I'm sitting in a chair at the dealership where I bought my new car 19 months ago, waiting for the service department to come back and tell me my failed brake caliper is "normal wear and tear."
If he's that concerned about bicyclists contributing CO2, he should propose something similar to California's smog checks.
In order to breathe on public roads a person must go to a licensed CO2 Test Only Station where they put you on a treadmill, stick a wand in your throat and another up your rear end, and attach electrodes to your ears. If you exhale more CO2 than the government-set limit, you must see a doctor and get fixed, then come back and re-test. This test station could be in a 7-Eleven, or a gas station, as long as it's not any place that could potentially be related to medicine, like a hospital or a pharmacy. This is to ensure doctors and pharmacists are not failing you on the test just to make you buy medicine or therapy from them.
People who do not plan to breathe on public roads would pay a small "Planned Non-Breathing" (PNB) fee of about $35 and would be allowed to breathe in their homes or while laying on cinderblocks in their front yard.
I know, it sounds crazy, but look at what it's done for L.A. The air is now clear enough to actually see the smog cloud overhead.
If Sam Kinison were alive today, he'd apply his philosophy on world hunger and say:
You want to help end extinction-level meteors? Stop sending up shit to blow them up. Don't send them another one, send up huge orbit-altering rockets. Send the UN a guy that says, "You know, we've been coming up with a plan to blow up meteors for about 35 years now and we were blowing stuff up, and we realized there wouldn't BE extinction-level meteors if you people would live where the METEORS AREN'T! YOU LIVE INSIDE AN ASTEROID BELT!! UNDERSTAND THAT? YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING ASTEROID BELT!! Stop wasting rockets by launching them at each other. You too, North Korea... don't give me that look. We're going to do this together in one shot.
The most-effective solution is don't be where the meteor is going to be. This worked well for me the other week. Giant meteor fell in Siberia and I wasn't there.
Do they pay for the content they download? If not, in 20 years, when those 20 somethings are 40 somethings, who is going to generate the content?
Chinawill. It's already producing censored news in the U.S. and "giving away" dispatches to struggling stations in Africa. When the local media disappear, China steps in with a friendly, wealthy hand.
Rumor has it John Broder is about to release a story that claims Dragon won't make it all the way to the space station. The capsule SpaceX lent him died somewhere in Connecticut and had to be towed back to Cape Canaveral. Alleged leaked picture here. No word on whether Musk will issue a rebuttal.
I used to work with someone who was close to Ted Leonsis. Ted's great infamous achievement is that he came up with the idea of blanketing the country in AOL disks. He made a lot of money at AOL and then got into buying DC-area sports teams. The media often liked to hold him up as a tech sector golden boy, but I can assure you that being close to Ted Leonsis is no guarantee of success. If anything, I find it interesting that Groupon's CEO was "mentored" by Ted, because I always thought the way Groupon advertised their coupon service was as strangely pervasive as AOL disks were. Put out enough and you're bound to get some return.
A Stanford comp-sci student has found a serious bug in Chromium, Safari, Opera, and MSIE.
OK, so we're talking about Google, Apple, Opera and Microsoft. But then...
The current limits are: 2.5 MB per origin in Google Chrome, 5 MB per origin in Mozilla Firefox and Opera, 10 MB per origin in Internet Explorer.
Now we're talking about Google, Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft. Where did Mozilla come from, and where did Apple go?
Chrome, Safari, and IE currently do not implement any such "affiliated site" storage limit.' Firefox's implementation of HTML5 local storage is not vulnerable to this exploit.
Now we're talking about Google, Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla. Apple's back, and Opera is left out this time, and even though the author seemed to be indicating that Mozilla's browser was on the vulnerable list, now it's set apart.
Editors, if a summary is inconsistent, please clean it up or don't promote the story.
The Ada Initiative's Valerie Aurora got Violet Blue's Hackers As A High-Risk Population (29c3 abstract) talk on harm reduction methodology pulled from the Security BSides meeting in San Francisco by claiming it contained rape triggers.
Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora, who founded a women's rights and FOSS non-profit in 2011, apparently had something to do with pulling a Chaos Communication Congress talk in San Francisco by a controversial sex author (who has a long history of having posts deleted and accounts closed by everyone from Boing Boing to Google for every reason from her opinions to her name) because the talk might trigger flashbacks in rape victims. Am I reading slashdot or is someone watching Gossip Girl in the next room with the volume turned up too high?
It frankly asinine to object to work around hacker ethics as 'off topic' at such broad hacker conference. Is Appelbaum's 29c3 keynote 'off topic' for asking hackers to work for the 'good guys' rather than military, police, their contractors, Facebook, etc.?
Apparently the author of the summary is rebutting an argument he has failed to share with the rest of us... And using disjointed, broken English to accomplish this... And then asking for our opinion on Applebaum's keynote. Who the hell is Applebaum? Maybe I should know, but I don't care. What is this summary about?
Yes, obviously harm reduction is a psychological hack that need not involve a computer, but this holds for 'social engineering' as well.
The author answered his own question, a common technique to attempt to force opinions on people by asking a question so they open their minds to consider possibilities and jam an opinion in during the window of opportunity. It might have been more successful if the audience wasn't still busy trying to figure out what the author was talking about in the first place. Fail on multiple levels. I could be doing something useful right now, like brushing my teeth, but this is epically bad. It's like watching the aftermath of a train wreck. You just stare in amazement.
It's simply that hacking isn't nearly as specialized or inaccessible as say theoretical physics.
Random meaningless and false generalization about hacking. I think the author has even lost track of what he was saying... this could get interesting. Wait for it...
Worse, there is no shortage of terrible technology laws like the CFAA, DMCA, etc. that exist partially because early hackers failed to communicate an ethics that seemed coherent and reasoned to outsiders.
Apparently, terrible technology-related laws are worse than... something... perhaps this summary. Oh, and failing to communicate things in a coherent fashion is bad. Wait, was that self-flagellation on the part of the summary author?
I watched the YouTube video of the sex author's talk, and she's almost as incoherent as the author of the summary. Perhaps she makes sense to him, and vice versa. Or perhaps they are one and the same. After about five minutes of watching, I was trying to figure out what the hell she was talking about when she said something to the effect of, "so you can see what I'm trying to say." Translation: I can't express myself well enough to explain what I'm talking about, so I'm going to suggest that everyone in the room understands, and if you don't there must be something wrong with you. At that point I closed the video and was done with it.
Nothing to see here, unless you like drama about train wreck stories about train wrecks.
Turn your back on them, and they WILL try to go back to a similar model.
That ship has sailed. Their future now lies in following the movie industry by adding extra unskippable tracks at the beginning of the album that advertise other albums, contain public service message warnings about piracy and disclaimers like "the opinions expressed in the music you are about to hear do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the studio or music distribution service." Expect Blu-Ray versions of albums to be released with 3-D music you can only hear with special glasses -- listening to the music without the glasses will have the jarring effect of sounding like Mariah Carey and Bob Dylan singing a duet.
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. -Arthur Conan Doyle
Have you considered the probability that perhaps they meant to send you a virus? What sort of tools are these? The system administration tools, I mean, not the people who can't properly administer their systems but expect to help you administer yours.
Why is it that the attack-dog AGs of the world are ready to go when somebody runs wget contrary to a site's terms of service; but people like this are allowed to operate unchecked?
Maybe it's because they're supposed to be using cURL? Attorneys General have a tendency to get wrapped up in political nonsense.
Sony's real breakthrough with the PS4 might not be the specs, but its ability to turn every game you play into a multiplayer one.
This is not a breakthrough. They already did this with the PS3. Every time I turned the thing on I found myself stuck in a multiplayer game. When I wanted to stream Netflix videos, I'd spend 30-60 minutes in a tug of war between Sony, Netflix, Content Owners and Content Pirates... The Content Pirates would get an edge on Netflix, which would update its software to keep the Content Owners happy, but Sony would make the customers update over their network and lock up the machine for an hour once a week. That game got old so I stopped playing. When I wanted to use OtherOS, I found myself stuck in a multiplayer game between the hobbyists, Sony's marketing department, Sony's software developers, and Sony's legal team. Ultimately, that game got old too, so I stopped playing.
One would think Sony would learn from this, but even if one head of the Sony hydra learned, it couldn't focus on the concept for very long because the other heads are too busy snapping at it.
If the research is behind a paywall, the Chinese are likely the only ones who have access to it anyway (and not because they're paying for it), which gives them a first-mover advantage over everyone else. Getting research out from behind a paywall simply levels the playing field.
Normally I'd agree with that sentiment, but there's a point where the publishing requirement becomes such a burden that it gets in the way of the research, or prevents it altogether. What qualifies as research? You opened a spreadsheet today and had it calculate the average of a series of numbers? Sorry, now you have to write a report about why you did that research, your results, and what they mean. And then someone has to review it. And you have to submit a form certifying that you did your mandated report. And someone has to read those and put together a report on the compliance rates of every agency. And then they have to publish that.
We're talking about the federal government, an entity that adds an extra page to a four-page form so it can print its congressionally-mandated one-paragraph statement about its compliance with the "Paperwork Reduction Act," which actually increases the amount of paperwork in the process. There has to be a threshold. Besides, $100 million doesn't buy as much as you'd think when hammers cost $436, pliers cost $748 and toilet seats cost $640.
1. Have Wikimedia set up a sort of wiki journal specifically for this that anyone can read for free (better yet, have the federal government pay Wikimedia for the server and bandwidth costs. It's a drop in the bucket for agencies that are spending 100 million on R&D.)
2. Give each of the federal agencies (that spend 100 million or more on R&D) accounts that can post articles
3. Give each major research university accounts that can edit and comment on the articles, but not post articles
4. Now you have a peer-reviewed journal and open access to research for the public
5. Profit! For society, that is (taxpayer-funded research becomes available to everyone)
If they are interested in experimenting with paying their employees in Bitcoin, they should use real dollars to buy Bitcoin. If they can't manage converting dollars into Bitcoin, how are their employees supposed to manage buying goods and services with it? What are your options for paying rent or property taxes with Bitcoin? Or looked at another way, if they are so convinced that Bitcoin is a valid currency, perhaps the experiment should be to accept Bitcoin as a donation and convert it to local currencies with which their employees are normally paid. If they are consistently able to do so, then look at paying them in Bitcoin. Or bottle caps – wait, scratch that... Bottle caps are real physical objects. Or sea monkeys.
12 years sounds about right. Buy N Large estimated 5 years to clean up the whole planet with an army of underpaid worker drones. Remember, "Today is the 700th anniversary of our five-year cruise. Ask for your free Septuacentennial Cupcake in a Cup!" So the underestimated it by a bit, but that was a whole planet. Twelve years should be enough time for China to clean up one country with an army of underpaid worker drones.
Mandiant page with appendix and hashes for their materials here.
I was reading through this last night and it contains some interesting details, but is also something of an advertisement for Mandiant's services. Some highlights:
The name of the group is People's Liberation Army Unit 61398 in Shanghai, and Mandiant has found that one of their personas uses easy to remember passwords for the many accounts he sets up, including a sort of mnemonic for the unit's number (“2j3c1k” likely stands for 2 ju 3 chu 1 ke, which likely stands for 2nd Bureau, 3rd Division, 1st Section, which is the official name of Unit 61398). The majority of attacks come from the neighborhood where this unit is based, and they have been supplied with "special" fiber connections "in the name of national defense."
The group is focused on the U.S. and Canada, and is mostly interested in attacking the information technology industry, but has taken an interest in aerospace, public administration, satellites and telecom, scientific research, energy and transportation.
They include interesting profiles of three "personas" known to be involved in the units attacks: Malware author "Ugly Gorilla" (a.k.a. "Wang Dong"), hacker "DOTA" (whose gmail account they claim to have broken into, and they provide a screenshot) and tool author "SuperHard" (Mei Qiang).
The group uses the term “rouji,” which translates to "Meat Chicken," in their software to refer to infected computers.
State officials in California have asked municipalities to reduce their storm drain waste by 40%. Whatever the solution to that would end up being, it would be expensive, if not impossible. How do you prevent 40% of the waste in your storm drains, which are publicly accessible all over town? The requirement wasn't to reduce waste to a certain level... it was to reduce it by 40% below what it already is... so if your numbers are already good, you have to make them that much better. It's chasing after a rainbow.
So the state gave the municipalities a loophole: you don't have to reduce your storm drain waste by 40% (or at all) if you institute a plastic bag ban. No questions asked. The municipalities get to avoid costly Environmental Impact Reports, and they get to tell their residents "look! We're doing something for the environment," so they're passing these bans with little or no discussion. So now you have just as much waste in the storm drains, restaurants and other places that have been given a pass are still handing out plastic bags all day long, and stores that weren't given a pass are either giving out thicker plastic bags with handles that are labelled as "reusable" or selling people paper bags for 10 cents. You don't see people walking into stores with these thicker bags or the paper bags, so that means they're being thrown out anyway, and they have more mass than the "banned" bags, so we really haven't reduced waste at all... we've made it worse.
A map of equally populated areas to promote equality in voting? We experimented with this some time ago... Couldn't make it work. It didn't promote voting equality on a per-person basis, just created the illusion that people had common interests that were defined by some arbitrary old lines that were drawn up a long time ago. Maybe it was the semicircular arrangement, or the blocking out of all sunlight in 1950. It still looks pretty.
If you want to use vim, why wouldn't you just use vim?
That's like asking "why would you install Linux on a toaster oven?" Because it might be possible, and it would be just awesome. Actually, it's probably more like asking "why would you install a toaster oven in my overly-versatile Linux box when the internal temperature already toasts slices of bread perfectly?" Because there are many shades of perfection and if you are to truly understand the zen of emacs you must experience them all.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sitting in a chair at the dealership where I bought my new car 19 months ago, waiting for the service department to come back and tell me my failed brake caliper is "normal wear and tear."
Looks down at my chair suspiciously...
If he's that concerned about bicyclists contributing CO2, he should propose something similar to California's smog checks.
In order to breathe on public roads a person must go to a licensed CO2 Test Only Station where they put you on a treadmill, stick a wand in your throat and another up your rear end, and attach electrodes to your ears. If you exhale more CO2 than the government-set limit, you must see a doctor and get fixed, then come back and re-test. This test station could be in a 7-Eleven, or a gas station, as long as it's not any place that could potentially be related to medicine, like a hospital or a pharmacy. This is to ensure doctors and pharmacists are not failing you on the test just to make you buy medicine or therapy from them.
People who do not plan to breathe on public roads would pay a small "Planned Non-Breathing" (PNB) fee of about $35 and would be allowed to breathe in their homes or while laying on cinderblocks in their front yard.
I know, it sounds crazy, but look at what it's done for L.A. The air is now clear enough to actually see the smog cloud overhead.
Remember, best block, no be there.
If Sam Kinison were alive today, he'd apply his philosophy on world hunger and say:
You want to help end extinction-level meteors? Stop sending up shit to blow them up. Don't send them another one, send up huge orbit-altering rockets. Send the UN a guy that says, "You know, we've been coming up with a plan to blow up meteors for about 35 years now and we were blowing stuff up, and we realized there wouldn't BE extinction-level meteors if you people would live where the METEORS AREN'T! YOU LIVE INSIDE AN ASTEROID BELT!! UNDERSTAND THAT? YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING ASTEROID BELT!! Stop wasting rockets by launching them at each other. You too, North Korea... don't give me that look. We're going to do this together in one shot.
The most-effective solution is don't be where the meteor is going to be. This worked well for me the other week. Giant meteor fell in Siberia and I wasn't there.
Do they pay for the content they download? If not, in 20 years, when those 20 somethings are 40 somethings, who is going to generate the content?
China will. It's already producing censored news in the U.S. and "giving away" dispatches to struggling stations in Africa. When the local media disappear, China steps in with a friendly, wealthy hand.
Rumor has it John Broder is about to release a story that claims Dragon won't make it all the way to the space station. The capsule SpaceX lent him died somewhere in Connecticut and had to be towed back to Cape Canaveral. Alleged leaked picture here. No word on whether Musk will issue a rebuttal.
I used to work with someone who was close to Ted Leonsis. Ted's great infamous achievement is that he came up with the idea of blanketing the country in AOL disks. He made a lot of money at AOL and then got into buying DC-area sports teams. The media often liked to hold him up as a tech sector golden boy, but I can assure you that being close to Ted Leonsis is no guarantee of success. If anything, I find it interesting that Groupon's CEO was "mentored" by Ted, because I always thought the way Groupon advertised their coupon service was as strangely pervasive as AOL disks were. Put out enough and you're bound to get some return.
If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be short-lived, fictitious, and not popular with today's consumers. Maybe Groupon is Battletoads.
A Stanford comp-sci student has found a serious bug in Chromium, Safari, Opera, and MSIE.
OK, so we're talking about Google, Apple, Opera and Microsoft. But then...
The current limits are: 2.5 MB per origin in Google Chrome, 5 MB per origin in Mozilla Firefox and Opera, 10 MB per origin in Internet Explorer.
Now we're talking about Google, Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft. Where did Mozilla come from, and where did Apple go?
Chrome, Safari, and IE currently do not implement any such "affiliated site" storage limit.' Firefox's implementation of HTML5 local storage is not vulnerable to this exploit.
Now we're talking about Google, Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla. Apple's back, and Opera is left out this time, and even though the author seemed to be indicating that Mozilla's browser was on the vulnerable list, now it's set apart.
Editors, if a summary is inconsistent, please clean it up or don't promote the story.
The Ada Initiative's Valerie Aurora got Violet Blue's Hackers As A High-Risk Population (29c3 abstract) talk on harm reduction methodology pulled from the Security BSides meeting in San Francisco by claiming it contained rape triggers.
Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora, who founded a women's rights and FOSS non-profit in 2011, apparently had something to do with pulling a Chaos Communication Congress talk in San Francisco by a controversial sex author (who has a long history of having posts deleted and accounts closed by everyone from Boing Boing to Google for every reason from her opinions to her name) because the talk might trigger flashbacks in rape victims. Am I reading slashdot or is someone watching Gossip Girl in the next room with the volume turned up too high?
It frankly asinine to object to work around hacker ethics as 'off topic' at such broad hacker conference. Is Appelbaum's 29c3 keynote 'off topic' for asking hackers to work for the 'good guys' rather than military, police, their contractors, Facebook, etc.?
Apparently the author of the summary is rebutting an argument he has failed to share with the rest of us... And using disjointed, broken English to accomplish this... And then asking for our opinion on Applebaum's keynote. Who the hell is Applebaum? Maybe I should know, but I don't care. What is this summary about?
Yes, obviously harm reduction is a psychological hack that need not involve a computer, but this holds for 'social engineering' as well.
The author answered his own question, a common technique to attempt to force opinions on people by asking a question so they open their minds to consider possibilities and jam an opinion in during the window of opportunity. It might have been more successful if the audience wasn't still busy trying to figure out what the author was talking about in the first place. Fail on multiple levels. I could be doing something useful right now, like brushing my teeth, but this is epically bad. It's like watching the aftermath of a train wreck. You just stare in amazement.
It's simply that hacking isn't nearly as specialized or inaccessible as say theoretical physics.
Random meaningless and false generalization about hacking. I think the author has even lost track of what he was saying... this could get interesting. Wait for it...
Worse, there is no shortage of terrible technology laws like the CFAA, DMCA, etc. that exist partially because early hackers failed to communicate an ethics that seemed coherent and reasoned to outsiders.
Apparently, terrible technology-related laws are worse than... something... perhaps this summary. Oh, and failing to communicate things in a coherent fashion is bad. Wait, was that self-flagellation on the part of the summary author?
I watched the YouTube video of the sex author's talk, and she's almost as incoherent as the author of the summary. Perhaps she makes sense to him, and vice versa. Or perhaps they are one and the same. After about five minutes of watching, I was trying to figure out what the hell she was talking about when she said something to the effect of, "so you can see what I'm trying to say." Translation: I can't express myself well enough to explain what I'm talking about, so I'm going to suggest that everyone in the room understands, and if you don't there must be something wrong with you. At that point I closed the video and was done with it.
Nothing to see here, unless you like drama about train wreck stories about train wrecks.
Turn your back on them, and they WILL try to go back to a similar model.
That ship has sailed. Their future now lies in following the movie industry by adding extra unskippable tracks at the beginning of the album that advertise other albums, contain public service message warnings about piracy and disclaimers like "the opinions expressed in the music you are about to hear do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the studio or music distribution service." Expect Blu-Ray versions of albums to be released with 3-D music you can only hear with special glasses -- listening to the music without the glasses will have the jarring effect of sounding like Mariah Carey and Bob Dylan singing a duet.
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
-Arthur Conan Doyle
Have you considered the probability that perhaps they meant to send you a virus? What sort of tools are these? The system administration tools, I mean, not the people who can't properly administer their systems but expect to help you administer yours.
Why is it that the attack-dog AGs of the world are ready to go when somebody runs wget contrary to a site's terms of service; but people like this are allowed to operate unchecked?
Maybe it's because they're supposed to be using cURL? Attorneys General have a tendency to get wrapped up in political nonsense.
[ducks]
Dude, everyone knows Fanning stole Napster from Seth Green while he was napping...
Sony's real breakthrough with the PS4 might not be the specs, but its ability to turn every game you play into a multiplayer one.
This is not a breakthrough. They already did this with the PS3. Every time I turned the thing on I found myself stuck in a multiplayer game. When I wanted to stream Netflix videos, I'd spend 30-60 minutes in a tug of war between Sony, Netflix, Content Owners and Content Pirates... The Content Pirates would get an edge on Netflix, which would update its software to keep the Content Owners happy, but Sony would make the customers update over their network and lock up the machine for an hour once a week. That game got old so I stopped playing. When I wanted to use OtherOS, I found myself stuck in a multiplayer game between the hobbyists, Sony's marketing department, Sony's software developers, and Sony's legal team. Ultimately, that game got old too, so I stopped playing.
One would think Sony would learn from this, but even if one head of the Sony hydra learned, it couldn't focus on the concept for very long because the other heads are too busy snapping at it.
If the research is behind a paywall, the Chinese are likely the only ones who have access to it anyway (and not because they're paying for it), which gives them a first-mover advantage over everyone else. Getting research out from behind a paywall simply levels the playing field.
Normally I'd agree with that sentiment, but there's a point where the publishing requirement becomes such a burden that it gets in the way of the research, or prevents it altogether. What qualifies as research? You opened a spreadsheet today and had it calculate the average of a series of numbers? Sorry, now you have to write a report about why you did that research, your results, and what they mean. And then someone has to review it. And you have to submit a form certifying that you did your mandated report. And someone has to read those and put together a report on the compliance rates of every agency. And then they have to publish that.
We're talking about the federal government, an entity that adds an extra page to a four-page form so it can print its congressionally-mandated one-paragraph statement about its compliance with the "Paperwork Reduction Act," which actually increases the amount of paperwork in the process. There has to be a threshold. Besides, $100 million doesn't buy as much as you'd think when hammers cost $436, pliers cost $748 and toilet seats cost $640.
Here's an idea:
1. Have Wikimedia set up a sort of wiki journal specifically for this that anyone can read for free (better yet, have the federal government pay Wikimedia for the server and bandwidth costs. It's a drop in the bucket for agencies that are spending 100 million on R&D.)
2. Give each of the federal agencies (that spend 100 million or more on R&D) accounts that can post articles
3. Give each major research university accounts that can edit and comment on the articles, but not post articles
4. Now you have a peer-reviewed journal and open access to research for the public
5. Profit! For society, that is (taxpayer-funded research becomes available to everyone)
If they are interested in experimenting with paying their employees in Bitcoin, they should use real dollars to buy Bitcoin. If they can't manage converting dollars into Bitcoin, how are their employees supposed to manage buying goods and services with it? What are your options for paying rent or property taxes with Bitcoin? Or looked at another way, if they are so convinced that Bitcoin is a valid currency, perhaps the experiment should be to accept Bitcoin as a donation and convert it to local currencies with which their employees are normally paid. If they are consistently able to do so, then look at paying them in Bitcoin. Or bottle caps – wait, scratch that... Bottle caps are real physical objects. Or sea monkeys.
12 years sounds about right. Buy N Large estimated 5 years to clean up the whole planet with an army of underpaid worker drones. Remember, "Today is the 700th anniversary of our five-year cruise. Ask for your free Septuacentennial Cupcake in a Cup!" So the underestimated it by a bit, but that was a whole planet. Twelve years should be enough time for China to clean up one country with an army of underpaid worker drones.
Mandiant page with appendix and hashes for their materials here.
I was reading through this last night and it contains some interesting details, but is also something of an advertisement for Mandiant's services. Some highlights:
State officials in California have asked municipalities to reduce their storm drain waste by 40%. Whatever the solution to that would end up being, it would be expensive, if not impossible. How do you prevent 40% of the waste in your storm drains, which are publicly accessible all over town? The requirement wasn't to reduce waste to a certain level... it was to reduce it by 40% below what it already is... so if your numbers are already good, you have to make them that much better. It's chasing after a rainbow.
So the state gave the municipalities a loophole: you don't have to reduce your storm drain waste by 40% (or at all) if you institute a plastic bag ban. No questions asked. The municipalities get to avoid costly Environmental Impact Reports, and they get to tell their residents "look! We're doing something for the environment," so they're passing these bans with little or no discussion. So now you have just as much waste in the storm drains, restaurants and other places that have been given a pass are still handing out plastic bags all day long, and stores that weren't given a pass are either giving out thicker plastic bags with handles that are labelled as "reusable" or selling people paper bags for 10 cents. You don't see people walking into stores with these thicker bags or the paper bags, so that means they're being thrown out anyway, and they have more mass than the "banned" bags, so we really haven't reduced waste at all... we've made it worse.
And each of the front-runner candidates received a box in the mail labelled "POLITICIAN PORK."
(Allegedly, Mitnick was tracking the FBI agents who were pursuing him, and would leave them boxes labelled "FBI DONUTS.")
OK, so they were never equally populated, but they were supposed to be regions with equal power.
A map of equally populated areas to promote equality in voting? We experimented with this some time ago... Couldn't make it work. It didn't promote voting equality on a per-person basis, just created the illusion that people had common interests that were defined by some arbitrary old lines that were drawn up a long time ago. Maybe it was the semicircular arrangement, or the blocking out of all sunlight in 1950. It still looks pretty.
If you want to use vim, why wouldn't you just use vim?
That's like asking "why would you install Linux on a toaster oven?" Because it might be possible, and it would be just awesome. Actually, it's probably more like asking "why would you install a toaster oven in my overly-versatile Linux box when the internal temperature already toasts slices of bread perfectly?" Because there are many shades of perfection and if you are to truly understand the zen of emacs you must experience them all.