I beg to differ. The Concord[e]'s landings may not be any louder than a regular commercial jet. I don't recall it being particularly loud. But take-off is another thing altogether.
And by God, what a noise. Especially when you're standing right by the fence and she's low enough for the wake vortices to kick up a dust storm. Hooyeh. (I'd just washed the car, too.)
I feel I have to point out that the God-awful roar of those lovely, lovely engines is not the sonic boom. It always made me smile when some cantankerous old bat a mile from Heathrow complained (usually in a quality newspaper like the Sun) about that "awful sonic boom every day". No, no, no! If you were hearing sonic booms over your house, the acceleration would have turned the passengers into a squishy mess on the aft bulkhead!
They will, too. The difference between them and legitimate senders are:
- leg. senders are willing to pay for the mail to reach their targets. even a $0.5 bond is less then cost of sending real life spam.
Spammers are NOT willing to pay $0.5 per spam.
Agreed - but the original quote was talking about during the adoption phase, when mailbox owners could require the sender to pass a Turing/CAPTCHA test as an alternative. This would therefore occur outside the Attention Bond mechanism, and the sender would not lose any money.
I thought it either remarkably selective with the truth or remarkably naive of the report authors, to propose this test as an interim solution because "legitimate senders of bulk email will be able to build or buy the systems required to respond to challenges automatically", while failing to mention that spammers would also be able to build or buy such systems. Makes me wonder how naive or selective they've been with the rest of it.
And if they are... they can spam me as hard as they are able. With a daily $250 income i could give up my job.
...and then we truly will G3T P4!D T0 R3AD EM4|L!!!!! Bring it on... just need a way to screw these spammers out of several bonds per message, and we're set.
If companies have to put up a bond for every outgoing email, and lose that bond when recipients don't want to read it, it might even cut down on the number of clueless twits who forward the same tired old jokes, etc., from their work account.
When someone from IT appears at their desk with a log printout and a total cost, and demands repayment on the spot, the idiot user might get the message. First offence, maybe the money gets donated to the corporate charity; second offence, the user in question gets suspended by their underwear from a 40th-floor window and left to rot.
On the other hand, if IT weren't smart enough to figure out who was doing it (or if the user were smart enough to foil them), what would stop some disgruntled employee sending thousands of stupid jokes just to cost the company money?
At the mailbox owner's option, the challenge message could include reference to means other than the posting of a bond as a way to get the original message delivered. The sender could be required to take a CAPTCHA (like a Turing Test - a simple test that is designed to allow the sender to prove they are human), which removes the requirement of having an account with an escrow agency. During early days of adoption, this alternative can make things a little easier for the typical sender until the infrastructure becomes widespread. Individuals will generally be able to take the CAPTCHA, while legitimate senders of bulk email will be able to build or buy the systems required to respond to challenges automatically.
[...] The above is fantastically usable... find me a GUI app that can accomplish the same purpose as quickly and easily
Agreed, it's fantastically usable - if you know what the hell any of that means. Of course, that means that if you don't know the first thing about ls, it isn't particularly usable.
I've ranted before about trying to print double-sided from a Linux/KDE machine, spending half an hour reading man pages, and finally booting up a Windows box and clicking a radio button marked "Double Sided". All because someone thought that sticking a command line in a pretty box with an OK button makes it usable. No, dammit, give me radio buttons.
What I could never understand was why, for the love of $DEITY, couldn't we have both? You can go straight to a command line, and I can play with my pointy-clicky button things (and maybe watch the command change as I do it, and just maybe learn something about lpr...)
I read a report about a lightning strike that found earth via a glider - IIRC, it travelled from one wingtip to the other via the aileron control linkages. Blew the glider to bits, but both occupants parachuted to safety.
Most worrying part for me (as a pilot or passenger): The test rigs couldn't crank out enough power to replicate the kind of damage seen. And Recommendation No 99-49 It is recommended that the CAA should request serious consideration, during its participation in the current international review of aircraft lightning certification standards, of the fact that energy levels from positive polarity discharges have been shown to greatly exceed those specified in Advisory Circular AC 20-53A, with the associated implications for the certificated lightning protection assurance of existing and future aircraft designs, particularly those which utilise significant amounts of composite material in their primary and control structures. That's worrying!
Read the official AAIB report here. Lots of interesting background info on aircraft certification against lightning strikes.
I can see how you may have difficulties comprehending my position.
Precisely. That's why we need to stick RFID tags all over you - we can't find you. Yet. And stop scratching your butt, it puts our operatives off their lunch.
A former colleague of mine tells me there is now a skip in the loading bay, full of Dell desktop and laptop machines. These are going back to be "recycled".
They could have sold the laptops two or three times over, but these machines must go back to Dell because "they're 70% recyclable". As this chap pointed out, surely if they were sold they'd be 100% recyclable. Which does indeed beg the question, is recycling really the aim here?
At my uni you didn't even have to resort to social engineering to get the basics. All you had to do was show up at the finance office for your student loan.
They made everyone sign next to their name on a big printout that sat close to the counter. This was in surname order, but also contained forenames, date of birth, matriculation number, department, and a couple of other bits and bobs.
Which was great. Especially given that the network user IDs all took the form [first initial][last initial][matric no].[department code] and the default password was the date of birth.
As far as I'm aware, this wasn't used for anything beyond "I don't like Bob, log in as Bob, look at doggy-porn, print doggy-porn, log off, run" - which would still be pretty bad news if you were Bob. But it would have been so easy for anyone with even more malicious intent to take a few pages of the printout and use it to extract even more personal information.
I'm not sure someone could walk out of my business with thousand dollars in merchandise, as I work at MacDonalds.
If your store has a night shift like ours did (no managers), I virtually guarantee that someone could turn up with a white van and steal a whole set of vats. Our guys would have drained it for you and helped you put it in the van.
In the McD's I worked at, we started inexplicably losing a few boxes of chicken nuggets a day. Management couldn't figure it out (surprise surprise), but it was obvious what was happening.
I realised straight away that it wasn't going through the kitchen (even our managers would check the transfer paperwork, every time). Then I worked out that, with the freezer door wide open, nobody could see the fire exit. I pointed this out to the shift manager - and the pompous bastard searched me then and there. For months afterward, he would regularly pull me into the office and rifle through my rucksack.
The lesson I learned from this was: If you discover a hole in the system, you either (1) keep your mouth shut, or (2) keep your mouth shut and exploit it. (Or, I suppose, (3) tell someone who will, um, appreciate the information.) Telling the bastards in management is too much trouble.
Besides, I wasn't going to risk my job, even that job, over a few measly nuggets. Putting a JCB through the wall and ripping out the deposit safe was more my style.:)
Footnote: that bastard shift manager went on long-term sick-leave. Our regional manager took our store manager to dinner, and who do you think was the waiter? He got fired from both jobs, as I understand it. Sweet.
In my Z3, I can (safely) take corners at speeds far in excess of the posted "recommended" limits. Indeed, I frequently don't actually need to slow down for the corners. That's because the car's center of gravity is extremely low, the wide tires provide huge contact patches, and the car is almost perfectly balanced (50/50 front/rear). Add to the mix the outstanding OEM suspension, and it is completely safe to take the corner above the recommended speed.
An additional factor is that the average BMW driver actually has better visibility while screaming round a bend. Their testicles swing towards the outside of the turn and only cover one eye!
What slows down traffic flow most is people braking when they don't need to, or braking more than they need to.
I've noticed this on the M25 round London. The traffic always seems to slow down in the same places - no junctions, no crashes, just a nice straight piece of road. The cause appears to be the hills. Or, more precisely, people realising they're about to start down a hill and touching the brake, the people tailgating them slamming on the anchors, etc. Behind these places, there's usually half a mile to a mile of slower traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
I beg to differ. The Concord[e]'s landings may not be any louder than a regular commercial jet. I don't recall it being particularly loud. But take-off is another thing altogether.
And by God, what a noise. Especially when you're standing right by the fence and she's low enough for the wake vortices to kick up a dust storm. Hooyeh. (I'd just washed the car, too.)
I feel I have to point out that the God-awful roar of those lovely, lovely engines is not the sonic boom. It always made me smile when some cantankerous old bat a mile from Heathrow complained (usually in a quality newspaper like the Sun) about that "awful sonic boom every day". No, no, no! If you were hearing sonic booms over your house, the acceleration would have turned the passengers into a squishy mess on the aft bulkhead!
They will, too. The difference between them and legitimate senders are:
- leg. senders are willing to pay for the mail to reach their targets. even a $0.5 bond is less then cost of sending real life spam.
Spammers are NOT willing to pay $0.5 per spam.
Agreed - but the original quote was talking about during the adoption phase, when mailbox owners could require the sender to pass a Turing/CAPTCHA test as an alternative. This would therefore occur outside the Attention Bond mechanism, and the sender would not lose any money.
I thought it either remarkably selective with the truth or remarkably naive of the report authors, to propose this test as an interim solution because "legitimate senders of bulk email will be able to build or buy the systems required to respond to challenges automatically", while failing to mention that spammers would also be able to build or buy such systems. Makes me wonder how naive or selective they've been with the rest of it.
And if they are... they can spam me as hard as they are able. With a daily $250 income i could give up my job.
...and then we truly will G3T P4!D T0 R3AD EM4|L!!!!! Bring it on... just need a way to screw these spammers out of several bonds per message, and we're set.
If companies have to put up a bond for every outgoing email, and lose that bond when recipients don't want to read it, it might even cut down on the number of clueless twits who forward the same tired old jokes, etc., from their work account.
When someone from IT appears at their desk with a log printout and a total cost, and demands repayment on the spot, the idiot user might get the message. First offence, maybe the money gets donated to the corporate charity; second offence, the user in question gets suspended by their underwear from a 40th-floor window and left to rot.
On the other hand, if IT weren't smart enough to figure out who was doing it (or if the user were smart enough to foil them), what would stop some disgruntled employee sending thousands of stupid jokes just to cost the company money?
From TFA:
At the mailbox owner's option, the challenge message could include reference to means other than the posting of a bond as a way to get the original message delivered. The sender could be required to take a CAPTCHA (like a Turing Test - a simple test that is designed to allow the sender to prove they are human), which removes the requirement of having an account with an escrow agency. During early days of adoption, this alternative can make things a little easier for the typical sender until the infrastructure becomes widespread. Individuals will generally be able to take the CAPTCHA, while legitimate senders of bulk email will be able to build or buy the systems required to respond to challenges automatically.
And spammers won't?
Whats so special about annoying IT people?
Watching their reaction, usually.
...that I've brought my passport to work on the day this appears on Slashdot?
My boss is wondering what I've done. No, really.
ls -la |grep foo > foo.txt
[...] The above is fantastically usable... find me a GUI app that can accomplish the same purpose as quickly and easily
Agreed, it's fantastically usable - if you know what the hell any of that means. Of course, that means that if you don't know the first thing about ls, it isn't particularly usable.
I've ranted before about trying to print double-sided from a Linux/KDE machine, spending half an hour reading man pages, and finally booting up a Windows box and clicking a radio button marked "Double Sided". All because someone thought that sticking a command line in a pretty box with an OK button makes it usable. No, dammit, give me radio buttons.
What I could never understand was why, for the love of $DEITY, couldn't we have both? You can go straight to a command line, and I can play with my pointy-clicky button things (and maybe watch the command change as I do it, and just maybe learn something about lpr...)
That's not bad spelling... that's Level 2 encryption! If you want to get really fancy, you can ROT-13 the whole mess...
(There's a movie embedded half way down.)
No, that's its willy. Better work on that translation. :P
...assuming the existence of an infinite number of people...
...and I still can't mod that twit Michael -5, Redundant. Gonna sit this lot out, I think.
I read a report about a lightning strike that found earth via a glider - IIRC, it travelled from one wingtip to the other via the aileron control linkages. Blew the glider to bits, but both occupants parachuted to safety.
Most worrying part for me (as a pilot or passenger): The test rigs couldn't crank out enough power to replicate the kind of damage seen. And Recommendation No 99-49 It is recommended that the CAA should request serious consideration, during its participation in the current international review of aircraft lightning certification standards, of the fact that energy levels from positive polarity discharges have been shown to greatly exceed those specified in Advisory Circular AC 20-53A, with the associated implications for the certificated lightning protection assurance of existing and future aircraft designs, particularly those which utilise significant amounts of composite material in their primary and control structures. That's worrying!
Read the official AAIB report here. Lots of interesting background info on aircraft certification against lightning strikes.
I can see how you may have difficulties comprehending my position.
Precisely. That's why we need to stick RFID tags all over you - we can't find you. Yet. And stop scratching your butt, it puts our operatives off their lunch.
Sincerely, The Government
Don't watch this! The sun will fry your TV!
The goatse.cx lawyer
He was a lawyer?! I thought he was the client, bending over like that!
Hang it off the back of my 56k modem, what do you think I'm gonna do with it? Sheesh!
http://www.happyworker.com/geekman/geekdom/ - An error occurred on the server when processing the URL. Please contact the system administrator.
Stop posing about like a superhero and fix your damn site, Geekman!!!
A former colleague of mine tells me there is now a skip in the loading bay, full of Dell desktop and laptop machines. These are going back to be "recycled".
They could have sold the laptops two or three times over, but these machines must go back to Dell because "they're 70% recyclable". As this chap pointed out, surely if they were sold they'd be 100% recyclable. Which does indeed beg the question, is recycling really the aim here?
[Y]ou can evade the sensors by doing something as simple as crying.
Crying, simple? I'm a bloke, you insensitive clod!
it sounds like there's a screw loose somewhere between keyboard and the chair
Also known as PICNIC - Problem In Chair, Not In Computer.
Once the diagnosis has got this far, trouble-shooting becomes a pleasure ;>
Who the hell modded that Funny? Man, there are some twisted people around.
At my uni you didn't even have to resort to social engineering to get the basics. All you had to do was show up at the finance office for your student loan.
They made everyone sign next to their name on a big printout that sat close to the counter. This was in surname order, but also contained forenames, date of birth, matriculation number, department, and a couple of other bits and bobs.
Which was great. Especially given that the network user IDs all took the form [first initial][last initial][matric no].[department code] and the default password was the date of birth.
As far as I'm aware, this wasn't used for anything beyond "I don't like Bob, log in as Bob, look at doggy-porn, print doggy-porn, log off, run" - which would still be pretty bad news if you were Bob. But it would have been so easy for anyone with even more malicious intent to take a few pages of the printout and use it to extract even more personal information.
Scary, really.
I'm not sure someone could walk out of my business with thousand dollars in merchandise, as I work at MacDonalds.
If your store has a night shift like ours did (no managers), I virtually guarantee that someone could turn up with a white van and steal a whole set of vats. Our guys would have drained it for you and helped you put it in the van.
In the McD's I worked at, we started inexplicably losing a few boxes of chicken nuggets a day. Management couldn't figure it out (surprise surprise), but it was obvious what was happening.
I realised straight away that it wasn't going through the kitchen (even our managers would check the transfer paperwork, every time). Then I worked out that, with the freezer door wide open, nobody could see the fire exit. I pointed this out to the shift manager - and the pompous bastard searched me then and there. For months afterward, he would regularly pull me into the office and rifle through my rucksack.
The lesson I learned from this was: If you discover a hole in the system, you either (1) keep your mouth shut, or (2) keep your mouth shut and exploit it. (Or, I suppose, (3) tell someone who will, um, appreciate the information.) Telling the bastards in management is too much trouble.
Besides, I wasn't going to risk my job, even that job, over a few measly nuggets. Putting a JCB through the wall and ripping out the deposit safe was more my style. :)
Footnote: that bastard shift manager went on long-term sick-leave. Our regional manager took our store manager to dinner, and who do you think was the waiter? He got fired from both jobs, as I understand it. Sweet.
In my Z3, I can (safely) take corners at speeds far in excess of the posted "recommended" limits. Indeed, I frequently don't actually need to slow down for the corners. That's because the car's center of gravity is extremely low, the wide tires provide huge contact patches, and the car is almost perfectly balanced (50/50 front/rear). Add to the mix the outstanding OEM suspension, and it is completely safe to take the corner above the recommended speed.
An additional factor is that the average BMW driver actually has better visibility while screaming round a bend. Their testicles swing towards the outside of the turn and only cover one eye!
What slows down traffic flow most is people braking when they don't need to, or braking more than they need to.
I've noticed this on the M25 round London. The traffic always seems to slow down in the same places - no junctions, no crashes, just a nice straight piece of road. The cause appears to be the hills. Or, more precisely, people realising they're about to start down a hill and touching the brake, the people tailgating them slamming on the anchors, etc. Behind these places, there's usually half a mile to a mile of slower traffic.
Stay off the damned brakes! And off my ass!