"Yesterday, I made inane commentary, ripped off images from the parent site, and quoted blocks of text whole-sale. I did this instead of submitting a story to Slashdot with links to the original site, because that wouldn't get me and CNET ad revenue. And now I'm doing it again today."
Can we please get a Roland filter, a la Jon Katz? And can Slashdot please stop linking to useless blogs?
Please. Those guys are supposed to be security wizards! And now one of them is caught using plain HTTP to access gmail? I hope they laughed hard at him. Even securety noobs like me know when to use HTTP and HTTPS.
Um...the really smart people aren't using https. They're using http/https via VPN or SSH tunnel to a more trusted network.
It's a bunch of unfunny people who think that exploding picture replicators near buildings in SL comprises some sort of Jacobin revolution. I'm serious. Look at their white paper.
Or maybe it's a bunch of people who are really amused at how seriously people are taking this stuff.
Seriously, people. Just because someone writes a "white paper", doesn't mean they seriously believe what's written. Did it occur to you that half of the crap "terrorist" groups publish on the web/satellite TV etc is just to get a rise out of everyone else? Don't you remember middle school? How many times do we have to talk about trolls?
The slippage of the blocks against one another as people walked would generate power through the principle of the dynamo, a device that converts the energy of motion into that of an electric current.
Ever walked in sand? It's many, many times slower and harder. So what are they going to do with travellers that are already exhausted from travel? Piss them off with a hard-to-walk-on floor. There's also NEVER 30,000 people in South Station; where did they get that number from? Let's put this in perspective: Fenway stadium, average summer weekend game, is ~30,000 people. Even at peak commuter rush hour, I think you'd be hard pressed to find even one TENTH that number of people at any one time.
The electric current generated by the Crowd Farm could then be used for educational purposes, such as lighting up a sign about energy.
Wow. Oh. Wow.
The MBTA (which is BILLIONS of dollars in debt) and Amtrak (same...) have much bigger priorities than some stupid concept like this. How about PA systems which actually work (and don't broadcast "please report suspicious packages, safety is our NUMBER ONE PRIORITY!" every 2 minutes), bus fareboxes which work in cold weather, online lookup+refilling of Charliecard balances, integration of Charliecards into the parking garages, or online bus status? (the busses have been equipped for years with such a capability.)
Or even the "signaling" systems in the orange line which are constantly broken, or replacing more cars on the green line (the newer cars use much more efficient motors which are also capable of regenerative braking), same for the red line. The entire orange and blue lines are also non-regenerative braking as well.
I told him to be more transparent, and stop ducking the hard questions. He said that he wanted to do that.
Maybe he does (bwahaha, you don't get to a federal government position that high up by being "transparent", Bruce) - but if you think the Bush administration was controlling with scientists and public health officials (see recent stuff from surgeon general), I bet his control of "security" people is even worse.
Most of it was off the record, but he asked me how the TSA could overcome its negative image.
First off, why didn't Bruce say, "I'll only come if everything is on the record?" As it stands, this is basically a PR puff piece for nerds.
Second, to actually answer the question:
Don't make mothers drink their own breast milk. When stupid shit like this happens, INVESTIGATE, and criminally charge the officers involved (Color of Law, anyone?) Punishing for "abuse of power" should be your #1 or #2 priority.
Don't confiscate ANYTHING without tagging it and giving someone a claims ticket for the trip home, unless storing it does represent a danger. Or, destroy everything instead of forking it over to a well-connected-guy's pawn shop where they make millions selling everything, even items with clear identification. Conflict of interest, anyone?
Stop thefts at the screening line by scam artists who employ complex plans such as "wait for the sucker to put his laptop on the belt, then slow the line down with a guy with tons of metal objects on him."
Actually screen your employees. Arrest and jail them for falsifying a statement if it turns out they lied. Right now, they just get booted out the door, right?
Stop luggage theft. It's pretty embarrassing when baggage handlers walk in and out of an airport with whatever they please. I remember seeing on national TV security camera footage of a woman hauling garbage bags filled with clothing out to her car.
Stop harassing the shit out of private aviation pilots. Oh, btw, if you send a blackhawk after some poor guy that wandered into restricted airspace, make sure the civilian-aviation-frequency radios on the blackhawk actually work.
I'm too disgusted to keep thinking about this. Overall? Don't do something unless/until you can do it competently.
FYI: KisMAC doesn't work in passive mode in the latest ibooks with Atheros AR5008 chipset.
You mean Macbook; I know, stupid term, but "iBook" means a completely different platform, albeit in the same market segment. And it doesn't work in any INTEL Macs; it looks like it works, acts like it works- finds some networks- but nothing beyond broadcast SSID frames are recorded, except for a very limited number of people who probably have one specific revision. You're best off with a PPC system.
Frankly, the guy / the team wasn't getting anything done; this is just a formal announcement for what's been going on for more than a year. The application has seen no UI refinement in 2+ years, there is very little proper documentation, nobody's doing a good job of actually tracking what hardware does/doesn't work, the changelogs aren't maintained, and there's been very little progress on the most important front: support of built-in Apple hardware. Kismet now has more support for said hardware than KisMac does.
This is a complete cop-out. It's been on the brink of abandonware practically since it started.
TFA states that water is the "kryptonite" of the superstrong paper. Doesn't that kill its practicality in things like planes and automobiles?
Carbon fiber is a floppy woven cloth that can be cut with scissors, but that doesn't stop people from building planes, cayaks, and golf club shafts with the stuff by making a composite with epoxy.
Carbon fiber is great stuff- its main failing is that nobody can make the stuff fast enough (or manufacturers are intentionally not ramping up capacity to milk the aerospace/defense industry.) Boeing and the USAF are buying the stuff by the football field for their planes.
Pierre Salinger was kind of a crackpot at this point in his career, so just because he believed somebody was an MI-5 operative doesn't mean much. He was a laughing stock because of all of his conspiracy theories at the time.
Too bad you're using a straw man attack on someone. Just because he's nuts, doesn't mean everything he says is false.
Really now, does every profession need it's own appreciation day?
Many people don't consider it a "profession". IT people in many offices are regarded in the same way secretaries were/are.
It's a field where, if you do your job properly, you're largely invisible- and when things break, even if it's not your fault, you're visible, during said crisis. Very high taskloads, deadlines measured in minutes, high specialization/training/experience requirements. You generally get the least/crappiest office space, first to get laid off, last to get additional staff. You're "overhead" in the budget; nobody else is save the janitor and the admin assistant, but he's cozy with upper management. I recall at one company there was a "salary review freeze", and the very day I was told I wouldn't get mine, the president's executive assistant got a 5% raise.
Wikipedia's problem has rarely been with the articles that get widespread review. The problem is with obscure knowledge; pages where only a handful of people maintain them. I wish I could find the op-ed piece I read a year or two ago about how a Florida group was using their Wikipedia entry to disseminate a view supporting their claim to being recognized as a tribe...so they could build a casino. I remember something about numerous statements being wrong, and the only people who would knew it was wrong (other people from that ethnic group who knew the oral history) were unlikely to surf wikipedia, much less correct it, or stick through an 'edit war'.
This doesn't sound like a big deal, until you realize that it's the fringe stuff that can be consulted the most by adults, particularly those who consider themselves well educated.
How many big fish in little ponds have axes to grind? More than most of us suspect, I'm guessing.
Ask is taking the most radical step by unveiling plans for a tool called AskEraser which, it claims, will let people tune whether data is gathered about them on a search-by-search basis."
AHA! But what happens to the logs from the AskEraser tool?
*runs for cover*
(Psst. Serious side note: with AT&T and others happily giving the NSA and others big fat listening tubes, who cares...about the end points? Besides, a 6 month retention policy gives Google plenty of time to do all sorts of analysis. They probably don't need *any* bits of your IP after a few days...)
Does that mean I can be jailed? Just because I'm taking advantage of someone else's screwup?
Yes. If you had any idea that the price was unintentionally set that low, you're criminally responsible for theft.
If the gas was priced several cents lower than it should have been, that's not an obvious error and it could be argued reasonably that you didn't notice. If it's priced at 1/10th the price of other gas and everyone knows that higher octane gas costs more, you'd have a very, very hard time convincing a judge you're truly that stupid you didn't realize you were taking advantage of the price.
Even if the price was identical or slightly less than lower grades, the line of questioning would go something like "aren't you aware that premium gas always costs more than other grades?" "Did you see any promotional materials indicating a special?" "Did you confirm the price with any of the staff despite noticing the lower than usual price?"
Stealing something from someone else is one form of conversion. However, conversion is not limited to theft: conversion can also be accomplished by moving, transferring, discarding, hiding, vandalizing, or destroying another person's chattel. Merely using another person's chattel can be grounds for conversion in certain cases.
If this were a violation of the fifth amendment, so would the IRS putting a lien on someone's property for tax purposes.
Number one, liens don't prevent usage of property. The title to your house has a mortgage lien on it from the day you buy it until the mortgage is paid off, but you still live in it, modify it, etc. Your car has a bank lien on it until the car loan is paid off, but you can drive it, modify it, etc.
Second, the IRS doesn't go around putting liens on things and confiscating assets without due process, which satisfies the 5th amendment.
Wow. Even for the Slashdot crowd that likes to run fast and loose with copyright, that cut-and-paste article summary was pretty bad.
It's not "fair use" to just fill a slashdot "story" with paragraphs from the story you're linking to. Give us an actual summary, a more informative/in depth article, or don't bother posting your submission at all.
The third source, who also spoke on condition of anonymity,
Sure would be nice if the US Press Core grew a pair. Everywhere else in the world, officials put their name to their comments because the press won't print comments without any name; there's no accountability, so people have no incentive to tell the truth, so there's no point in printing the comments. I'm so fed up with US politicians and officials covering their asses with "anonymous" comments, and the press core lapping it up.
For chrissakes, some of these people are even telling the press exactly how to "anonymously" describe them: Cheney, for example, always demands to be quoted as "a senior Bush administration official."
When the first canals were built in the 18th century that connected the centre of Manchester with the local coal mines, the price of coal fell by half. It wasn't just coal, suddenly the cotton from the New World could be transported from Liverpool to Manchester in a matter of days - not in the weeks of yester-year.
I don't see any validity in your comparison; the article is about last-mile connectivity, and you're talking about..end-to-end delivery paths. The internet is nothing like a dedicated canal; it's a public road system.
As such, the better comparison would be as if said grandmother got a 3-lane driveway from her garage to the local street, and she's got a bicycle in the garage and bad knees. The slowest bottlenecks are the rest of the internet and her home computer; PCI busses can't push data any faster than about 200-300MB/sec, which is what, 2-3GB? Most datacenters offer 10mbit-all-you-can-eat or 100mbit billed-by-the-bit. Sure, there's faster- but it's megabucks, the stuff only major corporations can afford.
This Silicon Snake Oil. Read Cliff Stoll's book by the same title.
While I'm sure folks appreciate your safety message, please don't try to practice chemistry at the same time. Both glass and asbestos are silicates, and are indeed chemically related.
Right back at you. There are two kinds of asbestos- one is cancerous, the other is not. And glass particles do not cause silicosis, silica does...
Garnet, Talc, Mica, and Quartz are all silicates too. Saying "glass and asbestos are chemically related" is about as relevant as comparing water to hydrogen peroxide, asshat.
This year's Usenix security symposium includes a paper that implements a "cheat" utility, which allows any non-privileged user to run his/her program, e.g., like so 'cheat 99% program' thereby insuring that the programs would get 99% of the CPU cycles, regardless of the presence of any other applications in the system, and in some cases (like Linux), in a way that keeps the program invisible from CPU monitoring tools (like 'top').
Next up, a virus which senses bad grammar and punishes you by using 99% of your CPU. Seriously, somewhere a middle school English teacher is crying, and doesn't know why.
Breathing in small amounts of glass smoke is incredibly bad for your lungs. That's why they banned asbestos, after all.
Asbestos has nothing to do with glass, only certain kinds of asbestos fibers are cancer-causing, and they are incredibly small- invisible to the unaided eye. But, fiberglass dust/fibers are now known to be harmful; always wear workgloves, long clothing, and a respirator when handling/installing fiberglass insulation. Lot of firms have gone to blown-in borax-treated newspaper fluff because it's safer to handle and easier to install.
As someone who used to work for Comcast allow me to say rotflmao. Either you are one lucky sob or you are lying. Just as a matter of example (one among many) during the entire nine months I worked for Comcast the entire state of Illinois never left the outage board.
I don't live in Illinois. I and my parents live in the northeast, which is where MediaOne started. That's probably why we've always had decent service. That and the fact that Comcast answers to the public utility commission state-wide, and in Boston, the mayor's office.
We've certainly had some outages, but they were brief (few hours) and half the time, weather related (ie, major storm.) We've even received partial service refunds if we complained enough.
Router/signal compatibility. Comcast has switched signals several times and in two cases, it caused horrendous performance. There's also a particular cablemodem (has a big blue "sleep" button on top) that has serious problems with high packet rates and connections (ie, BitTorrent crashes it.)
Interference.
Local loop, backbone, and uplink utilization. Guess what, guys? Sometimes traffic peaks for strange reasons. Sometimes it's a virus outbreak, a new movie trailer, or a big news story.
THE INTERNET . It's unreliable, not guaranteed, never has been, and YOU ALL KNOW THIS AND HAVE BEEN TOLD IT OVER AND OVER AND OVER. I work for a university. We have seriously fat pipes. We have a 10Gbit backbone. And some sites I can FTP from at 2MB/sec. Others, I get 40KB/sec. "Speed tester" services compete for bandwidth just like everyone else. Stop holding them up as some pure, holy source of internet traffic that magically flows through every router at maximum speed.
Some content is akamai-zed. I get Apple's software updates at maximum line speed, for example.
If you're not happy with your service, CALL THEM. My parents were some of the first people to get MediaOne service back around '98-'99, and every time they had problems, we picked up the phone, and it was taken care of.
I've had the same experience elsewhere. Any time I have problem with the service, be it regular disconnects or lousy performance- I pick up the phone, and a few minutes later someone is checking into signal to noise ratios and such. If you lease the modem, they're usually happy to try sending out a tech and swapping out a modem if you're polite but clear there's a problem. They're usually even more amenable if you pick up the modem yourself at a "service center."
In my years as a customer and having friends who were customers, I've seen a)flooded junction boxes b)in-house distribution amps turned up too high c)1 failed modem d)one buggy model e)several incompatible modems after "upgrades" to the area network (usually to support faster speeds.)
In short: call comcast, ask them to look into it. They've almost always been helpful, through all the various company changes: MediaOne, RoadRunner, etc.
But at what point will the Federal Government try to link federal funds & REAL ID compliance?
New England pays far more federal taxes than it receives in federal aid. Leaving the union would be a welcome move, as we could stop paying for all the federal welfare to the southern and mid-western states. If you want to read a very amusing (and profanity-laced) rant about this, go see FucktheSouth.com. The last few winters, Bush has slashed the federal home heating assistance programs; we've got people old people freezing to death because they can't afford to heat their homes. Meanwhile, you'll note that programs for midwestern corn and livestock farmers are doing quite well...
You don't understand how pissed off New England has been since 2000. New Hampshire is full of people who *really* don't like anyone telling them what they can/can't do, and they're pretty well armed. Maine's geographically IN Canada anyway, Vermont's voted to impeach Bush more times than I can count. In Massachusetts, residents run the political spectrum, but we're also the ones who started the War of Independence, bitches.
Why? They talk a great talk (and they love to talk- seems they're always giving speeches) but when it comes down to court time, their record is less than stellar, particularly with larger cases. I really don't give a shit about CSS or encrypted music/movies. I do care quite a bit when the government is engaged in unconstitutional wiretapping.
Slashdot Mirror
"Yesterday, I told you about virtual beer.
Translation:
"Yesterday, I made inane commentary, ripped off images from the parent site, and quoted blocks of text whole-sale. I did this instead of submitting a story to Slashdot with links to the original site, because that wouldn't get me and CNET ad revenue. And now I'm doing it again today."
Can we please get a Roland filter, a la Jon Katz? And can Slashdot please stop linking to useless blogs?
Please. Those guys are supposed to be security wizards! And now one of them is caught using plain HTTP to access gmail? I hope they laughed hard at him. Even securety noobs like me know when to use HTTP and HTTPS.
Um...the really smart people aren't using https. They're using http/https via VPN or SSH tunnel to a more trusted network.
It's a bunch of unfunny people who think that exploding picture replicators near buildings in SL comprises some sort of Jacobin revolution. I'm serious. Look at their white paper.
Or maybe it's a bunch of people who are really amused at how seriously people are taking this stuff.
Seriously, people. Just because someone writes a "white paper", doesn't mean they seriously believe what's written. Did it occur to you that half of the crap "terrorist" groups publish on the web/satellite TV etc is just to get a rise out of everyone else? Don't you remember middle school? How many times do we have to talk about trolls?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XQ_GWKvDE0
The slippage of the blocks against one another as people walked would generate power through the principle of the dynamo, a device that converts the energy of motion into that of an electric current.
Ever walked in sand? It's many, many times slower and harder. So what are they going to do with travellers that are already exhausted from travel? Piss them off with a hard-to-walk-on floor. There's also NEVER 30,000 people in South Station; where did they get that number from? Let's put this in perspective: Fenway stadium, average summer weekend game, is ~30,000 people. Even at peak commuter rush hour, I think you'd be hard pressed to find even one TENTH that number of people at any one time.
The electric current generated by the Crowd Farm could then be used for educational purposes, such as lighting up a sign about energy.
Wow. Oh. Wow.
The MBTA (which is BILLIONS of dollars in debt) and Amtrak (same...) have much bigger priorities than some stupid concept like this. How about PA systems which actually work (and don't broadcast "please report suspicious packages, safety is our NUMBER ONE PRIORITY!" every 2 minutes), bus fareboxes which work in cold weather, online lookup+refilling of Charliecard balances, integration of Charliecards into the parking garages, or online bus status? (the busses have been equipped for years with such a capability.)
Or even the "signaling" systems in the orange line which are constantly broken, or replacing more cars on the green line (the newer cars use much more efficient motors which are also capable of regenerative braking), same for the red line. The entire orange and blue lines are also non-regenerative braking as well.
I told him to be more transparent, and stop ducking the hard questions. He said that he wanted to do that.
Maybe he does (bwahaha, you don't get to a federal government position that high up by being "transparent", Bruce) - but if you think the Bush administration was controlling with scientists and public health officials (see recent stuff from surgeon general), I bet his control of "security" people is even worse.
Most of it was off the record, but he asked me how the TSA could overcome its negative image.
First off, why didn't Bruce say, "I'll only come if everything is on the record?" As it stands, this is basically a PR puff piece for nerds.
Second, to actually answer the question:
I'm too disgusted to keep thinking about this. Overall? Don't do something unless/until you can do it competently.
FYI: KisMAC doesn't work in passive mode in the latest ibooks with Atheros AR5008 chipset.
You mean Macbook; I know, stupid term, but "iBook" means a completely different platform, albeit in the same market segment. And it doesn't work in any INTEL Macs; it looks like it works, acts like it works- finds some networks- but nothing beyond broadcast SSID frames are recorded, except for a very limited number of people who probably have one specific revision. You're best off with a PPC system.
Frankly, the guy / the team wasn't getting anything done; this is just a formal announcement for what's been going on for more than a year. The application has seen no UI refinement in 2+ years, there is very little proper documentation, nobody's doing a good job of actually tracking what hardware does/doesn't work, the changelogs aren't maintained, and there's been very little progress on the most important front: support of built-in Apple hardware. Kismet now has more support for said hardware than KisMac does.
This is a complete cop-out. It's been on the brink of abandonware practically since it started.
TFA states that water is the "kryptonite" of the superstrong paper. Doesn't that kill its practicality in things like planes and automobiles?
Carbon fiber is a floppy woven cloth that can be cut with scissors, but that doesn't stop people from building planes, cayaks, and golf club shafts with the stuff by making a composite with epoxy.
Carbon fiber is great stuff- its main failing is that nobody can make the stuff fast enough (or manufacturers are intentionally not ramping up capacity to milk the aerospace/defense industry.) Boeing and the USAF are buying the stuff by the football field for their planes.
Pierre Salinger was kind of a crackpot at this point in his career, so just because he believed somebody was an MI-5 operative doesn't mean much. He was a laughing stock because of all of his conspiracy theories at the time.
Too bad you're using a straw man attack on someone. Just because he's nuts, doesn't mean everything he says is false.
Really now, does every profession need it's own appreciation day?
Many people don't consider it a "profession". IT people in many offices are regarded in the same way secretaries were/are.
It's a field where, if you do your job properly, you're largely invisible- and when things break, even if it's not your fault, you're visible, during said crisis. Very high taskloads, deadlines measured in minutes, high specialization/training/experience requirements. You generally get the least/crappiest office space, first to get laid off, last to get additional staff. You're "overhead" in the budget; nobody else is save the janitor and the admin assistant, but he's cozy with upper management. I recall at one company there was a "salary review freeze", and the very day I was told I wouldn't get mine, the president's executive assistant got a 5% raise.
Someone came in shitfaced drunk, got angry, went berserk, and fucked up a lot of stuff. There's an outage on 40 or so racks at minimum.
Libel lawsuit in 3...2...
This doesn't sound like a big deal, until you realize that it's the fringe stuff that can be consulted the most by adults, particularly those who consider themselves well educated.
How many big fish in little ponds have axes to grind? More than most of us suspect, I'm guessing.
Ask is taking the most radical step by unveiling plans for a tool called AskEraser which, it claims, will let people tune whether data is gathered about them on a search-by-search basis."
AHA! But what happens to the logs from the AskEraser tool?
*runs for cover*
(Psst. Serious side note: with AT&T and others happily giving the NSA and others big fat listening tubes, who cares...about the end points? Besides, a 6 month retention policy gives Google plenty of time to do all sorts of analysis. They probably don't need *any* bits of your IP after a few days...)
Does that mean I can be jailed? Just because I'm taking advantage of someone else's screwup?
Yes. If you had any idea that the price was unintentionally set that low, you're criminally responsible for theft.
If the gas was priced several cents lower than it should have been, that's not an obvious error and it could be argued reasonably that you didn't notice. If it's priced at 1/10th the price of other gas and everyone knows that higher octane gas costs more, you'd have a very, very hard time convincing a judge you're truly that stupid you didn't realize you were taking advantage of the price.
Even if the price was identical or slightly less than lower grades, the line of questioning would go something like "aren't you aware that premium gas always costs more than other grades?" "Did you see any promotional materials indicating a special?" "Did you confirm the price with any of the staff despite noticing the lower than usual price?"
Blocking the use of property is not legally the same as depriving someone of it (although, admittedly, practically-speaking it comes pretty close).
Bullshit. It's called Conversion.
If this were a violation of the fifth amendment, so would the IRS putting a lien on someone's property for tax purposes.
Number one, liens don't prevent usage of property. The title to your house has a mortgage lien on it from the day you buy it until the mortgage is paid off, but you still live in it, modify it, etc. Your car has a bank lien on it until the car loan is paid off, but you can drive it, modify it, etc.
Second, the IRS doesn't go around putting liens on things and confiscating assets without due process, which satisfies the 5th amendment.
Wow. Even for the Slashdot crowd that likes to run fast and loose with copyright, that cut-and-paste article summary was pretty bad.
It's not "fair use" to just fill a slashdot "story" with paragraphs from the story you're linking to. Give us an actual summary, a more informative/in depth article, or don't bother posting your submission at all.
The third source, who also spoke on condition of anonymity,
Sure would be nice if the US Press Core grew a pair. Everywhere else in the world, officials put their name to their comments because the press won't print comments without any name; there's no accountability, so people have no incentive to tell the truth, so there's no point in printing the comments. I'm so fed up with US politicians and officials covering their asses with "anonymous" comments, and the press core lapping it up.
For chrissakes, some of these people are even telling the press exactly how to "anonymously" describe them: Cheney, for example, always demands to be quoted as "a senior Bush administration official."
When the first canals were built in the 18th century that connected the centre of Manchester with the local coal mines, the price of coal fell by half. It wasn't just coal, suddenly the cotton from the New World could be transported from Liverpool to Manchester in a matter of days - not in the weeks of yester-year.
*Long, typical blogger-eze pie-in-the-sky rant snipped*
I don't see any validity in your comparison; the article is about last-mile connectivity, and you're talking about..end-to-end delivery paths. The internet is nothing like a dedicated canal; it's a public road system.
As such, the better comparison would be as if said grandmother got a 3-lane driveway from her garage to the local street, and she's got a bicycle in the garage and bad knees. The slowest bottlenecks are the rest of the internet and her home computer; PCI busses can't push data any faster than about 200-300MB/sec, which is what, 2-3GB? Most datacenters offer 10mbit-all-you-can-eat or 100mbit billed-by-the-bit. Sure, there's faster- but it's megabucks, the stuff only major corporations can afford.
This Silicon Snake Oil. Read Cliff Stoll's book by the same title.
While I'm sure folks appreciate your safety message, please don't try to practice chemistry at the same time. Both glass and asbestos are silicates, and are indeed chemically related.
Right back at you. There are two kinds of asbestos- one is cancerous, the other is not. And glass particles do not cause silicosis, silica does...
Garnet, Talc, Mica, and Quartz are all silicates too. Saying "glass and asbestos are chemically related" is about as relevant as comparing water to hydrogen peroxide, asshat.
This year's Usenix security symposium includes a paper that implements a "cheat" utility, which allows any non-privileged user to run his/her program, e.g., like so 'cheat 99% program' thereby insuring that the programs would get 99% of the CPU cycles, regardless of the presence of any other applications in the system, and in some cases (like Linux), in a way that keeps the program invisible from CPU monitoring tools (like 'top').
Next up, a virus which senses bad grammar and punishes you by using 99% of your CPU. Seriously, somewhere a middle school English teacher is crying, and doesn't know why.
Breathing in small amounts of glass smoke is incredibly bad for your lungs. That's why they banned asbestos, after all.
Asbestos has nothing to do with glass, only certain kinds of asbestos fibers are cancer-causing, and they are incredibly small- invisible to the unaided eye. But, fiberglass dust/fibers are now known to be harmful; always wear workgloves, long clothing, and a respirator when handling/installing fiberglass insulation. Lot of firms have gone to blown-in borax-treated newspaper fluff because it's safer to handle and easier to install.
As someone who used to work for Comcast allow me to say rotflmao. Either you are one lucky sob or you are lying. Just as a matter of example (one among many) during the entire nine months I worked for Comcast the entire state of Illinois never left the outage board.
I don't live in Illinois. I and my parents live in the northeast, which is where MediaOne started. That's probably why we've always had decent service. That and the fact that Comcast answers to the public utility commission state-wide, and in Boston, the mayor's office.
We've certainly had some outages, but they were brief (few hours) and half the time, weather related (ie, major storm.) We've even received partial service refunds if we complained enough.
To name a few:
If you're not happy with your service, CALL THEM. My parents were some of the first people to get MediaOne service back around '98-'99, and every time they had problems, we picked up the phone, and it was taken care of.
I've had the same experience elsewhere. Any time I have problem with the service, be it regular disconnects or lousy performance- I pick up the phone, and a few minutes later someone is checking into signal to noise ratios and such. If you lease the modem, they're usually happy to try sending out a tech and swapping out a modem if you're polite but clear there's a problem. They're usually even more amenable if you pick up the modem yourself at a "service center."
In my years as a customer and having friends who were customers, I've seen a)flooded junction boxes b)in-house distribution amps turned up too high c)1 failed modem d)one buggy model e)several incompatible modems after "upgrades" to the area network (usually to support faster speeds.)
In short: call comcast, ask them to look into it. They've almost always been helpful, through all the various company changes: MediaOne, RoadRunner, etc.
But at what point will the Federal Government try to link federal funds & REAL ID compliance?
New England pays far more federal taxes than it receives in federal aid. Leaving the union would be a welcome move, as we could stop paying for all the federal welfare to the southern and mid-western states. If you want to read a very amusing (and profanity-laced) rant about this, go see FucktheSouth.com. The last few winters, Bush has slashed the federal home heating assistance programs; we've got people old people freezing to death because they can't afford to heat their homes. Meanwhile, you'll note that programs for midwestern corn and livestock farmers are doing quite well...
You don't understand how pissed off New England has been since 2000. New Hampshire is full of people who *really* don't like anyone telling them what they can/can't do, and they're pretty well armed. Maine's geographically IN Canada anyway, Vermont's voted to impeach Bush more times than I can count. In Massachusetts, residents run the political spectrum, but we're also the ones who started the War of Independence, bitches.
If this ruling makes you angry, support the EFF!
Why? They talk a great talk (and they love to talk- seems they're always giving speeches) but when it comes down to court time, their record is less than stellar, particularly with larger cases. I really don't give a shit about CSS or encrypted music/movies. I do care quite a bit when the government is engaged in unconstitutional wiretapping.