So called "deep cycling" a liio battery (or nimh actually) is not good on a battery. I don't know the exact nature of the damage, (whether its an irreversable chemical change, drying out of the electrolyte, or possible plate damage) but I've read in many places with my electronics work that deep cyclng liio and nimh batteries damages their ability to take a charge. Such batteries that are completely discharged for a period of time tend to not accept a new charge at all, rendering them bricked. I have ran into this problem more than once myself. If you have any small products that use liio or nimh batteries and you have let them sit in a clothset for several months you will find that they are fully discharged and very often they will refuse to charge at all. (nicd do not appear to have this problem, or at least not to the same extent) This is why ALL liio/nimh batteries you will find their documentation says they ship with a "partitial charge" to avoid an extended wait in the warehouse resulting in a DOA.
I doubt the liio batteries are catching fire due to taking on water. They WILL however explode if placed in a fire, as all rechargeable batteries have a warning label on them to not dispose of in fire and that is why. If the pack is badly designed and somehow several of the cells are allowed to short, such as if the recharge control chip shorts out, this can lead to the batteries dead shorting. (this is only an issue if the cells are charged, which as I mentioned is pretty much assured) Any rechargeable battery (liio, nimh, or nicd) will get extremely hot when dead shorted while charged, as all the energy of its charge is rapidly released. (most laptop batteries are around 50 watts normal discharge, which can translate easily into 200-300 watt discharges when shorted) Liio carries the additional penalty of being more prone to explosion when superheated, and this can lead to them exploding if shorted.
Though in this article it does not sound like explosion was an issue, more fire. This probably means a pack shorted out (defective, failed) and overheated, catching its battery case on fire due to heat. The burning case eventually helped raise the battery temperature enough to lead to the ignition of the battery electrolyte. (the lithium itself) Once a pallet of liio batteries starts on fire, fire suppression really doesn't matter any more. When the fire department has to deal with things like that they don't try to put it out - they just get everything flammable away from it and cover it with water to suppress the heat until it burns itself out. Once the lithium goes from merely hot to actually burning, you cannot smother it with water, it will rip the oxygen right off the water molicules to continue to burn. So the plane's fire suppression system would have actually fed such a fire. Foam (or something solid) is about the only thing that has a chance of suppressing a lithium fire, and even that is not very effective due to the intense heat of burning lithium vaporizing the foam. (it takes a lot of foam)
Opinions will differ and circumstances will adjust, but
Imagine if you're the IT Director, and the President has just locked the annual budget reports in an encrypted vault. It's somewhat difficult to just point a finger at him and laugh.
It is not necessary for I.T. to have the master keys to the entire company. The president is the only one that should have that. If he loses the keys, it's his fault too bad quit crying. Responsibility has to be placed somewhere. The buck stops here. What happens if I go into work today and the door is locked, my silly manager lost his key. Is this justification for ME to have a building security key too? What if I lose mine? Should we give another copy to the neighbor? What part of security do people have trouble grasping? That's all this argument is doing, handing out more copies of the key. Actually worse still, we are not handing out keys, we are making the lock PICKABLE. Now it's not just me that can bypass it, not just the neighbor, but that guy over there walking down the street. All they need is the knowledge of how the pre-designed built-in security hole works, and they're golden.
That is not security, that is fraud. Makes me sick.
Remember though anytime you have a "if a user has rights xyz they can do..." means there is no actual security through encryption. All I have to do is hack my privs (once I root the box, this is not hard?) and poof I'm into your "encrypted" data. That is not security. The only thing that should allow someone into a vault is the key. The only thing that should get you at the key is encryption based on one of several sub-keys, such as the user's password or in the case of OS X filevault, the master password. None of these is stored anywhere on the machine, not even the master password. I don't care if you are head of IT, you cannot get into an ecrypted disk image. (which has no master key option)
The admins paniced when they realized this definitively meant they were not god anymore. There was security in their own system that they could not bypass. Waaaah.
Those admins are on a power trip or have a severe insecurity complex.
So often we hear about worms that attack the net via vulnerabilities that have been around for months, and everyone screams at the vendor for being slow to patch.
I've seen this suggested before and it's a simple idea. Give them three weeks. Send it to the bat-phone or whatever the vendor has. Three weeks later, post it somewhere nice and public - a forum for the discussion of existing unpatched vulnerabilities. Post it regardless of whether or not a patch is available.
If the vendors cry, tell them if they patched in a reasonably fast timeframe this would be a non-issue.
I don't see the problem with this. They are businesses, they react only to money. If taking 2 mos avg to release a patch starts costing them money due to bad press and pissed off owned customers, they will change their behavior. Costing them money is the only way to force them into action. They will whine and cry and snivel and litigate to prevent you from doing this, but in the end they aren't going slow for your good, they're slow for their bank book.
You're falling into the oxymoron of "windows security" again.
I find it amusing that Mac OS has had filevault for what, several years now, with no resulting cataclysm. MS introduces it and half the PC IT flip their lids and MS runs scared. What is wrong with these people? Sorry if I sound like a BOFH but if the user puts data into a vault and then loses their password, they will get no pity from me. Do we cry for the neighbor that just locked his keys in his car while it was running? No, we laugh and point fingers. Some actions carry a built-in penalty for blatant stupidity, and this is one of them. If I put a hammer in the toolbox at work and Joe cracks his thumb trying to hang a picture in his cubicle, do we chase after me for leaving a dangerous object within reach of the monkeys? No, again we laugh and point fingers.
If your company is impossibly tilted toward the users, then just add a line to the AUP that states that filevault or whatever is not and cannot be supported by IT and if you have problems with it you should not expect any help.
In some organizations, the head of IT thinks he's god. More often though it seems, the users think they are the chosen ones and that IT can do the work of gods.
Given how easy it is to change your mac address, (I can do this at will on my ethernet AND wireless) I would hope no serious security system relied entirely on that one factor. We have to assume the serious criminals have all the easy angles covered.
Step 1: do anything that pisses off say, the president Step 2: get labeled a "terrorist" or "enemy combatant" Step 2b: you just lost all your civil liberties Step 3: whatever they want to do to you
How do we really have any civil liberties (protection from the govt as you describe it) when such laws exist that allow the government to ignore the laws?
It's very arguable that the actual letter of the law in America is no better than the letter of the law in China - it's just that other circumstances here in the USA prevent the government from taking the amount of control that china's government has, despite their actually having the legal authority to do it.
When you have "enemy combatant", "for reasons of national security", and "executive order", all the other laws really lose their true meaning. "We'll allow you to do that, unless we decide otherwise" is not true fredom.
Isn't it strange how while the Chinese people are gaining and exercising new civil liberties despite the government, here in the US we are losing our civil liberties to the government, just about as fast as the Chinese are gaining them.
... do not believe that the laws apply to them. To them, the laws are a nuisance, interfere with their god-given right to do their jobs, and there is no acceptable reason to prevent them from enforcing policy by any means necessary. They are knights in shining armor, fighting for you and me, and would never do anything to hurt or suppress us. Then, the laws become mere obstructions to these agencies, to be excepted and bypassed and invalidated by any means necessary, legal, or otherwise. And even then, when caught doing something that even the "adjusted" laws do not allow, they will cower behind the all-powerful statutes that basically say "we do what we want to, are accountable to no one, and it's illegal to investiage us."
The patriot act comees immediately to mind, as do executive orders, "state secrets", and of course our all time favorite, "for reasons of national security."
I am now thoroughly convinced that the executive portion of the US is hopelessly broken, broken in such a way that the very means to fix it are quickly becoming illegal. It's being done for our protection. But isn't that the way it always is? Preying on people's fears, tricking them into giving up their fredom and rights for safety? B. Franklin said "those that would give up a basic liberty for a measure of temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Too bad we missed that lesson. I think we are fulfilling that as prophesy.
Soon all avenues of escape will be gone. American is broken, and it doesn't look like it's fixable. But what to do?
It's all paid support anyway. You can get that from your nearest consultant on demand, far into the future. This applies to 95, 98, Linux, or anything else for that matter. Once you're footing the bill, you can get any support you want. I don't see how this will change anything. Support from a private consultant is likely to be better quality support than MS over the phone anyway.
SSH is specifically designed to prevent MITMA. If I try to ssh to a system that I have recently swapped hardware on and still have the same hard drive, ssh flips out and warns me of a possible MITMA due to the MAC address of the destination having changed. (it displays a short warning saying "someone may be doing something nasty!") In fact, it won't even let me ignore the error, I have go go into the known_hosts file and remove the previous fingerprint before it will let me ssh into that system again. This problem never occurs unless I have changed the machine I am ssh'ing into, so there are no false positives to get accustomed to.
Although this prevents MITMA, it does not necessarily prevent phishing by default because the phisher could somehow trick me into ssh'ing to the wrong address, by hacking a DNS for example. However there is one further security feature of SSH. When you are ssh'ing into a system that you have never connected to before, it displays a warning and asks if you want to add the new host to your list of known hosts. Since you should never get this except the very first time you connect, if you see this warning when connecting to someplace you visit regularly, you know something is wrong.
I suppose the best defense to phishing instead of 2 part authentication, would be to send the users the program to access their content. Imagine the bank writing an ssh-enabled client with the fingerprint of their server hard coded into it, where it remembers your account information as well so you don't get used to typing in your bank password whenever asked for it. No link to click, just "run the bank program" to access your account. Even a dns compromise would not impact this. The only issue I can see with this method is storing the acccount information in a way that cannot be extracted by spyware AND not in a way that can be used in its encrypted form. (such as hashed)
The big problem with phishing here is simply that the user is too used to being asked for their account information, and as long as the phisher doesn't deviate too much from the norm the user will just go zombie and type it in. This information needs to be something you enter once, and if it ever asks you again there is a problem.
But in the end, profound user stupidity trumps all. That will never change.
Many DVDs you rent nowadays have "extra content" on them. Several of the disks I have you can select from two or more "viewpoints", and in any scene where there are alternate camera angles you will see the alternates. Sometimes you see someone not quite in frame where they belong, or a bit of the set crew or you see someonene just standing there listening to dialog from an actor off camera. Occasionally you'll see an aspect of a prop or some activity that was too subtle to notice from the main viewpoint.
There is absolutely no reason they could not use this existing technology to imbed a "pg-13", "nonviolent", or "non-gore" thread for the movie. (it's even possible for the alternate track to have the same video, but say different audio, to censor bad language) The studios simply choose not to do this, and I think that's their right.
I for one am pleased to see copyright laws applied somewhere that actually makes an improvement. When I go to rent a movie, I want the content as the director made it, not the way YOU want your content. If I don't like the content, maybe I'm following the wrong director or studio. Just as you are saying don't make me watch your violence, I say you don't have the right to prevent me from watching mine.
It works both ways.
Push for the use of technology as described above that lets us both have our cake.
I believe it was the Cistine Chapel that had to be renovated recently because at some point hundreds of years ago the clergy thought the stained glass (Da Vinci?) was too lewd and had it PAINTED OVER to add clothes. They restored the stained glass recently to its original condition, and the improvement was amazing. I fear more people support the butchering of art.
If they seriously didn't want to give their customers popups, it's very simple. When you start getting complaints that affiliate #46 is causing popups, call that affiliate. "That affiliate code is now invalid. Your new code is 86. Clicks to code 46 will no longer be paid. If we start receiving popups to affiliate code 86, your contract will be immediately terminated."
Any of them could do that in a heartbeat. If they don't do it, we can only assume they support the popups and adware, or at the very least are deliberately turning a blind eye "but it's not our fault!" Yes, it is, and you know it. You're continuing to pay them even though you know what they are doing with your money. In the end, the affiliate is 100% accountable for the actions of their sub-affiliates, just the same as the company is 100% accountable for the actions of their advertisers. In business, the buck always stops at the top.
(to be fair a few of them do follow this crede, and do have to work the crowd a bit before they find affiliates that aren't scum, but all in all, they are the rare ones)
My favorite page-1 quote from that article would have to be Some advertisers say their messages have appeared in pop-ups without their permission.
How STUPID do they think we are? As an advertiser, you don't accidentally advertise for someone that's not paying you. When's the last time you saw a commercial on TV that the retailer denied they paid for? The spammers are charginng a lot for their service, and there is no shortage of customers, so I'm quite certain they are only spamming for paying customers.
More than likely these are cases where someone in marketing got the brilliant idea to advertise with spyware and started it without really letting their uppers know what the fallout was going to be. Then six months later when the CEO's in-box is piled high with complaints they deny they had anything to do with it.
I haven't heard of any sting operations for hitting the phishers... Considering the anonymous and random nature of the phishing scams and ease with which you can attract a phishing email, you could send an email from a newly created email account back to the phisher without them realizing this wasn't one of the addresses they phished, and could arrange for a carefully monitored and traceable transaction to take place, to track down the phisher. ("follow the money" principle) Why don't we see more of this going on?
There's a small degree of higher risk, but if you get a new disposable cell phone every three days and move around all day you'd be a hard mark to hit.
Too many people are now aware of the "don't click the link" aspect of phishing, but I'm sure there are still pleanty of suckers that assume if they have your phone number you must be legit. I would not be surprised if they find a way to do this through US Mail in a way that hides their identity.
It would be interesting if one day, to get such an online account set up, they make you pass a short test, where they give you ten examples of people asking for your account information in various ways, and you have to answer "give them the information" or "report the incident to phishing.ebay.com". Anyone that answers "give them the information" on any of the questions doesn't get an account.
I wager that alone would eliminate 80% of successful phishes.
I've had fairly good luck in getting my rebates filled in the past, having redeemed maybe a dozen mail-in rebates for various things. I did run into a problem on the last one, a hard drive at Tiger Direct, $50 rebate on a seagate 250. It was one of those things where they say to mail in the original bar code, yet the bar code exists in only one place, on the label on the hard drive. Not wanting to peel the label off my HD, I included a scan of it. They also said that the rebate form MUST match the name on the invoice AND the credit card. My full name is on my card, and my short common name is on the receipt. And they always wait as long as possible before replying to your rebate, the usual scam is "expect 8-12 weeks for your rebate" and "unfilled rebates must be counter-claimed within 14 weeks of purchase". They give you as small of a window of appeal as possible between the last possible day you might receive the check and the very last day they will accept an appeal due to your not receiving said check. And to help this process along they mail out your check at the last possible moment if at all. I have never seen anyone receive their rebate check earlier than one week before the last possible day it might arrive.
So the $50 rebate disappeared into the Rebate Black Hole and I had to send them another claim. A full two months later I actually did get a check, but that was what, almost half a year after I bought the drive. I wonder how much interest they made on my $50 check over the course of 5 months, multiplied by how many thousands of customers?
I don't know the exact details of how they handle rebates, but many companies simply sell them to rebate centers, as obligations. So my $50 rebate was sold to this rebate center for maybe $-45. (they received $45 to accept the obligation of the rebate) Then if they have to cut you a check, they lose $5. But if you fail to ask for the rebate, they clear $45. So it is to their advantage to make you jump through lots of hoops, give you numerous opportunities to submit an invalid or incomplete request, and under no circumstances do they tell you if your submission was rejected.
I would imagine that out of say, 100 initial rebate requests that are rejected, only 5 of the customers actually catch it in time and resubmit to get their rebate. The rest forget about it by the time the deadline has arrived for them to receive their check, and by the time they realize they never got a check, it's too late to resubmit. I would be very interested to know what their statistics are... does anyone have any hard numbers for any of the rebate centers?
- percentage of rebate submissions initially rejected (guessing 40%) - percentage of rejected submissions where the consumer received notice of rejection (guessing 0%) - percentage of initial rejections that were followed up by a resubmission from the customer, in time (guessing 10%) - percentage of resubmissions that were not fulfilled for any reason (guessing 20%) - percentage of submitted rebates that resulted in a check (guessing 60%)
If I'm anywhere near accurate in my guestimates, they are filling up big lawn and leaf bags with our cash. But it seems that if you are dilligent, you have very good chances of getting your money, albeit with a fight. They are just making it soooo easy for you to NOT get your rebate that they can rake in the cash at our expense.
Lets review this. Lagrange point. Last I checked, a point is not a "region". So there's no way to put a titanium anything completely within a Lagrange Point. At the very best they might put the "sun" part of it centered at the LP, but then the "planetoids" would all be outside the LP, and however minorly, would be affected to varying degrees by the gravity of the earth and of the sun.
This test is invalid. The use of a LP is not going to nullify the effect of gravity of the earth, let alone of the sun. If they are going to do a test that is this sensitive, there is nowhere in the solar system they can hold it and get accurate results.
In my experience, the people that switch tend to be the ones that know someone else that has switched. It took me almost two years of listening to my mother whine and moan about her PC and then "don't tell me about your mac, I don't want to hear it, I LIKE my PC!". Ya, sounds like you're really loving it.
Then she got hit by three major viruses in 6 months, paying techs hundreds each time to fix it. (and she was downright religious with her antivirus software) Completely fed-up, she finally switched. First 2 months she hated it, and you know I heard every word. It took her the next half year to relearn old habits. Then it occurred to her, every thing she hated about her PC was a non-issue with her new computer. Now every time the discussion comes up all she can say is why didn't I do this sooner?
That's the tough one to convert, the one that is so stuck in the rut that anything else is going to be a major hassel. Switching is a much bigger deal for the computer-illiterate because they have a hard time learning anything computer, and dread having to go back to square one with a new system. They are horribly afraid of needing several months of time to re-learn things.
Then a funny thing happened. She's in a rather large social circle, and her friends kept stopping over and noticing the new iMac on her desk. Now many of these people are more interested in good looking computers than good running computers, but in this case they saw both. With a few words from a trusted 'switcher', many of them now have an iMac of their own. At least a few of these converts have converted more people that they know.
I find it astonishing that I have been responsible for maybe six people switching to mac, and yet my mother, the computer novice and long-standing windows advocate, has probably been responsible for over 20 switches in just the last year.
My neighbor recently got a new laptop and it came with wireless, so I moved her over to using my WAP intead of her AOL dialup. She is of course loving the speed increase, but she still pays the monthly AOL subscription, mostly because she has not weaned herself off her AOL email and onto my mailserver. AOL's deciding to not charge for the service and only for the dial-up will be a cost saver for her and many like her.
I can't help but wonder why they are doing this though? I don't use AOL myself, but I was under the impression that they didn't get hit by a lot of banners etc while say, accessing their AOL email. Where is AOL making money on these customers if not by charging them subscription fees?
The usual reply here is that macs are only immune for now due to low market share. While I could place some stock in that argument, it becomes very difficult to get it to hold water when you take a realistic look at the current condition of the Macintosh. Market share is what, triple that of two years ago? There are a lot of people using both mac and windows. The market share does not have to be dominant like MS to attract attacks, it just needs to be high enough profile to get your name in lights. Tell me a successful mac virus right now wouldn't be front page news all over the place? The opportunity/reward is there, and it's really a big, juicy, tempting target. The fact that it has not sustained a single successful attack under these conditions is a very strong statement as to the security of the system.
By contrast, would anyone really care very much if there were another major security hole found in Windows today? Sure, everyone would be scrambling for patches etc but really would it be news? Would it be big? Would it attract serious attention? No, not really, not anymore. It would have been big news if it was the first major issue in say, a year, but this is just the issue of the month. *yawn*
So I believe it's fair to say the argument of low market share is the true reason Macintoshes appear secure is fantasy. If there were exploits easily found as in Windows, we'd be seeing them by now. Some people just need to open their eyes and embrace reality.
>If we sent all our business to other stores, what would we have?
I'm not talking about *all* your business. I'm talking about the ones you consider totalled. You're not going to make any money besides the 15-minute diagnostic, so what does it matter if you recommend another shop or a family geek?
At that point we have no stake in what the customer does with their machine and we will give them our best honest estimation of what they have and what their options are. The typical customer brings their machine to us because they don't have a geek in the family that's willing to work on it, so there's little point in recommending they do that. Most people are either going to leave it at our store and pay for the 15 minutes, say "I'll be back next week to pick it up" and then never come back, (we get that a lot) or pay our service fee and take the machine home and stick it in the attic/garage. Very few of those machines get taken to someone else to work on, and we have no impact on that.
>Besides, what kind of a (take your pick) donates a broken computer for a tax write-off?
I imagine the charity would use it to build a working medium-end system, same your guy does.
Not sure about your town, but the local charities here like Good Will aren't staffed by computer experts. Their check-over is plug it in, does it turn on? Some of them probably contact people like the guy that picks up our machines, to either repair the machine or get it as parts. I think you are over-estimating the computer savvy of the average person. Not many people's reliatives are computer geeks that are willing to fix family computers for free, and not many people at Good Will know how to do a repair-and-install.
My argument stands that there are ethical problems with what your shop is doing. Sure, you can offer that as a "get it out of my hair NOW" solution. But if you really want to help the customer, you'd try a little harder to get his/her machine fixed (even if another shop does it), or at least get him a little more compensation than "we'll waive the diag fee".
"good business" and "ethical" are often seen as opposites. There are extremes of both though. "good business" can mean not letting your employees slack off and then work overtime later in the week, or it can mean making it difficult for a customer to return a product. "ethical" can mean not charging someone an hour's labor when it took you 15 minutes, or it can mean doing work for free. So it is possible for a good business to be considered ethical by some interpretations, or extremely unethical by other interpretations.
As I said, we are not a charity, and we do expect to be compensated for our time. Neither our business nor our employees are willing to just donate our time or money to customers that have a broken computer. Yes I suppose this is the "nice thing to do" and in theory this is a good way for everyone to behave, but in practice not everyone is willing to be nice, so if you are charitable you get taken advantage of. We are neither charitable nor cut-throat, and I believe in this way we are a good business. The alternative is my taking home 20% smaller paychecks because I say, don't clock in when working on a charity case, or the business lowers my hourly pay due to low revenue because I am not billing customers while I'm on the clock, or the business goes bankrupt due to paying me for my time when they are not being paid for the service.
Now where my argument breaks down is here: if the diag fee is more than they'd make back on their taxes anyway, it becomes monetarily better for them to donate it at your store and have their diagnostic fee waived (since you said you do that).
I should probably clarify on that, it's not something we do often nor really willingly. In most cases we expect to be paid at least the 15 minute diagnostic time. In most cases, if the customer is interested in getting a new computer from us, we often will waive the check-out charge. (customer
Do you give the customer the option of taking the broken machine back home?
Of course. Did you think we refuse to give them their machine back? That's absurd. They will have to pay us our 15 minutes service time for the diagnosis, though that was agreed to when they signed the check-in sheet. Before you start... if they knew it was totalled before they brought it in then why did they bring it in? So obviously we have provided them with some missing information (service), and yes our techs have to be paid to look at your machine even if it turns out to be not worth repairing.
Do you encourage the customer to seek estimates at other shops?
If we sent all our business to other stores, what would we have? When you go to McDonalds do you expect them to suggest you stop at Burger King? We don't discourage our customers from getting a second opinion, but we don't encourage them to shop somewhere besides our store for products and services that we are trying to sell. Recommending your competition is a good way to go out of business. We DO recommend other businesses in our area when they provide a service that we do not, or jobs that we are unwilling to take on.
Do you ask the customer if they know a family geek that could fix it for cheap?
see previous. I don't mean to harp about it but do you have any business sense? The world is not a charity, and driving your customers away is business suicide. When's the last time that the guy taking your order at McDonalds said "you know, it'd be much cheaper if you went to your parents' house and had your mom make you dinner."? Isn't that absurd?
Can the customer claim a tax deduction for his donation?
No. We are not a 'charitable organization' and I expect if they tried to claim a deduction they would be audited. I also doubt the man that does the refurbishing for the low income families is considered a 'charitable organization' either, but maybe he is. Besides, what kind of a (take your pick) donates a broken computer for a tax write-off? "Here Timmy, enjoy your new paper weight. If you save up your food money for a week I bet you can pay to get that all fixed up!" That's not a "charitable" donation, that's just plain cruel. I feel bad for places like Good Will that have to deal with people that drop off broken crap as "donation". They have to have someone that knows the item evaluate it, determine it's totalled, probably pay that worker from the GoodWill donations to make that determination, and then pay someone to haul it away. In the end you probably cost them money when you pull that. Hope you are happy with your tax write-off, you just wrote off $100 on your taxes, cost Good Will $7, and helped no one but yourself.
When you drop off equipment here for donation, it goes to a guy that, of his own free time, fixes up machines so that kids that have never gotten to use a computer can have a working 486 at home to play with and learn what a computer is like. No one makes money off it. It costs us resources in the form of storage space for the stuff, and the guy that fixes it up I believe is donating his time, so I suppose we are the losers and Timmy is the winner. Do you see why this is better than dumping your crap at Good Will?
My definition of totalled is "the estimated repair cost for this machine will exceed 80% of the estimated value of the equipment in working condition". YMMV. Some people will pay $500 to fix a 386 because it's "my baby". Other people would just as soon buy a new computer as pay for us to clean the spyware back off their old box.
I'm sure this post will bruise my karma but sorry, that attitude just upsets me.
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So called "deep cycling" a liio battery (or nimh actually) is not good on a battery. I don't know the exact nature of the damage, (whether its an irreversable chemical change, drying out of the electrolyte, or possible plate damage) but I've read in many places with my electronics work that deep cyclng liio and nimh batteries damages their ability to take a charge. Such batteries that are completely discharged for a period of time tend to not accept a new charge at all, rendering them bricked. I have ran into this problem more than once myself. If you have any small products that use liio or nimh batteries and you have let them sit in a clothset for several months you will find that they are fully discharged and very often they will refuse to charge at all. (nicd do not appear to have this problem, or at least not to the same extent) This is why ALL liio/nimh batteries you will find their documentation says they ship with a "partitial charge" to avoid an extended wait in the warehouse resulting in a DOA.
I doubt the liio batteries are catching fire due to taking on water. They WILL however explode if placed in a fire, as all rechargeable batteries have a warning label on them to not dispose of in fire and that is why. If the pack is badly designed and somehow several of the cells are allowed to short, such as if the recharge control chip shorts out, this can lead to the batteries dead shorting. (this is only an issue if the cells are charged, which as I mentioned is pretty much assured) Any rechargeable battery (liio, nimh, or nicd) will get extremely hot when dead shorted while charged, as all the energy of its charge is rapidly released. (most laptop batteries are around 50 watts normal discharge, which can translate easily into 200-300 watt discharges when shorted) Liio carries the additional penalty of being more prone to explosion when superheated, and this can lead to them exploding if shorted.
Though in this article it does not sound like explosion was an issue, more fire. This probably means a pack shorted out (defective, failed) and overheated, catching its battery case on fire due to heat. The burning case eventually helped raise the battery temperature enough to lead to the ignition of the battery electrolyte. (the lithium itself) Once a pallet of liio batteries starts on fire, fire suppression really doesn't matter any more. When the fire department has to deal with things like that they don't try to put it out - they just get everything flammable away from it and cover it with water to suppress the heat until it burns itself out. Once the lithium goes from merely hot to actually burning, you cannot smother it with water, it will rip the oxygen right off the water molicules to continue to burn. So the plane's fire suppression system would have actually fed such a fire. Foam (or something solid) is about the only thing that has a chance of suppressing a lithium fire, and even that is not very effective due to the intense heat of burning lithium vaporizing the foam. (it takes a lot of foam)
It would not surprise me if apple had a patent on the technique of having a second password that would decrypt the key to the vault.
You just KNOW what that will result in
TERRORISM! THEY ARE TERRORIZING OUR CUSTOMERS! ARREST THEM!
You laugh. now think about it. Yes, you see now, this is not meant to be modded "funny".
Opinions will differ and circumstances will adjust, but
Imagine if you're the IT Director, and the President has just locked the annual budget reports in an encrypted vault. It's somewhat difficult to just point a finger at him and laugh.
It is not necessary for I.T. to have the master keys to the entire company. The president is the only one that should have that. If he loses the keys, it's his fault too bad quit crying. Responsibility has to be placed somewhere. The buck stops here. What happens if I go into work today and the door is locked, my silly manager lost his key. Is this justification for ME to have a building security key too? What if I lose mine? Should we give another copy to the neighbor? What part of security do people have trouble grasping? That's all this argument is doing, handing out more copies of the key. Actually worse still, we are not handing out keys, we are making the lock PICKABLE. Now it's not just me that can bypass it, not just the neighbor, but that guy over there walking down the street. All they need is the knowledge of how the pre-designed built-in security hole works, and they're golden.
That is not security, that is fraud. Makes me sick.
Remember though anytime you have a "if a user has rights xyz they can do..." means there is no actual security through encryption. All I have to do is hack my privs (once I root the box, this is not hard?) and poof I'm into your "encrypted" data. That is not security. The only thing that should allow someone into a vault is the key. The only thing that should get you at the key is encryption based on one of several sub-keys, such as the user's password or in the case of OS X filevault, the master password. None of these is stored anywhere on the machine, not even the master password. I don't care if you are head of IT, you cannot get into an ecrypted disk image. (which has no master key option)
The admins paniced when they realized this definitively meant they were not god anymore. There was security in their own system that they could not bypass. Waaaah.
Those admins are on a power trip or have a severe insecurity complex.
So often we hear about worms that attack the net via vulnerabilities that have been around for months, and everyone screams at the vendor for being slow to patch.
I've seen this suggested before and it's a simple idea. Give them three weeks. Send it to the bat-phone or whatever the vendor has. Three weeks later, post it somewhere nice and public - a forum for the discussion of existing unpatched vulnerabilities. Post it regardless of whether or not a patch is available.
If the vendors cry, tell them if they patched in a reasonably fast timeframe this would be a non-issue.
I don't see the problem with this. They are businesses, they react only to money. If taking 2 mos avg to release a patch starts costing them money due to bad press and pissed off owned customers, they will change their behavior. Costing them money is the only way to force them into action. They will whine and cry and snivel and litigate to prevent you from doing this, but in the end they aren't going slow for your good, they're slow for their bank book.
You're falling into the oxymoron of "windows security" again.
I find it amusing that Mac OS has had filevault for what, several years now, with no resulting cataclysm. MS introduces it and half the PC IT flip their lids and MS runs scared. What is wrong with these people? Sorry if I sound like a BOFH but if the user puts data into a vault and then loses their password, they will get no pity from me. Do we cry for the neighbor that just locked his keys in his car while it was running? No, we laugh and point fingers. Some actions carry a built-in penalty for blatant stupidity, and this is one of them. If I put a hammer in the toolbox at work and Joe cracks his thumb trying to hang a picture in his cubicle, do we chase after me for leaving a dangerous object within reach of the monkeys? No, again we laugh and point fingers.
If your company is impossibly tilted toward the users, then just add a line to the AUP that states that filevault or whatever is not and cannot be supported by IT and if you have problems with it you should not expect any help.
In some organizations, the head of IT thinks he's god. More often though it seems, the users think they are the chosen ones and that IT can do the work of gods.
Given how easy it is to change your mac address, (I can do this at will on my ethernet AND wireless) I would hope no serious security system relied entirely on that one factor. We have to assume the serious criminals have all the easy angles covered.
Step 1: do anything that pisses off say, the president
Step 2: get labeled a "terrorist" or "enemy combatant"
Step 2b: you just lost all your civil liberties
Step 3: whatever they want to do to you
How do we really have any civil liberties (protection from the govt as you describe it) when such laws exist that allow the government to ignore the laws?
It's very arguable that the actual letter of the law in America is no better than the letter of the law in China - it's just that other circumstances here in the USA prevent the government from taking the amount of control that china's government has, despite their actually having the legal authority to do it.
When you have "enemy combatant", "for reasons of national security", and "executive order", all the other laws really lose their true meaning. "We'll allow you to do that, unless we decide otherwise" is not true fredom.
Isn't it strange how while the Chinese people are gaining and exercising new civil liberties despite the government, here in the US we are losing our civil liberties to the government, just about as fast as the Chinese are gaining them.
I wonder when they'll catch up with us?
... do not believe that the laws apply to them. To them, the laws are a nuisance, interfere with their god-given right to do their jobs, and there is no acceptable reason to prevent them from enforcing policy by any means necessary. They are knights in shining armor, fighting for you and me, and would never do anything to hurt or suppress us. Then, the laws become mere obstructions to these agencies, to be excepted and bypassed and invalidated by any means necessary, legal, or otherwise. And even then, when caught doing something that even the "adjusted" laws do not allow, they will cower behind the all-powerful statutes that basically say "we do what we want to, are accountable to no one, and it's illegal to investiage us."
The patriot act comees immediately to mind, as do executive orders, "state secrets", and of course our all time favorite, "for reasons of national security."
I am now thoroughly convinced that the executive portion of the US is hopelessly broken, broken in such a way that the very means to fix it are quickly becoming illegal. It's being done for our protection. But isn't that the way it always is? Preying on people's fears, tricking them into giving up their fredom and rights for safety? B. Franklin said "those that would give up a basic liberty for a measure of temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Too bad we missed that lesson. I think we are fulfilling that as prophesy.
Soon all avenues of escape will be gone. American is broken, and it doesn't look like it's fixable. But what to do?
It's all paid support anyway. You can get that from your nearest consultant on demand, far into the future. This applies to 95, 98, Linux, or anything else for that matter. Once you're footing the bill, you can get any support you want. I don't see how this will change anything. Support from a private consultant is likely to be better quality support than MS over the phone anyway.
SSH is specifically designed to prevent MITMA. If I try to ssh to a system that I have recently swapped hardware on and still have the same hard drive, ssh flips out and warns me of a possible MITMA due to the MAC address of the destination having changed. (it displays a short warning saying "someone may be doing something nasty!") In fact, it won't even let me ignore the error, I have go go into the known_hosts file and remove the previous fingerprint before it will let me ssh into that system again. This problem never occurs unless I have changed the machine I am ssh'ing into, so there are no false positives to get accustomed to.
Although this prevents MITMA, it does not necessarily prevent phishing by default because the phisher could somehow trick me into ssh'ing to the wrong address, by hacking a DNS for example. However there is one further security feature of SSH. When you are ssh'ing into a system that you have never connected to before, it displays a warning and asks if you want to add the new host to your list of known hosts. Since you should never get this except the very first time you connect, if you see this warning when connecting to someplace you visit regularly, you know something is wrong.
I suppose the best defense to phishing instead of 2 part authentication, would be to send the users the program to access their content. Imagine the bank writing an ssh-enabled client with the fingerprint of their server hard coded into it, where it remembers your account information as well so you don't get used to typing in your bank password whenever asked for it. No link to click, just "run the bank program" to access your account. Even a dns compromise would not impact this. The only issue I can see with this method is storing the acccount information in a way that cannot be extracted by spyware AND not in a way that can be used in its encrypted form. (such as hashed)
The big problem with phishing here is simply that the user is too used to being asked for their account information, and as long as the phisher doesn't deviate too much from the norm the user will just go zombie and type it in. This information needs to be something you enter once, and if it ever asks you again there is a problem.
But in the end, profound user stupidity trumps all. That will never change.
Many DVDs you rent nowadays have "extra content" on them. Several of the disks I have you can select from two or more "viewpoints", and in any scene where there are alternate camera angles you will see the alternates. Sometimes you see someone not quite in frame where they belong, or a bit of the set crew or you see someonene just standing there listening to dialog from an actor off camera. Occasionally you'll see an aspect of a prop or some activity that was too subtle to notice from the main viewpoint.
There is absolutely no reason they could not use this existing technology to imbed a "pg-13", "nonviolent", or "non-gore" thread for the movie. (it's even possible for the alternate track to have the same video, but say different audio, to censor bad language) The studios simply choose not to do this, and I think that's their right.
I for one am pleased to see copyright laws applied somewhere that actually makes an improvement. When I go to rent a movie, I want the content as the director made it, not the way YOU want your content. If I don't like the content, maybe I'm following the wrong director or studio. Just as you are saying don't make me watch your violence, I say you don't have the right to prevent me from watching mine.
It works both ways.
Push for the use of technology as described above that lets us both have our cake.
I believe it was the Cistine Chapel that had to be renovated recently because at some point hundreds of years ago the clergy thought the stained glass (Da Vinci?) was too lewd and had it PAINTED OVER to add clothes. They restored the stained glass recently to its original condition, and the improvement was amazing. I fear more people support the butchering of art.
If they seriously didn't want to give their customers popups, it's very simple. When you start getting complaints that affiliate #46 is causing popups, call that affiliate. "That affiliate code is now invalid. Your new code is 86. Clicks to code 46 will no longer be paid. If we start receiving popups to affiliate code 86, your contract will be immediately terminated."
Any of them could do that in a heartbeat. If they don't do it, we can only assume they support the popups and adware, or at the very least are deliberately turning a blind eye "but it's not our fault!" Yes, it is, and you know it. You're continuing to pay them even though you know what they are doing with your money. In the end, the affiliate is 100% accountable for the actions of their sub-affiliates, just the same as the company is 100% accountable for the actions of their advertisers. In business, the buck always stops at the top.
(to be fair a few of them do follow this crede, and do have to work the crowd a bit before they find affiliates that aren't scum, but all in all, they are the rare ones)
My favorite page-1 quote from that article would have to be Some advertisers say their messages have appeared in pop-ups without their permission.
How STUPID do they think we are? As an advertiser, you don't accidentally advertise for someone that's not paying you. When's the last time you saw a commercial on TV that the retailer denied they paid for? The spammers are charginng a lot for their service, and there is no shortage of customers, so I'm quite certain they are only spamming for paying customers.
More than likely these are cases where someone in marketing got the brilliant idea to advertise with spyware and started it without really letting their uppers know what the fallout was going to be. Then six months later when the CEO's in-box is piled high with complaints they deny they had anything to do with it.
I haven't heard of any sting operations for hitting the phishers... Considering the anonymous and random nature of the phishing scams and ease with which you can attract a phishing email, you could send an email from a newly created email account back to the phisher without them realizing this wasn't one of the addresses they phished, and could arrange for a carefully monitored and traceable transaction to take place, to track down the phisher. ("follow the money" principle) Why don't we see more of this going on?
There's a small degree of higher risk, but if you get a new disposable cell phone every three days and move around all day you'd be a hard mark to hit.
Too many people are now aware of the "don't click the link" aspect of phishing, but I'm sure there are still pleanty of suckers that assume if they have your phone number you must be legit. I would not be surprised if they find a way to do this through US Mail in a way that hides their identity.
It would be interesting if one day, to get such an online account set up, they make you pass a short test, where they give you ten examples of people asking for your account information in various ways, and you have to answer "give them the information" or "report the incident to phishing.ebay.com". Anyone that answers "give them the information" on any of the questions doesn't get an account.
I wager that alone would eliminate 80% of successful phishes.
I've had fairly good luck in getting my rebates filled in the past, having redeemed maybe a dozen mail-in rebates for various things. I did run into a problem on the last one, a hard drive at Tiger Direct, $50 rebate on a seagate 250. It was one of those things where they say to mail in the original bar code, yet the bar code exists in only one place, on the label on the hard drive. Not wanting to peel the label off my HD, I included a scan of it. They also said that the rebate form MUST match the name on the invoice AND the credit card. My full name is on my card, and my short common name is on the receipt. And they always wait as long as possible before replying to your rebate, the usual scam is "expect 8-12 weeks for your rebate" and "unfilled rebates must be counter-claimed within 14 weeks of purchase". They give you as small of a window of appeal as possible between the last possible day you might receive the check and the very last day they will accept an appeal due to your not receiving said check. And to help this process along they mail out your check at the last possible moment if at all. I have never seen anyone receive their rebate check earlier than one week before the last possible day it might arrive.
So the $50 rebate disappeared into the Rebate Black Hole and I had to send them another claim. A full two months later I actually did get a check, but that was what, almost half a year after I bought the drive. I wonder how much interest they made on my $50 check over the course of 5 months, multiplied by how many thousands of customers?
I don't know the exact details of how they handle rebates, but many companies simply sell them to rebate centers, as obligations. So my $50 rebate was sold to this rebate center for maybe $-45. (they received $45 to accept the obligation of the rebate) Then if they have to cut you a check, they lose $5. But if you fail to ask for the rebate, they clear $45. So it is to their advantage to make you jump through lots of hoops, give you numerous opportunities to submit an invalid or incomplete request, and under no circumstances do they tell you if your submission was rejected.
I would imagine that out of say, 100 initial rebate requests that are rejected, only 5 of the customers actually catch it in time and resubmit to get their rebate. The rest forget about it by the time the deadline has arrived for them to receive their check, and by the time they realize they never got a check, it's too late to resubmit. I would be very interested to know what their statistics are... does anyone have any hard numbers for any of the rebate centers?
- percentage of rebate submissions initially rejected (guessing 40%)
- percentage of rejected submissions where the consumer received notice of rejection (guessing 0%)
- percentage of initial rejections that were followed up by a resubmission from the customer, in time (guessing 10%)
- percentage of resubmissions that were not fulfilled for any reason (guessing 20%)
- percentage of submitted rebates that resulted in a check (guessing 60%)
If I'm anywhere near accurate in my guestimates, they are filling up big lawn and leaf bags with our cash. But it seems that if you are dilligent, you have very good chances of getting your money, albeit with a fight. They are just making it soooo easy for you to NOT get your rebate that they can rake in the cash at our expense.
Once at the Lagrange point
Lets review this. Lagrange point. Last I checked, a point is not a "region". So there's no way to put a titanium anything completely within a Lagrange Point. At the very best they might put the "sun" part of it centered at the LP, but then the "planetoids" would all be outside the LP, and however minorly, would be affected to varying degrees by the gravity of the earth and of the sun.
This test is invalid. The use of a LP is not going to nullify the effect of gravity of the earth, let alone of the sun. If they are going to do a test that is this sensitive, there is nowhere in the solar system they can hold it and get accurate results.
In my experience, the people that switch tend to be the ones that know someone else that has switched. It took me almost two years of listening to my mother whine and moan about her PC and then "don't tell me about your mac, I don't want to hear it, I LIKE my PC!". Ya, sounds like you're really loving it.
Then she got hit by three major viruses in 6 months, paying techs hundreds each time to fix it. (and she was downright religious with her antivirus software) Completely fed-up, she finally switched. First 2 months she hated it, and you know I heard every word. It took her the next half year to relearn old habits. Then it occurred to her, every thing she hated about her PC was a non-issue with her new computer. Now every time the discussion comes up all she can say is why didn't I do this sooner?
That's the tough one to convert, the one that is so stuck in the rut that anything else is going to be a major hassel. Switching is a much bigger deal for the computer-illiterate because they have a hard time learning anything computer, and dread having to go back to square one with a new system. They are horribly afraid of needing several months of time to re-learn things.
Then a funny thing happened. She's in a rather large social circle, and her friends kept stopping over and noticing the new iMac on her desk. Now many of these people are more interested in good looking computers than good running computers, but in this case they saw both. With a few words from a trusted 'switcher', many of them now have an iMac of their own. At least a few of these converts have converted more people that they know.
I find it astonishing that I have been responsible for maybe six people switching to mac, and yet my mother, the computer novice and long-standing windows advocate, has probably been responsible for over 20 switches in just the last year.
So, it takes a switcher to make a switcher.
My neighbor recently got a new laptop and it came with wireless, so I moved her over to using my WAP intead of her AOL dialup. She is of course loving the speed increase, but she still pays the monthly AOL subscription, mostly because she has not weaned herself off her AOL email and onto my mailserver. AOL's deciding to not charge for the service and only for the dial-up will be a cost saver for her and many like her.
I can't help but wonder why they are doing this though? I don't use AOL myself, but I was under the impression that they didn't get hit by a lot of banners etc while say, accessing their AOL email. Where is AOL making money on these customers if not by charging them subscription fees?
The usual reply here is that macs are only immune for now due to low market share. While I could place some stock in that argument, it becomes very difficult to get it to hold water when you take a realistic look at the current condition of the Macintosh. Market share is what, triple that of two years ago? There are a lot of people using both mac and windows. The market share does not have to be dominant like MS to attract attacks, it just needs to be high enough profile to get your name in lights. Tell me a successful mac virus right now wouldn't be front page news all over the place? The opportunity/reward is there, and it's really a big, juicy, tempting target. The fact that it has not sustained a single successful attack under these conditions is a very strong statement as to the security of the system.
By contrast, would anyone really care very much if there were another major security hole found in Windows today? Sure, everyone would be scrambling for patches etc but really would it be news? Would it be big? Would it attract serious attention? No, not really, not anymore. It would have been big news if it was the first major issue in say, a year, but this is just the issue of the month. *yawn*
So I believe it's fair to say the argument of low market share is the true reason Macintoshes appear secure is fantasy. If there were exploits easily found as in Windows, we'd be seeing them by now. Some people just need to open their eyes and embrace reality.
>If we sent all our business to other stores, what would we have?
I'm not talking about *all* your business. I'm talking about the ones you consider totalled. You're not going to make any money besides the 15-minute diagnostic, so what does it matter if you recommend another shop or a family geek?
At that point we have no stake in what the customer does with their machine and we will give them our best honest estimation of what they have and what their options are. The typical customer brings their machine to us because they don't have a geek in the family that's willing to work on it, so there's little point in recommending they do that. Most people are either going to leave it at our store and pay for the 15 minutes, say "I'll be back next week to pick it up" and then never come back, (we get that a lot) or pay our service fee and take the machine home and stick it in the attic/garage. Very few of those machines get taken to someone else to work on, and we have no impact on that.
>Besides, what kind of a (take your pick) donates a broken computer for a tax write-off?
I imagine the charity would use it to build a working medium-end system, same your guy does.
Not sure about your town, but the local charities here like Good Will aren't staffed by computer experts. Their check-over is plug it in, does it turn on? Some of them probably contact people like the guy that picks up our machines, to either repair the machine or get it as parts. I think you are over-estimating the computer savvy of the average person. Not many people's reliatives are computer geeks that are willing to fix family computers for free, and not many people at Good Will know how to do a repair-and-install.
My argument stands that there are ethical problems with what your shop is doing. Sure, you can offer that as a "get it out of my hair NOW" solution. But if you really want to help the customer, you'd try a little harder to get his/her machine fixed (even if another shop does it), or at least get him a little more compensation than "we'll waive the diag fee".
"good business" and "ethical" are often seen as opposites. There are extremes of both though. "good business" can mean not letting your employees slack off and then work overtime later in the week, or it can mean making it difficult for a customer to return a product. "ethical" can mean not charging someone an hour's labor when it took you 15 minutes, or it can mean doing work for free. So it is possible for a good business to be considered ethical by some interpretations, or extremely unethical by other interpretations.
As I said, we are not a charity, and we do expect to be compensated for our time. Neither our business nor our employees are willing to just donate our time or money to customers that have a broken computer. Yes I suppose this is the "nice thing to do" and in theory this is a good way for everyone to behave, but in practice not everyone is willing to be nice, so if you are charitable you get taken advantage of. We are neither charitable nor cut-throat, and I believe in this way we are a good business. The alternative is my taking home 20% smaller paychecks because I say, don't clock in when working on a charity case, or the business lowers my hourly pay due to low revenue because I am not billing customers while I'm on the clock, or the business goes bankrupt due to paying me for my time when they are not being paid for the service.
Now where my argument breaks down is here: if the diag fee is more than they'd make back on their taxes anyway, it becomes monetarily better for them to donate it at your store and have their diagnostic fee waived (since you said you do that).
I should probably clarify on that, it's not something we do often nor really willingly. In most cases we expect to be paid at least the 15 minute diagnostic time. In most cases, if the customer is interested in getting a new computer from us, we often will waive the check-out charge. (customer
Do you give the customer the option of taking the broken machine back home?
Of course. Did you think we refuse to give them their machine back? That's absurd. They will have to pay us our 15 minutes service time for the diagnosis, though that was agreed to when they signed the check-in sheet. Before you start... if they knew it was totalled before they brought it in then why did they bring it in? So obviously we have provided them with some missing information (service), and yes our techs have to be paid to look at your machine even if it turns out to be not worth repairing.
Do you encourage the customer to seek estimates at other shops?
If we sent all our business to other stores, what would we have? When you go to McDonalds do you expect them to suggest you stop at Burger King? We don't discourage our customers from getting a second opinion, but we don't encourage them to shop somewhere besides our store for products and services that we are trying to sell. Recommending your competition is a good way to go out of business. We DO recommend other businesses in our area when they provide a service that we do not, or jobs that we are unwilling to take on.
Do you ask the customer if they know a family geek that could fix it for cheap?
see previous. I don't mean to harp about it but do you have any business sense? The world is not a charity, and driving your customers away is business suicide. When's the last time that the guy taking your order at McDonalds said "you know, it'd be much cheaper if you went to your parents' house and had your mom make you dinner."? Isn't that absurd?
Can the customer claim a tax deduction for his donation?
No. We are not a 'charitable organization' and I expect if they tried to claim a deduction they would be audited. I also doubt the man that does the refurbishing for the low income families is considered a 'charitable organization' either, but maybe he is. Besides, what kind of a (take your pick) donates a broken computer for a tax write-off? "Here Timmy, enjoy your new paper weight. If you save up your food money for a week I bet you can pay to get that all fixed up!" That's not a "charitable" donation, that's just plain cruel. I feel bad for places like Good Will that have to deal with people that drop off broken crap as "donation". They have to have someone that knows the item evaluate it, determine it's totalled, probably pay that worker from the GoodWill donations to make that determination, and then pay someone to haul it away. In the end you probably cost them money when you pull that. Hope you are happy with your tax write-off, you just wrote off $100 on your taxes, cost Good Will $7, and helped no one but yourself.
When you drop off equipment here for donation, it goes to a guy that, of his own free time, fixes up machines so that kids that have never gotten to use a computer can have a working 486 at home to play with and learn what a computer is like. No one makes money off it. It costs us resources in the form of storage space for the stuff, and the guy that fixes it up I believe is donating his time, so I suppose we are the losers and Timmy is the winner. Do you see why this is better than dumping your crap at Good Will?
My definition of totalled is "the estimated repair cost for this machine will exceed 80% of the estimated value of the equipment in working condition". YMMV. Some people will pay $500 to fix a 386 because it's "my baby". Other people would just as soon buy a new computer as pay for us to clean the spyware back off their old box.
I'm sure this post will bruise my karma but sorry, that attitude just upsets me.