Boy, this thread is going off on a bit of a tangent.
You bring up an interesting point regarding the 6 guys sending money home.
I've seen estimates from about 30 billion to 300 billion dollars that are being being wired to other nations anually from legal and illegal workers in the US. While I can't fault the legal ones, especially since I occasionally send funds to help my Brazilian in-laws, the illegals are an unpleasant and growing addition to this problem. Why is it a problem? Because the money is not spent on the US economy. It is hemorraging from our economic system. Sure, it's cheap labor, but when this cheap labor is exlpoited on a large scale, the effect from disenfranchising an increasingly significant demographic of your customers (the U.S. workers that cost a bit more but will actually spend their money in the U.S.) by off-shore outsourcing and hiring illegal immigrants who wire their money back to the homeland, the system (U.S. econonmy) will eventually fail due to the money not re-entering it. Some say it is a nice way to get economic aid directly to the poorest residents of other nations -- not a completely unreasonable point, but at the same time we shouldn't be using that point to justify being a welfare system for other countries at the expense of our own country's economic well-being. I just hope that we find some sort of balance before it's too late. We don't want to be too protective or too open.
I'm not sure if many folks noticed your reference to the quote attributed to Bill Gates (usually stating that it occurred in 1981) about 640KB being enough. I've heard this quote off and on ever since taking an interest in computers almost 20 years ago. Your post reminded me of it and I decided to try to find an informative link that would cite an authoritative source and discovered that I couldn't. In fact I found that it may have been a mis-quote or simply an urban legend.
Even though in the coxtext of the time it was allegedly said it isn't such a ridiculous statment I find it strange that it is so widely accepted without an original source such as a magazine interview.
Interesting trick about telling the guys at the front desk that it's illegal to surrender your U.S. Passport to the hotel. I'm a bit surprised that they'd buy that, I'll consider trying that if they try to hold mine. I haven't traveled in Europe much but in Africa and South America they'd typically want a copy at a minimum.
If you're worried about problems such as natural disasters, unrest, etc. in a country you're visiting or residing in it would be a good idea to register at: https://travelregistration.state.gov/ That way the embassy would know you're in that country and would be able to notify you of problems and give advice as what to do to deal with these problems.
Thanks for the heads up, an AC schooled me in not so nice a manner -- subtly hinting that I managed to be both preachy and dense in the same post (without spelling it out again). Darn liberal arts majors alway getting tricky with me! Simply called me a retard and explained the reference. Now I'll ride to work on the short bus, I suppose.
Retard's a bit cold -- but might be a bit deserved... Nice reference, the first time I read it I only heard something swoosh right over my head. Now I know what it was. Ouch. I'll crawl back into my cave now.
Is that your solution to life's problems? Run away from them?
I see you're no Einstein.
How the hell does this comment get modded +5?
+2 Anti-American/Govt (always popular here -- darn cyber hippies...) ?
+2 Bitch and do nothing ?
+1 Cheap and irrelevant attack on a message board ?
It reads more like a troll comment to me.
While the parent's post isn't incredibly insightful, the rebuke is pathetic. Why not propose alternatives than simply run away? It's a lot harder, but real efforts might actually fix the problem or at least mitigate it somewhat. I'm not saying that things are going well; in fact, I belive that this administration will likely go down in history as one of the worst and I shudder to think about what damage the winner of the next election is going to do the "fix" it.
If you're as clever as you seem to think you are, please go into politics and fix some problems, otherwise keep your comments relevant to whatever it is that you are good at.
In the long run, cell phone contracts aren't that great of a deal if you want high-end techy phones -- ESPECIALLY if you work or travel frequently overseas. When I'm in the US I only use pre-paid services. To do this, I typically have to use imported unlocked GSM phones as I prefer not to buy hacked unlocked phones.
I currently am using an HP 6915 that was imported from England long before the US version was made available. It has worked all over Africa, South America and many parts of the US (some parts of the US still don't have GSM service).
The iPhone in its hacked form does work overseas and is a lot more responsive than my Windows crippled HP mess. If the iPhone had a real GPS in it I might consider risking a purchase and then unlocking it.
In short, we don't all buy phone/network combinations. Some of use work very had to avoid such inconveniences.
We would certainly want to reduce the chance of a foreign person introducing undocumented features into our weapons systems by using "cleared" US citizens. These guys will work for contractors and I thought this was the only way things were being done.
This article surprised me - I thought there were sufficient controls in place to prevent just any code being used on sensitive systems. TFA seems to suggest that it's a lot more wild than I had suspected.
COTS stuff will always have a chance of a bad American or foreigner adding backdoors or whatever and even some guy with a security clearance could go bad -- it's just a lot less likely that someone would want to jeapordize their clearance and forsake their own country at the same time. COTS code shouldn't be too common in things like missle guidance systems. Last time I checked at OfficeMax I did not see Microsoft Patriot Missle Guidance System 2006 Professional on the shelf, but less sensitive systems like ERP, Finance and other Intranet related things likely incorporate uncontrolled code. In this code, backdoors, or whatever, could be used to sneak into other things that might be on the network or even the same server.
After reading the article, I am left with the feeling that perhaps code could creep in. Perhaps, even from unrelated projects where the coders are not "cleared". I'm glad they're looking into the problem and I hope they do something smart.
I wonder if anyone can recommend some HW based (provides analog phone connection attached to a broadband connection) solutions that work well under such conditions where the latency is huge and highly variable.
I gave up a while back and started using Skype on my PC, but they aren't the cheapest option and have some strange payment options when travelling about. Sometimes they simply won't allow you to make a payment based on your location. This anti-fraud stuff annoys me, sometimes. They seem to forget that it's my money and there should be a mechanism in place for me to spend it.
I travel quite a bit and I've had problems with SIP hardware solutions when I'm in countries where the ISP's use satellite for their uplinks. Ping response time runs from 600-800 ms and the SIP devices get very choppy, remember Max Headroom? http://www.maxheadroom.com/
Skype's software works surprisingly well in these environments compares to software from other providers. I have not tried any of Skypes HW based options.
An engineer from one provider whose hardware solution I was testing and who was actually trying to be helpful said that my problem was with SIP's Jitter Buffer not being able to handle the ghastly latencies that I've been experiencing during my journies. If I hadn't already had problems with 2-3 other providers, I'd have thought that he was blowing smoke...
If your friend is aware of the fraud and doesn't report it, then she had better do a good job of hiding her knowledge when someone else brings them down. I'm pretty sure she'd be considered as an accomplice if she doesn't report it in a reasonable period of time. It may not be too late, she could say that she was waiting to be certain that it was indeed fraud.
What gives is that historically, Microsoft destroys companies by bundling "free" software into their monopoly powered OS. This is using monopoly power to destroy businesses. The software may be called "free" but it can be charged for later, when the competition is gone and it isn't really free anyway - why does WinXP Pro cost $300.00. MSDOS used to cost me $40.00.
-There used to be a market for IP stacks until Win95 included one for free, (WFW 3.11 sucked so badly that it didn't hurt until 95). Remember FTP Software? Chameleon? Clarkson (freeware)? There were more.
-There used to be a market for Web browsers.
-There used to be a market for peer-to-peer file/print servivces. Remeber Lantastic? Netware lite? Others?
The list goes on.
Not everyone that is not happy with Microsoft is simply caught up in a religious fervor. Seeing what they have done and what is being done SHOULD help one predict, roughly, what will be done and what some of the effects will be.
I'm sure someone's going to mention that MS Antivirus used to be part of DOS... It didn't update itself and was not nearly as effective as the commercial versions. Back then, McAfee was shareware. Back then there wasn't a market - now there is one and it will be hurt if MS abuses their monopoly power again and includes a anti-virus scanner/cleaner for free.
We need to get some kind of magical address blocker on Slashdot to prevent George Bush and current Microsoft employees from poluting this divine forum with greedism spew. Capialism != Corporatism.
Note: The opinions expressed herein are mine and not those of my current, former or future empoyers. *SHRUG*
Hi Microsoft guy, hows that MCP cert coming along?
They don't. They have telnet, ftp and a few other tools from BSD. This BSD TCP/IP stack in WinNT-rumor is just an urban legend, nothing more.
If you really believed that, then you'd sign in with your real ID so, this is probably a wasted effort. I don't have time to really research this but, here a couple of relevant links are that seem to not be crazy, anti-MS sources: (might be a starting point for someone that cares to take a closer look)
The details in these links seem to be more useful than statements that are too empty or too broad. I was surprised that concrete evidence of rampant code copying relevant to the IP stack from BSD was not very easy to find. "Urban legend" is an overstatment because there is some truth that some things relevant to the IP stack were copied, but the scale probably has been exagerrated.
Well since Novell purchased SUSE Linux I don't think they'll be granting expressed permission for SCO to start revoking UNIX licenses.
BUT if hell freezes over and SCO starts winning in court, perhaps they could offer immunity to Novell in order to coax this expressed permission to revoke licenses to use AIX and who knows what else.
I hope the SCO squashing comes soon!
Hurray!! Someone who can think outside of the moment! You should not have logged in as anonymous. You are exactly right. The norm before 9/11 was to cooperate with hijackers in order not to jeopardize your own, and more importantly the safety of others, by playing hero. Now, AFTER 9/11, the world will treat airline highjackers as if they intend to kill everyone and have no value for their own lives. In this particular period of fun the murderers think they will be rewarded by Allah and given multiple virgins in heaven for their charming deeds.
To call the people on the planes cowards for not fighting is a special kind of ignorance. - Like when we judge the actions of people in the past by todays standards.
While I'm spewing, I'd like to note something interesting. I had to fly a few times immediately after 9/11 to Washington D.C. and noticed that the aisle seats seemed to be populated almost completely by male passengers. I wonder if the airlines tried to arrange that, if the passengers just did it on their own, or if it was a bizarre coincidence.
The BRM is only for the purpose intended by the sender. Taping it to a brick doesn't work, either. The BRM is often encoded, so you'll get a call from the postal inspector to quit committing felonies.
If you really want to cut the crap out of your mailbox, ask your postmaster for the address of the mail preference services, AND THEN USE THEM, IDIOT.
Idiot? That's seems a bit strong...
So are you a telemarketer, spammer, mailman or a bulk mailer? Hmm, you're on/. so you must be at least a mailman...
Religious moment: Novell isn't Microsoft, that is enough reason even if one has to may more money.
Logical moment: You can still own Novell server licenses, it is faster for most things and far more stable. Their definition of Academic institutions is looser than MS and ALA's are absolutely the cheapest way to go for academic institutions. If you do the homework Novell can sometimes be a MUCH better choice.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where anyone that can run a mouse thinks they can be an IT guy so things like Microsoft become prevalent.
Slashdot Mirror
Boy, this thread is going off on a bit of a tangent.
You bring up an interesting point regarding the 6 guys sending money home.
I've seen estimates from about 30 billion to 300 billion dollars that are being being wired to other nations anually from legal and illegal workers in the US. While I can't fault the legal ones, especially since I occasionally send funds to help my Brazilian in-laws, the illegals are an unpleasant and growing addition to this problem. Why is it a problem? Because the money is not spent on the US economy. It is hemorraging from our economic system. Sure, it's cheap labor, but when this cheap labor is exlpoited on a large scale, the effect from disenfranchising an increasingly significant demographic of your customers (the U.S. workers that cost a bit more but will actually spend their money in the U.S.) by off-shore outsourcing and hiring illegal immigrants who wire their money back to the homeland, the system (U.S. econonmy) will eventually fail due to the money not re-entering it. Some say it is a nice way to get economic aid directly to the poorest residents of other nations -- not a completely unreasonable point, but at the same time we shouldn't be using that point to justify being a welfare system for other countries at the expense of our own country's economic well-being. I just hope that we find some sort of balance before it's too late. We don't want to be too protective or too open.
Some links:
http://www.immigrationwatchdog.com/?p=4509
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-transfer2apr02,1,3240079.story
http://www.rense.com/general62/frain.htm
http://www.politicalprisonerblog.com/politicalprisonerblog/2008/04/money-launderin.html
(I don't agree with all of the ideas in these, but they're somewhat though provoking)
I'm not sure if many folks noticed your reference to the quote attributed to Bill Gates (usually stating that it occurred in 1981) about 640KB being enough. I've heard this quote off and on ever since taking an interest in computers almost 20 years ago. Your post reminded me of it and I decided to try to find an informative link that would cite an authoritative source and discovered that I couldn't. In fact I found that it may have been a mis-quote or simply an urban legend.
Check out: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed
Even though in the coxtext of the time it was allegedly said it isn't such a ridiculous statment I find it strange that it is so widely accepted without an original source such as a magazine interview.
Interesting trick about telling the guys at the front desk that it's illegal to surrender your U.S. Passport to the hotel. I'm a bit surprised that they'd buy that, I'll consider trying that if they try to hold mine. I haven't traveled in Europe much but in Africa and South America they'd typically want a copy at a minimum.
If you're worried about problems such as natural disasters, unrest, etc. in a country you're visiting or residing in it would be a good idea to register at: https://travelregistration.state.gov/ That way the embassy would know you're in that country and would be able to notify you of problems and give advice as what to do to deal with these problems.
Thanks for the heads up, an AC schooled me in not so nice a manner -- subtly hinting that I managed to be both preachy and dense in the same post (without spelling it out again). Darn liberal arts majors alway getting tricky with me! Simply called me a retard and explained the reference. Now I'll ride to work on the short bus, I suppose.
Retard's a bit cold -- but might be a bit deserved... Nice reference, the first time I read it I only heard something swoosh right over my head. Now I know what it was. Ouch. I'll crawl back into my cave now.
Though, you're still a cyber hippie.
Is that your solution to life's problems? Run away from them?
I see you're no Einstein.
How the hell does this comment get modded +5?
+2 Anti-American/Govt (always popular here -- darn cyber hippies...) ?
+2 Bitch and do nothing ?
+1 Cheap and irrelevant attack on a message board ?
It reads more like a troll comment to me.
While the parent's post isn't incredibly insightful, the rebuke is pathetic. Why not propose alternatives than simply run away? It's a lot harder, but real efforts might actually fix the problem or at least mitigate it somewhat. I'm not saying that things are going well; in fact, I belive that this administration will likely go down in history as one of the worst and I shudder to think about what damage the winner of the next election is going to do the "fix" it.
If you're as clever as you seem to think you are, please go into politics and fix some problems, otherwise keep your comments relevant to whatever it is that you are good at.
In the long run, cell phone contracts aren't that great of a deal if you want high-end techy phones -- ESPECIALLY if you work or travel frequently overseas. When I'm in the US I only use pre-paid services. To do this, I typically have to use imported unlocked GSM phones as I prefer not to buy hacked unlocked phones.
I currently am using an HP 6915 that was imported from England long before the US version was made available. It has worked all over Africa, South America and many parts of the US (some parts of the US still don't have GSM service).
The iPhone in its hacked form does work overseas and is a lot more responsive than my Windows crippled HP mess. If the iPhone had a real GPS in it I might consider risking a purchase and then unlocking it.
In short, we don't all buy phone/network combinations. Some of use work very had to avoid such inconveniences.
This article surprised me - I thought there were sufficient controls in place to prevent just any code being used on sensitive systems. TFA seems to suggest that it's a lot more wild than I had suspected.
COTS stuff will always have a chance of a bad American or foreigner adding backdoors or whatever and even some guy with a security clearance could go bad -- it's just a lot less likely that someone would want to jeapordize their clearance and forsake their own country at the same time. COTS code shouldn't be too common in things like missle guidance systems. Last time I checked at OfficeMax I did not see Microsoft Patriot Missle Guidance System 2006 Professional on the shelf, but less sensitive systems like ERP, Finance and other Intranet related things likely incorporate uncontrolled code. In this code, backdoors, or whatever, could be used to sneak into other things that might be on the network or even the same server.
After reading the article, I am left with the feeling that perhaps code could creep in. Perhaps, even from unrelated projects where the coders are not "cleared". I'm glad they're looking into the problem and I hope they do something smart.
It sucks to have so many folks mad at us.
I gave up a while back and started using Skype on my PC, but they aren't the cheapest option and have some strange payment options when travelling about. Sometimes they simply won't allow you to make a payment based on your location. This anti-fraud stuff annoys me, sometimes. They seem to forget that it's my money and there should be a mechanism in place for me to spend it.
Skype's software works surprisingly well in these environments compares to software from other providers. I have not tried any of Skypes HW based options.
An engineer from one provider whose hardware solution I was testing and who was actually trying to be helpful said that my problem was with SIP's Jitter Buffer not being able to handle the ghastly latencies that I've been experiencing during my journies. If I hadn't already had problems with 2-3 other providers, I'd have thought that he was blowing smoke...
IANAL
If your friend is aware of the fraud and doesn't report it, then she had better do a good job of hiding her knowledge when someone else brings them down. I'm pretty sure she'd be considered as an accomplice if she doesn't report it in a reasonable period of time. It may not be too late, she could say that she was waiting to be certain that it was indeed fraud.
What gives is that historically, Microsoft destroys companies by bundling "free" software into their monopoly powered OS. This is using monopoly power to destroy businesses. The software may be called "free" but it can be charged for later, when the competition is gone and it isn't really free anyway - why does WinXP Pro cost $300.00. MSDOS used to cost me $40.00. -There used to be a market for IP stacks until Win95 included one for free, (WFW 3.11 sucked so badly that it didn't hurt until 95). Remember FTP Software? Chameleon? Clarkson (freeware)? There were more. -There used to be a market for Web browsers. -There used to be a market for peer-to-peer file/print servivces. Remeber Lantastic? Netware lite? Others? The list goes on. Not everyone that is not happy with Microsoft is simply caught up in a religious fervor. Seeing what they have done and what is being done SHOULD help one predict, roughly, what will be done and what some of the effects will be. I'm sure someone's going to mention that MS Antivirus used to be part of DOS... It didn't update itself and was not nearly as effective as the commercial versions. Back then, McAfee was shareware. Back then there wasn't a market - now there is one and it will be hurt if MS abuses their monopoly power again and includes a anti-virus scanner/cleaner for free. We need to get some kind of magical address blocker on Slashdot to prevent George Bush and current Microsoft employees from poluting this divine forum with greedism spew. Capialism != Corporatism. Note: The opinions expressed herein are mine and not those of my current, former or future empoyers. *SHRUG*
They don't. They have telnet, ftp and a few other tools from BSD. This BSD TCP/IP stack in WinNT-rumor is just an urban legend, nothing more.
If you really believed that, then you'd sign in with your real ID so, this is probably a wasted effort. I don't have time to really research this but, here a couple of relevant links are that seem to not be crazy, anti-MS sources: (might be a starting point for someone that cares to take a closer look)
Common bugs in both IP stack examples noted here.
More, but not as many accusations.
The details in these links seem to be more useful than statements that are too empty or too broad. I was surprised that concrete evidence of rampant code copying relevant to the IP stack from BSD was not very easy to find. "Urban legend" is an overstatment because there is some truth that some things relevant to the IP stack were copied, but the scale probably has been exagerrated.
Well since Novell purchased SUSE Linux I don't think they'll be granting expressed permission for SCO to start revoking UNIX licenses. BUT if hell freezes over and SCO starts winning in court, perhaps they could offer immunity to Novell in order to coax this expressed permission to revoke licenses to use AIX and who knows what else. I hope the SCO squashing comes soon!
Hurray!! Someone who can think outside of the moment! You should not have logged in as anonymous. You are exactly right. The norm before 9/11 was to cooperate with hijackers in order not to jeopardize your own, and more importantly the safety of others, by playing hero. Now, AFTER 9/11, the world will treat airline highjackers as if they intend to kill everyone and have no value for their own lives. In this particular period of fun the murderers think they will be rewarded by Allah and given multiple virgins in heaven for their charming deeds.
To call the people on the planes cowards for not fighting is a special kind of ignorance. - Like when we judge the actions of people in the past by todays standards.
While I'm spewing, I'd like to note something interesting. I had to fly a few times immediately after 9/11 to Washington D.C. and noticed that the aisle seats seemed to be populated almost completely by male passengers. I wonder if the airlines tried to arrange that, if the passengers just did it on their own, or if it was a bizarre coincidence.
Idiot? That's seems a bit strong... So are you a telemarketer, spammer, mailman or a bulk mailer? Hmm, you're on /. so you must be at least a mailman...
Braindead manager? What a braindead statement!
Religious moment: Novell isn't Microsoft, that is enough reason even if one has to may more money.
Logical moment: You can still own Novell server licenses, it is faster for most things and far more stable. Their definition of Academic institutions is looser than MS and ALA's are absolutely the cheapest way to go for academic institutions. If you do the homework Novell can sometimes be a MUCH better choice.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where anyone that can run a mouse thinks they can be an IT guy so things like Microsoft become prevalent.