Those differences are usually tax-related. Once you drive across the border into the higher-cost jurisdiction, you're going to be responsible for collecting the appropriate taxes from the end user (and selling the fuel without collecting the taxes is probably going to land you in a wee bit of trouble, because few things irritate the government more than failing to provide the piece of the pie you are mandated to).
Rubbish. You could add a "This app may send your credit card info to third parties randomly or may turn on the camera when specific grunting or fapping sounds are detected on the microphone (which is always on)" permission to Android and 80% of the people who installed the app would click "OK".
That's part of my point—there's no incentive for app or OS developers to be more sensible as long as 80% (and that may be optimistically low) will click "OK, do it" for any permission requested. If people in general suddenly became more aware of the security risks, maybe that number would drop to 50% and there would be some incentive to do things right...
Any chance this means that mobile OS and mobile app developers might actually start setting up permissions structures that allow apps to function with the minimum necessary privileges?
The permissions framework on Android (and iOS) seems like a reasonable start, but when the norm for a flashlight app is to have full network access and full camera access, it becomes painfully obvious that we as users are not leveraging the frameworks to protect ourselves. If more people cared about Facebook asking for write access to your first-born's soul, they (and other app developers) might have some incentive to build apps that work within the narrowest ruleset possible.
Instead, we have the current disaster, where my stopwatch app requires full network access, Flood-It has full network access *and* access to the contents of the phone's USB storage, etc. Set up an API to allow ads to get pulled in without granting full network access, limit the access the apps have, and it won't matter if the NSA can access your Angry Birds game.
That doesn't always solve it. My personal address is on my personal domain, which is my name (dot com). My name is not particularly common, but not terribly uncommon, either, and on several occasions I've gotten misdirected email because someone got the domain wrong. My personal favorite was the Verizon FIOS signup info, because clearly the person who signed up screwed up his *own* email address.
I've given up on dealing with them, I just hit the GMail archive button.
(and yes, I could reduce the volume by turning off the catchall inbox feature, but I prefer to leave it on so that I can sign up for websites with unique email addresses and then know which jackasses sold (or lost) my info to a spammer down the road.)
Unfortunately, you're out of luck on your MacBook for the time being...some of the libraries upon which Gnucash depends do not yet run on OS X/Intel. (see the Wiki entry on OS X installation). You may also notice the list of dependencies earlier in the wiki article, which is not short (and is the reason that using fink is the recommended course of action).
It's also worth noting that the actions *of the telcos* in some of these cases may be a violation of *state* privacy laws; even if the NSA wasn't violating the law by asking "can we please have this information?", the companies holding it may have had a legal obligation to not release it without a court order.
The solution to poverty isn't penalizing productive people even more, it's in making a future of poverty unattractive enough to kids (and their parents) to make them want to actually bother to complete a solid high school and at least a real vocational education. Taking newly created income from someone who just earned it and handing it over to someone who didn't does not change the cultural ruts that keep some families explaining to their kids that sticking with entry level jobs is not a career strategy.
The solution is not just making poverty unattractive, it's making productive and non-poverty existence both attractive and plausible. If someone has a choice between a barely-above-minimum wage job flipping burgers or collecting state benefits that will keep them alive (and maybe doing some under-the-table stuff on the side), where the minimum wage job might lead to a lead-burger-flipper position in several years but will also result in reduction of state benefits and the necessity to flip burgers thirty-four hours a week, why not stay on the state benefits and buy Powerball tickets? The latter has a better apparent rate of return, especially if there are already community members busting their asses and getting nowhere fast.
The economy in the US today is not like it was even a generation ago, when expanding white-collar jobs allowed for a significant amount of mobility from the working class and lower-middle class into the middle-middle and upper-middle classes. The idea that you children will have a better standard of living and be better off financially than you were, assuming that they go to college, is no longer a given. College is more accessible, but loans are also horrendously accessible and the whole system is tilted towards pushing high school students to sign on for thousands of dollars in debt without really considering the whole equation. And, in real dollars, college graduates no longer get big salaries compared to the cost of not working for four years and putting an additional chunk of change into education for each of those four years.
Now, if the upward mobility of the lower-middle / upper-working class has slowed down (or ceased), what happens to the layer of people trapped one rung lower on the socioeconomic ladder? Add to this the lesser chance of a college education due to cultural and economic issues, and you have a situation where it is necessary to provide assistance to make the path to improvement seem plausible and reasonable, rather than something for the edge cases of extreme book smarts or excessive sporting talent.
Of course, why anyone in ATC has any business running AOL Instant Messenger on their radar screen is utterly beyond me.
btvctrl1: dude, ur alt sucks. usair03: asl??? btvctrl1: ur are too low. usair03: a/s/l ? ? ? ? ? ? btvctrl1: u a bot? usair03: no. u? asl?? btvctrl1: pull up now! usair03: wtf? usair03: oh, fuck usair03 has signed out.
...and most of the "articles" are slightly-edited press releases.
(And yes, I actually read most issues. But that's because, like Slashdot, they have enough useful material amongst the cruft to be worthwhile. And that Spencer Katt guy, he's got a heck of a column.)
As pointed out in the article, tying together disparate POS systems is highly desirable for multi-venue resorts, but it's often not technically feasible (as you're talking about multiple closed systems with a limited, if any, number of opportunities for information exchange). Some companies offer gift cards that fill the gap in that they "pose" as credit cards, allowing them to work in any system that can deal with credit cards. Putting the data from a credit card's first two tracks onto a keycard's first two tracks would seem to be another way around this, in that the keycard could then be swiped just like a credit card.
(that is, I can see why this might be desirable from a resort's point of view; however, I can also see why it's a Really Bad Idea from other standpoints. And just for the record, my employer's keycards only have room and length-of-stay encoded on them--the keycard system is physically separate from the PMS system)
Wrong. It's more like going up a private road which isn't marked as a private road.
Which is illegal. What's your point? You can't possibly have any legitimate reason to go up the private road as it only leads to other stuff which isn't yours.
I don't know what jurisdiction you're in, but around here, a lack of "No Trespassing signs" or "Private Road" signs implies that the public has certain access rights (hunting, fishing, and trapping in particular).
Don't want people to go driving up your private road? Put some signs up or a gate.
I have 200 acres of land. How can I put up signs or a gate on 200 acres of land? You shouldn't be trespassing - you have no legitimate reason to go on to my land.
If you don't have signs up, he's not trespassing (at least around here). If you want to keep people off, you need to post it, per State Law. Or you can make sure to tell anyone who shoes up to go away, but the burden is on the landholder to notify the public that particular land is off limits.
Check out the Oakland program for disabled skaters and the United Cerebral Palsy adaptive skating page; there are probably a lot more programs like that. I'm more familiar with skiing, where programs such as Maine Handicapped Skiing, as I was a ski racer and one of my high-school classmates races for the US Disabled Ski Team. I will admit that having a ski academy van parked in the accessible spot in front of the ski lodge seems a bit odd, but when one of the team members uses a wheelchair to get into the lodge, the journey from the van to the lodge can be quite challenging (wheelchairs don't handle snow and mud all that well, even with knobby tires).
To argue that bias somehow affects the player subliminally, influencing the player towards the bias of the game designer, is to say that people are influenced significantly by what they play or see. However, I have to reject this, from my own experience. I have known many people who play violent video games such as Grand Theft Auto and its ilk who have no inclination to go out and commit those crimes shown in the game.
Bias is inherent in any human action. To make it a central pillar of a video game is foolish because it is uninteresting to anyone not interested in it. Game makers, for the most part, sublimate their biases and focus on gameplay. Whether they succeed or not is debatable, of course.
Actually, it does matter. Claiming that games perpetuate subtle biases is extremely different from claiming that games cause people to dramatically change their outlooks with regard to morality and violence, and the argument that most people who played the original GTA didn't go around trying to set monks on fire is irrelevant to the question of more subtle biases.
Continuing with the GTA line of though, let's suppose that a game very similar to GTA exists but has real cars (IIRC, the original GTA used fake names to avoid trade name issues, and I assume that's still the case). Let's further consider that it has both Volkswagen Jettas and Ford Focuses as in-game options. In the game, the Jetta provides more gokart-like handling (i.e. more nimbler and quicker) while the Focus is more "solid" and better at handling damage (e.g. pedestrians have less of a tendency to knock you off course). As someone who plays GTA frequently, you are quite likely to internalize the preconceptions that the Jetta is more nimble while the Focus rides more solidly and handles damage better, because that's the way the game is programmed. On the other hand, the real-world incarnations of the Focus and the Jetta (for the 2005 model year) are the reverse--the Focus is a lighter car and arguably better-handling, while the Jetta is heavier and has a better crash rating.
Now, consider the same issue with regard to sexual orientation as treated in the Sims 2, according to the article--the game treats gender identification and sexual orientation as freely made choices, and it allows them to be made without the full barrage of results that occur in the real world. Play that game enough, and it would be quite natural to internalize the idea that those elements of identity are conscious choices (which is contrary to most opinions in the real world--even those who reject genetics as an influence on sexual orientation tend to support extended "treatment" programs to encourage those whose sexual orientation upsets their agendas, implying an agreement that it is not a conscious choice).
In summary, I think it is not the central themes of a game that present a danger but the details; just as non-politically-correct jokes can create a hostile environment, those details can add up to an internalization of biases that may not even be conscious in the developers' minds. And those unconscious biases can be among the most difficult biases to confront in a society--a courageous DA can, with the support of good cops and a crime lab, track down a jackass burning crosses all over town. But it's going to be a lot harder to erase the perception amongst the citizens that a certain ethnic group is shiftless or prone to stealing.
My thoughts on this are fairly simple: 1. The advertisers, web site folks, etc have a way to know whether or not people are loading their ads--they only have to correlate IPs and times of content loads (i.e. *real* content) with times and loads of advertising. 2. So long as your are honest in the tracks you leave (i.e. don't send requests to load ads but then not display them, which is just a waste of bandwidth anyhow), blocking advertising is in no way unethical (I started using Privoxy when a car club site hosted by ezBoards started displaying rather non-work-safe ads, including popping and moving stuff, because that was the tipping point for me). 3. Some sites--Salon and their day passes come to mind--do provide an offer to you (i.e. you can view the content, but you need to view the ad first), which you must accept to view the content. This does create a contract (IMO), ethically if not legally, and in that case one does have an obligation to at least play the ad. 4. If you find ads on a given site to be non-obnoxious and you'd like to support the site with your two-hundreths of a cent (or whatever the impression rate is), then you should unblock them. Personally, I do this for non-doubleclick ads on slashdot and for Google text ads in general.
That would be a completely reasonable argument, if gas prices weren't so damn low. The US severely under-taxes gasoline, effectively subsidizing the use of petrol-burning vehicles.
(By "under-taxes", I mean that the current amount of tax collected in the US on gasoline, though it does vary from state to state, barely covers the cost of maintaining roadways, in the best cases. It does not cover the costs of associated damage to the commons resulting from dumping burnt hydrocarbons and various chemicals into the air, nor the damage resulting from spills associated with maintaining the infrastructure to produce and deliver the volume of petrol we use, nor the cost of maintaining sufficient access to world-wide sources of oil reserves so that we can continue burning oil for such uses. I would grudgingly, if not happily, pay more taxes on gasoline so long as (a) everyone did it and (b) the additional funds went *only* to mitigate the costs associated with gasoline usage.)
FWIW, "your-2r8c40dfb2" or "your-34slks32sc" or similar (I don't know the exact number of letters off the top of my head) match the default Compaq naming pattern, at least for Presario laptops--my gf's shows up as something like that on my AP, and I've seen one or two others that did likewise. I the random-looking part is either (a) pseudorandom or (b) the machine's service tag, so that when you go plug two brand new laptops into your network you don't get a naming conflict.
With that said, I suspect that if the same name showed up elsewhere as a spam source and then did a lot of upstream but little downstream traffic at your site, it's probably a spammer hopping from connection to connection with the computer auto-registering itself with the same hostname each time.
Well, the simplest way that I know of is to get a 1(800) number coming into your very own PBX; the regulators have (sensibly) decided that, since the recipient of the 1(800) call is paying for it, the recipient deserves to know where it is coming from. Therefore, most (if not all) modern switches will allow you to get the ANI information from the incoming call. ANI info, as it is used by the telcos for billing purposes, has a much greater chance of being accurate; however, calls from businesses may show up as being from the main trunk line if that is the way their billing works.
As for how you could get the same CPN info that PSAPs do, I have no idea.
Just to be a bit pedantic, it's not Caller ID, it's Calling Party Number. Both are out-of-band information sent with a phonecall over a modern phone system, but caller ID is much easier to spoof, block. or otherwise change; CPN is often derived instead from ANI data, although it may not be. In many states, providing accurate CPN information (including both originating number and the physical location of that originating number) is required by law or regulation.
(in some cases, the same number may be sent for both; in some, it won't. For example, if a larger company has a spread-out campus with multiple buildings, they will be required in some states to provide CPN data that identifies the caller to at least building and floor level; at the same time, they may not want to provide the direct line for a particular location to outside parties and the caller ID might be set to a main number.)
The other good reason is that, when you have thousands of lines of VB6 code that [mostly] work and exactly one person to develop, test, and support that code, the effort involved in porting to.NET is simply not an option.
OK, do you *really* want the folks responsible for the Big Cluster..err...Dig building you, anyone you know, or anyone you might ever want to visit a transporter?
Yeah, well, I've got a small stack of emails spread across the past several months between myself, Staples, and Staples' agents and so far no one has been willing to honor the damn rebate on the Belkin wireless router I bought. I'm about ready to stop in at the store where I bought it with the stack of emails and demand that the manager rectify the situation, major problem being that I already have enough other crap to deal with on my days off.
The network services site might be of a little more interest to folks here than the main site, and I don't recall the link being obvious.
With that said, Gould transitioned from a Novell-centered network with Windows 3.11 to Novell-centered with Windows9x to Linux and did it quite successfully, as far as I can tell. The first year the lab in the main classroom building went all-Linux, it went to Linux prior to the start of Summer School and the summer session was, in many ways, a beta. I'd say it worked; the major gripes generally came from people who had been used to how the lab used to be, whereas students who were new to Gould had little or no trouble adapting. From an IT perspective, it helped matters greatly; not having to either fight Fortres or other Win9x lockdown tools or reimage machines on a regular basis makes life so much better.
and/or PAM and winbind with Samba3, at least on the client. All available via aptitude on debian sarge, and rather not difficult to configure.
(I'm not using users' domain homedirs on the box I've got that setup on, as my primary desire was to use Apache basic auth to the existing AD infrastructure, but other than that it works rather well so far.)
I know Snood is a relatively recent game based on older games, but it was still a big hit in college...I realized I had been playing too much when I started falling asleep in one of my classes and the inside of my eyelids had Snoods on them. Then I got worried when I started seeing Snood formations in my peripheral vision that would turn out to be furniture or unrelated posters or such...
Slashdot Mirror
Those differences are usually tax-related. Once you drive across the border into the higher-cost jurisdiction, you're going to be responsible for collecting the appropriate taxes from the end user (and selling the fuel without collecting the taxes is probably going to land you in a wee bit of trouble, because few things irritate the government more than failing to provide the piece of the pie you are mandated to).
Rubbish. You could add a "This app may send your credit card info to third parties randomly or may turn on the camera when specific grunting or fapping sounds are detected on the microphone (which is always on)" permission to Android and 80% of the people who installed the app would click "OK".
That's part of my point—there's no incentive for app or OS developers to be more sensible as long as 80% (and that may be optimistically low) will click "OK, do it" for any permission requested. If people in general suddenly became more aware of the security risks, maybe that number would drop to 50% and there would be some incentive to do things right...
Any chance this means that mobile OS and mobile app developers might actually start setting up permissions structures that allow apps to function with the minimum necessary privileges?
The permissions framework on Android (and iOS) seems like a reasonable start, but when the norm for a flashlight app is to have full network access and full camera access, it becomes painfully obvious that we as users are not leveraging the frameworks to protect ourselves. If more people cared about Facebook asking for write access to your first-born's soul, they (and other app developers) might have some incentive to build apps that work within the narrowest ruleset possible.
Instead, we have the current disaster, where my stopwatch app requires full network access, Flood-It has full network access *and* access to the contents of the phone's USB storage, etc. Set up an API to allow ads to get pulled in without granting full network access, limit the access the apps have, and it won't matter if the NSA can access your Angry Birds game.
That doesn't always solve it. My personal address is on my personal domain, which is my name (dot com). My name is not particularly common, but not terribly uncommon, either, and on several occasions I've gotten misdirected email because someone got the domain wrong. My personal favorite was the Verizon FIOS signup info, because clearly the person who signed up screwed up his *own* email address.
I've given up on dealing with them, I just hit the GMail archive button.
(and yes, I could reduce the volume by turning off the catchall inbox feature, but I prefer to leave it on so that I can sign up for websites with unique email addresses and then know which jackasses sold (or lost) my info to a spammer down the road.)
Unfortunately, you're out of luck on your MacBook for the time being...some of the libraries upon which Gnucash depends do not yet run on OS X/Intel. (see the Wiki entry on OS X installation). You may also notice the list of dependencies earlier in the wiki article, which is not short (and is the reason that using fink is the recommended course of action).
It's also worth noting that the actions *of the telcos* in some of these cases may be a violation of *state* privacy laws; even if the NSA wasn't violating the law by asking "can we please have this information?", the companies holding it may have had a legal obligation to not release it without a court order.
The solution is not just making poverty unattractive, it's making productive and non-poverty existence both attractive and plausible. If someone has a choice between a barely-above-minimum wage job flipping burgers or collecting state benefits that will keep them alive (and maybe doing some under-the-table stuff on the side), where the minimum wage job might lead to a lead-burger-flipper position in several years but will also result in reduction of state benefits and the necessity to flip burgers thirty-four hours a week, why not stay on the state benefits and buy Powerball tickets? The latter has a better apparent rate of return, especially if there are already community members busting their asses and getting nowhere fast.
The economy in the US today is not like it was even a generation ago, when expanding white-collar jobs allowed for a significant amount of mobility from the working class and lower-middle class into the middle-middle and upper-middle classes. The idea that you children will have a better standard of living and be better off financially than you were, assuming that they go to college, is no longer a given. College is more accessible, but loans are also horrendously accessible and the whole system is tilted towards pushing high school students to sign on for thousands of dollars in debt without really considering the whole equation. And, in real dollars, college graduates no longer get big salaries compared to the cost of not working for four years and putting an additional chunk of change into education for each of those four years.
Now, if the upward mobility of the lower-middle / upper-working class has slowed down (or ceased), what happens to the layer of people trapped one rung lower on the socioeconomic ladder? Add to this the lesser chance of a college education due to cultural and economic issues, and you have a situation where it is necessary to provide assistance to make the path to improvement seem plausible and reasonable, rather than something for the edge cases of extreme book smarts or excessive sporting talent.
Of course, why anyone in ATC has any business running AOL Instant Messenger on their radar screen is utterly beyond me.
btvctrl1: dude, ur alt sucks.
usair03: asl???
btvctrl1: ur are too low.
usair03: a/s/l ? ? ? ? ? ?
btvctrl1: u a bot?
usair03: no. u? asl??
btvctrl1: pull up now!
usair03: wtf?
usair03: oh, fuck
usair03 has signed out.
...and most of the "articles" are slightly-edited press releases.
(And yes, I actually read most issues. But that's because, like Slashdot, they have enough useful material amongst the cruft to be worthwhile. And that Spencer Katt guy, he's got a heck of a column.)
As pointed out in the article, tying together disparate POS systems is highly desirable for multi-venue resorts, but it's often not technically feasible (as you're talking about multiple closed systems with a limited, if any, number of opportunities for information exchange). Some companies offer gift cards that fill the gap in that they "pose" as credit cards, allowing them to work in any system that can deal with credit cards. Putting the data from a credit card's first two tracks onto a keycard's first two tracks would seem to be another way around this, in that the keycard could then be swiped just like a credit card.
(that is, I can see why this might be desirable from a resort's point of view; however, I can also see why it's a Really Bad Idea from other standpoints. And just for the record, my employer's keycards only have room and length-of-stay encoded on them--the keycard system is physically separate from the PMS system)
I don't know what jurisdiction you're in, but around here, a lack of "No Trespassing signs" or "Private Road" signs implies that the public has certain access rights (hunting, fishing, and trapping in particular).
If you don't have signs up, he's not trespassing (at least around here). If you want to keep people off, you need to post it, per State Law. Or you can make sure to tell anyone who shoes up to go away, but the burden is on the landholder to notify the public that particular land is off limits.
Check out the Oakland program for disabled skaters and the United Cerebral Palsy adaptive skating page; there are probably a lot more programs like that. I'm more familiar with skiing, where programs such as Maine Handicapped Skiing, as I was a ski racer and one of my high-school classmates races for the US Disabled Ski Team. I will admit that having a ski academy van parked in the accessible spot in front of the ski lodge seems a bit odd, but when one of the team members uses a wheelchair to get into the lodge, the journey from the van to the lodge can be quite challenging (wheelchairs don't handle snow and mud all that well, even with knobby tires).
Actually, it does matter. Claiming that games perpetuate subtle biases is extremely different from claiming that games cause people to dramatically change their outlooks with regard to morality and violence, and the argument that most people who played the original GTA didn't go around trying to set monks on fire is irrelevant to the question of more subtle biases.
Continuing with the GTA line of though, let's suppose that a game very similar to GTA exists but has real cars (IIRC, the original GTA used fake names to avoid trade name issues, and I assume that's still the case). Let's further consider that it has both Volkswagen Jettas and Ford Focuses as in-game options. In the game, the Jetta provides more gokart-like handling (i.e. more nimbler and quicker) while the Focus is more "solid" and better at handling damage (e.g. pedestrians have less of a tendency to knock you off course). As someone who plays GTA frequently, you are quite likely to internalize the preconceptions that the Jetta is more nimble while the Focus rides more solidly and handles damage better, because that's the way the game is programmed. On the other hand, the real-world incarnations of the Focus and the Jetta (for the 2005 model year) are the reverse--the Focus is a lighter car and arguably better-handling, while the Jetta is heavier and has a better crash rating.
Now, consider the same issue with regard to sexual orientation as treated in the Sims 2, according to the article--the game treats gender identification and sexual orientation as freely made choices, and it allows them to be made without the full barrage of results that occur in the real world. Play that game enough, and it would be quite natural to internalize the idea that those elements of identity are conscious choices (which is contrary to most opinions in the real world--even those who reject genetics as an influence on sexual orientation tend to support extended "treatment" programs to encourage those whose sexual orientation upsets their agendas, implying an agreement that it is not a conscious choice).
In summary, I think it is not the central themes of a game that present a danger but the details; just as non-politically-correct jokes can create a hostile environment, those details can add up to an internalization of biases that may not even be conscious in the developers' minds. And those unconscious biases can be among the most difficult biases to confront in a society--a courageous DA can, with the support of good cops and a crime lab, track down a jackass burning crosses all over town. But it's going to be a lot harder to erase the perception amongst the citizens that a certain ethnic group is shiftless or prone to stealing.
My thoughts on this are fairly simple:
1. The advertisers, web site folks, etc have a way to know whether or not people are loading their ads--they only have to correlate IPs and times of content loads (i.e. *real* content) with times and loads of advertising.
2. So long as your are honest in the tracks you leave (i.e. don't send requests to load ads but then not display them, which is just a waste of bandwidth anyhow), blocking advertising is in no way unethical (I started using Privoxy when a car club site hosted by ezBoards started displaying rather non-work-safe ads, including popping and moving stuff, because that was the tipping point for me).
3. Some sites--Salon and their day passes come to mind--do provide an offer to you (i.e. you can view the content, but you need to view the ad first), which you must accept to view the content. This does create a contract (IMO), ethically if not legally, and in that case one does have an obligation to at least play the ad.
4. If you find ads on a given site to be non-obnoxious and you'd like to support the site with your two-hundreths of a cent (or whatever the impression rate is), then you should unblock them. Personally, I do this for non-doubleclick ads on slashdot and for Google text ads in general.
That would be a completely reasonable argument, if gas prices weren't so damn low. The US severely under-taxes gasoline, effectively subsidizing the use of petrol-burning vehicles.
(By "under-taxes", I mean that the current amount of tax collected in the US on gasoline, though it does vary from state to state, barely covers the cost of maintaining roadways, in the best cases. It does not cover the costs of associated damage to the commons resulting from dumping burnt hydrocarbons and various chemicals into the air, nor the damage resulting from spills associated with maintaining the infrastructure to produce and deliver the volume of petrol we use, nor the cost of maintaining sufficient access to world-wide sources of oil reserves so that we can continue burning oil for such uses. I would grudgingly, if not happily, pay more taxes on gasoline so long as (a) everyone did it and (b) the additional funds went *only* to mitigate the costs associated with gasoline usage.)
FWIW, "your-2r8c40dfb2" or "your-34slks32sc" or similar (I don't know the exact number of letters off the top of my head) match the default Compaq naming pattern, at least for Presario laptops--my gf's shows up as something like that on my AP, and I've seen one or two others that did likewise. I the random-looking part is either (a) pseudorandom or (b) the machine's service tag, so that when you go plug two brand new laptops into your network you don't get a naming conflict.
With that said, I suspect that if the same name showed up elsewhere as a spam source and then did a lot of upstream but little downstream traffic at your site, it's probably a spammer hopping from connection to connection with the computer auto-registering itself with the same hostname each time.
..and make sure you don't leave the pen anywhere near the desk of the client's Accounts Payable department.
Well, the simplest way that I know of is to get a 1(800) number coming into your very own PBX; the regulators have (sensibly) decided that, since the recipient of the 1(800) call is paying for it, the recipient deserves to know where it is coming from. Therefore, most (if not all) modern switches will allow you to get the ANI information from the incoming call. ANI info, as it is used by the telcos for billing purposes, has a much greater chance of being accurate; however, calls from businesses may show up as being from the main trunk line if that is the way their billing works.
As for how you could get the same CPN info that PSAPs do, I have no idea.
Just to be a bit pedantic, it's not Caller ID, it's Calling Party Number. Both are out-of-band information sent with a phonecall over a modern phone system, but caller ID is much easier to spoof, block. or otherwise change; CPN is often derived instead from ANI data, although it may not be. In many states, providing accurate CPN information (including both originating number and the physical location of that originating number) is required by law or regulation.
(in some cases, the same number may be sent for both; in some, it won't. For example, if a larger company has a spread-out campus with multiple buildings, they will be required in some states to provide CPN data that identifies the caller to at least building and floor level; at the same time, they may not want to provide the direct line for a particular location to outside parties and the caller ID might be set to a main number.)
The other good reason is that, when you have thousands of lines of VB6 code that [mostly] work and exactly one person to develop, test, and support that code, the effort involved in porting to .NET is simply not an option.
OK, do you *really* want the folks responsible for the Big Cluster..err...Dig building you, anyone you know, or anyone you might ever want to visit a transporter?
Yeah, well, I've got a small stack of emails spread across the past several months between myself, Staples, and Staples' agents and so far no one has been willing to honor the damn rebate on the Belkin wireless router I bought. I'm about ready to stop in at the store where I bought it with the stack of emails and demand that the manager rectify the situation, major problem being that I already have enough other crap to deal with on my days off.
With that said, Gould transitioned from a Novell-centered network with Windows 3.11 to Novell-centered with Windows9x to Linux and did it quite successfully, as far as I can tell. The first year the lab in the main classroom building went all-Linux, it went to Linux prior to the start of Summer School and the summer session was, in many ways, a beta. I'd say it worked; the major gripes generally came from people who had been used to how the lab used to be, whereas students who were new to Gould had little or no trouble adapting. From an IT perspective, it helped matters greatly; not having to either fight Fortres or other Win9x lockdown tools or reimage machines on a regular basis makes life so much better.
and/or PAM and winbind with Samba3, at least on the client. All available via aptitude on debian sarge, and rather not difficult to configure.
(I'm not using users' domain homedirs on the box I've got that setup on, as my primary desire was to use Apache basic auth to the existing AD infrastructure, but other than that it works rather well so far.)
I know Snood is a relatively recent game based on older games, but it was still a big hit in college...I realized I had been playing too much when I started falling asleep in one of my classes and the inside of my eyelids had Snoods on them. Then I got worried when I started seeing Snood formations in my peripheral vision that would turn out to be furniture or unrelated posters or such...