The real answer is to put people to work answering the phone. Yes, they cost more than the computer system costs in the short term, but all your customers are happier in the long run also. Besides that, if more people are working the cost can be distributed to more customers and the economy improves, etc.
Personally, as long as the menu is well-designed, and I'm not doing anything that absolutely requires human interaction, I'd rather deal with an automated system. First of all, I don't have to repeatedly explain myself to the automated system about the basics of whatever product or service I'm calling about, because most of the time what I need is one of the menu options. Also, the automated systems usually don't talk in a completely incomprehensible drawl.
My question is how much better is it than simply moving your services to non-standard ports?
Non-standard ports still respond to basic port-scanning. Inactive ports don't respond until the correct sequence of ports is scanned, which will most likely prevent a random attack, and will prevent a directed attack by anyone who can't sniff the packet stream.
I thought that it had been decided - security by obscurity is bad! It creates a false sense of security, leading people to think they are safe when in fact they are not.
How is this "security by obscurity"? Security by obscurity means that security is dependent on the attacker's ignorance of the security scheme. It does not mean that an attacker who has complete knowledge of a system will not be able to gain access. Under this scheme, even if an attacker does know that there is a port combination required, he still needs to know what that combination is before he can gain any access whatsoever. This is what is known as a "password", and I don't know of any secure system that doesn't depend on passwords of some sort. While others have pointed out that discovering the right port combination is trivial for someone who has access to the data packets, getting access to these data packets is generally not a trivial excersize.
Unfortunately some people fall for this. Does anyone have any numbers on just how succesful these e-mails are? Is the American public that ignorant?
No, the American public is not that ignorant. Very few scams are clever enough to hook the American public. Fortunately for the scammers, the American public isn't the target. Just like the Nigerian scam, it only takes about 0.001% of the population to fall for it in order to make a lot of cash.
This is the equivilant, IMHO, of passing bills making abortion illegal. Phone books and compilations are not copyrightable, says the Supreme Court. Feist v. Rural Telecom. Congress cannot change this and prescient would take priority here, the law would be immediatly challenged and overturned if it directly contradicts Feist. IANAL, but this is my read on it.
This would be true if the case were decided solely on the basis of Constitutionality, but it wasn't. If you read the decision, you will see that the Supreme Court rules that the white pages do not meet the statutory requirements for copyright, and Congress can change a statute at any time, which invalidates all court decisions based on that statute.
Now, because the decision did have a Constitutional component, the court may invalidate this potential law, but it is by no means certain.
There's a big difference to politicians between "what it says" and "how we can warp it". Patriot Act, harmless on paper, bad in effect, DMCA same thing
Since when are the Patriot Act and DMCA harmless on paper? They have been used exactly as they were written, and anyone who is surprised by this should have paid more attention to how they were written.
On the other hand, here we have a bill that explicitly limits how it can be applied. As long as that clause doesn't get removed in negotiations, it's pretty iron-clad.
What incentive do printer manufacturers have to treat their customers like criminals?
To be fair, this only treats customers who engage in suspicious activity (as defined by the manufacturer) like criminals. My guess is that roughly 95% of all customers don't care whether or not this is in there, so it doesn't hurt the bottom line in a noticeable manner.
As for the incentive, they most likely want to indemnify themselves in case a criminal organization uses their equipment, and the feds decide to go after the manufacturers, under RICO, Patriot, or whatever other law they can find. This kind of legal battle would have a huge effect on the bottom line.
Sheesh! Its not like people are going to be eating these fish. They could at least make it against the law to release them into the wild & some export restriction. Do they think that there will be some mishap and the fish will mutate into a super fish and do things like file patent lawsuits?
You obviously haven't been to many drunken parties in your life.
I think it's very obvious that natural disaster prediction would be devastating for local and regional economies. In the big picture, as local economies start their own self-destruction, it'll have a bigger effect on the nation as a whole.
I think it's very obvious that natural distasters themselves are devastating for local and regional economies. In the big picture, as tens of thousands of people are killed and hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on rebuilding, it can take several years for these local regions to recover.
It does absolutely no good for the local economy to have massive business investment, if that gets wiped out in a few minutes by an otherwise predictable event.
Do I get in trouble for watching pornography if the neighbor kid hijacks my wireless?
Since this unit is just a receiver, not a transmitter, you won't get into any trouble as long as the only porn you watch on your TV is from DVD's, and not downloaded from the Internet (without transferring it to DVD or VCD first, of course).
Well, it would if you could figure out how to set off gunpowder/cordite... in a vacuum...
For all of you who don't know anything about explosives, explosives are generally self-oxidizing, meaning that they work without exposure to atmospheric oxygen. It's this characteristic that gives them their explosive properties.
Whoa.... Saying it sucked was insightful? More like deluded. Firefly was the best piece of TV to come out in a long, long time. It is too bad that some people were too used to crap to enjoy it.
After reading the original post, I'm pretty sure it was making fun of all those people who have subsequently posted to tell us how much they hate the show, thus the "There, I just saved about 80% of you from having to post to this article.".
Seriously, if you don't like the show, don't waste your time telling all of us who couldn't care less what you think, especially because these comments are rarely anything more insightful than "it sucked". And save the rest of us from having to scroll through reading "It sucked" 500 times just to read a comment that actually contains something meaningful.
Um... actually, if Linux is going to make it on the desktop, it is incorrect to say that it will never do so.
The truth value of that "if" will not be determined until Linux actually makes it on the desktop. Until it actually happens, the claim is just speculation, so the statement of "never" is not false. Not to mention the problem in defining & determining "makes it".
Sure they can, as long as they make Starbuck a hard drinking, hard gambling, sexually agressive woman. Otherwise there'd be no reason to keep the name "Starbuck".
Still a lot of companies thinks: "If it's free it cannot be woth much".
This is basically free as a beer/free as a speech paradox: They have to understand that it's not about price but it's about values.
It's about values for them, too. Specifically, the value of their stock. Unless, of course, you can convince the shareholders that open source values are more important than profit.
A lot of people never think about it, but corporate management is ethically and morally required to act in the interest of the shareholders, so doing something just because a large movement of developers who don't own much stock believe strongly that it is morally right is, for them, morally wrong.
Surely then, the anti position should be considered the least plausible, since the status quo is to recgonize the basic human right to keep and bear arms.
Not really. From what I read, the hypothesis "gun abolition reduces violent crime" was compared to the hypothesis "gun abundance reduces violent crime". Obviously there is a lot of evidence that isn't presented in this brief book summary, but I could easily imagine that while there is no evidence to support the first argument, there could be a lot of evidence to counter the second argument, meaning that anti-gun is less crazy that pro-gun.
If you are pro-gun, but don't try to argue the deterrent effect, you wouldn't be considered 3 cuckoos.
I'm sorry, is it just me or do they seem to be taking a bad shortcut to get to a good end? It doesn't seem like they are doing this correctly. Why not plan to migrate to unicode? Their choice seems shortsighted and flawed. I hope they atleast considered unicode and came up with real reasons why not to use it.
It would be a bad shortcut 15 years ago. Today it is a necessity. There's more than just DNS servers at stake. Web browsers would have to be rewritten to accept Unicode URLs, and everybody would have to get the new version. Tens of thousands of databases that store URLs would have to be rewritten to support Unicode. Standard Internet utilities, such as telnet, ftp, and ping, would have to be reviewed to ensure compatibility, and every networked application that transports data across the Internet would be affected. All of these systems would need to be tested to ensure that there's sufficient buffer space for the new characters, and that there's no buffer overflows or other newly introduced bugs. Individually, this may be simple, but there are a lot of these programs out there, and converting all of them would be a huge effort.
I play a similar game. It's called "Real Life". I also spend a lot of time creating social relationshipsand building things. Right now, I've got a ton of friends, several hot girlfriends, and I'm building a business. It's really fucking exciting. The best part of it? I don't even need to sit in front of a computer for 12 hours a day! If anybody wants to try "Real Life", just turn your computer "off". It's very interactive, and very, very realistic.
Since you're posting on slashdot, I'll take it that "a ton of friends" comes out to about 5, and "several hot girlfriends" refers to your porno collection. Since you are advocating turning off the computer, I assume that this porno collection consists largely of magazines and videos.
From the article:
"In theory, these oscillators could recapture most of the energy expended in a calculation and reuse it other calculations."
What the hell does this mean?
4(0100) + 3(0011) = 7(0111)
Ok, now, let's take that 0111 and use the bits for the answer to 7+8.
Is that really what they're saying?
"The concept is somewhat analogous to hybrid cars now on the market that take the energy generated during braking and recycle it into electricity used to power the car."
Ummm, no. The car analogy would work if we captured the waste heat thrown off, and converted it back to electricity. The concept here is that we don't waste the heat to begin with. This would be analogous to driving back to point A in reverse and reclaiming the fuel.
I'm now going to get technical on your ass.
Actually, what happens in a standard x86 processor is that if I want to add 4 + 3, and then add 8 to the result, I'm already reusing the bits from the 7 in the process.
Here's how it works:
I want to add 3 to 4. I put 0100 in my processor's A register, and I put 0011 in the B register. I then send an "add" command to the processor. The result is that I now have 0111 in the A register. Now let's say I want to add 1 to this. I put 0001 in the B register, which switches one bit from a 1 to a 0. There was energy in that 1, which, in a normal processor, was "lost" (converted to waste heat) by grounding that bit. I now give the processor another add command, which changes the A register to 1000. The processor grounds out three bits, and takes energy from the power supply to energize the fourth bit. In this process (which takes a few nanoseconds) I have lost the energy to power 4 bits (assuming my registers initially were 0000).
What a "reversible computer" would do is, instead of grounding out those bits, it would move the energy into a reservoir, and then use the energy from that reservoit to power other bits. It would also take the energy included in the bits that I sent to the processor as the "add" commands and put it back into the reservoir. If 50% of the bit energy could be reclaimed (which is a very conservative estimate), the processor would generate a lot less heat, requiring less cooling (which means less energy wasted by your CPU fan as well). This is almost exactly what a hybrid car does during braking, as a hybrid car does not capture the waste heat thrown off by the brakes, but instead uses magnet-assisted braking, which directly converts some of the car's kinetic energy to electricity.
Yet more evidence that information is in fact a quantifiable property. We're starting to see hints that information and energy are flip sides of the same coin.
I'm not just spewing. There are serious theoretical problems associated with how information "disappears" when it falls into a black hole. Fortunately, you get the information back again from Hawking radiation, as the hole converts mass into energy. From a theoretical standpoint it's really starting to look like "information == energy," or to put it more precisely, there is a specific equivalence between information and energy like the equivalence between matter and energy.
Actually, you are just spewing, at least kind of. As long as the Second Law of Thermodynamics holds true, there is no "conservation of information" law in this universe.
What's really happening here is a lot more simple. In a digital computer, information is stored as a series of energy states. A bit is either 1 or 0, with a 1 meaning that a circuit is energized, while a 0 means that the circuit is not energized. The important thing is that both energized and non-energized circuits hold exactly the same amount of information.
The only thing that this article is talking about is storing the energy from the energized bits in an "energy cache" once the 1 has been switched back to 0, so it can then be used to power other bits. It's really not a very radical idea at all. The only semi-radical thought here is that it would be worthwhile to recover this energy, and that chip manufacturers would benefit from investing in this research.
If Microsoft was patenting this technology, most/. users would call it evil, right? But, you claim Mozilla/Opera should patent it, and that would be good, right? Somehow I don't quite follow the logic here.
Wait, I've heard of this. I think it's something called a "joke". To fully comprehend it, apparently you need something called a "sense of humor". I'm not sure what it is, but supposedly it helps in attracting members of the "opposite sex", whatever those are.
This guy is not a Redhat founder, he's just some MBA dork they picked up to make the VCs happy. You can see how quickly he's sold out the dream of linux on everything and turned it into the VC dream of 'linux on everything profitable'.
Which is exactly why his opinion is so important. Because it's people like him, not people like/. posters, who make decisions like "I can't work with this complicated system, Windows is so much easier, so everyone in the company needs to use MS for everything."
Also, despite his probable lack of computer knowlege, he is probably a lot smarter that your average computer user, so if he doesn't think it's ready, your average computer user won't think it's ready, either. As long as Linux is more difficult to install and use than Windows, it doesn't stand a chance. Even though a lot of improvements have been made, none of the UI's for it are anywhere close to being as good as Microsoft's. If you want Liinux to dominate Microsoft (and, clearly, the CEO of Redhat will care about that), you have to remember that most of the people who use computers today didn't before Windows 95.
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Now, because the decision did have a Constitutional component, the court may invalidate this potential law, but it is by no means certain.
On the other hand, here we have a bill that explicitly limits how it can be applied. As long as that clause doesn't get removed in negotiations, it's pretty iron-clad.
As for the incentive, they most likely want to indemnify themselves in case a criminal organization uses their equipment, and the feds decide to go after the manufacturers, under RICO, Patriot, or whatever other law they can find. This kind of legal battle would have a huge effect on the bottom line.
It does absolutely no good for the local economy to have massive business investment, if that gets wiped out in a few minutes by an otherwise predictable event.
Seriously, if you don't like the show, don't waste your time telling all of us who couldn't care less what you think, especially because these comments are rarely anything more insightful than "it sucked". And save the rest of us from having to scroll through reading "It sucked" 500 times just to read a comment that actually contains something meaningful.
Seriously, what makes you think that you're entitled to anything if you're not willing to pay for it?
A lot of people never think about it, but corporate management is ethically and morally required to act in the interest of the shareholders, so doing something just because a large movement of developers who don't own much stock believe strongly that it is morally right is, for them, morally wrong.
If you are pro-gun, but don't try to argue the deterrent effect, you wouldn't be considered 3 cuckoos.
Actually, what happens in a standard x86 processor is that if I want to add 4 + 3, and then add 8 to the result, I'm already reusing the bits from the 7 in the process.
Here's how it works: I want to add 3 to 4. I put 0100 in my processor's A register, and I put 0011 in the B register. I then send an "add" command to the processor. The result is that I now have 0111 in the A register. Now let's say I want to add 1 to this. I put 0001 in the B register, which switches one bit from a 1 to a 0. There was energy in that 1, which, in a normal processor, was "lost" (converted to waste heat) by grounding that bit. I now give the processor another add command, which changes the A register to 1000. The processor grounds out three bits, and takes energy from the power supply to energize the fourth bit. In this process (which takes a few nanoseconds) I have lost the energy to power 4 bits (assuming my registers initially were 0000).
What a "reversible computer" would do is, instead of grounding out those bits, it would move the energy into a reservoir, and then use the energy from that reservoit to power other bits. It would also take the energy included in the bits that I sent to the processor as the "add" commands and put it back into the reservoir. If 50% of the bit energy could be reclaimed (which is a very conservative estimate), the processor would generate a lot less heat, requiring less cooling (which means less energy wasted by your CPU fan as well). This is almost exactly what a hybrid car does during braking, as a hybrid car does not capture the waste heat thrown off by the brakes, but instead uses magnet-assisted braking, which directly converts some of the car's kinetic energy to electricity.
Actually, you are just spewing, at least kind of. As long as the Second Law of Thermodynamics holds true, there is no "conservation of information" law in this universe.
What's really happening here is a lot more simple. In a digital computer, information is stored as a series of energy states. A bit is either 1 or 0, with a 1 meaning that a circuit is energized, while a 0 means that the circuit is not energized. The important thing is that both energized and non-energized circuits hold exactly the same amount of information.
The only thing that this article is talking about is storing the energy from the energized bits in an "energy cache" once the 1 has been switched back to 0, so it can then be used to power other bits. It's really not a very radical idea at all. The only semi-radical thought here is that it would be worthwhile to recover this energy, and that chip manufacturers would benefit from investing in this research.
Also, despite his probable lack of computer knowlege, he is probably a lot smarter that your average computer user, so if he doesn't think it's ready, your average computer user won't think it's ready, either. As long as Linux is more difficult to install and use than Windows, it doesn't stand a chance. Even though a lot of improvements have been made, none of the UI's for it are anywhere close to being as good as Microsoft's. If you want Liinux to dominate Microsoft (and, clearly, the CEO of Redhat will care about that), you have to remember that most of the people who use computers today didn't before Windows 95.