Running an open DNS resolver isn't itself always a problem, but it looks like people are enabling neither source address verification nor rate limiting.
One has to wonder if this is caused by negligence,...
Also, one has to wonder if it's negligence by the person installing the resolver, or by the person distributing the resolver.
What are the default values for source address verification and rate limiting? If having them both disabled is a problem, at least ONE of them should be on by default, requiring it to be explicitly DISabled by the user, and the config file should have a warning about WHY it's on/even there.
If the default configuration is vulnerable you can't expect a whole user population to ALL figure out ALL the fine details and tweak the configuration into safety the FIRST TIME and EVERY TIME. It should be safe (if crippled) out of the box and a warning obvious during the process of changing it to be less safe.
Colony collapse has ALREADY been explained by pesticides, specifically a pesticide made by Bayer AG.
Really? That's interesting.
I was under the impression that it was most likely caused by the relaxation of import restrictions on bees into the US from areas which had significant bee diseases and parasites which were not (yet) present in the US. From what I hear these occurred shortly (like a couple years) before the "collapse" phenomenon was noticed.
I'll have to see if I can find the claims and research reports you refer to. (Citations from you would be nice.)
He said it's a secondary bank account solely for sending money to PayPal, so he should be fine. Still, it's a massive overkill.
It's not overkill. It's just an especially thick firewall. It's close to the "air gap" level of unplugging the computer from all communication with the outside world (though it does have the connections of common ownership of the accounts and the record of transfers.)
Maxim 37: There is no 'overkill.' There is only 'open fire' and 'I need to reload".
I think this is less about monetizing purchasing data (though there is certainly an element of that) and more about scaling their fee structure to known loss paterns.
If that were the case, they could scale the PayPal fee structure according to the aggregate PayPall loss rate.
Nope. Looks to me like it's about profit from monitizing the customer data and trying to replace that revenue stream because they were unable to get the data from the PayPall transactions.
The excuse trotted out will be one of... Drug dealers, Terrorists, Or tax evasion. Maybe all three.
Actually, those will be the real reasons, too. What, you think the feds care what you're spending your money on? You're delusional.
Actually, they'd love to know about a lot of your spending. For instance:
- If you buy a gun: Then they'll know who to search if/when they decide to confiscate them.
- If you buy gold, silver, or other long-term store-of-value commodities: If/when the dollar weakens they can make those illegal to possess and confiscate them to try proping pu the failing dollar and heading off a competing currency, forcing people to stick with the printing-press fiat money. (They already did that with gold during the Great Depression.)
- If you buy a bunch of long-shelf-life food or other "survivalist" supplies. It's stuff to raid in a crisis and an indicator of who the non-sheep are.
- If you buy political literature of a non-mainstream nature. I could go on for pages.
... they'll repopulate, and bury the planet in their droppings...
That's not really a joke.
As I understand it the Passenger Pigeon once cruised the flyways along the eastern part of the US in numbers so great that, during annual migrations, they darkened the sky for days and whitewashed the ground beneath. Their extinction was met more with relief than unhappiness.
That being said, I've always thought reviving this bird would be a good idea. It is reputed to be quite tasty, raising it in captivity should be a snap, and if it does get loose and establish a pest-level wild population, it's ALREADY been wiped out once by human action so we have a proof-of-concept.
Others on my list for revival:
- Quagga. (Zebras are essentially striped donkeys that are essentially impossible to domesticate. The Quagga is a relative that is EASY to domesticate - and in fact was, until it went extinct because other equines became more popular.)
Dodo: A flightless bird that went extinct very recently because it had evolved on an island, had no fear of people, and had it's "lek" (breeding ground) located right where the military built an airbase during a World War. Big as a domestic turkey but allegedly much more tasty,not prone to panic so easy to handle.
Mammoth: Those went extinct a while back (some populations apparently by human action), but some in Siberia are frozen in permafrost and suitable for extraction of well-preserved DNA. Apparently these were tasty enough that both stone-age Europeans and pre-Columbian American Indians hunted them - on an industrial scale in the case of the Indians.
Even that was not all THAT surprising. Most cancers tend to be weak - because the continuous reproduction leads to them skipping things they would normally do in idle time between reproductions and also causes them to use up resources on reproduction as fast as they can absorb them.
Many cancer therapies are built around this, ALMOST killing off the normal cells in the hope of JUST BARELY killing off the weaker cancer cells. (An exception to the above is Melanoma, which gets extra energy as a side-effect of synthesizing melanin, making it more robust than normal tissue.)
HeLa is very robust and invasive - to the point of being able to survive outside the original host body and contaminate cell cultures. (In fact a now-discarded theory of cancer cell progression, with all types of cancer gradually mutating and converging on a set of common characteristics, turned out to be based on an illusion caused by the robust HeLa cancer cells scattered about in research laboratories eventually contaminating cultures of other cancer cell lines and taking them over.)
Cells with more copies of chromosomes tend to be more robust. So it's not too surprising that this line has extra copies of most chromosomes.
And it just happens the subject-line mnemonic is how many digits I've memorized: 3.1415926.
My favorite for inputting an approximate pi into a calculator is the 11 33 55 hack: 355/113 is close enough to pi for most practical purposes: It's high by about one part in ten million. You can check against the above mnemonic: The approximation fails on the eighth digit, producing 9, rather than 6.
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.
This is often misread as putting treaties on a par with constitutional amendments and making them trump federal law.
In fact the clause puts treaties on a par with federal law, below the constitution, and makes the whole set of three (constitution, law, treaties) trump state law where they conflict with it.
There is, however, one major advantage of being a well off white male: cops are afraid of you. This country still battles racism, and will continue to do so as long as 1) the police and court systems treat the poor, blacks, and Hispanics unequally...
Note, by the way, that one of the ways they are treated unequally is that a white person who is actually tried and convicted of murder is substantially more likely to receive the death penalty than those of other ethnicities with the circumstances of the crime otherwise similar. This is true even (especially) if the judge and jury are all or predominantly white. (Perhaps white males are held - including especially by other white males, to a higher standard when it comes to murder, or perhaps only the real scumbags get convicted.)
The disproportionately high death penalty rate, per population, for people of other ethnicities, is the result of dominance of other stages of the process: Commission, successful investigation, accusation, arrest, plea bargaining, successful prosecution, etc.
(Note that I make no comment on how much of this may be the result of differential crime commission rates among people of different cultures and how much is the result of bias by the operators of the processes.)
Because science instruction belongs in school and religious instruction does not.
The issue isn't whether religious instruction belongs in school. It's whether religious indoctrination belongs in PUBLIC school, where public funds are spent on it and attendance is mandatory (enforced by truancy laws) unless a government-approved substitute schooling is provided.
This violates the First Amendment, both by spending government money promoting one religion over another (which includes promoting religion over atheism or vice versa) and by mandating exposure.
Unfortunately, those trying stretch this into keeping the inmates of public schools from voluntarily performing non-disruptive rituals of their religion, or even talking about it, are ignoring the second part of the Constitutional prescription:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
Apple just got a patent on allowing people to resell or loan digital "content" when it's hosted on a server and managed by client software? Is that really the meaning of the claims, not something narrower?
Hasn't the patent office YET stopped patenting business models consisting of "Doing an existing business model on the Internet using a database"?
Make giant paper mache/spit wads and launch them at the corporate building with a trebuchet. Figure out where the executive suite is and call that the bullseye.
Why bother making paper mache? That's a lot of work. What's wrong with just launching the phone books? Or a bale of them?
Europa is too far away. We should just send it on a crash course for mars. By the time it gets there we will have found a way to thicken up the atmosphere a bit so the water doesn't evaporate right away.
Do you plan to do the pushing?
No kidding on "by the time it gets there". It will take a LOT of pushing to get it up out of Jupiter's orbit and then downhill to an impact orbit with Mars.
After that Mars will be too hot for life for a long time.
Meanwhile, if there is life on Europa OR Mars, you've just created an extinction (event or two) of total-biosphere magnitude. Here's hoping nobody does that to Earth.
Also: Some of the early results hinting that megadoses of vitamin C were good for cancer patients general health turned out to be the result of the vitamin C causing the subjects to vomit up (and greatly reduce the absorbed amount of) the chemotherapy drugs they were also taking. This reduced the side-effects of the chemotherapy drugs, giving the appearance of a benefit.
I said, that 9% isn't a good number, but pretending like they were giving these shots out knowing that whom they would and would not work for is just plain wrong.
That may have been the situation several months back.
But about the start of January they HAD stats. At that time they did a big publicity blitz, claiming that:
- This year's flu had a particularly high mortality among seniors,
- But this year's vaccine was quite effective against it.
- In particular: It both substantially (though far from completely) reduced the incidence among seniors and reducing the severity among most of those it didn't fully protect.
I think the numbers they were claiming had the death rate among immunized seniors running well under a third that of the unimmunized.
I'm in California, where the flu was just starting to show up. On the basis of those claims of high mortality and high protection, and the fact that I hadn't yet gotten a shot, I went out and got one.
I don't see how those claims could be reconciled wtih the ACTUAL numbers showing 9% instead of mid-30s % for full protection and the high mortality among seniors being due to the inoculation being largely ineffective.
So I, and no doubt many others, balanced the risks of the shots against a risk of PREVENTABLE mortality. If the latter was deliberately overstated, we may have made bad decisions as a result.
Note that the risks of the shot, for seniors, includes identity theft: The shots are free for those on Medicare part A. But the medicare I.D. number is the social security number with a letter added at the end. If you get the "free" shot (say, at a pharmacy or doctor's office) the provider ends up with your name, address, and social security number on a single form. Presto: Another point-of-failure for identity security.
(Note that pharmacies DON'T get seniors' SS# for drugs: Those are under part D, handled by insurance companies which assign a non-SS# identifier, and only the insurance company's database has your medicare I.D. with the unencrypted SS# embedded in it.)
Lots of stuff is unconstitutional (whether by a state constitution or the US Constitution) and is still enforced; the 4th Amendment in particular has been null and void for a long time...
Much of the second as well. That's why you can't have machine guns, silencers, short shotguns, and a number of other guns or accessories in most states and to have them where the states don't ban them you must go through major federal hoops, (fingerprints, $200 tax per item, risk of federal prison {or a shoot the dog, stomp the cat, throw the pregnant wife against the wall and make her miscarry, raid} if the BATF {thinks} your paperwork is defective or you have something you didn't tell them about).
U.S. v. Miller (1939) said the fed could tax guns that AREN'T suitable for "militia" (military) use, in particular a short barreled ("sawed-off") shotgun (because Miller and his team weren't there to "bring to judicial notice" that they were also called "trench guns" and were an important weapon in WW I). The federal and state governments have taken that to mean they can tax any gun any amount, erect arbitrarily draconian red tape barriers, then bust anyone for screwing up the red tape or failing to pay the tax - "revenuer"/"untouchables"/Waco/Ruby Ridge style.
Saying "demand" when you have no power to enforce your demand just annoys them, making them less likely to respond well to what is actually a request.
It also reduces the number of signatures you'll get, due to people who think such language implies the speaker is impolite and/or a twit refusing to do something that makes them feel like an impolite twit themselves.
Asking nicely - with a large number of people asking - may convince the bureaucrats that there is enough popular support for the position that it might be worth changing their ruling (and/or foregoing the bribe in pursuit of a better target - like votes that enable future bribes).
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Who the [...] came up with that dumb word [kilomile]?
Probably a techie, used to using prefixes to indicate power of ten scaling factors when talking about large or small counts or measurements.
But it's a perfectly valid construction. Quantities measured in non-metric units can also be expressed in base 10.
Assuming you CAN count in base 10, of course. B-)
Also, one has to wonder if it's negligence by the person installing the resolver, or by the person distributing the resolver.
What are the default values for source address verification and rate limiting? If having them both disabled is a problem, at least ONE of them should be on by default, requiring it to be explicitly DISabled by the user, and the config file should have a warning about WHY it's on/even there.
If the default configuration is vulnerable you can't expect a whole user population to ALL figure out ALL the fine details and tweak the configuration into safety the FIRST TIME and EVERY TIME. It should be safe (if crippled) out of the box and a warning obvious during the process of changing it to be less safe.
Colony collapse has ALREADY been explained by pesticides, specifically a pesticide made by Bayer AG.
Really? That's interesting.
I was under the impression that it was most likely caused by the relaxation of import restrictions on bees into the US from areas which had significant bee diseases and parasites which were not (yet) present in the US. From what I hear these occurred shortly (like a couple years) before the "collapse" phenomenon was noticed.
I'll have to see if I can find the claims and research reports you refer to. (Citations from you would be nice.)
He said it's a secondary bank account solely for sending money to PayPal, so he should be fine. Still, it's a massive overkill.
It's not overkill. It's just an especially thick firewall. It's close to the "air gap" level of unplugging the computer from all communication with the outside world (though it does have the connections of common ownership of the accounts and the record of transfers.)
Maxim 37: There is no 'overkill.' There is only 'open fire' and 'I need to reload".
I think this is less about monetizing purchasing data (though there is certainly an element of that) and more about scaling their fee structure to known loss paterns.
If that were the case, they could scale the PayPal fee structure according to the aggregate PayPall loss rate.
Nope. Looks to me like it's about profit from monitizing the customer data and trying to replace that revenue stream because they were unable to get the data from the PayPall transactions.
Actually, they'd love to know about a lot of your spending. For instance:
- If you buy a gun: Then they'll know who to search if/when they decide to confiscate them.
- If you buy gold, silver, or other long-term store-of-value commodities: If/when the dollar weakens they can make those illegal to possess and confiscate them to try proping pu the failing dollar and heading off a competing currency, forcing people to stick with the printing-press fiat money. (They already did that with gold during the Great Depression.)
- If you buy a bunch of long-shelf-life food or other "survivalist" supplies. It's stuff to raid in a crisis and an indicator of who the non-sheep are.
- If you buy political literature of a non-mainstream nature.
I could go on for pages.
"Canadian" (as opposed to "Canada") Goose/Geese is a recognized regional variant of the name of the animal.
... they'll repopulate, and bury the planet in their droppings...
That's not really a joke.
As I understand it the Passenger Pigeon once cruised the flyways along the eastern part of the US in numbers so great that, during annual migrations, they darkened the sky for days and whitewashed the ground beneath. Their extinction was met more with relief than unhappiness.
That being said, I've always thought reviving this bird would be a good idea. It is reputed to be quite tasty, raising it in captivity should be a snap, and if it does get loose and establish a pest-level wild population, it's ALREADY been wiped out once by human action so we have a proof-of-concept.
Others on my list for revival:
- Quagga. (Zebras are essentially striped donkeys that are essentially impossible to domesticate. The Quagga is a relative that is EASY to domesticate - and in fact was, until it went extinct because other equines became more popular.)
Dodo: A flightless bird that went extinct very recently because it had evolved on an island, had no fear of people, and had it's "lek" (breeding ground) located right where the military built an airbase during a World War. Big as a domestic turkey but allegedly much more tasty,not prone to panic so easy to handle.
Mammoth: Those went extinct a while back (some populations apparently by human action), but some in Siberia are frozen in permafrost and suitable for extraction of well-preserved DNA. Apparently these were tasty enough that both stone-age Europeans and pre-Columbian American Indians hunted them - on an industrial scale in the case of the Indians.
this particular cancer's DNA was fouled up.
Even that was not all THAT surprising. Most cancers tend to be weak - because the continuous reproduction leads to them skipping things they would normally do in idle time between reproductions and also causes them to use up resources on reproduction as fast as they can absorb them.
Many cancer therapies are built around this, ALMOST killing off the normal cells in the hope of JUST BARELY killing off the weaker cancer cells. (An exception to the above is Melanoma, which gets extra energy as a side-effect of synthesizing melanin, making it more robust than normal tissue.)
HeLa is very robust and invasive - to the point of being able to survive outside the original host body and contaminate cell cultures. (In fact a now-discarded theory of cancer cell progression, with all types of cancer gradually mutating and converging on a set of common characteristics, turned out to be based on an illusion caused by the robust HeLa cancer cells scattered about in research laboratories eventually contaminating cultures of other cancer cell lines and taking them over.)
Cells with more copies of chromosomes tend to be more robust. So it's not too surprising that this line has extra copies of most chromosomes.
And it just happens the subject-line mnemonic is how many digits I've memorized: 3.1415926.
My favorite for inputting an approximate pi into a calculator is the 11 33 55 hack: 355/113 is close enough to pi for most practical purposes: It's high by about one part in ten million. You can check against the above mnemonic: The approximation fails on the eighth digit, producing 9, rather than 6.
Many people misunderstand the supremacy clause.
The clause reads:
This is often misread as putting treaties on a par with constitutional amendments and making them trump federal law.
In fact the clause puts treaties on a par with federal law, below the constitution, and makes the whole set of three (constitution, law, treaties) trump state law where they conflict with it.
I guess this explains the antics of some of the big-name chess masters.
There is, however, one major advantage of being a well off white male: cops are afraid of you. This country still battles racism, and will continue to do so as long as 1) the police and court systems treat the poor, blacks, and Hispanics unequally ...
Note, by the way, that one of the ways they are treated unequally is that a white person who is actually tried and convicted of murder is substantially more likely to receive the death penalty than those of other ethnicities with the circumstances of the crime otherwise similar. This is true even (especially) if the judge and jury are all or predominantly white. (Perhaps white males are held - including especially by other white males, to a higher standard when it comes to murder, or perhaps only the real scumbags get convicted.)
The disproportionately high death penalty rate, per population, for people of other ethnicities, is the result of dominance of other stages of the process: Commission, successful investigation, accusation, arrest, plea bargaining, successful prosecution, etc.
(Note that I make no comment on how much of this may be the result of differential crime commission rates among people of different cultures and how much is the result of bias by the operators of the processes.)
Because science instruction belongs in school and religious instruction does not.
The issue isn't whether religious instruction belongs in school. It's whether religious indoctrination belongs in PUBLIC school, where public funds are spent on it and attendance is mandatory (enforced by truancy laws) unless a government-approved substitute schooling is provided.
This violates the First Amendment, both by spending government money promoting one religion over another (which includes promoting religion over atheism or vice versa) and by mandating exposure.
Unfortunately, those trying stretch this into keeping the inmates of public schools from voluntarily performing non-disruptive rituals of their religion, or even talking about it, are ignoring the second part of the Constitutional prescription:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
Please stop pretending these things are equal
Dead on!
Let's see if I have this straight:
Apple just got a patent on allowing people to resell or loan digital "content" when it's hosted on a server and managed by client software? Is that really the meaning of the claims, not something narrower?
Hasn't the patent office YET stopped patenting business models consisting of "Doing an existing business model on the Internet using a database"?
"second hand content" ...as in second hand DIGITAL content?
Do explain to me what a used bit looks like, if you will...
It's actually the license contract and viewing rights that are second-hand. The bits of the "content" just come with it.
Make giant paper mache/spit wads and launch them at the corporate building with a trebuchet. Figure out where the executive suite is and call that the bullseye.
Why bother making paper mache? That's a lot of work. What's wrong with just launching the phone books? Or a bale of them?
B-)
Europa is too far away. We should just send it on a crash course for mars. By the time it gets there we will have found a way to thicken up the atmosphere a bit so the water doesn't evaporate right away.
Do you plan to do the pushing?
No kidding on "by the time it gets there". It will take a LOT of pushing to get it up out of Jupiter's orbit and then downhill to an impact orbit with Mars.
After that Mars will be too hot for life for a long time.
Meanwhile, if there is life on Europa OR Mars, you've just created an extinction (event or two) of total-biosphere magnitude. Here's hoping nobody does that to Earth.
"lent data"??? "honed in"????
Not sure what's up with "lent data". (Typo of "sent data"? Odd translation of an idiom from a non-English language?)
I've heard the "honed in" misusage a lot. It seems to be a Mondegreen> from "homed in" (like a homing pigeon.)
It qualifies as an "arm" (armament). It's useful in war. So yes, you do.
But good luck trying to enforce it, in an environment where the legal system has only occasionally given it even lip service since 1938.
Unless I missed it, it's not clear from TFA which of the three belts shown in the map is the "new", intermittent belt.
I'm guessing it's the inner one (which I'd expect to decay from encounters with the very tenuous upper atmosphere). But I'd like to know for sure.
Also: Some of the early results hinting that megadoses of vitamin C were good for cancer patients general health turned out to be the result of the vitamin C causing the subjects to vomit up (and greatly reduce the absorbed amount of) the chemotherapy drugs they were also taking. This reduced the side-effects of the chemotherapy drugs, giving the appearance of a benefit.
I said, that 9% isn't a good number, but pretending like they were giving these shots out knowing that whom they would and would not work for is just plain wrong.
That may have been the situation several months back.
But about the start of January they HAD stats. At that time they did a big publicity blitz, claiming that:
- This year's flu had a particularly high mortality among seniors,
- But this year's vaccine was quite effective against it.
- In particular: It both substantially (though far from completely) reduced the incidence among seniors and reducing the severity among most of those it didn't fully protect.
I think the numbers they were claiming had the death rate among immunized seniors running well under a third that of the unimmunized.
I'm in California, where the flu was just starting to show up. On the basis of those claims of high mortality and high protection, and the fact that I hadn't yet gotten a shot, I went out and got one.
I don't see how those claims could be reconciled wtih the ACTUAL numbers showing 9% instead of mid-30s % for full protection and the high mortality among seniors being due to the inoculation being largely ineffective.
So I, and no doubt many others, balanced the risks of the shots against a risk of PREVENTABLE mortality. If the latter was deliberately overstated, we may have made bad decisions as a result.
Note that the risks of the shot, for seniors, includes identity theft: The shots are free for those on Medicare part A. But the medicare I.D. number is the social security number with a letter added at the end. If you get the "free" shot (say, at a pharmacy or doctor's office) the provider ends up with your name, address, and social security number on a single form. Presto: Another point-of-failure for identity security.
(Note that pharmacies DON'T get seniors' SS# for drugs: Those are under part D, handled by insurance companies which assign a non-SS# identifier, and only the insurance company's database has your medicare I.D. with the unencrypted SS# embedded in it.)
Lots of stuff is unconstitutional (whether by a state constitution or the US Constitution) and is still enforced; the 4th Amendment in particular has been null and void for a long time ...
Much of the second as well. That's why you can't have machine guns, silencers, short shotguns, and a number of other guns or accessories in most states and to have them where the states don't ban them you must go through major federal hoops, (fingerprints, $200 tax per item, risk of federal prison {or a shoot the dog, stomp the cat, throw the pregnant wife against the wall and make her miscarry, raid} if the BATF {thinks} your paperwork is defective or you have something you didn't tell them about).
U.S. v. Miller (1939) said the fed could tax guns that AREN'T suitable for "militia" (military) use, in particular a short barreled ("sawed-off") shotgun (because Miller and his team weren't there to "bring to judicial notice" that they were also called "trench guns" and were an important weapon in WW I). The federal and state governments have taken that to mean they can tax any gun any amount, erect arbitrarily draconian red tape barriers, then bust anyone for screwing up the red tape or failing to pay the tax - "revenuer"/"untouchables"/Waco/Ruby Ridge style.
Saying "demand" when you have no power to enforce your demand just annoys them, making them less likely to respond well to what is actually a request.
It also reduces the number of signatures you'll get, due to people who think such language implies the speaker is impolite and/or a twit refusing to do something that makes them feel like an impolite twit themselves.
Asking nicely - with a large number of people asking - may convince the bureaucrats that there is enough popular support for the position that it might be worth changing their ruling (and/or foregoing the bribe in pursuit of a better target - like votes that enable future bribes).