I used to think of LEDs as cute little indicator lights. A nice tiny, soft green LED light tells me that my monitor is on, or blinkenlights let me know that packets are flowing through my router. An orange LED might alert me to standby mode on a device. None of them were really all that visible unless I was looking directly at them, and certainly none put out any ambient light.
Then I got my newest computer. This thing has a single blue LED backlighting an area the size of a dime, behind the power button on the case. When I turn off all the lights, after a minute or so of my eyes adapting, the single blue LED gives off enough light to illuminate half the room. For the first week or so, I had trouble getting to sleep because of the light... From one blue LED.
As the technology gets better I can imagine LED lamps coming in vogue. I seriously doubt that the end of the bulb will come anytime soon, though. Probably not in my lifetime.
Once again, Slashdot advertises for a service that...
Dude, chill out. The MeetUp service was totally free for a long time. You can see the original Slashdot story, plugging MeetUp and announcing the creation of Slashdot MeetUps, from almost three years ago.
This story is relevant because there are a lot of people who actually went to various Slashdot MeetUps. If you want to bitch about paid ads on Slashdot, call me when the next Roland Piquepaille story is posted.
anyone know if [PeerGuardian] is actually effective?
That depends on your definition of effective. PeerGuardian does what it claims to do, and that is block connections to and from IP ranges known to be used by RIAA, MPAA, and their hired guns. If this makes you feel good, then by all means, install PeerGuardian. However, be warned that a "good feeling" is all that you're going to get. The logic behind PeerGuardian doesn't go full circle, for two reasons.
First off, the PeerGuardian concept assumes that all enemy attacks are going to come from known enemy IP space. This is a dangerous and rather dumb assumption; nothing says that the RIAA or BayTSP et al are scanning/probing P2P networks from their own IP space. They might not be popular, but most of these organizations are full of lawyers and other relatively smart people. They do have at least half a clue.
It's long been rumored that some of these organizations recruit a) employees to run P2P crawlers at home and b) students to run P2P crawlers on campus. The fact that they've somehow obtained access to Internet2 makes the idea that they're paying students to run P2P crawlers all the more likely. My guess is that running P2P spidering software on behalf of RIAA might be part of some silent settlements that we aren't hearing about. "We caught you sharing files you're not allowed to. Either we sue you, you pay us $2000 and we go away, or you run this nice little program and promise not to tell anyone..."
So, PeerGuardian blocks a few connections from "known" RIAA IP space (nevermind that many of the blocks are a bit overzealous and will generate false positives). The user is lulled into a false sense of security - hey, it's working! Connections from those evil bastards are being stopped! I'm safe!!
But are you sure that the connection from a Comcast cablemodem isn't really an RIAA lawyer's home PC? How do you know what application is really connecting to you from that rice.edu address?
Secondly, from what I understand of the C&D letters being sent to ISPs, and perhaps even some of the lawsuits being filed, often times no connection was involved at all. The P2P spidering software does a search for "Britney Spears MP3," parses the results, and builds a list of IP/Date/Filename. They don't actually try to connect to your computer and download the file, otherwise Professor Usher would never have been threatened, admins would not be getting C&D letters regarding IPs which have never been lit up, etc.
PeerGuardian is a nice idea. It apparently makes a lot of people feel better. And it might even work if this was 1980 when everyone on the internet was exactly who they said they were.
Don't go crying to the PeerGuardian authors when you get caught anyway.
'N. H. Rev. Stat. Ann. 570-A:2: It is a
felony to intercept, or disclose the contents of, any telecommunication or oral communication without the consent of all parties.'
Now wait just a minute here. My friend Bill tells me that he just got a new job. (For effect, let's say that he told me this during a phone conversation.) I tell my friend Joe that our mutual friend Bill got a new job. Bill never gave me consent to "disclose the contents of" our "oral communication." If I live in New Hampshire, I'm now guilty of a felony??
Quoting further from the link you posted:
However, it is a misdemeanor for a party to a communication, or anyone who has the consent of only one of the parties, to intercept a telecommunication or oral communication.
So let's say I'm a party to a phone conversation with my friend Bill, who was telling me all about his new job. Seeing as how I'm on the other end of the line, how is it not possible for me to "intercept" the oral communication? This could be interpreted such that anyone engaging in a telephone call is guilty of a misdemeanor!
How in the name of all that is holy do such vague and ambiguous laws get passed?
Your story is believable and very interesting up to a point... That point being when you suggested to grab a 6-pack of Heineken! Why oh why??
Not knowing the reason for your protest, I'll provide several possibly compatible responses:
Answer 1: I couldn't afford a 6-pack of Guinness, so I went with the next best thing.
Answer 2: I would have grabbed a 12-pack, but 12 Heinekens mean that I'll be seriously dehydrated when I wake up, so I had to stick with 6, or else get a 12-pack of Bud.
Answer 3: MADD is an American organization, so getting drunk on beer imported from Holland doesn't count.
Answer 4: I don't know Bill W.
If none of these answers were suitable, feel free to send me a case of your favorite poison...:)
One *always* pays taxes on capitals gains from stock sales. Is it me or does the article poster spin from the left and ignore facts ?
Is it me or does the right always try to blame the left, even if there's not a fucking issue to place blame about?
Talk about false premises, your statement assumes that the Google guys are going to be selling their stock sometime soon. If you'd RTFA, you'd know that Page and Brin earned 150K a year, and Schmidt earned 250K/year. Cutting their salaries to $1 does mean a substantial tax savings, as the poster indicated.
Not that it really matters when you're worth what these guys are worth. I think they're doing it as a statement, not to save a few inconsequential thousand dollars in taxes.
Your attempt to politicize the issue is really scummy.
I know that people with GEDs can go to university here, although they usually woulnd't be able to get into top tier schools.
I got a release from compulsory education (aka "legal dropout") in 11th grade because of a medical issue I had at the time. Once my health was in order, I went and got my GED.
As a previous poster mentioned, high SAT or ACT scores will help, whether you finished high school or not. I took the ACT twice, and got a 31 and 32. My SAT was decent (1350) but not outstanding. On the ACT scores alone, I could have walked into pretty much any university I wanted; I was being actively recruited by any number of "top" universities around the country, well after I'd stopped going to high school. They'd gotten copies of my test scores from god-knows-where, and were more than happy to take me if I wanted to pay.
In the end I did a semester at the local state U, then decided that environment was for the birds, and got an AAS at the community college. The instructors there were actual industry professionals, not career educators. Nothing against career educators, I've got some in the family, but for tech skills I'd rather learn from someone who's proficient in the industry as opposed to someone who's proficient as a teacher.
I don't know how this works for someone living in a foreign country. I presume that each country probably has its own standardized tests ala ACT/SAT, and the scores or transcripts could be sent. There are plenty of folks here on student visas, so while I don't know how the import process works, there obviously is one. In addition to speaking with admissions advisors, it might help to write or call the Egyptian embassy in the US.
Looking back, I wouldn't do anything differently if I had the chance. I do have a tendency to skirt the GED issue on the resume, e.g. under Education I list my college/degree, followed by my high school. I don't claim on my resume that I graduated, but I don't say that I got a GED instead, either. Nobody's ever asked.
Is this just another excuse to dislike a major corporation because they obviously hired a moron?
I presume you aren't aware that Best Buy has had legitimate customers arrested in the past. I haven't set foot in a Best Buy since that story broke two and a half years ago, and this latest gaffe isn't doing much to convince me that I should ever go back.
But, as you point out, they are required to take 'legal tender' in payments of debts, and coins are legal tender. Unless they specifically restrict forms of payment before you incur your debt.
This is absolutely correct! Unfortunately, many people don't understand the idea of "debt" as it applies to one-off transactions. They see the word "debt" and think about a mortgage or a credit card, so they wrongfully assume that this law doesn't apply to everyday purchases.
Let me add a couple of examples to further the point that you made.
Scenario 1: You go to the corner store, grab a 6-pack of Heineken, and walk to the checkout counter. The cashier tells you that your total is $7.48. You put four $2 bills on the counter. The cashier says, "We don't take those." The cashier is not violating the law; you have no debt to the store, the beer is still technically theirs. The store is not required to accept any particular form of payment from you.
Scenario 2: You go to the bar, grab a stool, and order a Heineken. The bartender brings it to you, and you drink it. You go to leave, and the bartender tells you that your total is $2.25. You put two $2 bills on the bar (and being a good patron, you tell the bartender to keep the change, of course!). The bartender says, "We don't take those." The bartender is violating the law. When you drank the beer, you incurred a debt to the bar; the bar is now obligated to accept any legal tender as payment.
Here's something I'm wondering about - what does the Secret Service have to do with counterfeit bills, anyway?
The initial charter of the USSS was to protect the nation's currency and put counterfeiters out of business, so to speak.
The whole "protecting the president" assignment came decades later, and while it's the task they're currently best known for, a large part of their work still goes towards the original goal. The Secret Service has field offices in all major US cities and many locales overseas, and when you consider that the president can only be in one place at a time (and is not constantly being threatened in all the other places where USSS has a presence), it becomes evident that most of the manpower is spent doing other things.
Among those other things, they assist with certain fraud investigations, especially mail fraud. When I worked in a retail postal facility, we'd get calls from USSS almost as often as USPIS. More recently, they've been called upon by various agencies to help investigate computer-related crimes, financial ones in particular. For example, they have an office specifically dedicated to investigating "419" scams (those emails you get from Prince Mambuto's widow in Nigeria who wants to transfer ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS to your bank account) - next time you get one, forward it to 419.fcd(at)usss.treas.gov with a quick note that you didn't lose any money.
We always 'google' our perspective new-hires. People have been not hired because of the content discovered.
"We always proofread things that our prospective new-hires have posted on the internet. People have been not hired because their spelling and grammar aren't perfect."
Still believe that you're using fair screening procedures?
What someone has said or done on the internet prior to applying for employment with your company is, generally, none of your business. I'll grant that there are possible exceptions. I suppose that if your company has a strict "drug free" policy, and you discover that the applicant runs the local NORML chapter's website (and you're positive that it's the same person), he's probably not the right candidate. If he checked the "No" box next to the "Have you ever been convicted of a felony?" question (which is another rant that I'll save for a later time) but you determine that he's been convicted of a felony - and, again, you're sure that it's the same person - then you're probably right to reject his application.
But someone's past behavior as recorded online generally should have nothing to do with your hiring decisions, especially if your Google results reflect actions taken outside of a workplace. If I want to get drunk and make tasteless and off-color posts on Fark, that's my business. I damned sure better not find out that anyone has round-filed my resume simply because they found my blog and disagreed with my political commentary, or found posts that I've made on message boards deriding certain companies, or learned that I used to play a certain type of character in a game that they don't like.
P.S... Normally, the signs say "Watch For Children". But there were a few in the Blacksburg area I think that said "Watch Children".
I always get a kick when I see one that says "Slow Children" instead of something like "Children At Play." Who'd want to advertise that their neighborhood is full of special ed kids...;)
Ha, I know this is off-topic, but I find it hilarious that their site has an example image of a document that's been "fixed" by StyleWriter. One of the sentences has been corrected to "I assume you'll dealing this soon..."
In addition, if you check the screenshot and look for the promotional blurb highlighted in cyan, you'll see that the word "following" is spelled incorrectly. You'd really think that a company trying to sell editing software would do a better job of proofreading their copy.
I live in Memphis, fairly close to the "Six Carrier Pine" pictured on that site. Those photos are completely deceptive, except perhaps for this one.
There's nothing natural about that structure whatsoever. For starters, we don't have trees that tall around here, you can see how it dwarfs the real trees in the area. It's too uniform and deliberate to be a real tree; hell, my artificial Christmas tree looks more realistic. 6 cell carriers were footing the bill for this structure and they couldn't build something a tad more lifelike?
If anything, the camo tower draws more attention to itself. I've learned to "tune out" the regular cell towers, sort of like I can look around and not notice power lines or other common infrastructure. But there's no tuning this ugly thing out. I wish they'd have just put up a normal cell tower.
Some of their other stuff looks nice though. Considering the amount of churches around here, they should have gone with the tower-in-a-steeple idea.
The only people who use the phrase "double opt-in" are spammers.
Oh, bullshit. Consider this scenario:
Customer: I need some more memory, my computer is running low.
Clerk: What sort of memory do you need? PC133, maybe?
Customer: I need a couple more RAMs, I'm running out of space to store my files.
Clerk: Ah, so you need a bigger hard drive!
Customer: Right, some more memory, like I said.
The customer knows what he needs (more storage space for his files), he just isn't sure which term to use. And why should he? He isn't in the computer business, so nobody expects him to be familiar with all of the lingo. That doesn't mean he's an idiot.
Legitimate mass mailers talk about "confirmed opt-in."
No, professional mass mailers should be using this phrase if they want to appear reputable in their field. Jane Public, who operates a charity and not a mass mailing company, might describe her mailing list as "double opt-in" and might ask the computer store for "more memory" when her disk is filling up.
And if you have seven friends with the same amount of cash, you can afford to fill up your gas tank. Of course, your 7 friends will be wanting to carpool...
The GF bought a Sony HDTV which of course, the resident geek BF set up
I don't know what's cooler, the fact that you have a girlfriend, or the fact that you also have a resident geek boyfriend to take care of all your girlfriend's honey-do tech issues. Genius!
If you are paranoid about security, run the ircd in a chroot jail.
And even better, wrap ircd inside of stunnel, then set up your firewall to reject packets to port 6667 on the external interface. People will only be able to connect if they're coming through an SSL-encrypted session, meaning that the conversations can't be sniffed on the wire. The downside is that all of the folks you want to talk to will have to be running stunnel themselves, but if you can get 'em to figure out IRC, they can probably handle stunnel.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to think of LEDs as cute little indicator lights. A nice tiny, soft green LED light tells me that my monitor is on, or blinkenlights let me know that packets are flowing through my router. An orange LED might alert me to standby mode on a device. None of them were really all that visible unless I was looking directly at them, and certainly none put out any ambient light.
Then I got my newest computer. This thing has a single blue LED backlighting an area the size of a dime, behind the power button on the case. When I turn off all the lights, after a minute or so of my eyes adapting, the single blue LED gives off enough light to illuminate half the room. For the first week or so, I had trouble getting to sleep because of the light... From one blue LED.
As the technology gets better I can imagine LED lamps coming in vogue. I seriously doubt that the end of the bulb will come anytime soon, though. Probably not in my lifetime.
This story is relevant because there are a lot of people who actually went to various Slashdot MeetUps. If you want to bitch about paid ads on Slashdot, call me when the next Roland Piquepaille story is posted.
First off, the PeerGuardian concept assumes that all enemy attacks are going to come from known enemy IP space. This is a dangerous and rather dumb assumption; nothing says that the RIAA or BayTSP et al are scanning/probing P2P networks from their own IP space. They might not be popular, but most of these organizations are full of lawyers and other relatively smart people. They do have at least half a clue.
It's long been rumored that some of these organizations recruit a) employees to run P2P crawlers at home and b) students to run P2P crawlers on campus. The fact that they've somehow obtained access to Internet2 makes the idea that they're paying students to run P2P crawlers all the more likely. My guess is that running P2P spidering software on behalf of RIAA might be part of some silent settlements that we aren't hearing about. "We caught you sharing files you're not allowed to. Either we sue you, you pay us $2000 and we go away, or you run this nice little program and promise not to tell anyone..."
So, PeerGuardian blocks a few connections from "known" RIAA IP space (nevermind that many of the blocks are a bit overzealous and will generate false positives). The user is lulled into a false sense of security - hey, it's working! Connections from those evil bastards are being stopped! I'm safe!!
But are you sure that the connection from a Comcast cablemodem isn't really an RIAA lawyer's home PC? How do you know what application is really connecting to you from that rice.edu address?
Secondly, from what I understand of the C&D letters being sent to ISPs, and perhaps even some of the lawsuits being filed, often times no connection was involved at all. The P2P spidering software does a search for "Britney Spears MP3," parses the results, and builds a list of IP/Date/Filename. They don't actually try to connect to your computer and download the file, otherwise Professor Usher would never have been threatened, admins would not be getting C&D letters regarding IPs which have never been lit up, etc.
PeerGuardian is a nice idea. It apparently makes a lot of people feel better. And it might even work if this was 1980 when everyone on the internet was exactly who they said they were.
Don't go crying to the PeerGuardian authors when you get caught anyway.
You're just jealous that Freenet doesn't support realtime audio streaming.
:)
Yet.
Quoting further from the link you posted: So let's say I'm a party to a phone conversation with my friend Bill, who was telling me all about his new job. Seeing as how I'm on the other end of the line, how is it not possible for me to "intercept" the oral communication? This could be interpreted such that anyone engaging in a telephone call is guilty of a misdemeanor!
How in the name of all that is holy do such vague and ambiguous laws get passed?
Answer 1: I couldn't afford a 6-pack of Guinness, so I went with the next best thing.
Answer 2: I would have grabbed a 12-pack, but 12 Heinekens mean that I'll be seriously dehydrated when I wake up, so I had to stick with 6, or else get a 12-pack of Bud.
Answer 3: MADD is an American organization, so getting drunk on beer imported from Holland doesn't count.
Answer 4: I don't know Bill W.
If none of these answers were suitable, feel free to send me a case of your favorite poison...
Talk about false premises, your statement assumes that the Google guys are going to be selling their stock sometime soon. If you'd RTFA, you'd know that Page and Brin earned 150K a year, and Schmidt earned 250K/year. Cutting their salaries to $1 does mean a substantial tax savings, as the poster indicated.
Not that it really matters when you're worth what these guys are worth. I think they're doing it as a statement, not to save a few inconsequential thousand dollars in taxes.
Your attempt to politicize the issue is really scummy.
As a previous poster mentioned, high SAT or ACT scores will help, whether you finished high school or not. I took the ACT twice, and got a 31 and 32. My SAT was decent (1350) but not outstanding. On the ACT scores alone, I could have walked into pretty much any university I wanted; I was being actively recruited by any number of "top" universities around the country, well after I'd stopped going to high school. They'd gotten copies of my test scores from god-knows-where, and were more than happy to take me if I wanted to pay.
In the end I did a semester at the local state U, then decided that environment was for the birds, and got an AAS at the community college. The instructors there were actual industry professionals, not career educators. Nothing against career educators, I've got some in the family, but for tech skills I'd rather learn from someone who's proficient in the industry as opposed to someone who's proficient as a teacher.
I don't know how this works for someone living in a foreign country. I presume that each country probably has its own standardized tests ala ACT/SAT, and the scores or transcripts could be sent. There are plenty of folks here on student visas, so while I don't know how the import process works, there obviously is one. In addition to speaking with admissions advisors, it might help to write or call the Egyptian embassy in the US.
Looking back, I wouldn't do anything differently if I had the chance. I do have a tendency to skirt the GED issue on the resume, e.g. under Education I list my college/degree, followed by my high school. I don't claim on my resume that I graduated, but I don't say that I got a GED instead, either. Nobody's ever asked.
Let me add a couple of examples to further the point that you made.
Scenario 1: You go to the corner store, grab a 6-pack of Heineken, and walk to the checkout counter. The cashier tells you that your total is $7.48. You put four $2 bills on the counter. The cashier says, "We don't take those." The cashier is not violating the law; you have no debt to the store, the beer is still technically theirs. The store is not required to accept any particular form of payment from you.
Scenario 2: You go to the bar, grab a stool, and order a Heineken. The bartender brings it to you, and you drink it. You go to leave, and the bartender tells you that your total is $2.25. You put two $2 bills on the bar (and being a good patron, you tell the bartender to keep the change, of course!). The bartender says, "We don't take those." The bartender is violating the law. When you drank the beer, you incurred a debt to the bar; the bar is now obligated to accept any legal tender as payment.
Re: "the law," it's 31 USC 5103.
The whole "protecting the president" assignment came decades later, and while it's the task they're currently best known for, a large part of their work still goes towards the original goal. The Secret Service has field offices in all major US cities and many locales overseas, and when you consider that the president can only be in one place at a time (and is not constantly being threatened in all the other places where USSS has a presence), it becomes evident that most of the manpower is spent doing other things.
Among those other things, they assist with certain fraud investigations, especially mail fraud. When I worked in a retail postal facility, we'd get calls from USSS almost as often as USPIS. More recently, they've been called upon by various agencies to help investigate computer-related crimes, financial ones in particular. For example, they have an office specifically dedicated to investigating "419" scams (those emails you get from Prince Mambuto's widow in Nigeria who wants to transfer ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS to your bank account) - next time you get one, forward it to 419.fcd(at)usss.treas.gov with a quick note that you didn't lose any money.
Still believe that you're using fair screening procedures?
What someone has said or done on the internet prior to applying for employment with your company is, generally, none of your business. I'll grant that there are possible exceptions. I suppose that if your company has a strict "drug free" policy, and you discover that the applicant runs the local NORML chapter's website (and you're positive that it's the same person), he's probably not the right candidate. If he checked the "No" box next to the "Have you ever been convicted of a felony?" question (which is another rant that I'll save for a later time) but you determine that he's been convicted of a felony - and, again, you're sure that it's the same person - then you're probably right to reject his application.
But someone's past behavior as recorded online generally should have nothing to do with your hiring decisions, especially if your Google results reflect actions taken outside of a workplace. If I want to get drunk and make tasteless and off-color posts on Fark, that's my business. I damned sure better not find out that anyone has round-filed my resume simply because they found my blog and disagreed with my political commentary, or found posts that I've made on message boards deriding certain companies, or learned that I used to play a certain type of character in a game that they don't like.
I live in Memphis, fairly close to the "Six Carrier Pine" pictured on that site. Those photos are completely deceptive, except perhaps for this one.
There's nothing natural about that structure whatsoever. For starters, we don't have trees that tall around here, you can see how it dwarfs the real trees in the area. It's too uniform and deliberate to be a real tree; hell, my artificial Christmas tree looks more realistic. 6 cell carriers were footing the bill for this structure and they couldn't build something a tad more lifelike?
If anything, the camo tower draws more attention to itself. I've learned to "tune out" the regular cell towers, sort of like I can look around and not notice power lines or other common infrastructure. But there's no tuning this ugly thing out. I wish they'd have just put up a normal cell tower.
Some of their other stuff looks nice though. Considering the amount of churches around here, they should have gone with the tower-in-a-steeple idea.
No, professional mass mailers should be using this phrase if they want to appear reputable in their field. Jane Public, who operates a charity and not a mass mailing company, might describe her mailing list as "double opt-in" and might ask the computer store for "more memory" when her disk is filling up.
I accidentally read that as "wife detector." If you can get one of those for $100, it would probably be more useful than the Canary...
And if you have seven friends with the same amount of cash, you can afford to fill up your gas tank. Of course, your 7 friends will be wanting to carpool...
To heck with Armageddon, when do I get to make Deep Impact with Leelee Sobieski?
So what? If Philip Morris bought Slashdot, would you stop coming?