While that was funny, and I have so little truck with the current state of the GOP (I'm a lifelong Republican) that I may abstain from voting for the first time in almost 30 years as a voter, let's not forget that the most draconian of the proposed requirements come not from Republicans, but from Democrats.
The trouble with GW is comes not from his being a Republican, but from being a false Republican and a false conservative. Look at his track record and the kinds of things he supports; these are things a leftist would do. I've lived in a communist country, and these rules sound eerily familiar; it;s how things just work in those places. You assume you're always being watched and your communications are always being monitored, because they usually were. Crypto was illegal there, although there was an exception for foreigners on business or tourism.
So when you vote this year, think about what you might really be voting for if you vote for (Obama|Clinton). A regime even worse than the one we have now.
I don't have any good answer to that, because I think we're screwed no matter what we do. McCain sucks less than Clinton or Obama, but he still sucks. If everyone would think about how much these so-called "mainstream" candidates all suck, maybe some actual reform would begin and we could start returning the country to what the framers of the Constitution envisioned. We sure don't have it now, when we're edging closer to a police state daily:(
A few days after this thread, I came across the following stats that were provided by one of our customers (I don't know who, it was anonymized before reaching me). 99.7% of 7 million attempted messages were filtered, 0.3 percent were delivered. I don't have a false positive number for these, but zero wouldn't surprise me. Our FP rate is consistently either the lowest in the industry or second lowest (we really only have one competitor on FP rate; some months we're best, some months they're best, and we're always very close together). WRT the very low virus detection rate, it could be that they are not buying our A/V service, or the viruses were just all stopped by other edge blocks. That's not unusual.
Brag? Sure, why not? I think I'll sneer at 95% now;-)
You're proud of 95% efficacy? I work for one of the well-known anti-spam companies, and if our efficacy *fell* to 95% that would be considered an emergency. Our overall efficacy is >99% and the spam categories I manage are closing in on five nines.
I hear that. I have a MacBook Pro that's about 15 months old now and my boss has a brand new one. His has a glossy screen and mine has matte, and there's no way I'd trade him, even though his MBP is a better machine in every respect except for the glossy screen.
I would say this really depends on the users. At my current employer, engineering, sysops, QA, etc. (the technically skilled, basically) are allowed to pretty much do whatever we want. The overwhelming majority of engineering here uses Macs, and most of the rest are BSD or Linux. I have a MacBook Pro, and run Linux in VMWare Fusion, in addition. If I really wanted to, I could install Linux natively. That would be an self-supported configuration and I'd be on my own if it didn't work (IT support would be limited to reinstalling OS X), but I could do it if I wanted to.
At my previous employer, pretty much anyone was allowed to install whatever OS they wanted to, and most of engineering, support, sysops, QA, etc., there was running a Linux distro. No standard one, just use whatever floats your boat.
This was very good for productivity, and I'm not aware of any problems arising from it at either place. However, if typical end user types were allowed to install whatever on their machines it would be a mess. My wife (the only Windows user in my house, and someone who neither is nor even wants to be computer-competent) recently complained that her Thinkpad was very sluggish. I examined it and found over 100 different pieces of crapware. It all seemed to have arrived in March when she installed a few "free" games. Without mentioning it to me, of course. I reiterated my previous admonishments about not installing software unless I've vetted it first. This time, I think she'll actually go along with that. I was up until 3:00 AM fixing the machine, detailed what I found, and the speed difference was very noticeable.
An IT department would be nuts to let someone like that have carte blanche on their machine, but I think letting the technically competent do pretty much whatever they want, with the caveats that A) You have to be able to get your work done, and B) We only support a given list of apps and OSes; if you go beyond that, you're on your own. In my experience, it's unquestionably good for productivity and morale to let the technically competent run whatever software suits them.
Movie-goers who take detailed notes during a movie to later re-sell them for a profit are usually called "reviewers." A studio wouldn't have an ice cube's chance in hell of winning a lawsuit against a reviewer who published a movie review. Both the reviewer and the paper profit, and that's totally fair. There's nothing wrong with selling your lecture notes, either. Moreover, in every class I took in college, the lecture was sufficiently derived from the course textbook (none of which were written by the prof teaching the course) that there's no reasonable way a claim of infringement could stand up in court.
Heh. I'm a former Microsoft employee and I have loads of negative things to say about Microsoft. Some positive things, too, but the negative list is far longer and contains more "heavyweight" items. He may be under heavy NDA, but OTOH I never signed anything regarding not saying bad things about Microsoft after I left, and I was a manager there, FWIW. Probably, as others have suggested, he doesn't want to piss off Microsoft by saying negative - if truthful - things about Microsoft or its products.
On the third hand, so to speak, I will tell anyone who asks what I thing is good and bad about MSFT, and I don't mind saying that in the relative anonymity of/. either, but I'm not sure I would want to put my negative opinions up in a well-read forum with my real name attached. MSFT is a 900 gorilla with 1000 pound lawyers and by far the most paranoid place I ever worked, so I can't say as I blame the guy.
The case that Linux as we know it wouldn't exist without Red Hat is also pretty compelling. Keep in mind that Linux is just a kernel, and without the efforts of early distro packagers like the Yyggdrasil team, Patrick Volkerding, Debian, and Red Hat, almost no one would be using Linux today.
If you want to argue that distros that came later got where they are mostly by standing on the shoulders of giants, you'd have a much better case. But by picking on Red Hat, you're far wide of the mark. Linux as we know it would not exist without Red Hat. Considering what a relatively small company Red Hat really is, I think there's a much better case that they've contributed out of proportion to their profits, especially when you consider the cases where Red Hat has bought other companies, then turned around and GPLed their products.
I think you'd be really hard pressed to find a company that has contributed more GPL-licensed code than Red Hat. Even IBM probably doesn't measure up on that point, plus we have to take into consideration the fact that if companies like Red Hat weren't releasing everything they write under the GPL since their foundation in the 1990s, it's highly unlikely that IBM and other traditional closed-source companies would have ever come around to releasing *some* of their software under the GPL.
Red Hat 7.3 was the last Red Hat I used and I don't see myself ever using it or Fedora again (having gone over to Debian when RH 8 was released), but Red Hat needs to be given their props for all they've done for - and contributed to - Free software. Your comment displays complete ignorance about not only Red Hat, but about how many other companies and distros have made money - or at least attempted to - using software that Red Hat paid for and released under the GPL. You can start with the RPM packaging system as just one example. SuSE, Mandriva, and an ***load of other distros all use it. Back in the nineties, almost everything was either based on Red Hat, based on Debian, or based on Slackware. Gee, now that I mention it, here in 2008 the great majority of Linux distros are *still* based on one of those three. Gee, doesn't that look more like other people making money on software that Red Hat paid for and released under the GPL? Uh-huh. Thought so.
TFA is almost as unclear as the stupid/. headline that says missile nose cones were shipped (they were not). TFA says they are electrical fuses, but also describes them as being cone-shaped. Judging by the size - 33 x 19 inches - it sounds like they are a complex type of fuse integral to the detonation process, so I suppose the definition is somewhere between your two.
They probably weren't usable to do anything per se, but it sounds like a highly classified component used in advanced nuclear weapons. Not the kind of thing you want to be accidentally sending to the wrong place. This was clearly a major screwup. If the wrong person had gotten a hold of them and sent the fuses, or detailed drawings and photos, to China, that could have pushed their nuclear weapons program ahead significantly.
1) Do you have any information that they're planning on selling it?
2) If they are, why hasn't it been sold already?
3) Considering its past use, I don't know that many people would make an informed decision to buy it, unless they were either a spammer or planned to re-open ORDB. If someone were planning to re-open ORDB, I'd want to ask them why. ORDB was a great tool when I was a postmaster at an ISP in the late nineties and early 2000s, but open relays really aren't a problem anymore. I've been working in the email security industry since 2003, and we don't even pay any attention to open relays anymore, really.
It was already letting all mail through after they took ORDD out of service, that obviously didn't make a difference at any domain that was using it on auto-pilot.
What really gets me about this case is that this is at least the third time a defunct BL has done this (Osirusoft and monkeys.com being the other two examples I know of), and in this case, returning false positives was particularly unnecessary. Since ORDB is defunct, the domain could have been just allowed to expire. Or, make sure that no IP space is associated with the domain at all. For the upstream ISP(s) who owned the IPs formerly used by ORDB, they might have to let them lie fallow forever, though, since queries would never stop in the absence of this sort of event.
OTOH, I have to assign more than the usual amount of blame to those who kept using ORDB so long after it went defunct, just because it is at least the third time this has happened. Anyone responsible for a mail server should stop to think that "Gee, continuing to query a defunct BL service over a year after it was shut down could someday be hazardous to my mail stream. I'd better update my config." I'm not absolving anyone from ORDB for not just getting rid of all ORDB IPs and having no routes to any of the ones they used to use, but willfully ignorant admins are also played a starring role in this tragedy. Or comedy of errors, depending on your point of view.
The only really secure solution for your laptop is to take it home.
Not long, my company suffered an after-hours break-in in which internal card-key protected doors were forced open with pry bars, and a number of laptops stolen. At least one of them was on a cable lock. According to the internal email about the incident, the thieves simply tore the cable lock from the computer and took it. Apparently, they either thought it could be fenced even with the cable lock hole broken, or intended it for personal use. Policy on notebook computers - that you should either take them home or lock them in your overhead bin at night - was reiterated in the wake of this incident. Door security was also improved after the horse had left the barn:p
A ventilated metal box would offer more security than a cable lock, however, in the event of an after-hours break-in, anyone who really wants your computer is going to get it out of the box, or take the whole box. An overhead bin is more secure because there's no easy way to tell if there's a laptop inside, unlike with the box you describe. It would be pretty obvious the box contained a laptop, and probably a valuable one; why else go to such lengths to protect it? That could make yours a more attractive target to a thief with time.
Taking it home with you is really the most secure option. In the break-in at my company, my MacBook Pro was not one of the ones stolen because I *always* take it home at night. Being paranoid, uh, I mean "security-conscious" during the day I lock it to my desk with a cable lock, especially since I sit pretty near a stairway door.
Of course, using a terabyte is a humorous exaggeration, but Vista is not exactly known for being memory-stingy, not even in comparison to previous Microsoft products. And I'm a troll for humorously pointing out that truth? Mmmmmkay.
This is totally spot-on. I started out in IT working for a bank in the early 1980s, and my experience at the time was that bankers fundamentally didn't understand anything about IT, most especially the fact that the bank's money *isn't in the vault* - it's in those rows of IBM 3350s in the computer room. It's in those thousands of 9-track tapes in the tape library. And if those don't work, or can't be accessed, it's not much different than if the bank has no money.
They're not totally ignorant, of course. We did have off-site backup storage in a fireproof vault (although I suspect no one outside of IT knew anything about things that small) and had a disaster recovery contract, although it was only for a cold site. I know hot sites cost a lot more, but I wonder if they fully appreciated how much money the bank would have lost in the days it would have taken IBM to delivery and install enough hardware to get up and running at the cold site if we'd declared a disaster and moved to set up there? It could have been bankruptcy-inducing. We never had to declare a disaster, fortunately, but if the worst had happened, they would have viewed that cold-site contract as penny-wise and pound-foolish. I know they were taking the accounting view/insurer's view/poker player's view (call it pot odds) of "What is the cost difference between a hot-site contract and a cold-site contract Vs. the probability of us having to declare a disaster?" and figured that the odds favored the cold-site contract. That looks great on paper, but if The Big One had hit San Diego and either destroyed the building or rendered it unusable, those stats would have looked a bit dry.
The kind of hotspot that may become less common is the kind he's talking about - the for-pay kind you find at Starbucks. Free hotspots aren't going anywhere anytime soon, nor is wireless broadband going to replace home access, unless it works the same way wired broadband does: I can stick a cheapo broadband router on the line and run as many PCs as I want behind it. My current cable connection is 10 megabits down (and I can really do it, or as close to it as TCP will let you get) and 768 kbits up. I don't know anybody with a wireless broadband plan like that.
Don't know why this was modded funny, you're obviously familiar with Japan and Juki-net. I lived in Japan for 8 years and everything you say rings completely true, even the Hello Kitty stuff.
That is so utterly untrue that I can do nothing but state publicly that you are a liar. It's not a distortion, a mis-statement, or an exaggeration. It is just a lie.
Why? Because the Castro government confiscated (read "stole") all property in Cuba that was owned by US private citizens and corporations and has not to this day compensated them for their losses. When the Cuban government wants to talk about compensation, we can also talk about normalization of relations. The situation with Cuba has more to do with that than it does with the disproportionate political power of Cuban-Americans in Florida.
Cf. the number of Vietnamese living in the United States and their level of affluence and growing political influence (a community with which I am very familiar; my wife, as well as most of our friends and relatives, are Vietnamese), yet we have full diplomatic relations with Viet Nam. The difference? Viet Nam has not only returned confiscated property (the former US Embassy in Saigon is now the US Consulate General building there), but has been very helpful in locating the remains of US military personnel lost during the war and not recovered at the time. Cuba has done nothing to try to improve relations with the United States, and in fact has resorted to things such as dumping the Marielitos on us. The Cuban government has completely brought its situation vis-a-vis the United States on itself, period.
When the Cubans want to come to the table and talk, starting with compensation issues, I'm sure they'll be welcomed, the Cuban-American lobby notwithstanding. When will they be ready to? Not until sometime after Fidel's grave - and probably his brother's as well - has grown quite cold. They have too much baggage for it to happen before that.
It is indeed primarily a measure of customer IQ. I've been in the anti-spam industry for five years and before that was a postmaster at an ISP, and every single freaking day, I see blatant phishing released from quarantine and reported as a false positive. It makes me want to rip my hair out, that so many people are so gullible. The only thing that gives me any hope that people are wising up is that phishers have recently started targeting very small institutions in addition to the biggies (I've seen phishing lately that's aimed at banks with only 1 or 2 branches!). Phishers wouldn't be going that far down the food chain if the biggies were still paying off. They've also very recently been targeting universities, emailing people and saying the university is deleting old accounts to make room for new ones and you have to respond or you will "loose" your account forever. These are all indicators that some of the phish are wising up at least a little. It's also an indicator of where the ID theft industry is going (and to a great extent has already arrived): building full profiles of victims, with large amounts of detailed info. A good example of that is the "ID theft warehouse" that was recently busted in Canada.
I'm certain it's no coincidence that the institutions the report says have the highest rates of identity theft are the same ones that have the highest volume of phishing directed at them. The phishers are throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. Since big names like BofA and WAMU have the most phishing directed at them, it's only natural that they would also have the highest loss incidents. Customer gullibility is a pretty good constant across institutions.
All in all, I don't find the report to be terribly useful. A useful report would contain info such as which banks use one-time PIN generators, which ones DKIM-sign their mail (*all* of it, because if you let a third-party marketer send mail with your on it without using your DKIM key, the headers are indistinguishable from phishing, from a machine point of view, and it tells people who are looking that it's OK for a mail that says it's from you to not really be from your network), which banks publish SPF records, and other hard security info. The ones with the most identity theft and phishing victims is no metric, since the person primarily to blame for getting phished is the customer, not the bank.
There are so many holes in that argument that it's not worth the time it would take to address them all. You're obviously a Microsoft fanboy and fail to realize that calling the GPL "a cancer" (Ballmer's exact words, in case your selective memory doesn't want to remember that), is not pragmatic self-protection. It's right up there on a par with his on-stage monkey dance antics when it comes to being professional and businesslike. When I say Microsoft is hostile to the GPL (and to open source in general, really), I truly mean hostile. The public evidence is quite clear on that, but for anyone who has worked there, it's a lot more clear.
Your foot's stuck in your mouth and you don't even know it.
That's because you didn't (so far as we know) spend a good portion of your life up until, say, 6 months ago, both doing everything you could to be incompatible with Christians and Christianity, and above and beyond that, threatening to persecute them, sometimes directly persecuting, and at other times getting others to persecute Christians on your behalf (think SCO).
If you had done those things, it is likely that your Christian friends would view you with a great deal of suspicion (as St. Paul was initially viewed after his conversion), and it's even more likely that you would not even *have* any Christian friends, and you'd have to go out and try very hard to get some if you really wanted them. It's even possible that they might not believe you unless you actually became a Christian yourself and thereafter demonstrated a good track record as one. That's not saying you'd have to become an evangelist, but if you'd spent your life persecuting Christians and all of a sudden switched gears and tried to make nice, you'd have to understand if nobody trusted you unless you converted and established a five year track record as a solid Christian.
When Microsoft has opened up its protocols and file formats, has released some significant software under the GPL or a BSD license, and has established a couple years of cooperating with open source, maybe throws in a bunch of patents, then people will start to believe that Microsoft is going to walk the walk. For now, they still look to most people like they're just talking the talk, and they'll have to be understanding if most people don't believe them, trust them, or want much to do with them. Especially since the situation on the ground is that FOSS can defeat Microsoft and the broader world of proprietary software *without* Microsoft's help, and it might even be counter-productive to cooperate with them. Put another way, Microsoft wouldn't be waving these olive branches around if they didn't think it was not only in their own self-interest, but more in their interest than FOSS's interest to try and play nice with FOSS.
I used to work there until not all that long ago, and Microsoft employees are forbidden to even look at GPLed code, on the clock or off. The level of hostility to open-source in general and the GPL in particular is very high. Having been in that environment, I most especially don't believe Microsoft has turned over a new leaf, and so quickly. I'm certain they believe appearing to make nice with FOSS is better for them than it is for FOSS.
If they release IE under the GPL or a BSD license sometime in the next two years, go ahead and call me wrong/paranoid/whatever you want. But I bet you won't get the chance:)
HTF is this a troll? As anyone who has lived in east Asia (especially Japan) can tell you, that sort of spelling is pretty common. Definitely should be modded up Funny. I couldn't even begin to count how many products I've seen on shelves that actually had spelling like that. Heck, right now on my desk, there is a toothbrush (from China) whose package advises that it should be thrown out after three "moths."
And to forestall any whiny do-gooder types who'd like to throw accusations at me: why, yes, my wife is from east Asia and our children were all born there, and yes, I do speak a couple of east Asian languages in addition to my native English. Thanks for playing.
Why is "Microsoft releasing software under the GPL (or $FREE_LICENSE, if you insist)" an unreasonable standard? Red Hat, MySQL, IBM, and Sun (just to name four; there are many others) all did/do that, and it's what put them in good standing with the FOSS community. Why should we hold Microsoft - the most egregious anti-FOSS offender - to a lesser standard than that?
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While that was funny, and I have so little truck with the current state of the GOP (I'm a lifelong Republican) that I may abstain from voting for the first time in almost 30 years as a voter, let's not forget that the most draconian of the proposed requirements come not from Republicans, but from Democrats.
:(
The trouble with GW is comes not from his being a Republican, but from being a false Republican and a false conservative. Look at his track record and the kinds of things he supports; these are things a leftist would do. I've lived in a communist country, and these rules sound eerily familiar; it;s how things just work in those places. You assume you're always being watched and your communications are always being monitored, because they usually were. Crypto was illegal there, although there was an exception for foreigners on business or tourism.
So when you vote this year, think about what you might really be voting for if you vote for (Obama|Clinton). A regime even worse than the one we have now.
I don't have any good answer to that, because I think we're screwed no matter what we do. McCain sucks less than Clinton or Obama, but he still sucks. If everyone would think about how much these so-called "mainstream" candidates all suck, maybe some actual reform would begin and we could start returning the country to what the framers of the Constitution envisioned. We sure don't have it now, when we're edging closer to a police state daily
A few days after this thread, I came across the following stats that were provided by one of our customers (I don't know who, it was anonymized before reaching me). 99.7% of 7 million attempted messages were filtered, 0.3 percent were delivered. I don't have a false positive number for these, but zero wouldn't surprise me. Our FP rate is consistently either the lowest in the industry or second lowest (we really only have one competitor on FP rate; some months we're best, some months they're best, and we're always very close together). WRT the very low virus detection rate, it could be that they are not buying our A/V service, or the viruses were just all stopped by other edge blocks. That's not unusual.
;-)
Brag? Sure, why not? I think I'll sneer at 95% now
Stopped by Reputation Filtering 98.9% 6.9M
Stopped as Invalid Recipients 0.7% 47.8k
Spam Detected 0.1% 5,795
Virus Detected 0.0% 1
Stopped by Content Filter 0.0% 0
Total Threat Messages: 99.7% 7.0M
Clean Messages 0.3% 20.6k
Total Attempted Messages: 7.0M
You're proud of 95% efficacy? I work for one of the well-known anti-spam companies, and if our efficacy *fell* to 95% that would be considered an emergency. Our overall efficacy is >99% and the spam categories I manage are closing in on five nines.
I hear that. I have a MacBook Pro that's about 15 months old now and my boss has a brand new one. His has a glossy screen and mine has matte, and there's no way I'd trade him, even though his MBP is a better machine in every respect except for the glossy screen.
I would say this really depends on the users. At my current employer, engineering, sysops, QA, etc. (the technically skilled, basically) are allowed to pretty much do whatever we want. The overwhelming majority of engineering here uses Macs, and most of the rest are BSD or Linux. I have a MacBook Pro, and run Linux in VMWare Fusion, in addition. If I really wanted to, I could install Linux natively. That would be an self-supported configuration and I'd be on my own if it didn't work (IT support would be limited to reinstalling OS X), but I could do it if I wanted to.
At my previous employer, pretty much anyone was allowed to install whatever OS they wanted to, and most of engineering, support, sysops, QA, etc., there was running a Linux distro. No standard one, just use whatever floats your boat.
This was very good for productivity, and I'm not aware of any problems arising from it at either place. However, if typical end user types were allowed to install whatever on their machines it would be a mess. My wife (the only Windows user in my house, and someone who neither is nor even wants to be computer-competent) recently complained that her Thinkpad was very sluggish. I examined it and found over 100 different pieces of crapware. It all seemed to have arrived in March when she installed a few "free" games. Without mentioning it to me, of course. I reiterated my previous admonishments about not installing software unless I've vetted it first. This time, I think she'll actually go along with that. I was up until 3:00 AM fixing the machine, detailed what I found, and the speed difference was very noticeable.
An IT department would be nuts to let someone like that have carte blanche on their machine, but I think letting the technically competent do pretty much whatever they want, with the caveats that A) You have to be able to get your work done, and B) We only support a given list of apps and OSes; if you go beyond that, you're on your own. In my experience, it's unquestionably good for productivity and morale to let the technically competent run whatever software suits them.
Movie-goers who take detailed notes during a movie to later re-sell them for a profit are usually called "reviewers." A studio wouldn't have an ice cube's chance in hell of winning a lawsuit against a reviewer who published a movie review. Both the reviewer and the paper profit, and that's totally fair. There's nothing wrong with selling your lecture notes, either. Moreover, in every class I took in college, the lecture was sufficiently derived from the course textbook (none of which were written by the prof teaching the course) that there's no reasonable way a claim of infringement could stand up in court.
Heh. I'm a former Microsoft employee and I have loads of negative things to say about Microsoft. Some positive things, too, but the negative list is far longer and contains more "heavyweight" items. He may be under heavy NDA, but OTOH I never signed anything regarding not saying bad things about Microsoft after I left, and I was a manager there, FWIW. Probably, as others have suggested, he doesn't want to piss off Microsoft by saying negative - if truthful - things about Microsoft or its products.
/. either, but I'm not sure I would want to put my negative opinions up in a well-read forum with my real name attached. MSFT is a 900 gorilla with 1000 pound lawyers and by far the most paranoid place I ever worked, so I can't say as I blame the guy.
On the third hand, so to speak, I will tell anyone who asks what I thing is good and bad about MSFT, and I don't mind saying that in the relative anonymity of
The case that Linux as we know it wouldn't exist without Red Hat is also pretty compelling. Keep in mind that Linux is just a kernel, and without the efforts of early distro packagers like the Yyggdrasil team, Patrick Volkerding, Debian, and Red Hat, almost no one would be using Linux today.
If you want to argue that distros that came later got where they are mostly by standing on the shoulders of giants, you'd have a much better case. But by picking on Red Hat, you're far wide of the mark. Linux as we know it would not exist without Red Hat. Considering what a relatively small company Red Hat really is, I think there's a much better case that they've contributed out of proportion to their profits, especially when you consider the cases where Red Hat has bought other companies, then turned around and GPLed their products.
I think you'd be really hard pressed to find a company that has contributed more GPL-licensed code than Red Hat. Even IBM probably doesn't measure up on that point, plus we have to take into consideration the fact that if companies like Red Hat weren't releasing everything they write under the GPL since their foundation in the 1990s, it's highly unlikely that IBM and other traditional closed-source companies would have ever come around to releasing *some* of their software under the GPL.
Red Hat 7.3 was the last Red Hat I used and I don't see myself ever using it or Fedora again (having gone over to Debian when RH 8 was released), but Red Hat needs to be given their props for all they've done for - and contributed to - Free software. Your comment displays complete ignorance about not only Red Hat, but about how many other companies and distros have made money - or at least attempted to - using software that Red Hat paid for and released under the GPL. You can start with the RPM packaging system as just one example. SuSE, Mandriva, and an ***load of other distros all use it. Back in the nineties, almost everything was either based on Red Hat, based on Debian, or based on Slackware. Gee, now that I mention it, here in 2008 the great majority of Linux distros are *still* based on one of those three. Gee, doesn't that look more like other people making money on software that Red Hat paid for and released under the GPL? Uh-huh. Thought so.
TFA is almost as unclear as the stupid /. headline that says missile nose cones were shipped (they were not). TFA says they are electrical fuses, but also describes them as being cone-shaped. Judging by the size - 33 x 19 inches - it sounds like they are a complex type of fuse integral to the detonation process, so I suppose the definition is somewhere between your two.
They probably weren't usable to do anything per se, but it sounds like a highly classified component used in advanced nuclear weapons. Not the kind of thing you want to be accidentally sending to the wrong place. This was clearly a major screwup. If the wrong person had gotten a hold of them and sent the fuses, or detailed drawings and photos, to China, that could have pushed their nuclear weapons program ahead significantly.
OK, I'll bite.
1) Do you have any information that they're planning on selling it?
2) If they are, why hasn't it been sold already?
3) Considering its past use, I don't know that many people would make an informed decision to buy it, unless they were either a spammer or planned to re-open ORDB. If someone were planning to re-open ORDB, I'd want to ask them why. ORDB was a great tool when I was a postmaster at an ISP in the late nineties and early 2000s, but open relays really aren't a problem anymore. I've been working in the email security industry since 2003, and we don't even pay any attention to open relays anymore, really.
It was already letting all mail through after they took ORDD out of service, that obviously didn't make a difference at any domain that was using it on auto-pilot.
What really gets me about this case is that this is at least the third time a defunct BL has done this (Osirusoft and monkeys.com being the other two examples I know of), and in this case, returning false positives was particularly unnecessary. Since ORDB is defunct, the domain could have been just allowed to expire. Or, make sure that no IP space is associated with the domain at all. For the upstream ISP(s) who owned the IPs formerly used by ORDB, they might have to let them lie fallow forever, though, since queries would never stop in the absence of this sort of event.
OTOH, I have to assign more than the usual amount of blame to those who kept using ORDB so long after it went defunct, just because it is at least the third time this has happened. Anyone responsible for a mail server should stop to think that "Gee, continuing to query a defunct BL service over a year after it was shut down could someday be hazardous to my mail stream. I'd better update my config." I'm not absolving anyone from ORDB for not just getting rid of all ORDB IPs and having no routes to any of the ones they used to use, but willfully ignorant admins are also played a starring role in this tragedy. Or comedy of errors, depending on your point of view.
The only really secure solution for your laptop is to take it home.
:p
Not long, my company suffered an after-hours break-in in which internal card-key protected doors were forced open with pry bars, and a number of laptops stolen. At least one of them was on a cable lock. According to the internal email about the incident, the thieves simply tore the cable lock from the computer and took it. Apparently, they either thought it could be fenced even with the cable lock hole broken, or intended it for personal use. Policy on notebook computers - that you should either take them home or lock them in your overhead bin at night - was reiterated in the wake of this incident. Door security was also improved after the horse had left the barn
A ventilated metal box would offer more security than a cable lock, however, in the event of an after-hours break-in, anyone who really wants your computer is going to get it out of the box, or take the whole box. An overhead bin is more secure because there's no easy way to tell if there's a laptop inside, unlike with the box you describe. It would be pretty obvious the box contained a laptop, and probably a valuable one; why else go to such lengths to protect it? That could make yours a more attractive target to a thief with time.
Taking it home with you is really the most secure option. In the break-in at my company, my MacBook Pro was not one of the ones stolen because I *always* take it home at night. Being paranoid, uh, I mean "security-conscious" during the day I lock it to my desk with a cable lock, especially since I sit pretty near a stairway door.
Troll?! Troll?! The mods have one or more of:
-No sense of humor
-No experience with Vista
Of course, using a terabyte is a humorous exaggeration, but Vista is not exactly known for being memory-stingy, not even in comparison to previous Microsoft products. And I'm a troll for humorously pointing out that truth? Mmmmmkay.
Want to use a TB of RAM? It's simple - just install Vista and that terabyte'll be used up before you can say "640K ought to be enough for anybody" :)
This is totally spot-on. I started out in IT working for a bank in the early 1980s, and my experience at the time was that bankers fundamentally didn't understand anything about IT, most especially the fact that the bank's money *isn't in the vault* - it's in those rows of IBM 3350s in the computer room. It's in those thousands of 9-track tapes in the tape library. And if those don't work, or can't be accessed, it's not much different than if the bank has no money.
They're not totally ignorant, of course. We did have off-site backup storage in a fireproof vault (although I suspect no one outside of IT knew anything about things that small) and had a disaster recovery contract, although it was only for a cold site. I know hot sites cost a lot more, but I wonder if they fully appreciated how much money the bank would have lost in the days it would have taken IBM to delivery and install enough hardware to get up and running at the cold site if we'd declared a disaster and moved to set up there? It could have been bankruptcy-inducing. We never had to declare a disaster, fortunately, but if the worst had happened, they would have viewed that cold-site contract as penny-wise and pound-foolish. I know they were taking the accounting view/insurer's view/poker player's view (call it pot odds) of "What is the cost difference between a hot-site contract and a cold-site contract Vs. the probability of us having to declare a disaster?" and figured that the odds favored the cold-site contract. That looks great on paper, but if The Big One had hit San Diego and either destroyed the building or rendered it unusable, those stats would have looked a bit dry.
The kind of hotspot that may become less common is the kind he's talking about - the for-pay kind you find at Starbucks. Free hotspots aren't going anywhere anytime soon, nor is wireless broadband going to replace home access, unless it works the same way wired broadband does: I can stick a cheapo broadband router on the line and run as many PCs as I want behind it. My current cable connection is 10 megabits down (and I can really do it, or as close to it as TCP will let you get) and 768 kbits up. I don't know anybody with a wireless broadband plan like that.
Don't know why this was modded funny, you're obviously familiar with Japan and Juki-net. I lived in Japan for 8 years and everything you say rings completely true, even the Hello Kitty stuff.
That is so utterly untrue that I can do nothing but state publicly that you are a liar. It's not a distortion, a mis-statement, or an exaggeration. It is just a lie.
Why? Because the Castro government confiscated (read "stole") all property in Cuba that was owned by US private citizens and corporations and has not to this day compensated them for their losses. When the Cuban government wants to talk about compensation, we can also talk about normalization of relations. The situation with Cuba has more to do with that than it does with the disproportionate political power of Cuban-Americans in Florida.
Cf. the number of Vietnamese living in the United States and their level of affluence and growing political influence (a community with which I am very familiar; my wife, as well as most of our friends and relatives, are Vietnamese), yet we have full diplomatic relations with Viet Nam. The difference? Viet Nam has not only returned confiscated property (the former US Embassy in Saigon is now the US Consulate General building there), but has been very helpful in locating the remains of US military personnel lost during the war and not recovered at the time. Cuba has done nothing to try to improve relations with the United States, and in fact has resorted to things such as dumping the Marielitos on us. The Cuban government has completely brought its situation vis-a-vis the United States on itself, period.
When the Cubans want to come to the table and talk, starting with compensation issues, I'm sure they'll be welcomed, the Cuban-American lobby notwithstanding. When will they be ready to? Not until sometime after Fidel's grave - and probably his brother's as well - has grown quite cold. They have too much baggage for it to happen before that.
It is indeed primarily a measure of customer IQ. I've been in the anti-spam industry for five years and before that was a postmaster at an ISP, and every single freaking day, I see blatant phishing released from quarantine and reported as a false positive. It makes me want to rip my hair out, that so many people are so gullible. The only thing that gives me any hope that people are wising up is that phishers have recently started targeting very small institutions in addition to the biggies (I've seen phishing lately that's aimed at banks with only 1 or 2 branches!). Phishers wouldn't be going that far down the food chain if the biggies were still paying off. They've also very recently been targeting universities, emailing people and saying the university is deleting old accounts to make room for new ones and you have to respond or you will "loose" your account forever. These are all indicators that some of the phish are wising up at least a little. It's also an indicator of where the ID theft industry is going (and to a great extent has already arrived): building full profiles of victims, with large amounts of detailed info. A good example of that is the "ID theft warehouse" that was recently busted in Canada.
I'm certain it's no coincidence that the institutions the report says have the highest rates of identity theft are the same ones that have the highest volume of phishing directed at them. The phishers are throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. Since big names like BofA and WAMU have the most phishing directed at them, it's only natural that they would also have the highest loss incidents. Customer gullibility is a pretty good constant across institutions.
All in all, I don't find the report to be terribly useful. A useful report would contain info such as which banks use one-time PIN generators, which ones DKIM-sign their mail (*all* of it, because if you let a third-party marketer send mail with your on it without using your DKIM key, the headers are indistinguishable from phishing, from a machine point of view, and it tells people who are looking that it's OK for a mail that says it's from you to not really be from your network), which banks publish SPF records, and other hard security info. The ones with the most identity theft and phishing victims is no metric, since the person primarily to blame for getting phished is the customer, not the bank.
There are so many holes in that argument that it's not worth the time it would take to address them all. You're obviously a Microsoft fanboy and fail to realize that calling the GPL "a cancer" (Ballmer's exact words, in case your selective memory doesn't want to remember that), is not pragmatic self-protection. It's right up there on a par with his on-stage monkey dance antics when it comes to being professional and businesslike. When I say Microsoft is hostile to the GPL (and to open source in general, really), I truly mean hostile. The public evidence is quite clear on that, but for anyone who has worked there, it's a lot more clear.
Your foot's stuck in your mouth and you don't even know it.
That's because you didn't (so far as we know) spend a good portion of your life up until, say, 6 months ago, both doing everything you could to be incompatible with Christians and Christianity, and above and beyond that, threatening to persecute them, sometimes directly persecuting, and at other times getting others to persecute Christians on your behalf (think SCO).
:)
If you had done those things, it is likely that your Christian friends would view you with a great deal of suspicion (as St. Paul was initially viewed after his conversion), and it's even more likely that you would not even *have* any Christian friends, and you'd have to go out and try very hard to get some if you really wanted them. It's even possible that they might not believe you unless you actually became a Christian yourself and thereafter demonstrated a good track record as one. That's not saying you'd have to become an evangelist, but if you'd spent your life persecuting Christians and all of a sudden switched gears and tried to make nice, you'd have to understand if nobody trusted you unless you converted and established a five year track record as a solid Christian.
When Microsoft has opened up its protocols and file formats, has released some significant software under the GPL or a BSD license, and has established a couple years of cooperating with open source, maybe throws in a bunch of patents, then people will start to believe that Microsoft is going to walk the walk. For now, they still look to most people like they're just talking the talk, and they'll have to be understanding if most people don't believe them, trust them, or want much to do with them. Especially since the situation on the ground is that FOSS can defeat Microsoft and the broader world of proprietary software *without* Microsoft's help, and it might even be counter-productive to cooperate with them. Put another way, Microsoft wouldn't be waving these olive branches around if they didn't think it was not only in their own self-interest, but more in their interest than FOSS's interest to try and play nice with FOSS.
I used to work there until not all that long ago, and Microsoft employees are forbidden to even look at GPLed code, on the clock or off. The level of hostility to open-source in general and the GPL in particular is very high. Having been in that environment, I most especially don't believe Microsoft has turned over a new leaf, and so quickly. I'm certain they believe appearing to make nice with FOSS is better for them than it is for FOSS.
If they release IE under the GPL or a BSD license sometime in the next two years, go ahead and call me wrong/paranoid/whatever you want. But I bet you won't get the chance
HTF is this a troll? As anyone who has lived in east Asia (especially Japan) can tell you, that sort of spelling is pretty common. Definitely should be modded up Funny. I couldn't even begin to count how many products I've seen on shelves that actually had spelling like that. Heck, right now on my desk, there is a toothbrush (from China) whose package advises that it should be thrown out after three "moths."
And to forestall any whiny do-gooder types who'd like to throw accusations at me: why, yes, my wife is from east Asia and our children were all born there, and yes, I do speak a couple of east Asian languages in addition to my native English. Thanks for playing.
Why is "Microsoft releasing software under the GPL (or $FREE_LICENSE, if you insist)" an unreasonable standard? Red Hat, MySQL, IBM, and Sun (just to name four; there are many others) all did/do that, and it's what put them in good standing with the FOSS community. Why should we hold Microsoft - the most egregious anti-FOSS offender - to a lesser standard than that?