I think a big issue is that the longer this goes on, the less reliable "evidence" there will be. From all the reports, the scene of the crash is chaotic. Bodies aren't being tended to (or refrigerated) properly, pieces of the plane have been removed. At first it was "we're sending the black box to Russia for investigation" and then "we haven't found the black box yet", etc etc.
It's going to be pretty hard to sort things out if the "evidence" is being mishandled this badly, whether intentionally or otherwise.
I've found the opposite. My local Chapters is good at stocking mostly big names. However, since I picked up a Kindle a few years ago, I've found tons of good authors I'd not heard of before. Yes, there is some formulaic drivel, but the biggest problem for the most part is a few typos here and there. How often do you review a book before buying it at a bookstore? At least online, I see a bunch of reviews and can read what people have to say before I buy. The worst book I got was actually from a bookstore. Perhaps it might have come up with a good plot, but the terrible repetition and generally poor editing made it unreadable
In terms of monentary cost, many useful things are. Free software also used to be less of a crapshoot (is it *really* safe, a virus/trojan, adware, or nagware)?
There were/are also a lot of free utilities that - while not pretty - were basically in the realm of "hey I made this to solve X for myself and thought somebody else might find it useful."
There may be some learning involved to *use* the product, and certainly many FOSS solutions involve community-provided updates, but in terms of personal cost it's free for me.
It's like where I used to work. We had certain users that were bad on the network (running torrents, whatever). They were important enough that they couldn't really be penalized and kept finding ways around the blocks. Instead, they just put the "bad" users' internet connection through a old switch (or was it a hub) that got like 10MBps
Basically, Verizon is doing the equivalent to sticking a 10MBps switch on the connections where Netflix routes through...
This has a couple of connotations in science (that have also existed in sci-fi previously)
The obvious one would be antigravity. What gravity attracts, it would repel. So there's your Marty McFly hoverboard. There are further connotations for other things though, such as achieving orbit or space-travel (getting too close to a gravity well at the wrong angle=not good in most cases). Depending on whether such anti-mass would be created/harvested in quantity, it could be used to cancel out mass of vehicles being sent to space, or used in propulsion.
Similarly, anti-inertia has a lot of interesting using. The old trek "inertial dampers" come to mind.
Also, missiles and military tech are still tech, and of some interest to nerds. I'd imagine there are some people here that know enough about such to rule out stuff like shoulder-mounted rockets etc. History and politics are also "news for nerds"
Indeed. They're getting better at it too. Canada's CBC.ca has lots of posts saying "oh, the Ukranians recently moved some AA into the area. It was them" and various other similar posts.
Honestly, so what if they were? People change positions and come/go a lot, and the bigger the company the more the churn. Could have been a retirement, a job offer elsewhere, somebody died, or a firing. I doubt that somebody's primary job was watching domain expirations, so likely this got lost in a transition among a bunch of other job functions. IMHO, the best way to take care of this would be to have checks for primary domains in the central monitoring/alerting system, and flag them yellow 15-30 days from expiration (and red a few days before).
Actually, I'd like to see stats on that For every lawsuit like this that gets bad publicity, whose to say there aren't tens or hundreds more that go through without notice. Beyond that, while the base of potential "customers" who may read about the lawsuit and skip dining is somewhat limited, I'd imagine this is getting more notice amongst those that would do restaurant reviews, and possibly chilling speech amongst those that don't wish to be sued.
Would this work with snow? Sounds useful for Canada and other places that have snowy winters that aren't so solar-friendly. Won't help on an overcast-but-not-wet day though.
There are two parts to a review, there's service and there's product. Beyond the power itself, there's quality of customer service, wait times for calls or technicians, etc. Up-time is also a consideration
Yeah, let's see that excuse save somebody's ass when it's a botnet taking out a media company's site. Oh wait, it won't. So why is it a valid excuse for media companies performing takedowns of other's people's content?
Not to mention that they dropped driver support from the SBLive 5.1/Gold after XP, despite it being a *very* common card in many systems (partly, I believe, because it came with many Dell's and/or possibly HP's).
When Vista/7 came out, Creative dropped it like a hot rock and didn't provide a driver for the newer OS. There is a FOSS driver, but it lacked much of what was supported in the XP driver (while also adding other features).
What, you're telling me that my $5.00 USB "7.1 surround sound" card (that oddly only has two analog jacks) *ISN'T* as good as a high-end soundcard?:-)
Actually, the main advantage I've found for USB vs onboard sound - even with cheap USB - is that they tend to pick up less of the "electrical whine" that a lot of onboard stuff does. Dedicated cards oftimes have better filtering that keeps this out, and the onboard designs are better these days, but I do still find you can actually hear when you're moving the mouse from the background growl of many board-chip audio cards.
I have a sideline job doing computer servicing/repair. Since the issues between Russia/Ukraine have ramped up, there's also been a noticeable uptick in online/banking fraud coming from Russia. Thankfully the banks seem to be on the watch for this - the notify customers of unusual transactions, e.g. western union, to Russian accounts - so most of my work is just ensuring that machines are clean after the fact.
I won't say that this is state-sponsored, but likely more to issues alluded to with this guy: mainly that Russia doesn't seem to be very cooperative in dealing with known international criminals - especially with the poor international relations of current - and the criminal element are taking advantage of this.
Usual cause: trying to execute certain commands while logged in as a user that no longer exists in/etc/passwd.
Also known as "oops I overwrite/etc/password!".
Bonus points if you get this while logged in a root. An associate of mine discovered that it's bad to use system variable names when he had this one in a script he ran (as root):
deluser $USER
Perhaps so, but keep in mind those older models *still* resell for more than many others, and before the release of the PS4 you could see good condition CECHE01's selling for $100+ over the price of the regular models. When the PS3 first came out, the price jump over other consoles also included the blu-ray drive etc, and generally better build quality. The PS3 did have some issues, but the RROD and laser-burn (cheaping out over a 5c bumper, geeze) issues on the XB360 were legendary.
My understanding is that the main difference was in the chip that supported the older hardware, so why not just make it an option which could be easily added? A little socket for the chip and a dip-switch or jumper would probably do.
How do they throw away the keys? If they're just zeroing the area with the identity/security info it might not be that much more secure. That said, scrambling the stored keys *and* zeroing the storage space is probably the best solution.
I've got a couple that are definitely targeted at a gamepad rather than a keyboard/mouse. Injustice: Gods Among Us comes to mind. My solution was just to steal some controllers from the XBox and use them on the PC.
My buddy has the same game on console. The big difference: I paid under $30 on a Steam sale, and got the "extended edition" or whatever it's called with all the addons. He paid around the same, but every time he starts it up his Playstations tells him about all the fun addons he *could* have is he's just willing to shell out another $15-30 for the expansions.
Also, it actually looks a bit better on the PC with the settings turned up.
On a PC, I can still play almost all of my games from up to a decade ago. Some of them require VM's (e.g. DOSBox, or perhaps XP in VirtualBox), but my library is still fairly playable excepting some online play and disc-rot.
XBox can't play 360, and PS4 can't play PS3. That's lame. I don't want to have 10 consoles sitting around
I think Sony actually had a good idea with adding a chip to the early PS3's for backwards compatibility. I think that current-gen would do better if this concept continued. I have a 360 with a decent library of games. The XBone didn't really launch with a lot of offerings, but as my old console is starting to show signs of wear I might have considered the newer model instead of fixing/replacing my old one.
Actually, even Origins looks pretty decent on a modern rig. One of the nice things about PC games is sometimes they get *better* over time. I've just started playing it a few months ago and considering the age it looks quite nice with all settings turned up to full. When I look at the trailers, they actually look somewhat crappy compared to my current gameplay (and youtube walkthroughs made on older hardware look particularly dated).
Slashdot Mirror
I think a big issue is that the longer this goes on, the less reliable "evidence" there will be. From all the reports, the scene of the crash is chaotic. Bodies aren't being tended to (or refrigerated) properly, pieces of the plane have been removed. At first it was "we're sending the black box to Russia for investigation" and then "we haven't found the black box yet", etc etc.
It's going to be pretty hard to sort things out if the "evidence" is being mishandled this badly, whether intentionally or otherwise.
I've found the opposite. My local Chapters is good at stocking mostly big names. However, since I picked up a Kindle a few years ago, I've found tons of good authors I'd not heard of before. Yes, there is some formulaic drivel, but the biggest problem for the most part is a few typos here and there.
How often do you review a book before buying it at a bookstore? At least online, I see a bunch of reviews and can read what people have to say before I buy. The worst book I got was actually from a bookstore. Perhaps it might have come up with a good plot, but the terrible repetition and generally poor editing made it unreadable
In terms of monentary cost, many useful things are. Free software also used to be less of a crapshoot (is it *really* safe, a virus/trojan, adware, or nagware)?
Apache: Free
OpenOffice/LibreOffice: Free
Java: Free
There were/are also a lot of free utilities that - while not pretty - were basically in the realm of "hey I made this to solve X for myself and thought somebody else might find it useful."
There may be some learning involved to *use* the product, and certainly many FOSS solutions involve community-provided updates, but in terms of personal cost it's free for me.
It's like where I used to work. We had certain users that were bad on the network (running torrents, whatever). They were important enough that they couldn't really be penalized and kept finding ways around the blocks. Instead, they just put the "bad" users' internet connection through a old switch (or was it a hub) that got like 10MBps
Basically, Verizon is doing the equivalent to sticking a 10MBps switch on the connections where Netflix routes through...
Too well-bribed to regulate....
This has a couple of connotations in science (that have also existed in sci-fi previously)
The obvious one would be antigravity. What gravity attracts, it would repel. So there's your Marty McFly hoverboard. There are further connotations for other things though, such as achieving orbit or space-travel (getting too close to a gravity well at the wrong angle=not good in most cases). Depending on whether such anti-mass would be created/harvested in quantity, it could be used to cancel out mass of vehicles being sent to space, or used in propulsion.
Similarly, anti-inertia has a lot of interesting using. The old trek "inertial dampers" come to mind.
Also, missiles and military tech are still tech, and of some interest to nerds. I'd imagine there are some people here that know enough about such to rule out stuff like shoulder-mounted rockets etc. History and politics are also "news for nerds"
Indeed. They're getting better at it too.
Canada's CBC.ca has lots of posts saying "oh, the Ukranians recently moved some AA into the area. It was them" and various other similar posts.
Honestly, so what if they were? People change positions and come/go a lot, and the bigger the company the more the churn. Could have been a retirement, a job offer elsewhere, somebody died, or a firing. I doubt that somebody's primary job was watching domain expirations, so likely this got lost in a transition among a bunch of other job functions. IMHO, the best way to take care of this would be to have checks for primary domains in the central monitoring/alerting system, and flag them yellow 15-30 days from expiration (and red a few days before).
Actually, I'd like to see stats on that
For every lawsuit like this that gets bad publicity, whose to say there aren't tens or hundreds more that go through without notice. Beyond that, while the base of potential "customers" who may read about the lawsuit and skip dining is somewhat limited, I'd imagine this is getting more notice amongst those that would do restaurant reviews, and possibly chilling speech amongst those that don't wish to be sued.
Would this work with snow? Sounds useful for Canada and other places that have snowy winters that aren't so solar-friendly. Won't help on an overcast-but-not-wet day though.
Unity
Yes, deity forbid that those children find fun in a competitive intellectual venture. The horror!
Really, they should all be sitting down to Starcraft tournaments with doritos and mountain dew readily nearby.
Actually, even better, ban both of those, and redirect any funding the useful things like the local sports/football club.
There are two parts to a review, there's service and there's product.
Beyond the power itself, there's quality of customer service, wait times for calls or technicians, etc. Up-time is also a consideration
"Oh. I'm sorry. My Automated script did it"
Yeah, let's see that excuse save somebody's ass when it's a botnet taking out a media company's site. Oh wait, it won't. So why is it a valid excuse for media companies performing takedowns of other's people's content?
Not to mention that they dropped driver support from the SBLive 5.1/Gold after XP, despite it being a *very* common card in many systems (partly, I believe, because it came with many Dell's and/or possibly HP's).
When Vista/7 came out, Creative dropped it like a hot rock and didn't provide a driver for the newer OS. There is a FOSS driver, but it lacked much of what was supported in the XP driver (while also adding other features).
What, you're telling me that my $5.00 USB "7.1 surround sound" card (that oddly only has two analog jacks) *ISN'T* as good as a high-end soundcard? :-)
Actually, the main advantage I've found for USB vs onboard sound - even with cheap USB - is that they tend to pick up less of the "electrical whine" that a lot of onboard stuff does. Dedicated cards oftimes have better filtering that keeps this out, and the onboard designs are better these days, but I do still find you can actually hear when you're moving the mouse from the background growl of many board-chip audio cards.
I have a sideline job doing computer servicing/repair. Since the issues between Russia/Ukraine have ramped up, there's also been a noticeable uptick in online/banking fraud coming from Russia.
Thankfully the banks seem to be on the watch for this - the notify customers of unusual transactions, e.g. western union, to Russian accounts - so most of my work is just ensuring that machines are clean after the fact.
I won't say that this is state-sponsored, but likely more to issues alluded to with this guy: mainly that Russia doesn't seem to be very cooperative in dealing with known international criminals - especially with the poor international relations of current - and the criminal element are taking advantage of this.
I've actually had servers say that to me.
Usual cause: trying to execute certain commands while logged in as a user that no longer exists in /etc/passwd.
Also known as "oops I overwrite /etc/password!".
Bonus points if you get this while logged in a root. An associate of mine discovered that it's bad to use system variable names when he had this one in a script he ran (as root):
deluser $USER
someone who never speaks, rocks in a corner, and screams if their normal routine is changed
So, middle-management then? Except for the never speaking part, they tend to speak at length *after* things go south. :-)
Perhaps so, but keep in mind those older models *still* resell for more than many others, and before the release of the PS4 you could see good condition CECHE01's selling for $100+ over the price of the regular models. When the PS3 first came out, the price jump over other consoles also included the blu-ray drive etc, and generally better build quality. The PS3 did have some issues, but the RROD and laser-burn (cheaping out over a 5c bumper, geeze) issues on the XB360 were legendary.
My understanding is that the main difference was in the chip that supported the older hardware, so why not just make it an option which could be easily added? A little socket for the chip and a dip-switch or jumper would probably do.
How do they throw away the keys? If they're just zeroing the area with the identity/security info it might not be that much more secure.
That said, scrambling the stored keys *and* zeroing the storage space is probably the best solution.
I've got a couple that are definitely targeted at a gamepad rather than a keyboard/mouse. Injustice: Gods Among Us comes to mind. My solution was just to steal some controllers from the XBox and use them on the PC.
My buddy has the same game on console. The big difference:
I paid under $30 on a Steam sale, and got the "extended edition" or whatever it's called with all the addons. He paid around the same, but every time he starts it up his Playstations tells him about all the fun addons he *could* have is he's just willing to shell out another $15-30 for the expansions.
Also, it actually looks a bit better on the PC with the settings turned up.
On a PC, I can still play almost all of my games from up to a decade ago. Some of them require VM's (e.g. DOSBox, or perhaps XP in VirtualBox), but my library is still fairly playable excepting some online play and disc-rot.
XBox can't play 360, and PS4 can't play PS3. That's lame. I don't want to have 10 consoles sitting around
I think Sony actually had a good idea with adding a chip to the early PS3's for backwards compatibility. I think that current-gen would do better if this concept continued. I have a 360 with a decent library of games. The XBone didn't really launch with a lot of offerings, but as my old console is starting to show signs of wear I might have considered the newer model instead of fixing/replacing my old one.
Actually, even Origins looks pretty decent on a modern rig. One of the nice things about PC games is sometimes they get *better* over time. I've just started playing it a few months ago and considering the age it looks quite nice with all settings turned up to full. When I look at the trailers, they actually look somewhat crappy compared to my current gameplay (and youtube walkthroughs made on older hardware look particularly dated).