> > It "conference called" phone calls to 14 prepaid mobile phones where the calls were recorded.
> >That was clever. How did they get access to the phones to flash the programming? Phones worked fine otherwise. Makes me think someone had access to them at the factory. How else would they be able to get the source. Or would they need it?
One of three ways:
1) A backdoor in phones for snooping; either placed there by design/regulation in concert with the manufacturer, or slipped in by means of some clever hackery. Read "Reflections on Trusting Trust" for just how clever said hackery could be.
2) By means of the normal process whereby automated firmware updates can be delivered to phones. Same sort of way a Tivo or satellite/cable decoder can be "updated" remotely. Except that the "update" only went to the "right" phones. Sort of a variant on #1.
3) Or the old-fashioned way: the same way a virus/worm author gets access to flash your BIOS, or overwrite the material on a hard drive. Sent 'em some HTML that exploited a flaw when rendered. Sent 'em a.JPG with corrupt headers.
A mobile phone is a computer with a writable storage device on it. Computers run code. Computers do what they're designed to do, unless the code they run contains flaws - in which case they do what they're told to do, which may not be what the designer intended, but it's precisely what the cracker intends.
...then the Chairman of the Party pointed out that after he ordered his citizens to throw their chairs into the Yangtze River, they fucking flooded 1.9 million peasants, and that fucking burying Google would be a cinch in comparison.
Speaking of Ballmer, I wonder if you can find the monkeyboy video on MSN search?
> Welcome to Real Life.
> >
In this game you start life as a helpless child totally dependent on others for survival. As you gain experience and skills you will have access to more of the game's features, including day care, school, college, and finally a place called "the real world." > >You will also have responsibilities. If you so choose, you can become responsible for new game-players as they enter the game as infants. Be aware that this is committment that will entail responsibilities for as long as both of you are still in the game.
> >
The game never ends, but at some point you will be forced to exit the game due to circumstances or declining health. The game is engineered so it is very difficult to spend more than 115 years in the game without a severe decline in health.
This guy's gotta be astroturfing or shilling. He's missed a whole bunch of problems with the gameplay.
First off, it's slow. We're talking boring like the Sims, but even slower-paced, and the devs only concession to the slow gameplay is to have a speed-up item that can only be used once a day. Moreover, the speed-up item only works at night (when you should be trying to play) rather than during the day part of the cycle where the game is at its most boring.
The list of defects goes on. No fucking server rollbacks. You read in the paper that your character's about to get hit by a nuke, so you spend a few days setting up a menage-a-trois with your boss' wife and just one lousy goat, and no nuke comes. Gameplay after that sucks so hard that you might as well pull out the old.45 and reroll.
Anyways, this guy's review is teh suck. But "Real Life" is teh bigger suck. I wouldn't even warez it.
> What is more important, be a showmen technologist like Jobs or an humanitarian missionaire like Gates? And even more important: Is it important that donations from rich billionaires be public or should they remain private?"
It's more important to do what you do best. Jobs really is a showman, and he really is technologist. Gates? Gates was a damn good coder, and he is a damn proficient businessman. The humanitarian stuff only started in earnest when he realized he had to do some serious brown-nosing with the government in order to get a free pass from the DOJ for his abuse of his monopoly.
On that score - it's Jobs by a million miles. He knows what he's good at. He does it.
Besides, you really don't wanna see Gates putting on a show with technology anyways, but at least now you know where Steve "monkeyboy" Ballmer got his dance lessons.
Private or public donations? Not my money, none of my freaking business.
If it were my money, it'd be donated in private.
"So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you." - Some long-haired hippy freak
You don't have to believe in Jesus -- hell, you don't even have to believe in God to see that the long-haired hippy freak had a pretty good point. If you support a cause - donate. There doesn't have to be a God for you to feel pretty fucking good about what you've done to advance your views.
> However, our needs are unlikely to ever require a full time person, so I'm wondering if small, offsite sysadmin services exist
Sure they do!
Send an email to these guys, and tell them they're interested in outsourcing your system adminstration tasks. I did, and they got me set up in a jiffy.
By the way, what was your username again? >clickity-click<
In the past 15 years, the Martians have shot down Deep Space 2, Mars Polar Lander, Mars Climate Observer, Mars Observer, Phobos 1 and 2, and half a dozen earlier probes.
(OK, so Mars Climate Observer wasn't shot down - it was Martian spies who infiltrated NASA and switched things between Metric/Imperial units - but you get my drift.)
> For the three months ending Dec. 31, ChoicePoint said it earned $27.68 million on revenues of over one billion dollars in 2005
Then $10M is about a third of a quarter's earnings. Your revenue figure is for all four quarters, and revenue ("amount of money you took in") is not the same as earnings ("amount of money you actually made").
CPS has about 90M shares outstanding. A $10M fine is about $0.09 per share.
For the year ended December 31, 2005, the Company recorded a pre-tax
charge of $8.0 million ($8.8 million net of taxes) for the probable
FTC settlement discussed above, $19.3 million ($11.9 million net of
taxes) for specific legal expenses and other professional fees related
to the fraudulent data access previously disclosed in our public
filings, and $1.5 million ($0.9 million net of taxes) of other
operating charges for lease abandonment charges related to the
consolidation of two facilities.
also paid $12M in legal expenses (after tax deductions) trying to beat the rap. Total cost to the company appears to be $22M, or $0.24 per share. When you're earning $1.50 and change per share, it looks like they got dinged for about two months' worth of profits.
Put in more human terms -- someone scammed you out of a month's paycheck by means of identity theft, and you spent another month's paycheck hiring landsharks to get your reputation back.
The punishment is actually pretty proportional to the crime. Personally, I might have gone for about double what the FTC went for, but it's still not chump change.
No amount of fines will the fact that they're a bunch of privacy-invading fuckweasels who deserve to be first against the wall when the revolution comes. The privacy-invading fuckweaselry was an inherent part of their business model; they'd have earned their spot against the wall even without the data theft.
> What if they found a copy of the fast and the furious in one of the cars? i guess it'd be the movies fault then right? oh wait... movies aren't a pariah subject like gaming, my bad.
Put yourself in your Senator's shoes. One industry lobbyist offers you a line of cocaine from between some Hollywood starlet's tits. The other industry lobbyist offers you a can of Jolt cola and apologizes for his clients' manboobs. Whose industry would you hand out the pork to?
> > This way you can explicitly put there alcoholic beverages, cigarrettes, pornography and violent videogames in the same category. > >You forgot religious indoctrination.
No he didn't. Look at your version of the list again:
"Booze, smokes, pr0n, video games, church."
One of these things is not like the other. One of these things does not belong.
I'll grant that getting "material harmful for minors" to show up when you type "fun things to do on wednesday night" is a bit of a stretch, even if he's using a Dvorak keyboard.
Maybe the Mormons have special keyboards to go with the underwear or something, and he's managed to find one in order to translate?
> 1. What you know you know. >
2. What you know you don't know. >
3. What you don't know you know. >
4. What you don't know you don't know. >
>
As long as Google tells people items where removed from their search because of their government, then Google is still providing information in the form of #2 instead of #4 like other search engines might, or the absense of any search engine would be.
Wow, I didn't know the Secretary of Defense had a Slashdot account!
"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know." - Donald Rumsfeld, February 12, 2002
> I want some big, important pundit on the right to give an example of something the president does not, by their lights, have the authority to do. If he becomes a dictator in wartime (which it's mighty sketchy to say we're in), why not come out and say this? Can he rape and murder? No, seriously, if he can break one law, why not others?
Well, you see, it's necessary - we have laws that prevent our leaders from raping and murdering our citizens over here. But these are different times. We rape and murder our citizens over there, so we don't have to rape and murder our citizens over here! Why do our citizens hate our freedom?
>There is, by my understanding, an absolutely ZERO chance that Fox will pick up a second season of Firefly and an approximately equivalent chance that Fox will consider surrendering the television rights to another channel.
Given a largely-male demographic for science fiction, you're saying that FOX wouldn't even pass the proverbial leaf on the wind over to these guys?
> As part of a recent examination of the most popular html authoring techniques, my colleague Ian Hickson parsed through a billion web pages from the Google repository to find out what are the most popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata.
"Unfortunately, it was also of significant interest to the DOJ, who wanted to know how many times the word 'boobs' appeared in the first 50 characters after the string "IMG SRC". Because we didn't actually look for this data, and because the DOJ folks didn't believe us when we told them so, we're now enjoying a taxpayer-funded vacation in sunny Cuba."
> We decided that to publish this would be of significant utility to developers
whom we would encourage to send lawyers, guns and money; the blink tag now encloses the rotating ad banner.
> > They pay tax on those stock sales
> > But not income tax, which is what the parent mentioned. They probably pay the (much lower) long-term captial gains tax.
In Kalifornistan, all income - salary, interest, dividends, and both short-term and long-term capital gains - is taxed by the State as well as the Federal government. Every dollar earned over $40000 is taxed at 9.3%. (Every buck over $1M is taxed at 10.3% starting January 1, 2006.)
So if you have, say, a $400M capital gain on a $500M hunk of stock, the Feds take $60M (to build a quarter of a bridge to nowhere in Alaska, or to blow up some Arabs), and Ahnold takes an extra $37M in state taxes (for the pensions purchased by the various government employees union' under the previous administration in exchange for campaign donations.)
And since the AMT threshold is measured in thousands of dollars, no, you can't deduct the $37M in state taxes from your Federal return, because you're so far beyond the AMT threshold that your accountant can't even see the AMT threshold without very long baseline interferometry.
Ask yourself what the various levels of government have done to earn a quarter of the wealth spawned by Google.
This isn't a right-vs-left issue. Wouldn't most Democrats be a little happier if the government wasn't able to take a huge chunk of your wealth in order to buy bombs to drop on brown people? And wouldn't most Republicans be a little happier of the government didn't take the rest of your money to spend on government employees' unions and welfare queens?
> >
Hello, I'm Sunava Dutta and I am a Program Manager in the Internet Explorer team.
> >
It's OK, we understand...
1) We admitted we were powerless over the cruft - that the code base had become unmanageable.
2) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3) Made a decision to turn our specs and our code over to the care of Gates as we understood Him.
4) Made a recursive search and complete manifest of our source files.
5) Admitted to Gates, to ourselves, and to another developer the exact nature of our design flaws.
6) Were entirely ready to have Gates fire our sorry asses.
7) Humbly asked Him to allocate the budget for the security upgrades.
8) Made a list of all bugs we had let slip into the released codebase, and became willing to provide patches for them all.
9) Provided patches to such systems wherever possible, except when to do so would break existing functionality or introduce new security holes.
10) Continued to monitor the security mailing lists, and when we were notified of an exploit, promptly fixed the bug.
11) Sought through coding and specification to improve our conscious contact with Gates, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to program managers, and to practice these principles in all our projects.
> OSDir.com: What do you advise people to bear in mind
if they plan to deploy Asterisk for their PBX needs? What should
they know about the features and limitations of the software's
current version? > >
Spencer: Asterisk, as its name implies, was designed to do
everything in telecom -- the name comes from the wildcard
symbol. It can do most anything that you need it to do.
A good answer, but I half-expected to read...
"Asterisk? As its name implies - I regret that I have but one asterisk for my company. That's why I went with an open source solution."
But then I'm an invertebrate punster. (so slug me!)
> My personal experience suggests that people purchased Internet access for information and communication purposes, and that for the most part it was sites like Amazon that brought us e-commerce. Does anybody know of any research or science that backs up or refutes this claim?
It goes back farther than that.
Instead of thinking "Amazon" and "e-commerce", think USENET and alt.sex.
Once upon a time, alt.sex was the main reason (well, if you were a college student) to do this USENET thing. Then some schmuck figured out that you could uuencode a binary file into 7-bit-clean text, and upload it into alt.sex, and every other schmuck on the planet could see teh b00bies.
When a scanner cost thousands of dollars, you could get your b00bies in one of three ways: Buy the dead trees (and deal with storing them:), download the pictures from a pay BBS at 2400 baud (because someone else paid thousands of dollars for a scanner), or copy them from the news spool free (and not have to wait, because the college's 56k leased line was up 24/7!) from USENET, because some other guy who already bought the dead trees was willing to use the scanner in the lab (that had already been paid for:) to scan in the pictures and upload them (again for free, because the leased line was always there) to alt.sex.
Needless to say, this didn't last long - kilobytes turned into megabytes, hard drives overflowed, links became saturated, and thus was born alt.sex.pictures. And because news admins got tired of dealing with alt.sex.yet.another.funny.group name (which had to be permitted) and denying alt.sex.pictures.* (whose groups would overflow the news spool in rapid order), there was a great split - and thus was born alt.binaries.*.
Long story short -- USENET administrators needed more diskspace and bandwidth, and at one time, pr0n was indeed a major proportion of all USENET traffic, and even though the transmission network was still in the process of shifting from UUCP store-and-forward technology to a TCP/IP network, the fundamental issues of bandwidth and storage remained.
That's not to say there weren't other legitimate uses for all that bandwidth and storage; there were. But the growth of USENET (on account of a lot of sites -- even corporate sites, which would be unthinkable today -- maintaining "a full feed", including alt.binaries.*, out of either a sense of tradition or a pervy newsadmin) was in large part fueled by pr0n. And in large part, the growth of USENET drove "the Internet".
USENET was the first peer-to-peer network. Each "peer" was a machine costing tens of thousands of dollars in hardware, and hundreds of dollars a month, but considering that "consumer-level" communications was limited to 2400-baud modems, the combination of a USENET server to store "everything", and deliver it through the university LAN, was a huge step forward for the end user.
Typical conversation from circa 1988:
Fourth-year-student: "USENET? It's like a BBS, with ten thousand message boards, a hundred thousand users, and no waiting to connect to it! And FTP? It's like a download section of a BBS, with no upload quota! And you can get files from anywhere in the world! Look, here's an FTP server with a collection of all those DOS utilities you'll ever need, and it's in Finland, fer Chrissakes, and it doesn't cost a cent to call it up!"
First-year student: "Finland? Why Finland?"
Fourth-year student: "Why not? But if you don't like Finland, we'll get it from the mirror at White Sands Missile Range!"
Das Wikipagen is nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben.
Ist easy pissen off der blogbereich, libellen und
slanderen mit lawsuitspawnen. Ist nicht fur editten
by das dummkopfen. Das rubbernecken kourtjudgen musten
keepen das cotten-pickenen hands in das pockets -
relaxen und watchen das flammekrieg.
> Bill Smith, chief technology officer at BellSouth justified content charging companies by saying they are using the telco's network without paying for it. "
Agent Smith: "If I go to the airport, I can buy a coach standby ticket or a first-class ticket," Smith said. "In the shipping business, I can get two-day air or six-day ground."
Neoogle: Wow, that sounds like a really good deal, Bill. But I think I've got a better one. How about I give you the finger, and you give me my phone call.
A tip, by the way, for all who go down to the sea in ships:
Always carry a length of fiber-optic cable in your pocket.
Should you be shipwrecked and find yourself stranded on a desert island, bury
the cable in the sand. A few hours later, a guy driving a backhoe
will be along to dig it up. Ask him to rescue you.
> > It is like the interstate, if everyone speeds, they can't arrest everyone.
> >
No, but the scary part is they can arrest who they choose too when everyone breaks the law.
Bingo.
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said
Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that
it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know
that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power
and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick,
and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares
so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live
without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens'
What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that
can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and
you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.
Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you
understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
Slashdot Mirror
> Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
> the first few times I tried to view this article. Are we sure Slashdot isn't infected?
Naw, if Slashdot had been hit, it would have said DATA Error [47 0F 94 93 F4 K5]. Please move along.
Man, those Kuro5hin folks, always trying to get the last byte in edgewise...
>
>That was clever. How did they get access to the phones to flash the programming? Phones worked fine otherwise. Makes me think someone had access to them at the factory. How else would they be able to get the source. Or would they need it?
One of three ways:
1) A backdoor in phones for snooping; either placed there by design/regulation in concert with the manufacturer, or slipped in by means of some clever hackery. Read "Reflections on Trusting Trust" for just how clever said hackery could be.
2) By means of the normal process whereby automated firmware updates can be delivered to phones. Same sort of way a Tivo or satellite/cable decoder can be "updated" remotely. Except that the "update" only went to the "right" phones. Sort of a variant on #1.
3) Or the old-fashioned way: the same way a virus/worm author gets access to flash your BIOS, or overwrite the material on a hard drive. Sent 'em some HTML that exploited a flaw when rendered. Sent 'em a .JPG with corrupt headers.
A mobile phone is a computer with a writable storage device on it. Computers run code. Computers do what they're designed to do, unless the code they run contains flaws - in which case they do what they're told to do, which may not be what the designer intended, but it's precisely what the cracker intends.
>
>That sounds painful!
Yeah, but at least with the Shuffle, he won't look like the Goatse Guy when he's done with it.
Speaking of Ballmer, I wonder if you can find the monkeyboy video on MSN search?
"You don't need to see his identification."
"Nothing for you to see here. Stick around."
>
> In this game you start life as a helpless child totally dependent on others for survival. As you gain experience and skills you will have access to more of the game's features, including day care, school, college, and finally a place called "the real world."
>
>You will also have responsibilities. If you so choose, you can become responsible for new game-players as they enter the game as infants. Be aware that this is committment that will entail responsibilities for as long as both of you are still in the game.
>
> The game never ends, but at some point you will be forced to exit the game due to circumstances or declining health. The game is engineered so it is very difficult to spend more than 115 years in the game without a severe decline in health.
This guy's gotta be astroturfing or shilling. He's missed a whole bunch of problems with the gameplay.
First off, it's slow. We're talking boring like the Sims, but even slower-paced, and the devs only concession to the slow gameplay is to have a speed-up item that can only be used once a day. Moreover, the speed-up item only works at night (when you should be trying to play) rather than during the day part of the cycle where the game is at its most boring.
The list of defects goes on. No fucking server rollbacks. You read in the paper that your character's about to get hit by a nuke, so you spend a few days setting up a menage-a-trois with your boss' wife and just one lousy goat, and no nuke comes. Gameplay after that sucks so hard that you might as well pull out the old .45 and reroll.
Anyways, this guy's review is teh suck. But "Real Life" is teh bigger suck. I wouldn't even warez it.
It's more important to do what you do best. Jobs really is a showman, and he really is technologist. Gates? Gates was a damn good coder, and he is a damn proficient businessman. The humanitarian stuff only started in earnest when he realized he had to do some serious brown-nosing with the government in order to get a free pass from the DOJ for his abuse of his monopoly.
On that score - it's Jobs by a million miles. He knows what he's good at. He does it.
Besides, you really don't wanna see Gates putting on a show with technology anyways, but at least now you know where Steve "monkeyboy" Ballmer got his dance lessons.
Private or public donations? Not my money, none of my freaking business.
If it were my money, it'd be donated in private.
You don't have to believe in Jesus -- hell, you don't even have to believe in God to see that the long-haired hippy freak had a pretty good point. If you support a cause - donate. There doesn't have to be a God for you to feel pretty fucking good about what you've done to advance your views.
Sure they do!
Send an email to these guys, and tell them they're interested in outsourcing your system adminstration tasks. I did, and they got me set up in a jiffy.
By the way, what was your username again? >clickity-click<
Stanford and Berkeley snubbed by alumni, film at 11!
In the past 15 years, the Martians have shot down Deep Space 2, Mars Polar Lander, Mars Climate Observer, Mars Observer, Phobos 1 and 2, and half a dozen earlier probes.
(OK, so Mars Climate Observer wasn't shot down - it was Martian spies who infiltrated NASA and switched things between Metric/Imperial units - but you get my drift.)
Anyways, it's payback time!
Then $10M is about a third of a quarter's earnings. Your revenue figure is for all four quarters, and revenue ("amount of money you took in") is not the same as earnings ("amount of money you actually made").
CPS has about 90M shares outstanding. A $10M fine is about $0.09 per share.
According to their press release, they...
also paid $12M in legal expenses (after tax deductions) trying to beat the rap. Total cost to the company appears to be $22M, or $0.24 per share. When you're earning $1.50 and change per share, it looks like they got dinged for about two months' worth of profits.
Put in more human terms -- someone scammed you out of a month's paycheck by means of identity theft, and you spent another month's paycheck hiring landsharks to get your reputation back.
The punishment is actually pretty proportional to the crime. Personally, I might have gone for about double what the FTC went for, but it's still not chump change.
No amount of fines will the fact that they're a bunch of privacy-invading fuckweasels who deserve to be first against the wall when the revolution comes. The privacy-invading fuckweaselry was an inherent part of their business model; they'd have earned their spot against the wall even without the data theft.
Put yourself in your Senator's shoes. One industry lobbyist offers you a line of cocaine from between some Hollywood starlet's tits. The other industry lobbyist offers you a can of Jolt cola and apologizes for his clients' manboobs. Whose industry would you hand out the pork to?
>
>You forgot religious indoctrination.
No he didn't. Look at your version of the list again:
"Booze, smokes, pr0n, video games, church."
One of these things is not like the other. One of these things does not belong.
I'll grant that getting "material harmful for minors" to show up when you type "fun things to do on wednesday night" is a bit of a stretch, even if he's using a Dvorak keyboard.
Maybe the Mormons have special keyboards to go with the underwear or something, and he's managed to find one in order to translate?
> 2. What you know you don't know.
> 3. What you don't know you know.
> 4. What you don't know you don't know.
>
> As long as Google tells people items where removed from their search because of their government, then Google is still providing information in the form of #2 instead of #4 like other search engines might, or the absense of any search engine would be.
Wow, I didn't know the Secretary of Defense had a Slashdot account!
"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."
- Donald Rumsfeld, February 12, 2002
Well, you see, it's necessary - we have laws that prevent our leaders from raping and murdering our citizens over here. But these are different times. We rape and murder our citizens over there, so we don't have to rape and murder our citizens over here! Why do our citizens hate our freedom?
Given a largely-male demographic for science fiction, you're saying that FOX wouldn't even pass the proverbial leaf on the wind over to these guys?
(One ticket to hell, please.)
"Unfortunately, it was also of significant interest to the DOJ, who wanted to know how many times the word 'boobs' appeared in the first 50 characters after the string "IMG SRC". Because we didn't actually look for this data, and because the DOJ folks didn't believe us when we told them so, we're now enjoying a taxpayer-funded vacation in sunny Cuba."
> We decided that to publish this would be of significant utility to developers
whom we would encourage to send lawyers, guns and money; the blink tag now encloses the rotating ad banner.
>
> But not income tax, which is what the parent mentioned. They probably pay the (much lower) long-term captial gains tax.
In Kalifornistan, all income - salary, interest, dividends, and both short-term and long-term capital gains - is taxed by the State as well as the Federal government. Every dollar earned over $40000 is taxed at 9.3%. (Every buck over $1M is taxed at 10.3% starting January 1, 2006.)
So if you have, say, a $400M capital gain on a $500M hunk of stock, the Feds take $60M (to build a quarter of a bridge to nowhere in Alaska, or to blow up some Arabs), and Ahnold takes an extra $37M in state taxes (for the pensions purchased by the various government employees union' under the previous administration in exchange for campaign donations.)
And since the AMT threshold is measured in thousands of dollars, no, you can't deduct the $37M in state taxes from your Federal return, because you're so far beyond the AMT threshold that your accountant can't even see the AMT threshold without very long baseline interferometry.
Ask yourself what the various levels of government have done to earn a quarter of the wealth spawned by Google.
This isn't a right-vs-left issue. Wouldn't most Democrats be a little happier if the government wasn't able to take a huge chunk of your wealth in order to buy bombs to drop on brown people? And wouldn't most Republicans be a little happier of the government didn't take the rest of your money to spend on government employees' unions and welfare queens?
>
> It's OK, we understand
1) We admitted we were powerless over the cruft - that the code base had become unmanageable.
2) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3) Made a decision to turn our specs and our code over to the care of Gates as we understood Him.
4) Made a recursive search and complete manifest of our source files.
5) Admitted to Gates, to ourselves, and to another developer the exact nature of our design flaws.
6) Were entirely ready to have Gates fire our sorry asses.
7) Humbly asked Him to allocate the budget for the security upgrades.
8) Made a list of all bugs we had let slip into the released codebase, and became willing to provide patches for them all.
9) Provided patches to such systems wherever possible, except when to do so would break existing functionality or introduce new security holes.
10) Continued to monitor the security mailing lists, and when we were notified of an exploit, promptly fixed the bug.
11) Sought through coding and specification to improve our conscious contact with Gates, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to program managers, and to practice these principles in all our projects.
>
> Spencer: Asterisk, as its name implies, was designed to do everything in telecom -- the name comes from the wildcard symbol. It can do most anything that you need it to do.
A good answer, but I half-expected to read...
"Asterisk? As its name implies - I regret that I have but one asterisk for my company. That's why I went with an open source solution."
But then I'm an invertebrate punster. (so slug me!)
It goes back farther than that.
Instead of thinking "Amazon" and "e-commerce", think USENET and alt.sex.
Once upon a time, alt.sex was the main reason (well, if you were a college student) to do this USENET thing. Then some schmuck figured out that you could uuencode a binary file into 7-bit-clean text, and upload it into alt.sex, and every other schmuck on the planet could see teh b00bies.
When a scanner cost thousands of dollars, you could get your b00bies in one of three ways: Buy the dead trees (and deal with storing them :), download the pictures from a pay BBS at 2400 baud (because someone else paid thousands of dollars for a scanner), or copy them from the news spool free (and not have to wait, because the college's 56k leased line was up 24/7!) from USENET, because some other guy who already bought the dead trees was willing to use the scanner in the lab (that had already been paid for :) to scan in the pictures and upload them (again for free, because the leased line was always there) to alt.sex.
Needless to say, this didn't last long - kilobytes turned into megabytes, hard drives overflowed, links became saturated, and thus was born alt.sex.pictures. And because news admins got tired of dealing with alt.sex.yet.another.funny.group name (which had to be permitted) and denying alt.sex.pictures.* (whose groups would overflow the news spool in rapid order), there was a great split - and thus was born alt.binaries.*.
Long story short -- USENET administrators needed more diskspace and bandwidth, and at one time, pr0n was indeed a major proportion of all USENET traffic, and even though the transmission network was still in the process of shifting from UUCP store-and-forward technology to a TCP/IP network, the fundamental issues of bandwidth and storage remained.
That's not to say there weren't other legitimate uses for all that bandwidth and storage; there were. But the growth of USENET (on account of a lot of sites -- even corporate sites, which would be unthinkable today -- maintaining "a full feed", including alt.binaries.*, out of either a sense of tradition or a pervy newsadmin) was in large part fueled by pr0n. And in large part, the growth of USENET drove "the Internet".
USENET was the first peer-to-peer network. Each "peer" was a machine costing tens of thousands of dollars in hardware, and hundreds of dollars a month, but considering that "consumer-level" communications was limited to 2400-baud modems, the combination of a USENET server to store "everything", and deliver it through the university LAN, was a huge step forward for the end user.
Typical conversation from circa 1988:
Fourth-year-student: "USENET? It's like a BBS, with ten thousand message boards, a hundred thousand users, and no waiting to connect to it! And FTP? It's like a download section of a BBS, with no upload quota! And you can get files from anywhere in the world! Look, here's an FTP server with a collection of all those DOS utilities you'll ever need, and it's in Finland, fer Chrissakes, and it doesn't cost a cent to call it up!"
First-year student: "Finland? Why Finland?"
Fourth-year student: "Why not? But if you don't like Finland, we'll get it from the mirror at White Sands Missile Range!"
First-year student: "Whoa!"
ALLES WEBBENSURFERS!
Das Wikipagen is nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy pissen off der blogbereich, libellen und slanderen mit lawsuitspawnen. Ist nicht fur editten by das dummkopfen. Das rubbernecken kourtjudgen musten keepen das cotten-pickenen hands in das pockets - relaxen und watchen das flammekrieg.
Agent Smith: "If I go to the airport, I can buy a coach standby ticket or a first-class ticket," Smith said. "In the shipping business, I can get two-day air or six-day ground."
Neoogle: Wow, that sounds like a really good deal, Bill. But I think I've got a better one. How about I give you the finger, and you give me my phone call.
Always carry a length of fiber-optic cable in your pocket. Should you be shipwrecked and find yourself stranded on a desert island, bury the cable in the sand. A few hours later, a guy driving a backhoe will be along to dig it up. Ask him to rescue you.
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> No, but the scary part is they can arrest who they choose too when everyone breaks the law.
Bingo.