometres from your house, a mass extinction might occur.
Seriously, this has to be the most bizzare astronomy story tagline I've ever read. I figured this was the submitter's quote, or possibly the article writer - nope, it was from one of the physicists.
Why is it bizarre? When I read it I understood what he meant and why he said it. Light years are big. For anything ten light years distant to have a measurable effect on the Earth is pretty amazing!
The radiation intensity at the surface of the Sun is 63,000,000 watts per square meter. (Your 10 km makes no real difference.) The intensity 10 light years (10^17 m) away from a 10^40 watt source would be approx. 100,000 watts per square meter. So you'd have to be 25 solar radii away from the Sun for its radiation intensity to be equivalent to this magnetar if it were ten light years distant. (For comparison, mercury orbits at about 86 solar radii.) Nitpickers may note that the Sun is mostly radiating UV through IR, and the magnetar's energy is brief and in the gamma ray spectrum, but this is still impressive.
Ya know, IANAPOAPOA (I Am Not A Physicist Or AstroPhysicist or Astronomer) but I'm willing to bet that if I were 160,000 kilometers from this object, or even our sun, I might be worried about other things than my credit cards getting wiped.
That's why YANAPOAPOA. I can imagine the interview.
"If you were 160,000 kilometers from this black hole... we'll, you'd be in space, so you'd be dead! So don't go there!"
Magnetic fields are difficult to characterize. What are you going to do, tell people the field is 1000000000000 Tesla? (Yawn, what's a Tesla?) You can't compare magnetic fields to hens eggs or Libraries of Congress. The only thing you can really do is compare them to a field strength that people are intuitively familiar with- like a refrigerator magnet's field, an MRI field, or a field sufficient to wipe magnetic cards. Refrigerator magnets and MRIs come in a variety of field strengths. Plus, smartasses would make comments about refrigerators and magnetic imaging machines in space.
I have to agree with the other guy who responded to this... I can't make out what your position is or is based on, other than "California FAILED us" somehow, for which no supporting evidence is offered. And looking at your posting history, you seem to have had a very short posting career during which you have been puzzling other people as well.
Are you a human being or did some clever coder write you as a fun side project?
What are you telling us for? Why aren't you writing your senators instead?
Seriously- all of you who have been making this same complaint on Slashdot- have you also been complaining to your elected representatives? (I haven't, but I have an excuse- I live in the "People's Republic of California". No letter from ChoicePoint in my mailbox yet!)
This is really amazingly egregious that they shouldn't be required by law to contact you if they realize they sold your mother's maiden name to mobsters. I can't believe how shit happens in the rest of the country sometimes.
Yes...what scientist wants to come out against the indoctrinated religious pontification and make an anti-environmental blasphemous statement that although humans are likely to blame in part for the warming, that this could be a natural trend.
You'd think a lot of them would, given the economic incentives to do it. If an American scientist denies global warming, or says that the evidence is still inconclusive, he's far more likely to receive his research grant than a scientist who tells the truth.
Should we reduce emissions yes....but let's get off the fanatic religious belief of mass scientology...
I would have posted this anonymously if I were you. You don't want to piss off Scientologists.
Um. Several studies into dirty bombs have been done. They all showed that the most dangerous part of a dirty bomb is the conventional explosive.
Then don't use a conventional explosive.
Drop the Pu in nitric acid and make a plutonium nitrate solution. Fill an open container with it and put it in the back of a pickup truck. Drive the pickup truck into a city reservoir. This last part is quite possible; I've seen it done on COPS.
who isn't afraid to post anonymously and knows how to use his CAPS LOCK key...
should have no problem finding a new husband on Slashdot
I felt a great disturbance in the Force when I read this, as if millions of socially inept voices suddenly cried out at the opportunity to get laid.
Nobody put a gun to your head and forced you to reuse a library. You could always code it yourself (at higher cost and risk of bugs).
This sort of ignores reality. In a weird twist of "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft", GPL software is more and more being seized on by the market to define implementation standards that all other code must comply to.
It reminds me of something that happened at a place I used to work that wrote scientific software for analyzing data [of a type that is unimportant to the story] and one of the things it has to do is normalize the data as it came in. A novel normalization algorithm, correcting for a specific (tiny) source of systematic error, was developed by some researchers, and they described it in a paper. They also released a small library which implemented it, released under the GPL.
Our customers seized on it- the algorithm became the hot new fad. Everyone just had to throw away their old straightforwardly normalized data and renormalize it with this new algorithm, to see if their results came out "better". And people started screaming at us for not supporting it. So we assigned a developer to it, he read the paper, did a straightforward implementation based on the paper, and the numbers did come out a little better after normalization- we considered it a success and released a beta to some customers.
Immediately the verdict came back- Not Acceptable. "Your numbers aren't the same as the numbers that come out of the GPL library! You have a bug! Fix it!" But we obviously couldn't have the developer involved looking at the GPL library to see what it was doing differently. In fact he was scared his eyes might accidentally see GPL code, for fear of having to spend the rest of his career in the industry working for Free-with-a-capital-F.
So he recruited a non-programmer (a statistician who wasn't very skilled at reading code) to help him figure out what the GPL code was doing, without actually looking at it himself. This made for a very convoluted compile-debug-test cycle, since it involved running to the statistician to ask for advice. It was actually quite a spectacle- with the statistician squinting at the code, occasionally having shocked revelations about it, and then horror and puzzlement all around- "they're doing what?!? That's not right!" The numbers wandered around but refused to agree with the GPL package- which they had to, period. Not a single customer would tolerate anything otherwise.
Gradually it became apparent that the algorithm described in the paper was not at all the same algorithm that was actually implemented in the GPL library. The authors seemed to have no idea what they were doing. They were tossing every sort of normalization step that they could think of at the data. They corrected for everything they could think of. They corrected for some things twice. They made mistakes with log and linear scales. They included stuff that made no sense, or was redundant in combination with other things they did. All this actually introduced significant artifacts into the data. It became abundantly clear that nobody had looked at the code, despite the fact that it was open source.
But, we were stuck, because everyone was demanding the same results that came out of the buggy GPL code. But we couldn't really say anything about why the GPL implementation was incorrect, for fear of having to work for Free.
Eventually he ended up producing numbers identical to within roundoff error, after sabotaging his original code and working hard to reimplement the same bugs one by one. His code also ran faster and used less memory. He released it as a plugin under the LGPL, with an option to run the "improved" algorithm without the bugs. Nobody uses it, and the GPL library hasn't changed at all. It continues to mungle people's data to this day.
And when people release their code under the GPL, the 'payment' they want if you choose to use it is that you put your code under the GPL too. If you don't want that, then don't use the code. WTF is so hard to understand about that?
What is hard to understand is that people expect "payment" for code that they simultaneously proclaim as superior for being "free". Just stop bragging that your code is "free" if it's proprietary.
A while ago I wanted to use a standard library for parsing command line arguments (I'd been doing it myself with less than perfect attention to detail, causing confusion among users used to standard GNU command line conventions). I was prevented from doing so by the GPL, which seemed to be mindlessly slapped onto every stupid little library for parsing command line arguments that I came across.
There are some libraries for this available now under the LGPL. But I have yet to work at any company where they'll let me link to an LGPL library. In my experience most corporate legal departments don't seem to think much of the concessions in the LGPL, which is considered equivalent to the GPL.
My current employer is releasing some external plugin code as open source, and they were going to release it under an Apache or BSD license. They decided to switch to the LGPL, they said, in order to screw over competitors.
Suddenly, just as Paul was about to clinch the job interview...
3 bottles! Wow!
You must have gotten into the range where your bladder is bulging and painfully full but you can't seem to remember how to pee.
Don't do it, kids- it puts pits and holes in your brain.
...and takes with it those stupid posts to alt.drugs I wrote in college...
I was thinking he could use his vast conflicts of interest to power the vehicles.
The Hummer owners I see on El Camino are going to love per-mile taxing. Although the round trip consumes a little over a half gallon, it's less than 2 miles from Atherton to Stanford Mall.
He owns a fleet of Hummers. Although he mumbled something a while ago about converting them all to hydrogen.
Sure.
I'm surprised California would even consider this, instead of a gas tax. "Tax by mile" must appeal to the Hummer owners I see driving down El Camino.
This may actually be preferable to a class action. What you wouldn't want to happen in this case is for lots of people to sign their rights away (absolving ChoicePoint of future liability) in exchange for a check that arrives in the mail later to the tune of $53.47 or something that will seem inconsequential once your identity is stolen. Although depending on the egregiousness of the fault, the sum may be greater than that, and it may be in this case. But the point is moot- there will be no class action.
If this happened to me, I'd monitor my credit report closely and lawyer up personally on ChoicePoint's ass the minute anything weird showed up. Everyone complains that people sue too much. But when a corporation leaves your ass flapping in the wind like this, what other redress is there? We should be so lucky that individuals still have the right to sue corporations when they screw us over- things won't stay like this for long.
Yes, you're correct- I screwed up. Those are the wrong dockets. Someone with a mod point- please mod down my original post.
This is 04-405
and
this is 04-440
(Warning, PDF)
You can tell I didn't read the originals too closely. But these look like the correct ones.
This is what the Bush FCC appears to have planned for you.
Oh no! Bias! How can I trust any of this information when you're biased?
Ha ha ha, just kidding.
Docket #04-405
Docket #04-440
(warning: PDFs)
Remember, this is what "economic freedom" is all about. I don't want the government telling me what traffic I can and can't block with my Baby Bell. That would be communism- and we all know how that turned out.
- First!
- First Post!
- In Soviet Russia...
- And the server is toast...
- Well it didn't take long for that to happen...
- Nothing for you to see here, please move along huh huh huh
If a real first post arrives within a certain time limit, it should be preceded by one of these. And modding one down shouldn't cost you a mod point.Even if nobody but the first posters themselves know the difference, just spoiling the experience for them would make it worth it.
*although the Propositions usually suck
/schadenfreude
That is not an excuse. The fact that you happen to live in another state doesn't mean they have less of an obligation to you.
Of course it does. ChoicePoint's obligations in this matter extend only as far as set forth by state and federal law.
Now I've been told many times by people on Slashdot who don't live in California that I must be a pinko commie because I live in California. Us pinko commies here like to push corporations around with strange socialist-style laws, creating obligations for them that simply don't exist in more enlightened areas of the country that enjoy what the guys at CATO call "economic freedom".
For example, we make people print weird things on cans about stuff known to our state to cause cancer- a subject on which California appears to be some sort of an authority. (If other states know what's causing cancer, they're sure keeping it a secret.) And if ChoicePoint compromises your personal information, California forces them to tell you. Apparently in other states it's none of your damn business unless you're an employee of ChoicePoint. Or maybe a customer- if ChoicePoint is smart, they'll recognize the business opportunity here. I bet plenty of people in the other 49 states would be willing to pay to know whether ChoicePoint gave crooks their data or not.
If you don't live in California, there is always freecreditreport.com. It has a 30 day free trial.
Look at the bright side. If you don't live in California, you're far more likely to pay less than a half million for your house, so your credit doesn't need to be that shiny anyway. If a few Russian mobsters get your personal information, you're probably still better off than the average California home-buyer. And once you buy your non-CA house, you'll only pay your own share of property taxes- you won't also be paying them for all your neighbors on the street who voted to make themselves a landed gentry years ago with Prop 13.