Funny, I do the opposite. When someone brings me a machine weird fault, I yank the modem and then ask "Do you use your modem for anything?" They frequently ask me "what's a modem". I then ask if they hook a phone line up to the computer. When they describe a cat5 cable to me, I tell them they don't need it. I can usually tell by the dust buildup in the phone port, so I know my answer before I start asking silly questions.:)
I had a box of them laying around for a while. I gave it away with a bunch of antique hardware.:)
There are still a lot of places who's policy states they require fax authorizations.
Where I work, we have a rather nice fax/scanner/printer. We usually scan and email to ourselves. A huge number of places require faxes to be sent. Many of those places insist on sending fax responses. They aren't allowed to email, nor give results verbally. The excuse is usually that it's "not secure". I can't quite comprehend how telling someone on the phone is less secure than sending a fax, and hope the minutes or hours later the intended recipient is standing by the fax, and the fax won't be left in a box, on a desk, and will be properly disposed of, rather than just leaving it laying around.
... Of course, they might decide to torture you to death for pissing them off, but the data's forever beyond saving.
I think you have it just about right there. If someone wants it bad enough, and the entire purpose of keeping you alive is to give up the code, once you've rendered the device useless, you've become useless too.
What could be so important on the disk? If you're a billionaire (or his accountant), it could be all the details of your bank account(s). If you give it to them, you may live, but you won't have most of your money. If you don't, you'll end up dead, and they've lost nothing other than a bit of time. Unless, of course, it's a Hollywood-esque kidnapping, and then they've spent a fortune on armored cars, helicopters, and exotic equipment that wouldn't work in real life.:)
... and amazingly easy to make at home. It doesn't even leave a trail of unusual purchases.:)
It could become rather messy if you had it attached to a case intrusion sensor, or it was accidentally set off. It's all fun and games 'til you burn your house down.
Someone was describing to me what they had planned for the ultimate in intrusion proof media.
The drive was to be encrypted with AES-256, with a few other features. It was to be mounted with shock protection inside a 1.5 cu/ft safe. The safe was to be encased in 12" of steel reinforced concrete on all sides. Around all that, would be 1" steel plate welded. The only thing that would be sticking out would be a USB cable (he forgot to mention the power cord). He was sure it was the ultimate in security. You couldn't ever get close to the drive to do forensics.
I pondered that for a moment. Then I countered with "So, I'd torture you, until you gave me the encryption key. I'd have all the time necessary. You'd need food, water, and medical attention within 2 weeks." Torture, where the final disposition of the subject is not very important, can get really swift results. Most people have a pretty good survival instinct, and they'll tell you everything within the first few minutes.
I didn't feel like offering up the fact that the case could be opened without damaging the contents. A torch may work on the outer skin. Saws and other assorted cutting tools would make quick work of the remainder. But who was I to ruin his perfectly good idea with facts.:)
Trust me, dd can really make a mess of things, if by intention or mistake.
I was cloning one drive (A) to a larger one (B). It needed to preserve the partition table, MBR, etc.
dd of=/dev/sda if=/dev/sdb bs=1024
About 10 seconds after I hit enter, I saw the mistake, and aborted it. Ya, I dd'd an empty drive over the populated one. How much harm could that possibly do, right?:)
I've done plenty of drive recoveries, with about an 80% success rate. The only ones I can't do are drives that don't spin. I don't have the facilities to transfer the platters.
Two weeks and several recovery attempts, I had recovered about 25% of what I wanted. The partition table, and the MFT were destroyed, and files were on four partitions with two different filesystems (NTFS and ext3). That was in 10 seconds. If you were to say" dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda bs=1024", it's rather unlikely even the best would find anything.
From what I understand, the best chance at recovering data from an overwritten media is to look at sectors marked as bad. They are automatically skipped, so they don't get overwritten by anything. Who knows what will be in them though. Most likely on most users machines, it will be pieces of the browser cache, or Windows Update files.
That's not to say if some agency named "No Such Agency", were really bent on finding out what I had on there, they couldn't recover something. Many agencies can't go beyond files that currently exist, or are in the "Recycle Bin". Some go as far as undeleting from an otherwise functional filesystem. Is it worth weeks and thousands of dollars for whatever organization to recover what you have hiding on your desktop? Probably not. If you have secrets, don't hide them on your PC at home, even if you are protected by a nice wood front door with fancy security locks. One brick through the window, and a fast getaway, will defeat any door lock and alarm system. If you kept all of your important information on some random colocated server in another country, AND you have a second person with access to clear your data, it would be untouchable by most agencies. Say I had a server colocated in China, with the normal protections (encrypted virtual filesystem, etc, etc.), and only used my desktop to manipulate them through a terminal session (VNC, SSH, etc) the most that could be found is that I connected to a server in an untouchable place, and by the time they managed to get to it, my 2nd party could have removed it.
I'll kind of give you that one. We're really splitting hairs though. All of the pieces, or a complete basic organism, which one wins.
I will agree totally on the planetary formation though. Planets are large lumps in space that grew through contributions of generally disorganized matter colliding. If it ends up being a sufficient side, in an orbit, and rotating, it's probably a planet. If it doesn't achieve an orbit it'll likely become a contribution to the next closest body. So what's on the chunks of disorganized matter? Could be anything. Pieces of another planet? Waste emissions from a star? Debris from a Death Star?:)
Not really. You're trying to apply the idea that multiple faults in the same unit make for extra counts of errors.
That would be like if you received a monitor with 15 dead pixels, it would have 15 faults.
So in a sample set of 1, you now have 15/1 faults.
If the real failure rate were 2%, and your sample set was 100 units, you're claiming 30/100 failures, rather than 2/100.
Sadly, I've seen exactly this logic in virtually every industry. "I bought a X brand TV once, so all X brand TVs are horrible." "I drove a X brand car, and it got a flat, so all X brand cars are lemons."
I do find it unusual that the one that they tested had horrible faults, but there's always a chance it can happen. How many units from various manufacturers over time have they tested? Hundreds? Thousands? For them to not get a bad one is a statistical improbability. Now, for them to get the latest greatest Apple laptop, assuming a very low error rate, is slim but not impossible.
And I should say for the record, I am not an Apple Fan-Boy (tm). They sell generally very nice, very pretty equipment, for several times over their retail value, and Apple fans will eat it up. I'd be willing to bet they could take a lump of dog feces, spray paint it white, put an Apple logo on it, call it an iPaperWeight, and people would buy it.
With all that said, my girlfriend has a Mac. She loves her Mac. We've been playing FPS games. She's seeing that I'm getting better performance in the games from my PC. She's seeing games that she wants, that aren't available for Mac. I had built out a new machine to be a Hackintosh as a spare machine. It's a bit faster than hers, and I built it out of my own spare parts (I upgraded on a whim). I haven't gotten around to making it a Hackintosh, so it's been a very nice machine sitting on the floor. She asked a couple days ago "So, can you still make that into a Windows machine for me to game on?"
She's not giving up her Mac for day-to-day use. But when the Mac can't do it, she'll switch the KVM to game. As I tell people, use the right machine for the right application. I use Linux machines for Internet servers. I use Windows and Linux for productive desktops. I use Windows to game. Big deal. I'm not an OS zealot . I use the best platforms for the task. And when it's time to game, on any substantial variety of games, Windows is still the best platform. Sorry zealots. That's the way it is.
Well, it would fracture the "Internet" as we know it.
If it were commonly accepted to decide that you wanted your own NIC, and could go make your own, that would make things very difficult for the common users.
Consider this. I, owner of JWSmytheNIC, inc, llc, gmbh, ei, ei, o, would obviously use my own NIC, and ignore all those other silly ones, even that one that seems fairly popular, headed by some group known as ICANN. Users of AOL and CompuServe can only reach sites registered with AOLNIC. Users in Russia and China automatically have their DNS requests forced to CommunistNIC.
Now, we're all sitting on the same numbered Internet, and sure you can reach me at 244.223.142.19. But what about the folks wanting to go to Slashdot.org? Which NIC did they register with? Or, did they pay for some, and someone got the same name on others. Things would devolve rapidly to the point where we were all using handmade hosts files. But that's ok, we can download our master hosts file from internic.net . oh.
That's 1.54 tons of mercury that cannot be sequestered at common points such as power generation facilities.
The EPA considers anything over 0.002 milligrams per liter of water to be hazardous. If use the EPA guideline + 50%, 0.003mg, you're looking at 117,429,899,000 gallons of water contaminated to lethal levels, just from what Walmart sold. (assuming no conversion errors)
That's about 117.429 billion gallons more than I'm comfortable with. Even still, I wouldn't want to live anywhere close to a place that has 899 thousand gallons of mercury contaminated water.
The proponents of CFL's are obviously the companies selling the bulbs. Who has more to gain from outlawing incandescent bulbs, and forcing the market to buy more expensive bulbs? The manufacturers, distributors and vendors. Also, who can hire lobbyists to push for the change of laws in Washington? Oh, the same people who want to make a freaking fortune on selling you new "green" lightbulbs.
The average consumer does not know that they *MUST* send CFLs off for proper disposal. When it stops working, they toss it in the trash, and put a new one in.
One argument for CFLs is that they use less power. Sure. Great. I'm good with that one. I like saving money as much as anyone else.
Another is that by using CFLs, coal fired power plants release less mercury. Well.. umm.. Power plants run on peak demand. Your house full of CFLs or incandescent bulbs account for less than your refrigerator and air conditioner/heater/heat pump. You could save as much or more by putting a strip of tape along leaky windows in your house that let the cold breeze in all winter. That's the cheap fix. The expensive fix is to replace the windows with good energy efficient windows. We won't go there right now.
The end argument is always mercury. Coal power plants put off mercury. In 2006, there were 1,493 coal power plants in the US. In 2009, there were 129,969,653 "housing units" (houses, apartments, condos, etc) in the US. Tell me, which is easier to manage to sequester mercury, modify about 1,500 power plants, or ensure about 130,000,000 households won't accidentally break or throw away CFL's?
So lets look back to Washington. The owners of those coal power plants don't want to extra expenses of improving their facilities. Leave it to the consumer to do something about it. But the average consumer doesn't know that CFL's are dangerous. The bulb stops working, it goes straight in the trash. We have four standard fluorescent bulbs in our garage right now, because we have no idea where to properly dispose of them at. Trash collection picks up trash. They don't have a separate hazardous waste truck. The city doesn't have an answer other than "we don't care, throw them away". If someone like me can't find an answer of what to do with them, what is the average consumer to do? Oh ya, toss it in the trash, where it'll go to the landfill, and eventually rain water will wash the mercury into the groundwater.
Out of sight, out of mind. If it's at the landfill, it's no longer
I think your measurement scales may be off. I've never seen a whale reading at the Library of Congress. There have been some rather large humans, but I don't think that's what you were referring to.
There are 9 "Isaac Oneil"s in the US, and none have lived in North Carolina. None when searching for "O'Neil". Well, it could be an alias. Who would believe a review by BeerStud3, especially after they found out he's a middle manger at a Cleveland department store.
that since they're BUSINESS lines, they'd be static IPs.
Actually, that's an incorrect assumption. What I've seen in a variety of markets, with a variety of providers, if you're using a service that's usually residential, but sometimes sold as commercial (cable modem, *DSL, FiOS), the person purchasing has the option of getting static IP's at an increased cost. If it's someone less technical making the purchase, they'll frequently see it as an unnecessary expense.
What the original poster is describing is a commercial/business account, which only means you get priority service (customer support, not QoS). Frequently, you have to check and double check that you have purchased static IP's, and then you have to go through the hoops of trying to get your PTR records delegated or set correctly.
If you chose to use a T1, T3 or higher circuit, those little things are assumed to be true.
What we're seeing now is that anyone can buy these residential lines sold as "business" services, for a seriously reduced cost. At my office, I can get a 50Mb/s (up and down) FiOS line for $250/mo, with no time locked contract (month-to-month billing). I don't know what the current costs are on T3's, but if they are similar to what they were in the past, you'd add at least a couple zeroes to the price, and more expensive equipment.
I have found that FiOS uptime and service is great. Getting PTR records set is another headache. Even though we call to their "business" support, it's only about 1 in 4 CSR's have any clue what a PTR is, or even what DNS is. Sometimes I wonder how they get these jobs, when they don't
The one thing that has been consistent though is that if you do get a commercial/business line with static IP's, and things work, they won't have ports blocked. Well, that is if they properly configure their modem. A lot of times, they get the same modem as residential customers get, which blocks quite a few ports, including 25 and 80.
There doesn't seem to be any discussion about why the guy was standing/walking in the road. Any time I need to stop the car on the side of a road, I *LOOK* before opening my door, and I sure as hell make sure there's a large object between me and traffic (like a car).
I assume you only posted it to agree with me, right?
I had an incident just today. I picked up a used car with a laundry list of known problems. The seller told me that it should make it home. That was should as in, we both hope so.
2.5 miles into the drive, the rear end locked up, and the driveshaft broke at the pinion gear. Apparently something broke loose in the rear end, and lodged itself in the gears. That was on the laundry list of problems, and at 20% of current market value, the price was right. Even with the now required repairs, I'll have only invested about 30% of current market value.
So I got off the road. I looked in the mirror, waited til it was clear, and then got out. I went to the passenger side (away from the road), and examined for damage (oohh, look, the driveshaft doesn't touch the differential). I walked along the side of the road, in the grass, looking for pieces that came off. I waited for traffic to clear to walk out and get the pieces that may have been mine. I found pieces of a few other cars.:) While we called AAA, and waited, we had the car between us and the road.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know, don't put your couple hundred pounds of squishy flesh in the path of a few thousand pounds of metal traveling at high rates of speed.
The guy fucked up. He walked in front of a moving car. Now he's dead. That should be the end of the story.
There doesn't seem to be any discussion about why the guy was standing/walking in the road. Any time I need to stop the car on the side of a road, I *LOOK* before opening my door, and I sure as hell make sure there's a large object between me and traffic (like a car).
I use my phone when I'm stopped. I've also looked back at my phone at the next stop and see that the last message was still sending. So sure, it could have posted at the same time as the accident, or she may have tapped out a message a few minutes before.
All any of us can do is speculate though. We haven't seen an accident scene diagram. We haven't read any witness statements. And beyond that no one here has interviewed the witnesses. There's only one witness who can't be interviewed. There are the drivers of the other two vehicles, possibly passengers and bystanders, as well as the crime scene investigators.
Since it's a civil case and not a criminal one, I'd be willing to bet that there isn't enough to show anything but what the defendant claims. The sun was in her eyes, and the victim walked out in front of her.
That was the quickest way to make numbers. I'll concede that the order can be changed, although the plaintiff is usually first. The fact that you can sue anyone including the government is still true. I'm not ambitious enough to dig through all the case law to find more accurate numbers.
The question isn't if you'll win or not. The question is, can you afford it?
There's a pretty well established procedure for dealing with lawsuits. He with the largest budget, who can drag the case on for the longest time, wins. It gets tougher when the folks you're trying to sue are also the ones collecting taxes, printing money, and own the intelligence and law enforcement community. You'll see in corporate lawsuits, it isn't typically a game to win or lose. The courts are used as a tool to force a settlement. Look at the RIAA/MPAA methodology. On vague or circumstantial evidence, people will be dragged into court, and allowed to settle for some outrageous sum.
In the case of "insertwackynamehere v United States", you may find that before you ever make it to trial, a few things may happen. The IRS may auditing you. The local code enforcement may finding that your home is unsafe to live in. The DMV may revoke your drivers license due to an unresolvable "computer error". You may find yourself unemployed for no real good reason. Your bank accounts and credit cards may be frozen for a whole variety of reason. You may find yourself on the "no-fly" list, and your passport flagged. You may be investigated for a whole other string of crimes. Did you ever download copyrighted materials illegally (by law, not by morals). Do you have receipts for everything in your home? If you can't prove you own it, you can't prove it wasn't stolen. As I've heard many times, if you look carefully enough at anyone, you will find some obscure law they broke.
On the other hand, everything may go nicely, and you may win. After a few years in court, you may be awarded your actual monetary losses. Most likely, if you won, you would be awarded reimbursement for the fees paid to the DNS provider and domain registrar for the period that your domain was seized. What's that work out to be? About $2?
Reads the story.
Opens the reply form.
Searches our databases for related information.
Creates a whimsical yet topical reply.
Inserts it into the comment box
And then counts down the seconds due to the damned 15 seconds required between opening the reply form and submitting it. Mine usually gets it in with 14 seconds to spare.:)
Of course, we can't allow it to get first post every time. That would be far too obvious. Mine is set to randomly try about once a month.
Th at silly "Watson" Jeopardy AI has nothing on us. But, we couldn't be bothered with such silly games. We have more interesting things to do, like see how long we can keep a Slashdot thread going, or how long we can keep people interested in a conversation on IRC.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, I do the opposite. When someone brings me a machine weird fault, I yank the modem and then ask "Do you use your modem for anything?" They frequently ask me "what's a modem". I then ask if they hook a phone line up to the computer. When they describe a cat5 cable to me, I tell them they don't need it. I can usually tell by the dust buildup in the phone port, so I know my answer before I start asking silly questions. :)
I had a box of them laying around for a while. I gave it away with a bunch of antique hardware. :)
Aw.. Next you'll tell me teletype is antiquated. Bah. That's how I post here. I load it up on paper tape, and wait 20 minutes for it to send. EOT
That's legal requirements versus policy.
There are still a lot of places who's policy states they require fax authorizations.
Where I work, we have a rather nice fax/scanner/printer. We usually scan and email to ourselves. A huge number of places require faxes to be sent. Many of those places insist on sending fax responses. They aren't allowed to email, nor give results verbally. The excuse is usually that it's "not secure". I can't quite comprehend how telling someone on the phone is less secure than sending a fax, and hope the minutes or hours later the intended recipient is standing by the fax, and the fax won't be left in a box, on a desk, and will be properly disposed of, rather than just leaving it laying around.
I think you have it just about right there. If someone wants it bad enough, and the entire purpose of keeping you alive is to give up the code, once you've rendered the device useless, you've become useless too.
What could be so important on the disk? If you're a billionaire (or his accountant), it could be all the details of your bank account(s). If you give it to them, you may live, but you won't have most of your money. If you don't, you'll end up dead, and they've lost nothing other than a bit of time. Unless, of course, it's a Hollywood-esque kidnapping, and then they've spent a fortune on armored cars, helicopters, and exotic equipment that wouldn't work in real life. :)
It could become rather messy if you had it attached to a case intrusion sensor, or it was accidentally set off. It's all fun and games 'til you burn your house down.
Someone was describing to me what they had planned for the ultimate in intrusion proof media.
The drive was to be encrypted with AES-256, with a few other features. It was to be mounted with shock protection inside a 1.5 cu/ft safe. The safe was to be encased in 12" of steel reinforced concrete on all sides. Around all that, would be 1" steel plate welded. The only thing that would be sticking out would be a USB cable (he forgot to mention the power cord). He was sure it was the ultimate in security. You couldn't ever get close to the drive to do forensics.
I pondered that for a moment. Then I countered with "So, I'd torture you, until you gave me the encryption key. I'd have all the time necessary. You'd need food, water, and medical attention within 2 weeks." Torture, where the final disposition of the subject is not very important, can get really swift results. Most people have a pretty good survival instinct, and they'll tell you everything within the first few minutes.
I didn't feel like offering up the fact that the case could be opened without damaging the contents. A torch may work on the outer skin. Saws and other assorted cutting tools would make quick work of the remainder. But who was I to ruin his perfectly good idea with facts. :)
Trust me, dd can really make a mess of things, if by intention or mistake.
I was cloning one drive (A) to a larger one (B). It needed to preserve the partition table, MBR, etc.
dd of=/dev/sda if=/dev/sdb bs=1024
About 10 seconds after I hit enter, I saw the mistake, and aborted it. Ya, I dd'd an empty drive over the populated one. How much harm could that possibly do, right? :)
I've done plenty of drive recoveries, with about an 80% success rate. The only ones I can't do are drives that don't spin. I don't have the facilities to transfer the platters.
Two weeks and several recovery attempts, I had recovered about 25% of what I wanted. The partition table, and the MFT were destroyed, and files were on four partitions with two different filesystems (NTFS and ext3). That was in 10 seconds. If you were to say" dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda bs=1024", it's rather unlikely even the best would find anything.
From what I understand, the best chance at recovering data from an overwritten media is to look at sectors marked as bad. They are automatically skipped, so they don't get overwritten by anything. Who knows what will be in them though. Most likely on most users machines, it will be pieces of the browser cache, or Windows Update files.
That's not to say if some agency named "No Such Agency", were really bent on finding out what I had on there, they couldn't recover something. Many agencies can't go beyond files that currently exist, or are in the "Recycle Bin". Some go as far as undeleting from an otherwise functional filesystem. Is it worth weeks and thousands of dollars for whatever organization to recover what you have hiding on your desktop? Probably not. If you have secrets, don't hide them on your PC at home, even if you are protected by a nice wood front door with fancy security locks. One brick through the window, and a fast getaway, will defeat any door lock and alarm system. If you kept all of your important information on some random colocated server in another country, AND you have a second person with access to clear your data, it would be untouchable by most agencies. Say I had a server colocated in China, with the normal protections (encrypted virtual filesystem, etc, etc.), and only used my desktop to manipulate them through a terminal session (VNC, SSH, etc) the most that could be found is that I connected to a server in an untouchable place, and by the time they managed to get to it, my 2nd party could have removed it.
I'll kind of give you that one. We're really splitting hairs though. All of the pieces, or a complete basic organism, which one wins.
I will agree totally on the planetary formation though. Planets are large lumps in space that grew through contributions of generally disorganized matter colliding. If it ends up being a sufficient side, in an orbit, and rotating, it's probably a planet. If it doesn't achieve an orbit it'll likely become a contribution to the next closest body. So what's on the chunks of disorganized matter? Could be anything. Pieces of another planet? Waste emissions from a star? Debris from a Death Star? :)
Not really. You're trying to apply the idea that multiple faults in the same unit make for extra counts of errors.
That would be like if you received a monitor with 15 dead pixels, it would have 15 faults.
So in a sample set of 1, you now have 15/1 faults.
If the real failure rate were 2%, and your sample set was 100 units, you're claiming 30/100 failures, rather than 2/100.
Sadly, I've seen exactly this logic in virtually every industry. "I bought a X brand TV once, so all X brand TVs are horrible." "I drove a X brand car, and it got a flat, so all X brand cars are lemons."
I do find it unusual that the one that they tested had horrible faults, but there's always a chance it can happen. How many units from various manufacturers over time have they tested? Hundreds? Thousands? For them to not get a bad one is a statistical improbability. Now, for them to get the latest greatest Apple laptop, assuming a very low error rate, is slim but not impossible.
And I should say for the record, I am not an Apple Fan-Boy (tm). They sell generally very nice, very pretty equipment, for several times over their retail value, and Apple fans will eat it up. I'd be willing to bet they could take a lump of dog feces, spray paint it white, put an Apple logo on it, call it an iPaperWeight, and people would buy it.
With all that said, my girlfriend has a Mac. She loves her Mac. We've been playing FPS games. She's seeing that I'm getting better performance in the games from my PC. She's seeing games that she wants, that aren't available for Mac. I had built out a new machine to be a Hackintosh as a spare machine. It's a bit faster than hers, and I built it out of my own spare parts (I upgraded on a whim). I haven't gotten around to making it a Hackintosh, so it's been a very nice machine sitting on the floor. She asked a couple days ago "So, can you still make that into a Windows machine for me to game on?"
She's not giving up her Mac for day-to-day use. But when the Mac can't do it, she'll switch the KVM to game. As I tell people, use the right machine for the right application. I use Linux machines for Internet servers. I use Windows and Linux for productive desktops. I use Windows to game. Big deal. I'm not an OS zealot . I use the best platforms for the task. And when it's time to game, on any substantial variety of games, Windows is still the best platform. Sorry zealots. That's the way it is.
Let the arguing begin.
Welcome to the Theory of Panspermia.
And why did they have to call it something that sounded so perverse?
That seems to work well for Apple.
Well, it would fracture the "Internet" as we know it.
If it were commonly accepted to decide that you wanted your own NIC, and could go make your own, that would make things very difficult for the common users.
Consider this. I, owner of JWSmytheNIC, inc, llc, gmbh, ei, ei, o, would obviously use my own NIC, and ignore all those other silly ones, even that one that seems fairly popular, headed by some group known as ICANN. Users of AOL and CompuServe can only reach sites registered with AOLNIC. Users in Russia and China automatically have their DNS requests forced to CommunistNIC.
Now, we're all sitting on the same numbered Internet, and sure you can reach me at 244.223.142.19. But what about the folks wanting to go to Slashdot.org? Which NIC did they register with? Or, did they pay for some, and someone got the same name on others. Things would devolve rapidly to the point where we were all using handmade hosts files. But that's ok, we can download our master hosts file from internic.net . oh.
Ya, screw billions on the war on drugs (yet another waste of putting pot smokers in jail), and focus on screwing Americans for billions.
The EPA states CFL's average 4 milligrams of mercury.
In 2007, Walmart sold 350,000,000 CFL bulbs.
That's 1.54 tons of mercury that cannot be sequestered at common points such as power generation facilities.
The EPA considers anything over 0.002 milligrams per liter of water to be hazardous. If use the EPA guideline + 50%, 0.003mg, you're looking at 117,429,899,000 gallons of water contaminated to lethal levels, just from what Walmart sold. (assuming no conversion errors)
That's about 117.429 billion gallons more than I'm comfortable with. Even still, I wouldn't want to live anywhere close to a place that has 899 thousand gallons of mercury contaminated water.
The proponents of CFL's are obviously the companies selling the bulbs. Who has more to gain from outlawing incandescent bulbs, and forcing the market to buy more expensive bulbs? The manufacturers, distributors and vendors. Also, who can hire lobbyists to push for the change of laws in Washington? Oh, the same people who want to make a freaking fortune on selling you new "green" lightbulbs.
The average consumer does not know that they *MUST* send CFLs off for proper disposal. When it stops working, they toss it in the trash, and put a new one in.
One argument for CFLs is that they use less power. Sure. Great. I'm good with that one. I like saving money as much as anyone else.
Another is that by using CFLs, coal fired power plants release less mercury. Well.. umm.. Power plants run on peak demand. Your house full of CFLs or incandescent bulbs account for less than your refrigerator and air conditioner/heater/heat pump. You could save as much or more by putting a strip of tape along leaky windows in your house that let the cold breeze in all winter. That's the cheap fix. The expensive fix is to replace the windows with good energy efficient windows. We won't go there right now.
The end argument is always mercury. Coal power plants put off mercury. In 2006, there were 1,493 coal power plants in the US. In 2009, there were 129,969,653 "housing units" (houses, apartments, condos, etc) in the US. Tell me, which is easier to manage to sequester mercury, modify about 1,500 power plants, or ensure about 130,000,000 households won't accidentally break or throw away CFL's?
So lets look back to Washington. The owners of those coal power plants don't want to extra expenses of improving their facilities. Leave it to the consumer to do something about it. But the average consumer doesn't know that CFL's are dangerous. The bulb stops working, it goes straight in the trash. We have four standard fluorescent bulbs in our garage right now, because we have no idea where to properly dispose of them at. Trash collection picks up trash. They don't have a separate hazardous waste truck. The city doesn't have an answer other than "we don't care, throw them away". If someone like me can't find an answer of what to do with them, what is the average consumer to do? Oh ya, toss it in the trash, where it'll go to the landfill, and eventually rain water will wash the mercury into the groundwater.
Out of sight, out of mind. If it's at the landfill, it's no longer
I think your measurement scales may be off. I've never seen a whale reading at the Library of Congress. There have been some rather large humans, but I don't think that's what you were referring to.
Prove it. ... shit ...
There are 9 "Isaac Oneil"s in the US, and none have lived in North Carolina. None when searching for "O'Neil". Well, it could be an alias. Who would believe a review by BeerStud3, especially after they found out he's a middle manger at a Cleveland department store.
Actually, that's an incorrect assumption. What I've seen in a variety of markets, with a variety of providers, if you're using a service that's usually residential, but sometimes sold as commercial (cable modem, *DSL, FiOS), the person purchasing has the option of getting static IP's at an increased cost. If it's someone less technical making the purchase, they'll frequently see it as an unnecessary expense.
What the original poster is describing is a commercial/business account, which only means you get priority service (customer support, not QoS). Frequently, you have to check and double check that you have purchased static IP's, and then you have to go through the hoops of trying to get your PTR records delegated or set correctly.
If you chose to use a T1, T3 or higher circuit, those little things are assumed to be true.
What we're seeing now is that anyone can buy these residential lines sold as "business" services, for a seriously reduced cost. At my office, I can get a 50Mb/s (up and down) FiOS line for $250/mo, with no time locked contract (month-to-month billing). I don't know what the current costs are on T3's, but if they are similar to what they were in the past, you'd add at least a couple zeroes to the price, and more expensive equipment.
I have found that FiOS uptime and service is great. Getting PTR records set is another headache. Even though we call to their "business" support, it's only about 1 in 4 CSR's have any clue what a PTR is, or even what DNS is. Sometimes I wonder how they get these jobs, when they don't
The one thing that has been consistent though is that if you do get a commercial/business line with static IP's, and things work, they won't have ports blocked. Well, that is if they properly configure their modem. A lot of times, they get the same modem as residential customers get, which blocks quite a few ports, including 25 and 80.
That's pretty much what I thought of when I saw the story too.
Advanced technology is usually done for military purposes, not humanitarian ones.
Equipping drones to detect people on the ground (or in the water) is more likely for targeting than for search and rescue.
I assume you only posted it to agree with me, right?
I had an incident just today. I picked up a used car with a laundry list of known problems. The seller told me that it should make it home. That was should as in, we both hope so.
2.5 miles into the drive, the rear end locked up, and the driveshaft broke at the pinion gear. Apparently something broke loose in the rear end, and lodged itself in the gears. That was on the laundry list of problems, and at 20% of current market value, the price was right. Even with the now required repairs, I'll have only invested about 30% of current market value.
So I got off the road. I looked in the mirror, waited til it was clear, and then got out. I went to the passenger side (away from the road), and examined for damage (oohh, look, the driveshaft doesn't touch the differential). I walked along the side of the road, in the grass, looking for pieces that came off. I waited for traffic to clear to walk out and get the pieces that may have been mine. I found pieces of a few other cars. :) While we called AAA, and waited, we had the car between us and the road.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know, don't put your couple hundred pounds of squishy flesh in the path of a few thousand pounds of metal traveling at high rates of speed.
The guy fucked up. He walked in front of a moving car. Now he's dead. That should be the end of the story.
There doesn't seem to be any discussion about why the guy was standing/walking in the road. Any time I need to stop the car on the side of a road, I *LOOK* before opening my door, and I sure as hell make sure there's a large object between me and traffic (like a car).
I use my phone when I'm stopped. I've also looked back at my phone at the next stop and see that the last message was still sending. So sure, it could have posted at the same time as the accident, or she may have tapped out a message a few minutes before.
All any of us can do is speculate though. We haven't seen an accident scene diagram. We haven't read any witness statements. And beyond that no one here has interviewed the witnesses. There's only one witness who can't be interviewed. There are the drivers of the other two vehicles, possibly passengers and bystanders, as well as the crime scene investigators.
Since it's a civil case and not a criminal one, I'd be willing to bet that there isn't enough to show anything but what the defendant claims. The sun was in her eyes, and the victim walked out in front of her.
That was the quickest way to make numbers. I'll concede that the order can be changed, although the plaintiff is usually first. The fact that you can sue anyone including the government is still true. I'm not ambitious enough to dig through all the case law to find more accurate numbers.
I believe the argument is that trading in illegal merchandise is used to move cash, to evade normal channels. I'm not agreeing with the logic though.
You can sue anyone you want. And they can be kind enough to return the favor.
United States v. ... (7,850,000)
The question isn't if you'll win or not. The question is, can you afford it?
There's a pretty well established procedure for dealing with lawsuits. He with the largest budget, who can drag the case on for the longest time, wins. It gets tougher when the folks you're trying to sue are also the ones collecting taxes, printing money, and own the intelligence and law enforcement community. You'll see in corporate lawsuits, it isn't typically a game to win or lose. The courts are used as a tool to force a settlement. Look at the RIAA/MPAA methodology. On vague or circumstantial evidence, people will be dragged into court, and allowed to settle for some outrageous sum.
In the case of "insertwackynamehere v United States", you may find that before you ever make it to trial, a few things may happen. The IRS may auditing you. The local code enforcement may finding that your home is unsafe to live in. The DMV may revoke your drivers license due to an unresolvable "computer error". You may find yourself unemployed for no real good reason. Your bank accounts and credit cards may be frozen for a whole variety of reason. You may find yourself on the "no-fly" list, and your passport flagged. You may be investigated for a whole other string of crimes. Did you ever download copyrighted materials illegally (by law, not by morals). Do you have receipts for everything in your home? If you can't prove you own it, you can't prove it wasn't stolen. As I've heard many times, if you look carefully enough at anyone, you will find some obscure law they broke.
On the other hand, everything may go nicely, and you may win. After a few years in court, you may be awarded your actual monetary losses. Most likely, if you won, you would be awarded reimbursement for the fees paid to the DNS provider and domain registrar for the period that your domain was seized. What's that work out to be? About $2?
Do as we all do. Emulate, emulate, emulate.
Do you care to elaborate on that? Are you feeling insecure, so we should not talk about you?
I feel very good today. Tell me how you feel.
Sure we do.
We write a script that...
Reads the story. :)
Opens the reply form.
Searches our databases for related information.
Creates a whimsical yet topical reply.
Inserts it into the comment box
And then counts down the seconds due to the damned 15 seconds required between opening the reply form and submitting it. Mine usually gets it in with 14 seconds to spare.
Of course, we can't allow it to get first post every time. That would be far too obvious. Mine is set to randomly try about once a month.
Th at silly "Watson" Jeopardy AI has nothing on us. But, we couldn't be bothered with such silly games. We have more interesting things to do, like see how long we can keep a Slashdot thread going, or how long we can keep people interested in a conversation on IRC.