Great. Its wonderful to know that grandma might lose all her important documents because she fails to follow proper backup procedures, but if I said something silly on usenet 20 years ago, google's caching and redundancy will ensure that it'll still be available for hundreds of years to come.
Turns out, if I advertise my site with my domain, and let it lapse, upon disconnection, nobody can get to me. However, if I do all my advertising by ip address (which never changes as long as I keep the same ISP), even though some people won't remember the ip addy, google is remarkably useful in finding the link as long as they know the title of the page, which is pretty simple to remember if you've ever been to the site.
Yes, I realize its still bad practice, and eventually I'll get a domain again, but nobody has had any problems accessing my site with just the ip address, and for now, I see no hurry to jump back on the domain bandwagon again.
Prolonged time playing video games could cause people to lose concentration, get angry easily and have trouble associating with others, a Japanese professor's research has suggested.
My own research has proven the following startling possibilities:
Crossing the street could result in immediate violent death.
Flying in a plane could result in impacting the ground at extremely high speeds, thereby resulting in death.
Followers of any religion could develop more fanatical views and act out in anti-social ways.
All life on Earth could be wiped out by a large meteor impact that we shall discover 3 days after impact.
Oh, and of course, sitting around all day watching TV or playing games could rot your brain. I think that research has been done before, but its good to keep bringing it up. Parents need to keep abreast of this research so they have an excuse to get their kids off the computer when they otherwise won't listen to anything the parents say.
How was this research conducted? What was the initial purpose of the reasearch to begin with? Did they set out to prove (or disprove) the results they ended up with? So you set out to prove that iodine is bad for rats. Take 100 10 ounce rats and inject them with 5 ounces of iodine each. 99 rats die, and one escapes prior to injection. From this, you can prove that iodine could be fatal to rats. You can prove that large doses of iodone are not fatal to rats in some circumstances (the rat escapes). And in the end, we've learned nothing.
Research causes cancer in rats. Move along. Move along
This has been covered in the main FAQ and on several other occasions, but I'll recap and expand on your points.
First of all, if ANY single host starts slamming my site with HTTP requests, I'll instantly assume that its a DOS attack. This means I'll either block that address, or I'll shut down completely until the "attack" passes. What would the results of this "test" be from the point of view of the one doing the testing. Granted, if you're testing CNN, you'll probably never notice. But if you're testing some small site, they might pay more attention.
Mirroring the site in advance creates a potential legal grey area. If permission to mirror is required, and legally it is unless the author provies a GNU type license for the material, then the author would need to be contacted in advance, a process that can take hours easily. Who wants to wait 6 hours when you can link NOW?
Google caches are only available for those sites that have been around for more than a couple months, and even then the content is probably out of date. If slashdot is linking to something that's been around for a while, this isn't a problem, but if they're linking to something that's happened hours or minutes ago (which 90% of the slashdot headlines refer to), then google won't help much. And google won't cache the images, they still hit the original site, and typically 90% or more of the data from a site is graphics anyways. There are plenty of karma whores who will copy/paste the text part of articles/pages, and submitters will include google links on the occasions that they're available.
And the best solution to the slashdot effect is for the website administrators to configure the webserver properly. Bandwidth is only part of the problem. The other problem is caused by servers locking up due to excessive resource allocation. Once a server starts thrashing, all hope is lost, the server will be receiving requests faster than it can respond to them.
To fool a dumbass, you only have to emulate a dumbass. The best way to fool a dumbass is to say the same stupid things over and over again, since that's all the dumbass does anyways. And from what I've seen from your generic IRC chats, 99% of them qualify.
And while we're on the subject, lets talk about people who's ego has outgrown their brain to the point they've driven themselves into depression over it. The author seems pretty bright, but maybe he heard that fact a bit too many times and believed it a bit too much. Grants aren't always "granted". Sometimes, you just have to give things time. To say that everyone schemes against you is the paranoid view. And the reactions of those he detests are well justified. Heck, even when some of them tried to give him the benefit of the doubt and give him and his project a good review, he simply turned the compliment against them. He's a product of his own misery.
This isn't even a legal issue. Its a technical one. 30 seconds of work on the part of the website administrator and nobody will be able to deep-link to anything, at least without a lot of extra work, more trouble than simply following the links. No lawyers necessary. No wasting time and money in court. And you won't even have to deal with the ire of millions of casual websurfers. Nobody gets upset when a direct link doesn't work, but everyone gets upset when you say you're not legally permitted to do so.
I agree with the part about doing it for much less. I was recently interviewed for a simple 2 week job involving installing and configuring some Sun boxes. Now, I know Unix backwards and forwards having worked on several linux distributions, AIX, System V, etc for many many years, yet I've never touched a Sun based operating system. So when I was asked about doing that job with a bunch of Sun related requirements, I politely declined the offer. I made a mental note to at least tinker with it in the future so if a similar job became available later I might be able to take it, but I'm not about to hack my way through something I've never looked at, at the expense of someone else. That's how I get myself into trouble.
Well, they decided to interview me anyways. Why? Despite the fact I had no directly relevent experience, I would do it a whole lot cheaper than those that did. So they figured, a hack and slash job would be sufficient as long as they could sell me on the "price". Mind you, this was not the actual company that was interviewing me, this was one of those contracting firms. And they told me flat out they had no in house unix experience.
Now, I'm confident I would have been able to install those systems, get them up and running to the satisfaction of all involved. Why did I still decline? There's a LOT more to properly configuring a system beyond the simple "get it working" stage. While I can work my way around a shell prompt on any *nix, the lack of experience on a specific OS will hurt me, and therefore them. Are there special utilities I don't know about? Are there known vulnerabilities I need to patch? Is there a generic expectation that everyone who uses this specific OS has that wouldn't be obvious to an outsider? Heck, I spent two hours once trying to figure out how to permanantly change the IP address on redhat, and I live and breath linux (just not that distro). I'm not about to say I'm qualified under those conditions even on an OS I've familiar with. To say I can manage it on an OS I've never touched would be, quite frakely, suicidal.
Yet this firm, with this knowledge in hand, was willing to risk several thousands of dollars of a customer's assest, along with a lot of future goodwill, because they figured they could sell me on the "price". I wonder sometimes if they weren't just planning to sell me at the same price as anyone else and just keep a larger share. I wouldn't have cared if I felt comfortable about the job. But there are times, you get what you pay for. And system administration is definitely one of them.
Ok, we have a few people that have looked beyond the simple hype and pointed out some of the shortcomings of Walmart's new experiement into Microsoft free computers. This is not all a bad thing. But don't be too hasty to count them out as a viable alternative.
Walmart has shown on at least one occasion that they listen to their primary consumer base, when they replaced the modems in their OS-free machine with a linux compatible one. They realize this is at best a nitch market, and they have to be sure to appeal that market as best they can. So they've made a few snafu's with this latest experiment, but at least they're trying. Tell them what's wrong. They'll probably make the effort to fix it.
At least now, there's an alternative. It might not be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but its something. And the company that's promoting it doesn't rely on a monthly infusion of venture capital to keep running and will surive if the stock market does another massive downturn. They will sell these products as long as people buy them. Sure, at first it'll be the geek crowd that doesn't really NEED them, but at some point, there will be someone that looks at the price and realizes that its worth the learning curve to save a few bucks. And they may very well be disappointed.
Just because something may be available on the web for years to come, doesn't make that any different from typical print publications. I can go to my library and look up 20 yr old newspaper articles. They're still available, so why should accessing webpages be any different? Publication dates means the date that the article was PUBLISHED. It doesn't make ANY difference when someone actually READS it.
Now, I wonder what effect this would have if an article was changed after the initial publication date. This is a possibility of all digital news, where papers are pretty well stuck with what they print.
This is true. Its also true that legitimately owned rocks are accompanied by paperwork proving ownership from Nasa to the final party, including all sales along the way. This isn't that unusual. Most expensive products, no matter how commodity, have such paperwork. Your car has a title. Homes have deeds. Even the less expensive consumer items can at least be confirmed to not be reported stolen. Pawn shops do this all the time.
And sucky though it might be, the one who ends up with stolen property, while not necessarily guilty of any crime, is not the rightful owner, regardless of how much he paid for it, and the rightful owner is under no obligation to reimburse the new owner to reclaim the property, although a court case is required to force the exchange.
Pawn shops, upon finding themselves in possession of something stolen, will typically settle with the owner by returning the product for the price the pawn shop paid for it, which is typically a small fraction of what its actually worth. This way, both parties avoid an expensive lawsuit.
So before you spend multiple thousands of dollars on something, you better damn well be sure you're getting the real deal, and that it's legitimate.
everyone knows usenet is only for pr0n and mp3z/w4r3z
Your statement has some element of truth to it. Probably 99% of the usenet data is devoted to these time honored traditions. However, these are generally not the areas that are inflicted with trolls. The binary newsgroups typically are pretty well organized, and most of the commentary is devoted to requests or to flaming those who haven't learned how to post properly yet. Pron newsgroups get a lot of spam and heated discussions as to image quality... or content quality. *Ahem*... or so I've heard.
The trolls prey upon the general discussion groups. That is because they can actually get a voice there. If you're in a binary group, you're there to download binaries, and thus, you're going to download the multipart messages that are visibly 10-15 megs in size. The individual messages you can scroll by in a heartbeat without ever paying attention to anything more than the message size. Even the title won't stand out. Trolls get no audience this way. Now, if the trolls took to posting large binaries for kicks, that would be something different. And while I'm not saying that they don't, I've never encountered this on usenet, although I have seen it done on the various P2P networks. It would appear, that if someone's going to spend 3 days uploading something, they're not going to waste their upstream on something just so one person can download it then post a warning message to the rest of the group to ignore it.
Large city evacuations happen periodically with hurricanes and such. Its not pretty, people don't like it, some stay behind because they're too stubborn to leave, worry about looters, etc. But it's been done before, and it can be done again if there is a crisis sufficient enough to warrant it.
It approached the earth from the direction of the sun, but that does not mean that it has always resided within the orbit of earth. Although I haven't seen what the orbit looks like, there's a good chance that the orbit is highly elliptical and therefore, it spends a good amount of time outside the earth's orbit frequently enough to have been spotted in the past, assuming we were searching enough.
Also, just because an asteroid resides within the earth's orbit, does not mean we can't observe it, even from the ground. It just limits the amount of time each day that it is visible. Both venus and mercury are within the earth's orbit, but we're still able to observe them from the ground.
There will always be blind spots. And there will always be comets that are heading this way that we've never had the chance to observe because they were never close enough. The best we could do is get 100% of the asteroids that orbit the sun nearby.
But an asteroid this size will only affect the size of a large city. There is plenty of time to evacuate the area, assuming you have a day's notice or more. If it hit the middle of the ocean, it wouldn't be a big deal.
The other major concern. If this asteroid hit a nuclear capable country (and there are quite a few of them), if there was no prior knowledge of the hit it would be very easy to confuse a meteor stike with a nuclear attack. You would have the miles of devastation and the mushroom cloud. Imagine if it were to hit india or pakistan right now. The other side might retalliate from the perceived attack before they ever figured out it was just a meteor. The only difference would be the lack of radioactive fallout.
Even in the US, where we have suffienent technology to quickly detect and determine what is going on, it still took us half a day to get a grip on what was happening on September 11. All day long there were car bombs going off that didn't exist. The Vice President ordered a plane shot down that didn't exist. And 9/11, as tragic as it was, would be insignificant compared to the type of disaster that a 120 meter rock would cause, especially if it hit a populated area.
Knowing that Washington DC was going to get wiped off the face of the planet by a meteor (literally) 6 hours before it happened would cause a lot of panic, but it would save a lot of after the fact confusion. We would be mounting rescue efforts instead of mounting for a nuclear response against an unknown enemy.
Wayback machines should function exactly like search engines. If there's a robots.txt file, check it. If it tells you to get lost, do so. A search engine is going to cache at least the text part of your site, and you know it. And you can prevent it if you wish. And depending on the engine, it can take months or years to update.
Besides, wayback machines will run into the same snags that search engines do. They can't replicate cgi scripts any better than search engines can, so to deny them access to those resources for their sake as well as the server's makes sense.
I don't know how wayback works. At the very least they SHOULD read the robots file. If they do, then I consider most of the copyright issues to be a moot point.
If you still have to do the math to figure out where the ball is going to go, you don't stand a chance. Even if you can do the math, there's so many other factors. The speed of the ball determines how far it will go. In addition, it also determines how much bounce you will get off of the rubber sides. A faster ball will rebound at a different angle than a slower one will. English matters. Topspin matters. Draw matters. I seriously doubt any "professional" needs to do the math anyways. He knows where the ball is going to go and where it will end up and he can do so just by looking at the table.
Its possible that your house can be broken into but nothing stolen. Do you avoid calling the police just because you couldn't find anything stolen? No. You call them anyways. They can still get fingerprints and have a stronger case against the theif the next time he hits someone.
There didn't seem to be any question about the system itself getting comprimised. The only question was about the data on that system, and the sysadmin seemed to be pretty sure that was taken as well. 80% is pretty damn sure.
He was sure that the system containing the credit card data was comprimised. The data itself MIGHT have been downloaded, but nobody's "sure". I assume they'll just plug the hole and otherwise leave the system intact because they're not "sure" the intruder installed any backdoors, worms, virii, timebombs, or other nasties. I mean, why waste all that time to be secure when you're not even SURE there's a problem.
If all the system held was personal information, names, email addresses, etc and it was comprimised, the worst that would probably happen is that someone would get more spam. And that individual is going to get spam no matter how hard they try to keep their information secret.
However, all that breaks down when you're talking about credit card numbers. He knows the data was comprimised. Credit card fraud on the internet is real. It happens all the time. And anytime fraud occurs, someone suffers as a result, and typically it isn't the theif that stole the creditcard number.
Say this was you and you were in a similiar situation. Upon reporting the crime (and this is a crime) to your boss, your boss informs you that it would be better for thieves to succeed than to look incompetant. This is someone who would rather cover his own ass by hiding the problem than to take appropritate responsibility and to assist law enforcement, the credit card companies, and the credit card holders in protecting their property. Have you got his decision in writing? Do you have witnesses that you reported it? After all, you ARE the sysadmin. To some degree you are responsible for the comprimised data. Lets say that in the unlikely event the theft was traced back to you. And you have knowledge of it happening. It doesn't appear that your boss is going to stand up and claim responsibility at that point. He's going to cover his ass and point the finger at you. Do you REALLY want to work for someone like that?
Yes, the job market is tight right now. Sometimes making the right choice comes with certain consequences. But that's what ethics is all about. Its not just aobut not doing the wrong things, its about doing the right things when others attempt to dissuade you. If you choose to sit back and look the other way, in the end you will lose. Maybe this event will result in no problems, but something else will happen. Someday. A lot of people get dragged through criminal court solely because they felt the consequences of doing the right thing were too severe.
So consider what would happen if the hammer did fall. You'll lose not only your job, but you'll also lose your respect and integrety as well. At least while you go out interviewing for a new job, you get to tell the interviewer you left your previous company because they wanted you to do something illegal or unethical, and not because you were fired for doing something illegal or unethical. The fact that you're willing to sacrifice a comfortable lifestyle to do the right thing will outshine any other element of your resume.
Ever notice how all the small planets are rocky and all the large planets are gassy? This is not a coincidence. Jupiter and most likely the rest of the gas giants have solid cores, larger in fact than the earth, but due to their immense mass, they have an extremely dense atmosphere, which could not support life, at least as we know it.
As for smaller planets, you end up with situations like Mars. Mars has an atmosphere, although it has less than 1% of the air pressure that Earth has..1% if I remember correctly, but don't quote me on that. The gravity of the planet is insufficent to maintain a signficant atmosphere. Atmosphere "leaks" off into space all the time, even on Earth. This lack of atmosphere creates several problems. First, breathing would be extremely difficult, so life forms that DO exist would have to sustain themselves on very little air. Meteors would also present more of a problem, as they can't burn up as easily.
Venus has sufficient atmosphere, but its proximity to the sun, as well as the contents of its atmosphere, creates an environment that's too hot for "conventional" life to survive.
Of course, you also have the issue of habitable zones and their relation to the size of the sun. Consider our solar system as one that works. We're not too close, nor too far away from the sun, and the sun has 10 billion years of life (half of which it has expended already). Say we're looking at a larger star, like a blue giant. The planet could orbit further away and maintain the same temperate zone, but in 10 million years that sun is going to go supernova and any life will have not had enough time to evolve from inception. It took longer than that just for the Earth to cool down.
Large planets orbiting close to the sun present a problem. The primary concern is how they got there. Chances are good that they didn't form that close to the star, but formed further out then migrated inward to their present positions. If this is the case, its a darn good chance that any planets within the habitable zones will have either collided with the gas giant or been kicked out of the solar system.
The lack of any gas giants is also a problem. Jupiter does a nice job of attracting and "removing" potential threats to Earth, mostly the very large rocks. Without the gas giants out there to help us out, the Earth would get battered far more frequently than it does. Life can handle a huge hit once every 60 million years or so. Long term evolution would be severely hampered, however, if it happened more frequently.
A potential alternative to the current solar system is a gas giant located in the habitable zone with a earth sized moon. The moons of Juipter would have a significantly more viable climate if they were orbiting at 1 AU. However, this would present other dificulties, namely tidal lock. The moon would have to be sufficiently close to the planet so it didn't roast any one side for any significant length of time, however, the planet itself would block the light to the moon, so the moon would have one side that was perpetually frozen and the other side that had to endure long days and long nights. And any moon close enough to the planet to orbit quickly enough would have severe tidal problems... think IO.
So anyway, our best bet... is to find a solar system that resembles ours. At least until we find another model that works. Sorry about the extended rant.
But it shouldn't have to be that way. Cable networks are designed like most local area networks that have a connection to the internet. The internal network has typically has an order of magnitude more bandwidth available than the uplink to the internet. Internally, they could handle almost the maximum capacity of all of thier users at once, but when that bandwidth demand hits their internet uplinks, the supply falls short. The same problem is encountered with University networks.
The P2P software, to remain on the network admin's good side, needs to go out of its way to search for files only on hosts that are close (network wise) to the client. Your typical cable network has thousands of cusotmers, and if even only a small fraction of them are using similar software, and by the looks of it, its more than just a small fraction, the chances are relatively good that the file you're looking for already exists somewhere on the local cable network.
This results in the same amount of traffic on the local network, but a signficant reduction in traffic to and from the internet. Only if a file is unavailable locally will it venture out to the internet at large, but chances are good, this will apply to 5% of the searches or less.
Slashdot Mirror
Great. Its wonderful to know that grandma might lose all her important documents because she fails to follow proper backup procedures, but if I said something silly on usenet 20 years ago, google's caching and redundancy will ensure that it'll still be available for hundreds of years to come.
-Restil
I do that already.
Turns out, if I advertise my site with my domain, and let it lapse, upon disconnection, nobody can get to me. However, if I do all my advertising by ip address (which never changes as long as I keep the same ISP), even though some people won't remember the ip addy, google is remarkably useful in finding the link as long as they know the title of the page, which is pretty simple to remember if you've ever been to the site.
Yes, I realize its still bad practice, and eventually I'll get a domain again, but nobody has had any problems accessing my site with just the ip address, and for now, I see no hurry to jump back on the domain bandwagon again.
-Restil
Prolonged time playing video games could cause people to lose concentration, get angry easily and have trouble associating with others, a Japanese professor's research has suggested.
My own research has proven the following startling possibilities:
Crossing the street could result in immediate violent death.
Flying in a plane could result in impacting the ground at extremely high speeds, thereby resulting in death.
Followers of any religion could develop more fanatical views and act out in anti-social ways.
All life on Earth could be wiped out by a large meteor impact that we shall discover 3 days after impact.
Oh, and of course, sitting around all day watching TV or playing games could rot your brain. I think that research has been done before, but its good to keep bringing it up. Parents need to keep abreast of this research so they have an excuse to get their kids off the computer when they otherwise won't listen to anything the parents say.
How was this research conducted? What was the initial purpose of the reasearch to begin with? Did they set out to prove (or disprove) the results they ended up with? So you set out to prove that iodine is bad for rats. Take 100 10 ounce rats and inject them with 5 ounces of iodine each. 99 rats die, and one escapes prior to injection. From this, you can prove that iodine could be fatal to rats. You can prove that large doses of iodone are not fatal to rats in some circumstances (the rat escapes). And in the end, we've learned nothing.
Research causes cancer in rats. Move along. Move along
-Restil
This has been covered in the main FAQ and on several other occasions, but I'll recap and expand on your points.
First of all, if ANY single host starts slamming my site with HTTP requests, I'll instantly assume that its a DOS attack. This means I'll either block that address, or I'll shut down completely until the "attack" passes. What would the results of this "test" be from the point of view of the one doing the testing. Granted, if you're testing CNN, you'll probably never notice. But if you're testing some small site, they might pay more attention.
Mirroring the site in advance creates a potential legal grey area. If permission to mirror is required, and legally it is unless the author provies a GNU type license for the material, then the author would need to be contacted in advance, a process that can take hours easily. Who wants to wait 6 hours when you can link NOW?
Google caches are only available for those sites that have been around for more than a couple months, and even then the content is probably out of date. If slashdot is linking to something that's been around for a while, this isn't a problem, but if they're linking to something that's happened hours or minutes ago (which 90% of the slashdot headlines refer to), then google won't help much. And google won't cache the images, they still hit the original site, and typically 90% or more of the data from a site is graphics anyways. There are plenty of karma whores who will copy/paste the text part of articles/pages, and submitters will include google links on the occasions that they're available.
And the best solution to the slashdot effect is for the website administrators to configure the webserver properly. Bandwidth is only part of the problem. The other problem is caused by servers locking up due to excessive resource allocation. Once a server starts thrashing, all hope is lost, the server will be receiving requests faster than it can respond to them.
-Restil
In general, people are dumbasses.
To fool a dumbass, you only have to emulate a dumbass. The best way to fool a dumbass is to say the same stupid things over and over again, since that's all the dumbass does anyways. And from what I've seen from your generic IRC chats, 99% of them qualify.
And while we're on the subject, lets talk about people who's ego has outgrown their brain to the point they've driven themselves into depression over it. The author seems pretty bright, but maybe he heard that fact a bit too many times and believed it a bit too much. Grants aren't always "granted". Sometimes, you just have to give things time. To say that everyone schemes against you is the paranoid view. And the reactions of those he detests are well justified. Heck, even when some of them tried to give him the benefit of the doubt and give him and his project a good review, he simply turned the compliment against them. He's a product of his own misery.
-Restil
This isn't even a legal issue. Its a technical one. 30 seconds of work on the part of the website administrator and nobody will be able to deep-link to anything, at least without a lot of extra work, more trouble than simply following the links. No lawyers necessary. No wasting time and money in court. And you won't even have to deal with the ire of millions of casual websurfers. Nobody gets upset when a direct link doesn't work, but everyone gets upset when you say you're not legally permitted to do so.
-Restil
Of COURSE that's too much to ask.
:)
We've been asking for it all along.
A lot of good its done
-Restil
I agree with the part about doing it for much less. I was recently interviewed for a simple 2 week job involving installing and configuring some Sun boxes. Now, I know Unix backwards and forwards having worked on several linux distributions, AIX, System V, etc for many many years, yet I've never touched a Sun based operating system. So when I was asked about doing that job with a bunch of Sun related requirements, I politely declined the offer. I made a mental note to at least tinker with it in the future so if a similar job became available later I might be able to take it, but I'm not about to hack my way through something I've never looked at, at the expense of someone else. That's how I get myself into trouble.
Well, they decided to interview me anyways. Why? Despite the fact I had no directly relevent experience, I would do it a whole lot cheaper than those that did. So they figured, a hack and slash job would be sufficient as long as they could sell me on the "price". Mind you, this was not the actual company that was interviewing me, this was one of those contracting firms. And they told me flat out they had no in house unix experience.
Now, I'm confident I would have been able to install those systems, get them up and running to the satisfaction of all involved. Why did I still decline? There's a LOT more to properly configuring a system beyond the simple "get it working" stage. While I can work my way around a shell prompt on any *nix, the lack of experience on a specific OS will hurt me, and therefore them. Are there special utilities I don't know about? Are there known vulnerabilities I need to patch? Is there a generic expectation that everyone who uses this specific OS has that wouldn't be obvious to an outsider? Heck, I spent two hours once trying to figure out how to permanantly change the IP address on redhat, and I live and breath linux (just not that distro). I'm not about to say I'm qualified under those conditions even on an OS I've familiar with. To say I can manage it on an OS I've never touched would be, quite frakely, suicidal.
Yet this firm, with this knowledge in hand, was willing to risk several thousands of dollars of a customer's assest, along with a lot of future goodwill, because they figured they could sell me on the "price". I wonder sometimes if they weren't just planning to sell me at the same price as anyone else and just keep a larger share. I wouldn't have cared if I felt comfortable about the job. But there are times, you get what you pay for. And system administration is definitely one of them.
-Restil
Ok, we have a few people that have looked beyond the simple hype and pointed out some of the shortcomings of Walmart's new experiement into Microsoft free computers. This is not all a bad thing. But don't be too hasty to count them out as a viable alternative.
Walmart has shown on at least one occasion that they listen to their primary consumer base, when they replaced the modems in their OS-free machine with a linux compatible one. They realize this is at best a nitch market, and they have to be sure to appeal that market as best they can. So they've made a few snafu's with this latest experiment, but at least they're trying. Tell them what's wrong. They'll probably make the effort to fix it.
At least now, there's an alternative. It might not be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but its something. And the company that's promoting it doesn't rely on a monthly infusion of venture capital to keep running and will surive if the stock market does another massive downturn. They will sell these products as long as people buy them. Sure, at first it'll be the geek crowd that doesn't really NEED them, but at some point, there will be someone that looks at the price and realizes that its worth the learning curve to save a few bucks. And they may very well be disappointed.
But they might not.
-Restil
Just because something may be available on the web for years to come, doesn't make that any different from typical print publications. I can go to my library and look up 20 yr old newspaper articles. They're still available, so why should accessing webpages be any different? Publication dates means the date that the article was PUBLISHED. It doesn't make ANY difference when someone actually READS it.
Now, I wonder what effect this would have if an article was changed after the initial publication date. This is a possibility of all digital news, where papers are pretty well stuck with what they print.
-Restil
PAN = BAN
WHO = TWO
Learning all sorts of new things today about acceptable letter replacement. I'll keep an eye out for more.
-Restil
This is true. Its also true that legitimately owned rocks are accompanied by paperwork proving ownership from Nasa to the final party, including all sales along the way. This isn't that unusual. Most expensive products, no matter how commodity, have such paperwork. Your car has a title. Homes have deeds. Even the less expensive consumer items can at least be confirmed to not be reported stolen. Pawn shops do this all the time.
And sucky though it might be, the one who ends up with stolen property, while not necessarily guilty of any crime, is not the rightful owner, regardless of how much he paid for it, and the rightful owner is under no obligation to reimburse the new owner to reclaim the property, although a court case is required to force the exchange.
Pawn shops, upon finding themselves in possession of something stolen, will typically settle with the owner by returning the product for the price the pawn shop paid for it, which is typically a small fraction of what its actually worth. This way, both parties avoid an expensive lawsuit.
So before you spend multiple thousands of dollars on something, you better damn well be sure you're getting the real deal, and that it's legitimate.
-Restil
everyone knows usenet is only for pr0n and mp3z/w4r3z
Your statement has some element of truth to it. Probably 99% of the usenet data is devoted to these time honored traditions. However, these are generally not the areas that are inflicted with trolls. The binary newsgroups typically are pretty well organized, and most of the commentary is devoted to requests or to flaming those who haven't learned how to post properly yet. Pron newsgroups get a lot of spam and heated discussions as to image quality... or content quality. *Ahem*... or so I've heard.
The trolls prey upon the general discussion groups. That is because they can actually get a voice there. If you're in a binary group, you're there to download binaries, and thus, you're going to download the multipart messages that are visibly 10-15 megs in size. The individual messages you can scroll by in a heartbeat without ever paying attention to anything more than the message size. Even the title won't stand out. Trolls get no audience this way. Now, if the trolls took to posting large binaries for kicks, that would be something different. And while I'm not saying that they don't, I've never encountered this on usenet, although I have seen it done on the various P2P networks. It would appear, that if someone's going to spend 3 days uploading something, they're not going to waste their upstream on something just so one person can download it then post a warning message to the rest of the group to ignore it.
-Restil
Large city evacuations happen periodically with hurricanes and such. Its not pretty, people don't like it, some stay behind because they're too stubborn to leave, worry about looters, etc. But it's been done before, and it can be done again if there is a crisis sufficient enough to warrant it.
-Restil
The dinosaurs had no interest in the space program either. And look what happened to them!
-Restil
This is not entirely true.
It approached the earth from the direction of the sun, but that does not mean that it has always resided within the orbit of earth. Although I haven't seen what the orbit looks like, there's a good chance that the orbit is highly elliptical and therefore, it spends a good amount of time outside the earth's orbit frequently enough to have been spotted in the past, assuming we were searching enough.
Also, just because an asteroid resides within the earth's orbit, does not mean we can't observe it, even from the ground. It just limits the amount of time each day that it is visible. Both venus and mercury are within the earth's orbit, but we're still able to observe them from the ground.
There will always be blind spots. And there will always be comets that are heading this way that we've never had the chance to observe because they were never close enough. The best we could do is get 100% of the asteroids that orbit the sun nearby.
-Restil
But an asteroid this size will only affect the size of a large city. There is plenty of time to evacuate the area, assuming you have a day's notice or more. If it hit the middle of the ocean, it wouldn't be a big deal.
The other major concern. If this asteroid hit a nuclear capable country (and there are quite a few of them), if there was no prior knowledge of the hit it would be very easy to confuse a meteor stike with a nuclear attack. You would have the miles of devastation and the mushroom cloud. Imagine if it were to hit india or pakistan right now. The other side might retalliate from the perceived attack before they ever figured out it was just a meteor. The only difference would be the lack of radioactive fallout.
Even in the US, where we have suffienent technology to quickly detect and determine what is going on, it still took us half a day to get a grip on what was happening on September 11. All day long there were car bombs going off that didn't exist. The Vice President ordered a plane shot down that didn't exist. And 9/11, as tragic as it was, would be insignificant compared to the type of disaster that a 120 meter rock would cause, especially if it hit a populated area.
Knowing that Washington DC was going to get wiped off the face of the planet by a meteor (literally) 6 hours before it happened would cause a lot of panic, but it would save a lot of after the fact confusion. We would be mounting rescue efforts instead of mounting for a nuclear response against an unknown enemy.
-Restil
Wayback machines should function exactly like search engines. If there's a robots.txt file, check it. If it tells you to get lost, do so. A search engine is going to cache at least the text part of your site, and you know it. And you can prevent it if you wish. And depending on the engine, it can take months or years to update.
Besides, wayback machines will run into the same snags that search engines do. They can't replicate cgi scripts any better than search engines can, so to deny them access to those resources for their sake as well as the server's makes sense.
I don't know how wayback works. At the very least they SHOULD read the robots file. If they do, then I consider most of the copyright issues to be a moot point.
-Restil
If you still have to do the math to figure out where the ball is going to go, you don't stand a chance. Even if you can do the math, there's so many other factors. The speed of the ball determines how far it will go. In addition, it also determines how much bounce you will get off of the rubber sides. A faster ball will rebound at a different angle than a slower one will. English matters. Topspin matters. Draw matters.
I seriously doubt any "professional" needs to do the math anyways. He knows where the ball is going to go and where it will end up and he can do so just by looking at the table.
The math is for beginners.
-Restil
Its possible that your house can be broken into but nothing stolen. Do you avoid calling the police just because you couldn't find anything stolen? No. You call them anyways. They can still get fingerprints and have a stronger case against the theif the next time he hits someone.
There didn't seem to be any question about the system itself getting comprimised. The only question was about the data on that system, and the sysadmin seemed to be pretty sure that was taken as well. 80% is pretty damn sure.
-Restil
He was sure that the system containing the credit card data was comprimised. The data itself MIGHT have been downloaded, but nobody's "sure". I assume they'll just plug the hole and otherwise leave the system intact because they're not "sure" the intruder installed any backdoors, worms, virii, timebombs, or other nasties. I mean, why waste all that time to be secure when you're not even SURE there's a problem.
-Restil
If all the system held was personal information, names, email addresses, etc and it was comprimised, the worst that would probably happen is that someone would get more spam. And that individual is going to get spam no matter how hard they try to keep their information secret.
However, all that breaks down when you're talking about credit card numbers. He knows the data was comprimised. Credit card fraud on the internet is real. It happens all the time. And anytime fraud occurs, someone suffers as a result, and typically it isn't the theif that stole the creditcard number.
Say this was you and you were in a similiar situation. Upon reporting the crime (and this is a crime) to your boss, your boss informs you that it would be better for thieves to succeed than to look incompetant. This is someone who would rather cover his own ass by hiding the problem than to take appropritate responsibility and to assist law enforcement, the credit card companies, and the credit card holders in protecting their property. Have you got his decision in writing? Do you have witnesses that you reported it? After all, you ARE the sysadmin. To some degree you are responsible for the comprimised data. Lets say that in the unlikely event the theft was traced back to you. And you have knowledge of it happening. It doesn't appear that your boss is going to stand up and claim responsibility at that point. He's going to cover his ass and point the finger at you. Do you REALLY want to work for someone like that?
Yes, the job market is tight right now. Sometimes making the right choice comes with certain consequences. But that's what ethics is all about. Its not just aobut not doing the wrong things, its about doing the right things when others attempt to dissuade you. If you choose to sit back and look the other way, in the end you will lose. Maybe this event will result in no problems, but something else will happen. Someday. A lot of people get dragged through criminal court solely because they felt the consequences of doing the right thing were too severe.
So consider what would happen if the hammer did fall. You'll lose not only your job, but you'll also lose your respect and integrety as well. At least while you go out interviewing for a new job, you get to tell the interviewer you left your previous company because they wanted you to do something illegal or unethical, and not because you were fired for doing something illegal or unethical. The fact that you're willing to sacrifice a comfortable lifestyle to do the right thing will outshine any other element of your resume.
-Restil
"You probably won't get any viruses from installing our software!"
-Restil
Ever notice how all the small planets are rocky and all the large planets are gassy? This is not a coincidence. Jupiter and most likely the rest of the gas giants have solid cores, larger in fact than the earth, but due to their immense mass, they have an extremely dense atmosphere, which could not support life, at least as we know it.
.1% if I remember correctly, but don't quote me on that. The gravity of the planet is insufficent to maintain a signficant atmosphere. Atmosphere "leaks" off into space all the time, even on Earth. This lack of atmosphere creates several problems. First, breathing would be extremely difficult, so life forms that DO exist would have to sustain themselves on very little air. Meteors would also present more of a problem, as they can't burn up as easily.
As for smaller planets, you end up with situations like Mars. Mars has an atmosphere, although it has less than 1% of the air pressure that Earth has.
Venus has sufficient atmosphere, but its proximity to the sun, as well as the contents of its atmosphere, creates an environment that's too hot for "conventional" life to survive.
Of course, you also have the issue of habitable zones and their relation to the size of the sun. Consider our solar system as one that works. We're not too close, nor too far away from the sun, and the sun has 10 billion years of life (half of which it has expended already). Say we're looking at a larger star, like a blue giant. The planet could orbit further away and maintain the same temperate zone, but in 10 million years that sun is going to go supernova and any life will have not had enough time to evolve from inception. It took longer than that just for the Earth to cool down.
Large planets orbiting close to the sun present a problem. The primary concern is how they got there. Chances are good that they didn't form that close to the star, but formed further out then migrated inward to their present positions. If this is the case, its a darn good chance that any planets within the habitable zones will have either collided with the gas giant or been kicked out of the solar system.
The lack of any gas giants is also a problem. Jupiter does a nice job of attracting and "removing" potential threats to Earth, mostly the very large rocks. Without the gas giants out there to help us out, the Earth would get battered far more frequently than it does. Life can handle a huge hit once every 60 million years or so. Long term evolution would be severely hampered, however, if it happened more frequently.
A potential alternative to the current solar system is a gas giant located in the habitable zone with a earth sized moon. The moons of Juipter would have a significantly more viable climate if they were orbiting at 1 AU. However, this would present other dificulties, namely tidal lock. The moon would have to be sufficiently close to the planet so it didn't roast any one side for any significant length of time, however, the planet itself would block the light to the moon, so the moon would have one side that was perpetually frozen and the other side that had to endure long days and long nights. And any moon close enough to the planet to orbit quickly enough would have severe tidal problems... think IO.
So anyway, our best bet... is to find a solar system that resembles ours. At least until we find another model that works. Sorry about the extended rant.
-Restil
But it shouldn't have to be that way. Cable networks are designed like most local area networks that have a connection to the internet. The internal network has typically has an order of magnitude more bandwidth available than the uplink to the internet. Internally, they could handle almost the maximum capacity of all of thier users at once, but when that bandwidth demand hits their internet uplinks, the supply falls short. The same problem is encountered with University networks.
The P2P software, to remain on the network admin's good side, needs to go out of its way to search for files only on hosts that are close (network wise) to the client. Your typical cable network has thousands of cusotmers, and if even only a small fraction of them are using similar software, and by the looks of it, its more than just a small fraction, the chances are relatively good that the file you're looking for already exists somewhere on the local cable network.
This results in the same amount of traffic on the local network, but a signficant reduction in traffic to and from the internet. Only if a file is unavailable locally will it venture out to the internet at large, but chances are good, this will apply to 5% of the searches or less.
-Restil