Looks like a lot of room for corruption to creep into the system. They also said their primary target for customers are governments; when have governments ever paid in advance?:)
The outcry that occured when they stopped publishing "Global Patterns on Terrorism" was not because there was no longer an annual report. It was because the report you point out above, which already existed separately since 1985(you are incorrect about a renaming), did not include any statistics or chronology of attacks. So, instead of the normal detailed report, (which would show a marked increase in terrorist activities for 2004), they turned it into a a political propaganda piece with statements like this that don't tell us anything at all:
Many other countries were hit by terrorist attacks; the most deadly, like Beslan, Madrid, and the Philippines ferry, were committed by local groups, many inspired by or linked to al-Qa'ida.
I see that they responded to the criticism of the 2004 "report" by adding some actual numbers to the 2005 report. Unfortunately, they only cite totals of private american citizens killed. So it is still not useful at all as a global report on terrorism. Ah, wikipedia says this:
The Country Reports on Terrorism does not provide any statistics on terrorism like its predecessor. It simply has several chapters dealing with a country and any progress it has made in fighting the War on Terrorism.
However, a separate report [1] released by the National Counter Terrorism Center gave a chronology of "significant terrorist events," something not featured in the Country Reports. That report said there were 651 "significant" attacks in 2004, which left 1,907 people killed and around 8,000 wounded. These figures were the highest in 21 years of compiled data on terrorism.
*sigh* More greedy people trying to squeeze their way in as useless middle men. It seems to me that when money enters the picture, things hardly ever go well.
Look at the scammy behaviour prompted by google's adsense money or yahoo and overtures' click bounties and "alliances" promoting spyware spammers and ad farms and search engine abuse. I even just got a spam of a monster.com job offer; apparently due to some kind of reward which is motivating people to spam their job postings around. "work at home" scams and reward systems like this seem to be the modern corporate way of doing things in unethical ways while maintaining plausible deniability.
I suppose stuff like this has always happened in the real world and I was just isolated from it in the open source world where most folks fix bugs and help each other and explain things for free. I just wish we could keep the real world out for a couple more decades.:)
I'm not inclined to read the whole thing since a cursory glance shows there's nothing here that I don't have a running alternative for already
Same here; sysmon and my own scripts grabbing stats to plug into mrtg graphs already do all of that for me.:) There are many variations on the theme. It's not a difficult problem area, so it has a low barrier to entry.;)
http://www.funambol.com/ looks like an open source version of the same thing. But it is dual-licensed like MySQL so they do also have a price associated with something they are giving out for free.:) (I don't know how much, because you have to fill out some long form to contact sales just to find out. I assume that means it costs a lot)
I just got a blackberry and the amount of open source software available for it is surprisingly low. We have to get coding.:)
Well, I didn't do any research, I just pulled up some random guesses myself of prices I've personally observed to be rising and not be in decline, as you claim. Although I may not have adjusted for inflation in my head properly.;)
For coffee, I wasn't thinking of buying it in bulk since I don't drink coffee. I was thinking of the exorbitant prices that places like starbucks and borders charge for a cup. Admittedly, though, that growth might also have to do with trendiness.
The second google result for "average book prices" is a link to the school library journal, which seems a reasonable source: "This year's increases reflect a 25-year trend of escalating book prices. Case in point: from 1990 to 1995, average book prices jumped by 9.5 percent; from 1995 to 2000, they increased by 12.3 percent; and from 2000 to 2005, the increase was even steeper, 14.4 percent. Overall, we have seen book prices increase by more than 35 percent in the last 20 years." Although these price increases are a lot higher than your anecdotal example, it actually doesn't look too far from the inflation rate.
I can't find data on video games. Maybe games themselves haven't gone up so much, but the consoles themselves have certainly shot up. The xbox 360 costs what? $400? and your nintendo in 90s cost what? $100?
I'm sorry, but you are talking out of your ass. You seriously expect us to believe that only those two markets have had better than 3% growth(which is what inflation has been under for the last decade)? notice the housing market the last decade(and further back)? books? coffee? video games? What market has *not* had more than 3% price growth!? textiles and plastic toys from china?
Well, he was talking about making sure it's not sending data to places you don't want it to.
It depends on your level of paranoia and suspicion. A quick glance at this code tells anyone with minimal C knowledge that it is not a rootkit. So suspecting it might send data to places you don't want seems a reasonable level of suspicion without spending much more effort reading all the code.
If you are more paranoid and are not familiar with C then you could take measures such as using software like tripwire that keeps track of checksums for all the files on your system. You run tripwire, copy the checksum db to another system, install and run this software, then run tripwire again with the saved db to verify it didn't modify/bin/login and friends or add a new suid file to your system.
The next level of paranoia would be to run the new software in a quaranteened area such as a chroot jail. Then it can't even modify your system files if it is a trojan. But that takes even more effort. Security is always a trade-off with convenience.:)
... or just run ethereal or tcpdump on your local machine to watch outgoing packets. or just watch from your firewall. You are overcomplicating things.:) or maybe you are just paranoid enough.;)
Because the Egyptian pyramids were famous for thousands of years before the pyramids in the Americas were discovered. Egypt is what comes to mind in most peoples heads when you say pyramids; one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and all. Do not attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance.:)
I was more referring to the open source community than the/. community. I have noticed more and more scams like this in various places, such as phony HOWTOs in the linux documentation project, the "explorer destroyer" project a few articles back promoting unsavory behaviour in the pursuit of google's adsense money under the guise of promoting firefox, random websites proclaiming to be a resource for linux or other open source projects, but in reality just link farms pushing products or services or unnecessary donation requests on people. These scum like "Roland" that are socially engineering the/. editors are just one more example; and they are getting smarter and more subtle in their methods of avoiding our notice, so it is even more imperative that we stand up and proclaim that we will not tolerate this behaviour.
I see your point. It really is one of those "shades of grey" issues. I have no qualms about people making money *using* open source software (in fact, wirespring makes a custom linux distro that very much relies on open source software); and I was one of the "open source community" people offered to purchase RedHat IPO stock (although E-trade didn't let me actually get them since I refused to lie on their survey as they suggested) What gets me upset are these people that are trying to make money just by misleading and scamming people and hanging out just on the borders of legally actionable fraudulent behaviour; and that they are sometimes successful precisely because we are such an open community. I was able to get those phony HOWTO's taken out of the linux documentation project simply by pointing it out to the guys running it. But more and more of these scammers are becoming more and more subtle, and it gets harder to detect them and weed them out.
The situation is even stickier with situations such as this "explorer destroyer" which is possibly well-intentioned, but at its root only attracting these greedy people with nothing to contribute because "don't be evil" google is giving out money... so is it wrong for google to be giving out that money? These aren't easy questions.
Is there anything that can be done to divest ourselves of these parasites? This "blog" is simply extracts of text taken from other places, images taken from other places, a referral link charging $110 ! dollars for the abstract of the paper, and then advertisements at the bottom of the blog telling you "how to make money with a blog"!
Are we really, as a community, this simple-minded to be taken in by pyramid schemes like this?(pyramid in that; look, I am making money with a blog, give me money to tell you how to make money with a blog)
Please, please, please, pay attention people. We have to be vigilant and not give these scammers even more views/clicks/dollars.
And isn't this Roland guy the same one that has blatantly defrauded us in the past with similar linkfarm/scam advertisement stories? What is going on here? We need to stand up and take notice of the leeches on our backs and make use of the salt!
For the money, obviously. A friend pointed me to killbillsbrowser.com the other day. It was amusing, but all it was was an advertisement to tell people to switch firefox. But then I noticed something quite peculiar; there was no link to mozilla.org so that people can actually switch! Then I realized that my ad filter had blocked the advertisement for this google program to make these guys money. They don't give a a crap about firefox. They are just doing it to make money. Which is quite depressing, actually.
This is a growing problem in the open source world; for instance, a while ago I discovered a scammer that had managed to inveigle his HOWTOs into the linux documentation project. His HOWTOs were just a bit of filler and links to his website where he was charging money for code such as a String class which any student writes in their first programming class.
As our community has grown larger and larger, more and more unsavory characters from the "real" world have started nibbling at the edges. I don't know how to prevent it other than to be vigilant and use our many eyes to find and point out the frauds and the scammers.
It's actually the other way around, frighteningly enough. Wal-mart has no need to bribe city officals now. Many cities actually pay Wal-Mart millions of dollars in "subsidies". e.g. Denver paid $10 million.
#!/usr/bin/perl -n use English; $OUTPUT_AUTOFLUSH++; if ( $EVAL_ERROR ) { $WARNING--; } else { # ok, can't do the last command: "Use of $# is deprecated";) }
the multi-lingual section does not show the parent distribution
Look again. See the legend in the upper right assigning colored dots to the major distros? See the colored dots on the cells for the multi-lingual distributions and the security related, and small distros?
(this also answers another posters erroneous gripe about having groups unrelated to their parentage)
At first I was thinking, "'discussion at google', doesn't he mean usenet?" But apparently he was correct since google seems to have extended usenet to have their own "groups" that aren't actually in the usenet heirarchy.
Oh wow, now I see they are also hosting mailing lists as "groups" as well. Way to muddle the terminology; I guess that is the point. I hate marketing/advertising people.
Someone moderate parent up; my unused mod points just timed out. The movie will very likely cover the Kobayashi Maru.
The article also metions that "As Spock had not entered the academy as a command track cadet, he had not taken the Kobayashi Maru test while at the academy"
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like a lot of room for corruption to creep into the system. They also said their primary target for customers are governments; when have governments ever paid in advance? :)
Sounds like you are describing freenet, which also resolves the problems the other folks replying have pointed out.
"The official name is the United Mexican States (Spanish: Estados Unidos Mexicanos)"/ mx.html#Govt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos
Look at the scammy behaviour prompted by google's adsense money or yahoo and overtures' click bounties and "alliances" promoting spyware spammers and ad farms and search engine abuse. I even just got a spam of a monster.com job offer; apparently due to some kind of reward which is motivating people to spam their job postings around. "work at home" scams and reward systems like this seem to be the modern corporate way of doing things in unethical ways while maintaining plausible deniability.
I suppose stuff like this has always happened in the real world and I was just isolated from it in the open source world where most folks fix bugs and help each other and explain things for free. I just wish we could keep the real world out for a couple more decades. :)
Same here; sysmon and my own scripts grabbing stats to plug into mrtg graphs already do all of that for me. :) There are many variations on the theme. It's not a difficult problem area, so it has a low barrier to entry. ;)
I just got a blackberry and the amount of open source software available for it is surprisingly low. We have to get coding. :)
Well, I didn't do any research, I just pulled up some random guesses myself of prices I've personally observed to be rising and not be in decline, as you claim. Although I may not have adjusted for inflation in my head properly. ;)
For coffee, I wasn't thinking of buying it in bulk since I don't drink coffee. I was thinking of the exorbitant prices that places like starbucks and borders charge for a cup. Admittedly, though, that growth might also have to do with trendiness.
The second google result for "average book prices" is a link to the school library journal, which seems a reasonable source:
"This year's increases reflect a 25-year trend of escalating book prices. Case in point: from 1990 to 1995, average book prices jumped by 9.5 percent; from 1995 to 2000, they increased by 12.3 percent; and from 2000 to 2005, the increase was even steeper, 14.4 percent. Overall, we have seen book prices increase by more than 35 percent in the last 20 years."
Although these price increases are a lot higher than your anecdotal example, it actually doesn't look too far from the inflation rate.
I can't find data on video games. Maybe games themselves haven't gone up so much, but the consoles themselves have certainly shot up. The xbox 360 costs what? $400? and your nintendo in 90s cost what? $100?
I'm sorry, but you are talking out of your ass.
You seriously expect us to believe that only those two markets have had better than 3% growth(which is what inflation has been under for the last decade)?
notice the housing market the last decade(and further back)?
books?
coffee?
video games?
What market has *not* had more than 3% price growth!? textiles and plastic toys from china?
If you are more paranoid and are not familiar with C then you could take measures such as using software like tripwire that keeps track of checksums for all the files on your system. You run tripwire, copy the checksum db to another system, install and run this software, then run tripwire again with the saved db to verify it didn't modify /bin/login and friends or add a new suid file to your system.
The next level of paranoia would be to run the new software in a quaranteened area such as a chroot jail. Then it can't even modify your system files if it is a trojan. But that takes even more effort. Security is always a trade-off with convenience. :)
... or just run ethereal or tcpdump on your local machine to watch outgoing packets. or just watch from your firewall. You are overcomplicating things. :) or maybe you are just paranoid enough. ;)
Whee!
Because the Egyptian pyramids were famous for thousands of years before the pyramids in the Americas were discovered. Egypt is what comes to mind in most peoples heads when you say pyramids; one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and all. Do not attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance. :)
I was more referring to the open source community than the /. community. I have noticed more and more scams like this in various places, such as phony HOWTOs in the linux documentation project, the "explorer destroyer" project a few articles back promoting unsavory behaviour in the pursuit of google's adsense money under the guise of promoting firefox, random websites proclaiming to be a resource for linux or other open source projects, but in reality just link farms pushing products or services or unnecessary donation requests on people. /. editors are just one more example; and they are getting smarter and more subtle in their methods of avoiding our notice, so it is even more imperative that we stand up and proclaim that we will not tolerate this behaviour.
These scum like "Roland" that are socially engineering the
What gets me upset are these people that are trying to make money just by misleading and scamming people and hanging out just on the borders of legally actionable fraudulent behaviour; and that they are sometimes successful precisely because we are such an open community. I was able to get those phony HOWTO's taken out of the linux documentation project simply by pointing it out to the guys running it. But more and more of these scammers are becoming more and more subtle, and it gets harder to detect them and weed them out.
The situation is even stickier with situations such as this "explorer destroyer" which is possibly well-intentioned, but at its root only attracting these greedy people with nothing to contribute because "don't be evil" google is giving out money... so is it wrong for google to be giving out that money? These aren't easy questions.
Are we really, as a community, this simple-minded to be taken in by pyramid schemes like this?(pyramid in that; look, I am making money with a blog, give me money to tell you how to make money with a blog)
Please, please, please, pay attention people. We have to be vigilant and not give these scammers even more views/clicks/dollars.
And isn't this Roland guy the same one that has blatantly defrauded us in the past with similar linkfarm/scam advertisement stories? What is going on here? We need to stand up and take notice of the leeches on our backs and make use of the salt!
For the money, obviously. A friend pointed me to killbillsbrowser.com the other day. It was amusing, but all it was was an advertisement to tell people to switch firefox. But then I noticed something quite peculiar; there was no link to mozilla.org so that people can actually switch! Then I realized that my ad filter had blocked the advertisement for this google program to make these guys money. They don't give a a crap about firefox. They are just doing it to make money. Which is quite depressing, actually.
This is a growing problem in the open source world; for instance, a while ago I discovered a scammer that had managed to inveigle his HOWTOs into the linux documentation project. His HOWTOs were just a bit of filler and links to his website where he was charging money for code such as a String class which any student writes in their first programming class.
As our community has grown larger and larger, more and more unsavory characters from the "real" world have started nibbling at the edges. I don't know how to prevent it other than to be vigilant and use our many eyes to find and point out the frauds and the scammers.
The mercenary nature of Mr Frazer and the tactics he used to make money are why I stopped frequenting userfriendly.org years ago.
It's actually the other way around, frighteningly enough. Wal-mart has no need to bribe city officals now. Many cities actually pay Wal-Mart millions of dollars in "subsidies". e.g. Denver paid $10 million.
duh, last index of @_ not $# from perldoc perlop. Time to sleep. :)
#!/usr/bin/perl -n ;)
use English;
$OUTPUT_AUTOFLUSH++;
if ( $EVAL_ERROR ) {
$WARNING--;
} else {
# ok, can't do the last command: "Use of $# is deprecated"
}
Look again. See the legend in the upper right assigning colored dots to the major distros? See the colored dots on the cells for the multi-lingual distributions and the security related, and small distros?
(this also answers another posters erroneous gripe about having groups unrelated to their parentage)
Not "probably", "definately": http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.asp ?CID=N00001811&cycle=2004
Oh wow, now I see they are also hosting mailing lists as "groups" as well. Way to muddle the terminology; I guess that is the point. I hate marketing/advertising people.
The article also metions that "As Spock had not entered the academy as a command track cadet, he had not taken the Kobayashi Maru test while at the academy"