I meant when you go to the store and pay with your bank card, if the store uses CIBC for their debit machines (the direct payment dealies) and you use Royal, Royal charges you ~$1.
I use a subset of CIBC - President's Choice. Unlimited free debit transactions (on any machines), unlimited computer banking, unlimited free use of CIBC bank machines. No monthly fee, no minimum balance. You also get points towards groceries for paying your bills.
Horrible customer service, next-to-nothing interest, but it's the best deal I could find.
You don't get overtime, do you? If your boss wants you to stay late, don't. If there isn't enough staff, make them hire more people. I mean, you can be flexible every now and again (like one saturday shift every two months or so), but don't give your boss / company extra free hours.
Look at the reverse: How likely is it for the company to say, "Hey, we've been on time all year, so here's a cheque for $1000. Enjoy!"
That'll never happen, so don't give them free cheques for $1000.
Leave on time on a regular basis or leave for good. It's that easy.
It's not that the people at Microsoft are making assumptions, it's just that they never thought of the problem in the first place. When buffer overrun exploits first came out, they concept probably never occured to the guys who wrote the OS.
"Okay, if we wait for an INT, and we get a 2MB file instead that writes over the software, then we might have a problem."
I realize that current exploits are more sophiticated than that, but the general idea is there - the folks writing the software simply didn't think of the problem. Further, there isn't enough time to test all the software perfectly. There never is for the public. If you want crash-proof or military grade software, you're going to have to run something really expensive. (I'm not going to pull a number out of my butt.)
Why doesn't Linux have the same vunerabilites? I guarantee that it does, but there aren't enough users to justify the expense, especially if you consider:
1. Linux users are more likely to understand the concepts of virus transmission and are thus more likely to discard suspicious emails and surf smart.
2. There are lots of XP home computers with broadband that never get turned off. Why come up with a new hack when you can use the one from last month?
We take our business elsewhere. I shopped around, and I get a way better deal at my bank than I'd get at Royal. Those brigands charge money every time you use a non-Royal DEBIT MACHINE!
Anyway, in Canada, we generally don't go running to lawyers the moment we're slightly inconvenienced. Besides, Royal said they'd pay for every penalty that any of their customers incur.
Email is not fundamentally flawed.
on
NYT on Spam Cops
·
· Score: 1
The problem lies not with email, but in the people who are misusing it. (i.e spammers). It's as though you were using stolen stamps to pay for a mass conventional mail solicitaion. It really just comes down to economics.
Email does cost money to send. I pay my ISP $40 / month so I can get email and internet access. My primary email address has cost me almost $150 000 in lost wages and tuition. ( It came with my degree. ) However, if I steal the money to pay for that, it wouldn't really cost me anything. When someone uses a virus to create zombie computers to send out email through unsecured relays and open ports, they are not out any money. I'm sure that XP home is responsible for a large portion of spam, especially when you add a broadband connection where the ISP does not require passwords onto their outgoing mail. (Not to mention open port 25 everywhere!) My dad had a zombie computer (XP home) but still refused to turn it off at night or install a better OS. (I recently put on Win2000 pro and bought him a hardware firewall.) Of course, *nix is no more secure than XP; there just aren't enough people using it to justify the ROI for writing a virus. Trust me, no matter how secure you think something is, there's a work-around. There's always a work-around.
Anyway, there are no solutions to spam. I'm sure there are at least 2 of those form "Why your solution won't work" forms in this thread. (I feel that a technical solution exists - analog trace the source to the master computers and permanently disable the machine. Imagine if every spammer on earth turned on their machine to find it dead, displaying only "spammers don't get computers" on the monitor. But I digress.)
It costs money to fight spam. Lots of money. Now that huge players like AOL and Microsoft realize how much money it's costing them, they're going to start throwing their weight around. As much as you may hate to admit it, the folks there (at least on the development side) are bright people and the companies have more money than spammers. I know who I'm betting on.
As I said, it's all economics. All that one has to do is make it more expensive to send spam than you can make from sending it. With jail terms just starting, we'll see a decrease - eventually. Further, the spammers are going to pick the wrong guy to write the virus. We'll find him. He'll talk. Some spammer will go to jail.
For any wireless signal, you have a series of variables that you juggle to figure out what the maximum distance is. I don't have the formula with me to tell you exactly what it is, and I haven't done anything with it for about two years.
To sum up, you can either boost the transmitting or receiving antenna gain in order to improve the distance. You can also move one or both of the antennae up - the higher up they are, the further the range.
In theory, you'd think that you could read any signal with a big enough gain, but that's not the case. If you have more than about 40 dB of gain, you'll get a lot of feedback.
I'm also an Electrical Engineer. I'm looking forward to this. I'll be able to make a nice profit selling mod chips for your HDTV. It's not hard to do. I'm certainly not subject to American laws.
You, ah, you don't get to write the manuals, okay?
It's not going to run Windows because there's probably not going to be a machine that's capable of running Windows (or Linux, for that matter)
It will likely be a low-power, sleep-capable PIC that doesn't have an OS. To run some bloatware (any operating system is bloatware on a low-power system) would be absolutely ridiculous. The software will be custom-written for the suits and work on the machine level.
I mean, really, there was some SERIOUS sexual tension there. If one (or both) of them had been a woman, there would have been a sex scene by now.
Am I gay? Does it matter? It's just clear that those two ARE and I feel bad for them. It's what, 2200? We'd have been doing gay marriages for 200 years by then. Besides, it's a ship. They've been serving hot buttered buns on naval ships for hundreds of years.
My understanding was that they saw energy that is indicative of Helium, while you say that they haven't seen the Helium. We both agree that they haven't seen the Helium.
Neither of us will believe for a moment that CF is working until they can show:
1. Some by-products of fusion. 2. Energy readings beyond a miniscule amount plus or minus a strong breeze.
I'm sorry for assuming you didn't read the article; this *is* slashdot, so I just assumed you hadn't. Mea Culpa.
"Theory predicts that the fusion reaction should generate 24 million electron volts (MeV) of energy per helium-4 nucleus. An analysis by Michael McKubre of SRI International detected energy of 31 MeV-- a match within the experimental uncertainty of plus or minus 13 MeV."
From what I understand, they have seen energy readings consistent with trace amounts of Helium. Perhaps they can't read the Helium directly because they don't have the money for the equipment.;)
I'm always skeptical about free, infinite energy as well. There's something compelling about the Laws of Thermodynamics.
My most recent co-op term required me to code some biology software for a startup company. The boss decided that rather than do any real work, we'd look at all the open source software we could find, take the parts we liked, and make a commercial product out of it.
One day, he came in with a 1.5' bar of structural steel. He borrowed a grinder from a a hydraulics shop and ground the steel into a dagger. He did this inside. This meant that there was iron dust (conductive) all over the computers. It took him about 4 days to make this dagger, but he'd start yelling that "people are dying of cancer while you're checking your email!" He played with this dagger every day. It was scary.
The last thing he asked me to do was make up a list of "all the built-in functions for C++ and Java". I showed him the Javadocs, and he told me to "put it in a spreadsheet." When I refused, he fired me. He's since decided to make this massive software project out of BASIC. Not Visual Basic - BASIC. TRS-80, CoCo2, Commodore64 BASIC.
To top it all off, he chewed tobacco. He was a vegan (which is fine; I'm vegetarian) and yet he chewed tobacco.
Seriously, I think that's one of the few posts that have actually deserved the "Funny" tag. Good one.
My "women" part was meant to be funny; perhaps the juxtaposition of the gold brick statement made it less so.;)
I meant that most people just trust a company and will treat them better than they'll treat you. i.e. You'd give two weeks notice when they'd tell you to leave immediately. Learning that lesson is vital in your "pre-professional" career. In my case, I sold glasses before going into engineering. I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned from them. Now that I'm out in my "real" career, I don't have to make the mistakes, but I still learned from them. For example, the odds of someone saying, "Hey, remember that time when Magnus wore checks and stripes?" are pretty low.
First, your units are wrong. It's 1500 kgs. That's almost 3000 pounds. A metric ton is 1000 kilograms.
Second, the water used in the manufacturing process isn't water. It's solutions. When they etch the boards, they use a high-concentration acid. While most of the fluid is H20, the "working" portion is nasty, nasty, nasty, NASTY stuff. You cannot simply reclaim the solution and get the water. That's the same as saying that you can trap the fumes from a car, process the fumes, and get gasoline.
Once, in my first-year chemistry lab, I was playing around after the lab (with supervision) and ended up making something so toxic that they had to fly someone in to figure out how to dispose of the mess I'd made. It might have been "mostly water", but there was no way to reclaim the H20 portion.
Computers generate an enormous amount of waste. Making them makes waste. Using them makes waste. Getting rid of them makes waste. It's not "eco-BS", it's a fact.
When I was going to College, the biggest influence in my confidence and people skills was a job in retail. NOT something even remotely connected to technology. I.E. No Future Suck, Elecsucknics Boutique, etc. Selling clothes or glasses are probably the best.
Other benefits: 1. Money. I mean, who couldn't use some more money? You can buy clothes, haircuts, women, toys; hell, he could even buy a gold brick if there's nothing else he wants.
2. Dress sense. Unless you're in a job that supplies a uniform, you're going to have to learn how to put together a good outfit. Some outfits will suck, especially at first, but soon the good outfits will outnumber the bad.
3. Talking to people all the time who don't give a nut how smart you are. As far as they're concerned, you're dumber than they are.
4. You will learn that a company will stab you in the back, then figure out if it's cheaper to pull out the knife and stab you again, or use a new knife. That's a VERY valuable lesson.
If he'd rather not work, then he's probably already too far gone to help, but the College / University that he's going to should have dozens of clubs. That's probably an okay substitute.
It's for Kelly. I don't know if you are aware of this, but Kelly is a temp agency. They don't really have a lot of people who are tech support, so I think the conversation went like this:
Kelly: "Okay, tech support, got it. What software?"
Company: "I don't know. All of them."
Kelly: *shrug* "Okay, I'll check all the boxes, since we get $6/hr off the top no matter what."
Let's say you leave your car running while you go in to get cash/booze/cigarettes/food. Let's also say that someone hops in your running car and robs a bank.
I for one am happy that they'll put in a broadcast flag into the TV sets. It'll be a piece of cake to throw the signal into a little filter and make it look like everything is being broadcast. All you'd have to do is get a cheap DSP chip and program it to set the output to match the input with the "broadcast" flag set to true. If they make it a pattern, it's a simple matter of matching the pattern.
The problem as I understand it is to make sure that you only get to vote once. I could make a quick device that had two 7-segment displays that would count two button presses, but you could come along and press the red button 10 times. Not a big deal if it's sitting in a lab, but it's a big deal if it's an election.
I agree with you, though. It sounds like the problem has been over-engineered. Either that, or they're supposed to be innaccurate. That's scary as hell.
Slashdot Mirror
We've been together for just over eight years, married for almost 6, and we have a 4-month-old daughter.
;)
So, can you and should you meet people online? Hell yes!
Um, if they want your credit card right away, they're not just being inquisitive.
I meant when you go to the store and pay with your bank card, if the store uses CIBC for their debit machines (the direct payment dealies) and you use Royal, Royal charges you ~$1.
I use a subset of CIBC - President's Choice. Unlimited free debit transactions (on any machines), unlimited computer banking, unlimited free use of CIBC bank machines. No monthly fee, no minimum balance. You also get points towards groceries for paying your bills.
Horrible customer service, next-to-nothing interest, but it's the best deal I could find.
It's this simple: LEAVE ON TIME.
You don't get overtime, do you? If your boss wants you to stay late, don't. If there isn't enough staff, make them hire more people. I mean, you can be flexible every now and again (like one saturday shift every two months or so), but don't give your boss / company extra free hours.
Look at the reverse: How likely is it for the company to say, "Hey, we've been on time all year, so here's a cheque for $1000. Enjoy!"
That'll never happen, so don't give them free cheques for $1000.
Leave on time on a regular basis or leave for good. It's that easy.
It's not that the people at Microsoft are making assumptions, it's just that they never thought of the problem in the first place. When buffer overrun exploits first came out, they concept probably never occured to the guys who wrote the OS.
"Okay, if we wait for an INT, and we get a 2MB file instead that writes over the software, then we might have a problem."
I realize that current exploits are more sophiticated than that, but the general idea is there - the folks writing the software simply didn't think of the problem. Further, there isn't enough time to test all the software perfectly. There never is for the public. If you want crash-proof or military grade software, you're going to have to run something really expensive. (I'm not going to pull a number out of my butt.)
Why doesn't Linux have the same vunerabilites? I guarantee that it does, but there aren't enough users to justify the expense, especially if you consider:
1. Linux users are more likely to understand the concepts of virus transmission and are thus more likely to discard suspicious emails and surf smart.
2. There are lots of XP home computers with broadband that never get turned off. Why come up with a new hack when you can use the one from last month?
We take our business elsewhere. I shopped around, and I get a way better deal at my bank than I'd get at Royal. Those brigands charge money every time you use a non-Royal DEBIT MACHINE!
Anyway, in Canada, we generally don't go running to lawyers the moment we're slightly inconvenienced. Besides, Royal said they'd pay for every penalty that any of their customers incur.
The problem lies not with email, but in the people who are misusing it. (i.e spammers). It's as though you were using stolen stamps to pay for a mass conventional mail solicitaion. It really just comes down to economics.
Email does cost money to send. I pay my ISP $40 / month so I can get email and internet access. My primary email address has cost me almost $150 000 in lost wages and tuition. ( It came with my degree. ) However, if I steal the money to pay for that, it wouldn't really cost me anything. When someone uses a virus to create zombie computers to send out email through unsecured relays and open ports, they are not out any money. I'm sure that XP home is responsible for a large portion of spam, especially when you add a broadband connection where the ISP does not require passwords onto their outgoing mail. (Not to mention open port 25 everywhere!) My dad had a zombie computer (XP home) but still refused to turn it off at night or install a better OS. (I recently put on Win2000 pro and bought him a hardware firewall.) Of course, *nix is no more secure than XP; there just aren't enough people using it to justify the ROI for writing a virus. Trust me, no matter how secure you think something is, there's a work-around. There's always a work-around.
Anyway, there are no solutions to spam. I'm sure there are at least 2 of those form "Why your solution won't work" forms in this thread. (I feel that a technical solution exists - analog trace the source to the master computers and permanently disable the machine. Imagine if every spammer on earth turned on their machine to find it dead, displaying only "spammers don't get computers" on the monitor. But I digress.)
It costs money to fight spam. Lots of money. Now that huge players like AOL and Microsoft realize how much money it's costing them, they're going to start throwing their weight around. As much as you may hate to admit it, the folks there (at least on the development side) are bright people and the companies have more money than spammers. I know who I'm betting on.
As I said, it's all economics. All that one has to do is make it more expensive to send spam than you can make from sending it. With jail terms just starting, we'll see a decrease - eventually. Further, the spammers are going to pick the wrong guy to write the virus. We'll find him. He'll talk. Some spammer will go to jail.
For any wireless signal, you have a series of variables that you juggle to figure out what the maximum distance is. I don't have the formula with me to tell you exactly what it is, and I haven't done anything with it for about two years.
To sum up, you can either boost the transmitting or receiving antenna gain in order to improve the distance. You can also move one or both of the antennae up - the higher up they are, the further the range.
In theory, you'd think that you could read any signal with a big enough gain, but that's not the case. If you have more than about 40 dB of gain, you'll get a lot of feedback.
I'm also an Electrical Engineer. I'm looking forward to this. I'll be able to make a nice profit selling mod chips for your HDTV. It's not hard to do. I'm certainly not subject to American laws.
You, ah, you don't get to write the manuals, okay?
It's not going to run Windows because there's probably not going to be a machine that's capable of running Windows (or Linux, for that matter)
It will likely be a low-power, sleep-capable PIC that doesn't have an OS. To run some bloatware (any operating system is bloatware on a low-power system) would be absolutely ridiculous. The software will be custom-written for the suits and work on the machine level.
I mean, really, there was some SERIOUS sexual tension there. If one (or both) of them had been a woman, there would have been a sex scene by now.
Am I gay? Does it matter? It's just clear that those two ARE and I feel bad for them. It's what, 2200? We'd have been doing gay marriages for 200 years by then. Besides, it's a ship. They've been serving hot buttered buns on naval ships for hundreds of years.
Luckily, I've got karma to burn on this post.
I get them at my local college's bookstore because it's the cheapest place in town.
Funnily enough, my University doesn't carry the paper. It's about 1/2 price at Camosun compared to the local merchants.
I liked the paper because nobody else used it - when the profs hand back a giant stack of white paper, you can grab the green and walk away.
My understanding was that they saw energy that is indicative of Helium, while you say that they haven't seen the Helium. We both agree that they haven't seen the Helium.
Neither of us will believe for a moment that CF is working until they can show:
1. Some by-products of fusion.
2. Energy readings beyond a miniscule amount plus or minus a strong breeze.
I'm sorry for assuming you didn't read the article; this *is* slashdot, so I just assumed you hadn't. Mea Culpa.
Second page, about halfway down:
;)
"Theory predicts that the fusion reaction should generate 24 million electron volts (MeV) of energy per helium-4 nucleus. An analysis by Michael McKubre of SRI International detected energy of 31 MeV-- a match within the experimental uncertainty of plus or minus 13 MeV."
From what I understand, they have seen energy readings consistent with trace amounts of Helium. Perhaps they can't read the Helium directly because they don't have the money for the equipment.
I'm always skeptical about free, infinite energy as well. There's something compelling about the Laws of Thermodynamics.
I'm not making any of this up.
My most recent co-op term required me to code some biology software for a startup company. The boss decided that rather than do any real work, we'd look at all the open source software we could find, take the parts we liked, and make a commercial product out of it.
One day, he came in with a 1.5' bar of structural steel. He borrowed a grinder from a a hydraulics shop and ground the steel into a dagger. He did this inside. This meant that there was iron dust (conductive) all over the computers. It took him about 4 days to make this dagger, but he'd start yelling that "people are dying of cancer while you're checking your email!" He played with this dagger every day. It was scary.
The last thing he asked me to do was make up a list of "all the built-in functions for C++ and Java". I showed him the Javadocs, and he told me to "put it in a spreadsheet." When I refused, he fired me. He's since decided to make this massive software project out of BASIC. Not Visual Basic - BASIC. TRS-80, CoCo2, Commodore64 BASIC.
To top it all off, he chewed tobacco. He was a vegan (which is fine; I'm vegetarian) and yet he chewed tobacco.
That's the worst development job I've ever had.
I've had this sig on all email and posts for about four years now. No arrests yet. ;)
Seriously, I think that's one of the few posts that have actually deserved the "Funny" tag. Good one.
;)
My "women" part was meant to be funny; perhaps the juxtaposition of the gold brick statement made it less so.
I meant that most people just trust a company and will treat them better than they'll treat you. i.e. You'd give two weeks notice when they'd tell you to leave immediately. Learning that lesson is vital in your "pre-professional" career. In my case, I sold glasses before going into engineering. I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned from them. Now that I'm out in my "real" career, I don't have to make the mistakes, but I still learned from them. For example, the odds of someone saying, "Hey, remember that time when Magnus wore checks and stripes?" are pretty low.
First, your units are wrong. It's 1500 kgs. That's almost 3000 pounds. A metric ton is 1000 kilograms.
Second, the water used in the manufacturing process isn't water. It's solutions. When they etch the boards, they use a high-concentration acid. While most of the fluid is H20, the "working" portion is nasty, nasty, nasty, NASTY stuff. You cannot simply reclaim the solution and get the water. That's the same as saying that you can trap the fumes from a car, process the fumes, and get gasoline.
Once, in my first-year chemistry lab, I was playing around after the lab (with supervision) and ended up making something so toxic that they had to fly someone in to figure out how to dispose of the mess I'd made. It might have been "mostly water", but there was no way to reclaim the H20 portion.
Computers generate an enormous amount of waste. Making them makes waste. Using them makes waste. Getting rid of them makes waste. It's not "eco-BS", it's a fact.
When I was going to College, the biggest influence in my confidence and people skills was a job in retail. NOT something even remotely connected to technology. I.E. No Future Suck, Elecsucknics Boutique, etc. Selling clothes or glasses are probably the best.
Other benefits:
1. Money. I mean, who couldn't use some more money? You can buy clothes, haircuts, women, toys; hell, he could even buy a gold brick if there's nothing else he wants.
2. Dress sense. Unless you're in a job that supplies a uniform, you're going to have to learn how to put together a good outfit. Some outfits will suck, especially at first, but soon the good outfits will outnumber the bad.
3. Talking to people all the time who don't give a nut how smart you are. As far as they're concerned, you're dumber than they are.
4. You will learn that a company will stab you in the back, then figure out if it's cheaper to pull out the knife and stab you again, or use a new knife. That's a VERY valuable lesson.
If he'd rather not work, then he's probably already too far gone to help, but the College / University that he's going to should have dozens of clubs. That's probably an okay substitute.
It's great. My resting rate is now 300 bpm.
Maybe that's who the anonymous submitter is...
/. - it'll be gone in two hours."
"Hey Bill, we can't get this site shut down legally."
"Eh... I'll send it to
It's for Kelly. I don't know if you are aware of this, but Kelly is a temp agency. They don't really have a lot of people who are tech support, so I think the conversation went like this:
Kelly: "Okay, tech support, got it. What software?"
Company: "I don't know. All of them."
Kelly: *shrug* "Okay, I'll check all the boxes, since we get $6/hr off the top no matter what."
Let's say you leave your car running while you go in to get cash/booze/cigarettes/food. Let's also say that someone hops in your running car and robs a bank.
You're an accessory. Have fun in jail, sucker.
I for one am happy that they'll put in a broadcast flag into the TV sets. It'll be a piece of cake to throw the signal into a little filter and make it look like everything is being broadcast. All you'd have to do is get a cheap DSP chip and program it to set the output to match the input with the "broadcast" flag set to true. If they make it a pattern, it's a simple matter of matching the pattern.
The problem as I understand it is to make sure that you only get to vote once. I could make a quick device that had two 7-segment displays that would count two button presses, but you could come along and press the red button 10 times. Not a big deal if it's sitting in a lab, but it's a big deal if it's an election.
I agree with you, though. It sounds like the problem has been over-engineered. Either that, or they're supposed to be innaccurate. That's scary as hell.
Of course, I'm using it as a weight to dampen the case vibrations. Works great.