Ok, so I call up using a Skype account where I can fake the caller ID.
No, someone else already had this right. Only send to the mail address on file. Still not perfect, but it should stop this corporations from being able to get out-of-region phone records (ok, if they're in NYC, they could sit on someone's porch in NYC, but that might get suspicious. They won't likely fly to Los Angeles or Toronto to get phone records from those areas.)
Seriously. You need to take a couple of simple electrical courses. Specifically, volts-for-dolts a physics course on magnetism, and a practical, hands-on course working with electric motors. All handily part of an electrical engineering degree. When there is load on an electric generator, it takes more energy to keep it moving. Of course, we need to keep it moving at the same speed (60Hz or 50Hz, depending on which part of the world you're in) at all times, so that means using more coal, gas, whatever, when there is higher demand, and nearly none when there is no demand (not that that ever happens, but I will admit to the fact that you never use no energy even when no energy is being demanded).
In fact, my alma mater pointed out that they had a huge electric motor (approx 20' tall) that did nothing but spin (not doing any actual "work") to lower power demand for the university. When the capacitance of the grid got too high (such that voltage and current were too far out of phase with one another), they'd turn on the motor (basically, an oversized inductor) to correct the phase, lowering the demand on the external grid, resulting in a real cost savings to the university on their huge electrical bills.
The CO2 output of your carbon-based generators will be drastically lower at night than during the day. It's really that simple. I'm no greenie, but this is simple fact, and completely non-controversial. Just go ask your local power utility.
Actually, interesting that you bring up gravity. Last time I checked, we *still* have no clue what the heck gravity is. How it acts at such great distances and such. We can describe it mathematically (G m1 m2 / d^2), but we don't really know the reason for it. Why is it that this works? How can it act apparently instantly across great distances that even photons can't reach as quickly?
Perhaps your smart-ass answer isn't far off - it's God's will. Whatever it is, we do not thoroughly understand it. All we can do is take advantage of it (through mathematics).
It's simple liability. The bar is liable for serving too much alcohol to a patron, the liquor store (where drinking is not permitted on the premises) is not. The bar may be held liable ("risk") in some cases of violence - knowing who was there at the time may mitigate it. The liquor store is unlikely to see violence other than from someone trying to rob the place (who probably wouldn't submit to an ID scan anyway).
The problem is that the bar now has way too much information on its patrons, and likely doesn't destroy the information in a manner that respects their patrons' privacy.
(Even if the bar shouldn't be liable for violence, scanning ID may be cheaper than defending stupid lawsuits.)
I don't see where you're coming from with this. On one hand is the Republican contender. The other is a Democrat. One is a turd. The other is shinier...
Well, I could copy & paste that whole thing into an email to my MP, but I'm worried that you'll sue me for copyright infringement.:-) And if you put some javascript in there to prevent copying the text, well, I'd be in *big* trouble for circumventing it!
(Ok, I realise that/. isn't exactly big on copyright banalities, but it'd be nice if you *explicitly* said it was ok... you kind of implied it in the GP post, but it's not actually explicit.)
As a slashdot user, I *only* look at the summaries. I don't click to read the actual article, but learn everything I need to know about a subject simply by the summary available on google.
Well, actually, given the aborted-bitchslap they almost received in the early 1980's (anti-trust case settled), I'd say IBM has only spent about 25 years developing a squeaky-clean reputation... that that's still worth the lawsuit.
#include <stdio.h> int main() { return printf("Hello world\n"); }
Small, simple, bug free. Scaling this to 50,000 lines is far simpler (or at least more accurately scaled) than scaling to 6,000,000 lines, or 50,000,000 lines.
(And then there is the defensive code that actually works around its own defects such that bugs can't actually be exploited... but I don't know if the VMs in question have that or not.)
To the right person, SCO has something of value. Two things. But only a handful of corporations would find value in them. First is a customer list. Second is the source to any proprietary data. This would allow a (former) competitor the opportunity to come up with a unique migration plan to migrate SCO customers from outdated hardware and software to the competitor's software (and hardware, if it's not commodity hardware anymore). Sure, they could try to do that now (think all the migration kits for going between Oracle, DB2, MS SQL, Informix, etc.). But with the source and the rights to that source (including any patents, if applicable), the threat of further litigation over "stealing" SCO's customers goes away, driving down the risk in going after these customers.
What that basically means is that a reduction of risk is worth cash to some companies. And with that migration plan comes a fairly-assured income stream as I'm pretty sure a significant portion of SCO's current customers will want an upgrade some time this decade...
What's really funny is that I'm currently using the Notes 8 pre-release, and, well, shift-click/ctrl-click (or, more usually in my case, shift-arrow/ctrl-arrow+ctrl-space) does exactly what it does everywhere else, once I've applied the Notes8 template. So why they need to patent something that's going away, I'm not sure... maybe it's to get the "oh, you can't be serious about such a stupid interface" lawsuit into patent-infringement court?
The bar code is like the license plate. The automated scanning of plates is like using a barcode reader tied into "the system" to read the barcode on your forehead. Since you're complaining about the barcode, you should be complaining about the license plates.
The fact that the police are automating reading what you already publicly display merely makes them more efficient. One alternative is to simply deputise a few hundred monkeys who write down plates, locations, and times, and store it all in a big filing cabinet at the end of the day. Of course, by the time they've looked up those plates to ensure they weren't stolen, well, the vehicle would be long gone. But they'd still have the nasty database. It just would be painful to use.
The problem originates with the law requiring you to publicly display your license to drive that vehicle on public roadways. After that, it's mostly just a matter of efficiency.
Really? I did all my Electrical Engineering lab reports in Star Office for OS/2. Either that or DeScribe... but I digress. I suppose that if you want to have the prettiest report, you may need stuff only found in Office 2007. But if you merely want to report your results so you can get the mark based on your understanding of the topic, and the execution of that knowledge, and then move on to your next class, OOo is more than adequate for the task.
(For those who may be missing some of their Geek Points(tm), DeScribe went defunct a decade or so ago, having produced one of the most innovative object-oriented word processing programs available for OS/2 - when they ported to Windows, they found themselves to be a small fish in a big pond dominated by Word Perfect and MS Word, and, as I understand it, couldn't recoup their extra porting costs, and died. Star Office is what OOo was before Sun bought it.)
Both the "credit is teh bomb" and "credit is teh ev1l" sides are doing the rest of us a disservice. Of course, the former group is usually the companies offering credit at 28% APR or something stupidly high like that, so it's understandable why they're lying to us. The latter may provide balance, but only in the sense that British loyalists provided balance to the American rebellion. They just got a bunch of people in the middle killed.
I read about the credit system and such in high school. When I got to university, many banks tried to give me credit cards. I took a few of them up on their offers. However, I never (purposefully) keep a balance. Pay it off every month (except for maybe 3 or 4 times in the last 15 years when I missed the date or lost/forgot about the statement). And have impeccable credit. This allows me to do lots of other things, including when we bought our house 5 years ago - I could negotiate for a better rate. Or when I needed a small line of credit to pay for those appliances that I didn't have up front - I put the all my appliances on credit card (18%+ APR), within 30 days I had a large enough line of credit (8% APR) to pay off the credit card, had the LoC paid off in three months. I could do all of this because I was playing the credit game, but with my own rules, not theirs.
And, yes, I paid some interest. But I paid no interest for the first month on the appliances (minimum 20-day grace period), saving a bunch there, and then I paid a small amount for the next few months. And if I had merely delayed my move so I could afford the whole thing, the cost of this house had gone up by 10% within that time frame (it's now worth more than twice what I paid for it - 5 years later). So paying that interest was an investment that thoroughly paid off. I probably could have put the appliances on the mortgage, but then I'd still be paying for it now.
Don't go cash-only unless you have a problem with credit. Otherwise, the interest that you are saving (which is nearly none if you pay off your credit on time every month) will be more than made up by the headaches you cause yourself by having no credit. If you have to, buy a $1000GIC (or whatever your institution's minimum is), and use that as collateral for some form of credit, whether that is a credit card (preferred) or a secured line of credit (secured against your GIC). Just build it. Heck, with a secured line of credit, you should be able to get $1000 for 6% interest. Assuming your GIC gets 3% interest, the cost to you for "borrowing" the $1000 will net out to about $30. Which is probably cheaper than the transaction fees you'll pay for that prepaid credit card. It'll build a credit score so you can get a normal credit card and avoid further fees. Another alternative is to go back to school - credit companies fall over each other trying to give out low-limit credit cards to post-secondary students;-) A might bit pricey, though, unless you were going back to school anyway...
Even when I see people recommending cash-only, it's only to help others recognise the value of money, and to curb spending to only buy what you can afford. But even they recognise the value of credit, and of rebuilding one's credit (or, in your case, just building it). So they'll eventually go back to using credit, but not until all the old credit is paid off, and the lifestyle changes are in place to live on what you actually bring in. You sound like you already have a "within-your-own-means" lifestyle. You just need the credit card(s). You had the right idea back in highschool - live on what you earn. You just missed the credit game and all the impact it would have on your life later.
Just my two cents...
PS: I applied for increased credit limits a few times. One turned me down, and I canceled the card. Another turned me down, and I simply stopped using it except for places that don't take AmEx. If they had given me the credit increase when I asked for it, I'd still be using it as my primary. Oh well. Too bad for them. By playing the credit game as a knowledgeable consumer, I get to set my own rules.
"Drug possession" is as victimless as "child pornography possession". It may not be the act that victimises, but it is involved in that victimisation.
Note that if "[v]ictimless crime" doesn't include the person committing the crime, suicide would be victimless. And yet it isn't. (Suicide also is not illegal everywhere, so this may not apply to your jurisdiction. Substitute "attempted suicide" if that is illegal in your locale. If neither, please skip this paragraph.) It affects a person's entire family, network of friends, coworkers (and employers, but I'm not that choked up about them).
Similarly, drugs create victims of entire families - who have lost their loved ones, and have nothing but the drugs inhabiting their child's/sibling's body left to talk to.
I thoroughly disagree with the value of a compromised machine. If you can crack Linux boxes at will (we'll even lump all distros together for the argument), or you can crack Windows boxes at will, the value of those at-will cracks will be the sum of all the bandwidth and diskspace and responsiveness of the entire set, not just the individual ones. Rather than cracking one server with a 10Gb pipe and 10TB of diskspace, and 32 CPUs (which is very generous - I doubt there is a market for more than 5 of these machines in the world), you crack 100,000 windows desktops with 1Mb pipe and 80GB diskspace... and 100,000 CPUs.
The value of the Windows boxes far exceeds the server. The server is more likely to be secured. Once you crack it, a single action can secure it and render your crack a waste. With the Windows machines, 100,000 people will all need to secure their systems to remove your ability to send out your spam. Likely, 50,000 will secure their machines, which will still leave you running at half speed (better than none). This is all just a long way of saying "single point of failure." The more redundancies in the system, the more reliable it is. It's High Availability, taken to the nth degree.
But then reality sets in, and the value of the Linux boxes will decrease even further. First off, until someone develops an at-will Linux cracker, you need to crack each one nearly individually. Some scripts may help multiply your work, but there will still be too much work to do manually. The cost of entry becomes high. Unless the server is holding valuable info all by itself (SSNs, credit cards, etc.), there's no point. Further, even with that crack tool, it should take very little time for a fix to be found. Dissemination will likely take a bit, but since the servers are likely being actively administered, they'll be among the first to get it. So your crack isn't likely to work on too many machines for very long, as opposed to, say, Windows 98 (we all know someone still running that, right?).
And then there's the distros. Each one opens a different set of ports, has slightly different patches, or even different tooling (your sendmail hack doesn't work against me since I'm running postfix, for example). Your crack may work on this Ubuntu box, and utterly fail to annoy that SLES box. Or vice versa. So the value of a cracking tool may be much reduced even without a fix being administered. One of many reasons for Linux's security is that, unlike MS's monoculture ("we support different OS's! ME, 2000, 2003, XP, Vista..."), Linux has a much larger genetic variety (genetic isn't too bad of an analogy, either - there is cross-pollination going on between distros as fixes get passed around, making each one stronger).
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so I call up using a Skype account where I can fake the caller ID.
No, someone else already had this right. Only send to the mail address on file. Still not perfect, but it should stop this corporations from being able to get out-of-region phone records (ok, if they're in NYC, they could sit on someone's porch in NYC, but that might get suspicious. They won't likely fly to Los Angeles or Toronto to get phone records from those areas.)
I use perl -MIO::All -e 'io(":80")->fork->accept->(sub { $_[0] < io(-x $1 ? "./$1 |" : $1) if /^GET \/(.*) / })'
as my webserver you insensitive clod!
(I ripped it from the IO::All documentation. That's gotta be secure, right?)
Seriously. You need to take a couple of simple electrical courses. Specifically, volts-for-dolts a physics course on magnetism, and a practical, hands-on course working with electric motors. All handily part of an electrical engineering degree. When there is load on an electric generator, it takes more energy to keep it moving. Of course, we need to keep it moving at the same speed (60Hz or 50Hz, depending on which part of the world you're in) at all times, so that means using more coal, gas, whatever, when there is higher demand, and nearly none when there is no demand (not that that ever happens, but I will admit to the fact that you never use no energy even when no energy is being demanded).
In fact, my alma mater pointed out that they had a huge electric motor (approx 20' tall) that did nothing but spin (not doing any actual "work") to lower power demand for the university. When the capacitance of the grid got too high (such that voltage and current were too far out of phase with one another), they'd turn on the motor (basically, an oversized inductor) to correct the phase, lowering the demand on the external grid, resulting in a real cost savings to the university on their huge electrical bills.
The CO2 output of your carbon-based generators will be drastically lower at night than during the day. It's really that simple. I'm no greenie, but this is simple fact, and completely non-controversial. Just go ask your local power utility.
Actually, interesting that you bring up gravity. Last time I checked, we *still* have no clue what the heck gravity is. How it acts at such great distances and such. We can describe it mathematically (G m1 m2 / d^2), but we don't really know the reason for it. Why is it that this works? How can it act apparently instantly across great distances that even photons can't reach as quickly?
Perhaps your smart-ass answer isn't far off - it's God's will. Whatever it is, we do not thoroughly understand it. All we can do is take advantage of it (through mathematics).
So, apparently, the solution is to have amazon not ship the book to you, but to your neighbour. Then you have to go pick it up.
*boggle*
It's simple liability. The bar is liable for serving too much alcohol to a patron, the liquor store (where drinking is not permitted on the premises) is not. The bar may be held liable ("risk") in some cases of violence - knowing who was there at the time may mitigate it. The liquor store is unlikely to see violence other than from someone trying to rob the place (who probably wouldn't submit to an ID scan anyway).
The problem is that the bar now has way too much information on its patrons, and likely doesn't destroy the information in a manner that respects their patrons' privacy.
(Even if the bar shouldn't be liable for violence, scanning ID may be cheaper than defending stupid lawsuits.)
I don't see where you're coming from with this. On one hand is the Republican contender. The other is a Democrat. One is a turd. The other is shinier...
Oh.
Nevermind.
Well, I could copy & paste that whole thing into an email to my MP, but I'm worried that you'll sue me for copyright infringement. :-) And if you put some javascript in there to prevent copying the text, well, I'd be in *big* trouble for circumventing it!
(Ok, I realise that /. isn't exactly big on copyright banalities, but it'd be nice if you *explicitly* said it was ok... you kind of implied it in the GP post, but it's not actually explicit.)
As a slashdot user, I *only* look at the summaries. I don't click to read the actual article, but learn everything I need to know about a subject simply by the summary available on google.
It works fine here, so why not on google?
Well, actually, given the aborted-bitchslap they almost received in the early 1980's (anti-trust case settled), I'd say IBM has only spent about 25 years developing a squeaky-clean reputation... that that's still worth the lawsuit.
Are you implying that this might have been anything other than on purpose?
Small, simple, bug free. Scaling this to 50,000 lines is far simpler (or at least more accurately scaled) than scaling to 6,000,000 lines, or 50,000,000 lines.
(And then there is the defensive code that actually works around its own defects such that bugs can't actually be exploited... but I don't know if the VMs in question have that or not.)
To the right person, SCO has something of value. Two things. But only a handful of corporations would find value in them. First is a customer list. Second is the source to any proprietary data. This would allow a (former) competitor the opportunity to come up with a unique migration plan to migrate SCO customers from outdated hardware and software to the competitor's software (and hardware, if it's not commodity hardware anymore). Sure, they could try to do that now (think all the migration kits for going between Oracle, DB2, MS SQL, Informix, etc.). But with the source and the rights to that source (including any patents, if applicable), the threat of further litigation over "stealing" SCO's customers goes away, driving down the risk in going after these customers.
What that basically means is that a reduction of risk is worth cash to some companies. And with that migration plan comes a fairly-assured income stream as I'm pretty sure a significant portion of SCO's current customers will want an upgrade some time this decade...
Oddly, I can play more wmv's on my Gentoo Linux box (using Kaffeine/Xine) than I can on my WindowsXP laptop...
What's really funny is that I'm currently using the Notes 8 pre-release, and, well, shift-click/ctrl-click (or, more usually in my case, shift-arrow/ctrl-arrow+ctrl-space) does exactly what it does everywhere else, once I've applied the Notes8 template. So why they need to patent something that's going away, I'm not sure... maybe it's to get the "oh, you can't be serious about such a stupid interface" lawsuit into patent-infringement court?
I really wish I had mod points. There should be a "+1, you referred to sharks with laser beams."
:-)
Depends on the module you're running.
Well, it's obviously an option - you just typed it. :-) It just happens to fail in being a good option...
Your analogy is a bit off.
The bar code is like the license plate. The automated scanning of plates is like using a barcode reader tied into "the system" to read the barcode on your forehead. Since you're complaining about the barcode, you should be complaining about the license plates.
The fact that the police are automating reading what you already publicly display merely makes them more efficient. One alternative is to simply deputise a few hundred monkeys who write down plates, locations, and times, and store it all in a big filing cabinet at the end of the day. Of course, by the time they've looked up those plates to ensure they weren't stolen, well, the vehicle would be long gone. But they'd still have the nasty database. It just would be painful to use.
The problem originates with the law requiring you to publicly display your license to drive that vehicle on public roadways. After that, it's mostly just a matter of efficiency.
Really? I did all my Electrical Engineering lab reports in Star Office for OS/2. Either that or DeScribe ... but I digress. I suppose that if you want to have the prettiest report, you may need stuff only found in Office 2007. But if you merely want to report your results so you can get the mark based on your understanding of the topic, and the execution of that knowledge, and then move on to your next class, OOo is more than adequate for the task.
(For those who may be missing some of their Geek Points(tm), DeScribe went defunct a decade or so ago, having produced one of the most innovative object-oriented word processing programs available for OS/2 - when they ported to Windows, they found themselves to be a small fish in a big pond dominated by Word Perfect and MS Word, and, as I understand it, couldn't recoup their extra porting costs, and died. Star Office is what OOo was before Sun bought it.)
The stuff burned to transport, of course!
:-P
Both the "credit is teh bomb" and "credit is teh ev1l" sides are doing the rest of us a disservice. Of course, the former group is usually the companies offering credit at 28% APR or something stupidly high like that, so it's understandable why they're lying to us. The latter may provide balance, but only in the sense that British loyalists provided balance to the American rebellion. They just got a bunch of people in the middle killed.
I read about the credit system and such in high school. When I got to university, many banks tried to give me credit cards. I took a few of them up on their offers. However, I never (purposefully) keep a balance. Pay it off every month (except for maybe 3 or 4 times in the last 15 years when I missed the date or lost/forgot about the statement). And have impeccable credit. This allows me to do lots of other things, including when we bought our house 5 years ago - I could negotiate for a better rate. Or when I needed a small line of credit to pay for those appliances that I didn't have up front - I put the all my appliances on credit card (18%+ APR), within 30 days I had a large enough line of credit (8% APR) to pay off the credit card, had the LoC paid off in three months. I could do all of this because I was playing the credit game, but with my own rules, not theirs.
And, yes, I paid some interest. But I paid no interest for the first month on the appliances (minimum 20-day grace period), saving a bunch there, and then I paid a small amount for the next few months. And if I had merely delayed my move so I could afford the whole thing, the cost of this house had gone up by 10% within that time frame (it's now worth more than twice what I paid for it - 5 years later). So paying that interest was an investment that thoroughly paid off. I probably could have put the appliances on the mortgage, but then I'd still be paying for it now.
Don't go cash-only unless you have a problem with credit. Otherwise, the interest that you are saving (which is nearly none if you pay off your credit on time every month) will be more than made up by the headaches you cause yourself by having no credit. If you have to, buy a $1000GIC (or whatever your institution's minimum is), and use that as collateral for some form of credit, whether that is a credit card (preferred) or a secured line of credit (secured against your GIC). Just build it. Heck, with a secured line of credit, you should be able to get $1000 for 6% interest. Assuming your GIC gets 3% interest, the cost to you for "borrowing" the $1000 will net out to about $30. Which is probably cheaper than the transaction fees you'll pay for that prepaid credit card. It'll build a credit score so you can get a normal credit card and avoid further fees. Another alternative is to go back to school - credit companies fall over each other trying to give out low-limit credit cards to post-secondary students ;-) A might bit pricey, though, unless you were going back to school anyway...
Even when I see people recommending cash-only, it's only to help others recognise the value of money, and to curb spending to only buy what you can afford. But even they recognise the value of credit, and of rebuilding one's credit (or, in your case, just building it). So they'll eventually go back to using credit, but not until all the old credit is paid off, and the lifestyle changes are in place to live on what you actually bring in. You sound like you already have a "within-your-own-means" lifestyle. You just need the credit card(s). You had the right idea back in highschool - live on what you earn. You just missed the credit game and all the impact it would have on your life later.
Just my two cents...
PS: I applied for increased credit limits a few times. One turned me down, and I canceled the card. Another turned me down, and I simply stopped using it except for places that don't take AmEx. If they had given me the credit increase when I asked for it, I'd still be using it as my primary. Oh well. Too bad for them. By playing the credit game as a knowledgeable consumer, I get to set my own rules.
Maybe they already do... it'd explain the dupes...
"Drug possession" is as victimless as "child pornography possession". It may not be the act that victimises, but it is involved in that victimisation.
Note that if "[v]ictimless crime" doesn't include the person committing the crime, suicide would be victimless. And yet it isn't. (Suicide also is not illegal everywhere, so this may not apply to your jurisdiction. Substitute "attempted suicide" if that is illegal in your locale. If neither, please skip this paragraph.) It affects a person's entire family, network of friends, coworkers (and employers, but I'm not that choked up about them).
Similarly, drugs create victims of entire families - who have lost their loved ones, and have nothing but the drugs inhabiting their child's/sibling's body left to talk to.
I thoroughly disagree with the value of a compromised machine. If you can crack Linux boxes at will (we'll even lump all distros together for the argument), or you can crack Windows boxes at will, the value of those at-will cracks will be the sum of all the bandwidth and diskspace and responsiveness of the entire set, not just the individual ones. Rather than cracking one server with a 10Gb pipe and 10TB of diskspace, and 32 CPUs (which is very generous - I doubt there is a market for more than 5 of these machines in the world), you crack 100,000 windows desktops with 1Mb pipe and 80GB diskspace ... and 100,000 CPUs.
The value of the Windows boxes far exceeds the server. The server is more likely to be secured. Once you crack it, a single action can secure it and render your crack a waste. With the Windows machines, 100,000 people will all need to secure their systems to remove your ability to send out your spam. Likely, 50,000 will secure their machines, which will still leave you running at half speed (better than none). This is all just a long way of saying "single point of failure." The more redundancies in the system, the more reliable it is. It's High Availability, taken to the nth degree.
But then reality sets in, and the value of the Linux boxes will decrease even further. First off, until someone develops an at-will Linux cracker, you need to crack each one nearly individually. Some scripts may help multiply your work, but there will still be too much work to do manually. The cost of entry becomes high. Unless the server is holding valuable info all by itself (SSNs, credit cards, etc.), there's no point. Further, even with that crack tool, it should take very little time for a fix to be found. Dissemination will likely take a bit, but since the servers are likely being actively administered, they'll be among the first to get it. So your crack isn't likely to work on too many machines for very long, as opposed to, say, Windows 98 (we all know someone still running that, right?).
And then there's the distros. Each one opens a different set of ports, has slightly different patches, or even different tooling (your sendmail hack doesn't work against me since I'm running postfix, for example). Your crack may work on this Ubuntu box, and utterly fail to annoy that SLES box. Or vice versa. So the value of a cracking tool may be much reduced even without a fix being administered. One of many reasons for Linux's security is that, unlike MS's monoculture ("we support different OS's! ME, 2000, 2003, XP, Vista..."), Linux has a much larger genetic variety (genetic isn't too bad of an analogy, either - there is cross-pollination going on between distros as fixes get passed around, making each one stronger).