I had to ask the bank *twice* for a plain-jane no frills no debit no visa logo ATM card.
I only had to ask once. They said, "okay, you can cut it up and keep using your old card, but if we ever have to issue you a new card it'll be a debit card."
My response was simple: "goodbye." I switched banks, and my new bank was perfectly happy to give me a PIN-only card instead of a works-like-a-credit card. And their service is better in other ways too.
It seems that the only real winners in this lawsuit are the lawyers.
Welcome to the world of class action lawsuits. A while back there was one that covered airline fare setting. The lawyers got millions of dollars, and members of the class got "AirScrip"--coupons for a few dollars off your next airline ticket.
They didn't even have the decency to print the AirScrip on nice soft paper so it'd be useful for something....
(People who'd flown 5 or more trips but didn't itemize got a whopping $79 in coupons; that was two $25, two $10, and one $9. Whee!)
Falwell has apparently backpedaled and apologized for some of his comments.
Yeah, he said that only the hijackers and terrorists were responsible for the attack, but that maybe all that bad stuff we've been doing "caused God to lift the veil of protection". (See the CNN article about this "apology").
Meanwhile, Mark Bingham, one of the passengers on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania (and apparently among those who fought to prevent its use as another aerial bomb) was an openly gay man.
If I had to pick one of the two to spend a day with, knowing only what I currently know about them both, I'd pick Mark any day. I've never met either Mark Bingham or Jerry Falwell, but Mark has a bunch of friends and family who miss him enough to put up a tribute web page and attend memorials; Jerry apparently has a bunch of people who give him money upon request.
Re:Why you should help
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 2
Call for an appointment. 1-800-GIVE-LIFE or check your local phone book. I am booked in for two weeks from today. There will still be a need for blood next week, next month, next year.
I'd been putting off donating time and time again. Now I'm going to make it a regular habit, in honor of those who can't.
And I don't like needles.
If you can't donate blood for any reason, do what you can. Donate money (I did that already). Donate your time (volunteer, it helps you and others at the same time). As another poster suggested, bring a cooler full of water bottles to the blood drive and hand 'em out to the folks in line.
If I'm not mistaked, correct me if I am, motorola's Dragonball processors used in Palm's products are a branch of Power PC.
Actually, they aren't. They're Motorola 680x0 family processors. Now, there is a computer company in Cupertino that did transition from 680x0 to PowerPC a while back, including emulating the 680x0 so that all their old applications still ran on the new machines. And, of course, both Palm and Be came from Apple alumni.
So a move to PowerPC (which Motorola's been using heavily in embedded systems markets) combined with BeOS, combined with 680x0 emulation for "Classic PalmOS"...yeah, that could work.
Apple's Airport Admin Utility will let you MAC-lock your Airport Base Station. Not that that gains you a whole lot of security since they can sniff your MAC address....
My measures for securing my ABS:
MAC address locking to my machines
"Closed" network to avoid broadcasting SSID
WEP turned on to keep out the anklebiters
base station powered off when not in use
The only one that I actually trust? The last one. However, given that there's a completely open 802.11 network somewhere fairly close (at least last time I popped up a wireless card to use my base station, I had two options and the other one didn't ask for a WEP password) I figure "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.":)
All of these measures are just to keep people from using my network connection for free, anyway. All my wireless traffic is either protected by SSH, SSL, or IPsec or it's stuff I don't care about ("ooh! look! I can watch him visit CNN's web site!").
Last time I've checked, neither PGP not GPG had any user-interface other than command line, and a key has only one name/e-mail address attached to it.
The Mac and Windows versions of PGP do have GUIs, and even PGP 2.6.2 let you have multiple userids on a single key. Most people didn't, but you always could.
This attack is interesting, but since it's really a UI bug and not an underlying weakness in the protocol or crypto implementation, it's not too tough to avoid by being careful to look at the keys you import (which you should be doing anyway).
A few misconceptions in the comments
on
Harry Potter Wins Hugo
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· Score: 4, Informative
#1: The Hugos are a juried award. Nope; they're a fan award. Anyone who is a member of that year's Worldcon can vote; all it takes is the money to pay for a voting membership. You don't even have to attend.
#2: The Hugos are only for SF. They tend to be given to SF works, but the criteria explicitly include fantasy.
#3: Why didn't <foo> win instead? Hugos are given based on year of first publication, so Lord of the Rings wasn't eligible this year. The movies will be eligible for the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo, however.
#4: The plagiarism case.A Washington Post article and a transcript of an online chat with Stouffer give some more details, but I tend to side with the folks who doubt the claims she makes. They were going to make a billion dollars! All my records were lost when my roof collapsed! I talked to the (never-married) editor and his wife! You can't remove IE from Windows without breaking it! (Sorry, that last one was from someone else.)
To be competitive with other upcoming games, a game must be written specifically for one platform anyway. Every decent game that's come out has taken a month or two to port to another platform.
Well, I guess we know how you feel about Quake III then, since it was a simultaneous release (even if the retailers and distributors, understandably, worked harder to get the Windows version on the shelves than either of the other two).
A small voice asks... what happens when Microsoft encrypt their email protocols, network file sharing protocols, office document formats, and then start prosecuting programmers who try to hack these protocols, say... to allow Linux to interoperate with Windows.
I doubt it, since only some of the W2K HotMail servers are infected (according to Microsoft, anyway). I suppose they missed a few or just ran out of time to patch them all - how many boxen do you think they have to patch? Lots?
The patch has been out since what, June? MS is happy to say "we had a patch out months ago, sent out plenty of warnings, everyone had plenty of time to stop this, it's not our fault they didn't patch it" when people complain about the problem.
The fact that they didn't get their systems patched is a real indictment of either their system administration practices (if even the vendor doesn't install widely-publicized vendor patches, how can they claim that Bob's Bait Store should always be up to date?) or the "easy administration" of W2K. Unfortunately I doubt anyone will actually be indicted....
The Hoka stories were great. Alas, not only did we lose Poul Anderson this year, but his co-author on the Hoka books (Gordon R. Dickson) also died earlier this year. Add in Douglas Adams and it's been a really, really, bad year. Sigh.
Now my personal caffeine measure device (which obviously needs to be told which coffee machine to connect to) gets configured to connect to mydomain.com:10000. mydomain.com is the only static IP address I have, but when something comes in on port 10000, it knows it needs to send it to port 443 on coffee.mydomain.com.
You're now limited to 65,535 possible things you can address through that firewall (TCP ports are a 16-bit field).
So you've got 10/8 behind the firewall (2^24 devices) and you can only address 2/3 of them--assuming each one "only" needs one TCP port. Oops!
Admittedly, you could as much as double the "address space" by using UDP for some things...but since most of your embedded gear is probably going to want to use HTTP, that won't work too well.
If your control software is smart enough, I suppose you could use an HTTP proxy on the gateway...but does the Linksys box provide one? Didn't think so.
Not necessarily. The rumors I've been hearing on one or another of my usual DVD news/rumor sites say that the upcoming DVD release will be a special edition with a commentary track, the 24 seconds of extra footage (which I suspect is the same extra footage found on the old Criterion laserdisc), and other spiffy new features.
Didn't American lawyers invent the cultural phenomenon of "suing anyone you can over anything at all"? Does this mean that the American Bar Association should be suing the Maori for violating their culture and traditions?
Now while the space for network and subnets is sufficient, using 64 bits for addressing hosts seems like a waste. It's unlikely that you will want to have several billion hosts on a single subnet, so what is the idea behind this?
Can you imagine the broadcast traffic you'd get on a several billion host subnet? I would hope you don't have an IPv6 aware rwhod running.:-)
A note on the PND changes: it looks like this bill got bottled up in committee in the Dáil (and given how long it's been there, it may never make it out), so there's still time to find someone Irish to marry. See this page on the status of the bill.
Disclaimer: I am not an attorney of any sort in either the US or Ireland.
Work permit? How about citizenship? If one of your grandparents was born in Ireland, you are entitled to citizenship. See Your Right to Irish Citizenship.
This lets you live and work, without a work permit, in any member country of the European Economic Area (the EU + Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein).
A warning on the mention of "post-nuptial declaration" in these documents: apparently the law has been changed, and from 2003 will require 3 years' residence in Ireland for the PND to be valid (basically making it only a shorter term for naturalization). If you were married in 2000 or earlier you might get in under the wire if you hurry. However, as the spouse of a citizen of an EEA country, you are guaranteed a work permit anyway.
Of course, then he went to work for Bill & the Gang and was the person who answered EFF's questions about the good ol' Clipper Chip, with wording that amounted to "Yes, it's really secure. Trust us."
So an example of why this is insidious... the human genome is supposed to be free for mankind to use... but what do you want to be the database that holds the information about the entire sequence will be copyrighted by someone? And anyone who tries to provide a free version will be DMCA'd to death?
The National Center for Biotechnology Information, home of Genbank and the public draft human sequence, is run by the National Institutes of Health. They're not gonna get DMCAed any time soon, especially since the participating public centers generated the data. The public sector Human Genome Project data is free for anyone to use...even Celera.
(Disclaimer: I work for one of the HGP sequencing centers.)
So while they didn't pay for the information, they did pay for the infrastructure.
Which (as you note) doesn't make this lawsuit any more legitimate; they're complaining that Roxio isn't using their infrastructure.
And they did develop the database for free; it was originally a GPLed server app that you could download (along with the complete database for use in local mirrors). Escient/Gracenote then bought it and closed it up.
As much as I dislike Amazon's one-click patent and so on, I must admit that they've done much better things with IMDB than Gracenote has with CDDB.
Come to think of it, doesn't this give us some reason to donate funds to freedb?
Yes indeed. There doesn't seem to be any donation info on freedb.org that I can find, though.
It wasn't just Garn, either. There was also a Congressman (Bill Nelson) who got a joyride, bumping a regular crew member to the next available flight. NASA's web site lists him as "Payload Specialist 2". More like "Special Payload 2".
That crew member was then killed in the Challenger explosion.
Tito paid his own money, took a seat that would have gone empty (the Soyuz has three seats, but normally uses only two for these missions), and helped keep some Russian rocket scientists employed for civilian work rather than freelancing in Baghdad. Garn, Nelson, and Glenn all got rides by calling in favors.
If you're building a house, and therefore don't have to pay much for the labor in running the wire, run lots of pairs. Make a wild guess about the maximum you'll ever use, and double it.
The wire is cheap compared to the cost of running new stuff later, and almost anything can be run over good twisted pair.
I'd recommend two 4 pair runs from each room to a "wiring closet" or similar location for networking, two more 4 pair runs for phones (yes, I know a normal phone line only takes one pair--what if you later want a home PBX or key system?), a 4 pair run for speakers and/or intercom system, and toss in another run of 4 pair for future expansion.
It doesn't cost six times as much to have them do six parallel runs of four pair cable. Take advantage of it. Even if you never use half the runs, the one time you need an extra pair to a particular spot you'll be glad you had it run in advance. When we had a new office wired at my last job we did this, and it came in handy when we found that the new copier wanted to be able to "phone home". If we'd bought one that could take a PostScript RIP we would have had Ethernet available there too--no new wire run needed.
If you're really gung-ho, run some nice fat conduit so you can pull fiber later....
Slashdot Mirror
And that was borrowed from NeXTStep's File Viewer's Shelf, which dates back a lot farther than IE5/Mac. Who's zooming who?
I only had to ask once. They said, "okay, you can cut it up and keep using your old card, but if we ever have to issue you a new card it'll be a debit card."
My response was simple: "goodbye." I switched banks, and my new bank was perfectly happy to give me a PIN-only card instead of a works-like-a-credit card. And their service is better in other ways too.
Welcome to the world of class action lawsuits. A while back there was one that covered airline fare setting. The lawyers got millions of dollars, and members of the class got "AirScrip"--coupons for a few dollars off your next airline ticket.
They didn't even have the decency to print the AirScrip on nice soft paper so it'd be useful for something....
(People who'd flown 5 or more trips but didn't itemize got a whopping $79 in coupons; that was two $25, two $10, and one $9. Whee!)
Yeah, he said that only the hijackers and terrorists were responsible for the attack, but that maybe all that bad stuff we've been doing "caused God to lift the veil of protection". (See the CNN article about this "apology").
Meanwhile, Mark Bingham, one of the passengers on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania (and apparently among those who fought to prevent its use as another aerial bomb) was an openly gay man.
If I had to pick one of the two to spend a day with, knowing only what I currently know about them both, I'd pick Mark any day. I've never met either Mark Bingham or Jerry Falwell, but Mark has a bunch of friends and family who miss him enough to put up a tribute web page and attend memorials; Jerry apparently has a bunch of people who give him money upon request.
Call for an appointment. 1-800-GIVE-LIFE or check your local phone book. I am booked in for two weeks from today. There will still be a need for blood next week, next month, next year.
I'd been putting off donating time and time again. Now I'm going to make it a regular habit, in honor of those who can't.
And I don't like needles.
If you can't donate blood for any reason, do what you can. Donate money (I did that already). Donate your time (volunteer, it helps you and others at the same time). As another poster suggested, bring a cooler full of water bottles to the blood drive and hand 'em out to the folks in line.
Actually, they aren't. They're Motorola 680x0 family processors. Now, there is a computer company in Cupertino that did transition from 680x0 to PowerPC a while back, including emulating the 680x0 so that all their old applications still ran on the new machines. And, of course, both Palm and Be came from Apple alumni.
So a move to PowerPC (which Motorola's been using heavily in embedded systems markets) combined with BeOS, combined with 680x0 emulation for "Classic PalmOS"...yeah, that could work.
Apple's Airport Admin Utility will let you MAC-lock your Airport Base Station. Not that that gains you a whole lot of security since they can sniff your MAC address....
My measures for securing my ABS:
The only one that I actually trust? The last one. However, given that there's a completely open 802.11 network somewhere fairly close (at least last time I popped up a wireless card to use my base station, I had two options and the other one didn't ask for a WEP password) I figure "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you." :)
All of these measures are just to keep people from using my network connection for free, anyway. All my wireless traffic is either protected by SSH, SSL, or IPsec or it's stuff I don't care about ("ooh! look! I can watch him visit CNN's web site!").
The Mac and Windows versions of PGP do have GUIs, and even PGP 2.6.2 let you have multiple userids on a single key. Most people didn't, but you always could.
This attack is interesting, but since it's really a UI bug and not an underlying weakness in the protocol or crypto implementation, it's not too tough to avoid by being careful to look at the keys you import (which you should be doing anyway).
#1: The Hugos are a juried award. Nope; they're a fan award. Anyone who is a member of that year's Worldcon can vote; all it takes is the money to pay for a voting membership. You don't even have to attend.
#2: The Hugos are only for SF. They tend to be given to SF works, but the criteria explicitly include fantasy.
#3: Why didn't <foo> win instead? Hugos are given based on year of first publication, so Lord of the Rings wasn't eligible this year. The movies will be eligible for the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo, however.
#4: The plagiarism case. A Washington Post article and a transcript of an online chat with Stouffer give some more details, but I tend to side with the folks who doubt the claims she makes. They were going to make a billion dollars! All my records were lost when my roof collapsed! I talked to the (never-married) editor and his wife! You can't remove IE from Windows without breaking it! (Sorry, that last one was from someone else.)
Well, I guess we know how you feel about Quake III then, since it was a simultaneous release (even if the retailers and distributors, understandably, worked harder to get the Windows version on the shelves than either of the other two).
You mean like what they did when they first "released" the spec for Microsoft Kerberos with a click-wrap license, then asked Slashdot to remove un-clickwrapped copies (or links to same), and finally made most of the info available without the clickwrap?
Yeah, they'd never do anything like that.
The patch has been out since what, June? MS is happy to say "we had a patch out months ago, sent out plenty of warnings, everyone had plenty of time to stop this, it's not our fault they didn't patch it" when people complain about the problem.
The fact that they didn't get their systems patched is a real indictment of either their system administration practices (if even the vendor doesn't install widely-publicized vendor patches, how can they claim that Bob's Bait Store should always be up to date?) or the "easy administration" of W2K. Unfortunately I doubt anyone will actually be indicted....
The Hoka stories were great. Alas, not only did we lose Poul Anderson this year, but his co-author on the Hoka books (Gordon R. Dickson) also died earlier this year. Add in Douglas Adams and it's been a really, really, bad year. Sigh.
You're now limited to 65,535 possible things you can address through that firewall (TCP ports are a 16-bit field).
So you've got 10/8 behind the firewall (2^24 devices) and you can only address 2/3 of them--assuming each one "only" needs one TCP port. Oops!
Admittedly, you could as much as double the "address space" by using UDP for some things...but since most of your embedded gear is probably going to want to use HTTP, that won't work too well.
If your control software is smart enough, I suppose you could use an HTTP proxy on the gateway...but does the Linksys box provide one? Didn't think so.
Not necessarily. The rumors I've been hearing on one or another of my usual DVD news/rumor sites say that the upcoming DVD release will be a special edition with a commentary track, the 24 seconds of extra footage (which I suspect is the same extra footage found on the old Criterion laserdisc), and other spiffy new features.
And this would be a Region 1 disc.
Didn't American lawyers invent the cultural phenomenon of "suing anyone you can over anything at all"? Does this mean that the American Bar Association should be suing the Maori for violating their culture and traditions?
Can you imagine the broadcast traffic you'd get on a several billion host subnet? I would hope you don't have an IPv6 aware rwhod running. :-)
A note on the PND changes: it looks like this bill got bottled up in committee in the Dáil (and given how long it's been there, it may never make it out), so there's still time to find someone Irish to marry. See this page on the status of the bill.
Disclaimer: I am not an attorney of any sort in either the US or Ireland.
Work permit? How about citizenship? If one of your grandparents was born in Ireland, you are entitled to citizenship. See Your Right to Irish Citizenship.
This lets you live and work, without a work permit, in any member country of the European Economic Area (the EU + Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein).
A warning on the mention of "post-nuptial declaration" in these documents: apparently the law has been changed, and from 2003 will require 3 years' residence in Ireland for the PND to be valid (basically making it only a shorter term for naturalization). If you were married in 2000 or earlier you might get in under the wire if you hurry. However, as the spouse of a citizen of an EEA country, you are guaranteed a work permit anyway.
(US citizen by birth, Irish citizen by PND.)
Do a quick Google search for "Podesta" and "EFF". The EFF's Washington, DC office (back when EFF HQ was still in Cambridge) originally shared space with Podesta & Associates, and he did some legal consulting for the EFF, including helping to fight an early FBI data access plan (which sure sounds like what became Carnivore).
Of course, then he went to work for Bill & the Gang and was the person who answered EFF's questions about the good ol' Clipper Chip, with wording that amounted to "Yes, it's really secure. Trust us."
The National Center for Biotechnology Information, home of Genbank and the public draft human sequence, is run by the National Institutes of Health. They're not gonna get DMCAed any time soon, especially since the participating public centers generated the data. The public sector Human Genome Project data is free for anyone to use...even Celera.
(Disclaimer: I work for one of the HGP sequencing centers.)
Which (as you note) doesn't make this lawsuit any more legitimate; they're complaining that Roxio isn't using their infrastructure.
And they did develop the database for free; it was originally a GPLed server app that you could download (along with the complete database for use in local mirrors). Escient/Gracenote then bought it and closed it up.
As much as I dislike Amazon's one-click patent and so on, I must admit that they've done much better things with IMDB than Gracenote has with CDDB.
Yes indeed. There doesn't seem to be any donation info on freedb.org that I can find, though.
Hey Dave, how much did you pay for those track entries again?
It wasn't just Garn, either. There was also a Congressman (Bill Nelson) who got a joyride, bumping a regular crew member to the next available flight. NASA's web site lists him as "Payload Specialist 2". More like "Special Payload 2".
That crew member was then killed in the Challenger explosion.
Tito paid his own money, took a seat that would have gone empty (the Soyuz has three seats, but normally uses only two for these missions), and helped keep some Russian rocket scientists employed for civilian work rather than freelancing in Baghdad. Garn, Nelson, and Glenn all got rides by calling in favors.
If you're building a house, and therefore don't have to pay much for the labor in running the wire, run lots of pairs. Make a wild guess about the maximum you'll ever use, and double it.
The wire is cheap compared to the cost of running new stuff later, and almost anything can be run over good twisted pair.
I'd recommend two 4 pair runs from each room to a "wiring closet" or similar location for networking, two more 4 pair runs for phones (yes, I know a normal phone line only takes one pair--what if you later want a home PBX or key system?), a 4 pair run for speakers and/or intercom system, and toss in another run of 4 pair for future expansion.
It doesn't cost six times as much to have them do six parallel runs of four pair cable. Take advantage of it. Even if you never use half the runs, the one time you need an extra pair to a particular spot you'll be glad you had it run in advance. When we had a new office wired at my last job we did this, and it came in handy when we found that the new copier wanted to be able to "phone home". If we'd bought one that could take a PostScript RIP we would have had Ethernet available there too--no new wire run needed.
If you're really gung-ho, run some nice fat conduit so you can pull fiber later....