It is your right to disagree. Pretty good is a long way from perfect. And very few things achive perfection. However the likely hood of some form of life from earth surviving the trip on one of the many probes we have sent is more than you would like to believe. While the process of sterilization we used is pretty good there is no way anyone could say with 100% assurance that there was not contamination. People are involved with that process and any process where people are involved is subject to failure. With as many probes as we have sent at least one of them most likely carried some level of contanmination.
And one thing to remember, life finds a way. And I am sure of the several probes that we have crashed on the surface that some of those hitchhikers could have made it under the surface.
How about we actually get there and figure out what is there first. We could doom any colonization effort by declaring areas off limits that have resources we will need or want. Can see it now, from here we say leave these areas alone and unexplored. We find out after the colony dies that those areas contain most of the water and other resources needed by a colony. But no, we can't touch them because they are declared national parks.
Face it people, if there was not life on Mars before there is a very high probability that there is life there now. As careful as we try to be keeping the various probes clean before launching them there will be a varity of microbes, bacteria, and viruses that hitched a ride on the probes and probably survived both the trip and reentry. So colonization has begun on the microbial level at least.
Lets get there first and find out what is really there then we can set aside areas as national parks.
OK, how many people went to the link and filled it out? How much you want to bet that that link actually is tied to a telemarketer and you have now established a business relationship with them. They now have you name and information and can proceed to make calls at all hours of the day and night.
Having been on the do not call list since the begnining I can say that it has worked very well. Where I used to get a couple of calls a day I have recevied only a hand full of calls over the last year. For those that I could get a company name or phone number I have reported them. I received a call yesterday that seems to be the new method of annoying people. The phone number is blocked and it is a recording, this case offering free travel, after giving the pitch with no mention of a company name they want you to leave your name and phone number so they can get back to you. Kind of like tele-spam (registered trademark pending on the term tele-spam). Well hopefully I cost them some time since I tried my best to fill up as much tape/disk as possible telling them just what I thought about them calling someone on the do not call list. Hopefully it consumed a fair amount of time as they had other people listen to the message I left. Slow them down from processing any morons that actually left their information.
Check out the Solaris 10 implementation of zones. So far it appears they have gone a few steps beyond normal chroot or jail type implementations. It does not appear to be easily broken by the technique you mentioned.
Solaris 10 has a very neat feature that lets you configure zones on a system. Each zone can run a specific service or applications and communicate via the network using its own designated IP address. In side the zone there is no way to break out into the rest of the system. Even with root access in that zone.
You would still want to take additional precautions if you let outsiders on your systems even in a zone. Monitor what is done and record all changes.
While this is an appealing idea, swamping the spammers web site to increase their bandwidth costs is not going to really work. Like another poster indicated they would need to enter random data into the order pages to make it difficult to extract legit orders. Remember most spammers are probably buying their bandwidth at fixed cost rates. So while this may use a lot of their bandwidth it is not going to prevent legit orders getting through.
What should really be done to curb spammers is to have all major ISPs implement the following:
1. block SMTP for all users and force them to route thier email through the ISPs email servers. Permit users to request port 25 be opened up. This would block all the spam generated by zombie machines (probably greater than 90% of spam comes from such machines.)
2. Implement greylisting on the ISPs email servers. This blocks better than 90% of spam being sent today since it mostly comes from zombie machines.
3. Utilize the block lists that contain the web sites the spam sends people to to block those IP addresses at the main routers on the back bone.
By implementing these items across all major ISPs, virtually none of the spammers messages would get through to the dupes that actually buy the crap. If you can dry up the responses to spam then the business model should fall apart and die. At least one can hope.
Many people apparently don't really understand that this new screensaver is not going to punish the zombie machines owners by using up their bandwidth. It is aimed at costing the owners of the web sites that collect the orders. Which kind of the right idea. But I figure most of those sites are not using metered service but have ordered at minimum full T1's and probably have more than that dedicated. So trying to run up their bandwidth costs is probably not going to impact them that much.
Impementing the three items outlined above is guaranteed to have a major impact on spam.
Wasn't there another slashdot story about a web site recycling all those dot com business plans?
This sounds like they are going to take all the ideas from the failed dot coms and set them up in a museum. I wonder if they can still get the smoke and mirror presentations to still work?
Velcro sheep? Is that so the hillbillies don't have to face the sheep over a cliff while they take care of business to get them to push backward?
The fourth item about producing results quickly is bogus. If a system produced accurate verifiable and auditable results it would not matter if it took a couple of weeks to collect all the results.
The expectation that the electorate would have immediate gratification the night of the election is silly and irrelavent.
The other factors are however important and need to be part of any system. The whole electronic voting machine kick is silly as well as the statitical analyisis reports indicating that something is wrong with optical readers. The conspiracy theorists would have you think that thousands of people can keep a secret (we rigged the election, don't tell anyone) when it is hard for two people to keep a secret of relative insignificance.
In order to affect an election the most logical place to modify the talley is at the central collection point. Fewer people you have to kill after the fact or even involve in the first place. However any system that does not have a dozen or more people manually adding the results as well as reviewing the output from the computer does not meet the three valid requirements given in the article.
Why after all these years do people still have the view that once the data has gone into the computer that it some how magically is transformed from garbage to valid data? I still wonder if Microsoft ever fixed that rounding error in the windows calculator.
Depending on which sound bite you happened to hear they said what they though would get them the votes of that particular group. In a large mixed crowd they would say something like they personally believed this way but would not infringe on others their current rights to do whatever. Both candidates did this and simply because they want votes not because they really care about the particular issue.
Personally I think it is silly to vote for someone based on a single issue like those. Very short sighted and in the long run not really that important.
Did you miss the ads in the last election? That is all they did. If you look at the speaches each give to the same groups you would find they do say the same thing the other guy says. Maybe in slightly different wording but the same never the less. They both say they won't touch social security to the AARP crowd. They tell the NRA types that guns are good (both showed up on TV doing the hunting thing). They both say they want to protect the environment (even if they don't really vote that way). They both say they will be tough on terrorists (even if some of them vote against inteligence and miltary spending bills). They both say about the same thing about abortion more of less (afraid they will alienate one group or the other).
In effect the current two parties we have to choose from are identical. The only real difference is who gets OUR money once they take it away from us in taxes. There won't be really major changes in the system simply because a different party controls the white house. There will be a few people that get more of our money than the ones that did the last time around. So in many ways it is amazing that as many people vote as there is. And look at this last election, there were a couple of states that had not even completed their counts when the election was declared over. So in effect a few entire states votes did not even count. This time around Ohio was really the only state's votes that really mattered. The time before it came down to what Florida voted. The rest of the country did not really matter in either case.
Personally I think the whole tax situation is way out of hand. Things like AMT just make it worse. I really believe we should move to a pure flat 10% tax. No exceptions no deductions. Yes, it would simplify things such that a lot of tax lawyers and CPA's would be thrown out of work. But it would be fairer that what is in place now.
But the likely hood of anything like this getting passed is infintesimal at best. To many special interest groups lobbying to protect their little deduction. Someone would have to buy a lot of congress critters to get a flat tax passed.
What is amazing is that if there was such a flat tax there would actually be more insentive to make more money there by increasing the taxable income to the government. As it is now once a person hits a threshold of a few hundred thousand they start spending money on CPAs and lawyers to find ways to hide their money from the government so they don't pay so much in taxes.
I think this is partially why the Democrats have slowly been loosing control. They typically seem to like the idea of tax everyone since they seem to think they know better how to spend your money than you do. This idea that it is somehow more fair to tax people that make more money is silly. They should all be taxed at the same rate. That is fair.
Is it cynical or just having lived long enough to learn how things really work?
When you live through a few more elections and watch the way things play out you will realize that virtually every politician out there will say what ever they have to say to get a vote. The whole election process has been reduced to producing a few select sound bites and photo ops and bombarding the electorate with negative ads saying just how bad the other guy would be if you voted for him.
I have often wondered if the same thing was done back when Lincoln was elected or if this is something that has occured in the last 50 years.
Either way the only real way you can get your views acted on by the government is either to adopt the views pushed on you by one of the two political parties or to buy a congress critter of your very own.
I suspect that you can currently buy a Democrat at all time low rates, at least for the next couple of years. And it all comes down to money no matter what they say. If you can provide a number large enough you can get politicians to do what ever you want. If they say no to something that just means that someone else is paying them more than you offered.
Open source software does not generate millions of dollars that can be funneled into a politicians pockets. As such it will never be an political issue, unless it threatens some proprietary software vendors enough. Then the politicians will pass laws to regulate open source software which will in effect make it illegal to write and dissiminate free software.
Unless you are a special interest with lots of money to buy a politician your pet issue will not have a voice in government circles. That is the way the system works.
If you want to force politicians to bring these issues to the forefront you will need to pass the hat and collect a sizeable wad of cash which may eventually attract a politician that you can sway to push your issue.
So pass the hat and start looking for a congress critter of your very own.
Thank you. Yes that is yet another way for companies to divide customers and extract more from those deemed less worthy. Systems like the ones in the article have already been implemented to varying degrees by many companies. The real danger lies in all of these companies combining their databases so that if you have a problem with one vendor you may be denied support by another vendor based on information in such a database. When that happens there will be a clear cut disadvantaged class which will have virtually no way to correct the problem. This could eventually be extended to family members as well so entire family could be disenfranchised. Imagine the worst case scenerio where there is a thriving black market for large portions of the population who are forced to pay a premium for the basics simply because they or someone in their family have been black listed by vendors.
Such a system if implemented widely so such databases are shared amongst all retailers could lead to creating a class of citizens that are denied purchase priveleges almost everywhere. This would lead to special stores for banned customers. Kind of like those check cashing stores that prey on people that for various reasons make use of their services and very high interest rates.
Of course such a system should only affect a very small minority of customers. But if the retailers find it profitable to force people into to the stores chargin above average rates then the system will be used to do just that. Eventually only a minority of people will be able to purchase items at the good customer price. Or the system will be used to provide adaptive pricing depending on the customers rating. Seems that I read something like this for certain web sites. Go to check the price on a product and depending on your particular user ID rating you might get a price higher or lower than the next person. Kind of the ultimate "all the market will bear" principle.
And for those that have commented that people should boycott the stores using such systems, it won't work. Never has never will. There are so many customers out there today that companies can and do chose to alienate entire groups since they can make up the difference from other groups. A number of years ago there was an article in Forbes (I believe) that stated many companies had figured out it was more costly to provide good customer service than to provide poor or bad customer service. The costs of keeping a few customers happy was not worth the time and effort required. Better to lose them as customers and move on to the next one that to make things right. And customer service orginizations have been doing similar things for awhile now. Credit card customers get sorted when they enter their credit card numbers on the phone. If you are considered a good customer they route you ahead of other callers to a real person. Those that are less desirable get put on hold for extended wait times. This has been done for a number of years.
Think about what the credit score business has done to some people. A few years ago when they started providing easier access to peoples credit scores a lot of people found they were locked out of low interest loans. They even use the credit scores in back ground checks now. Soon such a global CRM system will stratify the people of the world even more than they are now.
The best thing you can do in addition to using WEP, changing keys, and locking down the MAC addresses allowed, is to use ssh or VPN software to encrypt your connections. If someone spends enough time to crack WEP and spoof a MAC address then the most they can get is access through your access point. They would have to break ssh or VPN to look at your data. Of course you would need to have tools in place to identify a man in the middle attack to prevent them from spoofing your connections.
Of course if someone spends that much effort just to break into your wireless network you either have something really important or they are have way to much time on their hands. (and I doubt if anyone has anything that important on their network....)
Ah! They finally applied the technology for those black boxes they install in airplanes to something a little closer to every one. Very cool. Of course I never understood why they don't just build the airplane out of the stuff they build those black boxes out off. Those always survive the crashes.:) (and for any that don't get it that was a joke)
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. This idea of predicting the election is silly. About like watching those signs at the roulette table listing the past numbers and seeing 5 reds come up in a row. You just know that the next number to come up has to be black. No such thing. The last roll has nothing to do with the current roll.
And if you want put $50.00 on number 35 for me. It is a sure winner.:)
I know a few people that feel that this election may result in wide spread violence in the streets. In effect a civil war. So far there has been nothing very civil about this election. Just look at the replys to this item. People are split with few people undecided.
Have to say the article is not a bad troll just before the election. The editors might want to watch that in the next couple of days. I am sure there will be more troll arcticles like this. Would be nice to be able to moderate the main article instead of just the replys.
This is going to be great. You gear up for a business trip, strapping on all you gear running wires all over your body. Get to the air port and you have to strip down to almost nothing to get through security or spend time with the TSA waving wands up and down your body.
So you get through security (maybe without the free body cavity search, maybe not) and you get to the plane and get a seat. Your sitting there listening to music and pull out a keyboard to use with the screen built into your glasses and the passenger notices all these wires criss crossing your body. As the flight gets ready to take off you start turning all your electronics off, cell phone, laptop, ipod, SAT phone, GPS, PDA. The eyes of the passenger next to you go wide with fear thinking you are preparing to set off a bomb. The suspicious passenger rings the flight attendant worried you have a bomb hidden on your person (just what are all those bulges and wires?). The plane taxies back to the gate and you are taken off for further questioning. And a guarantted body cavity search this time even if you got one before.
Why does everyone keep saying all those dotcoms failed? The basic business plan was to convince a venture capital group to turn over money. The "founders" of the dotcom then used the money to play around for a year or two doing all kinds of fun things and buying expensive toys and throwing parties. Then they had one hell of a garage sell as they unloaded all that expensive equipment.
Saw this first hand at a storage service provider called Sanrise. Burned through something like 200 Million dollars in just a couple of years. Left more than a dozen Hitachi 9900 raid arrays and huge tape libraries all over the country.
Heck of a party while it lasted. And for the CEO and a few of the founders I am sure they extracted a very nice sum prior to the final implosion.
So all in all I would have to say that most of the business plans the dotcoms used worked just exactly the way they were suppose to. They extracted a huge amount of money from venture capital groups. The fact that most of them had silly ideas just makes the venture capital groups look very silly.
The third Death Star has finally been found. All these years it has been in a parking orbit in an out of the way solar system. Over time it picked up an atmosphere which is obscuring the laser turrets and docking ports.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that today's pennies are mostly zinc?
It is your right to disagree. Pretty good is a long way from perfect. And very few things achive perfection. However the likely hood of some form of life from earth surviving the trip on one of the many probes we have sent is more than you would like to believe. While the process of sterilization we used is pretty good there is no way anyone could say with 100% assurance that there was not contamination. People are involved with that process and any process where people are involved is subject to failure. With as many probes as we have sent at least one of them most likely carried some level of contanmination.
And one thing to remember, life finds a way. And I am sure of the several probes that we have crashed on the surface that some of those hitchhikers could have made it under the surface.
I guess my distrust of stuff posted on the Internet may be a tad to high. But then again it has protected me for many many years. :)
What do you think caused that fighter jet to straff that school last month?
How about we actually get there and figure out what is there first. We could doom any colonization effort by declaring areas off limits that have resources we will need or want. Can see it now, from here we say leave these areas alone and unexplored. We find out after the colony dies that those areas contain most of the water and other resources needed by a colony. But no, we can't touch them because they are declared national parks.
Face it people, if there was not life on Mars before there is a very high probability that there is life there now. As careful as we try to be keeping the various probes clean before launching them there will be a varity of microbes, bacteria, and viruses that hitched a ride on the probes and probably survived both the trip and reentry. So colonization has begun on the microbial level at least.
Lets get there first and find out what is really there then we can set aside areas as national parks.
OK, how many people went to the link and filled it out? How much you want to bet that that link actually is tied to a telemarketer and you have now established a business relationship with them. They now have you name and information and can proceed to make calls at all hours of the day and night.
Having been on the do not call list since the begnining I can say that it has worked very well. Where I used to get a couple of calls a day I have recevied only a hand full of calls over the last year. For those that I could get a company name or phone number I have reported them. I received a call yesterday that seems to be the new method of annoying people. The phone number is blocked and it is a recording, this case offering free travel, after giving the pitch with no mention of a company name they want you to leave your name and phone number so they can get back to you. Kind of like tele-spam (registered trademark pending on the term tele-spam). Well hopefully I cost them some time since I tried my best to fill up as much tape/disk as possible telling them just what I thought about them calling someone on the do not call list. Hopefully it consumed a fair amount of time as they had other people listen to the message I left. Slow them down from processing any morons that actually left their information.
Check out the Solaris 10 implementation of zones. So far it appears they have gone a few steps beyond normal chroot or jail type implementations. It does not appear to be easily broken by the technique you mentioned.
Solaris 10 has a very neat feature that lets you configure zones on a system. Each zone can run a specific service or applications and communicate via the network using its own designated IP address. In side the zone there is no way to break out into the rest of the system. Even with root access in that zone.
You would still want to take additional precautions if you let outsiders on your systems even in a zone. Monitor what is done and record all changes.
While this is an appealing idea, swamping the spammers web site to increase their bandwidth costs is not going to really work. Like another poster indicated they would need to enter random data into the order pages to make it difficult to extract legit orders. Remember most spammers are probably buying their bandwidth at fixed cost rates. So while this may use a lot of their bandwidth it is not going to prevent legit orders getting through.
What should really be done to curb spammers is to have all major ISPs implement the following:
1. block SMTP for all users and force them to route thier email through the ISPs email servers. Permit users to request port 25 be opened up. This would block all the spam generated by zombie machines (probably greater than 90% of spam comes from such machines.)
2. Implement greylisting on the ISPs email servers. This blocks better than 90% of spam being sent today since it mostly comes from zombie machines.
3. Utilize the block lists that contain the web sites the spam sends people to to block those IP addresses at the main routers on the back bone.
By implementing these items across all major ISPs, virtually none of the spammers messages would get through to the dupes that actually buy the crap. If you can dry up the responses to spam then the business model should fall apart and die. At least one can hope.
Many people apparently don't really understand that this new screensaver is not going to punish the zombie machines owners by using up their bandwidth. It is aimed at costing the owners of the web sites that collect the orders. Which kind of the right idea. But I figure most of those sites are not using metered service but have ordered at minimum full T1's and probably have more than that dedicated. So trying to run up their bandwidth costs is probably not going to impact them that much.
Impementing the three items outlined above is guaranteed to have a major impact on spam.
Wasn't there another slashdot story about a web site recycling all those dot com business plans?
This sounds like they are going to take all the ideas from the failed dot coms and set them up in a museum. I wonder if they can still get the smoke and mirror presentations to still work?
Velcro sheep? Is that so the hillbillies don't have to face the sheep over a cliff while they take care of business to get them to push backward?
The fourth item about producing results quickly is bogus. If a system produced accurate verifiable and auditable results it would not matter if it took a couple of weeks to collect all the results.
The expectation that the electorate would have immediate gratification the night of the election is silly and irrelavent.
The other factors are however important and need to be part of any system. The whole electronic voting machine kick is silly as well as the statitical analyisis reports indicating that something is wrong with optical readers. The conspiracy theorists would have you think that thousands of people can keep a secret (we rigged the election, don't tell anyone) when it is hard for two people to keep a secret of relative insignificance.
In order to affect an election the most logical place to modify the talley is at the central collection point. Fewer people you have to kill after the fact or even involve in the first place. However any system that does not have a dozen or more people manually adding the results as well as reviewing the output from the computer does not meet the three valid requirements given in the article.
Why after all these years do people still have the view that once the data has gone into the computer that it some how magically is transformed from garbage to valid data? I still wonder if Microsoft ever fixed that rounding error in the windows calculator.
Depending on which sound bite you happened to hear they said what they though would get them the votes of that particular group. In a large mixed crowd they would say something like they personally believed this way but would not infringe on others their current rights to do whatever. Both candidates did this and simply because they want votes not because they really care about the particular issue.
Personally I think it is silly to vote for someone based on a single issue like those. Very short sighted and in the long run not really that important.
Did you miss the ads in the last election? That is all they did. If you look at the speaches each give to the same groups you would find they do say the same thing the other guy says. Maybe in slightly different wording but the same never the less. They both say they won't touch social security to the AARP crowd. They tell the NRA types that guns are good (both showed up on TV doing the hunting thing). They both say they want to protect the environment (even if they don't really vote that way). They both say they will be tough on terrorists (even if some of them vote against inteligence and miltary spending bills). They both say about the same thing about abortion more of less (afraid they will alienate one group or the other).
In effect the current two parties we have to choose from are identical. The only real difference is who gets OUR money once they take it away from us in taxes. There won't be really major changes in the system simply because a different party controls the white house. There will be a few people that get more of our money than the ones that did the last time around. So in many ways it is amazing that as many people vote as there is. And look at this last election, there were a couple of states that had not even completed their counts when the election was declared over. So in effect a few entire states votes did not even count. This time around Ohio was really the only state's votes that really mattered. The time before it came down to what Florida voted. The rest of the country did not really matter in either case.
Personally I think the whole tax situation is way out of hand. Things like AMT just make it worse. I really believe we should move to a pure flat 10% tax. No exceptions no deductions. Yes, it would simplify things such that a lot of tax lawyers and CPA's would be thrown out of work. But it would be fairer that what is in place now.
But the likely hood of anything like this getting passed is infintesimal at best. To many special interest groups lobbying to protect their little deduction. Someone would have to buy a lot of congress critters to get a flat tax passed.
What is amazing is that if there was such a flat tax there would actually be more insentive to make more money there by increasing the taxable income to the government. As it is now once a person hits a threshold of a few hundred thousand they start spending money on CPAs and lawyers to find ways to hide their money from the government so they don't pay so much in taxes.
I think this is partially why the Democrats have slowly been loosing control. They typically seem to like the idea of tax everyone since they seem to think they know better how to spend your money than you do. This idea that it is somehow more fair to tax people that make more money is silly. They should all be taxed at the same rate. That is fair.
Is it cynical or just having lived long enough to learn how things really work?
When you live through a few more elections and watch the way things play out you will realize that virtually every politician out there will say what ever they have to say to get a vote. The whole election process has been reduced to producing a few select sound bites and photo ops and bombarding the electorate with negative ads saying just how bad the other guy would be if you voted for him.
I have often wondered if the same thing was done back when Lincoln was elected or if this is something that has occured in the last 50 years.
Either way the only real way you can get your views acted on by the government is either to adopt the views pushed on you by one of the two political parties or to buy a congress critter of your very own.
I suspect that you can currently buy a Democrat at all time low rates, at least for the next couple of years. And it all comes down to money no matter what they say. If you can provide a number large enough you can get politicians to do what ever you want. If they say no to something that just means that someone else is paying them more than you offered.
Open source software does not generate millions of dollars that can be funneled into a politicians pockets. As such it will never be an political issue, unless it threatens some proprietary software vendors enough. Then the politicians will pass laws to regulate open source software which will in effect make it illegal to write and dissiminate free software.
Unless you are a special interest with lots of money to buy a politician your pet issue will not have a voice in government circles. That is the way the system works.
If you want to force politicians to bring these issues to the forefront you will need to pass the hat and collect a sizeable wad of cash which may eventually attract a politician that you can sway to push your issue.
So pass the hat and start looking for a congress critter of your very own.
Thank you. Yes that is yet another way for companies to divide customers and extract more from those deemed less worthy. Systems like the ones in the article have already been implemented to varying degrees by many companies. The real danger lies in all of these companies combining their databases so that if you have a problem with one vendor you may be denied support by another vendor based on information in such a database. When that happens there will be a clear cut disadvantaged class which will have virtually no way to correct the problem. This could eventually be extended to family members as well so entire family could be disenfranchised. Imagine the worst case scenerio where there is a thriving black market for large portions of the population who are forced to pay a premium for the basics simply because they or someone in their family have been black listed by vendors.
Not a pretty picture.
Such a system if implemented widely so such databases are shared amongst all retailers could lead to creating a class of citizens that are denied purchase priveleges almost everywhere. This would lead to special stores for banned customers. Kind of like those check cashing stores that prey on people that for various reasons make use of their services and very high interest rates.
Of course such a system should only affect a very small minority of customers. But if the retailers find it profitable to force people into to the stores chargin above average rates then the system will be used to do just that. Eventually only a minority of people will be able to purchase items at the good customer price. Or the system will be used to provide adaptive pricing depending on the customers rating. Seems that I read something like this for certain web sites. Go to check the price on a product and depending on your particular user ID rating you might get a price higher or lower than the next person. Kind of the ultimate "all the market will bear" principle.
And for those that have commented that people should boycott the stores using such systems, it won't work. Never has never will. There are so many customers out there today that companies can and do chose to alienate entire groups since they can make up the difference from other groups. A number of years ago there was an article in Forbes (I believe) that stated many companies had figured out it was more costly to provide good customer service than to provide poor or bad customer service. The costs of keeping a few customers happy was not worth the time and effort required. Better to lose them as customers and move on to the next one that to make things right. And customer service orginizations have been doing similar things for awhile now. Credit card customers get sorted when they enter their credit card numbers on the phone. If you are considered a good customer they route you ahead of other callers to a real person. Those that are less desirable get put on hold for extended wait times. This has been done for a number of years.
Think about what the credit score business has done to some people. A few years ago when they started providing easier access to peoples credit scores a lot of people found they were locked out of low interest loans. They even use the credit scores in back ground checks now. Soon such a global CRM system will stratify the people of the world even more than they are now.
The best thing you can do in addition to using WEP, changing keys, and locking down the MAC addresses allowed, is to use ssh or VPN software to encrypt your connections. If someone spends enough time to crack WEP and spoof a MAC address then the most they can get is access through your access point. They would have to break ssh or VPN to look at your data. Of course you would need to have tools in place to identify a man in the middle attack to prevent them from spoofing your connections.
Of course if someone spends that much effort just to break into your wireless network you either have something really important or they are have way to much time on their hands. (and I doubt if anyone has anything that important on their network....)
Ah! They finally applied the technology for those black boxes they install in airplanes to something a little closer to every one. Very cool. Of course I never understood why they don't just build the airplane out of the stuff they build those black boxes out off. Those always survive the crashes. :) (and for any that don't get it that was a joke)
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. This idea of predicting the election is silly. About like watching those signs at the roulette table listing the past numbers and seeing 5 reds come up in a row. You just know that the next number to come up has to be black. No such thing. The last roll has nothing to do with the current roll.
:)
If you want a predictor try this out:
http://128.255.244.60/graphs/graph_Pres04_WTA.cfm
And if you want put $50.00 on number 35 for me. It is a sure winner.
I know a few people that feel that this election may result in wide spread violence in the streets. In effect a civil war. So far there has been nothing very civil about this election. Just look at the replys to this item. People are split with few people undecided.
Have to say the article is not a bad troll just before the election. The editors might want to watch that in the next couple of days. I am sure there will be more troll arcticles like this. Would be nice to be able to moderate the main article instead of just the replys.
This is going to be great. You gear up for a business trip, strapping on all you gear running wires all over your body. Get to the air port and you have to strip down to almost nothing to get through security or spend time with the TSA waving wands up and down your body.
:)
So you get through security (maybe without the free body cavity search, maybe not) and you get to the plane and get a seat. Your sitting there listening to music and pull out a keyboard to use with the screen built into your glasses and the passenger notices all these wires criss crossing your body. As the flight gets ready to take off you start turning all your electronics off, cell phone, laptop, ipod, SAT phone, GPS, PDA. The eyes of the passenger next to you go wide with fear thinking you are preparing to set off a bomb. The suspicious passenger rings the flight attendant worried you have a bomb hidden on your person (just what are all those bulges and wires?). The plane taxies back to the gate and you are taken off for further questioning. And a guarantted body cavity search this time even if you got one before.
Yeah, this stuff is really going to "take off".
Correct, I did not want to have to explain that to the vast majority of people out there. :)
Why does everyone keep saying all those dotcoms failed? The basic business plan was to convince a venture capital group to turn over money. The "founders" of the dotcom then used the money to play around for a year or two doing all kinds of fun things and buying expensive toys and throwing parties. Then they had one hell of a garage sell as they unloaded all that expensive equipment.
Saw this first hand at a storage service provider called Sanrise. Burned through something like 200 Million dollars in just a couple of years. Left more than a dozen Hitachi 9900 raid arrays and huge tape libraries all over the country.
Heck of a party while it lasted. And for the CEO and a few of the founders I am sure they extracted a very nice sum prior to the final implosion.
So all in all I would have to say that most of the business plans the dotcoms used worked just exactly the way they were suppose to. They extracted a huge amount of money from venture capital groups. The fact that most of them had silly ideas just makes the venture capital groups look very silly.
The third Death Star has finally been found. All these years it has been in a parking orbit in an out of the way solar system. Over time it picked up an atmosphere which is obscuring the laser turrets and docking ports.
Now the plot for the third Star Wars film is out.