At first glance I don't really care, either, I mean what do I care that they know how much beer I drink and how many steaks I am scarfing down?
The issue, in the USA at least, is that they might share this information with other people: I do care if my health insurance company knows how many bottles of wine I drink per week, or that I might be buying more fatty foods than are healthy. It's not just paranoia - There are already cases of people having their personal information used against them. In that case, the info was ostensibly being collected for another purpose. Just like the grocery store loyalty cards.
And I love the name loyalty card. When the Albertsons I frequented in Rapid City, South Dakota introduced them, I thought, "What sap is going to fall for that gimmick?" And then I walked around the store and realized that if I didn't want to have to suck up a 15% increase in my grocery bill, I was going to be one of those saps. Since I had shopped prior to the loyalty card introduction and immediately afterwards, I could see where the price increases were.
Anyway, my impression is that most European countries have laws protecting people from dissemination of their personal info.
That's why a lot of us are using SSH tunnels or VPNs with our own IM protocols, DNS and mail servers. There's a whole phantom internet out there and a lot of people don't even realize it.
Dunno, this made me think I had to post the Obligatory Talking Heads quote:
Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock,
We blended in with the crowd
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines,
I know that that ain't allowed...
We dress like students, we dress like housewives,
Or in a suit and a tie
I changed my hairstyle, so many times now,
I don't know what I look like!
I take the opposite tack: I just don't buy televisions at all. I have a mediocre television hooked to a cheap DVD player so I can watch movies, and I can use money left over from not paying for cable to buy more wine. Think of it: satellite TV for a year is two cases of drinkable wine, or one case of good wine. I also have a lot of extra time on my hands, to think about which bottle I will open tonight.
It is a shame, I admit, but I didn't just block Brazilian e-mail, I blocked access from large chunks of Brazilian IP space from any access.
Every few weeks I'd open it back up and see what happened. Sure enough, very large numbers of port scans and attempts to see if my servers had been Zombified. E-mails with firewall logs sent to the abuse addresses for those IPs did nothing, so back into the block list they went.
I have to admit, I was fascinated by the question: Why is this particular ISP in Brazil such a haven for these types of attacks? I never found an answer to that, though. But it was bizarre to me that our network was scanned more times by Brazil than everywhere else combined.
I think I speak for the nation when I say I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.
My guess is that the economics of e-mail will be rather similar to those of long distance calling: The sunk costs are pretty high, but the variable costs are ridiculously small.
Thus, the incremental cost of adding one more e-mail message to the system is vanishingly small, and so if there is competition, then the cost of e-mail will approach zero, all on its own.
Note the aassumption of competition within the industry, which may be incorrect.
Basically, the way that I did it was to have an unreasonably large number of service calls, where Verizon determined that my line needed to be repaired, and that the problem was outside of my house. Then, with the next call (the sixth or so within less than a year), I asked to speak to supervisors repeatedly, until someone called me back.
But I have to say, I think the person who is calling me back now is a pacifier, and that she actually isn't effective. I supsect that I have a mark in my file that says, "Look out, this guy is pissed ! Try to keep him from calling the Telecommunications Commission! If he gets all medieval on you, have him call Ms. So-and-So."
Either way, I have a soft-spoken, very nice woman whom I can call on her direct line. But my phone service still sucks. So I am writing a letter that I will send to the CEO, Mr. Ivan "I'm putting in fiber to every home!" Seidenberg, and to the Virginia State Corporation Commission, politely explaining how and why I am dissatisfied with his company's service.
We'll see what happens.
But if you want your own service rep, just keep politely asking to speak to a supervisor, telling everyone that you appreciate that they are doing everything that they can, but that you just Are Not Satisfied.
The last time I had to call Verizon repair services I was trapped in their new phone system, and my phone line was so noisy (hence the service call) that their voice recognition was not recognizing. I cursed at it a couple of times, and it asked me if I wanted to end the call. I said, "No!", and it continued.
To test it, I cursed again, and sure enough, it said sweetly, "Would you like to end this call?"
As an aside, I have had so many problems with my phone line that I now have my own personal Verizon rep, with a direct line to her office. But she seems pretty ineffective, so now I'm composing a letter to Mr. Seidenberg to see if he can get the damned line to work.
I recently upgraded to a DVD player, because, yes, I am really cheap, but I have discovered that the local "video" rental shops' DVD selection is far less expansive than their VHS selection. I mean, our Blockbuster and the competing local shops don't even have Repo Man on DVD !
What's up with that???
-- FOOD. BEER. "Let's go do some crimes..." "Yeah, let's go eat sushi and not pay !"
When the government wants to monitor people's communications to search for steganography, when they don't do anything about spam, the purpose of the monitoring is probably not the stated one.
On the other hand, if I were $SPY_AGENCY and I knew for a fact spam was being used by terrorists for communication, I would try to make sure that spam remained in existence and was easy to use, or at least, easy to circumvent any anti-spam laws. You never want to give away a good source of intelligence.
Don't ever do that, all spam has forged headers. You're just making life hard on someone who had their address sold.
I'm torn by this, actually. What I fear most is blackholing legitimate mail. At least if I bounce it, then the legitimate sender will see the return, and know their mail didn't get through.
But then, I know I am adding to the problem, because most of the bounces are going to the address the spammer forged...
I'm a big fan of NPR (no commercials during the news on my commute) and CSPAN radio (Washington DC having one of the few CSPAN radio broadcasting towers), and I don't know why I'd want either of those in HD.
It's all voice... I guess the musical segues are pretty cool, but hardly worth digital. To me.
This has nothing really to do with the question, but it reminds me of a dream/nightmare I had recently...(tinkly music indicating either a flashback or a dream sequence)
I knew there was a problem with one of the servers in the closet, and headed that way to check it out. I noticed water running under the door, out of the closet. I opened the closet, and the rack (which wasn't really a rack, just some cheap metal shelves from a hardware store, with regular towers screwed to it haphazardly).
Behind the rack was a swirling muddy whirlpool, "Ah," I thought, "there's where the water is coming from."
So there I was standing in the muddy closet, trying to figure out how the swirling muddy whirlpool came to exist on the third floor of a four story building, and trying to stand in the doorway and reach the keyboard and mouse......(tinkly music indicating the end of either a flashback or a dream sequence)
I have NO idea where this came from, except perhaps that our servers are cobbled together from old bits (AT motherboards forced into ATX cases and whatnot), and that I can't upgrade any wiring in our failing network, because, "we're going to be moving to a new building. Soon. Real soon! Trust me!"
That, and the double-anchovy pizza right before bed...
I am not familiar with the gambling business, but I know it wouldn't be that hard to alter the slot machine payout ratio from a programming perspective. ~1 line of code, in fact.
I worked in a casino management company in South Dakota, so this experience applies there:
It would be very hard to cheat like that for very long. The programs for the slot machines are on a single PROM, and that PROM is registered with the Gaming Commission after exhaustive testing.
The PROM is installed in the gaming device, and the device cannot be powered up during business hours unless the gaming commission has checked the PROM, watched you put it into the machine, and then sealed it into place with tamper-proof tape that only the Gaming Commission has access to. (They have a little box that they plug the PROM into which tells them if the chip is acceptable or not.)
Furthermore, the Gaming Commission can come by your casino, any time they want, with no prior notice, and have you open the machines to ensure that the tape is still in place, or to pull the chips for testing.
I was paid to watch the per centages paid ouit by the slots and the tables to make sure they were within acceptable range. At one Tribal Gaming establishment that we ran, the machines had a lot of play (1,000+ games per day) and tehy _always_ paid out what they were supposed to. If they deviated, we checked them for mechanical malfunction, and then we looked at staff and guests to see if someone had a new scam going. (The easiest is to request a fill on the coin bucket, and then hand the money to your friend instead of putting it into the machine. But that was very easy to catch, too. And look out at the Tribal Gaming establishments: >$100 is a federal offense, so we called the FBI to take care of any shmucks stealing from the tribe.)
So, if your gaming establishment is having a bad month, tweaking the payout won't help much: Every game was random, and just as likely to pay the jackpot as the previous game.
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At first glance I don't really care, either, I mean what do I care that they know how much beer I drink and how many steaks I am scarfing down?
The issue, in the USA at least, is that they might share this information with other people: I do care if my health insurance company knows how many bottles of wine I drink per week, or that I might be buying more fatty foods than are healthy. It's not just paranoia - There are already cases of people having their personal information used against them. In that case, the info was ostensibly being collected for another purpose. Just like the grocery store loyalty cards.
And I love the name loyalty card. When the Albertsons I frequented in Rapid City, South Dakota introduced them, I thought, "What sap is going to fall for that gimmick?" And then I walked around the store and realized that if I didn't want to have to suck up a 15% increase in my grocery bill, I was going to be one of those saps. Since I had shopped prior to the loyalty card introduction and immediately afterwards, I could see where the price increases were.
Anyway, my impression is that most European countries have laws protecting people from dissemination of their personal info.
Um yeah inflation isn't 10%/year. It's like 0.4%. Good try though, next time say 10 times the rate of inflation.
.4% and they are raising rates by 40%, then it's 100 times the rate of inflation.
Um yeah, well, if inflation is
It'll be interesting to see what arithmetic I've messed up in this math correcting post.
That's why a lot of us are using SSH tunnels or VPNs with our own IM protocols, DNS and mail servers. There's a whole phantom internet out there and a lot of people don't even realize it.
Dunno, this made me think I had to post the Obligatory Talking Heads quote:
Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock,
We blended in with the crowd
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines,
I know that that ain't allowed...
We dress like students, we dress like housewives,
Or in a suit and a tie
I changed my hairstyle, so many times now,
I don't know what I look like!
I take the opposite tack: I just don't buy televisions at all. I have a mediocre television hooked to a cheap DVD player so I can watch movies, and I can use money left over from not paying for cable to buy more wine. Think of it: satellite TV for a year is two cases of drinkable wine, or one case of good wine. I also have a lot of extra time on my hands, to think about which bottle I will open tonight.
I may also be a little bit bored.
So can we get the RIAA to track down and prosecute the terrorists for violating John Cage's copyright?
It is a shame, I admit, but I didn't just block Brazilian e-mail, I blocked access from large chunks of Brazilian IP space from any access.
Every few weeks I'd open it back up and see what happened. Sure enough, very large numbers of port scans and attempts to see if my servers had been Zombified. E-mails with firewall logs sent to the abuse addresses for those IPs did nothing, so back into the block list they went.
I have to admit, I was fascinated by the question: Why is this particular ISP in Brazil such a haven for these types of attacks? I never found an answer to that, though. But it was bizarre to me that our network was scanned more times by Brazil than everywhere else combined.
I think I speak for the nation when I say I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.
Ummmm....
What?
My guess is that the economics of e-mail will be rather similar to those of long distance calling: The sunk costs are pretty high, but the variable costs are ridiculously small.
Thus, the incremental cost of adding one more e-mail message to the system is vanishingly small, and so if there is competition, then the cost of e-mail will approach zero, all on its own.
Note the aassumption of competition within the industry, which may be incorrect.
Sorry, it took me a while to get to a reply.
Basically, the way that I did it was to have an unreasonably large number of service calls, where Verizon determined that my line needed to be repaired, and that the problem was outside of my house. Then, with the next call (the sixth or so within less than a year), I asked to speak to supervisors repeatedly, until someone called me back.
But I have to say, I think the person who is calling me back now is a pacifier, and that she actually isn't effective. I supsect that I have a mark in my file that says, "Look out, this guy is pissed ! Try to keep him from calling the Telecommunications Commission! If he gets all medieval on you, have him call Ms. So-and-So."
Either way, I have a soft-spoken, very nice woman whom I can call on her direct line. But my phone service still sucks. So I am writing a letter that I will send to the CEO, Mr. Ivan "I'm putting in fiber to every home!" Seidenberg, and to the Virginia State Corporation Commission, politely explaining how and why I am dissatisfied with his company's service.
We'll see what happens.
But if you want your own service rep, just keep politely asking to speak to a supervisor, telling everyone that you appreciate that they are doing everything that they can, but that you just Are Not Satisfied.
Good luck.
Well, the story is stupid, not the doctor.
At Virginia Tech, I started off in the honors program. The Dean of the Honors program was named, you guessed it, "Nurse". So he was Dr. Nurse.
Not so funny, you say? Well wait, there's more !
Dr. Nurse's wife worked in the infirmary, and she was a nurse !
So we would wander by his office, and say, "Hello Dr. Nurse, how is the wife? Nurse Nurse?"
I guess it wasn't really that funny.
I have had for a very, very long time a VCR that automatically turned on and played the tape when you pushed one into its slot.
Sounds like the "host" is activating a process to me.
The last time I had to call Verizon repair services I was trapped in their new phone system, and my phone line was so noisy (hence the service call) that their voice recognition was not recognizing. I cursed at it a couple of times, and it asked me if I wanted to end the call. I said, "No!", and it continued.
To test it, I cursed again, and sure enough, it said sweetly, "Would you like to end this call?"
As an aside, I have had so many problems with my phone line that I now have my own personal Verizon rep, with a direct line to her office. But she seems pretty ineffective, so now I'm composing a letter to Mr. Seidenberg to see if he can get the damned line to work.
I am a geek.
Wow, I've always wanted to meet someone who bites the heads off of chickens!
Because I've always wondered: Don't you get the feathers caught in your throat?
I recently upgraded to a DVD player, because, yes, I am really cheap, but I have discovered that the local "video" rental shops' DVD selection is far less expansive than their VHS selection. I mean, our Blockbuster and the competing local shops don't even have Repo Man on DVD !
What's up with that???
--
FOOD. BEER. "Let's go do some crimes..."
"Yeah, let's go eat sushi and not pay !"
Seems like I got a watch that just tells time, and saved $1000. The advantage to the expecsive analogs is what exactly?
Oooooo ! Shiny thing !
So if I don't want to pay inflated prices for your amateur pictures, is it o.k. if I steal them, instead?
Thanks ! That's so cool !
'Cause "counterfeiting [pictures] is not a 'right', but its bound to happen when [amateur photographers] overcharge..."
--
We deal in two things! Irony, and sarcasm !
Wait a minute, rstultz' comment is Flamebait and the parent is somehow insightful by claiming that "overcharging" promotes software piracy?
First off, the idea that prices promote piracy is as old as piracy, it's hardly insightful.
Secondly, rstultz' rejoinder just as insightfully promotes that opposite view: That the software isn't overpriced.
So how is that Flamebait?
--
what is this karma thing, anyway?
When the government wants to monitor people's communications to search for steganography, when they don't do anything about spam, the purpose of the monitoring is probably not the stated one.
On the other hand, if I were $SPY_AGENCY and I knew for a fact spam was being used by terrorists for communication, I would try to make sure that spam remained in existence and was easy to use, or at least, easy to circumvent any anti-spam laws. You never want to give away a good source of intelligence.
Don't ever do that, all spam has forged headers. You're just making life hard on someone who had their address sold.
I'm torn by this, actually. What I fear most is blackholing legitimate mail. At least if I bounce it, then the legitimate sender will see the return, and know their mail didn't get through.
But then, I know I am adding to the problem, because most of the bounces are going to the address the spammer forged...
--
It's a catch. Catch 22.
Holy Crap, you people are geeks !
Oh, sorry, forgot where I was for a minute there...
I'm a big fan of NPR (no commercials during the news on my commute) and CSPAN radio (Washington DC having one of the few CSPAN radio broadcasting towers), and I don't know why I'd want either of those in HD.
It's all voice... I guess the musical segues are pretty cool, but hardly worth digital. To me.
1) Will it gain the enormous foothold in the collective consciousness that Google has acquired?
You'll never get me to say "vivisimo" in a complete sentence.
--
oh crap, you've done it !
In his ruling, the trial judge...warned that it "would create a huge loophole in Congress' effort to prevent copyright infringement on the Internet."
This means that the RIAA and others will just lobby Congress, and a law that they can use will be passed.
We're still screwed, privacy-wise, because this development will be temporary.
This has nothing really to do with the question, but it reminds me of a dream/nightmare I had recently...(tinkly music indicating either a flashback or a dream sequence)
I knew there was a problem with one of the servers in the closet, and headed that way to check it out. I noticed water running under the door, out of the closet. I opened the closet, and the rack (which wasn't really a rack, just some cheap metal shelves from a hardware store, with regular towers screwed to it haphazardly).
Behind the rack was a swirling muddy whirlpool, "Ah," I thought, "there's where the water is coming from."
So there I was standing in the muddy closet, trying to figure out how the swirling muddy whirlpool came to exist on the third floor of a four story building, and trying to stand in the doorway and reach the keyboard and mouse......(tinkly music indicating the end of either a flashback or a dream sequence)
I have NO idea where this came from, except perhaps that our servers are cobbled together from old bits (AT motherboards forced into ATX cases and whatnot), and that I can't upgrade any wiring in our failing network, because, "we're going to be moving to a new building. Soon. Real soon! Trust me!"
That, and the double-anchovy pizza right before bed...
I am not familiar with the gambling business, but I know it wouldn't be that hard to alter the slot machine payout ratio from a programming perspective. ~1 line of code, in fact.
I worked in a casino management company in South Dakota, so this experience applies there:
It would be very hard to cheat like that for very long. The programs for the slot machines are on a single PROM, and that PROM is registered with the Gaming Commission after exhaustive testing.
The PROM is installed in the gaming device, and the device cannot be powered up during business hours unless the gaming commission has checked the PROM, watched you put it into the machine, and then sealed it into place with tamper-proof tape that only the Gaming Commission has access to. (They have a little box that they plug the PROM into which tells them if the chip is acceptable or not.)
Furthermore, the Gaming Commission can come by your casino, any time they want, with no prior notice, and have you open the machines to ensure that the tape is still in place, or to pull the chips for testing.
I was paid to watch the per centages paid ouit by the slots and the tables to make sure they were within acceptable range. At one Tribal Gaming establishment that we ran, the machines had a lot of play (1,000+ games per day) and tehy _always_ paid out what they were supposed to. If they deviated, we checked them for mechanical malfunction, and then we looked at staff and guests to see if someone had a new scam going. (The easiest is to request a fill on the coin bucket, and then hand the money to your friend instead of putting it into the machine. But that was very easy to catch, too. And look out at the Tribal Gaming establishments: >$100 is a federal offense, so we called the FBI to take care of any shmucks stealing from the tribe.)
So, if your gaming establishment is having a bad month, tweaking the payout won't help much: Every game was random, and just as likely to pay the jackpot as the previous game.