NWS weather data is in fact free. The government maintains http://weather.noaa.gov/ for specifically that purpose. Absolutely all data the NWS gathers is available via this site.
What are in dispute are new "products" such as XML-based feeds that are a bit more processed than the raw text file formats and HTML formats that are being offered now. It's the same data, just packaged a little more useful.
The NOAA has always been in the business of data gathering, but the main process of refining the data into more useful reports has always been left to private interests. What's being disputed now is where to draw that line...
When TWC is airing such a documenary show ("Atmospheres" and "Storm Stories" are the current titles) the "Local on the 8s" feature still continues uninterrupted. The shows have to take a break every 10 minutes to allow that to happen. If you want local information from TWC, there's not really much point to watching the other 8 minutes of the hour, the 90 seconds there is all you're really going to get.
If a tornado warning was issued for Fairfax County, the computer that generates the local forecast would have overtaken the video with a full red screen alert and added a beeping sound to the national audio. However, tornados rarely travel in a straight line and a National Weather Service warning is only issued once a tornado exists to communites that that will be hit by it. Since the tornado changed directions before heading into your area, there no reason for a warning to be issued.
I fear that your local TV station needlessly panicked you. Tornados are devistating storms, but they affect a very narrow path. That's why NWS only puts out warnings to the communities in immediate danger. You weren't. You could have gone about your business without having much to fear.
It's also being used as a "bait and switch" tactic as places that offer such cards quietly installed them while taking down their former gift certificate offers. Go to a Simon-owned mall and ask for a mall gift certificate and the pitch for the Visa Gift Card will begin just as if you had asked for Coke at a resturant that sells Pepsi products.
The states put the laws that regulate gift certifcates in order to maintain consumer protections, and then these things spring up as workarounds to offer instead. It's no wonder that the states are reinstalling the regulations onto the new platforms.
However, increasingly states are passing laws that say "Forget it, if you sell a gift card here it's really a gift certificate so go see the book of laws that apply to that."
In Massachusetts, the tipping point was the bankruptcy of the Bradlee's department store chain. Bradlee's sold their gift cards up until the day that the announced their bankruptcy after business hours. The next day, when the stores reopened in the hands of a liquidator, the liquidator refused to honor the gift cards because they claimed they were not responsible for the liablities of the failed company, they were just their to extract whatever value possible from the assets.
The state eventually pressured the store into getting the liquidator to accept the cards by threatening to represent the card-holding consumers of the state as a stakeholder in the bankruptcy, which would have made a serious mess since all of the unclaimed cards would come back to haunt an already troubled company. Instead, it was simply announced that the cards were good at face value for the remainder of the going out of business sale until the end at which point they'd be worthless. The reform law was not far behind at that point.
Simon's actually had their merchants biting them for that one. See, if a store accepts a gift card that the customer thinks can cover the purchase, but it turns out that it can't... they've just submitted an invalid transaction to Visa and get dinged a fee for that. Sure, Simon's making money off of these things, but they're upsetting their tenants who are the one who really butter their bread.
It remains to be seen if Simon's going to be able to keep this scheme up.
Those were the deals he had to make/accept in order for the DVD format to happen. Otherwise, we'd have the analog LaserDisc all over our Blockbusters...
There's simply no way to get $17 million and not have it be traced. Any financial transaction that large will trip alarm bells that'll make it stand out...
Large-scale extortion never works. What ever account gets that money will be traced, and that'll eventually give up the location of the criminal.
Netcraft reports that Yahoo runs FreeBSD and Earthlink runs Solaris so both of them can't possiby be spreading the worm. eBay runs IIS, but I doubt they've been hit or it'd be more widely reported.
What seems to be novel about this attack is that it uses holes in both IIS and IE. When an IIS server is attacked, the payload is to compromise the site such that malicious code is inserted into every page with no outward sign that anything's wrong. That code in turn exploits a hole in IE to get onto a user's PC, which in turn goes looking for more IIS sites to compromise.
This worm depends on there being flaws in both programs. It wouldn't be nearly as powerful if those two flaws couldn't be used in concert.
CERT's recommendation usually is to download the patch. However, since this hole has an exploit in the wild, and there isn't a patch to be found... use something else is the only recommendation left to issue.
What "9/11 report" are you talking about? The official comittee in Washington has yet to make its final report... all we have so far is the testimony from the public hearings and some preliminary findings that may be contradicted by later developments.
Re:What out for Michael Moore lawsuits through....
on
Fahrenheit 9/11 Discussion
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Moore commented Friday during an interview with the syndicated program Good Day Live that he may include the undedited video from that classroom event as an extra on the DVD version.
It's a debatable issue whether the president should have cut his visit to the classroom short when he was told that a second plane had hit the second tower. The principal of the school says that Bush did the right thing because running out of the classroom would have scared the kids... however those kids would eventually be told to stand quietly in the backround as the president made his first comments to the world about the 9/11 events. Moore claims that the president put those kids at risk because the president could have been a target in such a crisis, but he was a moving target and the hijackers only went after stationary ones.
Frankly, I think you leftists would do your cause better justice to tout someone a bit more reputable than Michael Moore. He's the leftist equivilant of Rush Limbaugh
Limbaugh, the man who was strongly in favor of locking up drug abusers and then a decade later because a drug addict himself.
I think the compasison is fair, both use an entertainment and psuedo-news medium to convey their hard-set politcal views. Neither is known for leting facts get in the way of a good rant...
Bradbury's complaint is never going to make it to a courtroom. Porn makers for years have titled their films as a play on words against a mainstream Hollywood title... it's not a trademark violation as long as the films are so different that nobody's going to confuse them.
Nobody's going to get a porn film confused with a Hollywood blockbuster. Nobody's going to get Moore's documentary confused with Bradbury's novel. Case dismissed.
Bradbury can complain all he wants, but that's about as far as he's going get. Moore may have stolen his title, but he did so in a way that's most certainly legal.
Fox News entertainment reporter Bill McCuddy included a mention of Moore bailing out on him in every one of his reports broadcast on FNC on Friday and Saturday.
Moore was doing a string of satellite interviews Friday morning through afternoon for various media outlets which is typical when a movie opens. (All of the segments have him against the same Times Square backdrop.) Fox News Channel's McCuddy was scheduled to have a few minutes with Moore as part of this event, but was told that they were running 45 minutes behind and therefore were being dropped.
McCuddy counters that the interview schedule was not off at all because he was able to confirm with local Fox stations that had slots before and after his that were hit on-time. Moore appeared on 20th Centrury Fox's syndicated show Good Day Live, which is produced by the Fox-owned station in Los Angeles without a problem.
McCuddy seems to have a legitimate complaint. He was in his studio ready to do an interview when Moore bailed on him while giving interviews to nearly any other media outlet that wanted one.
But as soon as Disney tried to put the movie away because of benefits they've received from the Bush family
That's Moore's claim. However, his original version was that Disney killed the film because Jeb Bush would try to take away Disney's tax breaks on DisneyWorld in Florida... that's nice, but no such tax breaks exist for them to lose.
In reality, Disney isn't as worried about retailation from elected officials as much as they're worried about retailation from the public. All mega-corperations hate politics because any time they take a stand in favor of X, all of the people who oppose X will start to dislike the company.
The basic connection is that if Disney was identified as backing Moore's film, then the entire Disney company could get labeled liberal. Even if there's no organized boycott, some conservative families who would have gone to DisneyWorld would instead go to Universal Studios. That's what Disney's worried about.
What's particually sad is that the 3rd parties of the USA are focused on longshot bids for President, while at this point the Senate is so tight that should two seats fall into "other" hands those people would become the swing voters that could break up any party line voting.
The Toys 'R Us-Amazon partnership started after the 1999 holiday season failure of ToysRUs.com because the.com operation accepted every order attempted and simply sent backorder notices... meaning many parents got caught with orders that wouldn't be filled until after Dec. 25, and as result the company had to rush out gift cards so that parents could pick up something at the retail stores to avoid making a mess of their whole brand in the process.
Re:Pretty cool
on
Field Day 2004
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It makes me wonder who would be connected first in a real disaster these days... HAM or an ad hoc WiFi net...
Maybe we should hold a race in some remote area to see who can deploy and communicate fastest in an unknown environment.
Which all users of RF technology of any kind consider a boogyman unknown because power lines weren't meant to carry any sort of signaling at all and therefore are completely unshielded. It's just plain a theoretical nightmare if this technology were to be widely deployed... nobody's quite sure how bad the problems for other applications would be.
This may be a nothingness, or it may be the death of ham radio depending on who you listen to.
Before implementing this kind of spybot, Syracuse University used to require that students caught running the major virus-of-the-month bring their students to the CMS office at the center of campus, where a work study student would install MacAffe (which the school has always had a site license that covered all students for) and then clean up the worm. This was done only during business hours and was intentionally slow... having your computer impounded for the weekend was an intentional side effect of this process as a punishment for being so dumb.
It's the school's network, however. You can do whatever you want with your computer so long as you don't plug it in, but once you do and request Internet service to it then you are part of the campus network and subject to their rules. If you don't want to play by them, then they can unplug your room's line at the network closet.
What's going to stop you from uninstalling their software is that you'll fail to respond when their server queries it.
Cable modem service is surprisingly more available than you might think. In most dorms, the cable service is provided by the cable company of record in the community. The school may or may not be paying for basic services... but if the students have the opportunity to purchase digital cable or on-demand service from the cable company, then the frequencies to allow cable modem service are most certainly present.
At that point, only a contract stipulating that they can't offer cable modem service in the dorms is the only thing that can stop it, and most schools don't demand that because they don't see much of a threat from that source anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
NWS weather data is in fact free. The government maintains http://weather.noaa.gov/ for specifically that purpose. Absolutely all data the NWS gathers is available via this site.
What are in dispute are new "products" such as XML-based feeds that are a bit more processed than the raw text file formats and HTML formats that are being offered now. It's the same data, just packaged a little more useful.
The NOAA has always been in the business of data gathering, but the main process of refining the data into more useful reports has always been left to private interests. What's being disputed now is where to draw that line...
When TWC is airing such a documenary show ("Atmospheres" and "Storm Stories" are the current titles) the "Local on the 8s" feature still continues uninterrupted. The shows have to take a break every 10 minutes to allow that to happen. If you want local information from TWC, there's not really much point to watching the other 8 minutes of the hour, the 90 seconds there is all you're really going to get.
If a tornado warning was issued for Fairfax County, the computer that generates the local forecast would have overtaken the video with a full red screen alert and added a beeping sound to the national audio. However, tornados rarely travel in a straight line and a National Weather Service warning is only issued once a tornado exists to communites that that will be hit by it. Since the tornado changed directions before heading into your area, there no reason for a warning to be issued.
I fear that your local TV station needlessly panicked you. Tornados are devistating storms, but they affect a very narrow path. That's why NWS only puts out warnings to the communities in immediate danger. You weren't. You could have gone about your business without having much to fear.
It's also being used as a "bait and switch" tactic as places that offer such cards quietly installed them while taking down their former gift certificate offers. Go to a Simon-owned mall and ask for a mall gift certificate and the pitch for the Visa Gift Card will begin just as if you had asked for Coke at a resturant that sells Pepsi products.
The states put the laws that regulate gift certifcates in order to maintain consumer protections, and then these things spring up as workarounds to offer instead. It's no wonder that the states are reinstalling the regulations onto the new platforms.
However, increasingly states are passing laws that say "Forget it, if you sell a gift card here it's really a gift certificate so go see the book of laws that apply to that."
In Massachusetts, the tipping point was the bankruptcy of the Bradlee's department store chain. Bradlee's sold their gift cards up until the day that the announced their bankruptcy after business hours. The next day, when the stores reopened in the hands of a liquidator, the liquidator refused to honor the gift cards because they claimed they were not responsible for the liablities of the failed company, they were just their to extract whatever value possible from the assets.
The state eventually pressured the store into getting the liquidator to accept the cards by threatening to represent the card-holding consumers of the state as a stakeholder in the bankruptcy, which would have made a serious mess since all of the unclaimed cards would come back to haunt an already troubled company. Instead, it was simply announced that the cards were good at face value for the remainder of the going out of business sale until the end at which point they'd be worthless. The reform law was not far behind at that point.
Simon's actually had their merchants biting them for that one. See, if a store accepts a gift card that the customer thinks can cover the purchase, but it turns out that it can't... they've just submitted an invalid transaction to Visa and get dinged a fee for that. Sure, Simon's making money off of these things, but they're upsetting their tenants who are the one who really butter their bread.
It remains to be seen if Simon's going to be able to keep this scheme up.
Those were the deals he had to make/accept in order for the DVD format to happen. Otherwise, we'd have the analog LaserDisc all over our Blockbusters...
I'm a little surprised Google doesn't provide hosting to an event that they sponsor...
There's simply no way to get $17 million and not have it be traced. Any financial transaction that large will trip alarm bells that'll make it stand out...
Large-scale extortion never works. What ever account gets that money will be traced, and that'll eventually give up the location of the criminal.
He said that specifically on Friday's broadcast of the syndicated program Good Day Live when discussing that segment in the movie.
Netcraft reports that Yahoo runs FreeBSD and Earthlink runs Solaris so both of them can't possiby be spreading the worm. eBay runs IIS, but I doubt they've been hit or it'd be more widely reported.
What seems to be novel about this attack is that it uses holes in both IIS and IE. When an IIS server is attacked, the payload is to compromise the site such that malicious code is inserted into every page with no outward sign that anything's wrong. That code in turn exploits a hole in IE to get onto a user's PC, which in turn goes looking for more IIS sites to compromise.
This worm depends on there being flaws in both programs. It wouldn't be nearly as powerful if those two flaws couldn't be used in concert.
CERT's recommendation usually is to download the patch. However, since this hole has an exploit in the wild, and there isn't a patch to be found... use something else is the only recommendation left to issue.
What "9/11 report" are you talking about? The official comittee in Washington has yet to make its final report... all we have so far is the testimony from the public hearings and some preliminary findings that may be contradicted by later developments.
Moore commented Friday during an interview with the syndicated program Good Day Live that he may include the undedited video from that classroom event as an extra on the DVD version.
It's a debatable issue whether the president should have cut his visit to the classroom short when he was told that a second plane had hit the second tower. The principal of the school says that Bush did the right thing because running out of the classroom would have scared the kids... however those kids would eventually be told to stand quietly in the backround as the president made his first comments to the world about the 9/11 events. Moore claims that the president put those kids at risk because the president could have been a target in such a crisis, but he was a moving target and the hijackers only went after stationary ones.
Frankly, I think you leftists would do your cause better justice to tout someone a bit more reputable than Michael Moore. He's the leftist equivilant of Rush Limbaugh
Limbaugh, the man who was strongly in favor of locking up drug abusers and then a decade later because a drug addict himself.
I think the compasison is fair, both use an entertainment and psuedo-news medium to convey their hard-set politcal views. Neither is known for leting facts get in the way of a good rant...
Bradbury's complaint is never going to make it to a courtroom. Porn makers for years have titled their films as a play on words against a mainstream Hollywood title... it's not a trademark violation as long as the films are so different that nobody's going to confuse them.
Nobody's going to get a porn film confused with a Hollywood blockbuster. Nobody's going to get Moore's documentary confused with Bradbury's novel. Case dismissed.
Bradbury can complain all he wants, but that's about as far as he's going get. Moore may have stolen his title, but he did so in a way that's most certainly legal.
Fox News entertainment reporter Bill McCuddy included a mention of Moore bailing out on him in every one of his reports broadcast on FNC on Friday and Saturday.
Moore was doing a string of satellite interviews Friday morning through afternoon for various media outlets which is typical when a movie opens. (All of the segments have him against the same Times Square backdrop.) Fox News Channel's McCuddy was scheduled to have a few minutes with Moore as part of this event, but was told that they were running 45 minutes behind and therefore were being dropped.
McCuddy counters that the interview schedule was not off at all because he was able to confirm with local Fox stations that had slots before and after his that were hit on-time. Moore appeared on 20th Centrury Fox's syndicated show Good Day Live, which is produced by the Fox-owned station in Los Angeles without a problem.
McCuddy seems to have a legitimate complaint. He was in his studio ready to do an interview when Moore bailed on him while giving interviews to nearly any other media outlet that wanted one.
But as soon as Disney tried to put the movie away because of benefits they've received from the Bush family
That's Moore's claim. However, his original version was that Disney killed the film because Jeb Bush would try to take away Disney's tax breaks on DisneyWorld in Florida... that's nice, but no such tax breaks exist for them to lose.
In reality, Disney isn't as worried about retailation from elected officials as much as they're worried about retailation from the public. All mega-corperations hate politics because any time they take a stand in favor of X, all of the people who oppose X will start to dislike the company.
The basic connection is that if Disney was identified as backing Moore's film, then the entire Disney company could get labeled liberal. Even if there's no organized boycott, some conservative families who would have gone to DisneyWorld would instead go to Universal Studios. That's what Disney's worried about.
What's particually sad is that the 3rd parties of the USA are focused on longshot bids for President, while at this point the Senate is so tight that should two seats fall into "other" hands those people would become the swing voters that could break up any party line voting.
The Toys 'R Us-Amazon partnership started after the 1999 holiday season failure of ToysRUs.com because the .com operation accepted every order attempted and simply sent backorder notices... meaning many parents got caught with orders that wouldn't be filled until after Dec. 25, and as result the company had to rush out gift cards so that parents could pick up something at the retail stores to avoid making a mess of their whole brand in the process.
It makes me wonder who would be connected first in a real disaster these days... HAM or an ad hoc WiFi net...
Maybe we should hold a race in some remote area to see who can deploy and communicate fastest in an unknown environment.
BPL= Broadband over Power Lines...
Which all users of RF technology of any kind consider a boogyman unknown because power lines weren't meant to carry any sort of signaling at all and therefore are completely unshielded. It's just plain a theoretical nightmare if this technology were to be widely deployed... nobody's quite sure how bad the problems for other applications would be.
This may be a nothingness, or it may be the death of ham radio depending on who you listen to.
Before implementing this kind of spybot, Syracuse University used to require that students caught running the major virus-of-the-month bring their students to the CMS office at the center of campus, where a work study student would install MacAffe (which the school has always had a site license that covered all students for) and then clean up the worm. This was done only during business hours and was intentionally slow... having your computer impounded for the weekend was an intentional side effect of this process as a punishment for being so dumb.
It's the school's network, however. You can do whatever you want with your computer so long as you don't plug it in, but once you do and request Internet service to it then you are part of the campus network and subject to their rules. If you don't want to play by them, then they can unplug your room's line at the network closet.
What's going to stop you from uninstalling their software is that you'll fail to respond when their server queries it.
Cable modem service is surprisingly more available than you might think. In most dorms, the cable service is provided by the cable company of record in the community. The school may or may not be paying for basic services... but if the students have the opportunity to purchase digital cable or on-demand service from the cable company, then the frequencies to allow cable modem service are most certainly present.
At that point, only a contract stipulating that they can't offer cable modem service in the dorms is the only thing that can stop it, and most schools don't demand that because they don't see much of a threat from that source anyway.