I noticed that when setting up a Cisco Call Manager with a PRI, that I could signal out on the SS7 D-channel pretty much any CLID information I wanted. And the phone switch would accept it.
Phone switch software has to trust certain types of trunk lines. This type of scam was available to PBXs, but the phone companies could trace it to the circuit that introduced the spoof, because they had records of the actual dialed number.
Same thing needs to happen with Vonage and others. They need to install a digital certificate on the box they send you and the call setup needs to have something like a X.509 signature. The soft switch run by the Vonage like company maps where the real box came from, doesn't accept any signatures it doesn't know, and records the originating src-ip address. Sudden and often changes in src-ip address means the customer gets a service message in their account asking them to verify. Just like credit card fraud protection.
And most importantly, the Vonages of the world are held responsible legally for it through legislation.
That's a fucking typical Slashdot thing to say. Imagine if it were a retired person on a fixed income. Somebody who is easily targeted. I'm sure your sorry punk ass would be the first to go up to them and say "0wn3d".
...that Microsoft has essentially blown off the Liberty Alliance. And that there is no sign that if they tie the authentication scheme into AD, that they intend to use SAML for SSO.
Windows Web SSO uses Kerberos under the covers now, so when you pass NTLM authentication to one IIS server, and that IIS server is part of a Windows domain, it can pass your authentication to AD, which is acting as the KDC, and you get a TGT. Wow, that's a lot of acronyms.
But, what MS should be doing, is moving away from Kerberos and towards SAML. And by blowing off the Liberty Alliance, they are saying, hey we may develop standards for authenticating a user via our new fingerprint reader keyboard to AD, but we'll publish how that protocol works, and it probably won't be SAML based, so go fuck yourself.
It's brash and really not in keeping with the way Microsoft has been handling authentication. They've been bullys in many areas, but when it came to authentication, they were on standards. Microsoft's IAS is a fine RADIUS server, supports many EAP types, and works well.
Charter cable, which competes region by region against Comcast in certain markets, made a deal with Motorola and created a Tivo knockoff, called Moxi. It's quite a bit like Tivo, even improving some things with the interface IMO, like making the channel guide vertical instead of horizontal. (It's hard to describe exactly, think of the Windows Explorer interface with the start button instead of the program guide way that Tivo does it).
I saw the box and the way Charter is competing hard against Comcast in rural areas of the midwest, and I thought that maybe Tivo's days were numbered. Moxi is such a close approximation of the function, that it's indistinguishable from Tivo. The cable companies are going out and getting their own gear, on their own terms. the box has an ethernet jack and a way to offload the MPEGs you record. I no longer see what makes TiVo special anymore, nor do I know how they can really compete or distinguish their service anymore. We've reached the commodity phase of the DVR lifecycle.
Cisco Systems just after 2000 was at an all time high, trading at something like $85/share. That put their market cap the same as General Electric. It made them the 2nd most valuable company in the WORLD.
Now, I know they make routers and switches and VPN and optical and all that stuff. But Microsoft employs more people (and a LOT more U.S. citizens, btw) and wasn't even CLOSE. It was some kind of hey the Y2k thing didn't happen irrational exhuberence. How could GE, who had contracts everywhere with the military to make F-16 engines, and light bulbs and washing machines and just about fucking everything that people woould always need be worth as much as an internet company? Come on. John Chambers may golf with Andy Grove and talk to Jack Welsh on the phone, but he's more Steve Jobs than Steve Forbes.
JDS uniphase went from $25 a share to $150 in the span of a couple years and had the highest P/E of any company ever. This was like the spring of 2000.
I didn't get into the market, despite alot of other people jumping in. It seemed insane. The spring of 2000 was like the summer of '69. instead of free love, it was free money.
I'm gonna kill your motherfuckin pasty white ass! Lightin bolt sendin motherfucker. Yo' bitch, you ever think of gettin new dentures? {ZZZZZZZap} God DAMN that hurt! Shit, your ass is mine now. With my blue Yoda saber, when you absolutely postively have to kill every last Sith motherfucker in the room...
Re:Games HAVE had a drastic effect on a generation
on
Got Game
·
· Score: 1
We're always looking for the shortcut, believing fully that it exists. And sometimes, even though it's often an asset in business, we can be a bit inhuman in our logic, dispassionately accepting losses, risks, and sacrifices when it furthers our goals.
I think this is why there is no anti-war movement on U.S. college campuses. That may change if there is a draft, but many of them think they were too smart to be a grunt, and feel superior to those that are killed, and blithley accept the Bush mantra that death is part of winning the war.
I did. Cancelled my WoW account. I set firm rules at my house about it. Casual play, maybe 4 hours on Friday night, that was it. No more than you would pull out a Monopoly game and play that. Didn't happen. We have three computers, three people, and the other two people started logging in on weeknights. Just gotta go to auction, sell a few things. Oh wait, let me get the key from the guy to unlock the box. Oh wait, lemme just kill 5 foozles and get some skins.
Pow. I pulled the plug. I cancelled my account, and the other two dropped off because I wasn't there to enable the addiction.
Slashdot once had a study on this, it's a kind of ladder system that feeds the need to press the button. What is it called? Anyhow, WoW refined the drug. Now, you get your button pushed more often. It's more seamless. You don't grind, you are always questing. Smart, smart. The combat system hardly makes it a fighting game, but there IS tactical combat techniques and team play is needed. feeds the addiction. Makes you group with people who share the addiction. Pretty soon, it's consuming you.
I nuked it. I went back to only race sims. It's a hobby. I race a few laps when I want to practice and get faster, and I participate in a league that runs a 2 hour race twice a month. Easy.
I'm lucky. I'm in my 30s, and see this stuff for what it is. Had I gotten on WoW in my teens, it would have fucked my career up good.
Except that he's not the primary author of Mosaic. He simply took the code when they were working on it, and forked the codebase and ran off to start Netscape with it. Many of the original authors of Mosaic know that Marc was not a talented programmer, just an opportunist looking for a way to cash in on other people's work.
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Pizza man.
I didn't order a pizza.
(pause)
Mailman.
Today is Sunday, there is no mail.
(pause)
Doorman.
Our building has no doorman.
(pause)
Travelling salesman.
I don't want anything.
(pause)
Gumby.
Oh, it's Gumby!
(opens door)
RARRRRRRR!!!!!
It's a no brainer that voIP is where things are going to end up.
It's a no brainer? Really? Where will it end up then? My stock portfolio would really like to know.
There are the backbone providers who are also telcos, like AT&T and Sprint. Some of these companies are in cellular, like Sprint, others like AT&T have dumped their wireless holdings and only want to be in IP services. There are the Vonages of the world, companies who go and create pricing models based on tarrifs and pass domestic calls on to customers for free and only charge them for long distance. Others, like Skype, use P2P technologies and are free to any gateways. There is asterisk, an open source softswitch, with companies making FXO and FXS gateways that go into PCI slots, and trying to build directory services on top of that to build a phone system for the people by the people.
There are RBOCs like Qwest who had to allow long distance providers like AT&T to compete as CLECs in their markets in exchange for carrying long distance traffic with the FCC.
There are state sponsored telcos like China Telecom who build multiservice backbones and want to outlaw any VoIP traffic that is not their own.
No, I'm afraid where VoIP is headed is not a no brainer. In fact, you need a pretty good crystal ball to predict where this is headed. And just for fun, throw video into the mix.
Cisco's Mario Mazzola and others set the direction for acquisitions. Chambers spends his time worrying about how much float should be on the street, and how to get the Chinese to buy stuff from him rather than reverse engineer it and compete against him.
Having said that, Cisco is a culture that is seeming to atrophy. They are getting their ass handed to them in key markets like VOIP. Juniper keeps coming at them in the high end router space.
Chambers is credited for taking a listing ship from John Mortgridge and righting it, and getting into all these markets. Mostly through crazy amounts of acquisition. And then patching all the companies together into architectures and giving the combination of products snappy names (self-defending networks, SAFE architecture, etc.) and then trying to get people to buy it by putting a certification around it.
It works for awhile, until the valley realizes that the best engineers don't stay there, and there is no cohesion in the product offering anymore. This month's Network Computing on WLANs state it best - the Cisco Cat6 blade + the WLSE is just a made up strategy. It stopped working as wireless switches became the new thing, so Cisco went out and bought Airespace after having the sales droids badmouth WLAN switching. Whoops, strike that.
Same with the proclimations that Cisco isn't interested in low margin gear and the retail space. Whoops, strike that. Need leverage with those wily chip makers in Taiwan. Better buy Linksys. Start a name brand recognition strategy. What did we say about margin? Forget that, it's the new new new new economy. Get with it. Let's get Chambers to do a Business 9.0 article touting the new vision.
Point being, Cisco has it's weaknessness from not having a guy like Gates or Jobs. A guy who sets the vision and has ownership. I don't see management structure at Cisco that shows that. I see a bunch of barons each with a single agenda fo their product lines. So do most people on the Motley Fool investment boards. Nobody is going long on Cisco anymore, the 90's are over.
I think yours is the best post so far. The guy who played the original Baltar seemed to be riffing on Lost in Space's Doctor Smith. He was a sniveling traitor, only seeking power and advancement even though there would be nobody but big toasters to share it with. It wasn't even depicted as a revenge fantasy for him, he was just a weasel with as much depth as a Dukes of Hazzard villian.
This Baltar is shallow, vain, brilliant and contemptous, but when put in his shoes, you wonder if your own character would be great enough to not act as he does. I know plenty of opportunistic slime in my professional life that I know would do EXACTLY what Baltar is doing. Hot pussy for life, king status, a religious transformation figure, all play to the massive ego that drives a lot of people. Many people I know are sociopaths underneath, they don't care about humanity, they care about themselves and their family and pretty much see everyone else as expendable. Those people would gladly remake humanity in their own image, as this Baltar has been given a chance to. To become Adam, to undo all the problems of society and start over and "get it right".
I think it's a pretty telling indictment of the old show that the worst, most wooden and unbelieveable actor in the new series is Richard Hatch. I mean, he sucks. It's hard to see how such an uncharismatic guy could be a revolutionary leader. This guy makes Lenin look like Robin Williams.
Making Tigh a srunk and his wife a social ladder climbing slut was great tv. As for the Boomer on Caprica subplot, it's meant to show how cylon AI comes apart at the seams once ideas like love and humanity become too embedded into the programming. She's so messed up, she thinks she really is in love, and once she gets preggers, she snaps. And the BSG Boomer actually is a sleeper agent and resists her programming and unsuccessfully attempts suicide, and requires a reboot at the cyclon base ship to get her assassination program back on track.
The only weakness is Adama. Everyone seems to love Edward James Olmos whispered delivery. I hate it. I've met a few U.S. Naval commanders and one admiral. None of them acted like that. They had command presence. Olmos does not. Olmos seems weird, and his reactions to things seem sometimes random. At times he's always prudent and avoids risk, until mid season when he gambles everything to take on the Cylons in a sneak attack. He gets pissed at Starbuck for telling him that she passed his son through basic and got him killed because she loved him instead of comforting her. But then, he comes to her rescue. I guess he's supposed to be conflicted, but instead he just seems bipolar. He's happy when he shouldn't be, mad when he shouldn't be - compared to Lorne Greene who was, in the perspective of time passed, a really 3rd rate actor, he's okay. But he's not walking around with the kind of presence even Patrick Stewart had as Picard. It's hard to see how he would have made his rank.
I agree with your observation that tech is used to drive plot in sci-fci, when it should be incidental to it. Tech should never save your ass at the last minute because only when faced with death did you figure out how to reconfigure the gizmo to save the day. That's not real life, and it never has been. In real life, under extreme duress, people fall back on only those things that have been drilled in.
It's the irony administration. Executives of logging companies sit on forestry committees, executives of chemical companies work on clean water legislation, coal company lobbyists sit on clean air legislation committees, the EPA is gutted. Scientists that note the irrefutable proof that global warming is upon us are either silenced forcibly or fired.
I was saw a re-run of Goodfellas last night. I kept thinking, these guys - they have nothing on today's white collar criminals. Just dumb hoods compared to the well oiled corruption machines that pervade the Bush administration. There is no FBI to stop these guys.
If Ozzy Ozbourne was acquitted from being responsible for a teenager's suicide because he listened to Ozzy's "Suicide solution" again and again, why are we even debating this?
There is case law precedent for the idea that media, when properly rated (and GTA carrys the ESRB mature rating) cannot be held responsible for personal behavior.
Lots of people here have come up with contrary examples, none of them are even close to the X rated series "Faces of Death" series of films, which straddle the line between legit and snuff film as finely as can be done without penalty.
If legislators don't like games which allow urban and undereducated youth to act out aggressive fantasies that map to their real existence, they will find a way to label it indecent. Or attack Take Two using tangental methods such as sicking the IRS on them every year, and subjecting them to all kinds of financial audits until they bankrupt them. But, the forces of good can't win this way, through the court cases regarding individuals performing acts and blaming the influence of media. There is too much precedent on this issue.
A serious challenge to Passport was unveiled separately by RSA Security, the Bedford, Mass., company hosting the conference.
The company, which runs America Online's authentication system, announced it's making its SecurID program for consumers available in the third quarter.
A key feature is a device that saves users from having to create or remember secure passwords. The system uses a key fob that plugs into a computer USB port and generates a new password each time a user logs in. To authenticate themselves during an online session, users enter the serial number on the back of the device and the password or code that appears on a small LCD display.
RSA did not provide pricing information. But in demonstrating the system by logging in to a fictional online bank, the company's slides showed an annual fee of $9.95 a year.
The system is being tested now by E-Trade, Yahoo! and Sony Online Entertainment.
Does anybody know what this is referring to? Is there a new SecurID form factor and how is it being marketed?
Way to go, Duncan. You earned your Slashdot street cred for the year. Not only did you bust him, you used Linux AND Python to do it. Double word score. That's at least good for 200 meta moderation points. The only thing preventing the trifecta and instant Hall of fame induction is that you didn't PGP encode the email as it left the server.
People made money on what is clearly a pump and dump scam. Go to Yahoo finance, and put SCO in and look at the 2 year graph. People were fooled, there was no case, no evidence, no nothing. This was just Darl being instructed to attack through indirect VC funding, and my guess is he made out quite nicely. The next step is for the IRS and the SEC along with the Justice department to jointly open an investigation regarding this conspiracy. This is no different than organized crime running boiler room pump and dump, it just pretended to be legit.
Stratfor and others have examined the issue with some depth. Deterrence theory is very complicated subject, but it boils down to a non MAD situation. Would the Chinese risk a nuclear exchange with the U.S. when reports speculate that only a few PRC missiles could reach the U.S. today? The Chinese can't successfully test sub launched nukes, this is google-able. They only have land based ICBMs, and much of it is Soviet SS-18 era tech. The U.S. would likely detect such a launch, and slam the CnC of the PRC with everything it had.
In 10 years, that may no longer be the case, but (and I'm completely speculating) the Chinese may not think they can win a nuclear exchange.
There's a bit of a false dichotomy at work here. The issue as it is presented is not the same at all. And the heart of the problem is bitTorrent itself. Lets use an older P2P protocol like GnuTella or something where you get a copy of Alias but you don't share it back. And you can somehow prove this.
You haven't committed copyright infringement. In the P2P case, you have. As the law sees it, even though in reality you only shared a few bytes of each episode's MPEG.
So, the analogy breaks down. It would be as if when stealing the DVDs from the government owned video shoppe, you somehow passed out copies to friends outside who also wanted to see it as an artifact of the act of stealing. But, somehow, you only gave them a few minutes of the show on the DVD copy. Then, in both cases, you'd be committing copyright infringement + theft and we could compare the crimes correctly.
This seems fairly obvious. IANAL and all that, but I'd have to say this article in attempting to show some sort of sentencing injustice in the system just reveals the ignorance of the author.
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed that when setting up a Cisco Call Manager with a PRI, that I could signal out on the SS7 D-channel pretty much any CLID information I wanted. And the phone switch would accept it.
Phone switch software has to trust certain types of trunk lines. This type of scam was available to PBXs, but the phone companies could trace it to the circuit that introduced the spoof, because they had records of the actual dialed number.
Same thing needs to happen with Vonage and others. They need to install a digital certificate on the box they send you and the call setup needs to have something like a X.509 signature. The soft switch run by the Vonage like company maps where the real box came from, doesn't accept any signatures it doesn't know, and records the originating src-ip address. Sudden and often changes in src-ip address means the customer gets a service message in their account asking them to verify. Just like credit card fraud protection.
And most importantly, the Vonages of the world are held responsible legally for it through legislation.
That's a fucking typical Slashdot thing to say. Imagine if it were a retired person on a fixed income. Somebody who is easily targeted. I'm sure your sorry punk ass would be the first to go up to them and say "0wn3d".
How you got modded up, I'll never understand.
...that Microsoft has essentially blown off the Liberty Alliance. And that there is no sign that if they tie the authentication scheme into AD, that they intend to use SAML for SSO.
Windows Web SSO uses Kerberos under the covers now, so when you pass NTLM authentication to one IIS server, and that IIS server is part of a Windows domain, it can pass your authentication to AD, which is acting as the KDC, and you get a TGT. Wow, that's a lot of acronyms.
But, what MS should be doing, is moving away from Kerberos and towards SAML. And by blowing off the Liberty Alliance, they are saying, hey we may develop standards for authenticating a user via our new fingerprint reader keyboard to AD, but we'll publish how that protocol works, and it probably won't be SAML based, so go fuck yourself.
It's brash and really not in keeping with the way Microsoft has been handling authentication. They've been bullys in many areas, but when it came to authentication, they were on standards. Microsoft's IAS is a fine RADIUS server, supports many EAP types, and works well.
Charter cable, which competes region by region against Comcast in certain markets, made a deal with Motorola and created a Tivo knockoff, called Moxi. It's quite a bit like Tivo, even improving some things with the interface IMO, like making the channel guide vertical instead of horizontal. (It's hard to describe exactly, think of the Windows Explorer interface with the start button instead of the program guide way that Tivo does it).
I saw the box and the way Charter is competing hard against Comcast in rural areas of the midwest, and I thought that maybe Tivo's days were numbered. Moxi is such a close approximation of the function, that it's indistinguishable from Tivo. The cable companies are going out and getting their own gear, on their own terms. the box has an ethernet jack and a way to offload the MPEGs you record. I no longer see what makes TiVo special anymore, nor do I know how they can really compete or distinguish their service anymore. We've reached the commodity phase of the DVR lifecycle.
It's a bitch. Is this poetic or ironic justice?
Cisco Systems just after 2000 was at an all time high, trading at something like $85/share. That put their market cap the same as General Electric. It made them the 2nd most valuable company in the WORLD.
Now, I know they make routers and switches and VPN and optical and all that stuff. But Microsoft employs more people (and a LOT more U.S. citizens, btw) and wasn't even CLOSE. It was some kind of hey the Y2k thing didn't happen irrational exhuberence. How could GE, who had contracts everywhere with the military to make F-16 engines, and light bulbs and washing machines and just about fucking everything that people woould always need be worth as much as an internet company? Come on. John Chambers may golf with Andy Grove and talk to Jack Welsh on the phone, but he's more Steve Jobs than Steve Forbes.
JDS uniphase went from $25 a share to $150 in the span of a couple years and had the highest P/E of any company ever. This was like the spring of 2000.
I didn't get into the market, despite alot of other people jumping in. It seemed insane. The spring of 2000 was like the summer of '69. instead of free love, it was free money.
I'm gonna kill your motherfuckin pasty white ass! Lightin bolt sendin motherfucker. Yo' bitch, you ever think of gettin new dentures? {ZZZZZZZap} God DAMN that hurt! Shit, your ass is mine now. With my blue Yoda saber, when you absolutely postively have to kill every last Sith motherfucker in the room...
We're always looking for the shortcut, believing fully that it exists. And sometimes, even though it's often an asset in business, we can be a bit inhuman in our logic, dispassionately accepting losses, risks, and sacrifices when it furthers our goals.
I think this is why there is no anti-war movement on U.S. college campuses. That may change if there is a draft, but many of them think they were too smart to be a grunt, and feel superior to those that are killed, and blithley accept the Bush mantra that death is part of winning the war.
Why is NASA federally funded then?
Do you have more concrete examples of how unethical and corrupt things are other than having the state systems be mostly on Microsoft?
I did. Cancelled my WoW account. I set firm rules at my house about it. Casual play, maybe 4 hours on Friday night, that was it. No more than you would pull out a Monopoly game and play that. Didn't happen. We have three computers, three people, and the other two people started logging in on weeknights. Just gotta go to auction, sell a few things. Oh wait, let me get the key from the guy to unlock the box. Oh wait, lemme just kill 5 foozles and get some skins.
Pow. I pulled the plug. I cancelled my account, and the other two dropped off because I wasn't there to enable the addiction.
Slashdot once had a study on this, it's a kind of ladder system that feeds the need to press the button. What is it called? Anyhow, WoW refined the drug. Now, you get your button pushed more often. It's more seamless. You don't grind, you are always questing. Smart, smart. The combat system hardly makes it a fighting game, but there IS tactical combat techniques and team play is needed. feeds the addiction. Makes you group with people who share the addiction. Pretty soon, it's consuming you.
I nuked it. I went back to only race sims. It's a hobby. I race a few laps when I want to practice and get faster, and I participate in a league that runs a 2 hour race twice a month. Easy.
I'm lucky. I'm in my 30s, and see this stuff for what it is. Had I gotten on WoW in my teens, it would have fucked my career up good.
Except that he's not the primary author of Mosaic. He simply took the code when they were working on it, and forked the codebase and ran off to start Netscape with it. Many of the original authors of Mosaic know that Marc was not a talented programmer, just an opportunist looking for a way to cash in on other people's work.
I would say CCIE for networking, SANS GIAC for security, CISSP for security management.
These are held in the same esteem in the marketplace as graduate degrees or 2nd bachelor's.
Windows users are vulnerable to Land Sharks.
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Pizza man.
I didn't order a pizza.
(pause)
Mailman.
Today is Sunday, there is no mail.
(pause)
Doorman.
Our building has no doorman.
(pause)
Travelling salesman.
I don't want anything.
(pause)
Gumby.
Oh, it's Gumby!
(opens door)
RARRRRRRR!!!!!
It's a no brainer that voIP is where things are going to end up.
It's a no brainer? Really? Where will it end up then? My stock portfolio would really like to know.
There are the backbone providers who are also telcos, like AT&T and Sprint. Some of these companies are in cellular, like Sprint, others like AT&T have dumped their wireless holdings and only want to be in IP services. There are the Vonages of the world, companies who go and create pricing models based on tarrifs and pass domestic calls on to customers for free and only charge them for long distance. Others, like Skype, use P2P technologies and are free to any gateways. There is asterisk, an open source softswitch, with companies making FXO and FXS gateways that go into PCI slots, and trying to build directory services on top of that to build a phone system for the people by the people.
There are RBOCs like Qwest who had to allow long distance providers like AT&T to compete as CLECs in their markets in exchange for carrying long distance traffic with the FCC.
There are state sponsored telcos like China Telecom who build multiservice backbones and want to outlaw any VoIP traffic that is not their own.
No, I'm afraid where VoIP is headed is not a no brainer. In fact, you need a pretty good crystal ball to predict where this is headed. And just for fun, throw video into the mix.
Cisco's Mario Mazzola and others set the direction for acquisitions. Chambers spends his time worrying about how much float should be on the street, and how to get the Chinese to buy stuff from him rather than reverse engineer it and compete against him.
Having said that, Cisco is a culture that is seeming to atrophy. They are getting their ass handed to them in key markets like VOIP. Juniper keeps coming at them in the high end router space.
Chambers is credited for taking a listing ship from John Mortgridge and righting it, and getting into all these markets. Mostly through crazy amounts of acquisition. And then patching all the companies together into architectures and giving the combination of products snappy names (self-defending networks, SAFE architecture, etc.) and then trying to get people to buy it by putting a certification around it.
It works for awhile, until the valley realizes that the best engineers don't stay there, and there is no cohesion in the product offering anymore. This month's Network Computing on WLANs state it best - the Cisco Cat6 blade + the WLSE is just a made up strategy. It stopped working as wireless switches became the new thing, so Cisco went out and bought Airespace after having the sales droids badmouth WLAN switching. Whoops, strike that.
Same with the proclimations that Cisco isn't interested in low margin gear and the retail space. Whoops, strike that. Need leverage with those wily chip makers in Taiwan. Better buy Linksys. Start a name brand recognition strategy. What did we say about margin? Forget that, it's the new new new new economy. Get with it. Let's get Chambers to do a Business 9.0 article touting the new vision.
Point being, Cisco has it's weaknessness from not having a guy like Gates or Jobs. A guy who sets the vision and has ownership. I don't see management structure at Cisco that shows that. I see a bunch of barons each with a single agenda fo their product lines. So do most people on the Motley Fool investment boards. Nobody is going long on Cisco anymore, the 90's are over.
You could take a dump on them. I'm sure that would send a message too.
I think yours is the best post so far. The guy who played the original Baltar seemed to be riffing on Lost in Space's Doctor Smith. He was a sniveling traitor, only seeking power and advancement even though there would be nobody but big toasters to share it with. It wasn't even depicted as a revenge fantasy for him, he was just a weasel with as much depth as a Dukes of Hazzard villian.
This Baltar is shallow, vain, brilliant and contemptous, but when put in his shoes, you wonder if your own character would be great enough to not act as he does. I know plenty of opportunistic slime in my professional life that I know would do EXACTLY what Baltar is doing. Hot pussy for life, king status, a religious transformation figure, all play to the massive ego that drives a lot of people. Many people I know are sociopaths underneath, they don't care about humanity, they care about themselves and their family and pretty much see everyone else as expendable. Those people would gladly remake humanity in their own image, as this Baltar has been given a chance to. To become Adam, to undo all the problems of society and start over and "get it right".
I think it's a pretty telling indictment of the old show that the worst, most wooden and unbelieveable actor in the new series is Richard Hatch. I mean, he sucks. It's hard to see how such an uncharismatic guy could be a revolutionary leader. This guy makes Lenin look like Robin Williams.
Making Tigh a srunk and his wife a social ladder climbing slut was great tv. As for the Boomer on Caprica subplot, it's meant to show how cylon AI comes apart at the seams once ideas like love and humanity become too embedded into the programming. She's so messed up, she thinks she really is in love, and once she gets preggers, she snaps. And the BSG Boomer actually is a sleeper agent and resists her programming and unsuccessfully attempts suicide, and requires a reboot at the cyclon base ship to get her assassination program back on track.
The only weakness is Adama. Everyone seems to love Edward James Olmos whispered delivery. I hate it. I've met a few U.S. Naval commanders and one admiral. None of them acted like that. They had command presence. Olmos does not. Olmos seems weird, and his reactions to things seem sometimes random. At times he's always prudent and avoids risk, until mid season when he gambles everything to take on the Cylons in a sneak attack. He gets pissed at Starbuck for telling him that she passed his son through basic and got him killed because she loved him instead of comforting her. But then, he comes to her rescue. I guess he's supposed to be conflicted, but instead he just seems bipolar. He's happy when he shouldn't be, mad when he shouldn't be - compared to Lorne Greene who was, in the perspective of time passed, a really 3rd rate actor, he's okay. But he's not walking around with the kind of presence even Patrick Stewart had as Picard. It's hard to see how he would have made his rank.
I agree with your observation that tech is used to drive plot in sci-fci, when it should be incidental to it. Tech should never save your ass at the last minute because only when faced with death did you figure out how to reconfigure the gizmo to save the day. That's not real life, and it never has been. In real life, under extreme duress, people fall back on only those things that have been drilled in.
It's the irony administration. Executives of logging companies sit on forestry committees, executives of chemical companies work on clean water legislation, coal company lobbyists sit on clean air legislation committees, the EPA is gutted. Scientists that note the irrefutable proof that global warming is upon us are either silenced forcibly or fired.
I was saw a re-run of Goodfellas last night. I kept thinking, these guys - they have nothing on today's white collar criminals. Just dumb hoods compared to the well oiled corruption machines that pervade the Bush administration. There is no FBI to stop these guys.
If Ozzy Ozbourne was acquitted from being responsible for a teenager's suicide because he listened to Ozzy's "Suicide solution" again and again, why are we even debating this?
There is case law precedent for the idea that media, when properly rated (and GTA carrys the ESRB mature rating) cannot be held responsible for personal behavior.
Lots of people here have come up with contrary examples, none of them are even close to the X rated series "Faces of Death" series of films, which straddle the line between legit and snuff film as finely as can be done without penalty.
If legislators don't like games which allow urban and undereducated youth to act out aggressive fantasies that map to their real existence, they will find a way to label it indecent. Or attack Take Two using tangental methods such as sicking the IRS on them every year, and subjecting them to all kinds of financial audits until they bankrupt them. But, the forces of good can't win this way, through the court cases regarding individuals performing acts and blaming the influence of media. There is too much precedent on this issue.
In the article, the following passage appeared:
A serious challenge to Passport was unveiled separately by RSA Security, the Bedford, Mass., company hosting the conference.
The company, which runs America Online's authentication system, announced it's making its SecurID program for consumers available in the third quarter.
A key feature is a device that saves users from having to create or remember secure passwords. The system uses a key fob that plugs into a computer USB port and generates a new password each time a user logs in. To authenticate themselves during an online session, users enter the serial number on the back of the device and the password or code that appears on a small LCD display.
RSA did not provide pricing information. But in demonstrating the system by logging in to a fictional online bank, the company's slides showed an annual fee of $9.95 a year.
The system is being tested now by E-Trade, Yahoo! and Sony Online Entertainment.
Does anybody know what this is referring to? Is there a new SecurID form factor and how is it being marketed?
Way to go, Duncan. You earned your Slashdot street cred for the year. Not only did you bust him, you used Linux AND Python to do it. Double word score. That's at least good for 200 meta moderation points. The only thing preventing the trifecta and instant Hall of fame induction is that you didn't PGP encode the email as it left the server.
People made money on what is clearly a pump and dump scam. Go to Yahoo finance, and put SCO in and look at the 2 year graph. People were fooled, there was no case, no evidence, no nothing. This was just Darl being instructed to attack through indirect VC funding, and my guess is he made out quite nicely. The next step is for the IRS and the SEC along with the Justice department to jointly open an investigation regarding this conspiracy. This is no different than organized crime running boiler room pump and dump, it just pretended to be legit.
Stratfor and others have examined the issue with some depth. Deterrence theory is very complicated subject, but it boils down to a non MAD situation. Would the Chinese risk a nuclear exchange with the U.S. when reports speculate that only a few PRC missiles could reach the U.S. today? The Chinese can't successfully test sub launched nukes, this is google-able. They only have land based ICBMs, and much of it is Soviet SS-18 era tech. The U.S. would likely detect such a launch, and slam the CnC of the PRC with everything it had.
In 10 years, that may no longer be the case, but (and I'm completely speculating) the Chinese may not think they can win a nuclear exchange.
There's a bit of a false dichotomy at work here. The issue as it is presented is not the same at all. And the heart of the problem is bitTorrent itself. Lets use an older P2P protocol like GnuTella or something where you get a copy of Alias but you don't share it back. And you can somehow prove this.
You haven't committed copyright infringement. In the P2P case, you have. As the law sees it, even though in reality you only shared a few bytes of each episode's MPEG.
So, the analogy breaks down. It would be as if when stealing the DVDs from the government owned video shoppe, you somehow passed out copies to friends outside who also wanted to see it as an artifact of the act of stealing. But, somehow, you only gave them a few minutes of the show on the DVD copy. Then, in both cases, you'd be committing copyright infringement + theft and we could compare the crimes correctly.
This seems fairly obvious. IANAL and all that, but I'd have to say this article in attempting to show some sort of sentencing injustice in the system just reveals the ignorance of the author.