This article has (here on/.) already raised the question "Why can't we stamp out the viral code from archives?" Well, let's take a lesson here from biology.
The human race took two different solutions to polio and malaria. (I'm not a doctor, so forgive any minor inaccuracies.)
With malaria, we took the "stamp out the viral archive" approach. We tried to kill the carriers - the mosquitos. If we can eliminate all the mosquitos that carry the infection (like eliminating old internet caches), nobody will have to worry about getting infected. Well, guess what - it didn't work. Malaria is a HUGE problem in many third-world countries, routinely killing a million Africans a year and costing $12 BILLION annually in Africa alone (see last week's WashPost Magazine article for details; registration required: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/10/04/AR2006100400127.html). The problem? You simply can't squash all the bugs. Only recently has attention turned to developing an artificial method of immunity from the disease, so that the bugs won't matter (at least, from that perspective).
With polio, we took the approach that preventing infection was the key. We innoculated EVERYONE, so that even if the virus surfaced, it wouldn't cause infections. It's proven to be a largely effective solution, with only a few periodic pockets of infection occurring in remote parts of Africa where the youngest are not innoculated afresh. And that problem is fairly easy to control.
Same thing here. Forget the archives. That's naive. Instead, focus on better immunity.
>I majored in computer engineering and minored in math and Japanese, and >actually took a lot of other classes that I didn't have to take because >I thought they were interesting. I have something like 32 credits that >don't really "count" as it were, for my degree. I am sure as hell glad >I took them though because I will probably never get another chance to >take a class in world music or Japanese literature. > >Those sure as hell don't help me on my job or in grad school next year, >but I really felt like they helped me grow as a human being....and if it were ME, looking at your application along side of his, even if you had a GPA a full point LOWER than his one-year degree, I'd hire you over him in a second. Who would I want as a prospective employer - someone with a drive to finish things instantly, has no demonstrated social skills, no interest in anything outside his laser-beam-focus, no demonstrated interest in expanding his mental horizons... or someone who took a couple extra years to grow, has five more years of real age and probably ten added years of relative maturity, wants to know more about more, is well-rounded, and is willing to work hard for a long time to succeed...
Seems like your approach is infinitely better. Sure, some employer might snap him up, but it's a rather risky thing for the long term.
His accomplishment is impressive. But that's not the whole story, obviously.
>Your street atlas GPS probably doesn't use NDGPS. It uses plain old satellite-based GPS, and that's just fine.
Welllllll...
Actually most consumer devices ALSO uses WAAS. Plain old satellite is "just fine" even without WAAS, but WAAS really helps refine the position.
Especially in the "urban canyons", normal GPS signals are pretty bad at times. Get in the city around tall buildings, and you'll see your accuracy get into the hundreds of feet if only three satellites are in view and lots of signal reflections are muddying the data. That's enough to put you a block away from your actual location. So WAAS or DGPS really helps in those situations. Sure, out in the middle of a cornfield in Kansas, you might not care about DGPS, but in that case you often have eight or ten satellites available and an accuracy of perhaps 15 feet. Not in the middle of the city.
I just suffered my FOURTH Maxtor failure in six years... and before you ask "didn't you learn after two", I will point out that two of those failures were of replacements shipped by Maxtor to replace drives that failed before the warranty expired.
I'm not even bothering to call them about this latest drive (a 120Gb SATA drive less than one year old) because I don't want the replacement they'd probably ship me.
To be fair, one of the early failures may have been due to an under-rated power supply, but after that I installed a highly overpowered Antec TruePower. Maxtor can't blame THAT anymore.
I'm glad to say I developed an excellent backup routine after a couple drive failures... so the last couple failures have been merely highly annoying instead of bit data loss events.
I agree about Ghost, at least version 9 or newer. As much as I hate other Symantec products, Ghost 9 just plain works, and does so with minimal resource hogging and no fuss.
My current backup solution, honed by several disk failures:
1) Ghost running every night. Each week a full backup, with nightly incrementals. These backups are compressed. 2) Backups are written to an external USB. Easy to move to another PC w/o hardware issues. 3) About every week, an xcopy *.*/d etc. to a second internal HD. This provides a file-wise backup for instant and easy access to any files.
I decided NOT to use a RAID solution for one simple reason. If a virus or Windows itself writes bogus data to a RAID disk, all copies will be getting the same bogus data. I'd rather have a nightly backup whereby I *might* lose a few hours of work, but I'll have a "clean" uncorrupted state to which I can restore.
I had my primary drive fail two weeks ago - an actual hardware failure. I'm pleased to say I lost only a few hours of work from that day, nothing irreplacable, and the time to restore from backups. Oh, BTW, I've now sworn off Maxtor discs for life; this was my 4th Maxtor problem in about six years, two of which were warranty-replaced units after the originals failed also. Never again.
>Great series, but clearly showing its age and suffering from 'we need to keep >inventing more überenemies' syndrome. I shall look forward to seeing how they >bow out. Personally, I think it is about time that they found an enemy capable >of destroying the earth which actually does it. Might not please some fans, but >would make great television.
You mean like Battlestar Galactica?
Gee, seems to me that they STARTED that way. What a kicker. Of course, the ORIGINAL BG wasn't "great television" from my point of view, but I think the new series is pretty good.
I don't believe this system will be as frustrating as the blade guards.
I'm all for the guards - I'm quite happy they're mandatory on new saws. I believe that under the right conditions, they're very useful. I know that guard would have helped 20 years ago on my first woodworking job when a saw tossed an 8" triangle of 2x4 into my face - fortunately it missed my eye by 1/2 inch. The guard and its anti-kickback fingers would have stopped that from happening. As it was, all I ended up with was a bruise and quite a new respect for the saw.
However, as a frequent woodworker, I can tell you that they are hideously inconvenient and actually DECREASE the safety of the saw in various situations. That's exactly why they are designed to be removed.
I believe if they were EASY to remove and replace, they'd be used more often. The tighter you integrate them, however, the less likely they will be replaced. It's like passenger side airbags without a kill switch - if you have small kids, you probably would get them deactivated. That doesn't help the adult passenger who rides sometimes. But if you make it easy, either automatic or key-switched, then most people will use them correctly. Same thing here.
Bottom line, there are many times I remove the guard - it just doesn't work for a lot of the harder, more complex cuts I need to make. But I put it back on when I can, because that saw really scares me, even when I use the guard. I have met too many mangled woodworkers over the years. But this system (as far as I can tell) doesn't affect the basic operation, use, or flexibility of the saw, and thus won't be subject to the "leave it off" problem of the guard.
We'd like to thank you for your "I'm sure my antivirus software will warn me about EVERYTHING bad on my machine, like the advertisements tell me it will" attitude. It demonstrates that you apparently place waaaaay too much trust in antivirus software, especially the latest and not-so-greatest. Hopefully you'll get infected by something written by your own associates when Norton doesn't catch it, and that will get you off our backs.
This looks suspiciously like self-promotion, trying to win a few dollars from Google AdSense placement. Yes, folks, Google can be used to make money. Who woulda known?
CPA only works when there's a trackable action... and in many cases, the trackable action is going to be impossible to define. For example, I launched a new site in July (geochecker.com), which is a free geocaching-related site, supported by Google Adsense ads, and doesn't sell anything. To get some initial traffic, I used my existing Adwords account to run ads on related search terms. Now, since my only monetizing product is advertising (from Google itself!), and the services the site offers are free, how on earth can there be any action? As a matter of fact, the very "action" that I'm trying to get IS a click - I want them to visit the site. I don't have anything to sell beyond that, other than possibly deciding they don't really want to be there and leaving thru a similar click on the Adsense links. I just need to build traffic above the breakeven critical mass. Beyond that, I don't care what happens to any "conversion".
(And given the economy of Google ads, I'm basically paying about 50% of the Adwords cost because I get about a 1% click-in, and about 1% click-out, and the Adsense click-out pays about half of what an Adwords click-in costs me. So obviously I can't use Adwords long-term, but it's okay for building initial traffic, and incidentally for making sure my site got quickly indexed - thanks to daily visits by the Adwords robot.)
Now, in that model, as with many other businesses who are not selling online, it becomes impossible to track CPA, and the CPC is really the only valid business model. And this is true of millions of link-farm sites (not that I'd mind most of THEM disappearing).
As others have mentioned above, advertising is about much more than simple action-tracking - if you put a favorable ad in front of a potential customer enough times, it will build brand awareness and eventually convert. But not in enough time to make CPA useful, and usually in ways that cannot be directly tracked anyway.
Sorry, but I think CPC is going to be around for quite some time. And I'm sure Google is well aware of these dynamics.
There's a LOT of neat stuff in there. For example:
1:30-1:40 Mach transition (breaking the sound barrier - watch the nose) 2:39 a rather visible bit of debris flies right past the camera 2:58 separation from the orbiter/tank stack 3:59 as the booster tumbles, you can briefly spot the shuttle as a bright dot 5:18 you can see the smoke plume thru the upper atmosphere 7:13 some debris goes past the booster camera 7:17 you can see a shroud (parachute) line falling 7:25 you can very briefly see a chute 7:30 water entry 7:40 the chute falls into the water 8:00 as the booster floats, the chutes and shroud lines are clearly visible around the booster
This reminds me... it's not really a support anecdote per se, but I was a college student and my friend asked my advice... so I guess it applies. Dave lived down the hall from me, and one afternoon he stopped by and asked "Do you think disks and a keyboard will dry out?"
That of course piqued my curiosity, so down the hall I went with him. I got into his room and found he had a few clotheslines strung across the room, each threaded with about 20 5-1/4 floppy disks, waving slowly in the breeze from his fan; his keyboard was sitting upside down in the sink, and a pile of damp floppy disk sleeves was on the floor.
Seems he had a huge (stadium beer sized) cup of water on top of his under-loft desk, and for whatever reason it flipped down, landing squarely upside down on his diskette storage box and then keyboard. (At least it was just water!)
Surprisingly, although it cost him a few hours of work, I believe he only lost the data on a few of the floppies, and his keyboard recovered quite nicely.
Of course, he never did live down the new nickname: Disco Dave. Heh.
>An airplane wing does not produce lift because it is angled downwards, >it generates lift almost purely because of its shape.
Actually, you are quite mistaken.
I am an aerospace engineer. I have a BS in Aerospace Engineering and 16 years experience conducting flight test on a dozen aircraft ranging from Cessna- to 707-sized. I have also published papers on the process.
A wing produces lift according to this basic equation: Lift = 0.5 * Coefficient of Lift * Density of the Air * Wing Area * Airspeed squared This includes a few approximations since I can't type various symbols in plain test. You can look at the properly written equation here: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/aerodynamics/ q0015b.shtml
Coefficient of lift, part of that equation, is itself a direct function of Angle of Attack - the angle at which the chord of the wing meets the air. ("Chord" is defined, roughly, as a line between the front and back edges of the wing.)
The wing curvature, or camber as you correctly call it, is a contributor, but far from the only one, to the equation of lift coefficient versus angle of attack. A flat, or non-cambered, wing will produce zero lift at zero angle of attack. Increase the camber, up to a point, and you increase the lift at zero angle of attack. Or you can increase the angle of attack at zero camber to increase the lift. For that matter, you can spin a cylinder in an airflow and generate lift - zero camber, zero angle of attack (it's a circular cross section, so there's no angle!). So there are MANY factors influencing lift - any combination of these is possible; you just need to select which ones are most beneficial to a given design requirement.
As a matter of fact, the first documented equation to describe lift included only angle of attack and speed. It wasn't until decades later that careful observation of bird wing structure revealed the importance of camber. There's an intriguing story here about the Wright brothers and their development of the theory of lifting bodies, and how they overturned decades of established wisdom: http://www.first-to-fly.com/Adventure/Workshop/lif t_and_drift.htm
In a very simple and small wing (like most insects, which obviously can fly), it's almost ALL angle of attack, and no camber. Consider a dragonfly. The wings are perfectly flat. And the creature must create not only lift but also forward thrust with those wings. Quick and repetitive motions (as mentioned in this article) are perfect for this requirement. Camber has nothing to do with it, and camber, in fact, would impede the dragonfly, because the wing must also be capable of generating lift while moving backwards - and any effective camber is usually detrimental while going backwards. Finally, in the case of insects, the qualities of air are different at small scales (the so-called Reynolds Number effects) and lift operates somewhat differently from in large airplanes.
Consider also a dime-store balsa wood glider. In its cheapest form, the wing is completely flat. Yet it flies just fine. Or consider the paper airplane. It flies just fine with a slab of paper for a wing.
In short, you can take this article at face value regarding simple wings and lift. There are other wishful comments, but the aerodynamic description is quite fine.
Okay, so we have TWO versions of WGA to play with. The only obvious difference is how often they phone home. Wouldn't it be fairly easy to DIFF the two programs, find out what changed, and change it one more time to make it phone home, say, once every 2,000 years?
Then we get the (dubious) advantage of knowing we'll continue to get other security updates etc., but the fool thing will stop phoning home (and thus risking false positives, deactivation, etc.)...
I have a 54Gv5 which I've been VERY unhappy with because of the almost weekly reboots. Jimbogun ALMOST convinced me to go ahead and try DD-WRT on it... But then I read it again, and the same paragraph convinced me NOT to mess with DD-WRT. But then I don't like the state of affairs now either... argh! Oh, the humanity!
The experience jimbogun describes sounds all too typical. The problem is that my time, at least notionally, is worth around $25 an hour, either for my day job or my home business, and that's underselling myself. Why not put in a bit more work and buy the better router in the first place?
The real problem for me is finding out what constitutes a really better router. Even before I bought the 54G, I did enough research to know that it was not that great, but the other ones offered at the time were not that great either. Basically, it was a crapshoot - buy ANYTHING, and you'll have a broad range of problems. Buy nothing, and I can't surf safely. Hmmm.
It's a sad state of affairs when reaching a stable and workable configuration on a notionally plug-n-play device requires hours of research on what (or what not) to buy, weeks of frustration with a buggy but new device, days wondering if the money was wasted, several hours of hacking on a brand new device thus voiding its warranty, and praying that it doesn't brick in the process.
I just wish there was a really solid, high quality device that really didn't stink OOTB. That already had something as solid as DD-WRT installed and tested. That came with the decent-quality hardware that used to be Linksys standard.
Oh well.
What's really bothersome is that this same comment seems to apply to far too many consumer devices I buy these days.
Funny, I don't recall ever seeing such an inflammatory title on a/. story in years. Just because the plane is a bomber? Come on now, the technology is cool, even if this is a bit outdated (I've got a swing-wing Estes rocket from when I was a kid, sitting on the shelf right over my desk, for crying out loud...). No need to make a political statement like this - let's keep the discussion a bit more civil, please.
Actually it's not the total velocity change that kills you, it's how fast the velocity changes - e.g., the acceleration (or in this case deceleration). You can go from 80 to zero in five seconds in reasonable comfort. But when you do it in a few milliseconds, it's gonna hurt. Bad.
Injury in accidents is from a couple basic sources: deceleration, and other things hitting you. Deceleration is bad because the organs and brain smack into their surrounding bone structure, and rip apart arteries and organ structures. If you aren't belted in, you decelerate a LOT faster if you smack into the already-stopped car interior. Broken bones, etc. are secondary to these injuries - they heal okay, even if painfully, but an artery torn loose from the heart, or a fragmented liver, won't heal before you die from massive internal bleeding.
The safest vehicles in a car-to-car crash, therefore, tend to be the big, heavy ones with a good collapsible structure. The REASON an SUV is safer in a collision with a Cooper Mini is that it doesn't decelerate as quickly as the Mini, with something like 1/4 of its mass. The Mini is going to lose big time in that collision - because it decelerates a LOT faster, along with your body. And the structure collapse pattern is also critical - you WANT it to collapse incrementally, so that as it does, it absorbs the impact energy and spreads out the deceleration over time, minimizing its transfer into your internal organs and brain. The SUV has a lot of extra metal to waste, whereas a Mini has little "padding".
A good mental picture for this is the egg drop contest - drop an egg 30 feet, it'll splash. Wrap it with collapsible materials and spread out the deceleration, and it survives. This is your brain... this is your brain in a Cooper Mini.
Quoth the article: > Their discovery could lead to a way of storing or disposing of carbon dioxide gas, > a major contributor to global warming, deep in the Earth's interior. > > To create the glassy amorphous carbonia, the team led by Professors Mario Santoro > and Federico Gorelli of the University of Florence heated solid carbon dioxide > between diamond teeth at pressures over 400,000 times greater than atmospheric pressure.
And I suppose this process would require less energy, and thus release less NEW CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere, than it would safely tie up in the earth's interior.
Somehow I doubt this is a good tradeoff. Instead, I think this is some journalist with a global-warming bone to pick, trying desperately to work it into a completely unrelated story.
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment... the majority of the comments about this article have been responding to the specific example given in the article. What makes everyone think that the NSA is stupid enough to limit their search to that specific pattern? Whether you like them or not, it's a big agency with a very highly trained and intelligent staff. And security procedures mandate that you don't give out your really important secrets (other than perhaps occasional leaks to the Washington Post or NYTimes, that is). Logically, it seems you can assume they've thought of all these issues, right?
Before you answer, please set aside the "any data mining is wrong" mantra...
To answer my own question, I don't believe for a minute that this specific example is even a small fraction of the number games that they play with the data. That's exactly why you folks complaining about the risk posed by your Aunt Zelda's goiter surgery phone calls have NOT been bothered by the NSA. They're smarter than that.
This question has been posed several times by conservative journalists: if they're doing such a lousy job, don't you find it curious that there has NOT been another successful attack in four and a half years, despite repeated hate-filled threats from Bin Laden and others like him? Either we're just lucky, or DHS has something going right.
I'm an aerospace engineer, and I work with a lot of other aerospace engineers in a job where I flight test airplanes and control systems, including autopilot systems similar to those used on big heavy jets.
I don't feel very comfortable on an Airbus. They're big and spacious and well appointed - and dangerous. Quite a few of my colleagues will change travel plans rather than have to fly on an Airbus.
Hmm.
On the autopilot system I'm helping to test, the manufacturer (yes, it's one of the big two) is up to version 19 of the software, out of a planned 3 versions. Yep, nineteen for three. It's taken them 19 revisions to even get CLOSE to an acceptable (not even perfect) design. It's very very difficult to uncover all the possible ways that hundreds-of-thousands-of-line computer code can go wrong (as I'm sure you geeks know very well) - and in passenger aviation, a wrong line can kill you, as Airbus has proven very successfully several times already.
>Yes individual changes produce very little obvious benefit, but the offspring >is almost always still viable. This is very important because it means that >evolution can (and does) make LOTS of changes within in each generation through >sexual reproduction.
Well, hold on there. Random changes tend to result in a very limited wander. Random changes do NOT generally result in directed motion, unless there's a driving force. What you seem to forget about evolution is that Darwin postulated not evolution directly, but instead survival of the fittest - the concept that selective presssure will select the most adept changes over time - not just any changes.
Given the evidence in our direct observation, I would strongly dispute that we see lots of changes - you and I both (at least, I do) still have two ears, two eyes, one nose, two arms, two legs, ten fingers and toes... even though it's easy to argue that more of any of those could be a real benefit. In fact, as far back as we have good records, the human is essentially unchanged, as are almost all other animals for which we have decent pictorial records. For that matter, as far back as we have fossil records, the basic structure of most creatures is fairly solidly set. The details vary widely, but most life forms in the vertebrate world are roughly speaking the four-limbed, two-eyed, two eared, bilateral symmetry variety, no matter how far back we look. Kind of strange that you can postulate a system which produces "LOTS" of changes constantly, and something as straightforward as basic body layout is still largely the same, all other variety aside.
Interestingly, it could be argued that our propensity to save human life is degrading our species... we are so intent on letting any human that does get born have an honest chance at a normal life that most non-lethal variations have much less anti-breeding pressure than in ages past (except places perhaps like North Korea, where it's rumored that disabled babies are routinely slain at birth). For example, someone with horrible vision can now lead a normal life, and pass that trait along to children - because of our intelligence at fixing or otherwise bypassing the disability's natural consequences. In ages past, such a being would have been at huge risk of early death, and less likely to breed. So has our increased intelligence led to a watering down of our genes? Hmmm.
>Our developmental engine for turning DNA into a human is incredibly robust.
But this very comment is predicated on the assumption that such massive changes are possible. We have no proof of that, only a lot of very equivocal data of small changes, plus a wide variety of forms for examples. Evolution is as much a religious dogma, with a god named Chance, as is intelligent design. You and I just have different gods
>>It's hard to conceptualize the transition, for example, from ground-based to >>airborne creatures caused by slow incremental changes - so many things need to >>occur, many of which are actually detrimental to the creature if it cannot >>actually fly...
>Hey, Rocky! Want to see me pull an example out of a hat? (link to Flying Squirrel article on Wikipedia)
Flying is a loooooooong way from gliding. No matter what changes you made to Rocky, he could never achieve self-powered climbing flight.
That's my point - valuable and significant structural changes are very very very hard to achieve incrementally, even over very long periods. Too many of the intervening changes would be a competitive disaster for the creature (or in this discussion, viral software).
>Changing which registry key a worm modifies, or what files a virus affects will >cause wildly varrying effects, 99.9999% of which will cause either no discernable >effect, or blue screen the system. This is not a good setup for the GA to figure >out what works best. > >So despite the similarity in name and function with biological viruses, computer >virii (and worms, trojans etc) are not really evolvable, but need to be >engineered.
Interestingly enough, this is also true of meatspace.
Evolution consists of incremental changes caused by (essentially) random mutations... as you say, "99.9999% of which will cause either no discernable effect", or (in meatspace) kill the recipient (or at least make it not breed well). A very very very very very small fraction of the changes turn out to be useful, and evolution postulates that these useful changes accumulate over time.
If you really want an evolutionary system to work in the computer world, you've got to accept that badly-selected mutations are inevitable - chance dictates what takes place, and obviously failed choices are squashed. And in the computer world, stuff that BSOD's on a bad mutation generally causes it to get noticed very quickly - or removed by the subsequent reformat. In either case, this soon creates the antibodies - in the computer world, a new virus definition file. And for a computer virus, it's carefully analyzed, and the antibody is generally created to spot the non-evolving portion, and thus the entire class of program is targeted for exinction, thereby largely negating the evolution.
I guess the point is that real random virus evolution would really only be practical in a closed system, with no outside interference (read, antivirus authors, or annoyed users, or ISP filtering, etc.). Despite a large number of unprotected systems, I don't believe that will ever be the case.
--
A bit off topic, but this is why a non-trivial number of scientists do believe in intelligent design - "random" just doesn't seem to be enough to cause what we see around us. It's hard to conceptualize the transition, for example, from ground-based to airborne creatures caused by slow incremental changes - so many things need to occur, many of which are actually detrimental to the creature if it cannot actually fly... for example see the dodo bird, now extinct. Sure, man caused the extinction of the dodo, but at the same time quail are still around despite centuries of determined hunting.
In the real world, in a system where an Intelligent author was Designing something, evolution would not work (at least on a large scale). Intelligent Design would necessarily be able to trump any random drift.
As a disclaimer, I am something of an evolutionary creationist. I see no reason to discount the idea that my Creator could use evolution as a tool - after all, He designed the whole genetic system, including the potential for mutation. Why not use the tools you create? However, I believe the Bible is rather clear that man is something of a special case, and cannot be explained solely by evolution, and I believe that a clear reading of the Bible necessarily trumps any logic I may apply. I believe there IS a God, and I'm not Him, and I'm not smart enough to completely understand Him or His ways either.
> I've been in project meetings where I meticulously explained the plan, only to > be whacked later because someone who was typing and reading stuff on her > laptop screen as I explained what I planned to do realized she didn't know > what I was doing... and had to report on the project to her manager.
Are you "enabling" the situation? In psychology terms, an "enabler" is someone who not only permits an undesireable situation, but often enables it to continue by fixing the resulting problems.
Seems to me that the best lesson we can teach this kind of person is to point out exactly why they missed the information, ask them to pay attention to the discussion next time, and let them take the heat with their manager, rather than bailing them out and essentially teaching them that what they did was not only accepted, but had no negative consequences and this could be repeated in the future.
Adults may not be small children, but sometimes they need to be treated like one if they can't get the point any other way.
I recently built a house and used a few credit cards heavily to shuffle funds around for a year or so during the build. Since we applied for a couple cards, and also obtained a home equity line of credit as part of the process, we found ourselves deluged with card and loan applications. "Deluged" as in "four or five per day". Waaaaaay too much shredding to suit me.
After a few months of frustration, I finally did some research and found that all three of the primary credit reporting agencies share credit with banks looking for customers, but they also all share the equivalent of a "Do Not Call" list for credit card apps. You can visit http://www.optoutprescreen.com/ and sign up to get your name off these lists, for either lifetime or two years.
I did this several months ago, while it took about a month, we're consistently down to a couple applications a week at most. (Almost all the remaining applications come from Capitol One, despite our repeated calls requesting that they stop. Scumbags.)
One other note: to get your name on the opt-out list, you have to provide some sensitive data. I did quite a bit of research before trusting this opt-out, but all that I found indicated they were trustworthy, and after all, they already have all the data anyway, so I wasn't giving them anything new. But do your own research anyway - don't trust me.
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This article has (here on /.) already raised the question "Why can't we stamp out the viral code from archives?" Well, let's take a lesson here from biology.
c le/2006/10/04/AR2006100400127.html). The problem? You simply can't squash all the bugs. Only recently has attention turned to developing an artificial method of immunity from the disease, so that the bugs won't matter (at least, from that perspective).
The human race took two different solutions to polio and malaria. (I'm not a doctor, so forgive any minor inaccuracies.)
With malaria, we took the "stamp out the viral archive" approach. We tried to kill the carriers - the mosquitos. If we can eliminate all the mosquitos that carry the infection (like eliminating old internet caches), nobody will have to worry about getting infected. Well, guess what - it didn't work. Malaria is a HUGE problem in many third-world countries, routinely killing a million Africans a year and costing $12 BILLION annually in Africa alone (see last week's WashPost Magazine article for details; registration required: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
With polio, we took the approach that preventing infection was the key. We innoculated EVERYONE, so that even if the virus surfaced, it wouldn't cause infections. It's proven to be a largely effective solution, with only a few periodic pockets of infection occurring in remote parts of Africa where the youngest are not innoculated afresh. And that problem is fairly easy to control.
Same thing here. Forget the archives. That's naive. Instead, focus on better immunity.
>I majored in computer engineering and minored in math and Japanese, and ...and if it were ME, looking at your application along side of his, even if you had a GPA a full point LOWER than his one-year degree, I'd hire you over him in a second. Who would I want as a prospective employer - someone with a drive to finish things instantly, has no demonstrated social skills, no interest in anything outside his laser-beam-focus, no demonstrated interest in expanding his mental horizons... or someone who took a couple extra years to grow, has five more years of real age and probably ten added years of relative maturity, wants to know more about more, is well-rounded, and is willing to work hard for a long time to succeed...
>actually took a lot of other classes that I didn't have to take because
>I thought they were interesting. I have something like 32 credits that
>don't really "count" as it were, for my degree. I am sure as hell glad
>I took them though because I will probably never get another chance to
>take a class in world music or Japanese literature.
>
>Those sure as hell don't help me on my job or in grad school next year,
>but I really felt like they helped me grow as a human being.
Seems like your approach is infinitely better. Sure, some employer might snap him up, but it's a rather risky thing for the long term.
His accomplishment is impressive. But that's not the whole story, obviously.
>Your street atlas GPS probably doesn't use NDGPS. It uses plain old satellite-based GPS, and that's just fine.
Welllllll...
Actually most consumer devices ALSO uses WAAS. Plain old satellite is "just fine" even without WAAS, but WAAS really helps refine the position.
Especially in the "urban canyons", normal GPS signals are pretty bad at times. Get in the city around tall buildings, and you'll see your accuracy get into the hundreds of feet if only three satellites are in view and lots of signal reflections are muddying the data. That's enough to put you a block away from your actual location. So WAAS or DGPS really helps in those situations. Sure, out in the middle of a cornfield in Kansas, you might not care about DGPS, but in that case you often have eight or ten satellites available and an accuracy of perhaps 15 feet. Not in the middle of the city.
I've just given up on Maxtor...
I just suffered my FOURTH Maxtor failure in six years... and before you ask "didn't you learn after two", I will point out that two of those failures were of replacements shipped by Maxtor to replace drives that failed before the warranty expired.
I'm not even bothering to call them about this latest drive (a 120Gb SATA drive less than one year old) because I don't want the replacement they'd probably ship me.
To be fair, one of the early failures may have been due to an under-rated power supply, but after that I installed a highly overpowered Antec TruePower. Maxtor can't blame THAT anymore.
I'm glad to say I developed an excellent backup routine after a couple drive failures... so the last couple failures have been merely highly annoying instead of bit data loss events.
I agree about Ghost, at least version 9 or newer. As much as I hate other Symantec products, Ghost 9 just plain works, and does so with minimal resource hogging and no fuss.
/d etc. to a second internal HD. This provides a file-wise backup for instant and easy access to any files.
My current backup solution, honed by several disk failures:
1) Ghost running every night. Each week a full backup, with nightly incrementals. These backups are compressed.
2) Backups are written to an external USB. Easy to move to another PC w/o hardware issues.
3) About every week, an xcopy *.*
I decided NOT to use a RAID solution for one simple reason. If a virus or Windows itself writes bogus data to a RAID disk, all copies will be getting the same bogus data. I'd rather have a nightly backup whereby I *might* lose a few hours of work, but I'll have a "clean" uncorrupted state to which I can restore.
I had my primary drive fail two weeks ago - an actual hardware failure. I'm pleased to say I lost only a few hours of work from that day, nothing irreplacable, and the time to restore from backups. Oh, BTW, I've now sworn off Maxtor discs for life; this was my 4th Maxtor problem in about six years, two of which were warranty-replaced units after the originals failed also. Never again.
>Great series, but clearly showing its age and suffering from 'we need to keep
>inventing more überenemies' syndrome. I shall look forward to seeing how they
>bow out. Personally, I think it is about time that they found an enemy capable
>of destroying the earth which actually does it. Might not please some fans, but
>would make great television.
You mean like Battlestar Galactica?
Gee, seems to me that they STARTED that way. What a kicker. Of course, the ORIGINAL BG wasn't "great television" from my point of view, but I think the new series is pretty good.
I don't believe this system will be as frustrating as the blade guards.
I'm all for the guards - I'm quite happy they're mandatory on new saws. I believe that under the right conditions, they're very useful. I know that guard would have helped 20 years ago on my first woodworking job when a saw tossed an 8" triangle of 2x4 into my face - fortunately it missed my eye by 1/2 inch. The guard and its anti-kickback fingers would have stopped that from happening. As it was, all I ended up with was a bruise and quite a new respect for the saw.
However, as a frequent woodworker, I can tell you that they are hideously inconvenient and actually DECREASE the safety of the saw in various situations. That's exactly why they are designed to be removed.
I believe if they were EASY to remove and replace, they'd be used more often. The tighter you integrate them, however, the less likely they will be replaced. It's like passenger side airbags without a kill switch - if you have small kids, you probably would get them deactivated. That doesn't help the adult passenger who rides sometimes. But if you make it easy, either automatic or key-switched, then most people will use them correctly. Same thing here.
Bottom line, there are many times I remove the guard - it just doesn't work for a lot of the harder, more complex cuts I need to make. But I put it back on when I can, because that saw really scares me, even when I use the guard. I have met too many mangled woodworkers over the years. But this system (as far as I can tell) doesn't affect the basic operation, use, or flexibility of the saw, and thus won't be subject to the "leave it off" problem of the guard.
Dear Black Hat Pirates,
We'd like to thank you for your "I'm sure my antivirus software will warn me about EVERYTHING bad on my machine, like the advertisements tell me it will" attitude. It demonstrates that you apparently place waaaaay too much trust in antivirus software, especially the latest and not-so-greatest. Hopefully you'll get infected by something written by your own associates when Norton doesn't catch it, and that will get you off our backs.
Sincerely,
The Rest of Us
This looks suspiciously like self-promotion, trying to win a few dollars from Google AdSense placement. Yes, folks, Google can be used to make money. Who woulda known?
0 0.asp
Skip the linked article and go straight to the source:
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,126371,
All the link does is duplicate the story summary, and then link to the PCWorld article.
CPA only works when there's a trackable action... and in many cases, the trackable action is going to be impossible to define. For example, I launched a new site in July (geochecker.com), which is a free geocaching-related site, supported by Google Adsense ads, and doesn't sell anything. To get some initial traffic, I used my existing Adwords account to run ads on related search terms. Now, since my only monetizing product is advertising (from Google itself!), and the services the site offers are free, how on earth can there be any action? As a matter of fact, the very "action" that I'm trying to get IS a click - I want them to visit the site. I don't have anything to sell beyond that, other than possibly deciding they don't really want to be there and leaving thru a similar click on the Adsense links. I just need to build traffic above the breakeven critical mass. Beyond that, I don't care what happens to any "conversion".
(And given the economy of Google ads, I'm basically paying about 50% of the Adwords cost because I get about a 1% click-in, and about 1% click-out, and the Adsense click-out pays about half of what an Adwords click-in costs me. So obviously I can't use Adwords long-term, but it's okay for building initial traffic, and incidentally for making sure my site got quickly indexed - thanks to daily visits by the Adwords robot.)
Now, in that model, as with many other businesses who are not selling online, it becomes impossible to track CPA, and the CPC is really the only valid business model. And this is true of millions of link-farm sites (not that I'd mind most of THEM disappearing).
As others have mentioned above, advertising is about much more than simple action-tracking - if you put a favorable ad in front of a potential customer enough times, it will build brand awareness and eventually convert. But not in enough time to make CPA useful, and usually in ways that cannot be directly tracked anyway.
Sorry, but I think CPC is going to be around for quite some time. And I'm sure Google is well aware of these dynamics.
There's a LOT of neat stuff in there. For example:
1:30-1:40 Mach transition (breaking the sound barrier - watch the nose)
2:39 a rather visible bit of debris flies right past the camera
2:58 separation from the orbiter/tank stack
3:59 as the booster tumbles, you can briefly spot the shuttle as a bright dot
5:18 you can see the smoke plume thru the upper atmosphere
7:13 some debris goes past the booster camera
7:17 you can see a shroud (parachute) line falling
7:25 you can very briefly see a chute
7:30 water entry
7:40 the chute falls into the water
8:00 as the booster floats, the chutes and shroud lines are clearly visible around the booster
This reminds me... it's not really a support anecdote per se, but I was a college student and my friend asked my advice... so I guess it applies. Dave lived down the hall from me, and one afternoon he stopped by and asked "Do you think disks and a keyboard will dry out?"
That of course piqued my curiosity, so down the hall I went with him. I got into his room and found he had a few clotheslines strung across the room, each threaded with about 20 5-1/4 floppy disks, waving slowly in the breeze from his fan; his keyboard was sitting upside down in the sink, and a pile of damp floppy disk sleeves was on the floor.
Seems he had a huge (stadium beer sized) cup of water on top of his under-loft desk, and for whatever reason it flipped down, landing squarely upside down on his diskette storage box and then keyboard. (At least it was just water!)
Surprisingly, although it cost him a few hours of work, I believe he only lost the data on a few of the floppies, and his keyboard recovered quite nicely.
Of course, he never did live down the new nickname: Disco Dave. Heh.
>An airplane wing does not produce lift because it is angled downwards,
/ q0015b.shtml
f t_and_drift.htm
>it generates lift almost purely because of its shape.
Actually, you are quite mistaken.
I am an aerospace engineer. I have a BS in Aerospace Engineering and 16 years experience conducting flight test on a dozen aircraft ranging from Cessna- to 707-sized. I have also published papers on the process.
A wing produces lift according to this basic equation:
Lift = 0.5 * Coefficient of Lift * Density of the Air * Wing Area * Airspeed squared
This includes a few approximations since I can't type various symbols in plain test. You can look at the properly written equation here: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/aerodynamics
Coefficient of lift, part of that equation, is itself a direct function of Angle of Attack - the angle at which the chord of the wing meets the air. ("Chord" is defined, roughly, as a line between the front and back edges of the wing.)
The wing curvature, or camber as you correctly call it, is a contributor, but far from the only one, to the equation of lift coefficient versus angle of attack. A flat, or non-cambered, wing will produce zero lift at zero angle of attack. Increase the camber, up to a point, and you increase the lift at zero angle of attack. Or you can increase the angle of attack at zero camber to increase the lift. For that matter, you can spin a cylinder in an airflow and generate lift - zero camber, zero angle of attack (it's a circular cross section, so there's no angle!). So there are MANY factors influencing lift - any combination of these is possible; you just need to select which ones are most beneficial to a given design requirement.
As a matter of fact, the first documented equation to describe lift included only angle of attack and speed. It wasn't until decades later that careful observation of bird wing structure revealed the importance of camber. There's an intriguing story here about the Wright brothers and their development of the theory of lifting bodies, and how they overturned decades of established wisdom: http://www.first-to-fly.com/Adventure/Workshop/li
In a very simple and small wing (like most insects, which obviously can fly), it's almost ALL angle of attack, and no camber. Consider a dragonfly. The wings are perfectly flat. And the creature must create not only lift but also forward thrust with those wings. Quick and repetitive motions (as mentioned in this article) are perfect for this requirement. Camber has nothing to do with it, and camber, in fact, would impede the dragonfly, because the wing must also be capable of generating lift while moving backwards - and any effective camber is usually detrimental while going backwards. Finally, in the case of insects, the qualities of air are different at small scales (the so-called Reynolds Number effects) and lift operates somewhat differently from in large airplanes.
Consider also a dime-store balsa wood glider. In its cheapest form, the wing is completely flat. Yet it flies just fine. Or consider the paper airplane. It flies just fine with a slab of paper for a wing.
In short, you can take this article at face value regarding simple wings and lift. There are other wishful comments, but the aerodynamic description is quite fine.
Okay, so we have TWO versions of WGA to play with. The only obvious difference is how often they phone home. Wouldn't it be fairly easy to DIFF the two programs, find out what changed, and change it one more time to make it phone home, say, once every 2,000 years?
Then we get the (dubious) advantage of knowing we'll continue to get other security updates etc., but the fool thing will stop phoning home (and thus risking false positives, deactivation, etc.)...
Just an idea.
I have a 54Gv5 which I've been VERY unhappy with because of the almost weekly reboots. Jimbogun ALMOST convinced me to go ahead and try DD-WRT on it... But then I read it again, and the same paragraph convinced me NOT to mess with DD-WRT. But then I don't like the state of affairs now either... argh! Oh, the humanity!
The experience jimbogun describes sounds all too typical. The problem is that my time, at least notionally, is worth around $25 an hour, either for my day job or my home business, and that's underselling myself. Why not put in a bit more work and buy the better router in the first place?
The real problem for me is finding out what constitutes a really better router. Even before I bought the 54G, I did enough research to know that it was not that great, but the other ones offered at the time were not that great either. Basically, it was a crapshoot - buy ANYTHING, and you'll have a broad range of problems. Buy nothing, and I can't surf safely. Hmmm.
It's a sad state of affairs when reaching a stable and workable configuration on a notionally plug-n-play device requires hours of research on what (or what not) to buy, weeks of frustration with a buggy but new device, days wondering if the money was wasted, several hours of hacking on a brand new device thus voiding its warranty, and praying that it doesn't brick in the process.
I just wish there was a really solid, high quality device that really didn't stink OOTB. That already had something as solid as DD-WRT installed and tested. That came with the decent-quality hardware that used to be Linksys standard.
Oh well.
What's really bothersome is that this same comment seems to apply to far too many consumer devices I buy these days.
Funny, I don't recall ever seeing such an inflammatory title on a /. story in years. Just because the plane is a bomber? Come on now, the technology is cool, even if this is a bit outdated (I've got a swing-wing Estes rocket from when I was a kid, sitting on the shelf right over my desk, for crying out loud...). No need to make a political statement like this - let's keep the discussion a bit more civil, please.
Actually it's not the total velocity change that kills you, it's how fast the velocity changes - e.g., the acceleration (or in this case deceleration). You can go from 80 to zero in five seconds in reasonable comfort. But when you do it in a few milliseconds, it's gonna hurt. Bad.
Injury in accidents is from a couple basic sources: deceleration, and other things hitting you. Deceleration is bad because the organs and brain smack into their surrounding bone structure, and rip apart arteries and organ structures. If you aren't belted in, you decelerate a LOT faster if you smack into the already-stopped car interior. Broken bones, etc. are secondary to these injuries - they heal okay, even if painfully, but an artery torn loose from the heart, or a fragmented liver, won't heal before you die from massive internal bleeding.
The safest vehicles in a car-to-car crash, therefore, tend to be the big, heavy ones with a good collapsible structure. The REASON an SUV is safer in a collision with a Cooper Mini is that it doesn't decelerate as quickly as the Mini, with something like 1/4 of its mass. The Mini is going to lose big time in that collision - because it decelerates a LOT faster, along with your body. And the structure collapse pattern is also critical - you WANT it to collapse incrementally, so that as it does, it absorbs the impact energy and spreads out the deceleration over time, minimizing its transfer into your internal organs and brain. The SUV has a lot of extra metal to waste, whereas a Mini has little "padding".
A good mental picture for this is the egg drop contest - drop an egg 30 feet, it'll splash. Wrap it with collapsible materials and spread out the deceleration, and it survives. This is your brain... this is your brain in a Cooper Mini.
Yeah, sure.
Quoth the article:
> Their discovery could lead to a way of storing or disposing of carbon dioxide gas,
> a major contributor to global warming, deep in the Earth's interior.
>
> To create the glassy amorphous carbonia, the team led by Professors Mario Santoro
> and Federico Gorelli of the University of Florence heated solid carbon dioxide
> between diamond teeth at pressures over 400,000 times greater than atmospheric pressure.
And I suppose this process would require less energy, and thus release less NEW CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere, than it would safely tie up in the earth's interior.
Somehow I doubt this is a good tradeoff. Instead, I think this is some journalist with a global-warming bone to pick, trying desperately to work it into a completely unrelated story.
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment... the majority of the comments about this article have been responding to the specific example given in the article. What makes everyone think that the NSA is stupid enough to limit their search to that specific pattern? Whether you like them or not, it's a big agency with a very highly trained and intelligent staff. And security procedures mandate that you don't give out your really important secrets (other than perhaps occasional leaks to the Washington Post or NYTimes, that is). Logically, it seems you can assume they've thought of all these issues, right?
Before you answer, please set aside the "any data mining is wrong" mantra...
To answer my own question, I don't believe for a minute that this specific example is even a small fraction of the number games that they play with the data. That's exactly why you folks complaining about the risk posed by your Aunt Zelda's goiter surgery phone calls have NOT been bothered by the NSA. They're smarter than that.
This question has been posed several times by conservative journalists: if they're doing such a lousy job, don't you find it curious that there has NOT been another successful attack in four and a half years, despite repeated hate-filled threats from Bin Laden and others like him? Either we're just lucky, or DHS has something going right.
I'm an aerospace engineer, and I work with a lot of other aerospace engineers in a job where I flight test airplanes and control systems, including autopilot systems similar to those used on big heavy jets.
I don't feel very comfortable on an Airbus. They're big and spacious and well appointed - and dangerous. Quite a few of my colleagues will change travel plans rather than have to fly on an Airbus.
Hmm.
On the autopilot system I'm helping to test, the manufacturer (yes, it's one of the big two) is up to version 19 of the software, out of a planned 3 versions. Yep, nineteen for three. It's taken them 19 revisions to even get CLOSE to an acceptable (not even perfect) design. It's very very difficult to uncover all the possible ways that hundreds-of-thousands-of-line computer code can go wrong (as I'm sure you geeks know very well) - and in passenger aviation, a wrong line can kill you, as Airbus has proven very successfully several times already.
*Shudder*
>Yes individual changes produce very little obvious benefit, but the offspring
>is almost always still viable. This is very important because it means that
>evolution can (and does) make LOTS of changes within in each generation through
>sexual reproduction.
Well, hold on there. Random changes tend to result in a very limited wander. Random changes do NOT generally result in directed motion, unless there's a driving force. What you seem to forget about evolution is that Darwin postulated not evolution directly, but instead survival of the fittest - the concept that selective presssure will select the most adept changes over time - not just any changes.
Given the evidence in our direct observation, I would strongly dispute that we see lots of changes - you and I both (at least, I do) still have two ears, two eyes, one nose, two arms, two legs, ten fingers and toes... even though it's easy to argue that more of any of those could be a real benefit. In fact, as far back as we have good records, the human is essentially unchanged, as are almost all other animals for which we have decent pictorial records. For that matter, as far back as we have fossil records, the basic structure of most creatures is fairly solidly set. The details vary widely, but most life forms in the vertebrate world are roughly speaking the four-limbed, two-eyed, two eared, bilateral symmetry variety, no matter how far back we look. Kind of strange that you can postulate a system which produces "LOTS" of changes constantly, and something as straightforward as basic body layout is still largely the same, all other variety aside.
Interestingly, it could be argued that our propensity to save human life is degrading our species... we are so intent on letting any human that does get born have an honest chance at a normal life that most non-lethal variations have much less anti-breeding pressure than in ages past (except places perhaps like North Korea, where it's rumored that disabled babies are routinely slain at birth). For example, someone with horrible vision can now lead a normal life, and pass that trait along to children - because of our intelligence at fixing or otherwise bypassing the disability's natural consequences. In ages past, such a being would have been at huge risk of early death, and less likely to breed. So has our increased intelligence led to a watering down of our genes? Hmmm.
>Our developmental engine for turning DNA into a human is incredibly robust.
But this very comment is predicated on the assumption that such massive changes are possible. We have no proof of that, only a lot of very equivocal data of small changes, plus a wide variety of forms for examples. Evolution is as much a religious dogma, with a god named Chance, as is intelligent design. You and I just have different gods
>>It's hard to conceptualize the transition, for example, from ground-based to >>airborne creatures caused by slow incremental changes - so many things need to >>occur, many of which are actually detrimental to the creature if it cannot >>actually fly...
>Hey, Rocky! Want to see me pull an example out of a hat? (link to Flying Squirrel article on Wikipedia)
Flying is a loooooooong way from gliding. No matter what changes you made to Rocky, he could never achieve self-powered climbing flight.
That's my point - valuable and significant structural changes are very very very hard to achieve incrementally, even over very long periods. Too many of the intervening changes would be a competitive disaster for the creature (or in this discussion, viral software).
>Changing which registry key a worm modifies, or what files a virus affects will
>cause wildly varrying effects, 99.9999% of which will cause either no discernable
>effect, or blue screen the system. This is not a good setup for the GA to figure
>out what works best.
>
>So despite the similarity in name and function with biological viruses, computer
>virii (and worms, trojans etc) are not really evolvable, but need to be
>engineered.
Interestingly enough, this is also true of meatspace.
Evolution consists of incremental changes caused by (essentially) random mutations... as you say, "99.9999% of which will cause either no discernable effect", or (in meatspace) kill the recipient (or at least make it not breed well). A very very very very very small fraction of the changes turn out to be useful, and evolution postulates that these useful changes accumulate over time.
If you really want an evolutionary system to work in the computer world, you've got to accept that badly-selected mutations are inevitable - chance dictates what takes place, and obviously failed choices are squashed. And in the computer world, stuff that BSOD's on a bad mutation generally causes it to get noticed very quickly - or removed by the subsequent reformat. In either case, this soon creates the antibodies - in the computer world, a new virus definition file. And for a computer virus, it's carefully analyzed, and the antibody is generally created to spot the non-evolving portion, and thus the entire class of program is targeted for exinction, thereby largely negating the evolution.
I guess the point is that real random virus evolution would really only be practical in a closed system, with no outside interference (read, antivirus authors, or annoyed users, or ISP filtering, etc.). Despite a large number of unprotected systems, I don't believe that will ever be the case.
--
A bit off topic, but this is why a non-trivial number of scientists do believe in intelligent design - "random" just doesn't seem to be enough to cause what we see around us. It's hard to conceptualize the transition, for example, from ground-based to airborne creatures caused by slow incremental changes - so many things need to occur, many of which are actually detrimental to the creature if it cannot actually fly... for example see the dodo bird, now extinct. Sure, man caused the extinction of the dodo, but at the same time quail are still around despite centuries of determined hunting.
In the real world, in a system where an Intelligent author was Designing something, evolution would not work (at least on a large scale). Intelligent Design would necessarily be able to trump any random drift.
As a disclaimer, I am something of an evolutionary creationist. I see no reason to discount the idea that my Creator could use evolution as a tool - after all, He designed the whole genetic system, including the potential for mutation. Why not use the tools you create? However, I believe the Bible is rather clear that man is something of a special case, and cannot be explained solely by evolution, and I believe that a clear reading of the Bible necessarily trumps any logic I may apply. I believe there IS a God, and I'm not Him, and I'm not smart enough to completely understand Him or His ways either.
> I've been in project meetings where I meticulously explained the plan, only to ... and had to report on the project to her manager.
> be whacked later because someone who was typing and reading stuff on her
> laptop screen as I explained what I planned to do realized she didn't know
> what I was doing
Are you "enabling" the situation? In psychology terms, an "enabler" is someone who not only permits an undesireable situation, but often enables it to continue by fixing the resulting problems.
Seems to me that the best lesson we can teach this kind of person is to point out exactly why they missed the information, ask them to pay attention to the discussion next time, and let them take the heat with their manager, rather than bailing them out and essentially teaching them that what they did was not only accepted, but had no negative consequences and this could be repeated in the future.
Adults may not be small children, but sometimes they need to be treated like one if they can't get the point any other way.
Do yourself a favor and opt out here: http://www.optoutprescreen.com/
I recently built a house and used a few credit cards heavily to shuffle funds around for a year or so during the build. Since we applied for a couple cards, and also obtained a home equity line of credit as part of the process, we found ourselves deluged with card and loan applications. "Deluged" as in "four or five per day". Waaaaaay too much shredding to suit me.
After a few months of frustration, I finally did some research and found that all three of the primary credit reporting agencies share credit with banks looking for customers, but they also all share the equivalent of a "Do Not Call" list for credit card apps. You can visit http://www.optoutprescreen.com/ and sign up to get your name off these lists, for either lifetime or two years.
I did this several months ago, while it took about a month, we're consistently down to a couple applications a week at most. (Almost all the remaining applications come from Capitol One, despite our repeated calls requesting that they stop. Scumbags.)
One other note: to get your name on the opt-out list, you have to provide some sensitive data. I did quite a bit of research before trusting this opt-out, but all that I found indicated they were trustworthy, and after all, they already have all the data anyway, so I wasn't giving them anything new. But do your own research anyway - don't trust me.