You know, there are probably quite a few once-slaves writhing in their small anonymous graves right now at that comment. Yes, a lot of people shackle themselves due to poor control, but it's in no way slavery. "Buying crap you don't need" is entirely voluntary, and an aspect of people's own lack of responsibility. If you want to make a monentary reference to slavery, perhaps you could consider those in poorer areas that work crappy/demeaning/low-paying jobs in order to scrape by, unable to afford a proper education for themselves (or their offspring) and thus produce offspring that work in the same cycle of low income, poor education, and low-grade employment.
Well there have definately been cases. Offhand I only have time to scare up one article, but basically you have people getting fake heart medication, fake schizophrenia meds, and others.
Often enough it's somebody who's been suckered because the real thing is quite expensive, so I guess a large part of the issue is human folly (who would take a risk with life-preserving medication), but yes, this does happen in North America and Europe as well.
My understanding is that a (simple) explanation of the diamond creating process involves carbon, and lots of pressure and/or other forces. Naturally, this can take quite a long time. In a lab, it can be accelerated and controlled for a better product.
Now, since humans are carbon based life forms, and we can be incinerated to ashes, etc. Would it be possible to be cremated and then made into a diamond (would there be enough to make a diamond). It might be weird to some, but being turned into a beautiful stone that your loved ones can have with them far into the future sounds like a nicer way to spend your end than in a ceramic jar or in the ground with the worms.
I wonder if this would be possible and, if so, how popuplar "diamond funerals" might be?
They might not be as obvious on every street corner, but how many ads do you get for meds in your inbox on a regular basis? Not just that, but there are quite a few cases of senior citizens etc being bilked with fake pills or medication.
Because it's a lot bloody easier to keep somebody who is underage out of a physical location:
a) You can see that the customer is underage (or appears so)
b) You can ID the customer for picture ID on the spot. It costs the customer nothing to do this, and if you don't believe the ID is real you can still kick 'em out. There's no way to tell if a credit card belongs to the online customer, and unlike a driver's license there are risks and/or charges the customer would have to assume for using it as an identifier
c) You have a physical person who can differentiate and judge whether a person be allowed in the store
If a physical shop and a virtual shop were the same thing, then there wouldn't be any virtual shops in the first place. Extremely different circumstances and conditions apply between a website and a brick'n'mortar.
And sometimes I'd imagine it's a hard part of the job. Imagine having a patient whom you know has some communicable disease start dating a friend of yours. Now, it would be against the law to divulge said patient's personal medical information to the friend. Mind you, it's also often against the law to knowingly expose an unwitting victim to a dangerous communicable disease (counts as sexual assault in many places), but two wrongs don't make a right in the legal system, and the best you could do is tell said friend "I really don't like him/her" without being able to give the specifics as to why.
Now, as an IT person, imagine finding out ahead of time that half your department is going to be fired and outsources, or the boss is planning to dump your friend in the next cubicle. How about if they're just going to deliberately make somebody's life miserable in order to get him/her to quit. I haven't run across these situations myself but I've heard of the nightmares that the responsibility of access to personal information or professional private information can bring.
Tons of people think nothing of sending important information over email. Certainly it's sometimes more convenient/fast than by phone, and it does tend to leave something more of a record.
But it isn't open to abuse. I was talking to my supervisor the other day as he was going through an administrator's old email to find an old message (with a request to do so from the admin) and we were discussion what one might do if in the act of such things, he came across something that referenced himself. The best solution for a good tech seems to be just to do one's best to avoid personal emails, but when you're fixing people's mail clients, debugging mailservers, and many others you never know what you might come across by accident. Certainly an abusive sysadmin could use the system to read other's mail, or CC himself a copy, filter anything that had his name, etc.
I remember a case where a slightly misconfigured mailserver at a school was sending all the bounce messages to me (the sysadmin). The funny thing that was many of them were threats from rather unintelligent students to other students, but they had spelled the recipient address wrong. Before I found the error and fixed it, I happily forwarded said emails on the students' principals.
Between the amount of pr0n and other personal things I've found on the computers of private clients, I'd say that part of being a tech is knowing when to turn the other way - although at times I've come up with suggestings to various clients on how to implement better privacy for themselves.
1. You implicitly assume that addiction is related to genetics, and therefore by letting addicts die you are improving the gene-pool. Please provide some evidence of this.
Maybe not genetics, but possibly child-rearing. Part of the problem is that drunks, drug addicts, and others can (and often do) have children. The extremely volitile environment is often very damaging to the children, and causes them to grow into damaged adults. The cycle continues.
This isn't always the case, but it tends to be quite prevalent in households with major abuse issues. I would hazard to say that if mom/dad spend 90% of their time with a needle in their veins, chances are that the child's chances of coming out good are going to be a lot more dependant on external factors. Heartless to say it, but if mom and dad took a little much one day and permanently flew off on iced wings, the kids might in the long term be better off.
2. You confuse stupidity with ignorance
The two often go hand-in-hand. Stupidity tends to related to lacking the ability to absorb or put to use knowledge. Ignorance is lack of knowledge, which may be due to stupidity (aka inability to absorb the knowledge at hand).
4. You ignore the negative effects that drug users have on society
People have to save themselves. Trust me, tons of money is spend on things such as "safe injection sites" and many others... which are a attempt to contain the problem or related problems (disease spread) rather than any effort to eliminate it.
I'm of two sides on the issue. Drugs in terms of dealing etc should be dealt with as much as possible to the extent that the regulation of such doesn't cause more negetive impact on the lives of citizens than the dealing itself. However, allowing the "war on drugs" to be used as an excuse for abuses of power (although now the "war on terror" is more prevalent), wasting money busting a few kids who smoke pot (not to mention the nasty criminal record), and pumping cash into problems that deal with the symptoms rather than the cause of the disease are in error.
Today's society focuses too much on trying to divert people or save them from their own bad choices, but tons of money is wasted on drug-related issues without effect. Big dealers rarely hit the jail because - on of the other ills of society - expensive lawyers find loopholes to protect them because they have the cash to afford the representation. The drug issue is just one facet of an overall flawed system.
Aren't there rules with the CC companies that when you tell somebody to get rid of your number, they must. How do you know they're keeping it (never used their services, don't plan to)
If you've ever worked in the educational-tech industry, you'd know that this on its own is a bad idea. Districts can have dozens of schools with labs, and trust me with the ways you can get spyware/viruses/etc you will be having to re-image them regularly. Yes, you can script it, but it's still not an elegant solution and has many issues. Also, while your machines are waiting on an image, they'll be happily popping up porno banners for the kids, connecting to P2P servers, running as open proxies or spam relays/botnets, and looking around for other machines to infect. You'll also need a different image for all the different hardware varieties, possibly the different license keys, machine names, and who knows what else.
Much better to secure the machine using one of the ways described - it's not impossible or even all that difficult to lock down a windows XP machine fairly well - and then have the backup image as a, well, backup solution in the event that something bad does happen.
I work in a school district and we use deep-freeze on pretty much everything. Our labs are mostly 'nix/LTSP thin clients, but the teachers and admins tend to use windows machines of some sort. I'd say that it's a good idea to use DF not just on the lab, but also on teacher machines. The trick with the teachers is to setup two partitions, a frozen C: for the windows install, and a thawed D:
Then, create you user, and move his/her "Application Data" "Templates" "My Favorites" and "My Documents" to a new area on D:, you can do this by drag and drop, and check it in the registry under:
H-Key-Local-User->Software->Microsoft->Windows->Cu rrentVersion->Explorer->Shell Folders
Alternately a former co-worker of mine (where I used to work) switched over to using the "Disk Protection" from the "Microsoft Shared Computer Resource Toolkit", which I believe is supposed to be free.
A lot of people use this freedom of speech to call eachother asshats, promote racism, speak lies, misinformation and nonsense
Yes, but that's where you run into the laws that curb in. In many non-US coutries you have the hotly-debated hate-speech laws. In most including the US you have laws that protect against libel, slander and such (telling unsubstantiated lies against a person or entity), as well as laws to protect against false advertising (companies lying to the public/consumers) and purjury (lying under oath, etc).
As for calling each other asshats. I can say so in many places, but if I sat on a street corner yelling out "person X is a *#$!#$!" I would probably be arrested for something such as disturbing the peace.
So really, which speech in general is protected, there are a lot of laws that do still restrict what and how you can say such things.
When I was in Australia, people definately brightened up and became more friendly when they found out I was Canadian, rather than American. It's a funny thing though, since most of the Americans that I would regard as arrogant idiots don't travel all that much, and those that due usually hit the usual destinations (a sunny spot or a short cruise). In Canada though, the Americans are regarded as roudy (partly because the liquor laws here are 18+ and they're under 21 so not legal at home, and thus get piss drunk), but tend to be pretty good tippers when they hit the sports bars etc.
Yank his license to practice law? From past history I'd assume that JT will become combative, rather than apologize... so can they please pull it then?
Recently, I received a bunch of $2.50 charges on my card. When I called Visa about it, they couldn't figure it out at first, but they appeared to be "cash advance fees," so they went to investigate. Later, they called to inform me that the fees were from when I bought lottery tickets, which were now treated as a cash advance: $2.50/transaction + interest, and that I had received in the mail a new policy stating such. I stated I hadn't recieved said changes, so they refunded the $2.50 fees (probably not the interest, buggers), and mailed me a new copy of the policy.
So I checked it out, and the closest thing they have is to the effect of:
Cash-like transactions: Some transactions are treated as a cash-advanced and are charged a service fee + interest. These include casino chips, money orders, wire transfers, etc. Transactions that are indicated by your teller as a cash-advance may also be treated in this manner, if in doubt, ask your teller.
Now a lottery ticket is a far fucking cry cash-wise from gambling chips or wire transfers. All the items indicated has a real-world value, with a consistent, fair exchange of cash-to-item value. Lottery tickets might win you cash, but if they want to go that far I could also go buy a bloody car and then sell if off for extra bucks at a loss.
In other words, with anyone who handles the big-bucks, you're pretty much screwed for anything that's not cash. As for the bottle of coke, with many cards you have a tied-in debit account, which gets charged accordingly with either a monthly amount, a per-transaction amount (not near $4), or a varying amount depending on your balance (in my case, so long as I keep $1000 in the account, which is always, I don't get charged on debit transactions, but if I ever dipped below for a moment, it would be like $1.50/transaction).
Personally, I was using Visa because I gain travel points and don't pay interest (always paid on time), unless I started getting fucked-up fees like the ones above. But when they've got the big-bucks, who do you complain about their very vague policies to?
To find a discreet expert who could have gone over the code before submitting it. In that case, one could submit the code on CD/DVD with printouts of offending lines such as:
if ($candidate eq 'John Smith' && $bribe_paid == 1)
{
if ($random
{
$votes{$candidate} ++;
}
}
So you're saying that they should re-elect Clinton?:-)
I've never really understood the big charade over the whole oral-office issue mind, people loved JFK even though he was well known for being a "ladies man"
We had one guy in the lab who constantly harped on people who left themselves logged in. At the end of one class, we found that the great man himself had forgotten to log out, so we moved all his files to the end of a directory structure named something like:
Remember this was a terminal system (vax) so he did have to type in the full path (while checking to see what the next subdir was) in order to get to his files.
Other tricks included putting the last command in somebody's login script as "logout" - but the teacher got annoyed with that as he was the one who got to change several login scripts a week. I believe other tricks included setting funny prompts and other such things, but nothing overly malicious that might warrant somebody getting a visit to the Dean's office. We did have one issue with a user that had left his IM on, and some dork decided to message a bunch of people rude IM's with *my* phone number (but it wasn't my IM logged in), which ended up with me getting some interesting phone calls and a rather long conversation between said dork and the admins for innapropriate behavior after he apparently also got caught making sexual comments on another person's IM (to a grandmother and a 15-yr girl, oooops).
I got a call from my uncle recently asking if (during his upcoming trip to Thailand/w his wife) he should bring his laptop so that he could get online, or whether he might be able to connect from public terminals. After discussing what he wanted to do, he indicated that he would like to get online to do his internet banking so that they could handle any bills etc while away.
My answer was of course: neither
Doing your banking through a public terminal or even with a personal laptop on an untrusted internet connection in a foreign country is just not a good idea. With a public terminal, you're dealing with keyloggers, spyware, and who knows what else. With the untrusted connection, you're dealing with man-in-the-middle attacks, proxies, and various other issues (and a user who doesn't know that the little messages about unknown authentication are likely indicating an https hijacking attempt).
The added danger of surfing on an insecure, untrusted wifi is even bigger. I would recommend that anyone using a connection not-their-own either refrain from doing anything financial or overly personal online. In my case, I have SSH and VPN tunnels I can setup to my home server for a semi-secure connection, but depending on the location I might not trust even these.
I'm fairly sure Hitler was rather concerned with making sure that there was a good number of blue eyed (and blond haired) individuals around.
If natural selection doesn't support such things, big freaking deal. If these people want to preserve the genes, they can go out and make sure to mate with somebody who has their preferred features and have lots of kids. That would be the way to support the genes they want, rather than telling other people to stay out of their nice white country or trying to eliminate members of other groups altogether.
I agree with the parent, I file all of these factions under the "nutcase" category.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, there are probably quite a few once-slaves writhing in their small anonymous graves right now at that comment. Yes, a lot of people shackle themselves due to poor control, but it's in no way slavery. "Buying crap you don't need" is entirely voluntary, and an aspect of people's own lack of responsibility. If you want to make a monentary reference to slavery, perhaps you could consider those in poorer areas that work crappy/demeaning/low-paying jobs in order to scrape by, unable to afford a proper education for themselves (or their offspring) and thus produce offspring that work in the same cycle of low income, poor education, and low-grade employment.
In some cases, elections might be a good tool to see who your political enemies are. State X voted 80% against me, time to cut some federal funding!
Well there have definately been cases. Offhand I only have time to scare up one article, but basically you have people getting fake heart medication, fake schizophrenia meds, and others.
Often enough it's somebody who's been suckered because the real thing is quite expensive, so I guess a large part of the issue is human folly (who would take a risk with life-preserving medication), but yes, this does happen in North America and Europe as well.
My understanding is that a (simple) explanation of the diamond creating process involves carbon, and lots of pressure and/or other forces. Naturally, this can take quite a long time. In a lab, it can be accelerated and controlled for a better product.
Now, since humans are carbon based life forms, and we can be incinerated to ashes, etc. Would it be possible to be cremated and then made into a diamond (would there be enough to make a diamond). It might be weird to some, but being turned into a beautiful stone that your loved ones can have with them far into the future sounds like a nicer way to spend your end than in a ceramic jar or in the ground with the worms.
I wonder if this would be possible and, if so, how popuplar "diamond funerals" might be?
They might not be as obvious on every street corner, but how many ads do you get for meds in your inbox on a regular basis? Not just that, but there are quite a few cases of senior citizens etc being bilked with fake pills or medication.
Because it's a lot bloody easier to keep somebody who is underage out of a physical location:
a) You can see that the customer is underage (or appears so)
b) You can ID the customer for picture ID on the spot. It costs the customer nothing to do this, and if you don't believe the ID is real you can still kick 'em out. There's no way to tell if a credit card belongs to the online customer, and unlike a driver's license there are risks and/or charges the customer would have to assume for using it as an identifier
c) You have a physical person who can differentiate and judge whether a person be allowed in the store
If a physical shop and a virtual shop were the same thing, then there wouldn't be any virtual shops in the first place. Extremely different circumstances and conditions apply between a website and a brick'n'mortar.
And sometimes I'd imagine it's a hard part of the job. Imagine having a patient whom you know has some communicable disease start dating a friend of yours. Now, it would be against the law to divulge said patient's personal medical information to the friend. Mind you, it's also often against the law to knowingly expose an unwitting victim to a dangerous communicable disease (counts as sexual assault in many places), but two wrongs don't make a right in the legal system, and the best you could do is tell said friend "I really don't like him/her" without being able to give the specifics as to why.
Now, as an IT person, imagine finding out ahead of time that half your department is going to be fired and outsources, or the boss is planning to dump your friend in the next cubicle. How about if they're just going to deliberately make somebody's life miserable in order to get him/her to quit. I haven't run across these situations myself but I've heard of the nightmares that the responsibility of access to personal information or professional private information can bring.
Tons of people think nothing of sending important information over email. Certainly it's sometimes more convenient/fast than by phone, and it does tend to leave something more of a record.
But it isn't open to abuse. I was talking to my supervisor the other day as he was going through an administrator's old email to find an old message (with a request to do so from the admin) and we were discussion what one might do if in the act of such things, he came across something that referenced himself. The best solution for a good tech seems to be just to do one's best to avoid personal emails, but when you're fixing people's mail clients, debugging mailservers, and many others you never know what you might come across by accident. Certainly an abusive sysadmin could use the system to read other's mail, or CC himself a copy, filter anything that had his name, etc.
I remember a case where a slightly misconfigured mailserver at a school was sending all the bounce messages to me (the sysadmin). The funny thing that was many of them were threats from rather unintelligent students to other students, but they had spelled the recipient address wrong. Before I found the error and fixed it, I happily forwarded said emails on the students' principals.
Between the amount of pr0n and other personal things I've found on the computers of private clients, I'd say that part of being a tech is knowing when to turn the other way - although at times I've come up with suggestings to various clients on how to implement better privacy for themselves.
The environment (both social and natural) itself is less conducive to the existance or spread of such a disease.
1. You implicitly assume that addiction is related to genetics, and therefore by letting addicts die you are improving the gene-pool. Please provide some evidence of this.
Maybe not genetics, but possibly child-rearing. Part of the problem is that drunks, drug addicts, and others can (and often do) have children. The extremely volitile environment is often very damaging to the children, and causes them to grow into damaged adults. The cycle continues.
This isn't always the case, but it tends to be quite prevalent in households with major abuse issues. I would hazard to say that if mom/dad spend 90% of their time with a needle in their veins, chances are that the child's chances of coming out good are going to be a lot more dependant on external factors. Heartless to say it, but if mom and dad took a little much one day and permanently flew off on iced wings, the kids might in the long term be better off.
2. You confuse stupidity with ignorance
The two often go hand-in-hand. Stupidity tends to related to lacking the ability to absorb or put to use knowledge. Ignorance is lack of knowledge, which may be due to stupidity (aka inability to absorb the knowledge at hand).
4. You ignore the negative effects that drug users have on society
People have to save themselves. Trust me, tons of money is spend on things such as "safe injection sites" and many others... which are a attempt to contain the problem or related problems (disease spread) rather than any effort to eliminate it.
I'm of two sides on the issue. Drugs in terms of dealing etc should be dealt with as much as possible to the extent that the regulation of such doesn't cause more negetive impact on the lives of citizens than the dealing itself. However, allowing the "war on drugs" to be used as an excuse for abuses of power (although now the "war on terror" is more prevalent), wasting money busting a few kids who smoke pot (not to mention the nasty criminal record), and pumping cash into problems that deal with the symptoms rather than the cause of the disease are in error.
Today's society focuses too much on trying to divert people or save them from their own bad choices, but tons of money is wasted on drug-related issues without effect. Big dealers rarely hit the jail because - on of the other ills of society - expensive lawyers find loopholes to protect them because they have the cash to afford the representation. The drug issue is just one facet of an overall flawed system.
Aren't there rules with the CC companies that when you tell somebody to get rid of your number, they must. How do you know they're keeping it (never used their services, don't plan to)
If you've ever worked in the educational-tech industry, you'd know that this on its own is a bad idea. Districts can have dozens of schools with labs, and trust me with the ways you can get spyware/viruses/etc you will be having to re-image them regularly. Yes, you can script it, but it's still not an elegant solution and has many issues. Also, while your machines are waiting on an image, they'll be happily popping up porno banners for the kids, connecting to P2P servers, running as open proxies or spam relays/botnets, and looking around for other machines to infect. You'll also need a different image for all the different hardware varieties, possibly the different license keys, machine names, and who knows what else.
Much better to secure the machine using one of the ways described - it's not impossible or even all that difficult to lock down a windows XP machine fairly well - and then have the backup image as a, well, backup solution in the event that something bad does happen.
I work in a school district and we use deep-freeze on pretty much everything. Our labs are mostly 'nix/LTSP thin clients, but the teachers and admins tend to use windows machines of some sort. I'd say that it's a good idea to use DF not just on the lab, but also on teacher machines. The trick with the teachers is to setup two partitions, a frozen C: for the windows install, and a thawed D:
u rrentVersion->Explorer->Shell Folders
Then, create you user, and move his/her "Application Data" "Templates" "My Favorites" and "My Documents" to a new area on D:, you can do this by drag and drop, and check it in the registry under:
H-Key-Local-User->Software->Microsoft->Windows->C
Alternately a former co-worker of mine (where I used to work) switched over to using the "Disk Protection" from the "Microsoft Shared Computer Resource Toolkit", which I believe is supposed to be free.
A lot of people use this freedom of speech to call eachother asshats, promote racism, speak lies, misinformation and nonsense
Yes, but that's where you run into the laws that curb in. In many non-US coutries you have the hotly-debated hate-speech laws. In most including the US you have laws that protect against libel, slander and such (telling unsubstantiated lies against a person or entity), as well as laws to protect against false advertising (companies lying to the public/consumers) and purjury (lying under oath, etc).
As for calling each other asshats. I can say so in many places, but if I sat on a street corner yelling out "person X is a *#$!#$!" I would probably be arrested for something such as disturbing the peace.
So really, which speech in general is protected, there are a lot of laws that do still restrict what and how you can say such things.
Which is odd when you consider that many other shows on Fox take pokes at the network all the time (especially in the Simpsons, etc)
When I was in Australia, people definately brightened up and became more friendly when they found out I was Canadian, rather than American. It's a funny thing though, since most of the Americans that I would regard as arrogant idiots don't travel all that much, and those that due usually hit the usual destinations (a sunny spot or a short cruise). In Canada though, the Americans are regarded as roudy (partly because the liquor laws here are 18+ and they're under 21 so not legal at home, and thus get piss drunk), but tend to be pretty good tippers when they hit the sports bars etc.
You don't have to hate the man to hate the ignorance which he represents.
Yank his license to practice law? From past history I'd assume that JT will become combative, rather than apologize... so can they please pull it then?
How about Visa in Canada (CIBC to be exact)?
Recently, I received a bunch of $2.50 charges on my card. When I called Visa about it, they couldn't figure it out at first, but they appeared to be "cash advance fees," so they went to investigate. Later, they called to inform me that the fees were from when I bought lottery tickets, which were now treated as a cash advance: $2.50/transaction + interest, and that I had received in the mail a new policy stating such. I stated I hadn't recieved said changes, so they refunded the $2.50 fees (probably not the interest, buggers), and mailed me a new copy of the policy.
So I checked it out, and the closest thing they have is to the effect of:
Cash-like transactions: Some transactions are treated as a cash-advanced and are charged a service fee + interest. These include casino chips, money orders, wire transfers, etc. Transactions that are indicated by your teller as a cash-advance may also be treated in this manner, if in doubt, ask your teller.
Now a lottery ticket is a far fucking cry cash-wise from gambling chips or wire transfers. All the items indicated has a real-world value, with a consistent, fair exchange of cash-to-item value. Lottery tickets might win you cash, but if they want to go that far I could also go buy a bloody car and then sell if off for extra bucks at a loss.
In other words, with anyone who handles the big-bucks, you're pretty much screwed for anything that's not cash. As for the bottle of coke, with many cards you have a tied-in debit account, which gets charged accordingly with either a monthly amount, a per-transaction amount (not near $4), or a varying amount depending on your balance (in my case, so long as I keep $1000 in the account, which is always, I don't get charged on debit transactions, but if I ever dipped below for a moment, it would be like $1.50/transaction).
Personally, I was using Visa because I gain travel points and don't pay interest (always paid on time), unless I started getting fucked-up fees like the ones above. But when they've got the big-bucks, who do you complain about their very vague policies to?
Never excuse by stupidity that which can be adequately be explained by conniving and greed
To find a discreet expert who could have gone over the code before submitting it. In that case, one could submit the code on CD/DVD with printouts of offending lines such as:
if ($candidate eq 'John Smith' && $bribe_paid == 1)
{
if ($random {
$votes{$candidate} ++;
}
}
$votes{$candidate} ++;
So you're saying that they should re-elect Clinton? :-)
I've never really understood the big charade over the whole oral-office issue mind, people loved JFK even though he was well known for being a "ladies man"
We had one guy in the lab who constantly harped on people who left themselves logged in. At the end of one class, we found that the great man himself had forgotten to log out, so we moved all his files to the end of a directory structure named something like:
p uter\logged\in\ever\again\etc\etc\
my\name\is\john\smith\and\I\will\not\leave\my\com
Remember this was a terminal system (vax) so he did have to type in the full path (while checking to see what the next subdir was) in order to get to his files.
Other tricks included putting the last command in somebody's login script as "logout" - but the teacher got annoyed with that as he was the one who got to change several login scripts a week. I believe other tricks included setting funny prompts and other such things, but nothing overly malicious that might warrant somebody getting a visit to the Dean's office. We did have one issue with a user that had left his IM on, and some dork decided to message a bunch of people rude IM's with *my* phone number (but it wasn't my IM logged in), which ended up with me getting some interesting phone calls and a rather long conversation between said dork and the admins for innapropriate behavior after he apparently also got caught making sexual comments on another person's IM (to a grandmother and a 15-yr girl, oooops).
I got a call from my uncle recently asking if (during his upcoming trip to Thailand /w his wife) he should bring his laptop so that he could get online, or whether he might be able to connect from public terminals. After discussing what he wanted to do, he indicated that he would like to get online to do his internet banking so that they could handle any bills etc while away.
My answer was of course: neither
Doing your banking through a public terminal or even with a personal laptop on an untrusted internet connection in a foreign country is just not a good idea. With a public terminal, you're dealing with keyloggers, spyware, and who knows what else. With the untrusted connection, you're dealing with man-in-the-middle attacks, proxies, and various other issues (and a user who doesn't know that the little messages about unknown authentication are likely indicating an https hijacking attempt).
The added danger of surfing on an insecure, untrusted wifi is even bigger. I would recommend that anyone using a connection not-their-own either refrain from doing anything financial or overly personal online. In my case, I have SSH and VPN tunnels I can setup to my home server for a semi-secure connection, but depending on the location I might not trust even these.
I'm fairly sure Hitler was rather concerned with making sure that there was a good number of blue eyed (and blond haired) individuals around.
If natural selection doesn't support such things, big freaking deal. If these people want to preserve the genes, they can go out and make sure to mate with somebody who has their preferred features and have lots of kids. That would be the way to support the genes they want, rather than telling other people to stay out of their nice white country or trying to eliminate members of other groups altogether.
I agree with the parent, I file all of these factions under the "nutcase" category.