Insurance like this is basically a scam. Even when the situation arises when you know the insurance should kick in, it doesn't, and you find yourself spending new money on a lawyer making sure the insurance provider upholds their part of the bargain. This is such a classic scam industry, it just feeds lawyers, and makes chumps of us all.
You think they want to make themselves look stupid? All these financial dweebs were cheering on the way up. Part of that is being foolish, the other part is convincing the investing public to throw more cash into the game. Then it all comes tumbling down, and it's so obvious in retrospect, and they are so wise for analyzing it. Rinse and repeat.
mod parent up insightful. i went through university studying business alongside absolute idiots who couldn't wait for the next party, who finished school without learning anything and without any skills. completely useless people
But the idiot in charge of writing that moronic javascript slideshow needs to be shot. Or fired. Or both.
But you did notice it, didn't you? I'm not trying to be funny, but marketing people don't care if they irritate you. Any kind of stimulation is to their advantage since it gets your attention and forces you to feel something... marketing is about affect.
mod parent up insightful. truly, slashdot and millions of other sites are inducing the infringement of copyright by linking, or implicitly linking, to other sites. right? right?
Who are the silly people who keep thinking they can come up with patchwork solutions to keep information from being copied? I keep attending computer conferences where people develop fancy watermarking schemes etc to keep bitstreams from being copied.
They try it with audio (so you can't steal from the RIAA), they try it with video (so you can't steal from the MPAA), they try it with paper documents, and obviously think they might as well try it with photographs too. It's just not going to work! If you can perceive it, you can duplicate it. Too bad, adapt to the new century, move on.
OMFG, you're actually using the windows media player? Go grab a better one from this site. Those players are all free. Personally I like WinAmp and VLC the best.
Although I would never recommend producing RealMedia content for Windows users (I really hate the RealOne player), it's a different matter if your audience is UNIX! Never thought I'd be saying this, but it's actually quite pleasant playing Real videos on Linux/UNIX/Solaris using RealPlayer which actually comes out of Real's open source Helix project. The only platform I know of where there isn't a good player for Real content is Windows.
Doesn't matter too much what extra security layers are in your OS if your users are just haphazardly clickety-clicketying everything in front of their noses.
what evidence do you have that a "definite environmental crisis looming"?
Based on reading many publications, opinions of many trusted scientists, and common sense with respect to resource consumption - you can not keep consuming and returning waste into the environment. The globe is a bubble, and perpetual throughput is not supported without adequate waste processing and new production. Simple calculus here.
World-wide we have fewer health problems, more abundant crops and food stores, not the reverse.
I don't know much about the health situation. But with respect to crops, species diversity on all fronts has decreased. While there used to be many varieties of corn, potatoes, and wheat we have decreased the biodiversity substantially today. In North America, we pretty much have one type of corn. Globally, world food supplies are much more susceptible to disasters since they are dependent on a few strains of plants.
We have more standing timber in North America than we did when the Pligrims first landed
Global carbon sinks matter much more than just visible north american forest. For this you have to consider the massive deforestation of the Amazon and other rainforests, jungles in south east Asia, and less obvious carbon/waste sinks such as mangrove areas and wetlands. Forests in Europe look better today too, but we're still in trouble globally (and air doesn't respect political borders).
Your comments about economic collapse are baseless. Most of the USA econmy is not based upon the ultra large company but the small "Mom-and-Pop" business. What does corporate scandal and greed have to do with them?
The great majority of cash floating around in the US stock markets is from institutional holders. Look up top holders (finance.yahoo.com) for any stock; over 80% of the money comes from financials: mutual funds, insurance, mortgate, etc. So Fannie Mae and those fellows move any stocks they want to. The money all comes from the big guys -- even if the money starts at mom and pop, it is leveraged and controlled by huge companies. And the derivative market (multi trillion dollar) is hidden debt, heavily abused by the financial sector, and quite risky. That risk is not acknowledged by institutional figures. For some good reading on the topic read some of the recent opinions of the famous economist Goerge Soros, and see his opinions on where the markets are headed at the first sign of cash instability. The problem all has to do with debt.
True, the religious folks do sound similar... except I've got behind my beliefs a century of well established science, and mountains of peer reviewed publications. This isn't, "God says you're fucked"... it's "damn, we discovered that we're fucked"
Crying wolf every day wont help solve the problem.
This isn't crying wolf. This is reminding people, YOU ARE SERIOUSLY FUCKED if you don't change your behaviours, and influence behaviour changes in others. This is part of what we call warnings -- you know, preventing disasters, or at least mitigating their extent, before the shit hits the fan.
This is kind of like me telling you, hey, that US economy doesn't look too hot... maybe you shouldn't be investing your life savings in it right now. Am I crying wolf? Or am I saving your ass? You decide... lemme know what you think in a couple years.
What I don't understand about this issue are the arguments against doing something to resolve the problem. They seem to be:
These canned responses are economically/industrially motivated. IT'S ALL ABOUT MONEY. This whole "there is no climate change" argument side originates from the energy industry -- newsflash, business people don't even care if they cause problems for their shareholders, let alone random fellow humans. The "conversation" that transpires in the common media is twisted by financial interests, and dishonest.
Anyone who is aware of the situation knows that there is a definite environmental crisis looming. This isn't just about global warming and resource depletion, but about eliminating our forests and converting nature into a wasteland. The side effects already affect your day to day life: more health problems, environmental pollutants, decreased quality of and less diversity of food, climate uncertainty.
But for us to sit here and say "nothing will change" and turn a blind eye is just plain stupid. If you're older, than... keep your mouth shut (thanks for the mess, btw). If you're younger, you have a responsibility to not contribute toward a spiralling problem because. What do you do?
BUY LESS STUFF and don't throw out so much trash (help decrease the resource consumption cycle)
Demand resource and energy efficient alternatives
Tell your politicians that you care about environmental issues such as air, water quality, waste responsibility
Steer clear of, and tell others to stay away from practices you know to be harmful
If you are fearing that such practices will destroy the US economy, don't worry -- the economy is on its way to collapse under the weight of decades of corporate scandals and greed. You are NOT going to destroy the economy by cutting down consumption. Nor are you going to save the economy by purchasing new cars or computers.
Do what you know is right. And if you're religious at all, take pride in the fact that you will not be eternally marked with the sin of helping destroy the lives of your fellow humans.
GnuPG is fine, too. These are alternatives, and alternatives are good. I am currently adding GPG support to a popular Windows email client (will go unmentioned;) Because GPG has been out there for some time it will have a head start for being integrated with other software. The interface, whether within UNIX software or Windows software, is easy to do to GPG but the difficulty is all the key mangement stuff. So in my case I'm assuming there's an existing installation, not handling management details. This is an area where Ciphire offers an easier global solution.
Sorry for ignoring... I did read your post, I'm a big fan of Postfix and Wietse's work. I'm watching him add TLS into Postfix main and also like the greylisting. But I think blacklist still have their place. There are not 4 billion possible IP addresses; you know most of those are reserved, and the remaining real internet is divided by hierarchy into a few hundred class A's by geography and a finite, several thousand major networks under each. Every IP address fits within a clearly identifiable network, for whom there is a business or organization responsible. Some of these networks are responsible and responsive to fixing abuse, and others simply aren't.
So while I think there are better solutions to spam, I think blacklists play a vital role in protecting my own servers from regions of the Internet which are mismanaged. These regions are well known, and I won't accept traffic from them.
I'll give you a solution: encourage your ISP to make use of the dozens of blacklists that currently exist. Select a reasonable blacklist that puts pressure on bad ISPs (those that don't do their part to eliminate spamming customers). Spamhaus comes to mind, and SPEWS has some merit too. Push businesses away from ISPs that support spammers or refuse to adequately secure their network. Spam does not come from any other place.
Blacklists these days don't have to accept/reject mail (binary decision); with spamassassin you may just be talking about a different threshold for spamminess depending on where the mail came from. This throws out the complaint, "doesn't give legitimate mail a fair chance".
Who in their right mind decides to publish media in RealMedia format?? Seriously? I'm really, really sick of that real stuff. Anyway, I found a decent solution... use Real Alternative on Windows (contains a simple media player and real codecs!) or the heavenly RealPlayer for Linux.
I also think ogg vorbis is surprisingly good at low bitrates. I serve 64 kbps radio streams for myself, which are stereo and sound better than FM radio with respect to frequency response -- both bass and high freq remain, and it is very pleasant to listen to unlike low bitrate mp3 or wma. I think low bitrate ogg vorbis is underappreciated!
Couldn't we wait a few billions of years before we start consider this question seriously?
Given the way we treat each other, our planet (i.e. an industrial dump), and a lack of a clear vision to move humans into space I think a more pressing problem is limited habitability of Earth -- thousand years, tops?
Not necessarily. There exist ways to get through a double NAT environment. We developed one such system for an engineering thesis; for documentation on another see the "STUN" RFC
There are actually commercial products (MagiQ) that do quantum encrypted links over fiber. If this product is properly made, I could well see it obsoleting any classical crypto tunnels (like VPN etc). Hell, you just layer the classical crypto over the quantum secured link anyway. I have recently been talking with professors at a major North American university who will in fact be dissecting this equipment; but yeah, classical crypto simply can't compete with equipment like this. You put up the quantum crypto link on fiber, then any classical crypto underneath.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they can follow RFID marked foreign visitors to the USA !
Insurance like this is basically a scam. Even when the situation arises when you know the insurance should kick in, it doesn't, and you find yourself spending new money on a lawyer making sure the insurance provider upholds their part of the bargain. This is such a classic scam industry, it just feeds lawyers, and makes chumps of us all.
You think they want to make themselves look stupid? All these financial dweebs were cheering on the way up. Part of that is being foolish, the other part is convincing the investing public to throw more cash into the game. Then it all comes tumbling down, and it's so obvious in retrospect, and they are so wise for analyzing it. Rinse and repeat.
mod parent up insightful. i went through university studying business alongside absolute idiots who couldn't wait for the next party, who finished school without learning anything and without any skills. completely useless people
mod parent up insightful. truly, slashdot and millions of other sites are inducing the infringement of copyright by linking, or implicitly linking, to other sites. right? right?
Who are the silly people who keep thinking they can come up with patchwork solutions to keep information from being copied? I keep attending computer conferences where people develop fancy watermarking schemes etc to keep bitstreams from being copied.
They try it with audio (so you can't steal from the RIAA), they try it with video (so you can't steal from the MPAA), they try it with paper documents, and obviously think they might as well try it with photographs too. It's just not going to work! If you can perceive it, you can duplicate it. Too bad, adapt to the new century, move on.
OMFG, you're actually using the windows media player? Go grab a better one from this site. Those players are all free. Personally I like WinAmp and VLC the best.
Although I would never recommend producing RealMedia content for Windows users (I really hate the RealOne player), it's a different matter if your audience is UNIX! Never thought I'd be saying this, but it's actually quite pleasant playing Real videos on Linux/UNIX/Solaris using RealPlayer which actually comes out of Real's open source Helix project. The only platform I know of where there isn't a good player for Real content is Windows.
Doesn't matter too much what extra security layers are in your OS if your users are just haphazardly clickety-clicketying everything in front of their noses.
what evidence do you have that a "definite environmental crisis looming"?
Based on reading many publications, opinions of many trusted scientists, and common sense with respect to resource consumption - you can not keep consuming and returning waste into the environment. The globe is a bubble, and perpetual throughput is not supported without adequate waste processing and new production. Simple calculus here.World-wide we have fewer health problems, more abundant crops and food stores, not the reverse.
I don't know much about the health situation. But with respect to crops, species diversity on all fronts has decreased. While there used to be many varieties of corn, potatoes, and wheat we have decreased the biodiversity substantially today. In North America, we pretty much have one type of corn. Globally, world food supplies are much more susceptible to disasters since they are dependent on a few strains of plants.We have more standing timber in North America than we did when the Pligrims first landed
Global carbon sinks matter much more than just visible north american forest. For this you have to consider the massive deforestation of the Amazon and other rainforests, jungles in south east Asia, and less obvious carbon/waste sinks such as mangrove areas and wetlands. Forests in Europe look better today too, but we're still in trouble globally (and air doesn't respect political borders).Your comments about economic collapse are baseless. Most of the USA econmy is not based upon the ultra large company but the small "Mom-and-Pop" business. What does corporate scandal and greed have to do with them?
The great majority of cash floating around in the US stock markets is from institutional holders. Look up top holders (finance.yahoo.com) for any stock; over 80% of the money comes from financials: mutual funds, insurance, mortgate, etc. So Fannie Mae and those fellows move any stocks they want to. The money all comes from the big guys -- even if the money starts at mom and pop, it is leveraged and controlled by huge companies. And the derivative market (multi trillion dollar) is hidden debt, heavily abused by the financial sector, and quite risky. That risk is not acknowledged by institutional figures. For some good reading on the topic read some of the recent opinions of the famous economist Goerge Soros, and see his opinions on where the markets are headed at the first sign of cash instability. The problem all has to do with debt.Have a nice day everyone!!!
True, the religious folks do sound similar... except I've got behind my beliefs a century of well established science, and mountains of peer reviewed publications. This isn't, "God says you're fucked"... it's "damn, we discovered that we're fucked"
This is kind of like me telling you, hey, that US economy doesn't look too hot... maybe you shouldn't be investing your life savings in it right now. Am I crying wolf? Or am I saving your ass? You decide... lemme know what you think in a couple years.
But for us to sit here and say "nothing will change" and turn a blind eye is just plain stupid. If you're older, than
- BUY LESS STUFF and don't throw out so much trash (help decrease the resource consumption cycle)
- Demand resource and energy efficient alternatives
- Tell your politicians that you care about environmental issues such as air, water quality, waste responsibility
- Steer clear of, and tell others to stay away from practices you know to be harmful
If you are fearing that such practices will destroy the US economy, don't worry -- the economy is on its way to collapse under the weight of decades of corporate scandals and greed. You are NOT going to destroy the economy by cutting down consumption. Nor are you going to save the economy by purchasing new cars or computers.Do what you know is right. And if you're religious at all, take pride in the fact that you will not be eternally marked with the sin of helping destroy the lives of your fellow humans.
GnuPG is fine, too. These are alternatives, and alternatives are good. I am currently adding GPG support to a popular Windows email client (will go unmentioned ;) Because GPG has been out there for some time it will have a head start for being integrated with other software. The interface, whether within UNIX software or Windows software, is easy to do to GPG but the difficulty is all the key mangement stuff. So in my case I'm assuming there's an existing installation, not handling management details. This is an area where Ciphire offers an easier global solution.
Sorry for ignoring... I did read your post, I'm a big fan of Postfix and Wietse's work. I'm watching him add TLS into Postfix main and also like the greylisting. But I think blacklist still have their place. There are not 4 billion possible IP addresses; you know most of those are reserved, and the remaining real internet is divided by hierarchy into a few hundred class A's by geography and a finite, several thousand major networks under each. Every IP address fits within a clearly identifiable network, for whom there is a business or organization responsible. Some of these networks are responsible and responsive to fixing abuse, and others simply aren't.
So while I think there are better solutions to spam, I think blacklists play a vital role in protecting my own servers from regions of the Internet which are mismanaged. These regions are well known, and I won't accept traffic from them.
I'll give you a solution: encourage your ISP to make use of the dozens of blacklists that currently exist. Select a reasonable blacklist that puts pressure on bad ISPs (those that don't do their part to eliminate spamming customers). Spamhaus comes to mind, and SPEWS has some merit too. Push businesses away from ISPs that support spammers or refuse to adequately secure their network. Spam does not come from any other place.
Blacklists these days don't have to accept/reject mail (binary decision); with spamassassin you may just be talking about a different threshold for spamminess depending on where the mail came from. This throws out the complaint, "doesn't give legitimate mail a fair chance".
that's probably the most useful link that's fallen in front of you all day. it took me 3 years to find a way to play real content without realplayer
Who in their right mind decides to publish media in RealMedia format?? Seriously? I'm really, really sick of that real stuff. Anyway, I found a decent solution... use Real Alternative on Windows (contains a simple media player and real codecs!) or the heavenly RealPlayer for Linux.
I also think ogg vorbis is surprisingly good at low bitrates. I serve 64 kbps radio streams for myself, which are stereo and sound better than FM radio with respect to frequency response -- both bass and high freq remain, and it is very pleasant to listen to unlike low bitrate mp3 or wma. I think low bitrate ogg vorbis is underappreciated!
Not necessarily. There exist ways to get through a double NAT environment. We developed one such system for an engineering thesis; for documentation on another see the "STUN" RFC
There are actually commercial products (MagiQ) that do quantum encrypted links over fiber. If this product is properly made, I could well see it obsoleting any classical crypto tunnels (like VPN etc). Hell, you just layer the classical crypto over the quantum secured link anyway. I have recently been talking with professors at a major North American university who will in fact be dissecting this equipment; but yeah, classical crypto simply can't compete with equipment like this. You put up the quantum crypto link on fiber, then any classical crypto underneath.