Not really. The money goes directly to the school to pay your tuition. If you withdraw or cancel all your classes, they don't give you the money. The money that the student gets is residual aid, or what's left over after paying for tuition, room/board, fees, and whatever. This is usually a fairly small portion of the loan, and a lot of students use the residual to pay for books and other expenses. Also, if you withdraw having already been given the residual aid, you are billed and expected to pay it back pretty much immediately. If you take the residual and stay in school but just never go, you'll flunk out and lose your financial aid eligibility, get kicked out of school, and lose your loan deferment, meaning you'll have to start making payments on your loans within 6 months.
Unless when you say "school" you mean those scare quotes to indicate that it isn't a real school. And, yeah, there are sometimes schools you can sign up for, get financial aid, and they'll just give you most of the money (taking a cut for themselves) without any actual education happening. But that's financial aid fraud, and they prosecute that.
I just finished deleting my Facebook account. I downloaded their data on me just to look at it, first. Luckily, I never told Facebook very much about me, never installed the app on my phone, rarely logged in, and clear cookies every time I close my browser, so their data on me looks pretty sparse.
I originally created the account because of a scare article suggesting that someone nefarious might create a Facebook account on my behalf and then post bad stuff there. Unlikely, I know, but it seemed a trivial precaution to take. I kept the account because of inertia, and because people (including some employers) started thinking it was weird if you didn't have a Facebook account. Now, I can use the cover of #deletefacebook to explain why I have no profile there.
I actually thought briefly about that before I posted. I can only guess that the difference is, Elon Musk eventually made rockets that routinely go into space, while I'm guessing that "Mad" Mike Hughes' efforts at steam-powered space travel will not be as successful. However, if he manages to fly a craft of this design or a derivative into space, I will recant and agree that this was indeed a prototype spacecraft.
I'm not sure you can really call it a "spacecraft" if it only made it to 1,875 feet. "Likely deathtrap" may be a better description. Hot air balloons commonly go higher and typically involve less physical trauma.
most people who don't read/. are going to end up assuming this was just an unavoidable accident caused by a crazy old homeless woman
I haven't read the news on this very closely, so I have no idea whether the woman was crazy, old, homeless, high, or whatever. When I watched the video, I did assume that she had some level of cognitive impairment for one reason or another because otherwise she probably would have checked for traffic before walking in front of it.
Doesn't mean she *deserves* death, but regardless of self-driving cars, if a person makes a habit of walking out into traffic without looking and just assuming cars will stop, they can probably look forward to a shortened life span.
The method that's becoming more common is that the scammer calls the user on the phone and asks them to confirm their 2FA verification code. This is particularly easy when the second factor is a crappy phone app. "We're going to send you a verification code by text message. Have you received it yet? Great, go ahead and read that to me."
People who have set up 2FA at their banks using the phone app are getting owned this way.
Yeah, I don't think the solution is to "accelerate" web pages -- it's to make them less shitty. Reduce framework bloat, find efficient ways to serve ads, cut out tracking links, minimize costly analytics.
Slashdot is not the worst offender, but I just turned off my ad blocker and loaded the front page. The page load was 3.5 MB in ~415 separate requests over 10.5 seconds. That's a crazy load time! With adblock turned on, 1.6MB in ~100 requests over 3.14 seconds. I can triple page load performance without any acceleration at all just by not loading 2 megabytes of bullshit that I don't want or need!
Just please don't fuck up Thunderbird. It could probably use a few updates here and there, but it's been basically done and stable for years now, I've got my plugins that just keep on working right, and most importantly I can send and receive mail using SMTP, POP, and IMAP. I worry about the day they decide to "improve" Thunderbird with a major overhaul.
Even in the case of activities covered under HIPAA, doctors and other medical people have a duty to report suspicions about things like sexual abuse. I don't have a big problem with Geek Squad turning in pedos if they happen to find kiddie porn.
However, I did computer repair work for many years, and I have never systematically searched a client's computer for porn or whatever. I have found it inadvertently--for example, one guy had a virus delete everything on his hard disk, and as I was going through and recovering his data files, I couldn't help but notice the dirty emails he was sending to his mistress. But I just did the work and gave the computer back. That guy's shit was none of my business.
When I'm getting on a plane, most of the time I'm waiting is because people ahead of me are wasting time trying to cram their massive luggage into the overhead bin or are getting out of their seats into the aisle to let in someone who is sitting farther outboard.
Someone above said 'enforce carry on size'. I think we can go one further and reduce carry-on size. We have a mad rush to get on the plane because people want to get overhead bin space for their huge roller bag before everyone else fills it up with their own huge roller bags. If there was no shortage of space, people may not be in such a hurry to get on the plane. We all depart and arrive at the same time.
Divide the volume of overhead bin space by the passenger capacity of the plane and limit bag size so everyone gets room. Then we can board back to front, windows to aisle, without anyone freaking out? You can still seat first class first, it doesn't take long compared to seating coach.
But what about families? You can't send in the two kids who have the window and middle seats before the mom who has the aisle. And disabled people? You can't send the half-daffy grandpa in separate from his helper. If too many exceptions crop up, we spoil the efficiency of the process.
I should probably change to key authentication for ssh, because although I travel a fair amount, I'm typically using my own laptop to connect. I've resisted whitelisting because of travel. I guess another option would be to get a VPN service and then whitelist my home IPs and the VPN, and just always use the VPN while traveling.
I used to have a fail2ban config that would block IPs based on their requesting certain things over http... phpmyadmin, wordpress, a few other things. I had a hard drive failure and lost that stuff, and I haven't yet bothered to rebuild. Since I don't run any of those items, there doesn't seem to be a great risk in ignoring the requests, although it does pollute the logs.
I have a VM with a hosting service where I run Ubuntu to host some things like svn and other small services. According to the ssh logs, where bots are trying to log in constantly, and the apache logs, where bots are constantly trying to access admin pages for services I don't run, I'd say that more than 99% of login attempts are malicious on that host. That's without advertising the IP or hostname anywhere; the bots just found it over time. I do run fail2ban, so they eventually get blocked, but there's an endless supply of them.
I use the Esri ArcGIS suite quite a lot in my work. There are open-source alternatives to many of its functions, but they're not always practical to use while maintaining interoperability with colleagues. That's the main one that comes to mind, but there are other spatial tools like Crimestat that I use on occasion that only have Windows binaries. It may be possible to run some of these things using Wine or whatever, but I haven't tried.
I have both a Windows 7 and an Ubuntu desktop with dual displays and use Synergy to share the mouse and keyboard between them, so for the most part I can use both systems fluidly. To transfer files between the two, I have a Windows share that I access via samba on the Ubuntu side. That's a little cumbersome at times, but it's way easier for me than dual boot and preferable to virtualization.
I believe that fission power is a critical part of an environmentally friendly energy portfolio, in combination with renewables. I can't see how we can practically implement nuclear power without a comprehensive waste management strategy. We can do reprocessing, we can do Yucca Mountain (or the like), and/or other options, but whatever it is, we need to have a real waste management strategy in place before we can implement a major nuclear energy plan.
Apparently, none of the nuclear power options are practically possible at this point due to NIMBY, waste management, and the potential for disastrous radiological accidents. The first two are mainly political problems (provided the engineering is sound). The last one is shown to be inevitable due to greed and carelessness -- people who build and run nuclear plants try to do it as cheaply as possible, bypassing safety and maintenance in the process, just like people who run petroleum pipelines, refineries, chemical plants, and many other kinds of industry.
Nuclear power is essential to green energy production, but based upon our history with it, we are not responsible enough to actually make proper use of it. Most of our major radiological incidents are caused by human error, and the consequences of these errors have the potential to be profound.
What's the deal with all the stories about the moon in recent months? Blue moons, super moons... a blue moon is a second full moon in a calendar month. Other than the arbitrary coincidence of the lunar cycle going from full moon to full moon within a named period of time, there's absolutely nothing interesting or unique about it.
The "super moon" is apparently a full moon near the moon's perigee appearing "up to 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter than usual." I guess that could be interesting, maybe to photographers? I don't personally notice that much difference. Maybe if I could see the super moon and the regular moon side-by-side in the sky...
Last year there was a news story about the "strawberry moon" which is apparently a name for a full moon that happens in June. Since the lunar cycle is about 29.5 days, and June is 30 days long, there is necessarily a full moon in June every year.
I don't want to shit on "science" things that are fun and interesting, but I mean... does the appearance of the moon qualify? What is this about? I don't remember these articles always popping up when I was a kid.
I still have no idea if he actually believed some of that fake news or if he simply didn't care.
It's weird, for some people, the outrage is completely transitory. How many people saw fake news about, say, "pizzagate", felt a flash of outrage, liked or reposted or whatever, and then just moved on to the next piece of propaganda calculated to anger them?
In a certain way, I admire the jerk who got his guns and went to liberate the kids in the pizza joint. I mean, if you honestly believe that this place is keeping a harem of kiddie sex slaves, aren't you morally obligated to do something about it?
I wonder if that guy learned any lesson about his credulity and fake news, or does he just think that that particular story turned out to be wrong?
People don't like to be shown for fools, and these messages are Facebook telling them they've been taken. Furthermore, they're already invested in whatever political side was favored by the Russian posts they liked, so it's easy to discount this as targeting their personal beliefs. It's like some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, or maybe a sunk cost fallacy situation. People seem more likely to double down on their position even when it's made clear that they were wrong.
For no particular reason, at a previous job, I kept a brightly colored Postit stuck to my monitor with a random string written on it. It wasn't the password to anything. And now, for no particular reason, I've shared it with all of you.
He had to forfeit his ill-gotten gains and is sentenced to 5 years prison. I don't know if that's really a slap on the wrist. What are we supposed to do, throw him in a cell forever? What's the maximum prison time for his conviction? We've already lost enough resources to this guy, I don't really want us to pay for his care and feeding for the rest of his life. Let the loser do his time and go back to his miserable life.
What's truly bizarre to me, after looking at the Reddit thread, is all the people who are impatient that the app is shut down for 24 hours because they want to keep using it. This company just lost more than $60 million of its users' money, and the users are upset that there is a delay in them sending the company more of their money.
What? You lost our $60 million?! Well, gosh, we'll give you more, but be more careful this time...
First, the teachers don't get $100... they get a code that allows them to put $100 toward a crowdfunding project at DonorsChoose. So the money goes to a classroom project somewhere. I guess a teacher could apply the code to their own crowdfunding goal, but even then, the money doesn't just go into the teacher's pocket. Oh, and they don't get $100 per student, they get $100 if they get 10 students involved.
Second, the 'grand prizes' are all classroom-oriented things, also.
I've said before, I don't have a lot of confidence that the Hour of Code is that beneficial, and it certainly can have the flavor of corporate marketing in schools, but this is not exactly a major payola scandal that we're looking at here.
Since you've given absolutely no concrete example, I'm going to guess... you're complaining that we unfairly look down on Jefferson for having bastard children with the house slave? I expect whatever point you're trying to make is of about that caliber, so let's go with it. But, guess what? People at that time weren't super excited about him doing that either. That's why they tried to keep it a secret. Bingo, sparky.
No, I did think a little bit about waiting for the customers in front of me in line. Of course I've stood behind the little old lady who is searching for a nickel because if she uses the dime in her hand... well, I don't know what happens, because they always search until they find the nickel. I was standing in line when a man's coupon evidently needed clearance from the store manager, the regional director, and the CFO of the grocery chain. For a while the main grocery store I shop at was throwing insufficient funds messages at debit card users regardless of how much money they had in their account, so people had to go over to the ATM to get money (using the same debit card) to pay.
And, yes, that's a waste of time. But I get to check up on the tabloids a little bit (I miss The Weekly World News) and read about this month's sexy tips on the cover of Cosmo. I can get a package of chewing gum and add it to my stuff. If it takes too long and I get desperately bored, I can look at my phone. I dunno, I guess a little bit of a wait is worth the tradeoff for me against the aggravation of checking out my own groceries. Unless I just have a couple things and I'm in a hurry. Although the checkout machines can sense that and it tempts them to plot against you.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. The money goes directly to the school to pay your tuition. If you withdraw or cancel all your classes, they don't give you the money. The money that the student gets is residual aid, or what's left over after paying for tuition, room/board, fees, and whatever. This is usually a fairly small portion of the loan, and a lot of students use the residual to pay for books and other expenses. Also, if you withdraw having already been given the residual aid, you are billed and expected to pay it back pretty much immediately. If you take the residual and stay in school but just never go, you'll flunk out and lose your financial aid eligibility, get kicked out of school, and lose your loan deferment, meaning you'll have to start making payments on your loans within 6 months.
Unless when you say "school" you mean those scare quotes to indicate that it isn't a real school. And, yeah, there are sometimes schools you can sign up for, get financial aid, and they'll just give you most of the money (taking a cut for themselves) without any actual education happening. But that's financial aid fraud, and they prosecute that.
I just finished deleting my Facebook account. I downloaded their data on me just to look at it, first. Luckily, I never told Facebook very much about me, never installed the app on my phone, rarely logged in, and clear cookies every time I close my browser, so their data on me looks pretty sparse.
I originally created the account because of a scare article suggesting that someone nefarious might create a Facebook account on my behalf and then post bad stuff there. Unlikely, I know, but it seemed a trivial precaution to take. I kept the account because of inertia, and because people (including some employers) started thinking it was weird if you didn't have a Facebook account. Now, I can use the cover of #deletefacebook to explain why I have no profile there.
I actually thought briefly about that before I posted. I can only guess that the difference is, Elon Musk eventually made rockets that routinely go into space, while I'm guessing that "Mad" Mike Hughes' efforts at steam-powered space travel will not be as successful. However, if he manages to fly a craft of this design or a derivative into space, I will recant and agree that this was indeed a prototype spacecraft.
I'm not sure you can really call it a "spacecraft" if it only made it to 1,875 feet. "Likely deathtrap" may be a better description. Hot air balloons commonly go higher and typically involve less physical trauma.
I haven't read the news on this very closely, so I have no idea whether the woman was crazy, old, homeless, high, or whatever. When I watched the video, I did assume that she had some level of cognitive impairment for one reason or another because otherwise she probably would have checked for traffic before walking in front of it.
Doesn't mean she *deserves* death, but regardless of self-driving cars, if a person makes a habit of walking out into traffic without looking and just assuming cars will stop, they can probably look forward to a shortened life span.
The method that's becoming more common is that the scammer calls the user on the phone and asks them to confirm their 2FA verification code. This is particularly easy when the second factor is a crappy phone app. "We're going to send you a verification code by text message. Have you received it yet? Great, go ahead and read that to me."
People who have set up 2FA at their banks using the phone app are getting owned this way.
Yeah, I don't think the solution is to "accelerate" web pages -- it's to make them less shitty. Reduce framework bloat, find efficient ways to serve ads, cut out tracking links, minimize costly analytics.
Slashdot is not the worst offender, but I just turned off my ad blocker and loaded the front page. The page load was 3.5 MB in ~415 separate requests over 10.5 seconds. That's a crazy load time! With adblock turned on, 1.6MB in ~100 requests over 3.14 seconds. I can triple page load performance without any acceleration at all just by not loading 2 megabytes of bullshit that I don't want or need!
Just please don't fuck up Thunderbird. It could probably use a few updates here and there, but it's been basically done and stable for years now, I've got my plugins that just keep on working right, and most importantly I can send and receive mail using SMTP, POP, and IMAP. I worry about the day they decide to "improve" Thunderbird with a major overhaul.
Even in the case of activities covered under HIPAA, doctors and other medical people have a duty to report suspicions about things like sexual abuse. I don't have a big problem with Geek Squad turning in pedos if they happen to find kiddie porn.
However, I did computer repair work for many years, and I have never systematically searched a client's computer for porn or whatever. I have found it inadvertently--for example, one guy had a virus delete everything on his hard disk, and as I was going through and recovering his data files, I couldn't help but notice the dirty emails he was sending to his mistress. But I just did the work and gave the computer back. That guy's shit was none of my business.
When I'm getting on a plane, most of the time I'm waiting is because people ahead of me are wasting time trying to cram their massive luggage into the overhead bin or are getting out of their seats into the aisle to let in someone who is sitting farther outboard.
Someone above said 'enforce carry on size'. I think we can go one further and reduce carry-on size. We have a mad rush to get on the plane because people want to get overhead bin space for their huge roller bag before everyone else fills it up with their own huge roller bags. If there was no shortage of space, people may not be in such a hurry to get on the plane. We all depart and arrive at the same time.
Divide the volume of overhead bin space by the passenger capacity of the plane and limit bag size so everyone gets room. Then we can board back to front, windows to aisle, without anyone freaking out? You can still seat first class first, it doesn't take long compared to seating coach.
But what about families? You can't send in the two kids who have the window and middle seats before the mom who has the aisle. And disabled people? You can't send the half-daffy grandpa in separate from his helper. If too many exceptions crop up, we spoil the efficiency of the process.
I should probably change to key authentication for ssh, because although I travel a fair amount, I'm typically using my own laptop to connect. I've resisted whitelisting because of travel. I guess another option would be to get a VPN service and then whitelist my home IPs and the VPN, and just always use the VPN while traveling.
I used to have a fail2ban config that would block IPs based on their requesting certain things over http... phpmyadmin, wordpress, a few other things. I had a hard drive failure and lost that stuff, and I haven't yet bothered to rebuild. Since I don't run any of those items, there doesn't seem to be a great risk in ignoring the requests, although it does pollute the logs.
I have a VM with a hosting service where I run Ubuntu to host some things like svn and other small services. According to the ssh logs, where bots are trying to log in constantly, and the apache logs, where bots are constantly trying to access admin pages for services I don't run, I'd say that more than 99% of login attempts are malicious on that host. That's without advertising the IP or hostname anywhere; the bots just found it over time. I do run fail2ban, so they eventually get blocked, but there's an endless supply of them.
I use the Esri ArcGIS suite quite a lot in my work. There are open-source alternatives to many of its functions, but they're not always practical to use while maintaining interoperability with colleagues. That's the main one that comes to mind, but there are other spatial tools like Crimestat that I use on occasion that only have Windows binaries. It may be possible to run some of these things using Wine or whatever, but I haven't tried.
I have both a Windows 7 and an Ubuntu desktop with dual displays and use Synergy to share the mouse and keyboard between them, so for the most part I can use both systems fluidly. To transfer files between the two, I have a Windows share that I access via samba on the Ubuntu side. That's a little cumbersome at times, but it's way easier for me than dual boot and preferable to virtualization.
I believe that fission power is a critical part of an environmentally friendly energy portfolio, in combination with renewables. I can't see how we can practically implement nuclear power without a comprehensive waste management strategy. We can do reprocessing, we can do Yucca Mountain (or the like), and/or other options, but whatever it is, we need to have a real waste management strategy in place before we can implement a major nuclear energy plan.
Apparently, none of the nuclear power options are practically possible at this point due to NIMBY, waste management, and the potential for disastrous radiological accidents. The first two are mainly political problems (provided the engineering is sound). The last one is shown to be inevitable due to greed and carelessness -- people who build and run nuclear plants try to do it as cheaply as possible, bypassing safety and maintenance in the process, just like people who run petroleum pipelines, refineries, chemical plants, and many other kinds of industry.
Nuclear power is essential to green energy production, but based upon our history with it, we are not responsible enough to actually make proper use of it. Most of our major radiological incidents are caused by human error, and the consequences of these errors have the potential to be profound.
What's the deal with all the stories about the moon in recent months? Blue moons, super moons... a blue moon is a second full moon in a calendar month. Other than the arbitrary coincidence of the lunar cycle going from full moon to full moon within a named period of time, there's absolutely nothing interesting or unique about it.
The "super moon" is apparently a full moon near the moon's perigee appearing "up to 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter than usual." I guess that could be interesting, maybe to photographers? I don't personally notice that much difference. Maybe if I could see the super moon and the regular moon side-by-side in the sky...
Last year there was a news story about the "strawberry moon" which is apparently a name for a full moon that happens in June. Since the lunar cycle is about 29.5 days, and June is 30 days long, there is necessarily a full moon in June every year.
I don't want to shit on "science" things that are fun and interesting, but I mean... does the appearance of the moon qualify? What is this about? I don't remember these articles always popping up when I was a kid.
It's weird, for some people, the outrage is completely transitory. How many people saw fake news about, say, "pizzagate", felt a flash of outrage, liked or reposted or whatever, and then just moved on to the next piece of propaganda calculated to anger them?
In a certain way, I admire the jerk who got his guns and went to liberate the kids in the pizza joint. I mean, if you honestly believe that this place is keeping a harem of kiddie sex slaves, aren't you morally obligated to do something about it?
I wonder if that guy learned any lesson about his credulity and fake news, or does he just think that that particular story turned out to be wrong?
People don't like to be shown for fools, and these messages are Facebook telling them they've been taken. Furthermore, they're already invested in whatever political side was favored by the Russian posts they liked, so it's easy to discount this as targeting their personal beliefs. It's like some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, or maybe a sunk cost fallacy situation. People seem more likely to double down on their position even when it's made clear that they were wrong.
For no particular reason, at a previous job, I kept a brightly colored Postit stuck to my monitor with a random string written on it. It wasn't the password to anything. And now, for no particular reason, I've shared it with all of you.
He had to forfeit his ill-gotten gains and is sentenced to 5 years prison. I don't know if that's really a slap on the wrist. What are we supposed to do, throw him in a cell forever? What's the maximum prison time for his conviction? We've already lost enough resources to this guy, I don't really want us to pay for his care and feeding for the rest of his life. Let the loser do his time and go back to his miserable life.
What's truly bizarre to me, after looking at the Reddit thread, is all the people who are impatient that the app is shut down for 24 hours because they want to keep using it. This company just lost more than $60 million of its users' money, and the users are upset that there is a delay in them sending the company more of their money.
What? You lost our $60 million?! Well, gosh, we'll give you more, but be more careful this time...
First, the teachers don't get $100... they get a code that allows them to put $100 toward a crowdfunding project at DonorsChoose. So the money goes to a classroom project somewhere. I guess a teacher could apply the code to their own crowdfunding goal, but even then, the money doesn't just go into the teacher's pocket. Oh, and they don't get $100 per student, they get $100 if they get 10 students involved.
Second, the 'grand prizes' are all classroom-oriented things, also.
I've said before, I don't have a lot of confidence that the Hour of Code is that beneficial, and it certainly can have the flavor of corporate marketing in schools, but this is not exactly a major payola scandal that we're looking at here.
Since you've given absolutely no concrete example, I'm going to guess... you're complaining that we unfairly look down on Jefferson for having bastard children with the house slave? I expect whatever point you're trying to make is of about that caliber, so let's go with it. But, guess what? People at that time weren't super excited about him doing that either. That's why they tried to keep it a secret. Bingo, sparky.
No, I did think a little bit about waiting for the customers in front of me in line. Of course I've stood behind the little old lady who is searching for a nickel because if she uses the dime in her hand... well, I don't know what happens, because they always search until they find the nickel. I was standing in line when a man's coupon evidently needed clearance from the store manager, the regional director, and the CFO of the grocery chain. For a while the main grocery store I shop at was throwing insufficient funds messages at debit card users regardless of how much money they had in their account, so people had to go over to the ATM to get money (using the same debit card) to pay.
And, yes, that's a waste of time. But I get to check up on the tabloids a little bit (I miss The Weekly World News) and read about this month's sexy tips on the cover of Cosmo. I can get a package of chewing gum and add it to my stuff. If it takes too long and I get desperately bored, I can look at my phone. I dunno, I guess a little bit of a wait is worth the tradeoff for me against the aggravation of checking out my own groceries. Unless I just have a couple things and I'm in a hurry. Although the checkout machines can sense that and it tempts them to plot against you.
You guys are doing good work down there, thanks for the heads up.