Really, they can do all of that that they want. It's not going to result in more sales. Their bank accounts aren't bottomless. At some point it will stop. Either they come to their senses, or go bankrupt.
That's stupid. We had the expertise and technology to make them secure ten years ago. We certainly have the expertise and technology to do it today. However, there are a few problems:
1) Government contracts go to the lowest bidder, or to the company of a friend of someone high up in the government. Neither means security. 2) Election fraud has been happening for a couple thousand years now. No reason to expect it to stop with electronic voting. In fact, it most likely goes up. That requires insecure machines. 3) Nobody gets elected because they're technologically adept. With our (collective, here at slashdot) experience with corporate IT management, why would we think that governmental IT management and technical requirements would be any better?
We have the technology and knowledge - we just don't have anyone implementing it. We don't need 50 years - we need someone experienced in IT security implementing voting machines, and no corruption to mar the process.
I have to agree with Hatta. You sound like an ignorant Puritan.
Can bars be completely unhealthy? Sure. Can they be a really good social outing, which helps make everyone happier? Hell yes.
A group of us occasionally hit our local pub for happy hour. Beers are half-price, and the food is excellent. (And it's no-smoking, so the air is clear and fresh.) 8 or so of us grab the L-shaped table in the back, order herb and Parmesan dusted potato wedges, mozzarella sticks, a monstrous plate of nachos, and a couple rounds of beers. We talk about life, work, school, politics - whatever comes up. We tell stories of our childhood, talk about relationships, and in general, have a good time being part of a group of friends. Being part of a little community. End total for 2-3 hours of this? $10-$15 per person.
The point is to do something real.
Indeed. And there's nothing more real than sharing good food and drink with a bunch of your friends. Especially in a place where nobody has to buy and prepare it all, there isn't a problem with parking, (private houses/apartments can be a bit tricky to get 8 people parked at) and nobody has to do the dishes. It's reasonably priced as long as you don't overdo it, and utterly stress free.
If you're depressed, getting dressed up, traveling to someone else's house, parking, being expected to buy/make/bring food or drink, etc., can be hard to get motivated to do. When a group of 4 of your friends pops into your office at the end of work on a Friday, and asks you to take a 5 minute walk with them, it's a lot harder to avoid being social. And for people suffering from depression, socialization is the #1 recommended thing.
Your hatred for bars sounds like you either haven't had a good group of people to have a healthy experience with, or all the bars near you suck. My girlfriend is a total non-drinker, hates drunk people, isn't really that social, and even she will come out with us. Why? The people are great, the food is good, and everyone has a good time. I'm sorry to hear that you've never had a positive experience in a bar. That said, I'd never suggest that you just drink all day instead of get some exercise. That and some good, positive socialization will go a long way to curing almost any depression.
And there's a big, big difference between Arab and Persian. It's akin to saying, "French, German, all the same. They're next door to each other." Redrawing a map of Eurpoe that combines parts of Germany and France really isn't going to work. I'm not sure that a lot of people in the West understand how different Iraq and Iran are. The mountains that divide Iraq and Iran represent more than political or geographical boundaries - they are a significant cultural boundary as well.
Have you listened to NPR lately? Every other story has a "brought to you by" some corporation or endowment. There are plenty of ads on NPR. I hear them every single morning I listen. They just aren't "made up people selling you things" ads, that's all.
Honestly, the amount of good that easily publicly accessible information does far, far outweighs the bad. And if for some reason it some part starts to have a bad effect, we legislate against it. It's really not that hard to do.
Personally, I think our sex offender laws constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Either someone is rehabilitated, and free to go live their life, or they're not, and need to be under lock and key. The whole permanent sex offender registry stuff is a load of crap. Way to make someone more likely to commit crimes, since they have no hope of a normal life.
As for low-level abuses, either they are a problem enough we make them a crime, or they're not, and we deal with them as byproducts of something immensely useful.
Stalking is an issue, and is illegal almost everywhere. Stalking, however, has nothing to do with this. At all. You might as well say that we need to abolish the white pages, because it will allow a stalker to find out where you live. Have to get rid of GPS systems, because stalkers could use them to figure out how to get to you. Abolish digital cameras, because stalkers could use them to take pictures of you, your house, your car, etc.
You might as well have just slapped a "think of the children" on your post, and have been done with it.
The good that google street view does is enormous. It allowed me to check out apartment locations from 1000 miles away, before I moved. I could see what kind of neighborhood they were in. Fences around every house, or open yards and parks? Miles of concrete and asphalt, or acres of grass and trees? It allowed me to get to know a small French fishing village I was going to be visiting, from the middle of the US. When I got there, I knew my way around, knew my landmarks, and had a fantastic time. I've used it to learn how to navigate through tricky mazes of one-way streets before I got there. Checked for parking areas before I spent half an hour driving around looking for the closest one.
This isn't about taking pictures of you in your living room with your head up your ass. This is about taking pictures of streets and buildings - the things that everyone sees every day driving past your house. The only difference is that people from thousands of miles away can virtually drive past your house. So what? Do you care about the tens to hundreds to thousands of people who drive past in real life every day? If so, you'd better get the hell out of any town, and find yourself a place with a mile long private drive.
If you want privacy, you need to be far from roads where people can see you. If you're living in a moderately populated place, you don't have privacy outside the walls of your house.
I was wondering reading this if it would be possible to build an RFID repeater in a wallet. You go to pay, kick on your repeater, and see if you can pick up any chips from outside the 6" or whatever the normal radius they read from is. If anyone else in line behind or on either side of you has an unshielded chip, bam, they just paid for you.
I think the GP had considered the fact that the neighbor that got murdered first wouldn't be doing very much murdering themselves. Thus the "half" comment.
I don't know the answer, but I know what the problems are:
1) A 24 hour news cycle, without enough news to fill 24 hours. I just realized that a sizable percentage of stories I read are either about things that did NOT happen, or things that will happen. Not things that actually happened. It's either that, or stuff about someone's opinion on something. Neither of these things constitute news.
2) News conflated with entertainment, because our entire news industry is based on the number of eyeballs watching it.
I don't know how to fix this - you can't get any of the major news network to stop reporting on entertainment and scandal, because that's what gets viewers. The only way would be with a state-owned news network. And that won't ever happen, because that's socialist, and the news networks will happily inflame the public against any such idea.
Yeah, I know about the pain of name-changing. My sister is getting married in a month, and is in the middle of trying to figure it all out.
Really my point was what you pointed out - why spend years and hundreds of dollars when you can just use an alias online? I mean, really. Even on Facebook you can use something close to your name, but not it exactly. Seems silly not to do it that way, given the alternative.
if I find nothing, my imagination is left to fill in the blanks
If only your imagination was good enough to conceive that many names are so common that thousands of others share it, and many people have more of a life than "creating an internet presence". I don't know how long you've been out of school, but the inability to find someone on the internet doesn't mean jack shit. You really sound like an idiot, to be frank.
If you google my name, you don't find me. If you add in the last two places I worked, you STILL don't find me, even though I was listed on both places websites for a long time. If you add in my undergraduate college, you find a current bio on me at the place I work now. But that's it. That's the bulk of my online presence you can find using google, browsing Facebook, etc.
Why you'd assume that lack of internet presence is any indication of anything is beyond me. I've got a pretty damn active social life, am very active online, and I've got a pretty long career behind me. All of this I'll tell you when you interview me, and give you contacts to check into these things.
But a random search? Doesn't find much of anything. If you base hiring decisions on that lack of information, you're an idiot.
I started doing that a bit late, but I've been doing it for awhile now too. It's nice to have a different "me" in different communities. I've even going so far as to have more than one identity in a few places, as I'm a member of more than one group that I don't want to combine. The wall is necessary when both know different other identities of me. It's a crazy web, for sure.
But by and large, it's working for me. I do have a very limited facebook profile, mainly because I went back to school a decade after I got out the first time, and all the kids here use it as their primary means of communication. It's either be there, or be a social outcast. However, it doesn't have my birthday, any previous employers, previous schools, likes or dislikes, or family connections. Just a brief bit of who I am now, and a list of people I need to keep an eye on for social announcements.
Keeping your identity from gathering mud online is hard work. I think that's part of why we're seeing so little of it as time goes on. Kids don't have that sort of patience or forethought, most of the time.
I should have read down further before posting...exactly what I said up above! Name changes aren't easy, and can be messy for years. What's easier is having a few online handles that you use in different scenarios. Internet communities are fairly temporary and nebulous. But the records last forever. It's definitely time to start pushing anonymity once again. I think the largest culprits are Facebook and your Google account linking to everything under the sun, it seems.
I don't know that it's worth it to change your name either. All your school and employment records will be tied to the previous name. Credit score, finances, medical history, state records, property records, etc. So what are we all going to do - pick totally new names when we get married? Might as well do it at a time of name-change as it is, I guess. John Smith and Mary Jones get married, and go with James and Jean Williams. Not going to be confusing at all....
What happens when your period of shame overlaps with things that you need to keep on record, associated with that name? If you changed your name after your time working for a company as a teen, are you going to call your old bosses and try to convince them to give references for the new name? If not, those references are gone forever. You can't exactly give out your name-of-shame to your prospective employer so they can ask for references, if you're trying to hide what it's tied to on the internet.
Pretty much the only way to work this is to....do what sensible people have been doing for the last 20-30 years: Use handles/avatars on the internet. Don't put you on the internet. It's not worth it.
For me, habit, and because I haven't found another news aggregation site that has a variety of articles as well suited to my tastes.
It'd be great if there was a good way to filter out the utter crap from the interesting stuff here. I've blocked anything posted by kwadson, which is an amazingly good start. However, it does mean that there are times when slashdot doesn't show any new content for a half day or so.
I like the variety here. What this place needs are some editors that do their fucking job, rather than just troll for eyeballs. The Firehose is filled with interesting stuff. An actual editor would use it for inspiration, then go and dig up the real info behind the stories. Instead, we get something that seems like the editors are always stoned, saying, "Dude, that's sooooo radical! Let's post that. Fucking SWEET man!" No editing of the submissions, no digging up some real meat behind something, no momentary pause to mentally consider, "Humm, is this really interesting, or just crap?"
How much of that has to do with not having a keyboard layout or the knowledge of how to make special characters to communicate with?
My Spanish isn't great, but even if it were, I'd have trouble making special characters on a website where I had to type it. Impossible? Not at all. But it's far easier to stick to the language that my keyboard comes in.
Because you're on probation or bail. If you're not on probation or bail, then the court can't make you do a damn thing. If you're on probation or bail, you've agreed to abide by the court's terms in exchange for your temporary freedom. Once that freedom becomes permanent, feel free to take the breath-checking interlock off.
See, I have a whole bunch of passwords. To remember them all, I have them written on an index card somewhere on my desk here. It's pretty damn secure, because the passwords are only labeled "Insecure Web 1", and "Secure Web 4" and stuff like that. On my computer (the password to it is not written down on the index card) I have an encrypted file (nor is that passwd written down) which contains stuff like "slashdot: Insecure Web 2". Put the two together, and you've got access to all my stuff. But the chances of someone being able to break into my house get the card, break into the computer, decrypt the file which matches passwords with websites, then figure out all my logins (which aren't written anywhere, but might be scattered across a few email accounts) is small. If someone cares that much, good for them. I'll buy them a beer for their troubles. Because that means I'm fucking important as all hell.
The thing is, you can't reliably use a contest as a substitute for hiring people. When you hire people, you interview, pick people with the correct skillset, and then tell them what to do. Contests are voluntary. There's no guarantee you'll get anyone finishing your project. There's even less of a guarantee that they'll finish it to-spec.
Using a contest in lieu of employees for anything is a gamble. Not enough prize money, and you won't get competent people working on it. You'll also have to spend employee time weeding through all the cruft submitted. Then there's the legal questions about the code submitted.
Unless you're a big-name company, with a solid reputation, I don't think that we really have to worry about exploitation via contests on any large scale. Even then, I don't know how many times a company could pull it off before everyone started calling out "bullshit". If you publicly pronounce that your in-house staff can't do a job too many times, everyone takes notice...
On top of that, a bunch of guys made this mod a stand-alone game, with a pretty bitching "subscription" model. Check out League of Legends. It's the same old DoTA, new characters, graphics, and items, because they couldn't mooch off any of the original artwork, free to download and play. The profit part? The heroes rotate through a lineup of like 10% of the heroes every week. If you want access to your favorite one all the time, you need to unlock it with money or in-game earned points. (Mostly money, at this point I think.) There are skins to buy, and a "rune" system that adds a few pct to various character attributes. While you can get all the runes with in-game earned points, it's far more efficient to purchase them. For the hardcore gamers, that's the way to go.
Having played a lot of DoTA, I have to say, LoL is vastly superior. You can shop while dead, the menu and game search blows the old DoTA one out of the water, and with levels and ranking, you actually get semi-evenly matched games a good percentage of the time. It's a very focused, polished game. I'm not sure that Valve can do any better. It will be interesting to see, however. Although I doubt they can beat the price of LoL.
The solution to this is to write a quick script (come on, SOMEONE in IT has to be able to whip up something in VB) to just add a "+1" to an existing stock email and bump it to the top of the inbox. You don't need to see all 200 form emails - just one showing that 200 people from this group all sent it. Hell, even a god damned folder and a filter rule would suffice.
They are so technically illiterate they can't handle some sort of automated email sorting? God...I hate politicians...
In your attempt to take a snipe at me, you nicely failed to read the GP and parent. He was talking about Circulating seawater through pipes for cooling. That, as mlts pointed out, has a number of major issues. Thanks for the awesome job summarizing them. My point was that you don't need to circulate the water - it is all around you. All you need is a big hunk of metal in contact with the water (the hull, as I pointed out) and you'll be good to go.
If you absolutely needed an external heatsink, and it got all fouled up, you'd just go down there with a steam hose and blast all the critters off. That's how ships are kept free from them. That and toxic paint. The coolant on the other side of the heat sink (hull, in the best case) could be whatever you wanted it to be. (Hint: Not seawater!) If you're going to accuse me of having a chip on my shoulder, you might want to be sure you're reading and understanding first.
The GP doesn't know what he's talking about. There is no need to circulate - the entire hull is a damned heat sink, with the capacity of whatever bay or ocean the ship is anchored in. You just run your piping in contact with the hull, and you're set. At the absolute worst, you just cut a hole in the hull and install a bigass heatsink, sticking out into the water. Not aerodynamic, but if you're attached to fiber and the grid, you're not moving anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
And?
Really, they can do all of that that they want. It's not going to result in more sales. Their bank accounts aren't bottomless. At some point it will stop. Either they come to their senses, or go bankrupt.
That's stupid. We had the expertise and technology to make them secure ten years ago. We certainly have the expertise and technology to do it today. However, there are a few problems:
1) Government contracts go to the lowest bidder, or to the company of a friend of someone high up in the government. Neither means security.
2) Election fraud has been happening for a couple thousand years now. No reason to expect it to stop with electronic voting. In fact, it most likely goes up. That requires insecure machines.
3) Nobody gets elected because they're technologically adept. With our (collective, here at slashdot) experience with corporate IT management, why would we think that governmental IT management and technical requirements would be any better?
We have the technology and knowledge - we just don't have anyone implementing it. We don't need 50 years - we need someone experienced in IT security implementing voting machines, and no corruption to mar the process.
Can bars be completely unhealthy? Sure. Can they be a really good social outing, which helps make everyone happier? Hell yes.
A group of us occasionally hit our local pub for happy hour. Beers are half-price, and the food is excellent. (And it's no-smoking, so the air is clear and fresh.) 8 or so of us grab the L-shaped table in the back, order herb and Parmesan dusted potato wedges, mozzarella sticks, a monstrous plate of nachos, and a couple rounds of beers. We talk about life, work, school, politics - whatever comes up. We tell stories of our childhood, talk about relationships, and in general, have a good time being part of a group of friends. Being part of a little community. End total for 2-3 hours of this? $10-$15 per person.
The point is to do something real.
Indeed. And there's nothing more real than sharing good food and drink with a bunch of your friends. Especially in a place where nobody has to buy and prepare it all, there isn't a problem with parking, (private houses/apartments can be a bit tricky to get 8 people parked at) and nobody has to do the dishes. It's reasonably priced as long as you don't overdo it, and utterly stress free.
If you're depressed, getting dressed up, traveling to someone else's house, parking, being expected to buy/make/bring food or drink, etc., can be hard to get motivated to do. When a group of 4 of your friends pops into your office at the end of work on a Friday, and asks you to take a 5 minute walk with them, it's a lot harder to avoid being social. And for people suffering from depression, socialization is the #1 recommended thing.
Your hatred for bars sounds like you either haven't had a good group of people to have a healthy experience with, or all the bars near you suck. My girlfriend is a total non-drinker, hates drunk people, isn't really that social, and even she will come out with us. Why? The people are great, the food is good, and everyone has a good time. I'm sorry to hear that you've never had a positive experience in a bar. That said, I'd never suggest that you just drink all day instead of get some exercise. That and some good, positive socialization will go a long way to curing almost any depression.
And there's a big, big difference between Arab and Persian. It's akin to saying, "French, German, all the same. They're next door to each other." Redrawing a map of Eurpoe that combines parts of Germany and France really isn't going to work. I'm not sure that a lot of people in the West understand how different Iraq and Iran are. The mountains that divide Iraq and Iran represent more than political or geographical boundaries - they are a significant cultural boundary as well.
Have you listened to NPR lately? Every other story has a "brought to you by" some corporation or endowment. There are plenty of ads on NPR. I hear them every single morning I listen. They just aren't "made up people selling you things" ads, that's all.
You spent a lot of time dealing with token ring networks, didn't you?
Oh my GOD!!!! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!
Honestly, the amount of good that easily publicly accessible information does far, far outweighs the bad. And if for some reason it some part starts to have a bad effect, we legislate against it. It's really not that hard to do.
Personally, I think our sex offender laws constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Either someone is rehabilitated, and free to go live their life, or they're not, and need to be under lock and key. The whole permanent sex offender registry stuff is a load of crap. Way to make someone more likely to commit crimes, since they have no hope of a normal life.
As for low-level abuses, either they are a problem enough we make them a crime, or they're not, and we deal with them as byproducts of something immensely useful.
Nice strawman.
Stalking is an issue, and is illegal almost everywhere. Stalking, however, has nothing to do with this. At all. You might as well say that we need to abolish the white pages, because it will allow a stalker to find out where you live. Have to get rid of GPS systems, because stalkers could use them to figure out how to get to you. Abolish digital cameras, because stalkers could use them to take pictures of you, your house, your car, etc.
You might as well have just slapped a "think of the children" on your post, and have been done with it.
The good that google street view does is enormous. It allowed me to check out apartment locations from 1000 miles away, before I moved. I could see what kind of neighborhood they were in. Fences around every house, or open yards and parks? Miles of concrete and asphalt, or acres of grass and trees? It allowed me to get to know a small French fishing village I was going to be visiting, from the middle of the US. When I got there, I knew my way around, knew my landmarks, and had a fantastic time. I've used it to learn how to navigate through tricky mazes of one-way streets before I got there. Checked for parking areas before I spent half an hour driving around looking for the closest one.
This isn't about taking pictures of you in your living room with your head up your ass. This is about taking pictures of streets and buildings - the things that everyone sees every day driving past your house. The only difference is that people from thousands of miles away can virtually drive past your house. So what? Do you care about the tens to hundreds to thousands of people who drive past in real life every day? If so, you'd better get the hell out of any town, and find yourself a place with a mile long private drive.
If you want privacy, you need to be far from roads where people can see you. If you're living in a moderately populated place, you don't have privacy outside the walls of your house.
I was wondering reading this if it would be possible to build an RFID repeater in a wallet. You go to pay, kick on your repeater, and see if you can pick up any chips from outside the 6" or whatever the normal radius they read from is. If anyone else in line behind or on either side of you has an unshielded chip, bam, they just paid for you.
I think the GP had considered the fact that the neighbor that got murdered first wouldn't be doing very much murdering themselves. Thus the "half" comment.
I don't know the answer, but I know what the problems are:
1) A 24 hour news cycle, without enough news to fill 24 hours. I just realized that a sizable percentage of stories I read are either about things that did NOT happen, or things that will happen. Not things that actually happened. It's either that, or stuff about someone's opinion on something. Neither of these things constitute news.
2) News conflated with entertainment, because our entire news industry is based on the number of eyeballs watching it.
I don't know how to fix this - you can't get any of the major news network to stop reporting on entertainment and scandal, because that's what gets viewers. The only way would be with a state-owned news network. And that won't ever happen, because that's socialist, and the news networks will happily inflame the public against any such idea.
Yeah, I know about the pain of name-changing. My sister is getting married in a month, and is in the middle of trying to figure it all out.
Really my point was what you pointed out - why spend years and hundreds of dollars when you can just use an alias online? I mean, really. Even on Facebook you can use something close to your name, but not it exactly. Seems silly not to do it that way, given the alternative.
if I find nothing, my imagination is left to fill in the blanks
If only your imagination was good enough to conceive that many names are so common that thousands of others share it, and many people have more of a life than "creating an internet presence". I don't know how long you've been out of school, but the inability to find someone on the internet doesn't mean jack shit. You really sound like an idiot, to be frank.
If you google my name, you don't find me. If you add in the last two places I worked, you STILL don't find me, even though I was listed on both places websites for a long time. If you add in my undergraduate college, you find a current bio on me at the place I work now. But that's it. That's the bulk of my online presence you can find using google, browsing Facebook, etc.
Why you'd assume that lack of internet presence is any indication of anything is beyond me. I've got a pretty damn active social life, am very active online, and I've got a pretty long career behind me. All of this I'll tell you when you interview me, and give you contacts to check into these things.
But a random search? Doesn't find much of anything. If you base hiring decisions on that lack of information, you're an idiot.
I started doing that a bit late, but I've been doing it for awhile now too. It's nice to have a different "me" in different communities. I've even going so far as to have more than one identity in a few places, as I'm a member of more than one group that I don't want to combine. The wall is necessary when both know different other identities of me. It's a crazy web, for sure.
But by and large, it's working for me. I do have a very limited facebook profile, mainly because I went back to school a decade after I got out the first time, and all the kids here use it as their primary means of communication. It's either be there, or be a social outcast. However, it doesn't have my birthday, any previous employers, previous schools, likes or dislikes, or family connections. Just a brief bit of who I am now, and a list of people I need to keep an eye on for social announcements.
Keeping your identity from gathering mud online is hard work. I think that's part of why we're seeing so little of it as time goes on. Kids don't have that sort of patience or forethought, most of the time.
I should have read down further before posting...exactly what I said up above! Name changes aren't easy, and can be messy for years. What's easier is having a few online handles that you use in different scenarios. Internet communities are fairly temporary and nebulous. But the records last forever. It's definitely time to start pushing anonymity once again. I think the largest culprits are Facebook and your Google account linking to everything under the sun, it seems.
I don't know that it's worth it to change your name either. All your school and employment records will be tied to the previous name. Credit score, finances, medical history, state records, property records, etc. So what are we all going to do - pick totally new names when we get married? Might as well do it at a time of name-change as it is, I guess. John Smith and Mary Jones get married, and go with James and Jean Williams. Not going to be confusing at all....
What happens when your period of shame overlaps with things that you need to keep on record, associated with that name? If you changed your name after your time working for a company as a teen, are you going to call your old bosses and try to convince them to give references for the new name? If not, those references are gone forever. You can't exactly give out your name-of-shame to your prospective employer so they can ask for references, if you're trying to hide what it's tied to on the internet.
Pretty much the only way to work this is to....do what sensible people have been doing for the last 20-30 years: Use handles/avatars on the internet. Don't put you on the internet. It's not worth it.
For me, habit, and because I haven't found another news aggregation site that has a variety of articles as well suited to my tastes.
It'd be great if there was a good way to filter out the utter crap from the interesting stuff here. I've blocked anything posted by kwadson, which is an amazingly good start. However, it does mean that there are times when slashdot doesn't show any new content for a half day or so.
I like the variety here. What this place needs are some editors that do their fucking job, rather than just troll for eyeballs. The Firehose is filled with interesting stuff. An actual editor would use it for inspiration, then go and dig up the real info behind the stories. Instead, we get something that seems like the editors are always stoned, saying, "Dude, that's sooooo radical! Let's post that. Fucking SWEET man!" No editing of the submissions, no digging up some real meat behind something, no momentary pause to mentally consider, "Humm, is this really interesting, or just crap?"
How much of that has to do with not having a keyboard layout or the knowledge of how to make special characters to communicate with?
My Spanish isn't great, but even if it were, I'd have trouble making special characters on a website where I had to type it. Impossible? Not at all. But it's far easier to stick to the language that my keyboard comes in.
Because you're on probation or bail. If you're not on probation or bail, then the court can't make you do a damn thing. If you're on probation or bail, you've agreed to abide by the court's terms in exchange for your temporary freedom. Once that freedom becomes permanent, feel free to take the breath-checking interlock off.
See, I have a whole bunch of passwords. To remember them all, I have them written on an index card somewhere on my desk here. It's pretty damn secure, because the passwords are only labeled "Insecure Web 1", and "Secure Web 4" and stuff like that. On my computer (the password to it is not written down on the index card) I have an encrypted file (nor is that passwd written down) which contains stuff like "slashdot: Insecure Web 2". Put the two together, and you've got access to all my stuff. But the chances of someone being able to break into my house get the card, break into the computer, decrypt the file which matches passwords with websites, then figure out all my logins (which aren't written anywhere, but might be scattered across a few email accounts) is small. If someone cares that much, good for them. I'll buy them a beer for their troubles. Because that means I'm fucking important as all hell.
The thing is, you can't reliably use a contest as a substitute for hiring people. When you hire people, you interview, pick people with the correct skillset, and then tell them what to do. Contests are voluntary. There's no guarantee you'll get anyone finishing your project. There's even less of a guarantee that they'll finish it to-spec.
Using a contest in lieu of employees for anything is a gamble. Not enough prize money, and you won't get competent people working on it. You'll also have to spend employee time weeding through all the cruft submitted. Then there's the legal questions about the code submitted.
Unless you're a big-name company, with a solid reputation, I don't think that we really have to worry about exploitation via contests on any large scale. Even then, I don't know how many times a company could pull it off before everyone started calling out "bullshit". If you publicly pronounce that your in-house staff can't do a job too many times, everyone takes notice...
On top of that, a bunch of guys made this mod a stand-alone game, with a pretty bitching "subscription" model. Check out League of Legends. It's the same old DoTA, new characters, graphics, and items, because they couldn't mooch off any of the original artwork, free to download and play. The profit part? The heroes rotate through a lineup of like 10% of the heroes every week. If you want access to your favorite one all the time, you need to unlock it with money or in-game earned points. (Mostly money, at this point I think.) There are skins to buy, and a "rune" system that adds a few pct to various character attributes. While you can get all the runes with in-game earned points, it's far more efficient to purchase them. For the hardcore gamers, that's the way to go.
Having played a lot of DoTA, I have to say, LoL is vastly superior. You can shop while dead, the menu and game search blows the old DoTA one out of the water, and with levels and ranking, you actually get semi-evenly matched games a good percentage of the time. It's a very focused, polished game. I'm not sure that Valve can do any better. It will be interesting to see, however. Although I doubt they can beat the price of LoL.
The solution to this is to write a quick script (come on, SOMEONE in IT has to be able to whip up something in VB) to just add a "+1" to an existing stock email and bump it to the top of the inbox. You don't need to see all 200 form emails - just one showing that 200 people from this group all sent it. Hell, even a god damned folder and a filter rule would suffice.
They are so technically illiterate they can't handle some sort of automated email sorting? God...I hate politicians...
In your attempt to take a snipe at me, you nicely failed to read the GP and parent. He was talking about Circulating seawater through pipes for cooling. That, as mlts pointed out, has a number of major issues. Thanks for the awesome job summarizing them. My point was that you don't need to circulate the water - it is all around you. All you need is a big hunk of metal in contact with the water (the hull, as I pointed out) and you'll be good to go.
If you absolutely needed an external heatsink, and it got all fouled up, you'd just go down there with a steam hose and blast all the critters off. That's how ships are kept free from them. That and toxic paint. The coolant on the other side of the heat sink (hull, in the best case) could be whatever you wanted it to be. (Hint: Not seawater!) If you're going to accuse me of having a chip on my shoulder, you might want to be sure you're reading and understanding first.
The GP doesn't know what he's talking about. There is no need to circulate - the entire hull is a damned heat sink, with the capacity of whatever bay or ocean the ship is anchored in. You just run your piping in contact with the hull, and you're set. At the absolute worst, you just cut a hole in the hull and install a bigass heatsink, sticking out into the water. Not aerodynamic, but if you're attached to fiber and the grid, you're not moving anyway.