Thanks for your insightful post. It makes sense and I agree, except that I understand from first hand accounts that sometimes protests and demonstrations attract people that are there expressly to get into fights with the police, so it's not always only AFTER the melee starts that they act. Sometimes these elements actively incite the conflicts. However, that doesn't take away from your point that the police showing up in riot gear is starting with an escalation.
NPR had an article a few weeks back about exactly the kind of alternative style of policing that you describe. It's a worthy read (or listen) if you or others reading this are interested: http://www.npr.org/2014/09/25/...
Very insightful post, and I think it approaches at least some of the mechanisms of how this shift happened. My local NPR station finally played this story this morning, so I came back here to comment. It actually included an anecdote of a girl who started in an intro CS class in the 80s who felt (and this was reinforced by the professor) she was way behind her peers and presumably out of place because they had been programming on their PCs (specific example given was a TRS-80) for a long time already, and she had not.
So yes, this disparity in early PC ownership definitely seems to have been a factor. However, then the question becomes why did boys get PCs and not girls? The theory that the article presents is that this was influenced by the advertising of the time. Their example talked about computer ads with all guys programming and using the computer, while the one woman appears in a bikini jumping into a pool. I can see where this may have had some significant influence as well, but it probably doesn't explain everything.
The thing is we only have small tidbits of data, and it would take some serious studies to confirm why in fact women are less prone to obsessing over computers. I think a lot of the arguments on both sides, including the story (it was the ads!) and the majority of the slashdot comments (women naturally don't like computers like men do) have oversimplified everything.
It's possible that boys are naturally more attracted to computers, like I believe has been confirmed that they are more attracted to cars (supposedly even male chimps are as well). However, we won't know for sure without the studies.
Just for reference, here's an interesting bit of news from a few years ago that never seemed to get much notice, but which I think may have something to do with FIOS seemingly grinding to a halt: https://gigaom.com/2011/12/02/...
Basically, it seems to basically boil down to a secret non-compete agreement between the established wireless and wired internet providers to not invade each others markets with new competition.
I understand the reason for your earlier post better now, thanks. I can see it too. Saying that any group is better suited to something than any other group in this day and age is opening yourself up for political battles.
Yours may be the first post on Slashdot that I've seen arguing for political correctness over discussion of engineering realities getting an early +5 rating. Very interesting to see the replies to your post so far. If it had been the other way around (men more suitable than women for mars mission) and someone had complained about sexism, it would have been downmodded to oblivion and received a flood of "screw political correctness, accept the facts" replies.
As to the information related by the summary, if we extrapolate a little bit and think about colonization ideas while having to deal with similar engineering constraints, women would possibly win again. They would be able to taken frozen sperm with them to impregnate with after arrival, as opposed to having to transport couples.
Yeah, about that. Sorry, but there was no good or even half-bad reason for a ground invasion of Iraq; only fully bad to terrible reasons, involving intelligence errors and exaggerations (about chemical weapons) and outright lies (about nuclear weapons). Many many people paid the price, and are still paying the price (we all are, actually). So yes, "Bush lied people died" is still completely applicable, and his administration is still completely deserving of the hate and vitriol that it receives and will continue to receive, probably forever.
In my experience, gmail is fairly good (the best?) about catching actual spam, but I still get both false positives and false negatives (a lot more of the former). That makes me believe that this is actually a very difficult problem to serve. The post above from someone who was a gmail engineer reinforces this impression.
However, how much spam you receive is largely under your control. I receive very little spam even in my spam folder - usually less than 5 a day. It basically boils down to keeping tight control over who gets your actual main personal email address. That should be reserved only for friends and family, and even then, I've thought about asking them to not enter my email address on any websites if I decide to change my main address some day.
Here's how I control the commercial emails (and consequently, spam):
1. You will need a domain name to use for receiving commercial emails (i.e. any website where you enter your email address), and domain hosting or at least an email forwarding service.
2. Configure the email forwarding/filtering to forward all emails or emails following a certain pattern for that domain to your real email address. I configured the option on my webhost to forward all email (a catch all, if you will), however, I've since learned that this is not the best way, because if your domain starts getting flooded with spam your domain could get blacklisted. Supposedly the best way is to configure a filter that has a "key" string. Let's say you use your initials:.jb (Joe Blow) - the filter would then only forward emails that contain.jb among the recipients' addresses.
3. Register with a unique address at each website, each store, any commercial use of your email. Ex: use spammer.com.jb@mydomain.com when you register at spammer.com. Same thing if you give your email address to any entity who is not a family member or personal friend. Now all the commercial emails will get forwarded to your real mailbox because they have the.jb key. I actually make an exception to this for banks and for things like webhosts, etc, but I'm reconsidering banks after the recent JPMorgan breach when they obtained contact info for everyone. I would still make an exception for webhosts or anything where there could be a problem if your mydomain.com is not available for some reason.
4. ???
5. Profit. I.E. as soon as you start seeing real spam (not the stuff that a lot of people incorrectly mark as spam), you will know what address they're sending to and can block them at your webhost or email forwarding service. Here are some examples of entities that I had to block because they were breached or sold my email address to spammers:
adobe.com (breach) dropbox.com (breach) planusa.org (unknown) cinegearexpo.com (unknown) equifax.com (unknown) zappos.com (breach) whois (open database - I use a proper domain registrar that hides my info by default now)
Bonus: another major advantage of doing this is that it makes it much much easier for you to change your main email address. You can reroute all your commercial email with one reconfiguration of your forwarder instead of having to go to each individual website to change your address.
Extra bonus: makes it super easy to setup a filter at your client or webmail to send all commercial email to a separate folder. Just filter for mydomain.com in the "to:" line.
Doing this for a few years now has really opened my eyes to how many companies and other organizations either don't give a shit about your private contact info, have shitty security, or actually sell you out for money. I was frankly surprised at some of the organizations that I had to block. Unfortunately early on in my spam-fighting days I did use my main email address on websites, and sometimes also used google's floating period or + functionality to try to individualize email addresses so I get some spam where I don't know where they obtained my address. But those are few and far between, and I've been slowly untangling myself from it to the extent that I can.
You're being a bit overly negative. This camera is nowhere near a RED competitor. This camera is going to be closer to a Blackmagic Production Camera competitor (which currently retails for $3k), at least in terms of hardware. In fact, their costs will likely be even lower than Blackmagic's, because they are concentrating on core features and openness, and will not include things like a video display, internal recording, etc.
While I agree with you that the goal of 100k Euro was a bit low (they actually ended up getting 175k Euro = 221k Dollars right now), the 350 Euro was just deposit/voucher that would allow you to buy a camera from the early batches for half the retail price. That means, you had to shell out another 2600 Euro to get the actual camera when they become available. Retail buyers will have to pay in the 5000-6000 Euro to get it.
I'm guessing that the money from this campaign will pay to build the prototype and get it ready for manufacturing, then they will probably finance the actual manufacturing run with the number of deposits/vouchers as an indicator of how much money they will actually get for selling the first batches of cameras. 175000/350 means something close to 500 deposits. 2600*500 means they're should expect to eventually get somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.3 million Euro, or about 1.65 million Dollars.
But yeah, I feel like that's a bit over-simplified and over-optimistic, especially given the delays and other issues experienced by both Digital Bolex and Blackmagic Design. They will have to demonstrate that they have things under control and are making good progress to get people to go through with the final orders. Still, I want them to succeed, and donated what small amount I could afford to help make it happen.
I had been noticing poor performance from Youtube when watching videos (buffering, dropping to low-res, etc). Then I noticed that youtube seemed to work much better while I was connected through VPN, which is the opposite of what you would expect, at least in theory. But I realize that ISPs have been playing throttling games with large video sites like Youtube and Netflix.
However, I did another test and the results of it were more surprising for me. I have 3mbps DSL service through Verizon. If I run a test through speedtest.net, it reports right around 3mbps. However, if I connect my VPN first and then do the same test, it reports around 5mbps! How is that even possible?
Unfortunately, I feel like the VPN slows normal browsing of other sites a little bit, but I haven't done a comparison yet to confirm my perception.
I heard this interesting interview over the weekend on NPR (transcript in link). In it, the interviewee has this gem:
I was meeting with the vice president of the Communist Party in Shanghai, and I said, well, you know, what's your plan, sir? And he said, well, our five-year plan is to ensure that every man, woman and child in China has, at the very least, five megs of connectivity. And in all the top 10 cities, everyone's going to have one gig a second of connectivity. So I said, you know, sir have you thought about, you know, the unexpected side effects of giving 1.3 or 1.4 billion people a gig a second? And he says OK, I know what you're saying, I know where you're going, but here's the thing - the future of the human race, at least in this century, is ultra-high-speed Wi-Fi everywhere all the time. And it's going to happen whether you or I don't want it to happen or not. And because it's inevitable, we might as well get there first.
I live in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the US, and my only viable choices for internet connectivity are 3mbps DSL or Cable internet which is supposedly much faster, but capped at 250GB/month. The cheapest option of the two is $50/month. There are no signs of this changing in the next few years. At the current rate we're going, the US is pretty much doomed to be at the back of the line when it comes to internet connectivity. Think of the effects this will have on our economy in the medium to long term and gnash your teeth.
Seriously. They prioritize form over function in many of their design decisions: thin aluminum cases that scratch and dent (and now frames that bend), chiclet keyboards with no tactile feedback for centering your fingertips, ultrasharp edges on laptop wrist-rest area that cuts into your wrist, glossy screens that have tons of glare, non-user-replaceable batteries that require you to send the device for service unnecessarily, etc.
I believe I heard that VMworld is now the largest IT infrastructure conference in the world. If you are already steeped in virtualization, it's a wonderful conference to learn stuff and meet people. If you're not already steeped in virtualization, it's a wonderful conference to learn where the IT world is moving, and in fact has largely already moved to.
I watched a documentary about movie art direction and production design, and they had an extended segment about the art design of Blade Runner, interviewing the people involved, etc. One thing that they said that was unusual about the film, and hard to replicate, is that there was some kind of a strike (perhaps writer's guild) around the time that they were pre-producing the film, so they had a much larger amount of time to design and plan the look of the movie than the usual, so they really went to town on it. I think the look of the film shows the extra attention to detail that was given.
What an interesting coincidence. I was having a conversation with my dad this last weekend about just this subject. He proposed his theory that people in, for example, countries like Russia and China were less ethical than in other countries because of the purging of religion that happened in those two examples, within recent history. This surprised me because he's a fairly liberal-thinking person, although he has become more religious as he gets older. I think of myself as agnostic for the most part, but after giving it some thought, I wonder if he might have a point.
What do you think? Did the suppression of religion in those countries reduce the level of ethics? Can ethics effectively spread and be maintained among a large population without a broad system of organized religion?
You forgot to add promoting comprehensive, real-world sex education from an early age, if you don't like abortions.
Although it has nothing to do with religion in general, but more with culture and what specific sub-type of religion people follow. Case in point being Scandinavian countries which are ostensibly Christian, but have the type of sex education I mentioned, a much healthier and natural attitude towards sex, and a much lower incidence of unwanted pregnancies as a result of both.
I had almost exactly the same experience as you did: $10 charges showed up on my t-mobile bill from some random bogus premium service. I called them up, they refunded me, and offered to put a block on those types of premium services on my account, which I accepted. Problem solved for me, but I feel bad for anyone who doesn't or didn't review their mobile phone bills. I would imagine that other carriers are subject to the same "premium" text service scams, by the way.
Jack Devine is the subject of the sentence, so the article is saying that Aldrich Ames was Devine's former colleague, not Snowden's:
Jack Devine, a former CIA director of operations, said he did not believe Snowden had been a spy, but that he shared many psychological characteristics of American traitors such as his former colleague Aldrich Ames, who spent years betraying secrets to Russia and is now serving life in prison.
Re:I've had it with these motherfucking breaches!
on
eBay Compromised
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the idea, and I'll check if my bank offers something similar for my credit card. But I'm going to stick with credit cards from now on. I realize now that there's a reason why banks seem to try to push us to use debit cards every change they get.
I say screw them, at least until they pull their heads out of their asses and give us secure cards (chip and pin).
I've had it with these motherfucking breaches!
on
eBay Compromised
·
· Score: 2
I'm getting so tired of these. It seems like every few months now I'm getting affected by one. Last year my bank replaced my debit card three times (Adobe breach, Target breach, and who knows what the third one was)! Consequently, I'm no longer using my debit card as a debit card, but only at ATMs. I use my credit card for any card-based purchases now. But it doesn't stop. You name it: zappos breach, dropbox breach, a breach at an old community college I attended years ago, and probably others that I've forgotten about in the last year or two. Fuck me running.
By the way, the stories about this breach claim that no financial data was compromised. That's fine, except that the data that was compromised may be used for identity theft: your name, date of birth, and street address. I'm pretty much getting ready to use the option that the credit reporting agencies offer to lock down my credit so that no one can obtain credit in my name without me unlocking it. It's a pain, but I don't think it's a choice anymore at the rate these breaches are going.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll grant you that this specific article was way too simplistic, but:
All of the people who rely solely on NPR for their news are misinformed.
You're way off with that one. Source: http://www.poynter.org/latest-...
Thanks for your insightful post. It makes sense and I agree, except that I understand from first hand accounts that sometimes protests and demonstrations attract people that are there expressly to get into fights with the police, so it's not always only AFTER the melee starts that they act. Sometimes these elements actively incite the conflicts. However, that doesn't take away from your point that the police showing up in riot gear is starting with an escalation.
NPR had an article a few weeks back about exactly the kind of alternative style of policing that you describe. It's a worthy read (or listen) if you or others reading this are interested: http://www.npr.org/2014/09/25/...
Very insightful post, and I think it approaches at least some of the mechanisms of how this shift happened. My local NPR station finally played this story this morning, so I came back here to comment. It actually included an anecdote of a girl who started in an intro CS class in the 80s who felt (and this was reinforced by the professor) she was way behind her peers and presumably out of place because they had been programming on their PCs (specific example given was a TRS-80) for a long time already, and she had not.
So yes, this disparity in early PC ownership definitely seems to have been a factor. However, then the question becomes why did boys get PCs and not girls? The theory that the article presents is that this was influenced by the advertising of the time. Their example talked about computer ads with all guys programming and using the computer, while the one woman appears in a bikini jumping into a pool. I can see where this may have had some significant influence as well, but it probably doesn't explain everything.
The thing is we only have small tidbits of data, and it would take some serious studies to confirm why in fact women are less prone to obsessing over computers. I think a lot of the arguments on both sides, including the story (it was the ads!) and the majority of the slashdot comments (women naturally don't like computers like men do) have oversimplified everything.
It's possible that boys are naturally more attracted to computers, like I believe has been confirmed that they are more attracted to cars (supposedly even male chimps are as well). However, we won't know for sure without the studies.
Just for reference, here's an interesting bit of news from a few years ago that never seemed to get much notice, but which I think may have something to do with FIOS seemingly grinding to a halt: https://gigaom.com/2011/12/02/...
Basically, it seems to basically boil down to a secret non-compete agreement between the established wireless and wired internet providers to not invade each others markets with new competition.
I understand the reason for your earlier post better now, thanks. I can see it too. Saying that any group is better suited to something than any other group in this day and age is opening yourself up for political battles.
Yours may be the first post on Slashdot that I've seen arguing for political correctness over discussion of engineering realities getting an early +5 rating. Very interesting to see the replies to your post so far. If it had been the other way around (men more suitable than women for mars mission) and someone had complained about sexism, it would have been downmodded to oblivion and received a flood of "screw political correctness, accept the facts" replies.
As to the information related by the summary, if we extrapolate a little bit and think about colonization ideas while having to deal with similar engineering constraints, women would possibly win again. They would be able to taken frozen sperm with them to impregnate with after arrival, as opposed to having to transport couples.
Yeah, about that. Sorry, but there was no good or even half-bad reason for a ground invasion of Iraq; only fully bad to terrible reasons, involving intelligence errors and exaggerations (about chemical weapons) and outright lies (about nuclear weapons). Many many people paid the price, and are still paying the price (we all are, actually). So yes, "Bush lied people died" is still completely applicable, and his administration is still completely deserving of the hate and vitriol that it receives and will continue to receive, probably forever.
In my experience, gmail is fairly good (the best?) about catching actual spam, but I still get both false positives and false negatives (a lot more of the former). That makes me believe that this is actually a very difficult problem to serve. The post above from someone who was a gmail engineer reinforces this impression.
However, how much spam you receive is largely under your control. I receive very little spam even in my spam folder - usually less than 5 a day. It basically boils down to keeping tight control over who gets your actual main personal email address. That should be reserved only for friends and family, and even then, I've thought about asking them to not enter my email address on any websites if I decide to change my main address some day.
Here's how I control the commercial emails (and consequently, spam):
1. You will need a domain name to use for receiving commercial emails (i.e. any website where you enter your email address), and domain hosting or at least an email forwarding service.
2. Configure the email forwarding/filtering to forward all emails or emails following a certain pattern for that domain to your real email address. I configured the option on my webhost to forward all email (a catch all, if you will), however, I've since learned that this is not the best way, because if your domain starts getting flooded with spam your domain could get blacklisted. Supposedly the best way is to configure a filter that has a "key" string. Let's say you use your initials: .jb (Joe Blow) - the filter would then only forward emails that contain .jb among the recipients' addresses.
3. Register with a unique address at each website, each store, any commercial use of your email. Ex: use spammer.com.jb@mydomain.com when you register at spammer.com. Same thing if you give your email address to any entity who is not a family member or personal friend. Now all the commercial emails will get forwarded to your real mailbox because they have the .jb key. I actually make an exception to this for banks and for things like webhosts, etc, but I'm reconsidering banks after the recent JPMorgan breach when they obtained contact info for everyone. I would still make an exception for webhosts or anything where there could be a problem if your mydomain.com is not available for some reason.
4. ???
5. Profit. I.E. as soon as you start seeing real spam (not the stuff that a lot of people incorrectly mark as spam), you will know what address they're sending to and can block them at your webhost or email forwarding service. Here are some examples of entities that I had to block because they were breached or sold my email address to spammers:
adobe.com (breach)
dropbox.com (breach)
planusa.org (unknown)
cinegearexpo.com (unknown)
equifax.com (unknown)
zappos.com (breach)
whois (open database - I use a proper domain registrar that hides my info by default now)
Bonus: another major advantage of doing this is that it makes it much much easier for you to change your main email address. You can reroute all your commercial email with one reconfiguration of your forwarder instead of having to go to each individual website to change your address.
Extra bonus: makes it super easy to setup a filter at your client or webmail to send all commercial email to a separate folder. Just filter for mydomain.com in the "to:" line.
Doing this for a few years now has really opened my eyes to how many companies and other organizations either don't give a shit about your private contact info, have shitty security, or actually sell you out for money. I was frankly surprised at some of the organizations that I had to block. Unfortunately early on in my spam-fighting days I did use my main email address on websites, and sometimes also used google's floating period or + functionality to try to individualize email addresses so I get some spam where I don't know where they obtained my address. But those are few and far between, and I've been slowly untangling myself from it to the extent that I can.
You're being a bit overly negative. This camera is nowhere near a RED competitor. This camera is going to be closer to a Blackmagic Production Camera competitor (which currently retails for $3k), at least in terms of hardware. In fact, their costs will likely be even lower than Blackmagic's, because they are concentrating on core features and openness, and will not include things like a video display, internal recording, etc.
While I agree with you that the goal of 100k Euro was a bit low (they actually ended up getting 175k Euro = 221k Dollars right now), the 350 Euro was just deposit/voucher that would allow you to buy a camera from the early batches for half the retail price. That means, you had to shell out another 2600 Euro to get the actual camera when they become available. Retail buyers will have to pay in the 5000-6000 Euro to get it.
I'm guessing that the money from this campaign will pay to build the prototype and get it ready for manufacturing, then they will probably finance the actual manufacturing run with the number of deposits/vouchers as an indicator of how much money they will actually get for selling the first batches of cameras. 175000/350 means something close to 500 deposits. 2600*500 means they're should expect to eventually get somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.3 million Euro, or about 1.65 million Dollars.
But yeah, I feel like that's a bit over-simplified and over-optimistic, especially given the delays and other issues experienced by both Digital Bolex and Blackmagic Design. They will have to demonstrate that they have things under control and are making good progress to get people to go through with the final orders. Still, I want them to succeed, and donated what small amount I could afford to help make it happen.
I don't know if my VPN uses compression, but that's a good tip. I will check that out, thanks!
I had been noticing poor performance from Youtube when watching videos (buffering, dropping to low-res, etc). Then I noticed that youtube seemed to work much better while I was connected through VPN, which is the opposite of what you would expect, at least in theory. But I realize that ISPs have been playing throttling games with large video sites like Youtube and Netflix.
However, I did another test and the results of it were more surprising for me. I have 3mbps DSL service through Verizon. If I run a test through speedtest.net, it reports right around 3mbps. However, if I connect my VPN first and then do the same test, it reports around 5mbps! How is that even possible?
Unfortunately, I feel like the VPN slows normal browsing of other sites a little bit, but I haven't done a comparison yet to confirm my perception.
I heard this interesting interview over the weekend on NPR (transcript in link). In it, the interviewee has this gem:
I was meeting with the vice president of the Communist Party in Shanghai, and I said, well, you know, what's your plan, sir? And he said, well, our five-year plan is to ensure that every man, woman and child in China has, at the very least, five megs of connectivity. And in all the top 10 cities, everyone's going to have one gig a second of connectivity. So I said, you know, sir have you thought about, you know, the unexpected side effects of giving 1.3 or 1.4 billion people a gig a second? And he says OK, I know what you're saying, I know where you're going, but here's the thing - the future of the human race, at least in this century, is ultra-high-speed Wi-Fi everywhere all the time. And it's going to happen whether you or I don't want it to happen or not. And because it's inevitable, we might as well get there first.
I live in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the US, and my only viable choices for internet connectivity are 3mbps DSL or Cable internet which is supposedly much faster, but capped at 250GB/month. The cheapest option of the two is $50/month. There are no signs of this changing in the next few years. At the current rate we're going, the US is pretty much doomed to be at the back of the line when it comes to internet connectivity. Think of the effects this will have on our economy in the medium to long term and gnash your teeth.
Seriously. They prioritize form over function in many of their design decisions: thin aluminum cases that scratch and dent (and now frames that bend), chiclet keyboards with no tactile feedback for centering your fingertips, ultrasharp edges on laptop wrist-rest area that cuts into your wrist, glossy screens that have tons of glare, non-user-replaceable batteries that require you to send the device for service unnecessarily, etc.
How much do you want to bet that the answer is "management"?
I believe I heard that VMworld is now the largest IT infrastructure conference in the world. If you are already steeped in virtualization, it's a wonderful conference to learn stuff and meet people. If you're not already steeped in virtualization, it's a wonderful conference to learn where the IT world is moving, and in fact has largely already moved to.
I watched a documentary about movie art direction and production design, and they had an extended segment about the art design of Blade Runner, interviewing the people involved, etc. One thing that they said that was unusual about the film, and hard to replicate, is that there was some kind of a strike (perhaps writer's guild) around the time that they were pre-producing the film, so they had a much larger amount of time to design and plan the look of the movie than the usual, so they really went to town on it. I think the look of the film shows the extra attention to detail that was given.
You believe in Lord Vader, don't you?
What an interesting coincidence. I was having a conversation with my dad this last weekend about just this subject. He proposed his theory that people in, for example, countries like Russia and China were less ethical than in other countries because of the purging of religion that happened in those two examples, within recent history. This surprised me because he's a fairly liberal-thinking person, although he has become more religious as he gets older. I think of myself as agnostic for the most part, but after giving it some thought, I wonder if he might have a point.
What do you think? Did the suppression of religion in those countries reduce the level of ethics? Can ethics effectively spread and be maintained among a large population without a broad system of organized religion?
You forgot to add promoting comprehensive, real-world sex education from an early age, if you don't like abortions.
Although it has nothing to do with religion in general, but more with culture and what specific sub-type of religion people follow. Case in point being Scandinavian countries which are ostensibly Christian, but have the type of sex education I mentioned, a much healthier and natural attitude towards sex, and a much lower incidence of unwanted pregnancies as a result of both.
I had almost exactly the same experience as you did: $10 charges showed up on my t-mobile bill from some random bogus premium service. I called them up, they refunded me, and offered to put a block on those types of premium services on my account, which I accepted. Problem solved for me, but I feel bad for anyone who doesn't or didn't review their mobile phone bills. I would imagine that other carriers are subject to the same "premium" text service scams, by the way.
Jack Devine is the subject of the sentence, so the article is saying that Aldrich Ames was Devine's former colleague, not Snowden's:
Jack Devine, a former CIA director of operations, said he did not believe Snowden had been a spy, but that he shared many psychological characteristics of American traitors such as his former colleague Aldrich Ames, who spent years betraying secrets to Russia and is now serving life in prison.
Thanks for the idea, and I'll check if my bank offers something similar for my credit card. But I'm going to stick with credit cards from now on. I realize now that there's a reason why banks seem to try to push us to use debit cards every change they get.
Here's an article describing why:
http://www.consumerreports.org...
I say screw them, at least until they pull their heads out of their asses and give us secure cards (chip and pin).
I'm getting so tired of these. It seems like every few months now I'm getting affected by one. Last year my bank replaced my debit card three times (Adobe breach, Target breach, and who knows what the third one was)! Consequently, I'm no longer using my debit card as a debit card, but only at ATMs. I use my credit card for any card-based purchases now. But it doesn't stop. You name it: zappos breach, dropbox breach, a breach at an old community college I attended years ago, and probably others that I've forgotten about in the last year or two. Fuck me running.
By the way, the stories about this breach claim that no financial data was compromised. That's fine, except that the data that was compromised may be used for identity theft: your name, date of birth, and street address. I'm pretty much getting ready to use the option that the credit reporting agencies offer to lock down my credit so that no one can obtain credit in my name without me unlocking it. It's a pain, but I don't think it's a choice anymore at the rate these breaches are going.
That's reassuring. Thanks for the reply!