I tried to order AT&T dry loop service in the San Francisco Bay area two months ago.
After jumping around the phone tree for a while, I was told that it was possible to order it, but that the cheapest possible plan cost more than $20 above the cost of their cheapest bundled rate, and it required paying for a professional installation, signing up for a one year contract, and not getting any discounts or rebates on the mandatory dsl modem purchase.
I ended up reluctantly ordering a minimal ("measured rate") voice line, which ends up costing around $11/mo including taxes and fees, and ordering DSL through an outside provider which offered a much better deal than AT&T.
I'm willing to go through a fair bit of trouble just to force a truly evil company like AT&T to meet even distressingly watered-down anti-trust settlements. . . but $12/mo, a $200 dollar setup fee, and a factor of 4 decrease in bandwidth all to prove a point is starting to get rather steep.
That was my thought exactly. Got to hand it to the US, bravely trying our best not to let Russia beat us to the title of "industrialized nation most annoying to foreign travelers."
I'd wager that we're not quite as frustrating as Russia yet, at least from the point of view of EU citizens, but we're making good time.
Well, probation *and* the 43 days served in jail while awaiting trial.
One might argue it's not enough - but it's far from nothing. And it's a hell of a lot closer to a fair sentence than executing someone for the crime of annoying you and wasted some of your time on phone calls and bank paperwork. (Are half the slashdot readers really crazy fucking sociopaths, or just prone to making rash, ill-considered comments?)
Amazing, for someone I've never met, I think I just cried a little (and am not afraid to admit it.) I used to love that show.
I also cried while reflecting upon the news of his death. (And I'm the sort of person who greets most celebrity deaths with rude jokes. You should hear my Lady Diana and Ronald Reagan one-liners.)
I don't want to belittle the very real loss his friends and family are experiencing or the pain of cancer, but perhaps we should envy him. To die at 89 with the knowledge that you've inspired generations of scientists and science enthusiasts is hardly the worst outcome one can hope for. I'd go to my grave satisfied having positively impacted a tiny fraction of the number of lives he's touched.
When the news of his death was announced in our lab, it generated a spontaneous group discussion and collective revery. Of the 8 mid-twenties physics PhD candidates in the room, only one wasn't intimately familiar with his programs. Most shared very detailed accounts of favorite demonstrations, and all examples were met with knowing nods from the gathered crowd.
I watched a lot of television as a kid, but (with Mr. Roger's Neighborhood a notable second), no program ever came close to matching Mr. Wizard's show in either the importance I placed upon it at the time or the degree to which I can remember it today. Outside of the occasional trip to the museum, it was the only chance many of us had to encounter the sciences in any guise other than the dessicated list of memorizable-facts presented in elementary textbooks.
Would I have found my calling in the sciences without his program? Who knows. Perhaps. But probably not as early or as easily. And I sure as hell would have missed out on several hours a week of sheer joy as I watched his program and tried to replicate some of the less materials-intensive experiments.
The real tragedy, of course, isn't that he has died, but that (according to wikipedia) his programs are no longer broadcast anywhere. I haven't seen television in a while, so its possible that there's even better science programming available today. But, somehow, I doubt it.
So long, Mr. Wizard. Tonight I'll light a candle in your honor (under an overturned air-and-water-filled tumbler sitting in a pan of water. ..)
How much crack did the author smoke before he decided this nonsense could possibly be interesting to anyone except him?
Even the passages on stories I understand in some detail (the carmageddon zombies and robots and the simcopter kissing boys) seem to be totally incoherent. If I didn't already know the back story, I'd be left without the slightest idea what happened, much less why I should care.
Am I the only person who read the whole article and left without even the vaguest understanding of what actually occurred in most of the examples? Is the Laura Croft story about a person dressed as a video game character, or about a scene in a video game? What the fuck are "Vangers?" Since when is "someone once made a Myst parody" an interesting statement?
Have I ever wondered where the name 'Guybrush Threepwood' came from?" Well, no, actually. Hadn't ever heard the name until now. And, since you've give it to me with no god damned context, I can't imagine what I'd care. Someone quotes PG Woodhouse in choosing the name for something. Can't tell you what it is, 'cause the author was too busy ejaculating over his own stylistic flourishes to treat the reader with respect.
Give me a break. For the five people in the world who already know all the context behind every and every story, this article is probably rather entertaining. For everyone else, it's a waste of time.
This is about as far off-topic as one can get, but I also find the prevalence of cumshot scenes in mainstream porn astonishing.
I know there are people out there who love their cumshots. But, there are people who love all sorts of wacky things, and most of them have to turn to specialty catalogs because their individual fetish doesn't automatically show up at the climax of every hardcore pornographic video produced in the last twenty years.
Don't get me wrong, I've my own kinks, and am perfectly happy to indulge in them, and in the interest of variety, to occasionally sample those of others. There clearly should exist a cumshot shelf - hell, an isle even - in the dirty movie store somewhere between the scat vids and the pissing-on-the-sidewalk display kiosk. But, that's about where a cumshot lives on my personal fetish rank: somewhere near the middle of the list under the heading "mildly distasteful and not at all exciting, and isn't it interesting that there are people in this world who find it engaging."
My own pet theory for the ubiquitous cumshot is that it's an artifice used by directors who can't get their actors to evoke a convincing orgasm even when they're *actually* having one. (Whether professionals in the industry are really as bad as they seem, or whether they're instead forced to perform far below their real talent by a society that demands a strict separation between titillation and art is open to debate.)
Then again, perhaps I'm wrong. It could be that 98% of male porn viewers actually do enjoy cumshots. Wouldn't be the first time I was mislead by assuming most people are like me. Surely an industry with as much funding as mainstream porn has done marketing studies on the subject.
I often find myself printing to postscript and saving the files as well.
But, in general, creating pictures of html pages (whether on actual paper or as postscript files) seems like a really bad idea. HTML files are small, searchable, portable, and easily transformed into other formats. Postscript files are none of these things.
It may be less wasteful than generating paper (given some assumption about the environmental and economic costs associated with hard drive space), but an html based solution seems like a much better idea.
I submitted my own reply below before reading yours - and ended up making more or less the same points.
If you ask me, the original article ought to have been called, "Why does being an obnoxious git with no reading comprehension skills make trying to learn science topics from wikipedia suck?"
The author's general points may be valid, but the examples and detailed commentary are terrible.
Wikipedia oughtn't be an expert-level source right off the bat--the average joe should be able to look up something, and with a high school level education at least have the basics of something explained to them before the Wikipedia editors go batshit crazy with Math LaTeX markup writing impenetrable proofs all the way down the page.
While I don't disagree with you in general, there is still the question of what an average Joe with an highschool education should be expected to know.
I'd argue that the two biological examples transcribed in the original article are quite accessible. Since I'm a physicist myself, I'm not really equipped to decide whether the fluid mechanics entry is appropriate for a general audience. But, I haven't had a lick of biological instruction since 9th grade, and I hated it and did rather poorly in it back then. (I realize the parent post didn't reference these passages in particular - but they seem fair examples for discussion.)
I'd never heard of epigenetics until I read the paragraph included in this article. Now I've got the basics. It may not be an example of the most engaging prose ever penned on the subject, but anyone with a junior high life-sciences course under the belt and the ability to correctly interpret a sentence with two clauses should have no problem with it. While I did already have some pop-science understanding of what makes mitochondrial dna interesting, I claim that if I hadn't, I would have found that entry perfectly straightforward. It's true I couldn't give you a solid definition of a "eukariotic;" however, that doesn't detract from the readability or utility of the passage.
When it comes to subjects about which I know nothing, I'll happily take the average wikipedia article over most newspaper science writing, which seems to assume an audience of eight year olds with ADD and will happily waste six paragraphs on misleading analogies without even providing the reader with enough keywords to allow them to find out more about the topic. Sure, there is room for improvement, especially when it comes to "big picture" summaries and background material on specialized topics, but let's not get rid of detailed information so that we don't frighten people by forcing them to occasionally encounter a word they don't understand.
What, you don't think '555' is a suitably secure password?
Yeah, full vendor-specific alphanumerics, and mostly obscure oddball parts you wouldn't find in a general-purpose parts bin. Still not as good as truly random passwords, but not too bad.
For years our lab (a research lab behind locked doors, open only to a few trusted people) use IC part numbers for root passwords. To avoid having to remember them, we'd just drop the device itself into the top drawer of the desk nearest a particular machine.
Not the most secure method in the world, but far better than the practices in any other academic research group I've seen. (Most do something really complicated and uncrackable. . . like taking two three or four letter English words and putting one after the other. Or, taking a short English word and misspelling it by changing one letter.)
I do exactly the same trick with song lyrics and lines from poems.
I never forget a password; however, I do sometimes forget which particular password is associated with a given service. The nice thing is that one can keep notes which are sufficiently obscure that they're useless to anyone who doesn't know your scheme and also recognize a given work.
Of course, if this sort of behavior becomes popular, it wouldn't be too hard to put together a brute force attack that uses variations on this on, say, the Project Gutenberg texts and quotation and poetry websites. We can only hope that easier targets make that unlikely.
"Hey Bob - it looks like that 100 MHz crap on the line goes away if we let the front chassis panel float." "Great. Problem solved. Just isolate the panel and let's forget about it." "Okay, but let's add a switch just in case we ever want to change back. Say, what luck - this old toggle switch shorts one pin to the chassis internally." "Great. Be sure to label that switch so we know what it does." "But we don't know why it works in the first place. I know, let's call it 'magic.' Here, hand me the label maker and grab another beer while you're up."
- skip five years -
"I figured out why the new translation board keeps dropping frames - some joker added a switch that isolates the front chassis on this old machine from ground. When this thing is in the 'magic' position, all the hardware in rack 7 is floating!" "You mean we spent eight days troubleshooting something that turned out to be a goddamn switch?" "Yup. We're just lucky we didn't fry anything expensive." "Tear out the switch." "But someone must have put it there for a reason." "Okay, then just make sure it's labeled so we don't end up doing this again in five years."
The phone had a flaky "1" button which would occasionally cut out while pressed. One night I got particularly unlucky. To get an outside line on our lab phones, one dials a 9. I tried to make a call from home at around 2am, mistakenly started to dial as if from the lab, and the "1" button hiccoughed on the first press and left a gap long enough to register as two digits. I then continued entering numbers and was surprised to hear the phone stop ringing before I had finished. I hung up immediately and redialed.
Five minutes later the 911 dispatcher called us back to ask if there was an emergency. They believed me when I explained what happened and didn't send anyone round. (A questionable policy given the circumstances under which someone is likely to dial 911 and then hang up immediately.)
The default should be "Save as XLS" because the safe choice should always be the default. Maybe a cancel button, too.
I've got to disagree with you there. If the user has explicitely *asked* for an unsafe choice, then the default should be what the user asked for. (And, while we're at it, there better be a way to turn off the warning after the first instance.)
I've never used a video ipod, but if the user interface hasn't changed dramatically in the last couple years, having to enter a pin to unlock it every time it's used sounds like a real pain in the ass. Any pin with more free digits than there are buttons on a device is certain to never be used by anyone except a hand full of paranoid nutters.
Although I usually fall into that category myself, having features like that are useless at protecting devices, even if (when implemented well) they can protect data. So long as most devices of a particular kind are likely to remain unlocked, they'll remain an attractive target for thieves.
According to a a second article linked to in one of the other followup posts, http://www.komotv.com/news/6888002.html , the advert "invited people to take 'items outside this home and in the garage on the 1200 block of East 64th Street.'"
No guarantee the quote is accurate, but it's the only direct quote I've seen, and it doesn't sound like an invitation to take windows and water heaters. I'd love to see the entire craigslist post if anyone has found a copy.
I'm not arguing that the former tenant isn't legally responsible for what happened, only that it may not have been malicious.
RTFA. This was a piece of rental property that the woman owned. It was empty. None of her personal things were taken.
Actually, it may be even *less* shocking than that. She evicted a tenant and then "cleaned out that rental."
Assuming the tenant didn't know the rental had been cleaned out, this could have easily been an honest mistake: a former tenant giving away the personal possessions he believed were left behind in his apartment. Without having read the original post, there's no reason to imagine the intent was "come steal my landlord's the water heater and windows" rather than "come get a free couch that I left behind when I had to move in with my sister in a hurry."
Granted, inviting everyone on Craig's list to empty out a house and not making arrangements to insure someone is around to meet them may not be particularly thoughtful. But it's hardly robbery.
"why would you want to let other people make money off of deterring cheaters by using your work - without you seeing a penny of the profit".
In this case, one could make the question even stronger:
"why would you let other people force you (as both taxpayer and school budget stakeholder) to pay them money in order to deter cheaters by using your work - without you seeing a penny of the profit."
There's something perverse about a for profit company throwing a smattering of database code at a massive stack of ill-gotten IP and then charging public institutions for access.
I'm sure there are a lot of reasons why someone would move from their home country to the Bay Area (reasons that obviously very widely based on the individual and the country). But let's face it, very few of those reasons will ever convince anyone to move to Siberia.
It's certainly true that, all things being equal, most people would probably choose San Francisco ahead of Novosibirsk.
Given a choice between Sunnyvale and Krasnoyasrk, however, the decision becomes a bit harder. In a contest between Atlanta and Irkutsk, the later wins hands down.
I live in the Bay area and love it, and would certainly have a tough time trying to argue against it. But, I'd happily settle in any of the dozen Siberian cities I've visited long before I'd move to Austin, Phoenix, or any of a number of would-be high tech centers in the US, assuming I could find work which was equally engaging and supported a similar standard of living. And that's even allowing for having been born and raised in the US and speaking hardly any Russian. If I a native of China or one of the former Soviet states, the choice would be even easier.
I'm not convinced geography alone is really such a big disadvantage.
People don't talk like in the real world because they know there are consequences. If someone said to my mom what some have said to Kathy, I'd beat the living shit out of them! Most of you would as well. But once we get online and start posting anonymously, there are no consequences. We can say the most vile and violent things and people act like it's normal.
Hmmm. In my book, calmly stating that you're going to beat the living shit out of someone because of an insult earns a place rather higher up on the crazy-sociopath-worth-avoiding list than making totally implausible, exaggerated threats in an anonymous forum.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay. . . so instead, you upload the file to the fab house server and then stop by your local3D-printer/SLS/CNC-mill kiosk to pick up your phone kit.
Well, after blindly tabbing through all those annoying thermal/mechanical/power-requirement/RFI warning screens, that is.
I tried to order AT&T dry loop service in the San Francisco Bay area two months ago.
After jumping around the phone tree for a while, I was told that it was possible to order it, but that the cheapest possible plan cost more than $20 above the cost of their cheapest bundled rate, and it required paying for a professional installation, signing up for a one year contract, and not getting any discounts or rebates on the mandatory dsl modem purchase.
I ended up reluctantly ordering a minimal ("measured rate") voice line, which ends up costing around $11/mo including taxes and fees, and ordering DSL through an outside provider which offered a much better deal than AT&T.
I'm willing to go through a fair bit of trouble just to force a truly evil company like AT&T to meet even distressingly watered-down anti-trust settlements. . . but $12/mo, a $200 dollar setup fee, and a factor of 4 decrease in bandwidth all to prove a point is starting to get rather steep.
That was my thought exactly. Got to hand it to the US, bravely trying our best not to let Russia beat us to the title of "industrialized nation most annoying to foreign travelers."
I'd wager that we're not quite as frustrating as Russia yet, at least from the point of view of EU citizens, but we're making good time.
Well, probation *and* the 43 days served in jail while awaiting trial.
One might argue it's not enough - but it's far from nothing. And it's a hell of a lot closer to a fair sentence than executing someone for the crime of annoying you and wasted some of your time on phone calls and bank paperwork. (Are half the slashdot readers really crazy fucking sociopaths, or just prone to making rash, ill-considered comments?)
I also cried while reflecting upon the news of his death. (And I'm the sort of person who greets most celebrity deaths with rude jokes. You should hear my Lady Diana and Ronald Reagan one-liners.)
I don't want to belittle the very real loss his friends and family are experiencing or the pain of cancer, but perhaps we should envy him. To die at 89 with the knowledge that you've inspired generations of scientists and science enthusiasts is hardly the worst outcome one can hope for. I'd go to my grave satisfied having positively impacted a tiny fraction of the number of lives he's touched.
Two generations, at the very least.
.)
When the news of his death was announced in our lab, it generated a spontaneous group discussion and collective revery. Of the 8 mid-twenties physics PhD candidates in the room, only one wasn't intimately familiar with his programs. Most shared very detailed accounts of favorite demonstrations, and all examples were met with knowing nods from the gathered crowd.
I watched a lot of television as a kid, but (with Mr. Roger's Neighborhood a notable second), no program ever came close to matching Mr. Wizard's show in either the importance I placed upon it at the time or the degree to which I can remember it today. Outside of the occasional trip to the museum, it was the only chance many of us had to encounter the sciences in any guise other than the dessicated list of memorizable-facts presented in elementary textbooks.
Would I have found my calling in the sciences without his program? Who knows. Perhaps. But probably not as early or as easily. And I sure as hell would have missed out on several hours a week of sheer joy as I watched his program and tried to replicate some of the less materials-intensive experiments.
The real tragedy, of course, isn't that he has died, but that (according to wikipedia) his programs are no longer broadcast anywhere. I haven't seen television in a while, so its possible that there's even better science programming available today. But, somehow, I doubt it.
So long, Mr. Wizard. Tonight I'll light a candle in your honor (under an overturned air-and-water-filled tumbler sitting in a pan of water. .
How much crack did the author smoke before he decided this nonsense could possibly be interesting to anyone except him?
Even the passages on stories I understand in some detail (the carmageddon zombies and robots and the simcopter kissing boys) seem to be totally incoherent. If I didn't already know the back story, I'd be left without the slightest idea what happened, much less why I should care.
Am I the only person who read the whole article and left without even the vaguest understanding of what actually occurred in most of the examples? Is the Laura Croft story about a person dressed as a video game character, or about a scene in a video game? What the fuck are "Vangers?" Since when is "someone once made a Myst parody" an interesting statement?
Have I ever wondered where the name 'Guybrush Threepwood' came from?" Well, no, actually. Hadn't ever heard the name until now. And, since you've give it to me with no god damned context, I can't imagine what I'd care. Someone quotes PG Woodhouse in choosing the name for something. Can't tell you what it is, 'cause the author was too busy ejaculating over his own stylistic flourishes to treat the reader with respect.
Give me a break. For the five people in the world who already know all the context behind every and every story, this article is probably rather entertaining. For everyone else, it's a waste of time.
Sure. But, when you find yourself living out of your vehicle, a tour bus has certain advantages.
sudo rm -f `which vi` && export EDITOR=/usr/bin/emacs-*.*-no-x11 && emacs -nw --load=www-notes-mode.elc --funcall=www-notes-mode --funcall=www-notes-enable-electric-entry --funcall=www-notes-jump-to-last-entry
(Yeah, okay - now we're really starting to get really silly.)
Interesting.
You bring up some points I hadn't considered. Nicely done.
This is about as far off-topic as one can get, but I also find the prevalence of cumshot scenes in mainstream porn astonishing.
I know there are people out there who love their cumshots. But, there are people who love all sorts of wacky things, and most of them have to turn to specialty catalogs because their individual fetish doesn't automatically show up at the climax of every hardcore pornographic video produced in the last twenty years.
Don't get me wrong, I've my own kinks, and am perfectly happy to indulge in them, and in the interest of variety, to occasionally sample those of others. There clearly should exist a cumshot shelf - hell, an isle even - in the dirty movie store somewhere between the scat vids and the pissing-on-the-sidewalk display kiosk. But, that's about where a cumshot lives on my personal fetish rank: somewhere near the middle of the list under the heading "mildly distasteful and not at all exciting, and isn't it interesting that there are people in this world who find it engaging."
My own pet theory for the ubiquitous cumshot is that it's an artifice used by directors who can't get their actors to evoke a convincing orgasm even when they're *actually* having one. (Whether professionals in the industry are really as bad as they seem, or whether they're instead forced to perform far below their real talent by a society that demands a strict separation between titillation and art is open to debate.)
Then again, perhaps I'm wrong. It could be that 98% of male porn viewers actually do enjoy cumshots. Wouldn't be the first time I was mislead by assuming most people are like me. Surely an industry with as much funding as mainstream porn has done marketing studies on the subject.
I often find myself printing to postscript and saving the files as well.
But, in general, creating pictures of html pages (whether on actual paper or as postscript files) seems like a really bad idea. HTML files are small, searchable, portable, and easily transformed into other formats. Postscript files are none of these things.
It may be less wasteful than generating paper (given some assumption about the environmental and economic costs associated with hard drive space), but an html based solution seems like a much better idea.
Sorry jbengt,
I submitted my own reply below before reading yours - and ended up making more or less the same points.
If you ask me, the original article ought to have been called, "Why does being an obnoxious git with no reading comprehension skills make trying to learn science topics from wikipedia suck?"
The author's general points may be valid, but the examples and detailed commentary are terrible.
While I don't disagree with you in general, there is still the question of what an average Joe with an highschool education should be expected to know.
I'd argue that the two biological examples transcribed in the original article are quite accessible. Since I'm a physicist myself, I'm not really equipped to decide whether the fluid mechanics entry is appropriate for a general audience. But, I haven't had a lick of biological instruction since 9th grade, and I hated it and did rather poorly in it back then. (I realize the parent post didn't reference these passages in particular - but they seem fair examples for discussion.)
I'd never heard of epigenetics until I read the paragraph included in this article. Now I've got the basics. It may not be an example of the most engaging prose ever penned on the subject, but anyone with a junior high life-sciences course under the belt and the ability to correctly interpret a sentence with two clauses should have no problem with it. While I did already have some pop-science understanding of what makes mitochondrial dna interesting, I claim that if I hadn't, I would have found that entry perfectly straightforward. It's true I couldn't give you a solid definition of a "eukariotic;" however, that doesn't detract from the readability or utility of the passage.
When it comes to subjects about which I know nothing, I'll happily take the average wikipedia article over most newspaper science writing, which seems to assume an audience of eight year olds with ADD and will happily waste six paragraphs on misleading analogies without even providing the reader with enough keywords to allow them to find out more about the topic. Sure, there is room for improvement, especially when it comes to "big picture" summaries and background material on specialized topics, but let's not get rid of detailed information so that we don't frighten people by forcing them to occasionally encounter a word they don't understand.
What, you don't think '555' is a suitably secure password?
Yeah, full vendor-specific alphanumerics, and mostly obscure oddball parts you wouldn't find in a general-purpose parts bin. Still not as good as truly random passwords, but not too bad.
For years our lab (a research lab behind locked doors, open only to a few trusted people) use IC part numbers for root passwords. To avoid having to remember them, we'd just drop the device itself into the top drawer of the desk nearest a particular machine.
Not the most secure method in the world, but far better than the practices in any other academic research group I've seen. (Most do something really complicated and uncrackable. . . like taking two three or four letter English words and putting one after the other. Or, taking a short English word and misspelling it by changing one letter.)
Nice.
I do exactly the same trick with song lyrics and lines from poems.
I never forget a password; however, I do sometimes forget which particular password is associated with a given service. The nice thing is that one can keep notes which are sufficiently obscure that they're useless to anyone who doesn't know your scheme and also recognize a given work.
Of course, if this sort of behavior becomes popular, it wouldn't be too hard to put together a brute force attack that uses variations on this on, say, the Project Gutenberg texts and quotation and poetry websites. We can only hope that easier targets make that unlikely.
Great story.
My attempt at scripting a plausible origin:
"Hey Bob - it looks like that 100 MHz crap on the line goes away if we let the front chassis panel float."
"Great. Problem solved. Just isolate the panel and let's forget about it."
"Okay, but let's add a switch just in case we ever want to change back. Say, what luck - this old toggle switch shorts one pin to the chassis internally."
"Great. Be sure to label that switch so we know what it does."
"But we don't know why it works in the first place. I know, let's call it 'magic.' Here, hand me the label maker and grab another beer while you're up."
- skip five years -
"I figured out why the new translation board keeps dropping frames - some joker added a switch that isolates the front chassis on this old machine from ground. When this thing is in the 'magic' position, all the hardware in rack 7 is floating!"
"You mean we spent eight days troubleshooting something that turned out to be a goddamn switch?"
"Yup. We're just lucky we didn't fry anything expensive."
"Tear out the switch."
"But someone must have put it there for a reason."
"Okay, then just make sure it's labeled so we don't end up doing this again in five years."
- skip five years -
etc.
I did something similar with a touch tone phone.
The phone had a flaky "1" button which would occasionally cut out while pressed. One night I got particularly unlucky. To get an outside line on our lab phones, one dials a 9. I tried to make a call from home at around 2am, mistakenly started to dial as if from the lab, and the "1" button hiccoughed on the first press and left a gap long enough to register as two digits. I then continued entering numbers and was surprised to hear the phone stop ringing before I had finished. I hung up immediately and redialed.
Five minutes later the 911 dispatcher called us back to ask if there was an emergency. They believed me when I explained what happened and didn't send anyone round. (A questionable policy given the circumstances under which someone is likely to dial 911 and then hang up immediately.)
I've never used a video ipod, but if the user interface hasn't changed dramatically in the last couple years, having to enter a pin to unlock it every time it's used sounds like a real pain in the ass. Any pin with more free digits than there are buttons on a device is certain to never be used by anyone except a hand full of paranoid nutters.
Although I usually fall into that category myself, having features like that are useless at protecting devices, even if (when implemented well) they can protect data. So long as most devices of a particular kind are likely to remain unlocked, they'll remain an attractive target for thieves.
According to a a second article linked to in one of the other followup posts, http://www.komotv.com/news/6888002.html , the advert "invited people to take 'items outside this home and in the garage on the 1200 block of East 64th Street.'"
No guarantee the quote is accurate, but it's the only direct quote I've seen, and it doesn't sound like an invitation to take windows and water heaters. I'd love to see the entire craigslist post if anyone has found a copy.
I'm not arguing that the former tenant isn't legally responsible for what happened, only that it may not have been malicious.
Actually, it may be even *less* shocking than that. She evicted a tenant and then "cleaned out that rental."
Assuming the tenant didn't know the rental had been cleaned out, this could have easily been an honest mistake: a former tenant giving away the personal possessions he believed were left behind in his apartment. Without having read the original post, there's no reason to imagine the intent was "come steal my landlord's the water heater and windows" rather than "come get a free couch that I left behind when I had to move in with my sister in a hurry."
Granted, inviting everyone on Craig's list to empty out a house and not making arrangements to insure someone is around to meet them may not be particularly thoughtful. But it's hardly robbery.
In this case, one could make the question even stronger:
"why would you let other people force you (as both taxpayer and school budget stakeholder) to pay them money in order to deter cheaters by using your work - without you seeing a penny of the profit."
There's something perverse about a for profit company throwing a smattering of database code at a massive stack of ill-gotten IP and then charging public institutions for access.
It's certainly true that, all things being equal, most people would probably choose San Francisco ahead of Novosibirsk.
Given a choice between Sunnyvale and Krasnoyasrk, however, the decision becomes a bit harder. In a contest between Atlanta and Irkutsk, the later wins hands down.
I live in the Bay area and love it, and would certainly have a tough time trying to argue against it. But, I'd happily settle in any of the dozen Siberian cities I've visited long before I'd move to Austin, Phoenix, or any of a number of would-be high tech centers in the US, assuming I could find work which was equally engaging and supported a similar standard of living. And that's even allowing for having been born and raised in the US and speaking hardly any Russian. If I a native of China or one of the former Soviet states, the choice would be even easier.
I'm not convinced geography alone is really such a big disadvantage.
Hmmm. In my book, calmly stating that you're going to beat the living shit out of someone because of an insult earns a place rather higher up on the crazy-sociopath-worth-avoiding list than making totally implausible, exaggerated threats in an anonymous forum.