Its about your rights, and its posted for comment online, as are the original articles. Also, a lot of the info for identity theft is available online. So. AC, how is this NOT approriate for YRO?
If you read the article, you'll see that the notary (who refuses to comment at this time:-) claims that he knew the seller and that the owner showed phot id - a drivers licnese. In other words, the notary screwed up, since there was no drivers license and he didn't know the seller.
The likely outcome is that the notary's insurance is on the hook, and the notary will be disciplined. Probably a 1 year suspension.
Well, the marketers are wrong in my case - if I damage something because of the extreme measures I have to take to open it first, the store's going to take it back or have one very angry person shouting at the top of their lungs about how BS their policy is.
I did this once a few years ago over some misleading advertising (they tried to claim that the item in the ad wasn't the same one, but the stock # on the photo said otherwise). 10 minutes at the cash register, loud enough so that people on the next floor could hear, showed the ad to everyone behind me in line, got quite a crowd. Didn't stop even when they agreed the ad was misleading and that I'd get it for the advertised price. Named competitors, etc. Made sure the other people in line got the same deal.
One day the sewer pipe broke and the basement filled up with you-know-what. Pretty gross. When we had bought the place, we left the original carpet, and put a new one over it. They were both ruined, so I rolled them up (sopping wet) and dragged them through the garage and to the curb. It was well below freezing, so they quickly turned solid.
Of course, now that they're solid, they don't smell like raw sewage...
Rush hour comes, and I see a station wagon stop... the driver gets out, sees an almost-brand-new carpet, and PUTS IT IN THE BACK OF HIS STATION WAGON.
I would have loved to have a video of him driving along, with the heater going full blast, when it starts to thaw out...
Or maybe he didn't have so far to drive, and brought it indoors to thaw out, or parked in the garage and had supper first...
I hate those new packages. EVERYTHING is impossible to open without a knife.
I know that marketers think it "adds perceived value", but you know something? There's more "perceived value" in my new cell phone (I bought it without even looking at the cardboard box first) than in some $10.00 item in a plastic bubble.
"Most people won't steal as easily from someone they know."
A bit naive, I think. Most people are KILLED by someone they know. Ditto for sexual abuse of children, Certainly true for domestic assault.
The only time my place was broken into, it was by the neighbours kids 2 houses down, and yes, we got along okay with their parents, which is why it was such a "surprise."
Or look at the stupidity going on in the workplace - people swiping each others' lunches (exlax-chip cookies to the rescue!), petty theft of company property, more significant fraud (oops - someone must have stolen the laptop... yeah, right...).
Studies with rats show that population density is the main contributor to violent behaviour. People behave the same way. That's one reason cubicles are such poor work environments (the other being that you never have enough space, no matter how much room you have).
Of course, stuffing 4 people into a cubie and calling it a team doesn't really fix the problem.
Just put your garbage in a box, wrapped up to look like a present, and leave it in your car with the window open.
Or, recently bought yourself a new air conditioner, computer or dvd player or other home electronics? Fill the box up with garbage, seal it up, and park at your local shopping mall.
Of course its the whole point. A flea cant' bring down a giant - but a giant that can be convinced to tie himself up in knots is doomed.
This is what's happened, and it was succesful because there's money to be made in helping that giant (the US) tie itself up in knots. Lots of money. Lots of power.
And we all know that every politician has this lust for power thing going...
Nah, this is slashdot... its all in good fun. You should see some of the goofs I've made (multiple tabs open, post to the wrong one, readers go wtf?!?...), or leaving out one word and it completely changes the meaning, etc. That happens a lot when I'm in a hurry, or while eating breakfast and posting.
"I telecommute as the editor of a fairly lage magazine (circ. ~ 100k). Net outages or low bandwidth are killers to us (I up- down-load hundreds of megs of text and photos daily). Because I am in a rural area, I hve NO choice of ISPs. Were Comcast one of them, I would NOT choose them because of theorlacadasicalattutude toward outgoing spm from zombied machines on their network.
"
Its not a problem as long as you make the partition the same size or slightly larger. Its the same as burning a CD iso to a DVD - it works (did it yesterday for one of the guys at work).
The drives will be in use for anly 15 meinues a week. The likelyhood that all 7 will go bad the same week is very high (we're not talking about the samsung 512 meg drives that had a failure rate of 10 out of 10 the first day back in the early 90's).
Of course its about restoring. And he's going to be able to have his system up and running a lot quicker after a hard drive failure by just restoring a linux-made image of his partition to another drive (copied either while running a bootable linux live cd or from a copy of linux on the backup hard drive) than by trying to restore using Windows - he needs a running copy, which his replacement drive lacks, so he'll end up having to install Windows over again.
boot into linux
fdisk the new drive
create the partitions
mark the future windows partition as bootable
write the partition table
dd if=windows_c_drive.img of=/dev/hda1
reboot
Compare THAT to the time it takes to install a new copy of windows, install your backup/restore software, then run it...
Don't bother gzipping it - use this instead http://man.linux-ntfs.org/ntfsclone.8.html and all the zeroes are replaced with a special marker saying, in effect, "there be a huge chunks of zeroes here". Sparse files are cool. I stuck a 1-gig sparse file on a 1.44 floppy just to show it could be done.
The second hard disk is running linux. You're also free to put it in a drive tray and pull it out (they're less than $20.00 and it means you can back up multiple machines to one disk and/or copy your backup to another box). It will also save you some wear and tear, and a bit of electricity.
If you tell them that 15 minutes learning how to boot a live cd and type a few commands will save them spending $$$ on backup software that probably won't be able to restore everything anyway without first having to reinstall Windows so they can boot their computer to run the backup software, they might have an incentive to learn.
Its quicker to just boot using a bootable linux CD, image the partition(s) in question, then reboot, than it is to xcopy a drive to another drive. AND its a lot easier and quicker to restore as well as being a lot more dependable.
But sit there and wait for xcopy to do its thing - your copy still won't be bootable, whereas the image made under linux can be quickly restored to another drive and booted in the event of a hardware failure.
Do the math - your DVD "solution" is more expensive, especially if you have a 250 gig or larger drive (or multiple drives), which is becoming the norm.
First, because you'll be replacing your DVD drive every few months as you burn it out. Second, you'll be going through a 50-spindle of DVDs every time you do your full backup. Even if you're only paying a quarter for each blank, that's still $12.50. Multiply that by 52 weeks in a year, and you get $650.00 - that's 7 x 250 gig hard drives right there. They now come with a 5-yer warranty if you buy them OEM, so you're good for 5 years. Your cost for 5 years of DVD backups - $3,250 - and that's just for the weekly backup, and without the cost of replacing the burner when it fails.
Then there's the space problem - where are you storing these 13,000 burnt dvds? That's right - 50 dvds per full backup x 52 weeks x 5 years is 13,000. WTF are you thinking? Oh, right, you didn't do the math.
So unless you can get dvds for under a nicekel a piece, they're not worth the hassle any more.
Since when can you fit 30 gig on "two or 3 dvds" without first compressing it? And those backups are going to get outdated, which means making more. Make it time-consuming, and it won;t get done. Make it a shell script that auto-runs off a bootable linux cd and the backup will get refreshed more often. Make it a shell script that auto-runs when you boot off the second drive, and the backup will probably get done weekly, rather than weakly.
Install the second drive permanently. Booting off it is as easy as selecting it from eithe the bios boot menu or the grub bootlaoder menu. No more dvds to lose, get scratched, get outdated, take up space in a landfill... and the backups are as quick as "dd if=/dev/hda of=/home/joe_luser/win_c_drive.img"
How are you going to restore if you can't boot off your hard drive?
Using linux to make the backup means that you can have multiple images sitting on a much larger drive. For example, if you have a C partition of 80 gigs, you can create 3 80-gig images on a 250-gig hd. This solves the problem of overwriting your previous backup.
As for swapping out the hard disk, just install a drive tray and they can pop it in and out at will. Or install the drive permanently, and show them how they just have to swap the two cables.
30 gig - he can find a used 80 gig drive for less, and he'll be able to make multiple image backups.
His image is also more likely to survive and be restoreable if its on a hard drive - after all, if he needs to boot from the cd/dvd in order to do a restore, he'll need 2 optical drives - why not just spring for the extra hard drive and enjoy the quicker performance and the extra storage space?
Its not just about backing up - its about restoring as well. A friend of mine screwed up his partition table this weekend and can't boot from the hard drive to do a restore, so partition magic isn't going to work for him. His best bet is to boot off a linux cd, delete all the partitions, then recreate them (he remembers the exact sizes, so it should take care of those two phantom 1-terabyte partitions that somehow are listed in the table of his 250 gig drive). If he's got his numbers right, his data will be sitting exactly where it was before disaster struck.
So how is this guy going to restore his images from dvd anyway? A spare hd is the best way to go. Its also better for the environment. His backup is going to be obsolete soon, at which time its time to burn new dvds. Neither cost-effective nor environmentally friendly. And individual file restores are also still way quicker using a hard drive, and don't have the file system limitations that dvds and cds do.
We're going to have to change that old saying to "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with cheap hard drives."
I haven't bought a blank dvd since last year - hard drives are just too cheap to bother with dvds any more. Thumb drives are cheap and easy to use, and even my cell phone has a half-gig of storage (which I can swap out for a gig if I want) for moving files back and forth via the usb cable.
So boot off a live linux cd (fedora just announced theirs today) and copy the files. You can even image the whole partition with a simple dd command.
Imaging the whole partition (example: dd if=/dev/hda1 of=winc.img) is quick and easy. It treats your whole partition as one big file, so there's no multiple "open file, copy bits, close file" stuff. Also, since its a partition image, you don't care about the type of file system - you're copying raw bytes.
You can even mount the resulting image via one of the loopback devices (useful if you want to edit the files in an iso of a cd or dvd, or to restore just a few files).
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the busted linky :-(
Its about your rights, and its posted for comment online, as are the original articles. Also, a lot of the info for identity theft is available online. So. AC, how is this NOT approriate for YRO?
If you read the article, you'll see that the notary (who refuses to comment at this time :-) claims that he knew the seller and that the owner showed phot id - a drivers licnese. In other words, the notary screwed up, since there was no drivers license and he didn't know the seller.
The likely outcome is that the notary's insurance is on the hook, and the notary will be disciplined. Probably a 1 year suspension.
Well, the marketers are wrong in my case - if I damage something because of the extreme measures I have to take to open it first, the store's going to take it back or have one very angry person shouting at the top of their lungs about how BS their policy is.
I did this once a few years ago over some misleading advertising (they tried to claim that the item in the ad wasn't the same one, but the stock # on the photo said otherwise). 10 minutes at the cash register, loud enough so that people on the next floor could hear, showed the ad to everyone behind me in line, got quite a crowd. Didn't stop even when they agreed the ad was misleading and that I'd get it for the advertised price. Named competitors, etc. Made sure the other people in line got the same deal.
Don't laugh ... here's another true story.
One day the sewer pipe broke and the basement filled up with you-know-what. Pretty gross. When we had bought the place, we left the original carpet, and put a new one over it. They were both ruined, so I rolled them up (sopping wet) and dragged them through the garage and to the curb. It was well below freezing, so they quickly turned solid.
Of course, now that they're solid, they don't smell like raw sewage ...
Rush hour comes, and I see a station wagon stop ... the driver gets out, sees an almost-brand-new carpet, and PUTS IT IN THE BACK OF HIS STATION WAGON.
I would have loved to have a video of him driving along, with the heater going full blast, when it starts to thaw out ...
Or maybe he didn't have so far to drive, and brought it indoors to thaw out, or parked in the garage and had supper first ...
I hate those new packages. EVERYTHING is impossible to open without a knife.
I know that marketers think it "adds perceived value", but you know something? There's more "perceived value" in my new cell phone (I bought it without even looking at the cardboard box first) than in some $10.00 item in a plastic bubble.
"Most people won't steal as easily from someone they know."
A bit naive, I think. Most people are KILLED by someone they know. Ditto for sexual abuse of children, Certainly true for domestic assault.
The only time my place was broken into, it was by the neighbours kids 2 houses down, and yes, we got along okay with their parents, which is why it was such a "surprise."
Or look at the stupidity going on in the workplace - people swiping each others' lunches (exlax-chip cookies to the rescue!), petty theft of company property, more significant fraud (oops - someone must have stolen the laptop ... yeah, right ...).
Studies with rats show that population density is the main contributor to violent behaviour. People behave the same way. That's one reason cubicles are such poor work environments (the other being that you never have enough space, no matter how much room you have).
Of course, stuffing 4 people into a cubie and calling it a team doesn't really fix the problem.
Geez ... there's a much simpler solution.
Just put your garbage in a box, wrapped up to look like a present, and leave it in your car with the window open.
Or, recently bought yourself a new air conditioner, computer or dvd player or other home electronics? Fill the box up with garbage, seal it up, and park at your local shopping mall.
Of course its the whole point. A flea cant' bring down a giant - but a giant that can be convinced to tie himself up in knots is doomed.
This is what's happened, and it was succesful because there's money to be made in helping that giant (the US) tie itself up in knots. Lots of money. Lots of power.
And we all know that every politician has this lust for power thing going ...
Nah, this is slashdot ... its all in good fun. You should see some of the goofs I've made (multiple tabs open, post to the wrong one, readers go wtf?!? ...), or leaving out one word and it completely changes the meaning, etc. That happens a lot when I'm in a hurry, or while eating breakfast and posting.
Of course, Tuesdays are another matter.
"I telecommute as the editor of a fairly lage magazine (circ. ~ 100k). Net outages or low bandwidth are killers to us (I up- down-load hundreds of megs of text and photos daily). Because I am in a rural area, I hve NO choice of ISPs. Were Comcast one of them, I would NOT choose them because of theor lacadasical attutude toward outgoing spm from zombied machines on their network. "
Come on, you're not REALLY an editor, are you?
The "rural" part, on the other hand ... :-)
"Does anyone here keep multiple internet connections at home?"
If you have a cell phone, you have a net connection for that "emergency email that just has to go out", etc.
If you have a laptop with wireless, a bit of wardriving or a stop at a Starbucks gives you another alternative.
So yeah, a lot of people have multiple home connection options.
Its not a problem as long as you make the partition the same size or slightly larger. Its the same as burning a CD iso to a DVD - it works (did it yesterday for one of the guys at work).
The drives will be in use for anly 15 meinues a week. The likelyhood that all 7 will go bad the same week is very high (we're not talking about the samsung 512 meg drives that had a failure rate of 10 out of 10 the first day back in the early 90's).
Of course its about restoring. And he's going to be able to have his system up and running a lot quicker after a hard drive failure by just restoring a linux-made image of his partition to another drive (copied either while running a bootable linux live cd or from a copy of linux on the backup hard drive) than by trying to restore using Windows - he needs a running copy, which his replacement drive lacks, so he'll end up having to install Windows over again.
Compare THAT to the time it takes to install a new copy of windows, install your backup/restore software, then run it ...
Don't bother gzipping it - use this instead http://man.linux-ntfs.org/ntfsclone.8.html and all the zeroes are replaced with a special marker saying, in effect, "there be a huge chunks of zeroes here". Sparse files are cool. I stuck a 1-gig sparse file on a 1.44 floppy just to show it could be done.
The second hard disk is running linux. You're also free to put it in a drive tray and pull it out (they're less than $20.00 and it means you can back up multiple machines to one disk and/or copy your backup to another box). It will also save you some wear and tear, and a bit of electricity.
Tapes are SO 70s.
If you tell them that 15 minutes learning how to boot a live cd and type a few commands will save them spending $$$ on backup software that probably won't be able to restore everything anyway without first having to reinstall Windows so they can boot their computer to run the backup software, they might have an incentive to learn.
Its quicker to just boot using a bootable linux CD, image the partition(s) in question, then reboot, than it is to xcopy a drive to another drive. AND its a lot easier and quicker to restore as well as being a lot more dependable.
But sit there and wait for xcopy to do its thing - your copy still won't be bootable, whereas the image made under linux can be quickly restored to another drive and booted in the event of a hardware failure.
Do the math - your DVD "solution" is more expensive, especially if you have a 250 gig or larger drive (or multiple drives), which is becoming the norm.
First, because you'll be replacing your DVD drive every few months as you burn it out. Second, you'll be going through a 50-spindle of DVDs every time you do your full backup. Even if you're only paying a quarter for each blank, that's still $12.50. Multiply that by 52 weeks in a year, and you get $650.00 - that's 7 x 250 gig hard drives right there. They now come with a 5-yer warranty if you buy them OEM, so you're good for 5 years. Your cost for 5 years of DVD backups - $3,250 - and that's just for the weekly backup, and without the cost of replacing the burner when it fails.
Then there's the space problem - where are you storing these 13,000 burnt dvds? That's right - 50 dvds per full backup x 52 weeks x 5 years is 13,000. WTF are you thinking? Oh, right, you didn't do the math.
So unless you can get dvds for under a nicekel a piece, they're not worth the hassle any more.
Since when can you fit 30 gig on "two or 3 dvds" without first compressing it? And those backups are going to get outdated, which means making more. Make it time-consuming, and it won;t get done. Make it a shell script that auto-runs off a bootable linux cd and the backup will get refreshed more often. Make it a shell script that auto-runs when you boot off the second drive, and the backup will probably get done weekly, rather than weakly.
Install the second drive permanently. Booting off it is as easy as selecting it from eithe the bios boot menu or the grub bootlaoder menu. No more dvds to lose, get scratched, get outdated, take up space in a landfill ... and the backups are as quick as "dd if=/dev/hda of=/home/joe_luser/win_c_drive.img"
Much quicker and easier than burning even 4 dvds.
How are you going to restore if you can't boot off your hard drive?
Using linux to make the backup means that you can have multiple images sitting on a much larger drive. For example, if you have a C partition of 80 gigs, you can create 3 80-gig images on a 250-gig hd. This solves the problem of overwriting your previous backup.
As for swapping out the hard disk, just install a drive tray and they can pop it in and out at will. Or install the drive permanently, and show them how they just have to swap the two cables.
30 gig - he can find a used 80 gig drive for less, and he'll be able to make multiple image backups.
His image is also more likely to survive and be restoreable if its on a hard drive - after all, if he needs to boot from the cd/dvd in order to do a restore, he'll need 2 optical drives - why not just spring for the extra hard drive and enjoy the quicker performance and the extra storage space?
Its not just about backing up - its about restoring as well. A friend of mine screwed up his partition table this weekend and can't boot from the hard drive to do a restore, so partition magic isn't going to work for him. His best bet is to boot off a linux cd, delete all the partitions, then recreate them (he remembers the exact sizes, so it should take care of those two phantom 1-terabyte partitions that somehow are listed in the table of his 250 gig drive). If he's got his numbers right, his data will be sitting exactly where it was before disaster struck.
So how is this guy going to restore his images from dvd anyway? A spare hd is the best way to go. Its also better for the environment. His backup is going to be obsolete soon, at which time its time to burn new dvds. Neither cost-effective nor environmentally friendly. And individual file restores are also still way quicker using a hard drive, and don't have the file system limitations that dvds and cds do.
Anyone still backing up to dvd or cd is an idiot.
We're going to have to change that old saying to "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with cheap hard drives."
I haven't bought a blank dvd since last year - hard drives are just too cheap to bother with dvds any more. Thumb drives are cheap and easy to use, and even my cell phone has a half-gig of storage (which I can swap out for a gig if I want) for moving files back and forth via the usb cable.
So boot off a live linux cd (fedora just announced theirs today) and copy the files. You can even image the whole partition with a simple dd command.
Imaging the whole partition (example: dd if=/dev/hda1 of=winc.img) is quick and easy. It treats your whole partition as one big file, so there's no multiple "open file, copy bits, close file" stuff. Also, since its a partition image, you don't care about the type of file system - you're copying raw bytes.
You can even mount the resulting image via one of the loopback devices (useful if you want to edit the files in an iso of a cd or dvd, or to restore just a few files).