Yes I do. $70-$200 depending on the extent of the infection including a fee for not having proper antivirus. I also require them to purchase an Anti-Virus program and AdAware from me (which of course I buy from them, no pirating here) and update/scan on a regular basis or all waranty on my work is void. Most of my clients systems stay clean for at least three to four months with reglar scanning. Then they bring them in for a $70 tune up.
Top Microsoft engineers were beaten by what the article said were over 100 pieces of malware. I have personally cleaned hundreds of mechines with 200 or more individual infections including ones that disable anti-virus and anti-malware. To date I have NEVER been forced to reformat anything but the Sony DRM rootkit. My toolkit: Knoppix CD, NTFS read write Linux drivers, AdAware, Spybot, HJT, and years of experience playing in the registry.
I know I am not alone here in the trenches. I use Linux at home and where I find users with even a slight clue I make them Linux or Mac users. Where the users have no clue (which sadly is most often the case) I scour their system and return it with their data unscathed and with functional defense against future infection. I try to educate them (sometimes at the heavy end of a bat) in safe procedures to keep their system clean. Then I move on to the next unlucky dope who downloaded an infected screensaver with no anti-virus.
I have to say, it is a sad sort of satisfaction when the people in charge of designing the software are incapable of doing something I (and thousands like me) do every day.
I currently have AT&T professional class DSL (3Mbps) and consistantly pull between 2.5 and 2.8 which shocks me. I am used to paying for 1.5Mbps and getting under 512Kbps. Of course it helps that my new apartment is almost sitting on one of the phone company central offices. I thinks speeds are only really going up for people with optimal situations. In my case much of the copper (both phone and coax) in my area was pulled in the last 5 years and is a bit higher quality. Add to that my apartments are wired with good quality CAT 3 for phones. In older neighborhoods you have copper as old as 20 years which leads to signal degradation and less than optimal speed.
This poor kid has been denied one of the most basic rights, one that should be freely afforded every American! "The right to have a decent English teacher shall not be infringed." All of his previous ones have been dismal failures and should be fired immediately...
Oh yeah, he should have free speech too...
Otsde of skool evry1 shood hve teh rite 2 speek hw thy wnt...
For reference, most of the "immigrants" seen in the protests were either legal immigrants or decended from illegal immigrants and actually U.S. citizens (having been born here). I am from South Texas and knew many of those who were protesting. Calling a group of people "illegal immigrants" where only a few are actually illegal immigrants would be unfair on the part of the news source.
Further, saying "one Islamic group bombed another" is news. Commenting about "Islamofascists" and the "Anti-Christian leftists" is not news, it is commentary with a blatant slant. Whether or not a person gets their news there is irrelevant, Google News tries to limit the news searches to actual news sources, not slanted and clearly racist commentary sources. Google can't keep all slant out because as humans we all show some bias and news reporters are all human. Google has every right to weed out those who blatantly parade around as a purely opinion site.
Yes, their posts contain a news item, but it is surrounded by hate speech. If Google News is forced to list these sources of hate speech they would also have to call any Neo-Nazi party blog news as well. Honestly, when I post a news based rant on my blog I understand it is clearly biased and wouldn't want Google calling it news.
It's called taking pride in your work. Code run through the validator has a level of quality control and a higher likelyhood of surviving the various browsers it gets crammed through. The only page I have ever designed that wasn't 100% CSS and XHTML compliant is my personal blog and the few things that throw it off are things Blogger.com requires. For my professional sites nothing less than W3C compliance will do.
So, lets pretend for a moment the MPAA actually gets carriers like FedEX to do this here in the USA. Pretend further they buy a judge or two and have this listed as constitutional. I burn a DVD of my kid's school talent show and to be witty title it similarly to a current movie. I send it to my family and MPAA thugs find it. Would they actually watch it to verify it was a pirated film or simply confiscate it and send their lawyers to sue me for copyright violation?
Every day I see more and more why the founding fathers of this nation rose up and revolted. Boston DVD Party anyone?
Currently my office runs on M$ Office 2k3. We could easily switch to OpenOffice save one luser who creates every one of his spreadsheets using M$ specific formatting that throws the OO conversion tool for a loop. I would switch the rest of us but we all have to be able to access his documents as he is the shop manager and he gets cranky when people don't read his crap. Had I been here when the network was set up in the first place this would be a M$ free shop as Linux has all of the tools these lusers need in a default workstation install. So I am going to sit here patiently waiting to move everyone to Linux immediately after we can get ODF translations for all of his crap. At least I can move the website to a Slack server soon (after I weed out the useless ASP code). IIS is killing me
I am Microsoft Certified, which is why I use Linux.
I'm with mrraven on this. The whole idea is a bit Orwellian. Adding to the government is the horror getting your info is the private corporations. Imagine walking into a store to glance at an item and by the time you get to the shelf they have run a full credit check and are ready to offer you a starting APR of 8% with no payments till January. Or worse, walk into a store you owe money to and they immediately deduct it from a credit card attached to your RFID. Then of course you have the identity theft implications as we know every Black Hat H4X0R will be working on that encryption. Why go through all of those risks just for the ability to shave a few seconds off of entering your car or home?
It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you... Now where is my tin foil hat and Rambo knife...
As much as we write and complain about the idiots in government creating legislation that is bad for technology and innovation we have yet to solve the problem. I think given the power of/. we could unite a movement to elect someone with an IQ higher than 3 and not in the back pockets of those abusing the DMCA. Viva la Revolution! Think about it. We could form a new political party where rank comes from ability, not tenure. We could take over the world!
For those who didn't get the memo: I was attmpting a little tounge in cheek jab. I have a firm grasp on the concepts of theory and law. Forgive the subtle tone of my original reply. It seems to have obscured the humor. Thank you.
Where does using a word stop being funny and become hate speech? In the context of the replies here the phrase, "That is sooo gaayyy" merely tries to bring levity to what could be a flame-rife topic. But saying to a complete stranger, "that faggot stole my (insert cool WOW item here)" or "That armor is gay" is offensive. There are far more effective ways of conveying how lame a thing is without going out of your way to offend (such as, "you are a jackass" or "that armor was forged in the fires of useless, just like you").
Calling things "gay" and people "faggot" is just freaking retarded...</sarcasm>
Philosophical underpants? You mean like Nietsche's nickers?
Oh...underpinnings...well that makes far more sense. It helps when I clean my glases.
So we should teach Intelligent Design in Philosophy class? Excellent idea...
wait, re-reading post...
You say we should teach kids to apply a philosophical model instead of allowing the facts to merely speak for themselves and assuming nothing. Using philosophy which makes moral judgements and uses assumptions where there is little data to examine scientific theory.
Yeah, this does not sound like a good idea. Putting a philosophical underpinning to science allows for assertions that cannot be tested and therefore creates bad science. Leave philosophical interpretation to the philosopy club.
There are some in society walking about (or being president) today who resemble that ancestor...(sorry, couldn't resist, you may mod me as flamebait now...)
Sorry, I guess you couldn't see my tongue planted firmly in my cheek as I was typing that. I thought the "Cease fire" and "resume firing" would give me away but perhaps I was too subtle. Sorry bout that...
Nope, a theory is not proven beyond all shadow of doubt. It is a hypothesis that has consistantly held true under repeated testing. That said, considering the Theory of Evolution has been tested and refined so many times by so many different scientists its likelyhood of ever being scientifically disproven would require the use of extremely tiny decimals. Minor details such as who decended from what might change but the overall Theory is well on its way to becoming law.
Funny you should mention carbon producers. The solution to stopping global warming starts with putting a plug in the largest producers of greenhouse gasses in the world. Is it factories? No. Oil companies? No.
The largest source of greenhouse gasses on earth by an exponential ammount is volcanos.
Man gives themselves way too much credit. Come to think of it, the largest producers of CFC's and the only things capable of giving them the velocity to reach the ozone layer and make those nasty holes, you guessed it, volcanos.
Just because a scientist has "data" to say the world is flat does not make it so. Common sense is only worth something when you have facts around which to form that sense. CFC's are heavy gasses, as are most carbon based (also read greenhouse) gasses. They tend to hang around down here in our layer of the atmosphere. For them to harm the ozone or warm the climate they need to reach altitudes they could never normally obtain without propulsion. While some are pulled up by the winds near the equator most have to be launched by the explosive force of an eruption.
There are two keys to efficient server tuning. One, build the server with the capability to run at least 3 times as much as you need right now. Then kill -9 any process that slows your watching the p0rn filter go nuts during lunch and breaks. Who really needs a freaking relational database engine anyway? The accounting department can kiss off, you have blackmail to collect.
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."-Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
One must remember when undertaking to find answers in the data to first figure out the question. Otherwise the answer you find will be as useful to you as the answer 42.
Without context you only have a neat compilation of arranged meaningless facts.
On the small scale data mining is used daily by marketing people and the like to figure out who would be most receptive to their approach. Webmasters use it to optimize content and respond to user trends. In most large corporations data mining is used on some level.
Data mining on the scale discussed here may be practical at some point in the future once we determine the questions we wish answers to.
ID and creationism get lumped together and then their followers get dismissed entirely by calling them uneducated. They then respond by showing the examples where details of evolution don't always fit (primarily because the research for that detail is not yet complete). Names are thrown back and forth and we end up with the mess we have here. Creationists and some followers of ID follow it based on faith. Other followers of ID follow it because they don't have a full grasp on the concept of the scientific method and thus buy into the well reasoned but more philosophical than scientific explanations of the "scientists" pushing the concept of ID.
In the end, while those holding that evolution is fact have actual science to back their claims, they look like a bunch of pompous asses because instead of simply presenting the facts they add insults to the intelligence of their opponents. Their opponents then fall back on faith as science and attack this as a holy war. Thus, by assuming their opponents are all idiots, those who follow what is most likely to be fact end up losing. This is what I have been attempting to point out from the beginning. Problems arise when people start to type before actually taking a moment to analyze what I have said.
To sum up for those who didn't feel like reading through the big words with more than one syllable, name is calling bad for your point of view. Let the science speak for itself and never assume your opponent is dumber than you.
Thank you for actually reading my response dilg and Enigma. It is much appreciated. It often happens that in a debate when someone is looking to take offence they will find it in the most reasoned response.
For the record, I never stated that Creationism or ID had any place in schools and specifically avoided that in my initial post. You are correct, until someone comes up with a testable concept that can then either be proven or disproven they don't even qualify as hypothesis. I merely pointed out that ID and Creationism are two entirely seperate concepts and that people are too hasty to lump them together and say, "They are out to get our theory" as you have done here just now.
As for the truth of evolution, I am not saying it should not be taught. I am not even saying that it should not be taught exclusively. I am merely stating that the supporters of evolution would do well to represent the concepts of their opponents accurately instead of lumping them into one group. By being intellectual snobs you give them reason to doubt your intelligence merely by not representing their own beliefs correctly. It is only by addressing the actual arguments of the other side that you can hope to stop them. It would be gross ignorance to believe that name calling counts as an argument.
Neither. It is both ignorant and dishonest to say that any of the "theories" (yes I am using that term loosely) for how we came to exist is anything more than theory. Darwinian theory happens to have the strongest science to back it up. ID recognizes this but allows for the possibility of it being wrong as well.
I get the feeling from the vitrol of your post that you would hold the theory of evolution to be law. So I ask you then, why is it still just a theory? Do you have some empirical evidence that eliminates the other possibilities? I for one don't and therefore prefer to reserve judgement until more facts are presented. As far as I am concerned in my daily life it is not vital for me to put all of my eggs in any one basket.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes I do. $70-$200 depending on the extent of the infection including a fee for not having proper antivirus. I also require them to purchase an Anti-Virus program and AdAware from me (which of course I buy from them, no pirating here) and update/scan on a regular basis or all waranty on my work is void. Most of my clients systems stay clean for at least three to four months with reglar scanning. Then they bring them in for a $70 tune up.
Top Microsoft engineers were beaten by what the article said were over 100 pieces of malware. I have personally cleaned hundreds of mechines with 200 or more individual infections including ones that disable anti-virus and anti-malware. To date I have NEVER been forced to reformat anything but the Sony DRM rootkit. My toolkit: Knoppix CD, NTFS read write Linux drivers, AdAware, Spybot, HJT, and years of experience playing in the registry.
I know I am not alone here in the trenches. I use Linux at home and where I find users with even a slight clue I make them Linux or Mac users. Where the users have no clue (which sadly is most often the case) I scour their system and return it with their data unscathed and with functional defense against future infection. I try to educate them (sometimes at the heavy end of a bat) in safe procedures to keep their system clean. Then I move on to the next unlucky dope who downloaded an infected screensaver with no anti-virus.
I have to say, it is a sad sort of satisfaction when the people in charge of designing the software are incapable of doing something I (and thousands like me) do every day.
I currently have AT&T professional class DSL (3Mbps) and consistantly pull between 2.5 and 2.8 which shocks me. I am used to paying for 1.5Mbps and getting under 512Kbps. Of course it helps that my new apartment is almost sitting on one of the phone company central offices. I thinks speeds are only really going up for people with optimal situations. In my case much of the copper (both phone and coax) in my area was pulled in the last 5 years and is a bit higher quality. Add to that my apartments are wired with good quality CAT 3 for phones. In older neighborhoods you have copper as old as 20 years which leads to signal degradation and less than optimal speed.
This poor kid has been denied one of the most basic rights, one that should be freely afforded every American! "The right to have a decent English teacher shall not be infringed." All of his previous ones have been dismal failures and should be fired immediately...
Oh yeah, he should have free speech too...
Otsde of skool evry1 shood hve teh rite 2 speek hw thy wnt...
DAMN THE MAN! SAVE THE EMPIRE!
For reference, most of the "immigrants" seen in the protests were either legal immigrants or decended from illegal immigrants and actually U.S. citizens (having been born here). I am from South Texas and knew many of those who were protesting. Calling a group of people "illegal immigrants" where only a few are actually illegal immigrants would be unfair on the part of the news source.
Further, saying "one Islamic group bombed another" is news. Commenting about "Islamofascists" and the "Anti-Christian leftists" is not news, it is commentary with a blatant slant. Whether or not a person gets their news there is irrelevant, Google News tries to limit the news searches to actual news sources, not slanted and clearly racist commentary sources. Google can't keep all slant out because as humans we all show some bias and news reporters are all human. Google has every right to weed out those who blatantly parade around as a purely opinion site.
Yes, their posts contain a news item, but it is surrounded by hate speech. If Google News is forced to list these sources of hate speech they would also have to call any Neo-Nazi party blog news as well. Honestly, when I post a news based rant on my blog I understand it is clearly biased and wouldn't want Google calling it news.
It's called taking pride in your work. Code run through the validator has a level of quality control and a higher likelyhood of surviving the various browsers it gets crammed through. The only page I have ever designed that wasn't 100% CSS and XHTML compliant is my personal blog and the few things that throw it off are things Blogger.com requires. For my professional sites nothing less than W3C compliance will do.
So, lets pretend for a moment the MPAA actually gets carriers like FedEX to do this here in the USA. Pretend further they buy a judge or two and have this listed as constitutional. I burn a DVD of my kid's school talent show and to be witty title it similarly to a current movie. I send it to my family and MPAA thugs find it. Would they actually watch it to verify it was a pirated film or simply confiscate it and send their lawyers to sue me for copyright violation?
Every day I see more and more why the founding fathers of this nation rose up and revolted. Boston DVD Party anyone?
Currently my office runs on M$ Office 2k3. We could easily switch to OpenOffice save one luser who creates every one of his spreadsheets using M$ specific formatting that throws the OO conversion tool for a loop. I would switch the rest of us but we all have to be able to access his documents as he is the shop manager and he gets cranky when people don't read his crap. Had I been here when the network was set up in the first place this would be a M$ free shop as Linux has all of the tools these lusers need in a default workstation install. So I am going to sit here patiently waiting to move everyone to Linux immediately after we can get ODF translations for all of his crap. At least I can move the website to a Slack server soon (after I weed out the useless ASP code). IIS is killing me
I am Microsoft Certified, which is why I use Linux.
I'm with mrraven on this. The whole idea is a bit Orwellian. Adding to the government is the horror getting your info is the private corporations. Imagine walking into a store to glance at an item and by the time you get to the shelf they have run a full credit check and are ready to offer you a starting APR of 8% with no payments till January. Or worse, walk into a store you owe money to and they immediately deduct it from a credit card attached to your RFID. Then of course you have the identity theft implications as we know every Black Hat H4X0R will be working on that encryption. Why go through all of those risks just for the ability to shave a few seconds off of entering your car or home?
It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you... Now where is my tin foil hat and Rambo knife...
As much as we write and complain about the idiots in government creating legislation that is bad for technology and innovation we have yet to solve the problem. I think given the power of /. we could unite a movement to elect someone with an IQ higher than 3 and not in the back pockets of those abusing the DMCA. Viva la Revolution! Think about it. We could form a new political party where rank comes from ability, not tenure. We could take over the world!
...well, after I blog about it...
then there is my L.U.G. meeting...
and the sites I need to code...
For those who didn't get the memo: I was attmpting a little tounge in cheek jab. I have a firm grasp on the concepts of theory and law. Forgive the subtle tone of my original reply. It seems to have obscured the humor. Thank you.
Where does using a word stop being funny and become hate speech? In the context of the replies here the phrase, "That is sooo gaayyy" merely tries to bring levity to what could be a flame-rife topic. But saying to a complete stranger, "that faggot stole my (insert cool WOW item here)" or "That armor is gay" is offensive. There are far more effective ways of conveying how lame a thing is without going out of your way to offend (such as, "you are a jackass" or "that armor was forged in the fires of useless, just like you").
Calling things "gay" and people "faggot" is just freaking retarded...</sarcasm>
Philosophical underpants? You mean like Nietsche's nickers?
Oh...underpinnings...well that makes far more sense. It helps when I clean my glases.
So we should teach Intelligent Design in Philosophy class? Excellent idea...
wait, re-reading post...
You say we should teach kids to apply a philosophical model instead of allowing the facts to merely speak for themselves and assuming nothing. Using philosophy which makes moral judgements and uses assumptions where there is little data to examine scientific theory.
Yeah, this does not sound like a good idea. Putting a philosophical underpinning to science allows for assertions that cannot be tested and therefore creates bad science. Leave philosophical interpretation to the philosopy club.
There are some in society walking about (or being president) today who resemble that ancestor...(sorry, couldn't resist, you may mod me as flamebait now...)
Sorry, I guess you couldn't see my tongue planted firmly in my cheek as I was typing that. I thought the "Cease fire" and "resume firing" would give me away but perhaps I was too subtle. Sorry bout that...
Nope, a theory is not proven beyond all shadow of doubt. It is a hypothesis that has consistantly held true under repeated testing. That said, considering the Theory of Evolution has been tested and refined so many times by so many different scientists its likelyhood of ever being scientifically disproven would require the use of extremely tiny decimals. Minor details such as who decended from what might change but the overall Theory is well on its way to becoming law.
For the record, it is called the LAW of gravity, not the theory. You may now resume fire...
Funny you should mention carbon producers. The solution to stopping global warming starts with putting a plug in the largest producers of greenhouse gasses in the world. Is it factories? No. Oil companies? No.
The largest source of greenhouse gasses on earth by an exponential ammount is volcanos.
Man gives themselves way too much credit. Come to think of it, the largest producers of CFC's and the only things capable of giving them the velocity to reach the ozone layer and make those nasty holes, you guessed it, volcanos.
Just because a scientist has "data" to say the world is flat does not make it so. Common sense is only worth something when you have facts around which to form that sense. CFC's are heavy gasses, as are most carbon based (also read greenhouse) gasses. They tend to hang around down here in our layer of the atmosphere. For them to harm the ozone or warm the climate they need to reach altitudes they could never normally obtain without propulsion. While some are pulled up by the winds near the equator most have to be launched by the explosive force of an eruption.
Save the world, cork a volcano!
There are two keys to efficient server tuning. One, build the server with the capability to run at least 3 times as much as you need right now. Then kill -9 any process that slows your watching the p0rn filter go nuts during lunch and breaks. Who really needs a freaking relational database engine anyway? The accounting department can kiss off, you have blackmail to collect.
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."-Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
One must remember when undertaking to find answers in the data to first figure out the question. Otherwise the answer you find will be as useful to you as the answer 42.
Without context you only have a neat compilation of arranged meaningless facts.
On the small scale data mining is used daily by marketing people and the like to figure out who would be most receptive to their approach. Webmasters use it to optimize content and respond to user trends. In most large corporations data mining is used on some level.
Data mining on the scale discussed here may be practical at some point in the future once we determine the questions we wish answers to.
Let us hope the answer is more useful than 42.
But here is the key, both sides are unreasonable.
ID and creationism get lumped together and then their followers get dismissed entirely by calling them uneducated. They then respond by showing the examples where details of evolution don't always fit (primarily because the research for that detail is not yet complete). Names are thrown back and forth and we end up with the mess we have here. Creationists and some followers of ID follow it based on faith. Other followers of ID follow it because they don't have a full grasp on the concept of the scientific method and thus buy into the well reasoned but more philosophical than scientific explanations of the "scientists" pushing the concept of ID.
In the end, while those holding that evolution is fact have actual science to back their claims, they look like a bunch of pompous asses because instead of simply presenting the facts they add insults to the intelligence of their opponents. Their opponents then fall back on faith as science and attack this as a holy war. Thus, by assuming their opponents are all idiots, those who follow what is most likely to be fact end up losing. This is what I have been attempting to point out from the beginning. Problems arise when people start to type before actually taking a moment to analyze what I have said.
To sum up for those who didn't feel like reading through the big words with more than one syllable, name is calling bad for your point of view. Let the science speak for itself and never assume your opponent is dumber than you.
Thank you for actually reading my response dilg and Enigma. It is much appreciated. It often happens that in a debate when someone is looking to take offence they will find it in the most reasoned response.
Nope. Just got a new job where I have the time to put in my two bits worth.
For the record, I never stated that Creationism or ID had any place in schools and specifically avoided that in my initial post. You are correct, until someone comes up with a testable concept that can then either be proven or disproven they don't even qualify as hypothesis. I merely pointed out that ID and Creationism are two entirely seperate concepts and that people are too hasty to lump them together and say, "They are out to get our theory" as you have done here just now. As for the truth of evolution, I am not saying it should not be taught. I am not even saying that it should not be taught exclusively. I am merely stating that the supporters of evolution would do well to represent the concepts of their opponents accurately instead of lumping them into one group. By being intellectual snobs you give them reason to doubt your intelligence merely by not representing their own beliefs correctly. It is only by addressing the actual arguments of the other side that you can hope to stop them. It would be gross ignorance to believe that name calling counts as an argument.
Neither. It is both ignorant and dishonest to say that any of the "theories" (yes I am using that term loosely) for how we came to exist is anything more than theory. Darwinian theory happens to have the strongest science to back it up. ID recognizes this but allows for the possibility of it being wrong as well.
I get the feeling from the vitrol of your post that you would hold the theory of evolution to be law. So I ask you then, why is it still just a theory? Do you have some empirical evidence that eliminates the other possibilities? I for one don't and therefore prefer to reserve judgement until more facts are presented. As far as I am concerned in my daily life it is not vital for me to put all of my eggs in any one basket.