" If everyone calls it hacking, it's hacking by definition."
No, popular usage can sometimes be wrong.
For example, is "irregardless" a word. (Not really, my dictionary lists it as "non-standard," the same category as "ain't.")
What does the expression "beg the question" mean? While you will often hear or read that phrase being misused, it really means to engage in circular reasoning.
Anyway, in this case, there is no evidence that hacking, even as that term is commonly understood nowadays, was involved. I mean, these guys had the password. When you have a password, you don't have to hack. You just log in! Whether they used any hacking to obtain the password was apparently not known by the reporter who wrote the story.
When banks, et. al. ask you for your mother's maiden name, use a special code word, not your mother's actual maiden name. This is not illegal (AFAIK-- IANAL) or crafty or anything. They ONLY use your mother's maiden name for verification purposes. You can even tell them at the time you give them the code word that it is not your mother's real maiden name. Make sure you choose a good word that you won't forget.
I NEVER give my mother's maiden name, because it is actually my first name, and I have recited that fact to large numbers of strangers and aquaintances.
You can also give a fake SSN. Any one with all zeroes in one of the three fields is guaranteed to never be issued to a real person.
i.e.,
000-xx-xxxx xxx-00-xxxx xxx-xx-0000
These will never be issued. There is also a famous SSN that was used as a sample on a lot of posters and so on. I don't remember what it was. You could use that. Depending on what kind of form you are filling out this may or may not be an acceptable alternative. Certainly if you are signing the document and claiming that it is true to the best of your knowledge, then you should NOT put in a bogus SSN.
Also, if they are using it to generate a credit report, you should probably give your real SSN, or none at all, otherwise who knows what they will come up with.
It used to be somewhat common for the sender to ship something prior to any payment having been received, and have the delivery person collect payment at the time of delivery. This isn't very common any more since most people pay with credit cards ahead of time. I imagine that the United States Postal Service (USPS) and the United Parcel Service (UPS) and Federal Express (FedEx) aren't keen on getting involved in these financial transactions. But I bet that you can still get the USPS to ship COD.
I don't think there are very many reasonable names at hotmail.com that aren't taken already. I registered mine about a year before hotmail was bought out by MS, and almost every simple arrangement of my my name was taken already.
I think you could spam hotmail by choosing names at random from a name or dictionary list. Or both. Very few emails would bounce. Heck, you could just start at a@hotmail.com, and increment your way ut to 99999999@hotmail.com.
Yes, different types of speech are protected differently. Some things are deemed to have expressive value while also having a non-expresive component. I figured this out by reading legal briefs and court judgments.
There is a concept of something called "pure speech" which would probably encompass any written or recorded form of human language, but not necessarily computer code. Pure speech is the most protected form of speech, and the courts usually view political expression as the most important form of pure speech. Things like paintings are highly expressive, also, but probably not considered "pure speech." Gun shows have been defended on the basis of free speech. The idea is that gun shows have some expressive value, but they are certainly not pure speech. Burning the US flag is a political statement which has been ruled to be protected by the first ammendment. In the Viet Nam war era, a case arose where someone was arrested for wearing a shirt that said "Fuck the draft" into a court. Eventually it was ruled that this was protected expression.
Another important concept in free speech cases is whether a plaintiff's request seeks to impose a prior restraint. A prior restraint, for example, would be a case where a plaitiff tries to get a court to issue an injunction ahead of time to block the publication of some material. The courts take a VERY dim view of prior restraint on pure speech. On the other hand, libel and slander laws merely seek to hold speakers acountable AFTER they speak, and this doesn't run afoul of the first ammendment.
Believe it or not, judges are NOT idiots, and free speech is a concept they tend to understand fairly well. They may not always be technologically up to date, of course.
Well, the money is INVESTED. That means that, one way or another, that money is being loaned to someone else who is doing something useful with it.
The term used was liquid reserves, which is not the same as cash. For example, stocks and bonds are liquid reserves.
Frankly, my question is if the company has 40 billion in liquid reserves, why make a product? The interest on a conservatively invested 40 billion is staggering (to me).
Well, if Americans don't donate then I guess NASA would either die under my plan, or exist on grants from the government.
In fact, I think you are largely correct that Americans don't donate. I think a lot of charities actually survive on government grants almost entirely.
But then again, there has never been a charity that even remotely resembles NASA! Who is to say what would happen.
I think other posters are right when they call this unfair. (Not all sci-fi fans care about NASA, many people would benefit from technology developed by NASA, whether they payed or not).
So if you want to create an incentive, just pass a law making contributions to NASA be tax free and let people contribute as much (or as little) as they want. Maybe NASA could put advertisements in sci-fi products encouraging people to donate (the product manufacturers could then write off some promotional expense or whatever). Maybe theaters could show a brief promotional trailer (put together by NASA) during the trailers in sci-fi movies. Afterall, their doing so could be a TAX DEDUCTIBLE contribution to NASA, even though it doesn't really cost them anything and would likely not anger customers at all.
Maybe this could usher in an era where we see a whole new class of quasi-governmental organizations with tax-exempt status.
I'm not sure this is a good idea, but it is an idea.
You are ignoring other benefits of centralized generation.
Actually, I'm not sure I believe that shifting hydrogen generation offshore is a good idea, because it undermines energy security, and hydrogen is somewhat dangerous to ship. But anyway, here are a couple of other benefits of centralized production:
1) Efficiency: Modern power plants are VASTLY more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than automotive engines.
2) Monitorability: It is much easier to monitor a few dozen or even hundred power plants spread across the country than to monitor every car for emissions conformance.
I think Al2O3 is standard aluminum oxide (white powdery substance).
In other words, pure aluminum metal is oxidized, and as a by-product, hydrogen is evolved. I always thought that the hydrogen-oxygen bond in water stored MORE potential energy than the aluminum-oxygen bond in Al2O3 (aluminum oxide), which would make the above reaction endothermic (meaning that it wouldn't happen without supplying some energy from somewhere else). I could be wrong, though. In any event, it is certainly possible to extract energy from aluminum, one way or another. It is not obvious that it is better to do so than to simply use hydrogen directly.
Your implied criticism is entirely unwarranted. Christine Sloane obviously gets the idea that hydrogen is an energy storage system, much more than it is a new fuel. She calls attention to this fact in the statement you quote by emphasizing that before you can use hydrogen, you need to make hydrogen, and the energy for doing that has to come from somewhere else.
It is not the least bit trivial (from an energy standpoint) to "make" hydrogen out of water. You always have to put in more energy that you will get back when you use the hydrogen. So when she says "you can make hydrogen from almost anything" she is making a statement that is reasonably accurate but hopefully won't confuse the masses who don't have a good knowledge of thermodynamics and simple chemistry.
I don't know exactly. It is an epidemiological question, so you can search in the life sciences database at any university library. Try JAMA, if they have some kind of on-line presence.
The most recent place I read about this is in the study guide for the General class HAM license. The section on RF exposure went over this issue summarily. As far as cancer goes, they said that any association between RF and cancer is extremely weak. I'm too lazy to look and see if there were specific studies sited or not.
The bottom line (for aspiring HAM's) is that when broadcasting at certain frequencies, and certain (high) powers, exposure could be an issue. But at low power, you could never get to the limits, no matter how close you are to the antenna.
Ultimately, you are right. Of course at some point MS will get everyone switched. But I think there will be a LOT more reluctance on the part of big corporations to just go along with MS this time. Increasingly they need to see some real business cases for WHY they should upgrade, and, in particular, WHY NOW. I was only expressing skepticism about the timetable of the problem.
Actually, the homework problems posted on comp.lang.c are pretty obviously recognizable, and no one ever gives easy answers. One guy, Chris Torek, IIRC, always finds some truly twisted, obfuscated snippet from God knows where and says here is the answer.
Anybody who turns in a Chris Torek solution might as well where a sign that says CHEATER.
Hot-air soldering station? Proto-house? I don't think you need all that.
I am an EE (laid-off) but for the last two years I worked on designing SMT single-board computers. Very dense, 12-layer, Intel-based boards. I also had to bring up and debug them. And after we layed-off our technician, I had to do the re-work, too. The only thing you can't really re-work with a soldering iron is a BGA. Sometimes you can cut traces on the BGA itself, but that is a REAL pain.
I will grant you that a microscope is just about essential for really fine-pitch parts.
Also, devices with lots of pins can be a pain to remove if you don't have the right tools, but you can always bend all the pins up, one at a time, until the chip is free. Get as much solder off as you can using braid, first.
With up to eight-pin parts, you can often get them off with two soldering irons, one in each hand. Just glob solder on the pins until they are all connected together, then lift the part right off of the board.
And you can still make single- or double-sided boards yourself, same as you ever could. No need to go to a proto-house. As someone said earlier, just use zero-ohm resistors to jump over traces, and you'd be surprised what you can do on one or two layers.
Hmmm. I don't know all that much about telescopes, but I did read a book about building your own. It seems to me that any scope which requires parabolic mirrors might be a bit tricky to build oneself. I believe that some mass-produced scopes DO use parabolic mirrors, don't they? Can you grind your own parabolic mirrors, or do you just stick to designs that use spherical grinds?
I know what you mean. The people you are talking about are not really engineers deep down in their souls.
There were very few people in the EE classes I went to that seemed to want to learn. They just wanted to get grades so they could get a degree so they could get a job. And many of them HATED lab classes as much or even more than they hated the theoretical classes. Wrong major, if you ask me.
Video would still be used as evidence. There is something called a chain of custody or something like that for evidence. I guess this basically means that the whereabouts of the evidence have to be accounted for at all times. This supposedly guarantees that evidence is not tampered with while in police possesion. So in the case you are talking about, the police would swear that the tape (or file or whatever) was taken from the video deck (or hard-drive or whatever) immediately after the crime, and not altered. Then it could be admitted as evidence.
Of course, if police conspire, they can invent or plant false evidence anyway, without the need to doctor video tape. For example, they could lie to a judge to get a search warrant, then plant false evidence (e.g., drugs) in someone's house. I don't think this happens very often because police are not any more evil than other people, and most people are not evil enough to BEAR FALSE WITNESS AGAINST THEIR NEIGHBORS.
I'm not at all sure that corporations will be as willing to "upgrade" to XP and whatever follows it as they have been to make upgrades in the past.
I believe Win2K will be THE standard MS office OS for a long, long time. So the problem you are talking about may take more than 2 years to really hit home.
Actually, there are whole eco-systems that seem to be built-up around the hydrothermal vents that have very little interaction with the rest of the world. Not just thermophillic bacteria, but weird crabs and worms and stuff, too.
And I believe a lot of bacteria can follow anaerobic metabolic pathways when they are in a reducing environment. Things that live in sludge and mud and scum.
That's why I think it is better to say that a nuclear (or other) cataclysm would "destroy life as we know it" rather than to say that it will "destroy all life on this planet." (Not that it makes much difference to us.) This planet has a very nasty infection of life, and I'm not sure what kind of medicine it would take to cure it.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
" If everyone calls it hacking, it's hacking by definition."
No, popular usage can sometimes be wrong.
For example, is "irregardless" a word. (Not really, my dictionary lists it as "non-standard," the same category as "ain't.")
What does the expression "beg the question" mean? While you will often hear or read that phrase being misused, it really means to engage in circular reasoning.
Anyway, in this case, there is no evidence that hacking, even as that term is commonly understood nowadays, was involved. I mean, these guys had the password. When you have a password, you don't have to hack. You just log in! Whether they used any hacking to obtain the password was apparently not known by the reporter who wrote the story.
MM
--
When banks, et. al. ask you for your mother's maiden name, use a special code word, not your mother's actual maiden name. This is not illegal (AFAIK-- IANAL) or crafty or anything. They ONLY use your mother's maiden name for verification purposes. You can even tell them at the time you give them the code word that it is not your mother's real maiden name. Make sure you choose a good word that you won't forget.
I NEVER give my mother's maiden name, because it is actually my first name, and I have recited that fact to large numbers of strangers and aquaintances.
MM
--
You can also give a fake SSN. Any one with all zeroes in one of the three fields is guaranteed to never be issued to a real person.
i.e.,
000-xx-xxxx
xxx-00-xxxx
xxx-xx-0000
These will never be issued. There is also a famous SSN that was used as a sample on a lot of posters and so on. I don't remember what it was. You could use that. Depending on what kind of form you are filling out this may or may not be an acceptable alternative. Certainly if you are signing the document and claiming that it is true to the best of your knowledge, then you should NOT put in a bogus SSN.
Also, if they are using it to generate a credit report, you should probably give your real SSN, or none at all, otherwise who knows what they will come up with.
MM
--
OK, I'll bite.
COD is an acronym for Collect on Delivery.
It used to be somewhat common for the sender to ship something prior to any payment having been received, and have the delivery person collect payment at the time of delivery. This isn't very common any more since most people pay with credit cards ahead of time. I imagine that the United States Postal Service (USPS) and the United Parcel Service (UPS) and Federal Express (FedEx) aren't keen on getting involved in these financial transactions. But I bet that you can still get the USPS to ship COD.
MM
--
I don't think there are very many reasonable names at hotmail.com that aren't taken already. I registered mine about a year before hotmail was bought out by MS, and almost every simple arrangement of my my name was taken already.
I think you could spam hotmail by choosing names at random from a name or dictionary list. Or both. Very few emails would bounce. Heck, you could just start at a@hotmail.com, and increment your way ut to 99999999@hotmail.com.
MM
--
Why bother obfuscating it if you already have to empty your box twice a day?
I do too, by the way.
MM
--
Yes, different types of speech are protected differently. Some things are deemed to have expressive value while also having a non-expresive component. I figured this out by reading legal briefs and court judgments.
There is a concept of something called "pure speech" which would probably encompass any written or recorded form of human language, but not necessarily computer code. Pure speech is the most protected form of speech, and the courts usually view political expression as the most important form of pure speech. Things like paintings are highly expressive, also, but probably not considered "pure speech." Gun shows have been defended on the basis of free speech. The idea is that gun shows have some expressive value, but they are certainly not pure speech. Burning the US flag is a political statement which has been ruled to be protected by the first ammendment. In the Viet Nam war era, a case arose where someone was arrested for wearing a shirt that said "Fuck the draft" into a court. Eventually it was ruled that this was protected expression.
Another important concept in free speech cases is whether a plaintiff's request seeks to impose a prior restraint. A prior restraint, for example, would be a case where a plaitiff tries to get a court to issue an injunction ahead of time to block the publication of some material. The courts take a VERY dim view of prior restraint on pure speech. On the other hand, libel and slander laws merely seek to hold speakers acountable AFTER they speak, and this doesn't run afoul of the first ammendment.
Believe it or not, judges are NOT idiots, and free speech is a concept they tend to understand fairly well. They may not always be technologically up to date, of course.
MM
--
Well, the money is INVESTED. That means that, one way or another, that money is being loaned to someone else who is doing something useful with it.
The term used was liquid reserves, which is not the same as cash. For example, stocks and bonds are liquid reserves.
Frankly, my question is if the company has 40 billion in liquid reserves, why make a product? The interest on a conservatively invested 40 billion is staggering (to me).
MM
--
Well, if Americans don't donate then I guess NASA would either die under my plan, or exist on grants from the government.
In fact, I think you are largely correct that Americans don't donate. I think a lot of charities actually survive on government grants almost entirely.
But then again, there has never been a charity that even remotely resembles NASA! Who is to say what would happen.
MM
--
I think other posters are right when they call this unfair. (Not all sci-fi fans care about NASA, many people would benefit from technology developed by NASA, whether they payed or not).
So if you want to create an incentive, just pass a law making contributions to NASA be tax free and let people contribute as much (or as little) as they want. Maybe NASA could put advertisements in sci-fi products encouraging people to donate (the product manufacturers could then write off some promotional expense or whatever). Maybe theaters could show a brief promotional trailer (put together by NASA) during the trailers in sci-fi movies. Afterall, their doing so could be a TAX DEDUCTIBLE contribution to NASA, even though it doesn't really cost them anything and would likely not anger customers at all.
Maybe this could usher in an era where we see a whole new class of quasi-governmental organizations with tax-exempt status.
I'm not sure this is a good idea, but it is an idea.
MM
--
No need. Just throw rocks.
See _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ by Robert Heinlein (sp?)
MM
--
You are ignoring other benefits of centralized generation.
Actually, I'm not sure I believe that shifting hydrogen generation offshore is a good idea, because it undermines energy security, and hydrogen is somewhat dangerous to ship. But anyway, here are a couple of other benefits of centralized production:
1) Efficiency: Modern power plants are VASTLY more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than automotive engines.
2) Monitorability: It is much easier to monitor a few dozen or even hundred power plants spread across the country than to monitor every car for emissions conformance.
MM
--
I think the reaction is as follows:
2Al + 3H2O --> Al203 + 3H2
I think Al2O3 is standard aluminum oxide (white powdery substance).
In other words, pure aluminum metal is oxidized, and as a by-product, hydrogen is evolved. I always thought that the hydrogen-oxygen bond in water stored MORE potential energy than the aluminum-oxygen bond in Al2O3 (aluminum oxide), which would make the above reaction endothermic (meaning that it wouldn't happen without supplying some energy from somewhere else). I could be wrong, though. In any event, it is certainly possible to extract energy from aluminum, one way or another. It is not obvious that it is better to do so than to simply use hydrogen directly.
MM
--
Don't worry, photosynthesis will replace all the oxygen used in fuel combustion.
MM
--
Your implied criticism is entirely unwarranted. Christine Sloane obviously gets the idea that hydrogen is an energy storage system, much more than it is a new fuel. She calls attention to this fact in the statement you quote by emphasizing that before you can use hydrogen, you need to make hydrogen, and the energy for doing that has to come from somewhere else.
It is not the least bit trivial (from an energy standpoint) to "make" hydrogen out of water. You always have to put in more energy that you will get back when you use the hydrogen. So when she says "you can make hydrogen from almost anything" she is making a statement that is reasonably accurate but hopefully won't confuse the masses who don't have a good knowledge of thermodynamics and simple chemistry.
MM
--
I don't know exactly. It is an epidemiological question, so you can search in the life sciences database at any university library. Try JAMA, if they have some kind of on-line presence.
The most recent place I read about this is in the study guide for the General class HAM license. The section on RF exposure went over this issue summarily. As far as cancer goes, they said that any association between RF and cancer is extremely weak. I'm too lazy to look and see if there were specific studies sited or not.
The bottom line (for aspiring HAM's) is that when broadcasting at certain frequencies, and certain (high) powers, exposure could be an issue. But at low power, you could never get to the limits, no matter how close you are to the antenna.
MM
--
Ultimately, you are right. Of course at some point MS will get everyone switched. But I think there will be a LOT more reluctance on the part of big corporations to just go along with MS this time. Increasingly they need to see some real business cases for WHY they should upgrade, and, in particular, WHY NOW. I was only expressing skepticism about the timetable of the problem.
MM
--
Thanks for the info. Now I understand better.
Happy stargazing!
MM
--
Heh, heh.
Actually, the homework problems posted on comp.lang.c are pretty obviously recognizable, and no one ever gives easy answers. One guy, Chris Torek, IIRC, always finds some truly twisted, obfuscated snippet from God knows where and says here is the answer.
Anybody who turns in a Chris Torek solution might as well where a sign that says CHEATER.
MM
--
Hot-air soldering station? Proto-house? I don't think you need all that.
I am an EE (laid-off) but for the last two years I worked on designing SMT single-board computers. Very dense, 12-layer, Intel-based boards. I also had to bring up and debug them. And after we layed-off our technician, I had to do the re-work, too. The only thing you can't really re-work with a soldering iron is a BGA. Sometimes you can cut traces on the BGA itself, but that is a REAL pain.
I will grant you that a microscope is just about essential for really fine-pitch parts.
Also, devices with lots of pins can be a pain to remove if you don't have the right tools, but you can always bend all the pins up, one at a time, until the chip is free. Get as much solder off as you can using braid, first.
With up to eight-pin parts, you can often get them off with two soldering irons, one in each hand. Just glob solder on the pins until they are all connected together, then lift the part right off of the board.
And you can still make single- or double-sided boards yourself, same as you ever could. No need to go to a proto-house. As someone said earlier, just use zero-ohm resistors to jump over traces, and you'd be surprised what you can do on one or two layers.
MM
--
Hmmm. I don't know all that much about telescopes, but I did read a book about building your own. It seems to me that any scope which requires parabolic mirrors might be a bit tricky to build oneself. I believe that some mass-produced scopes DO use parabolic mirrors, don't they? Can you grind your own parabolic mirrors, or do you just stick to designs that use spherical grinds?
I'm just curious.
MM
--
I know what you mean. The people you are talking about are not really engineers deep down in their souls.
There were very few people in the EE classes I went to that seemed to want to learn. They just wanted to get grades so they could get a degree so they could get a job. And many of them HATED lab classes as much or even more than they hated the theoretical classes. Wrong major, if you ask me.
MM
--
Video would still be used as evidence. There is something called a chain of custody or something like that for evidence. I guess this basically means that the whereabouts of the evidence have to be accounted for at all times. This supposedly guarantees that evidence is not tampered with while in police possesion. So in the case you are talking about, the police would swear that the tape (or file or whatever) was taken from the video deck (or hard-drive or whatever) immediately after the crime, and not altered. Then it could be admitted as evidence.
Of course, if police conspire, they can invent or plant false evidence anyway, without the need to doctor video tape. For example, they could lie to a judge to get a search warrant, then plant false evidence (e.g., drugs) in someone's house. I don't think this happens very often because police are not any more evil than other people, and most people are not evil enough to BEAR FALSE WITNESS AGAINST THEIR NEIGHBORS.
MM
--
I'm not at all sure that corporations will be as willing to "upgrade" to XP and whatever follows it as they have been to make upgrades in the past.
I believe Win2K will be THE standard MS office OS for a long, long time. So the problem you are talking about may take more than 2 years to really hit home.
Just my $0.02
MM
--
Actually, there are whole eco-systems that seem to be built-up around the hydrothermal vents that have very little interaction with the rest of the world. Not just thermophillic bacteria, but weird crabs and worms and stuff, too.
;-)
And I believe a lot of bacteria can follow anaerobic metabolic pathways when they are in a reducing environment. Things that live in sludge and mud and scum.
That's why I think it is better to say that a nuclear (or other) cataclysm would "destroy life as we know it" rather than to say that it will "destroy all life on this planet." (Not that it makes much difference to us.) This planet has a very nasty infection of life, and I'm not sure what kind of medicine it would take to cure it.
MM
--