At my workplace, we have client software used by our players that is Java based. All of our developers use Linux, so it is well tested on that platform. However our two supported platforms are Windows and OS X. Why? Those are the platforms that our support staff actually know something about. And even then, their OS X knowledge is pretty marginal. We do however provide a "use at your own risk" type installer for Linux, though the link to it is buried on our forums. It's kind of a "if it works for you then great, if not then tough luck" type of deal.
They agree to defer payments for 15 YEARS, and now that they're finally at the time they might have to actually start paying something they want to just pressure them to make it go away entirely? Yow.
I have to wonder if the huge amount of HD-DVD hack coverage lately is starting to make Sony wish that someone would spend more time hacking Blu-Ray. There's no such thing as bad press?
Gateway Financial Services was the company that offered CentralCoin and Nexum ACH deposits. Those two deposit types just suddenly started returning errors today, and the CentralCoin.com web site says "We are sorry to inform you that the CentralCoin service is currently not operational". When they say "not operational" I'm assuming that they mean "not operational while we figure out if anyone from our company is going to be arrested too". Obviously the FBI's scare tactics are working.
Yes, ePassporte still works for U.S. players. But for how long?
I'm a big fan of tags. I just recently got finished with a redesign of a personal web site at RockyMusic.org, and it uses tags heavily now. All of the content including photos, MP3s, videos, song lyrics, external links, documents, albums, individual tracks, and so on uses the same set of tags (which I applied). I can then use those tags to tie everything on the site together. Examples: Richard O'Brien, Little Nell, Rocky Horror Show. Since I did all the tagging, it's consistent across all the content as well.
That's a case I think where a tagging "standard" would not be at all useful, since making it non-standard is the primary reason it works well I think. Slashdot and other sites that use user-generated tags will always see a lot of humorous, insulting, and otherwise unuseful tags. I know I've seen photos of girls tagged "butter face", and Slashdot obviously has its own cults of "itsatrap", "slownewsday", and so on. Some that are specific to Slashdot ("slashvertisement") are quite useful though.
A captive specimen, a male named Qiqi (), was located at the Wuhan Institute of Hydrobiology from 1980 to July 14, 2002. Qiqi was discovered by a fisherman in Dongting Lake, and later became the sole resident of Baiji Dolphin Aquarium () beside East Lake. There was a later captive, which died after living a year (1996 to 1997) in the Shishou Semi-natural Baiji Dolphin Sanctuary () that had been empty since 1990. A female was found in Chongming Island near Shanghai in 1998, but she did not eat any of the provided food and starved to death within a month.
I'm a Texan as well, though I do live in Austin which is probably the most liberal city you'll find in Texas. I've heard our city described as being surrounded by an "asshole donut", referring to the fact that Austin is an island of liberal Democrats completely surrounded by conservative Republicans. Those of us who live in such islands don't necessarily realize that the majority of the state is in fact quite enamored of hunting, guns, pick-up trucks, country music, Republicans, etc. Even growing up in San Antonio, I had a friend in high school get expelled because he went hunting over the weekend and forgot to take the rifle out of his vehicle when he drove to school on Monday. So yes, I'd unfortunately agree with the overall depiction of Texas as "hunting-besotted" even though there are certainly many exceptions to that.
I use these throwaway e-mail addresses quite a lot in testing various web applications (which often require unique e-mail addresses for each registration or whatever). A lot of people have already mentioned Mailinator, so I'll also mention 2Prong. I came across it one day when Mailinator was down for whatever reason. It has a couple of things in its favor. First, it only uses a domain for two days before moving on to a different domain for throwaway e-mail addresses. So the likelihood of you ever finding the domain blocked is essentially nil. Second, it works completely automatically. All you do is copy/paste the e-mail address, use it, and then the page auto-refreshes when it gets the confirmation e-mail or whatever it is you're looking for. Nice and clean.
Granted, I can see where an open plan might be stressing in a corporate environment. Fortunately I'm not in one of those, and instead work in an office with anywhere from three to ten others. We have a few visual barriers around (bookcases sitting on desks), but for the most part are desks are all open and right next to each other. I find this the most productive way to work on things, overall. If I need to ask a question or consult with someone, all I do is take off my headphones and stand up. It also keeps me more focused on what I'm doing overall, since others can chat with me just as easily (and that tends to remind me of what I should be doing at the time). I'm positive that I'd get a lot less work done in a private office with nobody bothering me, because I'd get sidetracked on random things for too long.
My one caveat is that desks should, if possible, never be arranged such that people can walk up behind you without you seeing them. I carefully positioned my desk when moving into our current office so that I could see both the door and the hallway leading to actual offices, and that may be a key reason why I don't think it's stressing.
My e-mail, my wife's, and the ex co-worker I share the server with all have our e-mail greylisted. I have it set up so that it skips the greylisting process if the e-mail server it receives mail from is properly listed using SPF, which helps make sure that e-mails from large entities (GMail for instance) are never delayed. Nonetheless, I'll hear occasional complaints from the wife when she signs up for an account at a new set of forums or something and doesn't receive her confirmation e-mail immediately.
I think it works best on an individual basis, really. You could let everyone in the domain know that there's an option available which would help cut down on spam but might occasionally delay e-mails. For some people this will be completely unacceptable, but others will jump at the chance to reduce spam.
My actual e-mail address, in convenient text format and as a mailto: link, is at the bottom of every single web page at my personal web sites. I really don't see why I should change that just because spammers might harvest it. My e-mail address has been up there since about 1996, so that's at least a decade's worth of harvesting. I've also used the same e-mail address on Usenet posts.
Yes, I get quite a lot of spam. But with the usual techniques (greylisting, SpamAssassin, etc.) I only actually receive maybe half a dozen spam e-mails a day. And more importantly, all my actually valid e-mail still seems to get through just fine. I'm happy with it, and I get the personal satisfaction of being able to use my e-mail address wherever I damn well like without having to cower from spammers.
There's nothing remotely foolproof about paper ballots. The thing is though that it's a heck of a lot harder to perpetrate voting fraud with paper ballots than it is through electronic means. It's been demonstrated that one motivated person could change the results of an election using electronic voting machines. To do so with paper ballots would be vastly more tedious/difficult/etc. And if there's doubt about the election results, you can always re-count the paper ballots at least.
Commercial software, but... it's what I use: Panavue Image Assembler. You'd be using it in "mosaic" mode, which works quite well and is what I use constantly for doing scans of largish items. It does color blending on joins, and is fairly automatic. It can also handle 16-bit color depth TIFF images. I bought it recently, and have no complaints with it.
Sure, I can read e-mails for anyone in the company. No, I don't care to read any of them (heck I barely pay attention to my own e-mails). On occasion I do need to glance at somebody's mail spool to make sure something in the e-mail system is working, and I have sometimes seen things I didn't want to (the latest one was talking about S&M). But the only time I'd ever be tempted to read other people's e-mail of my own volition would be if I was suddenly feeling very insecure about my job. And honestly, this is one of the reasons why I still use POP3 everywhere and never IMAP. I just don't want all of my e-mails sitting on the mailserver, conveniently browsable by anyone with access to it. They should at least have to work at it and gain access to my own personal machine first...:-)
For Firefox, you can use the SearchStatus extension (download from either the Firefox add-ons page or their home page). It's actually a somewhat useful tool also, in that it displays Google PageRank and Alexa rank for each site you visit, and has a few decent tools for showing various search engine related information for a given page. It also feeds data on every page you visit to Alexa as a byproduct of looking up their Alexa rank, which may be a positive or a negative for you. I personally verified that Alexa rankings change as a result of this Firefox extension, based on the fact that a couple of my personal pages (which I generally look at several times a day) were unranked prior to me installing the extension and then had a large spike in traffic not long after I installed it.
I pointed out to my boss awhile back when he was complaining about our Alexa rank that if he actually wanted the rank to improve, probably the easiest way to do it would be to have every person in the company install and use either the Alexa toolbar for IE or the SearchStatus extension for Firefox. If you're not one of the top hundred sites (or so), then Alexa ranks seem pretty easy to manipulate. Having company employees install their toolbar isn't even gaming the system per se, it's just making sure that people who are likely to be visiting the sites you care about are "well represented". As for why people put so much stock in Alexa rankings despite the obvious facts against their reliability, it's simply because there's nothing better out there. I'm sure Google could do what Alexa does much better if they felt like it, based on both search engine traffic and the Google toolbar users (has to be a LOT more of those than Alexa toolbar users). Then marketing drones would be watching those ranks obsessively instead. They take what they can get.
If anything, I'd question how FEW sites they claim are vulnerable to SQL injection. It's an insidious problem that just creeps up on you anytime you don't think about it sufficiently (as when writing something quickly, on a deadline... not that this ever happens!). I know that at my workplace we fell victim at one point to a SQL injection attack on one of our (many) custom PHP scripts. We eventually found out how it worked through the web logs and were able to fix it, but honestly even after we did our best to clean things up... I'm dead certain that there are still probably hundreds of places that we're still vulnerable. This is due to a number things including the sheer volume of PHP code in use, the fact that the code has been written at various points in time over a period of six years or so, and the fact that this code has been written by at least twenty different people. It's like trying to plug holes in a dam.
U.S. credit card companies haven't accepted gaming transactions for years now. Primarily due to their increased exposure to chargebacks, on gaming transactions. See also the various suits from people against credit card companies where they attempt to claim that they're not actually responsible for their gambling. Just try using your U.S. based credit card at basically any online gaming site, and you'll get an immediate decline. Europeans on the other hand use their credit cards for this all the time, since apparently they're more trustworthy. Or something. *shrug* U.S. players are essentially forced to use third party payment processors like Neteller, Firepay, etc. in order to fund their accounts due to this.
They're specifically trying to prevent funds going from the U.S. to overseas gaming sites. Taking money from them has never been and still won't be a problem (unless you fail to report winnings to the IRS of course!). It's primarily the publicly traded gaming companies that are pulling out the the U.S. market now, and you can bet (haha) that their shareholders wouldn't look favorably on them taking money and running as it were. These sites can only exist and take in profits as long as their customers trust them. There's no reason for them to steal money when the players will willingly give it to them in the long run.
It was a giant grey area previously. The only law on the books was the Federal Wire Act, which forbids placing sports bets by phone. It took quite a stretch of the imagination to have that apply to Internet gambling. Nonetheless, companies in the U.S. were heavily pressured to not accept advertising from them with vague threats and such from government agencies. Now the gray area isn't nearly as gray. It's not like we don't have a history of misleadingly named legislation anyway (PATRIOT act, anyone?).
It wasn't so much a loophole as a gray area, because there wasn't a specific law covering it. All we had was the Federal Wire Act, which said that placing sports bets by phone was illegal. Hence the recent high-profile arrests of the heads of Internet sports books, at least one of which I know had a toll-free phone number set up in the U.S. to do exactly that (take sports bets by phone). Now Internet gambling isn't a gray area.
The credit card companies have been blocking gaming transactions for years, in the U.S. Mostly out of their own self-interest since gaming transactions had much higher chargeback rates. What they're going after now are electronic fund transfers between U.S. accounts and either the gaming companies or the financial intermediaries (Neteller, Firepay, et al.).
Slashdot Mirror
At my workplace, we have client software used by our players that is Java based. All of our developers use Linux, so it is well tested on that platform. However our two supported platforms are Windows and OS X. Why? Those are the platforms that our support staff actually know something about. And even then, their OS X knowledge is pretty marginal. We do however provide a "use at your own risk" type installer for Linux, though the link to it is buried on our forums. It's kind of a "if it works for you then great, if not then tough luck" type of deal.
It's only "ready for business use" if Cisco is doing it.
They agree to defer payments for 15 YEARS, and now that they're finally at the time they might have to actually start paying something they want to just pressure them to make it go away entirely? Yow.
I have to wonder if the huge amount of HD-DVD hack coverage lately is starting to make Sony wish that someone would spend more time hacking Blu-Ray. There's no such thing as bad press?
I use the VideoDownloader plugin for Firefox to download them, and then any of the various free FLV players to view them locally.
Gateway Financial Services was the company that offered CentralCoin and Nexum ACH deposits. Those two deposit types just suddenly started returning errors today, and the CentralCoin.com web site says "We are sorry to inform you that the CentralCoin service is currently not operational". When they say "not operational" I'm assuming that they mean "not operational while we figure out if anyone from our company is going to be arrested too". Obviously the FBI's scare tactics are working.
Yes, ePassporte still works for U.S. players. But for how long?
I'm a big fan of tags. I just recently got finished with a redesign of a personal web site at RockyMusic.org, and it uses tags heavily now. All of the content including photos, MP3s, videos, song lyrics, external links, documents, albums, individual tracks, and so on uses the same set of tags (which I applied). I can then use those tags to tie everything on the site together. Examples: Richard O'Brien, Little Nell, Rocky Horror Show. Since I did all the tagging, it's consistent across all the content as well.
That's a case I think where a tagging "standard" would not be at all useful, since making it non-standard is the primary reason it works well I think. Slashdot and other sites that use user-generated tags will always see a lot of humorous, insulting, and otherwise unuseful tags. I know I've seen photos of girls tagged "butter face", and Slashdot obviously has its own cults of "itsatrap", "slownewsday", and so on. Some that are specific to Slashdot ("slashvertisement") are quite useful though.
I'm a Texan as well, though I do live in Austin which is probably the most liberal city you'll find in Texas. I've heard our city described as being surrounded by an "asshole donut", referring to the fact that Austin is an island of liberal Democrats completely surrounded by conservative Republicans. Those of us who live in such islands don't necessarily realize that the majority of the state is in fact quite enamored of hunting, guns, pick-up trucks, country music, Republicans, etc. Even growing up in San Antonio, I had a friend in high school get expelled because he went hunting over the weekend and forgot to take the rifle out of his vehicle when he drove to school on Monday. So yes, I'd unfortunately agree with the overall depiction of Texas as "hunting-besotted" even though there are certainly many exceptions to that.
I use these throwaway e-mail addresses quite a lot in testing various web applications (which often require unique e-mail addresses for each registration or whatever). A lot of people have already mentioned Mailinator, so I'll also mention 2Prong. I came across it one day when Mailinator was down for whatever reason. It has a couple of things in its favor. First, it only uses a domain for two days before moving on to a different domain for throwaway e-mail addresses. So the likelihood of you ever finding the domain blocked is essentially nil. Second, it works completely automatically. All you do is copy/paste the e-mail address, use it, and then the page auto-refreshes when it gets the confirmation e-mail or whatever it is you're looking for. Nice and clean.
Granted, I can see where an open plan might be stressing in a corporate environment. Fortunately I'm not in one of those, and instead work in an office with anywhere from three to ten others. We have a few visual barriers around (bookcases sitting on desks), but for the most part are desks are all open and right next to each other. I find this the most productive way to work on things, overall. If I need to ask a question or consult with someone, all I do is take off my headphones and stand up. It also keeps me more focused on what I'm doing overall, since others can chat with me just as easily (and that tends to remind me of what I should be doing at the time). I'm positive that I'd get a lot less work done in a private office with nobody bothering me, because I'd get sidetracked on random things for too long.
My one caveat is that desks should, if possible, never be arranged such that people can walk up behind you without you seeing them. I carefully positioned my desk when moving into our current office so that I could see both the door and the hallway leading to actual offices, and that may be a key reason why I don't think it's stressing.
My e-mail, my wife's, and the ex co-worker I share the server with all have our e-mail greylisted. I have it set up so that it skips the greylisting process if the e-mail server it receives mail from is properly listed using SPF, which helps make sure that e-mails from large entities (GMail for instance) are never delayed. Nonetheless, I'll hear occasional complaints from the wife when she signs up for an account at a new set of forums or something and doesn't receive her confirmation e-mail immediately.
I think it works best on an individual basis, really. You could let everyone in the domain know that there's an option available which would help cut down on spam but might occasionally delay e-mails. For some people this will be completely unacceptable, but others will jump at the chance to reduce spam.
My actual e-mail address, in convenient text format and as a mailto: link, is at the bottom of every single web page at my personal web sites. I really don't see why I should change that just because spammers might harvest it. My e-mail address has been up there since about 1996, so that's at least a decade's worth of harvesting. I've also used the same e-mail address on Usenet posts.
Yes, I get quite a lot of spam. But with the usual techniques (greylisting, SpamAssassin, etc.) I only actually receive maybe half a dozen spam e-mails a day. And more importantly, all my actually valid e-mail still seems to get through just fine. I'm happy with it, and I get the personal satisfaction of being able to use my e-mail address wherever I damn well like without having to cower from spammers.
There's nothing remotely foolproof about paper ballots. The thing is though that it's a heck of a lot harder to perpetrate voting fraud with paper ballots than it is through electronic means. It's been demonstrated that one motivated person could change the results of an election using electronic voting machines. To do so with paper ballots would be vastly more tedious/difficult/etc. And if there's doubt about the election results, you can always re-count the paper ballots at least.
Commercial software, but... it's what I use: Panavue Image Assembler. You'd be using it in "mosaic" mode, which works quite well and is what I use constantly for doing scans of largish items. It does color blending on joins, and is fairly automatic. It can also handle 16-bit color depth TIFF images. I bought it recently, and have no complaints with it.
Sure, I can read e-mails for anyone in the company. No, I don't care to read any of them (heck I barely pay attention to my own e-mails). On occasion I do need to glance at somebody's mail spool to make sure something in the e-mail system is working, and I have sometimes seen things I didn't want to (the latest one was talking about S&M). But the only time I'd ever be tempted to read other people's e-mail of my own volition would be if I was suddenly feeling very insecure about my job. And honestly, this is one of the reasons why I still use POP3 everywhere and never IMAP. I just don't want all of my e-mails sitting on the mailserver, conveniently browsable by anyone with access to it. They should at least have to work at it and gain access to my own personal machine first...:-)
For Firefox, you can use the SearchStatus extension (download from either the Firefox add-ons page or their home page). It's actually a somewhat useful tool also, in that it displays Google PageRank and Alexa rank for each site you visit, and has a few decent tools for showing various search engine related information for a given page. It also feeds data on every page you visit to Alexa as a byproduct of looking up their Alexa rank, which may be a positive or a negative for you. I personally verified that Alexa rankings change as a result of this Firefox extension, based on the fact that a couple of my personal pages (which I generally look at several times a day) were unranked prior to me installing the extension and then had a large spike in traffic not long after I installed it.
I pointed out to my boss awhile back when he was complaining about our Alexa rank that if he actually wanted the rank to improve, probably the easiest way to do it would be to have every person in the company install and use either the Alexa toolbar for IE or the SearchStatus extension for Firefox. If you're not one of the top hundred sites (or so), then Alexa ranks seem pretty easy to manipulate. Having company employees install their toolbar isn't even gaming the system per se, it's just making sure that people who are likely to be visiting the sites you care about are "well represented". As for why people put so much stock in Alexa rankings despite the obvious facts against their reliability, it's simply because there's nothing better out there. I'm sure Google could do what Alexa does much better if they felt like it, based on both search engine traffic and the Google toolbar users (has to be a LOT more of those than Alexa toolbar users). Then marketing drones would be watching those ranks obsessively instead. They take what they can get.
If anything, I'd question how FEW sites they claim are vulnerable to SQL injection. It's an insidious problem that just creeps up on you anytime you don't think about it sufficiently (as when writing something quickly, on a deadline... not that this ever happens!). I know that at my workplace we fell victim at one point to a SQL injection attack on one of our (many) custom PHP scripts. We eventually found out how it worked through the web logs and were able to fix it, but honestly even after we did our best to clean things up... I'm dead certain that there are still probably hundreds of places that we're still vulnerable. This is due to a number things including the sheer volume of PHP code in use, the fact that the code has been written at various points in time over a period of six years or so, and the fact that this code has been written by at least twenty different people. It's like trying to plug holes in a dam.
Make sure you don't buy any DVDs either, what with region codes and encryption and such. Laserdiscs are where it's at, anyway. ;-)
U.S. credit card companies haven't accepted gaming transactions for years now. Primarily due to their increased exposure to chargebacks, on gaming transactions. See also the various suits from people against credit card companies where they attempt to claim that they're not actually responsible for their gambling. Just try using your U.S. based credit card at basically any online gaming site, and you'll get an immediate decline. Europeans on the other hand use their credit cards for this all the time, since apparently they're more trustworthy. Or something. *shrug* U.S. players are essentially forced to use third party payment processors like Neteller, Firepay, etc. in order to fund their accounts due to this.
They're specifically trying to prevent funds going from the U.S. to overseas gaming sites. Taking money from them has never been and still won't be a problem (unless you fail to report winnings to the IRS of course!). It's primarily the publicly traded gaming companies that are pulling out the the U.S. market now, and you can bet (haha) that their shareholders wouldn't look favorably on them taking money and running as it were. These sites can only exist and take in profits as long as their customers trust them. There's no reason for them to steal money when the players will willingly give it to them in the long run.
It was a giant grey area previously. The only law on the books was the Federal Wire Act, which forbids placing sports bets by phone. It took quite a stretch of the imagination to have that apply to Internet gambling. Nonetheless, companies in the U.S. were heavily pressured to not accept advertising from them with vague threats and such from government agencies. Now the gray area isn't nearly as gray. It's not like we don't have a history of misleadingly named legislation anyway (PATRIOT act, anyone?).
It wasn't so much a loophole as a gray area, because there wasn't a specific law covering it. All we had was the Federal Wire Act, which said that placing sports bets by phone was illegal. Hence the recent high-profile arrests of the heads of Internet sports books, at least one of which I know had a toll-free phone number set up in the U.S. to do exactly that (take sports bets by phone). Now Internet gambling isn't a gray area.
The bill has specific exemptions for "accepted" forms of American gambling. Such as the stock market. And fantasy sports leagues.
The credit card companies have been blocking gaming transactions for years, in the U.S. Mostly out of their own self-interest since gaming transactions had much higher chargeback rates. What they're going after now are electronic fund transfers between U.S. accounts and either the gaming companies or the financial intermediaries (Neteller, Firepay, et al.).