A spam that's trying to find out whether your address actually receives mail. If you click on the opt-out link, they've verified that the address works. They then add your e-mail to a list that they send to other spammers.
I've long suspected that most of the spam that doesn't advertise a product or offer a virus-laden attachment falls into this category. It seems a reasonable explanation for both the long strings of random prose spam and the short nonsense sentence and single-word spam.
In a world of honeypots and throw-away addresses, and bandwidth which is limited (if only by the cost of a zombie net or the time spent hunting for ill configured servers), it must be to someone's advantage to try to remove bogus addresses from lists. Using a message which really isn't spam when culling is probably the best way to avoid getting artificial bounces from spam filters. Besides, if you happen to be in the business of selling addresses rather than penis pills, there's no reason to spend time carefully trying to engineer *real* spam to get through filters.
Back on the topic of the main thread, I've always found it hard to believe that there exist people in this world who would sign up for a home mortgage advertised in misspelled, all-caps, barely intelligible spam. Buying something shady - like prescription meds or bestial pr0n - isn't too hard to believe. Embarrassed customers expect to deal with shady people. But it seems like a crazy way to do banking. It's shocking that something like that could work, even at the level of a few idiots per million addresses. Perhaps there are enough people trying to do sneaky business with property to which they don't legally have title to make such a thing worthwhile.
Even if the bandwidth is reduced to only 8 bits a day, useful information can still leak out.
Of course when you get down to bits per day, you have to put together a some pretty smart filters to try to pull only useful information.
I suppose it might not be too difficult, depending on your goal. Something as simple as recording the first thirty keystrokes after power-up is likely to catch usernames and passwords on a local machine. (If that's enough to get you in, then your victim isn't nearly as serious about security as you are about attacking him... but such isn't impossible.)
The more you know about the victim and the information target, the better your chances of catching them, assuming you customize the bug before deploying it.
If you want to really go to extremes, you might even be able to find a way to send information *in* to the keyboard by carefully delaying network packets. With a little experimentation, you could probably learn to measure the length of the delay in a keystroke echo using only the user's keystrokes. Then you just throw in a 1 second delay at precise intervals and include some pretty heavy analysis and error correction.
I find it ironic that you won't send your credit card number by unencrypted email, but your solution is to give it over an unencrypted telephone connection.
I doubt it is any more difficult for someone to eavesdrop on a phone conversation than to capture network packets...
If by *someone* you mean, "someone who works for the phone company, or is a government agent, or someone who knows where I live and is motivated to spend time and energy and to risk serious criminal charges by physically attaching hardware to my house and furthermore someone who is willing to spend enormous amounts of time listening to my conversations," then you are correct.
If instead you mean "someone who doesn't work for the phone company and isn't a cop and who isn't willing to go to extremes to attack me as an individual," then you're far better off using the phone.
The barriers to combing unencrypted email for useful data is a lot lower than the barrier to tapping phone lines. Not only are there more people with physical access to the message (either legitimately or illegitimately), but they have the great advantage that they can read huge amounts of data at a single point and can employ automation to scan for interesting material. And, the guilty party needn't even be located in the same country as you - which makes the whole thing a lot more tempting than having to mess around with wire strippers in the bushes by your house while risking huge wire tapping penalties if caught.
The exception, of course, is an analog cordless telephone. It's still unlikely you'll happen to live within a few blocks of someone who's life is dull enough they'd be interested in listening to all of your conversations and who is also willing and able to use credit card info, but not totally impossible.
The "what's more" comment was supposed to follow a prior correction mentioning that "this month's issue of Science" ought to be changed to "this WEEK'S issue of science."
But that comment seems to have vanished. Perhaps I hit the posting time-limit and didn't notice.
I think I'd better stop posting now before I get myself into *real* trouble.
Oh well. At least it gave me a chance to notice a a Vernor Vinge fan posting in this threat. Always nice to run across one of those.
So anyone out there have an idea of the magnitude of the change. Will athletes gain a boost there by training in a higher gravity environment? What are the effects of the lower gravity environment or is it so insignificant that who cares.
The full paper as well as a very nice layman's introduction in the Perspectives section is in this month's issue of Science. (Sorry - subscription only. But you may be able to find the text on a preprint server. I'm no geologist, but I haven't been able to find it in any of the obvious places.)
Basically, they map out a change of 15 microgals (1 gal = 1 cm/s^2) or around 1.5e-8 of the average gravitational field on the earth.
By comparison, the variation in g with latitude (at constant elevation) is around 0.5 percent, or 300'000 times as much. Variation associated with local geology is around 100 times smaller, but still swamps this earthquake signal.
What's cool about this measurement isn't that they're measuring something big enough to have any effect on humans, but rather that they're able to measure such a tiny effect at all.
There are all sorts of processes going on in the earth and in the oceans that involve movements of comparable amounts of mass: changes in glacier and polar icecaps, ocean-atmosphere gas exchange, deep sea current and temperature changes, movement and depletion of underground water, fast moving magma associated with volcanos, slow tectonic changes, etc. And now it seems like it's also helpful in trying to construct detailed models of an earthquake.
Incidentally, if you were an athlete trying to cash in on lower gravity, you'd be better off training in the Chilean highlands and competing in Puerto Rico - but it still wouldn't help you much, especially compared to biological effects and day to day variation in performance. (http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/publications/fact _sheet/3.html)
Is it just me, or does maintaining initrd seem like more trouble than it is worth? I guess it is good for generic distributions which want to support every hardware config under the sun and keep the kernel small, but if you know the (set of) hardware you are going to be running a given kernel on, you might as well just blow that initrd crap away. Whenever I recompile a kernel, initrd is the first thing to go. All you need in the kernel to make initrd irrelevant is disk and filesystem (and maybe software RAID modules) support. You can keep everything else as modules.
That's certainly my impression. Anyone know of any reason why someone might want to use initrd on a stock system (eg. x86 desktop machine with hard drives)?
I've always just put appropriate filesystem support into the kernel and skipped it.
I suppose if you wanted to encrypt your root directory or do some exotic network booting it might be useful - but for an ordinary desktop it just seems like one extra step without purpose.
Yup. TLDP is a great resource, especially for broad overview questions or cases where one starts off without enough keywords to make a meaningful search. Some information is old, but everything is dated, so it's usually relatively easy to stay clear of dangerously misleading material.
I usually spent a while on google and then try a mailing list. When searching, error messages or whole phrases that someone is likely to use when describing a problem tend to pull up worthwhile results.
For mailing lists, choosing the most specific mailing list possible is always a good idea. Sending mail to some generic linux list with a detailed question about some specific software package isn't likely to get you anywhere. Local user groups are a decent place to ask a question when you haven't enough information to know which specific list is appropriate.
For someone brand new to linux, starting out with a fairly brief overview of linux or unix-like OS's in general isn't a bad idea. The Slackware Book works rather nicely as a free option, even if you aren't a slackware fan. (But then, I am - so my judgment may be questionable.) http://www.slackbook.org/
Bundled downloads suck, especially for people with slow internet connections.
Yup. Bundling software on physical media is harmless and occasionally useful, assuming you give users plenty of opportunity to install only what they choose.
But bundling unrelated software in a download is infuriating.
Not only has Mozilla sullied its own reputation by associating itself with shitty software, it's actually made the shitty software even worse in the process. What's worse than realplayer? Easy: reaplayer + an 8 MB download of software the user either already has or doesn't want.
The only question is, what's in it for Real? Hard to see what they get out of the deal.
Who in their right mind would cite a Wikipedia article in their own Latex document?
Well, if the Latex document has "wikipedia" in the title, it might be appropriate. (And in a century or so, it may be a great place to find rather nice illustrative popular-opinion and common-knowledge anecdotes.)
But, on the whole, you're right. Bibtex entries for wikipedia articles are pretty funny. (As would be a service that generates bibtex entries for print encyclopedia articles.)
If you eventually want a Ph.D., why not get it now? You're used to a low standard of living & may be paid a meager wage to get your degree & you won't be interrupting your career path.
Yup. I couldn't agree more.
Transitioning into grad school is never going to be easier than immediately after your undergrad degree. If you know for a fact you want to go to grad school, then just do it. (Or take a year and travel the world, join the peace corps, start a band, or do other things that aren't half-hearted attempts to try to find a regular job for a couple years before going back to school.) Don't set yourself up in a situation where it becomes impossible later. The world is full of angry old men who've spent a lifetime doing stuff they hate because they decided to spend a few years making money before pursuing their dreams and then became trapped by social commitments.
On the other hand, if you're not at all sure that you do want to go to grad school, trying something else may not be a bad way to make up your mind.
Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap.
I don't think movies are getting worse - they're just as crap as they
always have been.
Yup. There have *always* been a lot of terrible movies out there. We just forget about them. ('cause they're forgettable.) And there are still some great movies being produced today.
The only difference is that the rise of consolidated suburban multiplexes and the erosion of small locally owned theaters has made it rather harder to see the good ones in many places throughout the US. When every theater in town is owned by one of two huge companies and they all play the same three blockbusters on twenty screens, it's easy to imagine that those are the only films being made.
That's just a phishing site. Just ask for their password.
Not really - your site isn't pretending to be another site. It just happens to ask the same questions as another site.
While everyone should (in princple) pick unique passwords for every site, most people are probably less likely to make up a different answer to the question "what is your favorite sports team" for every website.
Wrong. Embedded device manufacturers aren't "locking up" open source software. They're locking the hardware they spent money to manufacture. If I build a router and embed a version of Linux on it and hardcode my router to only run the copy of Linux that I supplied, that does not prevent you from modifying any code. It prevents you from modifying the operation of the hardware I built.
One could apply the exact same argument to derivative software:
Derivative software venders aren't "locking up" open source software. They're locking the changes to software that they spent money to manufacture. If I start with GPL networking tools and build a proprietary router OS based upon it and then refuse to give it away so that people can only use exactly the OS I've supplied, that does not prevent you from modifying any of the open source code that I used in building it. It prevents you from modifying only the software that I built.
But, of course, locking down derivative software has been explicitly forbidden since day one.
Why should we treat hardware any different? If you build software that directly uses open source code, you have to give people the ability to modify that software. If you build hardware that directly runs open source code, why is it unreasonable to demand the same freedom?
The thing is that many sites really have no legitimate need to having password changing functionality in the site.
Yup. Any site for which having the ability to recover a lost password is important *either* had lots of personal and financial information about me already which could be used for that purpose, or it has my email address and could easily mail me a password-changing token. (Sure, that scheme could in principle be vulnerable to attacks - but far less so than using my mother's maiden name and my highschool.)
I generally make stuff up and then keep it in the same encrypted file where I store all my seldom used passwords. This totally defeats the purpose of such questions, but then again since the purpose is fundamentally stupid, that's not so bad.
But perhaps we're looking at this the wrong way round. From the point of view of an identity thief, or even better, an ex-lover-turned-stalker, these websites present a great opportunity. Hell, I'd bet twenty percent of the time you can find the answer to every possible security question just by looking through someone's publicly accessible websites and old usenet/email/message-board postings. If you stumble on a geneology buff who tells jokes about their favorite sports team and attends their 10th highschool reunion, you're pretty much done.
We just need to stop thinking like victims and start thinking like perpetrators. Then this becomes an upbeat story.
Tip for *ask slashdot* posters - if you're going to submit a question of the form "how can I make my computer do X," you're much more likely to get useful answer if you tell us what kind of computer your using. If you're going to pose a question of the form "why doesn't what I'm doing work?" then you better give us a reasonably complete description of what you're doing.
If the quality you get through your headphones from both sides of the conversation is good enough, then messing around with hardware solutions is just silly - you just need to convince your software to dump your audio to a file. How exactly you do that will depend on your operating system, but it shouldn't be hard. (I could name several trivial ways to do it in linux - will that help you? We have no way of knowing.) If the remote audio isn't good enough, then you'll have to use something other than skype. See other posts for suggestions. If it isn't good enough on the local side, then the problem hasn't got anything to do with skype - you need to figure out what's wrong with your hardware.
Also, if you're in a genuine recording studio, you might want to think twice about starting out with a gizmo that has built-in DSP. Depending on the purpose for which it was intended, you may end up doing a lot of work trying to *undo* the artifacts the device injects into your audio. Using even a very modest studio mic and preamp going into a sound card will probably give you far better results.
I'm not an expert on student loans, but most of them that I've encountered stipulate that you're using them on something at least tangentially related to current or past educational expenses. They're not going to catch you (unless they pay very close attention to your financial statements), but it is sort of wrong to be using zero-interest federal education aid money to invest just on interest. This guy's already getting most of his way paid through college... I dunno.
IANAUFAA (I am not a university financial aid administrator), but as someone who got a free ride in college fairly recently, I remember being told that I was absolutely and totally ineligible for a no-interest student loan.
They offered me low interest loans with the option to postpone payments (including payments to cover interest charges) until after graduation, but that was it. In order to qualify for a no-interest loan, it was necessary to demonstrate educational expenses and also demonstrate that both the student and the student's parents (unless the student met rather severe criterion for declaring independent status) couldn't be expected to meet those expenses. Someone with a free ride and money in the bank ought to fail both tests.
If this guy's getting a free ride *and* no interest loan offers, he's either cheating, or he's not in the US, or else they've radically changed federal student loan policies in the last four years.
If instead he's chosen to take out a bunch of "low interest" loans, he's crazy. Trying to win by taking out loans and investing them is no easy task. Anything with a better return than what he's paying is surely a gamble. Stockpiling student loans because you foresee needing credit immediately after graduation is an okay idea, as the rates can be far better than any other options for borrowing money, even with a couple extra years of interest thown in. If you have a concrete reason that you'll need large sums of money in the near future, it's a good way to avoid losing even more money on interest, but it's no way to *make* money.
I imagine if authorities seriously suspected that you had something nasty hidden away somewhere they'd discover the extra partition, but it's certainly likely to get past most people, like customs agents and thieves. Using something like partition-backed loop-aes on the second partition wouldn't hurt either, just in case someone does take a closer look at the drive.
If you want to really go all out, buy two drives from the same manufacturer with a factor of two difference in size and swap cases. If someone plugs in a drive that says "512 MB" in big letters on the cover and finds a 512 MB fat partition full of holiday photos, they're pretty likely to move on to something more interesting.
I've actually had a customs agent at Gatwick Airport (London, UK) ask me if I had any porn on my laptop. I told him no, if I wanted any I'd just get some local stuff as it seemed plentiful. Fortunately the British pride themselves on having a sense of humor. He offered suggestions on where to get it...
Now, there *are* situations where the most efficient way to transmit data is by shipping physical media around - but they all involve huge amounts of data or places with little infrastructure. It's hard to come up with a scenario where it makes sense to illegally transfer data from one city with an international airport to another by putting it on a hard drive in a consumer laptop and flying people around with it.
A professional pornographer isn't going to bother carrying the product around with them. They'll set up shop somewhere, pay for a decent network connection and a bunch of dvd blanks, and bring it in electronically and then manufacture it on site. Or they'll bring in ten thousand pressed dvd's in a cargo crate labeled "bananas."
Likewise, someone carrying *really* bad stuff isn't going to just leave it lying around in an unencrypted folder on a laptop. Hell, I wouldn't think of leaving my perfectly legal vanilla porn unencrypted on a laptop in my house, much less one I'd take across international borders.
In countries where anyone can ssh to anywhere in the world and pull in whatever they want, this is just silly. You might occasionally catch really stupid consumers of illegal material, but that's all.
On a tangent, if I were going to try to get some really bad data across the border into a place with no network, I'd probably stick it on encrypted flash drives, disassemble them as much as possible to remove cases and excess hardware, and then screw or cement the boards into place in the bodies of consumer electronics gear. Add an equal number of identical but unmodified drives loaded with holiday photos to use for reassembly parts, and buy the screwdrivers and soldering station at a shop when you arrive. The illegal material in my laptop, if I had any, would be on the pc board hot-glued to the underside of the mainboar - not on the hard drive. (If you really want to do it right, you design pc boards that fit into the cases perfectly and come with standoff and mounting hardware designed to fit the flash drive boards, so that it would pass even a casual inspection by a knowledgeable person. Hide any identifying bits under globs of black epoxy, or place them upside down. Extra points if you manage to route the connectors on the flash board to accessible headers and connect to the drives without even reassembling them.)
I've never held a formal walking meeting, although I've certainly attended meetings that have included walking across a campus to a coffee house and back again as a group mid-meeting. We naturally tend to break up into small groups of three and four people each.
It seems to me trying to talk to more then four or five people while walking as a group is almost impossible. Four people can walk in two rows along most sidewalks and still converse in a normal speaking voice. Once you have more than that, you either end up trying to walk abreast and running into obstacles and people, or forming a long line which makes it impossible to communicate. It isn't easy to talk to someone walking four paces behind you, and with no eye contact I'd expect constant conversational collisions as people talk at each other.
I've got a Jerker arranged for lab-stool height, and it's great. Best part is the erector-set construction makes it easy to add hooks, shelves, wire-racks, outlet strips, etc.
They may not own your soul, but they own the network connection, the computer, the keyboard, the mouse and the office you're in. While you are on the company clock, you should (in theory) be doing the work they asked you to do because while you're on the clock you're being paid, and as you said, they pay you for specific work.
That's fine, if the employee also never works a minute of time beyond what's specified in their hiring documents, never reads or answers a work related email from home, never talks to co-workers about work related stuff on a personal cell phone, never allows business concerns to intrude on their personal schedule.
But, given a choice, I'd much prefer to work for a company in which I'm free to occasionally conduct non-disruptive personal business using company supplies and the company is free to occasionally call me on a Saturdays afternoon and ask me some work related questions.
If you insist on mistrusting employees, the best you can possibly expect is that they'll do the minimum amount of work necessary to fulfill their obligations and no more. (More likely, you'll piss them off and they'll spend their time actively trying to find ways to short-change the company.) On the other hand, if you treat them with respect, some of them may feel personally invested in the organization and willing to put more into their job than the bare minimum.
You can always tell when you're in a workplace with a time clock: everyone disappears at exactly 5:00pm, whether or not they happen to be in the middle of unfinished business.
[I guarantee you can find at least a hand full of authors and artists who are passionately of the opinion that such censorship perverts their work.]
And given that, we should then never see their movies on network television. After all, that would pervert their work.
The question is whether the changes are made with or without the rights holder's permission. People are still free to pervert their own work.
Whether or not the legal rights holder of a film is in fact who it ought to be is another question entirely. But at least in principle the movies on television have been changed with the permission of those responsible for the film, or a body with which they have contracted.
We're not talking political messeges or a company trying to alter the artistic vision of a film or a piece of music. We're talking about cutting out some of the sex and violence in movies. These companies try to preserve messeges.
Who is to say that the sex and violence in a particular movie is *not* part of the message? It may not be the dominant theme in a work (if it were, it's unlikely the edited version would be coherent enough to bother selling), but that doesn't mean that it they aren't important. Whoever included sex and violence in the movie in the first place must have done so for some reason.
That reason might be that it plays an important role in the narrative, or it might be a devotion to artistic realism, or it might be intended to shock the audience in order to make a particular statement, or it might just be that the director wanted to see Lulu's nipples. Who's to say? Any random company that happens along and decides to produce edited versions of a work? Why should we trust their judgment?
It's easy to come up with extreme examples where removing a few seconds of shocking material changes a movie completely. Perhaps in such cases we can trust everyone who starts one of these editing companies will recognize the import of such scenes and avoid making cleansed versions. (I'm skeptical.) Perhaps we can trust that they'll never cut anything that is obviously important or which will, by its absence, skew the dominant theme in the film.
I still claim that they do serious damage. For definiteness, consider what seems a very realistic example: the film Amelie (Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain).
It's a perfect candidate for this sort of editing: a joyous, uplifting, inoffensive film given a US R rating because of a few seconds of incidental naughty bits. Why shouldn't we remove those naughty bits if it means that thousands of poor, culturally deprived Mormon kiddies are therefore able to see a great film? My answer is that doing so fundamentally changes the film. The naughty bits fill only seconds of screen time, yet they anchor the rest of the work in realistic world inhabited by adults, and they serve a vital role in framing Amelie's character. Without them, the film becomes a fairy story, easily dismissed. Leaving the naughty bits in, you find a commentary on the world in which we live, and a vision of its possibilities. If you ask me, it's a perfect example of how cutting just a few seconds of incidental naughty bits can do significant damage to an artistic work. Now, assuming for the moment the director (and whoever owns the rights to the film) feels the same, shouldn't they have the right to prevent the release of what they consider an inferior work with their name attached to it?
From what I understand from this ruling, it would be illegal for me to buy a book, tear out every other page, and sell it to someone else. That's a pretty close analogy, seeing as both my actions and Cleanflicks' third-party video cutting are not authorized by the copyright holder.
Sounds analogous, in the ethical, if not perhaps the legal sense.
But, it's not at all obvious to me that such is a bad idea, especially if instead of removing pages at random you choose to remove pages so as to modify the content of the text.
Consider the following (admittedly rather extreme) thought experiment.
A neo-NAZI organization starts a business that buys World War II history books written by legitimate scholars, excises every passage that refers to the Jewish holocaust, throws a sticker that says "expurgated by Some Guy" on the cover, and then stocks bookstore shelves with them.
One would expect that the original authors to rage at that sort of thing. It's easy to see why: their name and their work is being used to push an agenda which they find offensive. In a case like this, removing material fundamentally changes the content of the work and perverts its intent.
Now, one might argue that the "naughty bits are bad" agenda is less dangerous and offensive than the "the Jewish holocaust never happened" agenda. (I'd have to agree, although I find the former pretty damned offensive.) But it's not at all clear how one ought to distinguish between those two in a systematic way. In any case where someone feels strongly enough about specific content to make publishing a censored version worthwhile, I guarantee you can find at least a hand full of authors and artists who are passionately of the opinion that such censorship perverts their work.
The only consistent way to prevent such extreme abuse is to prevent anyone from distributing censored versions of a work without the author's consent. (Note that I'm not talking about transformative works where it's clear that something is being sampled and used to create something new. That's a very different issue.)
Slashdot Mirror
I've long suspected that most of the spam that doesn't advertise a product or offer a virus-laden attachment falls into this category. It seems a reasonable explanation for both the long strings of random prose spam and the short nonsense sentence and single-word spam.
In a world of honeypots and throw-away addresses, and bandwidth which is limited (if only by the cost of a zombie net or the time spent hunting for ill configured servers), it must be to someone's advantage to try to remove bogus addresses from lists. Using a message which really isn't spam when culling is probably the best way to avoid getting artificial bounces from spam filters. Besides, if you happen to be in the business of selling addresses rather than penis pills, there's no reason to spend time carefully trying to engineer *real* spam to get through filters.
Back on the topic of the main thread, I've always found it hard to believe that there exist people in this world who would sign up for a home mortgage advertised in misspelled, all-caps, barely intelligible spam. Buying something shady - like prescription meds or bestial pr0n - isn't too hard to believe. Embarrassed customers expect to deal with shady people. But it seems like a crazy way to do banking. It's shocking that something like that could work, even at the level of a few idiots per million addresses. Perhaps there are enough people trying to do sneaky business with property to which they don't legally have title to make such a thing worthwhile.
Of course when you get down to bits per day, you have to put together a some pretty smart filters to try to pull only useful information.
I suppose it might not be too difficult, depending on your goal. Something as simple as recording the first thirty keystrokes after power-up is likely to catch usernames and passwords on a local machine. (If that's enough to get you in, then your victim isn't nearly as serious about security as you are about attacking him... but such isn't impossible.)
The more you know about the victim and the information target, the better your chances of catching them, assuming you customize the bug before deploying it.
If you want to really go to extremes, you might even be able to find a way to send information *in* to the keyboard by carefully delaying network packets. With a little experimentation, you could probably learn to measure the length of the delay in a keystroke echo using only the user's keystrokes. Then you just throw in a 1 second delay at precise intervals and include some pretty heavy analysis and error correction.
If by *someone* you mean, "someone who works for the phone company, or is a government agent, or someone who knows where I live and is motivated to spend time and energy and to risk serious criminal charges by physically attaching hardware to my house and furthermore someone who is willing to spend enormous amounts of time listening to my conversations," then you are correct.
If instead you mean "someone who doesn't work for the phone company and isn't a cop and who isn't willing to go to extremes to attack me as an individual," then you're far better off using the phone.
The barriers to combing unencrypted email for useful data is a lot lower than the barrier to tapping phone lines. Not only are there more people with physical access to the message (either legitimately or illegitimately), but they have the great advantage that they can read huge amounts of data at a single point and can employ automation to scan for interesting material. And, the guilty party needn't even be located in the same country as you - which makes the whole thing a lot more tempting than having to mess around with wire strippers in the bushes by your house while risking huge wire tapping penalties if caught.
The exception, of course, is an analog cordless telephone. It's still unlikely you'll happen to live within a few blocks of someone who's life is dull enough they'd be interested in listening to all of your conversations and who is also willing and able to use credit card info, but not totally impossible.
The "what's more" comment was supposed to follow a prior correction mentioning that "this month's issue of Science" ought to be changed to "this WEEK'S issue of science."
But that comment seems to have vanished. Perhaps I hit the posting time-limit and didn't notice.
I think I'd better stop posting now before I get myself into *real* trouble.
Oh well. At least it gave me a chance to notice a a Vernor Vinge fan posting in this threat. Always nice to run across one of those.
What's more, the layman's summary is in the Perspectives section, the paper itself is in the body of the issue as usual.
Cleary I haven't had enough caffine yet today.
The full paper as well as a very nice layman's introduction in the Perspectives section is in this month's issue of Science. (Sorry - subscription only. But you may be able to find the text on a preprint server. I'm no geologist, but I haven't been able to find it in any of the obvious places.)
Basically, they map out a change of 15 microgals (1 gal = 1 cm/s^2) or around 1.5e-8 of the average gravitational field on the earth.
By comparison, the variation in g with latitude (at constant elevation) is around 0.5 percent, or 300'000 times as much. Variation associated with local geology is around 100 times smaller, but still swamps this earthquake signal.
What's cool about this measurement isn't that they're measuring something big enough to have any effect on humans, but rather that they're able to measure such a tiny effect at all.
There are all sorts of processes going on in the earth and in the oceans that involve movements of comparable amounts of mass: changes in glacier and polar icecaps, ocean-atmosphere gas exchange, deep sea current and temperature changes, movement and depletion of underground water, fast moving magma associated with volcanos, slow tectonic changes, etc. And now it seems like it's also helpful in trying to construct detailed models of an earthquake.
Incidentally, if you were an athlete trying to cash in on lower gravity, you'd be better off training in the Chilean highlands and competing in Puerto Rico - but it still wouldn't help you much, especially compared to biological effects and day to day variation in performance. (http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/publications/fac
That's certainly my impression. Anyone know of any reason why someone might want to use initrd on a stock system (eg. x86 desktop machine with hard drives)?
I've always just put appropriate filesystem support into the kernel and skipped it.
I suppose if you wanted to encrypt your root directory or do some exotic network booting it might be useful - but for an ordinary desktop it just seems like one extra step without purpose.
Yup. TLDP is a great resource, especially for broad overview questions or cases where one starts off without enough keywords to make a meaningful search. Some information is old, but everything is dated, so it's usually relatively easy to stay clear of dangerously misleading material.
I usually spent a while on google and then try a mailing list. When searching, error messages or whole phrases that someone is likely to use when describing a problem tend to pull up worthwhile results.
For mailing lists, choosing the most specific mailing list possible is always a good idea. Sending mail to some generic linux list with a detailed question about some specific software package isn't likely to get you anywhere. Local user groups are a decent place to ask a question when you haven't enough information to know which specific list is appropriate.
For someone brand new to linux, starting out with a fairly brief overview of linux or unix-like OS's in general isn't a bad idea. The Slackware Book works rather nicely as a free option, even if you aren't a slackware fan. (But then, I am - so my judgment may be questionable.) http://www.slackbook.org/
Yup. Bundling software on physical media is harmless and occasionally useful, assuming you give users plenty of opportunity to install only what they choose.
But bundling unrelated software in a download is infuriating.
Not only has Mozilla sullied its own reputation by associating itself with shitty software, it's actually made the shitty software even worse in the process.
What's worse than realplayer? Easy: reaplayer + an 8 MB download of software the user either already has or doesn't want.
The only question is, what's in it for Real? Hard to see what they get out of the deal.
Well, if the Latex document has "wikipedia" in the title, it might be appropriate. (And in a century or so, it may be a great place to find rather nice illustrative popular-opinion and common-knowledge anecdotes.)
But, on the whole, you're right. Bibtex entries for wikipedia articles are pretty funny. (As would be a service that generates bibtex entries for print encyclopedia articles.)
Yup. I couldn't agree more.
Transitioning into grad school is never going to be easier than immediately after your undergrad degree. If you know for a fact you want to go to grad school, then just do it. (Or take a year and travel the world, join the peace corps, start a band, or do other things that aren't half-hearted attempts to try to find a regular job for a couple years before going back to school.) Don't set yourself up in a situation where it becomes impossible later. The world is full of angry old men who've spent a lifetime doing stuff they hate because they decided to spend a few years making money before pursuing their dreams and then became trapped by social commitments.
On the other hand, if you're not at all sure that you do want to go to grad school, trying something else may not be a bad way to make up your mind.
Yup. There have *always* been a lot of terrible movies out there. We just forget about them. ('cause they're forgettable.) And there are still some great movies being produced today.
The only difference is that the rise of consolidated suburban multiplexes and the erosion of small locally owned theaters has made it rather harder to see the good ones in many places throughout the US. When every theater in town is owned by one of two huge companies and they all play the same three blockbusters on twenty screens, it's easy to imagine that those are the only films being made.
That's just a phishing site. Just ask for their password.
Not really - your site isn't pretending to be another site. It just happens to ask the same questions as another site.
While everyone should (in princple) pick unique passwords for every site, most people are probably less likely to make up a different answer to the question "what is your favorite sports team" for every website.
One could apply the exact same argument to derivative software:
But, of course, locking down derivative software has been explicitly forbidden since day one.
Why should we treat hardware any different? If you build software that directly uses open source code, you have to give people the ability to modify that software. If you build hardware that directly runs open source code, why is it unreasonable to demand the same freedom?
Yup. Any site for which having the ability to recover a lost password is important *either* had lots of personal and financial information about me already which could be used for that purpose, or it has my email address and could easily mail me a password-changing token. (Sure, that scheme could in principle be vulnerable to attacks - but far less so than using my mother's maiden name and my highschool.)
I generally make stuff up and then keep it in the same encrypted file where I store all my seldom used passwords. This totally defeats the purpose of such questions, but then again since the purpose is fundamentally stupid, that's not so bad.
But perhaps we're looking at this the wrong way round. From the point of view of an identity thief, or even better, an ex-lover-turned-stalker, these websites present a great opportunity. Hell, I'd bet twenty percent of the time you can find the answer to every possible security question just by looking through someone's publicly accessible websites and old usenet/email/message-board postings. If you stumble on a geneology buff who tells jokes about their favorite sports team and attends their 10th highschool reunion, you're pretty much done.
We just need to stop thinking like victims and start thinking like perpetrators. Then this becomes an upbeat story.
Tip for *ask slashdot* posters - if you're going to submit a question of the form "how can I make my computer do X," you're much more likely to get useful answer if you tell us what kind of computer your using. If you're going to pose a question of the form "why doesn't what I'm doing work?" then you better give us a reasonably complete description of what you're doing.
If the quality you get through your headphones from both sides of the conversation is good enough, then messing around with hardware solutions is just silly - you just need to convince your software to dump your audio to a file. How exactly you do that will depend on your operating system, but it shouldn't be hard. (I could name several trivial ways to do it in linux - will that help you? We have no way of knowing.) If the remote audio isn't good enough, then you'll have to use something other than skype. See other posts for suggestions. If it isn't good enough on the local side, then the problem hasn't got anything to do with skype - you need to figure out what's wrong with your hardware.
Also, if you're in a genuine recording studio, you might want to think twice about starting out with a gizmo that has built-in DSP. Depending on the purpose for which it was intended, you may end up doing a lot of work trying to *undo* the artifacts the device injects into your audio. Using even a very modest studio mic and preamp going into a sound card will probably give you far better results.
IANAUFAA (I am not a university financial aid administrator), but as someone who got a free ride in college fairly recently, I remember being told that I was absolutely and totally ineligible for a no-interest student loan.
They offered me low interest loans with the option to postpone payments (including payments to cover interest charges) until after graduation, but that was it. In order to qualify for a no-interest loan, it was necessary to demonstrate educational expenses and also demonstrate that both the student and the student's parents (unless the student met rather severe criterion for declaring independent status) couldn't be expected to meet those expenses. Someone with a free ride and money in the bank ought to fail both tests.
If this guy's getting a free ride *and* no interest loan offers, he's either cheating, or he's not in the US, or else they've radically changed federal student loan policies in the last four years.
If instead he's chosen to take out a bunch of "low interest" loans, he's crazy. Trying to win by taking out loans and investing them is no easy task. Anything with a better return than what he's paying is surely a gamble. Stockpiling student loans because you foresee needing credit immediately after graduation is an okay idea, as the rates can be far better than any other options for borrowing money, even with a couple extra years of interest thown in. If you have a concrete reason that you'll need large sums of money in the near future, it's a good way to avoid losing even more money on interest, but it's no way to *make* money.
That's a good idea.
I imagine if authorities seriously suspected that you had something nasty hidden away somewhere they'd discover the extra partition, but it's certainly likely to get past most people, like customs agents and thieves. Using something like partition-backed loop-aes on the second partition wouldn't hurt either, just in case someone does take a closer look at the drive.
If you want to really go all out, buy two drives from the same manufacturer with a factor of two difference in size and swap cases. If someone plugs in a drive that says "512 MB" in big letters on the cover and finds a 512 MB fat partition full of holiday photos, they're pretty likely to move on to something more interesting.
Now, there *are* situations where the most efficient way to transmit data is by shipping physical media around - but they all involve huge amounts of data or places with little infrastructure. It's hard to come up with a scenario where it makes sense to illegally transfer data from one city with an international airport to another by putting it on a hard drive in a consumer laptop and flying people around with it.
A professional pornographer isn't going to bother carrying the product around with them. They'll set up shop somewhere, pay for a decent network connection and a bunch of dvd blanks, and bring it in electronically and then manufacture it on site. Or they'll bring in ten thousand pressed dvd's in a cargo crate labeled "bananas."
Likewise, someone carrying *really* bad stuff isn't going to just leave it lying around in an unencrypted folder on a laptop. Hell, I wouldn't think of leaving my perfectly legal vanilla porn unencrypted on a laptop in my house, much less one I'd take across international borders.
In countries where anyone can ssh to anywhere in the world and pull in whatever they want, this is just silly. You might occasionally catch really stupid consumers of illegal material, but that's all.
On a tangent, if I were going to try to get some really bad data across the border into a place with no network, I'd probably stick it on encrypted flash drives, disassemble them as much as possible to remove cases and excess hardware, and then screw or cement the boards into place in the bodies of consumer electronics gear. Add an equal number of identical but unmodified drives loaded with holiday photos to use for reassembly parts, and buy the screwdrivers and soldering station at a shop when you arrive. The illegal material in my laptop, if I had any, would be on the pc board hot-glued to the underside of the mainboar - not on the hard drive. (If you really want to do it right, you design pc boards that fit into the cases perfectly and come with standoff and mounting hardware designed to fit the flash drive boards, so that it would pass even a casual inspection by a knowledgeable person. Hide any identifying bits under globs of black epoxy, or place them upside down. Extra points if you manage to route the connectors on the flash board to accessible headers and connect to the drives without even reassembling them.)
How big is your meeting?
I've never held a formal walking meeting, although I've certainly attended meetings that have included walking across a campus to a coffee house and back again as a group mid-meeting. We naturally tend to break up into small groups of three and four people each.
It seems to me trying to talk to more then four or five people while walking as a group is almost impossible. Four people can walk in two rows along most sidewalks and still converse in a normal speaking voice. Once you have more than that, you either end up trying to walk abreast and running into obstacles and people, or forming a long line which makes it impossible to communicate. It isn't easy to talk to someone walking four paces behind you, and with no eye contact I'd expect constant conversational collisions as people talk at each other.
Yup. Good call.
I've got a Jerker arranged for lab-stool height, and it's great. Best part is the erector-set construction makes it easy to add hooks, shelves, wire-racks, outlet strips, etc.
That's fine, if the employee also never works a minute of time beyond what's specified in their hiring documents, never reads or answers a work related email from home, never talks to co-workers about work related stuff on a personal cell phone, never allows business concerns to intrude on their personal schedule.
But, given a choice, I'd much prefer to work for a company in which I'm free to occasionally conduct non-disruptive personal business using company supplies and the company is free to occasionally call me on a Saturdays afternoon and ask me some work related questions.
If you insist on mistrusting employees, the best you can possibly expect is that they'll do the minimum amount of work necessary to fulfill their obligations and no more. (More likely, you'll piss them off and they'll spend their time actively trying to find ways to short-change the company.) On the other hand, if you treat them with respect, some of them may feel personally invested in the organization and willing to put more into their job than the bare minimum.
You can always tell when you're in a workplace with a time clock: everyone disappears at exactly 5:00pm, whether or not they happen to be in the middle of unfinished business.
The question is whether the changes are made with or without the rights holder's permission. People are still free to pervert their own work.
Whether or not the legal rights holder of a film is in fact who it ought to be is another question entirely. But at least in principle the movies on television have been changed with the permission of those responsible for the film, or a body with which they have contracted.
Who is to say that the sex and violence in a particular movie is *not* part of the message? It may not be the dominant theme in a work (if it were, it's unlikely the edited version would be coherent enough to bother selling), but that doesn't mean that it they aren't important. Whoever included sex and violence in the movie in the first place must have done so for some reason.
That reason might be that it plays an important role in the narrative, or it might be a devotion to artistic realism, or it might be intended to shock the audience in order to make a particular statement, or it might just be that the director wanted to see Lulu's nipples. Who's to say? Any random company that happens along and decides to produce edited versions of a work? Why should we trust their judgment?
It's easy to come up with extreme examples where removing a few seconds of shocking material changes a movie completely. Perhaps in such cases we can trust everyone who starts one of these editing companies will recognize the import of such scenes and avoid making cleansed versions. (I'm skeptical.) Perhaps we can trust that they'll never cut anything that is obviously important or which will, by its absence, skew the dominant theme in the film.
I still claim that they do serious damage. For definiteness, consider what seems a very realistic example: the film Amelie (Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain).
It's a perfect candidate for this sort of editing: a joyous, uplifting, inoffensive film given a US R rating because of a few seconds of incidental naughty bits. Why shouldn't we remove those naughty bits if it means that thousands of poor, culturally deprived Mormon kiddies are therefore able to see a great film?
My answer is that doing so fundamentally changes the film. The naughty bits fill only seconds of screen time, yet they anchor the rest of the work in realistic world inhabited by adults, and they serve a vital role in framing Amelie's character. Without them, the film becomes a fairy story, easily dismissed. Leaving the naughty bits in, you find a commentary on the world in which we live, and a vision of its possibilities. If you ask me, it's a perfect example of how cutting just a few seconds of incidental naughty bits can do significant damage to an artistic work. Now, assuming for the moment the director (and whoever owns the rights to the film) feels the same, shouldn't they have the right to prevent the release of what they consider an inferior work with their name attached to it?
Sounds analogous, in the ethical, if not perhaps the legal sense.
But, it's not at all obvious to me that such is a bad idea, especially if instead of removing pages at random you choose to remove pages so as to modify the content of the text.
Consider the following (admittedly rather extreme) thought experiment.
A neo-NAZI organization starts a business that buys World War II history books written by legitimate scholars, excises every passage that refers to the Jewish holocaust, throws a sticker that says "expurgated by Some Guy" on the cover, and then stocks bookstore shelves with them.
One would expect that the original authors to rage at that sort of thing. It's easy to see why: their name and their work is being used to push an agenda which they find offensive. In a case like this, removing material fundamentally changes the content of the work and perverts its intent.
Now, one might argue that the "naughty bits are bad" agenda is less dangerous and offensive than the "the Jewish holocaust never happened" agenda. (I'd have to agree, although I find the former pretty damned offensive.) But it's not at all clear how one ought to distinguish between those two in a systematic way. In any case where someone feels strongly enough about specific content to make publishing a censored version worthwhile, I guarantee you can find at least a hand full of authors and artists who are passionately of the opinion that such censorship perverts their work.
The only consistent way to prevent such extreme abuse is to prevent anyone from distributing censored versions of a work without the author's consent. (Note that I'm not talking about transformative works where it's clear that something is being sampled and used to create something new. That's a very different issue.)