Good point on the BIOS password, forgot about that.
Of course, that would only be relevant on the one-tenth of one percent of machines whose users set a BIOS password. Hopefully, corporate IT would be smarter - but I doubt it. I've yet to encounter a machine with a BIOS password set.
Never said anything about the science. I just said I'm not gonna worry about an event whose last recorded incidence was 400 million years ago.
That was the focus of the stupid Slashdot headline - that Earth was in the path of a gamma ray burst that might happen nobody knows when. Since the last one that might have affected Earth was 400 million years ago, I allow that it might not happen before I can be transmogrified into a Transhuman in the next 50 years and blow this joint anyway.
To use this hack, I have to bring in a Linux machine, hook it up with a Firewire cable to a Firewire port on the target machine, and then run a command.
And this is better than simply booting Ultimate Boot CD for Windows and running the Linux-based utility on it to reset the Admin password to blank how?
I will be impressed by Firefox 3 if it doesn't crash every time it hits some JavaScript-laden site, or has simply been running too long with poor memory management, or has too many extensions operating.
Granted, Firefox 2 IS pretty stable compared to earlier versions - but not as stable as it should be.
I still don't understand why most desktop apps are reasonably stable, but everything that touches a network is utterly unstable. I mean, I know that the vagaries of network data means you get data coming in that could be any kind of binary crap, that the issue of managing state is a problem, that Web servers are constantly sending crap data and screwing up, etc. But still, the least stable apps are always network apps. This has been true since back in the BBS days and it hasn't gotten much better.
I just signed a new client yesterday. I mentioned to them that I wasn't getting rich doing tech support for small businesses because my marketing sucked. The manager then told me they'd called three or four other people before they called me, and I was the first one who was articulate and seemed knowledgeable enough to talk to! He said my marketing was fine. I told him my problem was more "lead generation" (that's what this client does.)
My point was that every botnet operation I've heard of wasn't making $45 million in revenue. As much as several million perhaps, for the largest botnet operations I've read about. But no where near $45 million.
It's much more likely that the police were overestimating - particularly because of all the reasons you cite why it would be hard to prove who did what.
If the cops find $45 million worth of bank assets or records indicating that much revenue went through the botnet operators accounts, then I'll buy it. But until then, there's no evidence these guys made that much.
OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised if a $45 million operation wasn't in the cards at some point, since the botnets are getting bigger, targeting wealthier people and getting bigger in scope and becoming more organized.
I'm just saying it would surprise me if these guys in Canada had that big an operation going at this point in time.
This sounds like the usual inflation of profit that law enforcement agencies love to do.
Most of the large-scale botnet scams I've heard of don't yield anywhere near that kind of money. The botnet operators maybe pull down $3-10,000 a month renting out the botnets. Even large-scale identify theft rings are reaching for anything like $45 million.
Unless these guys were targeting rich people, I don't see it. And since most of the alleged compromised computers were in South America, I doubt they hit a lot of rich people.
especially "scientists" who claim to be able to tell me "big things" like the age of the universe, the speed of light, the size of the universe, and all this other crap.
These morons get it wrong as often as they get it right.
How many times in my lifetime has the "size of the universe" been increased? I'll bet about a dozen times. I remember reading at least one article where one guy essentially doubled the size overnight.
One would conclude by now that nobody KNOWS the "size of the universe", rather than suggesting that "well, we're getting better at it."
This is not a general neo-Luddite rant against science. It's simply a reasonable skepticism that certain facts can be known precisely in the absence of being able to SEE or MEASURE them directly, rather than by convoluted methods that depend on everybody getting it right. That kind of thing is like programming - you end up with bugs, not perfection.
I think there's a slim chance Obama could beat McCain if he can energize his supporters, as he has been doing, and if the fact that he's black doesn't stop him - which could happen since he's been doing very well with white voters in the primaries. Of course, primaries aren't the general election, where the odds could be against him just by virtue of being black. He's also less well known than McCain, who has been around forever.
Clinton is hated by so many people that I think it's unlikely she can win against McCain. McCain gets ridiculously good press, given his numerous stupidities, which is another advantage he has.
I mean, it should have been a slam-dunk for Gore to beat Bush in 2000, and another slam-dunk for Kerry to beat Bush in 2004. And look how badly those two turned out. It should be a slam-dunk to beat McCain, given the country's problems and the Republican corruption scandals - but it won't be. It could well be another Democratic loss.
And as I said, even if the Dems win, both Obama and Clinton are so screwed up on foreign policy - which has a direct impact on the US economy due to the oil price and China holding so many US dollars - that they are likely to bumble into - or deliberately - start another war.
It doesn't look good.
Ron Paul would have been good, simply because he would be unlikely to start another war. Even if he never got anything else done, either in passing or reversing legislation, and only lasted four years with both Dems and Republicans in Congress ignoring him, that would have been a net benefit to the country. Every time they tried to start a war, he'd veto it. But he never had a chance, and neither does anyone else.
What we need right now is not a "leader" in the White House, but a "do nothing" President who won't start any more wars out of either ideology or stupidity.
OTOH, it looks increasingly likely that Israel is going to start a war with Iran and drag the US into it. That appears to be Cheney's goal - get that war started this year and thus tie the hands of the next Administration, no matter who it is. That way his military-industrial complex cronies continue to make big bucks, while the US economy in general - which that crowd doesn't care about - goes into the toilet.
Even Ron Paul probably couldn't stop that from happening. Once Israel attacks Iran, Iran will retaliate against the US, giving the Congress the justification to do what they want to do anyway - start another war. Even Ron Paul couldn't veto that - they'd override him. Both Dems and Repubs get their campaign money and bribes from the same military-industrial complex crowd.
The only difference between McCain and Obama or Clinton is that McCain will start a war the first year he's in. The other two will bumble around with "diplomacy" that can't work and end up in the same place - either accept the Iranian nuclear energy program (which they should, but won't) or bomb Iran.
They'll also screw up on Pakistan. There's no way to put US troops into Pakistan without accelerating the collapse of the Pakistani government. But all of the candidates are trying to shift their war mongering from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan - except McCain, who wants to stay in Iraq. So they'll screw that up and mire the US more deeply in Afghanistan - which is already lost - and then Pakistan, which is so much bigger and more screwed up that it will be much worse than Iraq.
It's a well-known overlap in the US - tech people, libs and sci-fi freaks. They all overlap to one degree or another. I'm not sure why myself, but it's a known overlap. My guess is it's because tech people tend to be more imaginative in an engineering way, and that carries over to politics as well as art. And because the US has tended to be more "libertarian" in its history than Europe, that translates into such people becoming libs more than socialists (although quite a few do tend to become more socialist as well) as in Europe.
I'm an anarcho-capitalist. Yes, that's more "extreme" than the Libertarian Party, in the sense that there are fewer "right" anarchists than there are "left" anarchists. "Right" anarchists have a long history in the US going back to people like Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner, whereas in Europe most anarchists were "left". But that doesn't mean I'm in favor of "corporations", which are creatures of the state. Anarcho-capitalists favor a totally free market - not a "corporate state". Left anarchists tend to believe that would concentrate economic power in the hands of the few, but right anarchists tend to dismiss that, believing that as long as that economic power does not translate into political power, it can always be dealt with by the market. You can't really have a "monopoly" without political force being involved; "natural" monopolies are rare and can be defeated by alternative solutions to achieve the same goal that the "natural" monopoly achieves. So a totally free market may produce inequalities in level of wealth, but that wealth's influence is minimized and prevented from being coercive.
Actually I'm a radical Transhumanist, so I don't even put that much stock in anarchism any more. Humans can't put together any kind of stable society for the long term, because of the defects of human nature. Transcending those defects by transcending human nature is the only solution. As William Burroughs said, "The human problem does not admit of a solution." Quoting Einstein, he said, "A problem cannot be solved in terms of itself." But there is a Transhuman solution.
I didn't see your foreign policy credits in your post, so I guess I'll just consider you another asshat troll.
My own credits have to do with staying up on what is going on in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and having some knowledge of the history of US foreign policy vis-a-vis the Middle East and Central Asia, and some knowledge of military history and insurgency.
None of which Obama - OR Clinton - let alone the nitwit McCain - have demonstrated.
Look, stupid. Being an anarchist doesn't mean you want the economy you live in to go into the toilet. Neither does an anarchist want the country to fall apart into warring tribes - or accelerate into a dictatorship which is more likely. That's not what anarchism means. Go look it up, nitwit.
The reason is that tech people and libertarians tend to overlap as demographics. There are more of the former than the latter, but if you know what a Venn diagram is, you won't have problems understanding that.
For the record, Ron Paul is a REPUBLICAN with some libertarian ideas - NOT a "libertarian", even though he ran once or twice on the Libertarian Party ticket. He's more of what they call a "paleoconservative" than a "libertarian". There is a wide variety of "libertarians", both left and right. The ones that end up in the Libertarian Party tend to be, as Bob Black once said, "Republicans who smoke dope."
And his support didn't come from "white supremacists" - that was bullshit media spin based on a couple donations.
I'm an anarchist myself, so I couldn't care less, but it was fun to see him skewer the other Republican candidates with their militarism and economic stupidity.
If McCain becomes President, we'll be at war with Iran AND Pakistan within six months - and the US economy will completely collapse as China dumps the dollar because they were cut off from Iranian oil and gas. Electing that senile old fool is a vote for the destruction of the United States.
Unfortunately, electing either Obama or Clinton will end up in the same place - it will just take a little longer as they screw around with "diplomacy" before starting their wars. Neither of them, let alone McCain, have any clue about US foreign policy.
I agree - (X)buntus are supposed to be for new Linux users, but they also try to be somewhat "cutting edge" - which means a lot of bugs and things that don't *quite* work right. I mean, they released an installer a couple of releases ago that wouldn't let you exit the mount point update screen! What kind of testing and QA is that?
I use openSUSE 10.3 and, aside from some weird bug that crashes Konqueror once a while when copying files - which didn't happen in 10.2 - it "just works". Compared to using Windows XP for any significant length of time, the ease of use and stability are just night and day. I dumped Kubuntu a release or so ago because of niggardly irritations that don't exist in openSUSE. But even Kubuntu was more usable than XP.
Not that openSUSE doesn't have a couple of minor issues and ALL the distros could stand major improvement, but they don't affect me as much as the Kubuntu bugs, let alone XP.
In fact, you don't have to worry about it "coming up", either - since you almost never have to reboot it, unless your distro just sent you a kernel upgrade.
The only time I reboot Linux is when I had to boot into Windows to do client work. And I dread that, because as soon as the desktop comes up on Windows - there's a problem. It might be waiting updates, it might be anything. The one thing I can guarantee is - there's a problem. And that problem will take an hour to resolve, delaying the reason I booted into Windows in the first place.
Anybody who thinks Linux is "hard" is simply someone who doesn't need anything more than a browser and an email client anyway.
Fortunately I've never paid for Windows since I got XP and 98 free from a developer who had open seats, and I got 2003 Server and some other Windows software (which I've never used) free from the educational program I was in. So I've never had to complain about the cost - except of course for the cost of my wasted time on this crap.
But I didn't bother reading the posts, so if this is redundant, well, fuck you.
Skynet?
This is just a tie-in with the "Terminator - The Sarah Connor Chronicles" TV show.
Anybody notice they also have a nice, even-tempered, humorous black FBI agent who has to deal with a crabby, argumentative, older, white female FBI agent?
Seriously, as I've repeatedly said here and elsewhere, nobody at Microsoft authorized to talk to the public - and many who aren't - ever says or writes anything that isn't a lie.
Meanwhile you can go back to whatever ugly bitch you think is "beautiful" since your discernment is so much greater than the rest of the human species.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point on the BIOS password, forgot about that.
Of course, that would only be relevant on the one-tenth of one percent of machines whose users set a BIOS password. Hopefully, corporate IT would be smarter - but I doubt it. I've yet to encounter a machine with a BIOS password set.
Never said anything about the science. I just said I'm not gonna worry about an event whose last recorded incidence was 400 million years ago.
That was the focus of the stupid Slashdot headline - that Earth was in the path of a gamma ray burst that might happen nobody knows when. Since the last one that might have affected Earth was 400 million years ago, I allow that it might not happen before I can be transmogrified into a Transhuman in the next 50 years and blow this joint anyway.
With time lags between events of 400-plus million years, I really have to worry about this happening in my lifetime.
Nitwits.
I used to work at Bank of America. It's run by idiots. So no surprise they come out on top.
To use this hack, I have to bring in a Linux machine, hook it up with a Firewire cable to a Firewire port on the target machine, and then run a command.
And this is better than simply booting Ultimate Boot CD for Windows and running the Linux-based utility on it to reset the Admin password to blank how?
Just more lies.
Microsoft does not sell software.
It sells lies.
Microsoft does not sell software.
It sells lies.
the killer robots look like Summer Glau, I can live with it.
I want to live with it!
See? Even John Connor agrees!
I will be impressed by Firefox 3 if it doesn't crash every time it hits some JavaScript-laden site, or has simply been running too long with poor memory management, or has too many extensions operating.
Granted, Firefox 2 IS pretty stable compared to earlier versions - but not as stable as it should be.
I still don't understand why most desktop apps are reasonably stable, but everything that touches a network is utterly unstable. I mean, I know that the vagaries of network data means you get data coming in that could be any kind of binary crap, that the issue of managing state is a problem, that Web servers are constantly sending crap data and screwing up, etc. But still, the least stable apps are always network apps. This has been true since back in the BBS days and it hasn't gotten much better.
I just signed a new client yesterday. I mentioned to them that I wasn't getting rich doing tech support for small businesses because my marketing sucked. The manager then told me they'd called three or four other people before they called me, and I was the first one who was articulate and seemed knowledgeable enough to talk to! He said my marketing was fine. I told him my problem was more "lead generation" (that's what this client does.)
Yes, being a "geek" can cost you business.
Yes, all of that is very standard in botnets.
My point was that every botnet operation I've heard of wasn't making $45 million in revenue. As much as several million perhaps, for the largest botnet operations I've read about. But no where near $45 million.
It's much more likely that the police were overestimating - particularly because of all the reasons you cite why it would be hard to prove who did what.
If the cops find $45 million worth of bank assets or records indicating that much revenue went through the botnet operators accounts, then I'll buy it. But until then, there's no evidence these guys made that much.
OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised if a $45 million operation wasn't in the cards at some point, since the botnets are getting bigger, targeting wealthier people and getting bigger in scope and becoming more organized.
I'm just saying it would surprise me if these guys in Canada had that big an operation going at this point in time.
This sounds like the usual inflation of profit that law enforcement agencies love to do.
Most of the large-scale botnet scams I've heard of don't yield anywhere near that kind of money. The botnet operators maybe pull down $3-10,000 a month renting out the botnets. Even large-scale identify theft rings are reaching for anything like $45 million.
Unless these guys were targeting rich people, I don't see it. And since most of the alleged compromised computers were in South America, I doubt they hit a lot of rich people.
Bill Gates has never said anything but a lie in his life.
Microsoft does not sell software - it sells lies.
Nothing to see here, move along.
especially "scientists" who claim to be able to tell me "big things" like the age of the universe, the speed of light, the size of the universe, and all this other crap.
These morons get it wrong as often as they get it right.
How many times in my lifetime has the "size of the universe" been increased? I'll bet about a dozen times. I remember reading at least one article where one guy essentially doubled the size overnight.
One would conclude by now that nobody KNOWS the "size of the universe", rather than suggesting that "well, we're getting better at it."
This is not a general neo-Luddite rant against science. It's simply a reasonable skepticism that certain facts can be known precisely in the absence of being able to SEE or MEASURE them directly, rather than by convoluted methods that depend on everybody getting it right. That kind of thing is like programming - you end up with bugs, not perfection.
is Summer Glau! And more Summer Glau! And MORE Summer Glau! And STILL MORE Summer Glau! In UHQ! And EVEN MORE Summer Glau!
I think there's a slim chance Obama could beat McCain if he can energize his supporters, as he has been doing, and if the fact that he's black doesn't stop him - which could happen since he's been doing very well with white voters in the primaries. Of course, primaries aren't the general election, where the odds could be against him just by virtue of being black. He's also less well known than McCain, who has been around forever.
Clinton is hated by so many people that I think it's unlikely she can win against McCain. McCain gets ridiculously good press, given his numerous stupidities, which is another advantage he has.
I mean, it should have been a slam-dunk for Gore to beat Bush in 2000, and another slam-dunk for Kerry to beat Bush in 2004. And look how badly those two turned out. It should be a slam-dunk to beat McCain, given the country's problems and the Republican corruption scandals - but it won't be. It could well be another Democratic loss.
And as I said, even if the Dems win, both Obama and Clinton are so screwed up on foreign policy - which has a direct impact on the US economy due to the oil price and China holding so many US dollars - that they are likely to bumble into - or deliberately - start another war.
It doesn't look good.
Ron Paul would have been good, simply because he would be unlikely to start another war. Even if he never got anything else done, either in passing or reversing legislation, and only lasted four years with both Dems and Republicans in Congress ignoring him, that would have been a net benefit to the country. Every time they tried to start a war, he'd veto it. But he never had a chance, and neither does anyone else.
What we need right now is not a "leader" in the White House, but a "do nothing" President who won't start any more wars out of either ideology or stupidity.
OTOH, it looks increasingly likely that Israel is going to start a war with Iran and drag the US into it. That appears to be Cheney's goal - get that war started this year and thus tie the hands of the next Administration, no matter who it is. That way his military-industrial complex cronies continue to make big bucks, while the US economy in general - which that crowd doesn't care about - goes into the toilet.
Even Ron Paul probably couldn't stop that from happening. Once Israel attacks Iran, Iran will retaliate against the US, giving the Congress the justification to do what they want to do anyway - start another war. Even Ron Paul couldn't veto that - they'd override him. Both Dems and Repubs get their campaign money and bribes from the same military-industrial complex crowd.
The only difference between McCain and Obama or Clinton is that McCain will start a war the first year he's in. The other two will bumble around with "diplomacy" that can't work and end up in the same place - either accept the Iranian nuclear energy program (which they should, but won't) or bomb Iran.
They'll also screw up on Pakistan. There's no way to put US troops into Pakistan without accelerating the collapse of the Pakistani government. But all of the candidates are trying to shift their war mongering from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan - except McCain, who wants to stay in Iraq. So they'll screw that up and mire the US more deeply in Afghanistan - which is already lost - and then Pakistan, which is so much bigger and more screwed up that it will be much worse than Iraq.
Yup. It doesn't look good.
It's a well-known overlap in the US - tech people, libs and sci-fi freaks. They all overlap to one degree or another. I'm not sure why myself, but it's a known overlap. My guess is it's because tech people tend to be more imaginative in an engineering way, and that carries over to politics as well as art. And because the US has tended to be more "libertarian" in its history than Europe, that translates into such people becoming libs more than socialists (although quite a few do tend to become more socialist as well) as in Europe.
I'm an anarcho-capitalist. Yes, that's more "extreme" than the Libertarian Party, in the sense that there are fewer "right" anarchists than there are "left" anarchists. "Right" anarchists have a long history in the US going back to people like Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner, whereas in Europe most anarchists were "left". But that doesn't mean I'm in favor of "corporations", which are creatures of the state. Anarcho-capitalists favor a totally free market - not a "corporate state". Left anarchists tend to believe that would concentrate economic power in the hands of the few, but right anarchists tend to dismiss that, believing that as long as that economic power does not translate into political power, it can always be dealt with by the market. You can't really have a "monopoly" without political force being involved; "natural" monopolies are rare and can be defeated by alternative solutions to achieve the same goal that the "natural" monopoly achieves. So a totally free market may produce inequalities in level of wealth, but that wealth's influence is minimized and prevented from being coercive.
Actually I'm a radical Transhumanist, so I don't even put that much stock in anarchism any more. Humans can't put together any kind of stable society for the long term, because of the defects of human nature. Transcending those defects by transcending human nature is the only solution. As William Burroughs said, "The human problem does not admit of a solution." Quoting Einstein, he said, "A problem cannot be solved in terms of itself." But there is a Transhuman solution.
I didn't see your foreign policy credits in your post, so I guess I'll just consider you another asshat troll.
My own credits have to do with staying up on what is going on in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and having some knowledge of the history of US foreign policy vis-a-vis the Middle East and Central Asia, and some knowledge of military history and insurgency.
None of which Obama - OR Clinton - let alone the nitwit McCain - have demonstrated.
So fuck off, troll.
Look, stupid. Being an anarchist doesn't mean you want the economy you live in to go into the toilet. Neither does an anarchist want the country to fall apart into warring tribes - or accelerate into a dictatorship which is more likely. That's not what anarchism means. Go look it up, nitwit.
The reason is that tech people and libertarians tend to overlap as demographics. There are more of the former than the latter, but if you know what a Venn diagram is, you won't have problems understanding that.
For the record, Ron Paul is a REPUBLICAN with some libertarian ideas - NOT a "libertarian", even though he ran once or twice on the Libertarian Party ticket. He's more of what they call a "paleoconservative" than a "libertarian". There is a wide variety of "libertarians", both left and right. The ones that end up in the Libertarian Party tend to be, as Bob Black once said, "Republicans who smoke dope."
And his support didn't come from "white supremacists" - that was bullshit media spin based on a couple donations.
I'm an anarchist myself, so I couldn't care less, but it was fun to see him skewer the other Republican candidates with their militarism and economic stupidity.
If McCain becomes President, we'll be at war with Iran AND Pakistan within six months - and the US economy will completely collapse as China dumps the dollar because they were cut off from Iranian oil and gas. Electing that senile old fool is a vote for the destruction of the United States.
Unfortunately, electing either Obama or Clinton will end up in the same place - it will just take a little longer as they screw around with "diplomacy" before starting their wars. Neither of them, let alone McCain, have any clue about US foreign policy.
I agree - (X)buntus are supposed to be for new Linux users, but they also try to be somewhat "cutting edge" - which means a lot of bugs and things that don't *quite* work right. I mean, they released an installer a couple of releases ago that wouldn't let you exit the mount point update screen! What kind of testing and QA is that?
I use openSUSE 10.3 and, aside from some weird bug that crashes Konqueror once a while when copying files - which didn't happen in 10.2 - it "just works". Compared to using Windows XP for any significant length of time, the ease of use and stability are just night and day. I dumped Kubuntu a release or so ago because of niggardly irritations that don't exist in openSUSE. But even Kubuntu was more usable than XP.
Not that openSUSE doesn't have a couple of minor issues and ALL the distros could stand major improvement, but they don't affect me as much as the Kubuntu bugs, let alone XP.
Amen!
In fact, you don't have to worry about it "coming up", either - since you almost never have to reboot it, unless your distro just sent you a kernel upgrade.
The only time I reboot Linux is when I had to boot into Windows to do client work. And I dread that, because as soon as the desktop comes up on Windows - there's a problem. It might be waiting updates, it might be anything. The one thing I can guarantee is - there's a problem. And that problem will take an hour to resolve, delaying the reason I booted into Windows in the first place.
Anybody who thinks Linux is "hard" is simply someone who doesn't need anything more than a browser and an email client anyway.
Fortunately I've never paid for Windows since I got XP and 98 free from a developer who had open seats, and I got 2003 Server and some other Windows software (which I've never used) free from the educational program I was in. So I've never had to complain about the cost - except of course for the cost of my wasted time on this crap.
But I didn't bother reading the posts, so if this is redundant, well, fuck you.
Skynet?
This is just a tie-in with the "Terminator - The Sarah Connor Chronicles" TV show.
Anybody notice they also have a nice, even-tempered, humorous black FBI agent who has to deal with a crabby, argumentative, older, white female FBI agent?
Can you say "Obama vs Hillary"?
I knew you could...
Seriously, as I've repeatedly said here and elsewhere, nobody at Microsoft authorized to talk to the public - and many who aren't - ever says or writes anything that isn't a lie.
Microsoft does not sell software. They sell lies.
Meanwhile you can go back to whatever ugly bitch you think is "beautiful" since your discernment is so much greater than the rest of the human species.
Lame.