The offending counts were generated locally on one of the machines, basically making differential counts along the way. And maybe a snapshot of that machine was placed on the FTP site, after the fact. Maybe.
Although, the transcript indicates that the tallies consisted of more than just one voting machine. That'd mean that the machines did talk to each other, and that's A Bad Thing(tm).
The issue is about protecting snake-oil. Look at the patterns of these laws - from Felton to Sklyarov - refuting claims of "being secure" is becoming illegal; any business model, no matter how far-fetched, is protected. The people creating the flaws are held harmless; the people who point them out are crucified.
Case and point - find an open WAP in the parking lot of a large retail store. Walk inside, and see the "PC Cash Registers" are using it, broadcasting credit card info etc. free and clear. You don't know this, but the jerk who set it up believes a MAC filter is adequate to prevent harvesting.
You gonna tell the people in the store? You sure as hell cannot tell the customers.
Join Harry Smathers on Wednesdays this fall, for an in-depth study of one of nature's most reclusive mysteries...
(Screen snippet of guy in a Jeep taking aim with a dart gun, another shot with a tranquilized wino on the ground being restrained by a "Crikey!" kind-of guy, and a third with the wino being released "back into the wild" with his new, sporty bright-orange tracking collar around his neck...)
And here I was worried that I was the only one to receive things that could never have even been tried.
The first Excel distribution on floppies using DMF. Problem was... the version of setup and LZE packaged on disk 1 didn't understand the DMF format... they were the same version that came with Win31. "Sector not found. Please insert disk 2", lmao. Many weeks later, upon finding a LZE that was capable, the install worked just fine.
Backoffice4.5. Main setup script wasn't finished. Literally, hitting syntax errors from instructions (not comments!) saying "Remember to finish SQL installation here". They apparently forgot. It's ok, though. The individual product installs weren't any better. I ended up getting a "new" copy. MS's reason? Defective Media.
Any time that TW pushes an "upgrade", you lose all of your recordings, and all of your schedules.
It wouldn't be that bad, except that these "brainwipes" seem to happen quite often... enough to wonder if these units aren't based on an MS product...
Oh, and there's an extra funny caveat. You get no instructions with the unit, just a card with an annotated screenshot of the remote.
If you want instructions, you can go to the SciAtl website. After you read their privacy policy which says all personal information is optional, you can sign up and give them your name, address, number of TVs, number of computers... then you can give them the serial number off of the DVR (which is strictly optional, they promise)... then you'll have access to a user's guide once they email you your account info. It's gotten better, though. I recall when I got my DVR a year ago, they also wanted my spouse, age, gender, race, income, number of kids, kid's names, and the barcode number off the unit as well... but it was strictly optional, so it's okay. Funny thing is, the none of their scripts will allow you to register unless you complete all of the required fields, lol.
Face it, the software market is pretty much saturated from their perspective, and there isn't much room for growth on the desktop compared with previous years.
What MS discovered, about two years ago, was that they could sell a completely different product. What MS discovered was Radio.
Radio doesn't make money by playing songs. Radio makes money by selling its listeners. Now, take a re-think of the Trusted Platform from that perspective, and what it's purpose will be completely obvious.
...and we ended up on it also. Had to make a call to their hostmaster in VA, and 120 seconds later it was fixed. I was repeatedly assured that the issue was in no way related to anything particular on my end... they just screwed up while implementing something yesterday morning.
that made the illegal technology specifically intended to speed the sharing and transfer of large, copywritten materials...... and they even go so far as to make a copy of it themselves, no less. I say these pirates and piracy enablers need to go to jail!
...having done rescue on a few thousand accidents, and been in a few myself... I don't want some naieve black-box 2nd-guessing my decision to smash into something. As odd as it sounds, consider:
- A nice frozen bridge. You've got a stopped/crashed car or obstruction in front of you, and a 90 ton Semi coming in behind you. Sorry, but I'm gonna get through that obstruction and out of his way, thanks.
- Hitting snow/ice banks at a low speed is a stupid idea that usually gets you stuck.
- If some on-coming idiot swerves into my lane, the last thing I want to do is stop and spend MORE time in his path. Thanks, I might prefer to add a little more energy and get out of his way as quickly as possible.
This idea ranks right up there with cars that refuse to start unless the clutch is pushed in. It sounds like a really great idea... until you stall in a high speed intersection, and then you're dead along with whoever hits you. Rather a shame, considering that you could otherwise just stuff it into gear and crank your car out of the way... but hey, cars never stall, fuel filters never ice up, and timing belts never break.
his argument that "strongly suggests" we're being simulated pretty much demands we, in fact, are not.
If we are being simulated, then the other two clauses are false. Great.
Of course, who is simulating us? His same rules must be asked, and the answers must be applied at each "level" of reality. The problem is that no "level of reality" can ever have a definitive state, even the supposed "base level" will not be able to say that it isn't a simulation... all you're left with is a vicious circle.
So, it's a fun argument, but it isn't complete.
Personally, I've always gamed that this was a sim of some sorts - we (most of us... I know quite a few people who'd qualify as "mindless automata") exist some place where life is really boring and safe, and we pay some guy $10 per life / immersion. Then you can live fast, take chances, die young, and still be home in time for dinner. It's a fun game theory, because any quirks we encounter here can be attributed to the reality's version of "Microsoft". Heh.
Second, if you're thinking about using GPS guidance, think again, consumer GPS receivers are designed to cut off when the speed is higher than a set value (precisely to prevent their use in this fashion).
FUD.
I've got 3 different Garmins, they all work just fine at 600+kts.
Using well documented "features" of IE and / or Outlook, for only $9.95, SBB's Patented Total Infomercial Awareness System(tm) will: a) Replace the user's desktop background with [Your Message Here] b) Replace all icons, system wide, with [Your Logo] c) Rename all files and directories on all partitions to [Your Message Here] (with some random suffix to keep each name unique) d) Replace the contents of all files on all partitions with [Your Message Here]
And, for a limited time only, we'll throw in a EULA for only $5.00 more!
Yes, by executing the TIA payloa^H^H^H^H^H^H System, your vict^H^H^H^H users will have agreed to a EULA which... e) requires them to legally change their name to [Your Message Here], along with any children or pets in their custody. f) Require your users to transfer all of their real properties to you g) Require your users to agree to pay any and all legal fees / penalties incurred by you as a result of the TIA System, or the EULA
Your observation that there's some problem with the language is probably incorrect; put a moron on a keyboard, you'll get a moron's results. I had a client, long ago - their previous guy wrote some crap, and all times had to be entered in military format. The reason he gave for this - and it exemplifies my point quite well - was that C could not be made to convert times from military to AM/PM. *** Could NOT. *** And he meant it, I'm serious.
If noone understands you, what you do, or why you do it, it could be that you're a genius. More likely, though, it's because you're an idiot.
Dunno if these are "good", or not. But,
I use fox to provide an interface to our Nortel PBX. It grabs the cdr events, the 30-second stats, the hourly ACD stats, tracks what agents are at which phones, who took or made what calls, periodically bounces phone numbers against a dozen reverse-lookup sites to see who our users were calling, watchdogs the various AUDs & DTIs, etc and sends me a txtmsg if things go awry, and watchdogs the actual inbound/outbound traffic patterns to figure out if any of our T1s go grey (meaning our provider faulted them, which won't cause an error on the switch for some strange reason). It watches the ACD queues and compares it to current staffing levels. If we're getting slammed at 3am, it'll txtmsg the manager-on-call, and tell her that the night crew needs a few telecommuters to hop on for an hour. That, and it proxies the serial TTY console so's that I can telenet to it from anywhere, even from home using an IPaq. That's a good app.
Writing another one that compares ESRI shape files. Each quarter, GDT sends us a map with every known street in the state. We have polygons, etc, all across the state that were drawn relative to the positions of those streets, and their intersections. GDT sends us a new map, and some of those streets (and intersections) move. Our polygons don't, and that's A Bad Thing(tm). Since GDT will not release changelogs, Our Little App walks every feature in our current release, finds or guesses where it is in the new one, deals exhaustively with name changes, and tries to suggest additions to our polygons to maintain their spatial relationships with those new features. That's a killer app, when it's done.
After reading a good Dilbert about "moving our database to an e-mail based system", I wrote one as a joke. In fox. More scarey, someone wanted to use it.
I've written too many parsers in Fox. LR, LL, whatever. Not the fastest, but great for harvesting.
One of the more fun projects was about Telephone Poles. I used pure fox to provide a GUI, featuring a pole. The user would drag-n-drop features onto the pole - transformers, wires, whatever. User would then add any quantified defects found. Lastly, core samples would be input from various heights, and the software would calculate the various moments, % remaining strengths in different directions, etc, and decide if the poll needed repair or replacement. The user could them spit out a list of poles needing work, etc.
The neatest one was a cut optimizer for a window factory. It'd invasively rip the day's work orders out of their proprietary software, figure out what parts where needed, rip the available inventory, merge it with any known scraps left over from previous runs, and spit out cut-patterns onto disks, that'd produce the least waste. The disks would then be stuffed into some semi-automated cutting saws, etc. I say this was the neatest, because it wasn't all linear cuts - this was a window factory, so I had to handle glass also. At the end of the run, any useful scraps were tracked for later use, and inventory would be deducted from the proprietary's files. It really pissed of that proprietary vendor, because they offered an optimizer for about 40 grand... and they ran theirs head-to-head against mine on several hundred batches, mine beat them by almost 65% on linear, and nearly 18% on planar (glass). ROFL, considering I wrote it in exactly 14 hours and 12 minutes... I
Imagine that the "keys" in the thread can be based on data that doesn't exist (completely, or at all) in the list itself.
The big ol problem faced by SQL based stuff is that it's record-set centric. It works really, really well with gobbs of data, and sucks at individual cases. And god help you if you wish to diverge right in the middle of one of those cases.
Fox is the exact opposite. It loves individual records. It loves recursion. It loves relations. It loves fractional relations. It loves relations that change on-the-fly, record by record, self-transmogrifying-based-on-other-relations that are also changing. If you can express it, it'll work, and it gives you very tight control of the record order.
The primary benefit is simply a matter of "The Big O". Because you're so close to the table structure, Fox can typically get close to the lovely O(n) or n.ln(n) we all desire. Most of the same crap in SQL will end up being n^2, because you cannot make the same assumptions. Consider any operation involving a Group By clause.
The downside is that Fox is file-based. Open your 5GB table on a disk you've got locally, you're fine. Open it across the network... snore... but even that can be beaten, with remote calling of Fox com objects. But at that point, you're probably better with SQL.
Slashdot Mirror
... they get around to requiring breeding permits.
Maybe he meant 'Xenu'.
... it means my AFDB is obsolete.
... maybe, just maybe...
The offending counts were generated locally on one of the machines, basically making differential counts along the way. And maybe a snapshot of that machine was placed on the FTP site, after the fact. Maybe.
Although, the transcript indicates that the tallies consisted of more than just one voting machine. That'd mean that the machines did talk to each other, and that's A Bad Thing(tm).
...next thing you'll know, we'll get an actor elected as president.
Thank god the DMCA prohibits the disclosure of this type of info, because if anyone finds out... we'd be screwed.
1st amendment kinda does apply, though.
The issue is about protecting snake-oil. Look at the patterns of these laws - from Felton to Sklyarov - refuting claims of "being secure" is becoming illegal; any business model, no matter how far-fetched, is protected. The people creating the flaws are held harmless; the people who point them out are crucified.
Case and point - find an open WAP in the parking lot of a large retail store. Walk inside, and see the "PC Cash Registers" are using it, broadcasting credit card info etc. free and clear. You don't know this, but the jerk who set it up believes a MAC filter is adequate to prevent harvesting.
You gonna tell the people in the store? You sure as hell cannot tell the customers.
my Apple ][ is infringing on this.
Wino Migration Routes!
Join Harry Smathers on Wednesdays this fall, for an in-depth study of one of nature's most reclusive mysteries...
(Screen snippet of guy in a Jeep taking aim with a dart gun, another shot with a tranquilized wino on the ground being restrained by a "Crikey!" kind-of guy, and a third with the wino being released "back into the wild" with his new, sporty bright-orange tracking collar around his neck...)
Quite a few EULAs for various MSOffice versions allowed for a backup, an install at work, and a SECOND INSTALL AT HOME OR ON A LAPTOP.
Oops.
Hey, shareware and demos are invalid too, maybe.
Amen, brother.
And here I was worried that I was the only one to receive things that could never have even been tried.
Half full mug
99% of the trash that's out there, isn't worth anything.
If the "content" has value, then sure! The problem is that most "providers" think television-quality content is worthy of compensation.
It isn't.
Hey, you left out the best part -
Any time that TW pushes an "upgrade", you lose all of your recordings, and all of your schedules.
It wouldn't be that bad, except that these "brainwipes" seem to happen quite often... enough to wonder if these units aren't based on an MS product...
Oh, and there's an extra funny caveat. You get no instructions with the unit, just a card with an annotated screenshot of the remote.
If you want instructions, you can go to the SciAtl website. After you read their privacy policy which says all personal information is optional, you can sign up and give them your name, address, number of TVs, number of computers... then you can give them the serial number off of the DVR (which is strictly optional, they promise)... then you'll have access to a user's guide once they email you your account info. It's gotten better, though. I recall when I got my DVR a year ago, they also wanted my spouse, age, gender, race, income, number of kids, kid's names, and the barcode number off the unit as well... but it was strictly optional, so it's okay. Funny thing is, the none of their scripts will allow you to register unless you complete all of the required fields, lol.
...what you think.
Face it, the software market is pretty much saturated from their perspective, and there isn't much room for growth on the desktop compared with previous years.
What MS discovered, about two years ago, was that they could sell a completely different product. What MS discovered was Radio.
Radio doesn't make money by playing songs. Radio makes money by selling its listeners. Now, take a re-think of the Trusted Platform from that perspective, and what it's purpose will be completely obvious.
Slump? Or finally figuring out that we do not, and never have needed to "upgrade" every 5 weeks...
...and we ended up on it also. Had to make a call to their hostmaster in VA, and 120 seconds later it was fixed. I was repeatedly assured that the issue was in no way related to anything particular on my end... they just screwed up while implementing something yesterday morning.
- SBB
that made the illegal technology specifically intended to speed the sharing and transfer of large, copywritten materials... ... and they even go so far as to make a copy of it themselves, no less. I say these pirates and piracy enablers need to go to jail!
heh.
...having done rescue on a few thousand accidents, and been in a few myself... I don't want some naieve black-box 2nd-guessing my decision to smash into something. As odd as it sounds, consider:
- A nice frozen bridge. You've got a stopped/crashed car or obstruction in front of you, and a 90 ton Semi coming in behind you. Sorry, but I'm gonna get through that obstruction and out of his way, thanks.
- Hitting snow/ice banks at a low speed is a stupid idea that usually gets you stuck.
- If some on-coming idiot swerves into my lane, the last thing I want to do is stop and spend MORE time in his path. Thanks, I might prefer to add a little more energy and get out of his way as quickly as possible.
This idea ranks right up there with cars that refuse to start unless the clutch is pushed in. It sounds like a really great idea... until you stall in a high speed intersection, and then you're dead along with whoever hits you. Rather a shame, considering that you could otherwise just stuff it into gear and crank your car out of the way... but hey, cars never stall, fuel filters never ice up, and timing belts never break.
- SBB
his argument that "strongly suggests" we're being simulated pretty much demands we, in fact, are not.
If we are being simulated, then the other two clauses are false. Great.
Of course, who is simulating us? His same rules must be asked, and the answers must be applied at each "level" of reality. The problem is that no "level of reality" can ever have a definitive state, even the supposed "base level" will not be able to say that it isn't a simulation... all you're left with is a vicious circle.
So, it's a fun argument, but it isn't complete.
Personally, I've always gamed that this was a sim of some sorts - we (most of us... I know quite a few people who'd qualify as "mindless automata") exist some place where life is really boring and safe, and we pay some guy $10 per life / immersion. Then you can live fast, take chances, die young, and still be home in time for dinner. It's a fun game theory, because any quirks we encounter here can be attributed to the reality's version of "Microsoft". Heh.
Ooo! Ooo! You can power them with fuel cells that run off methane!
Second, if you're thinking about using GPS guidance, think again, consumer GPS receivers are designed to cut off when the speed is higher than a set value (precisely to prevent their use in this fashion).
FUD.
I've got 3 different Garmins, they all work just fine at 600+kts.
Using well documented "features" of IE and / or Outlook, for only $9.95, SBB's Patented Total Infomercial Awareness System(tm) will:
a) Replace the user's desktop background with [Your Message Here]
b) Replace all icons, system wide, with [Your Logo]
c) Rename all files and directories on all partitions to [Your Message Here] (with some random suffix to keep each name unique)
d) Replace the contents of all files on all partitions with [Your Message Here]
And, for a limited time only, we'll throw in a EULA for only $5.00 more!
Yes, by executing the TIA payloa^H^H^H^H^H^H System, your vict^H^H^H^H users will have agreed to a EULA which...
e) requires them to legally change their name to [Your Message Here], along with any children or pets in their custody.
f) Require your users to transfer all of their real properties to you
g) Require your users to agree to pay any and all legal fees / penalties incurred by you as a result of the TIA System, or the EULA
5 Million IP addresses! Guaranteed!
ROFL, dammit... ok, five 1G tables, related to each other by recno(). Heh.
Your observation that there's some problem with the language is probably incorrect; put a moron on a keyboard, you'll get a moron's results. I had a client, long ago - their previous guy wrote some crap, and all times had to be entered in military format. The reason he gave for this - and it exemplifies my point quite well - was that C could not be made to convert times from military to AM/PM. *** Could NOT. *** And he meant it, I'm serious.
If noone understands you, what you do, or why you do it, it could be that you're a genius. More likely, though, it's because you're an idiot.
Dunno if these are "good", or not. But,
I use fox to provide an interface to our Nortel PBX. It grabs the cdr events, the 30-second stats, the hourly ACD stats, tracks what agents are at which phones, who took or made what calls, periodically bounces phone numbers against a dozen reverse-lookup sites to see who our users were calling, watchdogs the various AUDs & DTIs, etc and sends me a txtmsg if things go awry, and watchdogs the actual inbound/outbound traffic patterns to figure out if any of our T1s go grey (meaning our provider faulted them, which won't cause an error on the switch for some strange reason). It watches the ACD queues and compares it to current staffing levels. If we're getting slammed at 3am, it'll txtmsg the manager-on-call, and tell her that the night crew needs a few telecommuters to hop on for an hour. That, and it proxies the serial TTY console so's that I can telenet to it from anywhere, even from home using an IPaq. That's a good app.
Writing another one that compares ESRI shape files. Each quarter, GDT sends us a map with every known street in the state. We have polygons, etc, all across the state that were drawn relative to the positions of those streets, and their intersections. GDT sends us a new map, and some of those streets (and intersections) move. Our polygons don't, and that's A Bad Thing(tm). Since GDT will not release changelogs, Our Little App walks every feature in our current release, finds or guesses where it is in the new one, deals exhaustively with name changes, and tries to suggest additions to our polygons to maintain their spatial relationships with those new features. That's a killer app, when it's done.
After reading a good Dilbert about "moving our database to an e-mail based system", I wrote one as a joke. In fox. More scarey, someone wanted to use it.
I've written too many parsers in Fox. LR, LL, whatever. Not the fastest, but great for harvesting.
One of the more fun projects was about Telephone Poles. I used pure fox to provide a GUI, featuring a pole. The user would drag-n-drop features onto the pole - transformers, wires, whatever. User would then add any quantified defects found. Lastly, core samples would be input from various heights, and the software would calculate the various moments, % remaining strengths in different directions, etc, and decide if the poll needed repair or replacement. The user could them spit out a list of poles needing work, etc.
The neatest one was a cut optimizer for a window factory. It'd invasively rip the day's work orders out of their proprietary software, figure out what parts where needed, rip the available inventory, merge it with any known scraps left over from previous runs, and spit out cut-patterns onto disks, that'd produce the least waste. The disks would then be stuffed into some semi-automated cutting saws, etc. I say this was the neatest, because it wasn't all linear cuts - this was a window factory, so I had to handle glass also. At the end of the run, any useful scraps were tracked for later use, and inventory would be deducted from the proprietary's files. It really pissed of that proprietary vendor, because they offered an optimizer for about 40 grand... and they ran theirs head-to-head against mine on several hundred batches, mine beat them by almost 65% on linear, and nearly 18% on planar (glass). ROFL, considering I wrote it in exactly 14 hours and 12 minutes... I
The real reason that Fox rocks...
Imagine, if you will, a linked list.
Imagine it is infinitely threaded.
Imagine that the threads can be dynamic.
Imagine that the "keys" in the thread can be based on data that doesn't exist (completely, or at all) in the list itself.
The big ol problem faced by SQL based stuff is that it's record-set centric. It works really, really well with gobbs of data, and sucks at individual cases. And god help you if you wish to diverge right in the middle of one of those cases.
Fox is the exact opposite. It loves individual records. It loves recursion. It loves relations. It loves fractional relations. It loves relations that change on-the-fly, record by record, self-transmogrifying-based-on-other-relations that are also changing. If you can express it, it'll work, and it gives you very tight control of the record order.
The primary benefit is simply a matter of "The Big O". Because you're so close to the table structure, Fox can typically get close to the lovely O(n) or n.ln(n) we all desire. Most of the same crap in SQL will end up being n^2, because you cannot make the same assumptions. Consider any operation involving a Group By clause.
The downside is that Fox is file-based. Open your 5GB table on a disk you've got locally, you're fine. Open it across the network... snore... but even that can be beaten, with remote calling of Fox com objects. But at that point, you're probably better with SQL.