One thing to keep in mind is that many patents are self-defense patents. Often, you patent something to prevent others from patenting it and then charging you and the rest of the world money.
So it's probably a self-defense patent. So what?
The very fact that self-defense patents are obtained and used (despite their cost) shows that the patent system has broken down.
And if the big guys have a portfolio of self-defense patents, where does that leave the little guys who can't afford them? At the mercy of every peredatory lawyer in the employ of a big guy whose product is threatened by competition from the little guy's invention.
Maybe the current administration of the company really intends to use the portfolio defensively. But gore their successors' ox and those "defensive" patent portfolios can become offensive in very short order.
Maybe the EFF needs to start collecting patents and giving free liscense to them to prevent this. Maybe have a patent fund that patent authors can donate their patents to under the condition that they are liscensed freely.
Or perhaps used against anyone who attempts to enforce bogus patents? Or who goes after a little guy at all?
Now there's an idea! A common-defense patent pool for the little guys! B-)
(It could even be self-funding, as part of the settlement when they bring their guns to bear.)
There are definitely no alternative [Apple]OS's, but then again, its also unique architecture...
One reason there's a dearth of alternative software for Apple is that some years ago they launched the "look and feel" suit, trying to stretch copyright to cover their user interface by equating it to a "performance", like a play.
This threatened software developers in general, and mightily tweaked off some of the people behind GNU. (I recall Gilmore passing out protest buttons with the apple as the home of an ugly toothed worm. Legend: "Keep your lawyers off my computer!")
So the Gnuthians dropped support for Apple. For a long time, even GCC releases for apple were done by independents, and came out (if at all) months after the release for other platforms. It was even worse for GNU make. And a lot of independent software developers bit the bullet and hacked on the horribly-asymmetric Wintel architecture rather than the Motorola 68xxx-based Apples.
I think you are working at too high a level, reverse engineer the protocol, why? If you dont like them intruding on your privacy, you could just Smurf the server, all you need is the IP addy.
First: I don't intend to do this. I was just wondering whether/how long until someone did.
Second: Smurfing the server just stops it from collecting new information. Handing it bogus data corrupts what has already been collected.
The GPL keeps people from using GNU code and tools in the core of commercial products that they want to keep proprietary.
There are some exceptions - such as the library license. But these have flaws.
The library license lets you distribute objects that only uses the library routines by linking to them. But fix a bug in one of the library routines and your code catches the GNU Flu.
And then there's Bison - the GNU replacement for YACC. Bison emits a parser consisting of a table interpreter and a table it generates from the grammar. Last time I looked the table interpreter was under the full copyleft, NOT the library version, and it becomes the core code of your compiler, command language interpreter, or what-have-you.
Net result is that it's hazardous to use certain GNU tools for some steps of the development of a proprietary software product. This reduces the number of people using the tools.
Worse, it reduces the number of people who might otherwise be fixing up bugs in the tools, especially the compiler and the library.
One slogan I heard from a developer of proprietary software, on why he didn't use GNU:
Most of the current votes are counted by computer. By a private organization. With closed-source software. And if you ask for a recount the same people shove the same data through the same computers.
How do you know it hasn't been hacked already?
Think about how many people YOU know voted for the winner of the last election - or any election since about 1968.
Think about the political machines of distant history. Then think about the political machines of today.
Remember how Kennedy beat Nixon by less than one vote per precinct in (Richard Daily the First's) Chicago?
Remember how Willie Brown in San Francisco got his stadium ballot measure approved in a stunning upset turnaround when the last precincts were counted? (Remember him sticking out his tongue at the camera as he celebrated?)
Doing it on the internet doesn't stop machine politics. It just lets everybody play with the machinery.
I DO care whether they care enough about the issue to fight if they don't get their way.
If they're willing to fight, I want them to have a say in which way it goes - and to see if there are so many OTHER people who care enough to fight and want it to go the other way that they'd lose.
Then they won't fight - win or lose. The winners get their way without fighting. The losers aren't tempted to fight. And I don't have to fight OR dodge their bullets.
1) Mix a bunch of hydrogen and carbon with traces of other elements. Heat and squeeze for a few million years. Let H2 escape your squeezer more easily than other stuff.
2) Scatter a bunch of carbon, hydrogen, and traces of other elements in interstellar clouds and hard vacuum. Irradiate for a few million years, while letting them be pushed together and ionized by radiation pressure, mutual gravitation, and subtle orbital effects. Let hydrogen be blown away from the mass more easily than other elements and non-trivial molecules (due to relative lightness and selective scattering of hydrogen-line light).
There's a dirty little secret to republics: Their stability comes from the outcome of the election being a close model of the outcome of a civil war.
If the election models the civil war closely enough, power blocks who lose an election by a large margin will not try to reverse it through force of arms, because they know they won't win. And they won't try to reverse a close one because they know that will bring out a lot of fence-sitters and add them to the other side - so they'll probably still lose, and even if they win the war will be close, and thus long, bloody, and probably more costly than losing on the original issue.
This works only as long as the elections are perceived to be reasonably honest and the electorate to be a reasonably close approximation to the recruitable civil warriors. And that's how it was in this country for a long time.
The registration process was about as hard as getting to a recruiter or an organizing cabal. The franchise started out being held only by landowners - i.e. the people who had fought the Revolution - and was progressively extended to various groups after they had shown themselves capable of organizing mass violence.
Non-landowning white males got it early - after the Whiskey and Shay's rebellions. Women got it after they took axes to bars in the Temperance movement. The blacks had it handed to them as part of the Civil War and had it pulled back by corruption - then got it for real significantly after the freedom rides (which didn't work but provided a nice face-saving) but immediately after they burned the cities in '68. The 18-20 year olds got it right after the Vietnam Un-War protest marches graduated to riots, bombed buildings, and the National Guard firing into student crowds (with the implication that the shooting wouldn't be one-sided if this continued).
Getting down to the polls was about as hard as getting to a militia's muster. So even though voters were members of groups capable of fighting a war, they often wouldn't vote if they didn't have strong feelings on at least one candidate or issue in the election.
But lately we've got a few problems with the model:
Thanks to motor-votor, anybody can fill out a postcard and become registered - without producing I.D. - as many times as he thinks he can get away with. In some states, anyone can get mail-in absentee ballots, with no excuse beyond "I want to", and never attend a physical poll. So it's a lot easier to vote than to fight.
Checking I.D. at polls has been inhibited by various court rulings. So fraud abounds at the polls. And the motor-voter and absentee ballots make it easy for any power group to create as many bogus voters as they dare, and for whom they can come up with mailing addresses. (A single address in Berkeley CA was recently found to have several thousand absentee voters "living" there.)
Since 1968 progressively larger sections of the population are being disarmed by "gun control" legislation. The amount of this disarmament is wildly different among different ideological, cultural, and ethnic groups - and thus among different power blocks. (Fortunately for stability, the cultural groups remaining armed - so far - are also some of the strongest supporters of paying attention to elections.)
And the count itself is in doubt. For decades much of the tally have been counted by private contractors using proprietary software, with procedures and source code not open to public scrutiny, reading electronic ballots whose raw data is not available to those who would like to check the results.
So we're already in trouble on the stability front, due to the failure of the elections-as-model in fact. The failure in-perception is not as far advanced, which may have been why conflicts have been averted up to this point.
Internet voting could change that in two ways, both destabilizing. It could further weaken the correlation between voting and willingness to fight, by making voting so much easer. And it could break the perception of the elections as an accurate model, by raising the public perception of opportunity for electronic fraud. This is a hazard regardless of whether it actually increases or decreases the actual amount of fraud.
The only way I see internet voting as a positive force is if it results in an improvement in the actual accuracy of the electronic count, by bringing scrutiny to and improvements in the process and reducing fraud that might be occurring in the current system. This could result in fewer groups of potentially powerful citizens having their oxen gored by government, and thus decrease both the motivation for instability and actual responsiveness of government to its citizens' wishes.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure they can [start acting on internet time]. The whole government is setup to be slow from the start. It's almost intentional. The whole system of checks and balances is not there just to keep it fair, it's there to prevent government from doing things. Any things. I simply don't think the government can cope with any speedy processes.
It's not just almost intentional - it's intentional. The government is supposed to be slow, for a couple reasone: To give individuals time to work out their own problems and only act when that isn't effective, and to keep a tyrant from warping it into a monster before the citizens can react.
It was a good idea then, and an even better idea now - when information technology can give the government tools to accomplish oppressive survailence and interventions that were impractical before, due to excessive manpower and paper-shuffling requirements or the gross nature of the weapons of the time.
Perhaps this brace of murders wasn't because (or just because) the victims sent spam. Nevertheless, I have been expecting spam-motivated assaults or murders for some time now.
The government has allowed a massive annoyance and misappropriation of resources to continue for quite a long time now, and is not responsive to citizens' calls for regulation barring the practice (on the model of the earlier ban on junk faxes).
The spammers themselves are (understandably) unwilling to stop a practice they believe profitable, merely because people are annoyed.
The commercial network services have proven ineffective at stopping the practice, as spammers can create new accounts faster than the network operators can delete old ones, and the network operators themselves are not held liable for their customers behavior, and thus have no incentive to prescreen customers (and a disincentive, as it would reduce their customer base).
Technical solutions have not been effective - merely leading to an arms-race, which the spammers so far are winning.
This leaves a lot of very annoyed people with no effective way to abate the nuisance - except possibly direct action.
Now add to this the recognition that somewhere between one-in-50 and one-in-200 of the population in general are psycopaths. (Think of them as people with a brain damage that leaves them with no conscience - no sympathy for the suffering of others.) And that this group has the usual mix of smart and dumb, and of foreseeing and thinkers-for-today.
It's only a matter of time before one or more of them gets so mad as to try a little direct action. And given the above, such people might easily believe that the only direct action likely to eliminate the nuisance is to intimidate, damage, or eliminate the perpetrator of it.
This is, in my opinion, the inevitable result of the government's failure to live up to its claims of protection.
Please note that I'm not advocating either government action or literal attacks on spammers. I'm simply pointing out that I expect the latter in the absense of the former.
Checking the data on an open forum may not become universal, or even common, due to the value of the exclusive report or scoop.
Exposing the story to public criticism also exposes it to other reporters. The less scrupulous may then take advantage of it, quickly develop a source, and do their own story without either checking it or crediting the consientious reporter who really broke the story.
Janes has an advantage of being nearly a monopoly on their particular field of reportage. So they have less to risk.
t isn't anything new, although it doesn't surprise me that Katz thinks he discovered it. Most mainstream media types make that mistake about any story they write.
But why shouldn't Katz, or any other "media type", think they discovered something. They did. The mistake is assuming they discovered it FIRST.
And given the rush to publish, once they find out something new they often don't have time to discover the alternate literature where the "new" thing is really old news.
Further, if it's something that isn't common knowlege in their particular literature, importing it is still a useful and valuable act of reportage.
Once you've got the pophyrins handing the electrons off to the buckyballs, why not connect the buckyballs to a chemical "wire" which is in turn connected to a metallic wire? Then you run the electrons through an external circuit (which they power), and back to the pophyrins.
The cell voltage (under light load) will be the voltage difference up which the pophyrins can push the electron (probably about the electron-volt equivalent of the associated photon), less any potential-differences the electron must travel getting from the buckys to the negative wire and from the positive wire back to the pophyrins.
If your MAC address was used as your IP address, it would be a routing nightmare.
Not really. The routers will no doubt just be ignoring the lower bytes (like current netmasks) - and by the time it gets to your gateway they'll still be ignoring the part with the "MAC address".
In fact, it should be trivial to hack a linux IPv6 stack so every TCP connection gets a unique bogus MAC address. Then the snoopers can just whistle for their info, while the IPv6 cookie-replacers can watch their databases expand without limit. B-)
With significantly more work you could stretch the API to let the client program specify the fake MAC address it wants to present, so your browser could maintain an identity to use when you REALLY wanted to accept an un-cookie.
I'll take plastic - preferably a strong, tough plastic with lots of UV inhibitors, of course.
I ALWAYS want a non-conductive handle on any tool I might use on electronic or electrical equipment - just in case I screw up and work it "Hot" by accident. I've gotten a few "pokes" in my time, and I'd prefer not to get the permanent one.
Government employees developed those methods years before the commercial 'creators'. Prior Art.
Even if that were true, you'd have to prove it in court to break the patent. What evidence do you have?
Also: I understand there's some precident for the time the government has used a secret invention not counting against the time the public-and-patented version is protected. (Could be wrong - I'm not a patent attorney.)
Once upon a time the ATMs were standalone. They trusted the card. That didn't work for long: Clone a card, get another maximum daily withdrawal, and overdraw the account as much as you like (rather than just a couple hundred bux).
So soon they were networked, and checked the real records of the account. Big improvement.
But it costs a lot to keep the banks' machines up 24x7. So they went to standalone mode on weekend nights. And again they trusted the card, and again they were vulnerable.
I hear that one major bank in Detroit didn't bother with the extra shift on Sunday night when they were only losing $10K/weekend. When it got up to $100k, they paid for the extra shift, and the window of opportunity became very narrow and sporadic. (And nowadays the hosts are up so much of the time that they can program the ATMs to go out-of-service if they can't reach the host. So for these machines the window is zero.)
The same will likely happen with the blackmailers. If there are ever so many that it's cheaper for the banks to fight them than to pay them off they'll fight 'em. Menawhile, they can gain breathing room to work on their security by keeping the current few at bay with payoffs. And they can try to trace the payoffs and bust the blackmailer-of-opportunity now and then.
It looks like they're also starting on a process of educating the reader on the difference - working up to a future where they can just say "cracker" and everybody will understand what they mean, and where everybody ELSE will use it right, too.
Just as people don't call rustlers "cowboys" or (sea) pirates "sailors", so they won't call crackers "hackers" (though the former is almost an included set of the latter in all three cases).
Slashdot Mirror
So it's probably a self-defense patent. So what?
The very fact that self-defense patents are obtained and used (despite their cost) shows that the patent system has broken down.
And if the big guys have a portfolio of self-defense patents, where does that leave the little guys who can't afford them? At the mercy of every peredatory lawyer in the employ of a big guy whose product is threatened by competition from the little guy's invention.
Maybe the current administration of the company really intends to use the portfolio defensively. But gore their successors' ox and those "defensive" patent portfolios can become offensive in very short order.
Maybe the EFF needs to start collecting patents and giving free liscense to them to prevent this. Maybe have a patent fund that patent authors can donate their patents to under the condition that they are liscensed freely.
Or perhaps used against anyone who attempts to enforce bogus patents? Or who goes after a little guy at all?
Now there's an idea! A common-defense patent pool for the little guys! B-)
(It could even be self-funding, as part of the settlement when they bring their guns to bear.)
its also unique architecture...
One reason there's a dearth of alternative software for Apple is that some years ago they launched the "look and feel" suit, trying to stretch copyright to cover their user interface by equating it to a "performance", like a play.
This threatened software developers in general, and mightily tweaked off some of the people behind GNU. (I recall Gilmore passing out protest buttons with the apple as the home of an ugly toothed worm. Legend: "Keep your lawyers off my computer!")
So the Gnuthians dropped support for Apple. For a long time, even GCC releases for apple were done by independents, and came out (if at all) months after the release for other platforms. It was even worse for GNU make. And a lot of independent software developers bit the bullet and hacked on the horribly-asymmetric Wintel architecture rather than the Motorola 68xxx-based Apples.
intruding on your privacy, you could just Smurf the server, all you need is the IP addy.
First: I don't intend to do this. I was just wondering whether/how long until someone did.
Second: Smurfing the server just stops it from collecting new information. Handing it bogus data corrupts what has already been collected.
I wonder if anybody will reverse engineer enough of the protocol to flood the servers with bogus tracking data?
B-)
There are some exceptions - such as the library license. But these have flaws.
The library license lets you distribute objects that only uses the library routines by linking to them. But fix a bug in one of the library routines and your code catches the GNU Flu.
And then there's Bison - the GNU replacement for YACC. Bison emits a parser consisting of a table interpreter and a table it generates from the grammar. Last time I looked the table interpreter was under the full copyleft, NOT the library version, and it becomes the core code of your compiler, command language interpreter, or what-have-you.
Net result is that it's hazardous to use certain GNU tools for some steps of the development of a proprietary software product. This reduces the number of people using the tools.
Worse, it reduces the number of people who might otherwise be fixing up bugs in the tools, especially the compiler and the library.
One slogan I heard from a developer of proprietary software, on why he didn't use GNU:
Copyleft: More expensive than money!
How do you know it hasn't been hacked already?
Think about how many people YOU know voted for the winner of the last election - or any election since about 1968.
Think about the political machines of distant history. Then think about the political machines of today.
Remember how Kennedy beat Nixon by less than one vote per precinct in (Richard Daily the First's) Chicago?
Remember how Willie Brown in San Francisco got his stadium ballot measure approved in a stunning upset turnaround when the last precincts were counted? (Remember him sticking out his tongue at the camera as he celebrated?)
Doing it on the internet doesn't stop machine politics. It just lets everybody play with the machinery.
I DO care whether they care enough about the issue to fight if they don't get their way.
If they're willing to fight, I want them to have a say in which way it goes - and to see if there are so many OTHER people who care enough to fight and want it to go the other way that they'd lose.
Then they won't fight - win or lose. The winners get their way without fighting. The losers aren't tempted to fight. And I don't have to fight OR dodge their bullets.
only be used by one organization.
How do you propose to defend against corruption in that organization?
Vote counting must not just be honest. It must be seen to be honest.
1) Mix a bunch of hydrogen and carbon with traces of other elements. Heat and squeeze for a few million years. Let H2 escape your squeezer more easily than other stuff.
2) Scatter a bunch of carbon, hydrogen, and traces of other elements in interstellar clouds and hard vacuum. Irradiate for a few million years, while letting them be pushed together and ionized by radiation pressure, mutual gravitation, and subtle orbital effects. Let hydrogen be blown away from the mass more easily than other elements and non-trivial molecules (due to relative lightness and selective scattering of hydrogen-line light).
If the election models the civil war closely enough, power blocks who lose an election by a large margin will not try to reverse it through force of arms, because they know they won't win. And they won't try to reverse a close one because they know that will bring out a lot of fence-sitters and add them to the other side - so they'll probably still lose, and even if they win the war will be close, and thus long, bloody, and probably more costly than losing on the original issue.
This works only as long as the elections are perceived to be reasonably honest and the electorate to be a reasonably close approximation to the recruitable civil warriors. And that's how it was in this country for a long time.
The registration process was about as hard as getting to a recruiter or an organizing cabal. The franchise started out being held only by landowners - i.e. the people who had fought the Revolution - and was progressively extended to various groups after they had shown themselves capable of organizing mass violence.
Non-landowning white males got it early - after the Whiskey and Shay's rebellions. Women got it after they took axes to bars in the Temperance movement. The blacks had it handed to them as part of the Civil War and had it pulled back by corruption - then got it for real significantly after the freedom rides (which didn't work but provided a nice face-saving) but immediately after they burned the cities in '68. The 18-20 year olds got it right after the Vietnam Un-War protest marches graduated to riots, bombed buildings, and the National Guard firing into student crowds (with the implication that the shooting wouldn't be one-sided if this continued).
Getting down to the polls was about as hard as getting to a militia's muster. So even though voters were members of groups capable of fighting a war, they often wouldn't vote if they didn't have strong feelings on at least one candidate or issue in the election.
But lately we've got a few problems with the model:
Thanks to motor-votor, anybody can fill out a postcard and become registered - without producing I.D. - as many times as he thinks he can get away with. In some states, anyone can get mail-in absentee ballots, with no excuse beyond "I want to", and never attend a physical poll. So it's a lot easier to vote than to fight.
Checking I.D. at polls has been inhibited by various court rulings. So fraud abounds at the polls. And the motor-voter and absentee ballots make it easy for any power group to create as many bogus voters as they dare, and for whom they can come up with mailing addresses. (A single address in Berkeley CA was recently found to have several thousand absentee voters "living" there.)
Since 1968 progressively larger sections of the population are being disarmed by "gun control" legislation. The amount of this disarmament is wildly different among different ideological, cultural, and ethnic groups - and thus among different power blocks. (Fortunately for stability, the cultural groups remaining armed - so far - are also some of the strongest supporters of paying attention to elections.)
And the count itself is in doubt. For decades much of the tally have been counted by private contractors using proprietary software, with procedures and source code not open to public scrutiny, reading electronic ballots whose raw data is not available to those who would like to check the results.
So we're already in trouble on the stability front, due to the failure of the elections-as-model in fact. The failure in-perception is not as far advanced, which may have been why conflicts have been averted up to this point.
Internet voting could change that in two ways, both destabilizing. It could further weaken the correlation between voting and willingness to fight, by making voting so much easer. And it could break the perception of the elections as an accurate model, by raising the public perception of opportunity for electronic fraud. This is a hazard regardless of whether it actually increases or decreases the actual amount of fraud.
The only way I see internet voting as a positive force is if it results in an improvement in the actual accuracy of the electronic count, by bringing scrutiny to and improvements in
the process and reducing fraud that might be occurring in the current system. This could result in fewer groups of potentially powerful citizens having their oxen gored by government, and thus decrease both the motivation for instability and actual responsiveness of government to its citizens' wishes.
intentional. The whole system of checks and balances is not there just to keep it fair, it's there to prevent
government from doing things. Any things. I simply don't think the government can cope with any speedy
processes.
It's not just almost intentional - it's intentional. The government is supposed to be slow, for a couple reasone: To give individuals time to work out their own problems and only act when that isn't effective, and to keep a tyrant from warping it into a monster before the citizens can react.
It was a good idea then, and an even better idea now - when information technology can give the government tools to accomplish oppressive survailence and interventions that were impractical before, due to excessive manpower and paper-shuffling requirements or the gross nature of the weapons of the time.
The government has allowed a massive annoyance and misappropriation of resources to continue for quite a long time now, and is not responsive to citizens' calls for regulation barring the practice (on the model of the earlier ban on junk faxes).
The spammers themselves are (understandably) unwilling to stop a practice they believe profitable, merely because people are annoyed.
The commercial network services have proven ineffective at stopping the practice, as spammers can create new accounts faster than the network operators can delete old ones, and the network operators themselves are not held liable for their customers behavior, and thus have no incentive to prescreen customers (and a disincentive, as it would reduce their customer base).
Technical solutions have not been effective - merely leading to an arms-race, which the spammers so far are winning.
This leaves a lot of very annoyed people with no effective way to abate the nuisance - except possibly direct action.
Now add to this the recognition that somewhere between one-in-50 and one-in-200 of the population in general are psycopaths. (Think of them as people with a brain damage that leaves them with no conscience - no sympathy for the suffering of others.) And that this group has the usual mix of smart and dumb, and of foreseeing and thinkers-for-today.
It's only a matter of time before one or more of them gets so mad as to try a little direct action. And given the above, such people might easily believe that the only direct action likely to eliminate the nuisance is to intimidate, damage, or eliminate the perpetrator of it.
This is, in my opinion, the inevitable result of the government's failure to live up to its claims of protection.
Please note that I'm not advocating either government action or literal attacks on spammers. I'm simply pointing out that I expect the latter in the absense of the former.
Exposing the story to public criticism also exposes it to other reporters. The less scrupulous may then take advantage of it, quickly develop a source, and do their own story without either checking it or crediting the consientious reporter who really broke the story.
Janes has an advantage of being nearly a monopoly on their particular field of reportage. So they have less to risk.
media types make that mistake about any story they write.
But why shouldn't Katz, or any other "media type", think they discovered something. They did. The mistake is assuming they discovered it FIRST.
And given the rush to publish, once they find out something new they often don't have time to discover the alternate literature where the "new" thing is really old news.
Further, if it's something that isn't common knowlege in their particular literature, importing it is still a useful and valuable act of reportage.
(Oops. Made a consistent typo in the above post.)
Once you've got the pophyrins handing the electrons off to the buckyballs, why not connect the buckyballs to a chemical "wire" which is in turn connected to a metallic wire? Then you run the electrons through an external circuit (which they power), and back to the pophyrins.
The cell voltage (under light load) will be the voltage difference up which the pophyrins can push the electron (probably about the electron-volt equivalent of the associated photon), less any potential-differences the electron must travel getting from the buckys to the negative wire and from the positive wire back to the pophyrins.
Not really. The routers will no doubt just be ignoring the lower bytes (like current netmasks) - and by the time it gets to your gateway they'll still be ignoring the part with the "MAC address".
In fact, it should be trivial to hack a linux IPv6 stack so every TCP connection gets a unique bogus MAC address. Then the snoopers can just whistle for their info, while the IPv6 cookie-replacers can watch their databases expand without limit. B-)
With significantly more work you could stretch the API to let the client program specify the fake MAC address it wants to present, so your browser could maintain an identity to use when you REALLY wanted to accept an un-cookie.
(The original version predates unix. Substitute "customer engineer" for "hardware engineer" and "administrator" for "root".)
I'll take plastic - preferably a strong, tough plastic with lots of UV inhibitors, of course.
I ALWAYS want a non-conductive handle on any tool I might use on electronic or electrical equipment - just in case I screw up and work it "Hot" by accident. I've gotten a few "pokes" in my time, and I'd prefer not to get the permanent one.
Belt and suspenders...
these around.
Perhaps they have a few million around but don't know it.
Perhaps I do, too. (I WONDERED why things were getting so dusty...)
Why is that? They don't seem to be asking for money - just names and email addresses. If I register, will I get spammed? Will I get billed later?
Banner ads are bad enough - more spam is a nightmare.
Or just cover them up or ignore them.
Then you have to remap all the
keys in your operating system - this would involve a different process depending on what operating system
you use.
So who's up for writing a hack for the linux keyboard driver to remap the keys for DVORAK under stty control? (Assuming it isn't in there already.)
You can do it in X but that doesn't help when you don't have X up.
Even if that were true, you'd have to prove it in court to break the patent. What evidence do you have?
Also: I understand there's some precident for the time the government has used a secret invention not counting against the time the public-and-patented version is protected. (Could be wrong - I'm not a patent attorney.)
So soon they were networked, and checked the real records of the account. Big improvement.
But it costs a lot to keep the banks' machines up 24x7. So they went to standalone mode on weekend nights. And again they trusted the card, and again they were vulnerable.
I hear that one major bank in Detroit didn't bother with the extra shift on Sunday night when they were only losing $10K/weekend. When it got up to $100k, they paid for the extra shift, and the window of opportunity became very narrow and sporadic. (And nowadays the hosts are up so much of the time that they can program the ATMs to go out-of-service if they can't reach the host. So for these machines the window is zero.)
The same will likely happen with the blackmailers. If there are ever so many that it's cheaper for the banks to fight them than to pay them off they'll fight 'em. Menawhile, they can gain breathing room to work on their security by keeping the current few at bay with payoffs. And they can try to trace the payoffs and bust the blackmailer-of-opportunity now and then.
Just as people don't call rustlers "cowboys" or (sea) pirates "sailors", so they won't call crackers "hackers" (though the former is almost an included set of the latter in all three cases).
Good for you, USA Today!