Why spend actual money (even a low-end PC costs you what, a couple hundred dollars) just because of the hype, especially when you know darn well the likelihood of it ever getting booted up is zilch (particularly if technologically less-than-savvy people get an urgent "Don't wait, update your account information today!" email in their inbox -- which, incidentally, leaves them 100% as screwed no matter what Linux distribution you're using)
"Next year to be really, really scary on the computer security front", says a company which makes money from designing Comprehensive Solutions to Security Threats yet cannot decide whether keyloggers are silent but lethal or whether they have observable symptoms like a system slowdown (because you KNOW your 1 GHz Pentium just crawls when it tries to do processor-intensive tasks like parsing keyboard input). Honestly, these kind of folks give security research a bad name. Its like the doctor down the street who says "Hey, AIDS cases are likely to increase next year -- symptoms include coughing or feeling less energetic than you usually do. Be afraid!"
If you live in a state with a per-se defamation law, four types of claims are inherently injurious to your reputation without you having to prove anything else (i.e. anyone accused of the following would be assumed to suffer, ergo a false statement regarding them is defamatory on its face):
* imputations of criminal conduct
* allegations injurious to another in their trade, business, or profession
* imputations of loathsome disease
* imputations of unchastity in a woman
So if you live in a per-se state you're reasonably secure against being called a baby rapist, regardless of how much of a no-account rat-bastard you actually are (provided, of course, you are not actually raping babies).
Incidentally, even if you don't live in a per-se state its not exactly a high bar to prove the accusation of baby rapery damaged your reputation, although you might have trouble saying it damaged your reputation in the amount you want damages for. Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, blah blah blah.
All I remember is owning Australia is key to world domination. You get to deploy your hordes of Crockodile Dundee, Jeff Corwin, and Mel Gibson in his before-he-got-religion period (well, OK, Passion is probably more violent than Thunderdome, but in a different way). And the beatdown commences.
Lets see, in the last year I've racked up 30 days of/played in WoW (thats, oh, about two hours a night, averaged with some nights being none and some Saturdays being game-sessions) and my guild describes me as "casual".
Unfortunately, even if your DESTROY_UNIVERSE primitive runs in constant time, "check to see if the answer is correct" is linear with respect to the number of bits used to represent the factors. We can tweak your algorithm to make it constant, however:
Step 1: Say the number is prime.
Step 2: Destroy the universe.
Well, OK, so technically this algorithm might not terminate on the correct answer -- but try proving it by counterexample:)
From a security point of view, "less than five seconds on modern hardware" is absolutely unnecessary. After a transmission has been intercepted, and we work under the assumption that essentially all of them are these days, that transmission has to remain secure potentially for a very, very long time (sure, an encrypted radio communication might have no operational significance in two hours -- an encrypted dossier of a field agent had better stay secure until he's dead, and an encrypted report on security breaches in US nuclear command&control protocols better stay unbroken for the better part of the next century). And what takes a beowulf cluster of supercomputers 5 months to do today will be possible to crack on a botneck in less than a week by 2010, I guarantee you (I write distributed applications for a living and worked with a three-letter agency which was rather miffed that a competing TLA had the existence of their own internal distributed cracker leaked to the press back in 2002 or so). A couple years after that it will be a few minutes on dedicated hardware and a few years after that a desktop machine will smash it as a matter of course.
Events like this are warning flares to people with serious security needs that you need to start transitioning to harder codes or longer key lengths.
Yes, even the best sometime forget to do checks and what-not on their pointers sometimes, and those sometimes are the ones that come to bite them in the ass, but for the most part, thumbs up to pointers, thumbs up to c++ and thumbs down to silly languages that protect the coder from their own dumbness.
I can never figure out what sort of blind machismo animates C programmers that they *know* pointers are inevitably insecure and feel this makes them Manly Men for overcoming the difficulty ("well, most of the time"). The best C coders in the world get bitten in the hindquarters by pointer math, on a regular basis (see the flaw in the libpng, which was old, stable, open-source, well-tested, written by experts, everything you could want for secure software). You wouldn't go to a doctor who said "Screw the diagnostic protocol that relies on wasting fifteen minutes performing checks to verify that you indeed have tuberculosis instead of silicosis of the lungs, I am a MANLY MAN and n00b doctors who don't immediately notice your lack of dialated pupils don't deserve to be in this profession!"
Thumbs up for "silly languages" that protect ME from the dumbness of the Manly Men who are writing my applications.
To give props to another game company, Three Rings Design has a puzzle game which, while it theoretically involves violence (cannon balls and pirates), is tame enough to be enjoyable both by their typical subscriber (thirty/fourty-something female) and also her young child. The take steps to make sure both the game and the community are family-friendly, including policing the games/forums, encouraging positive behavior in their community, and sticking to their guns on the issue of... well... not allowing guns in the game. And it looks like they're making a boatload of money, which is exactly the take-home lesson I'd like other developers to see: you can make money without being GTA.
My high school (Adlai E Stevenson) had a similar incident with the football team and bananas. They treated it like it was a PR nightmare and went on the full-court hush-it-up-press. And apparently it worked -- I can't easily Google mention of the story unless I go out looking for stories about hazing instead of stories about SHS football.
Where would you point a young engineer with a BS in CS for a good introduction to SQL? Something that explains things from the ground up but not in a way that would insult the intelligence of someone who has been working for a while on non-database CS technologies, with the eventual goal of adding SQL to that big toolbox we all carry around when we get asked to Do The Impossible By Next Tuesday.
Well, technically, the Constitution whitelists a few things (regulating commerce between the several states, conducting foreign policy, etc), blacklists everything else (see any number of laws voided for falling out of scope of defined authorities -- Violence Against Women Act, for one), and then blacklists some exceptions to the few things that were whitelisted (no matter how broadly you construe "regulate interstate commerce" you can't regulate it in such a manner as to establish a state religion, etc). The Chinese governmental system, on the other hand, just gives the government root.
This makes as much sense as suing crowbar manufacturers for home break-ins
In this case, its more like suing a crowbar manufacturer who produced a product named BurglarBuddy, sent out advertising circulars saying "123 Maple Lane has excellent diamonds and fine silver visible from the window, guarded by a flimsy padlock... Buy Your BurglarBuddy Today!", and had your customer support actively support burglars ("No no, silly, you can't use BurglarBuddy if you haven't disabled the Canine Property Protection Device (CPPD) first. Try ending the CPPD process by applying JuicySteak2000. Then use your BurglarBuddy as described on our website and you'll be at that vine vase in ten minutes or less. Thank you for contacting BurglarBuddy!")
It seems you just can't fight corporate giants with billion dollar legal power...
It seems you just can't pull the wool over the eyes of judges after you've had your customer support give directions how to find specific copyrighted material on your network (page 1 of the opinion), positioned yourself as the new Napster by targetting ex-Napster users with a specifically designed client advertised to enable sharing copyrighted music (page 6 -- "Napster has announced that it may start charing a fee. Thats if the court don't order it shut it down first. What will you do to get around it?"), have a CTO who drops brilliant gems like "The goal is to get in trouble with the law and get sued. Its the best way to get in the news" (page 6), built in a feature to search for guaranteed-copyrighted Top40 songs (page 7), identified copyrighted materials you could find on their network by name in a newsletter to users as an enticement to use the network (page 7), etc, etc.
But I'm sure this could all have been a misunderstanding and they really meant to say "Hey, you can get free Shakespeare on this network, and thats why you'd use it, ignore the millions of copyrighted songs which we really can't do anything about like the latest from your favorites Brittney Spears, Usher, and random-boy-band-of-the-week available for free today." You can read that argument in the opinion, too. http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/27jun20051 200/www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/04pdf/04-480.p df
I totally agree on filesharing networks and Bittorrent. However, there are some other P2P networks (which are less used than filesharing, which is not synonymous with P2P just because it is the most popular app) which have socially redeeming features. P2P distributed caches or P2P computation grids, for example. P2P is just a technology, like anything else -- you take the "server" out or mostly out of the client-server paradigm, thats it. What you do with that is as open as any other CS meta-technology.
Don't forget to escape the spaces, lest you nail poor Paul and not find files W.S. and Anderson. And you won't even know it happened, because you passed in the -f flag, which stands for -fool or -f'ing_confident depending on whether it blows up or not.
(rm -rf'ed an hour worth of work yesterday with a typo, so maybe I'm just bitter.)
The pickle brand my mother and I both use are Vlasic Pickles. Google found the right spelling (I had put in another s and a k). Thought you'd like to know. Oh, they really are good pickles -- you pay an absurd amount for them relative to the generic brand right next to them but the taste is worth it, even without the 25 cent off coupon.
Are you familiar with the economics of coupon clipping? Coupon clipping is essentially the retail establishment's version of price discrimination: they know that, for example, that V. Pickles brand I can never spell but always buy appeals to people with vastly different ability to pay for quality pickles. So "they" (and by they I meant both the pickle manufacturer and the retail stores) put coupons out in the paper. If you're willing to spend the time searching through lots of advertising to find the coupon for the pickles you buy and not the hair dryer you don't, you get a little money. I'm a working professional, searching for a 25 cent pickle coupon is not a good use of my time. My mother, on the other hand, used to do this religiously before *every* shopping trip. The average shopper clears between $6 and $8 in savings per hour. So I end up paying an extra quarter for pickles than mom does (and, considered over several million buyers, thats not a small amount of difference to Wal-Mart).
OK, so thats the retail environment for you. Now, you'll notice that the price discrimination is enabled by one thing: differential access to information, or the "cost of search" if you want to think of it that way. You're already assuming that the cost of search for a better deal is going to be greater than the savings you'll realize. Question: do you consider $6 an hour for boring tedium a good use of your time? Many, many millions of people whose opinions are very valuable at Wal-Mart world headquarters do. The ultimate nightmare app for Walmart would be a scanner attached to your cellphone (already widely available here in Japan) which would just scan all the items you need and tell you "Buy pickles, diapers, baby formula, and orange juice at Walmart. Go to the Jewel three minutes away for apple juice, note paper, and their 8 for the price of 3 pizza deal."
Another thing retail loves is called a loss leader -- something which is a staple, like milk, priced so low it will actively get people to come into your store, where they'll naturally buy other items which are priced higher. This works because people might know, for example, that $1.50 a gallon milk is an absurdly good deal, but putting together a list of all the items you need is very difficult, so you just get people to comparison shop on a few high-profile items and nickle-and-dime them on, say, cereal. (This is also one thing small stores LOVE to do to Wal-Mart, since it is very, very difficult to beat Wal-Mart's pricing across the board.) You can have loss-leaders which are much more expensive than milk though -- computer monitors, for example. And that + google = scare the pants off of you if you work in retail. Because it will bring people to your store for the purpose of getting the loss leader and *nothing else*. Best Buy calls these sort of customers "demons" (Google it, interesting article on the phenomenon) -- if you can exploit the information gap between you and the store you can tremendously cut into their business.
On behalf of all Americans, I apologize if our screwy patent office has deprived Aussies of their God-given liberty to write bad novels combining MIT and Rip van Winkle.
So even if they do that, as soon as Blizzard gets their hands on it, they could just add it's signature to the definition.
Yep, and then they condemn their customer support to the fifth circle of CS hell, because Warden is going to immediately start banning thousands of innocent users who have done nothing wrong except run a Sony DRM-protected CD in their computer at some point, ever, and now the included rootkit makes WoW think they are trying to pull a fast one. That generates one account banning, and the world's worst CS situtation -- your temporary worker can't even *understand* the issue that is behind the company policy so he can only follow it to the letter, and if Warden says you're guilty then you're guilty. Remember, WoW has over *one million* US subscribers. The intersection between those one million subscribers and high-selling music is really, really bloody large.
Yeah. NASA's entire budget, every single penny, could be redirected to DARPA/NIS/any other basic research supporting agency and we'd get more of what we want (applied technology and basic science breakthroughs) with less of the pissing billions of dollars into the void. $100 billion dollars it cost us to keep that rickety bucket of bolts up in orbit. ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS. One tenth of one percent of that would kickstart research on any number of causes. Call it the Space Program Memorial Challenge Grant or the We Planted a Flag On The "#$"#%ing Moon Now We're Doing Something Useful Grant if it makes you feel better.
One elderly woman compatriot plus a smooth talking scam artist can social engineer their way past any telephone droid known to man. I know, as a former telephone droid (somebody fell for this hook line and sucker at my place of employment, and I swear if I heard the script today I would fall for it, too). Here's how it works: you get a list of easily publicly available information like, say, names and addresses from a source of your choice -- maybe buy a direct mail list, maybe use a public directory, whatever. Then, you search the list for Ethel, Gertrude, etc -- names which indicate women of a certain age. Then, you have your old woman compatriot call $TARGET (you can just cold call people randomly or make an educated guess -- if she's in a certain neighborhood in Chicago, she probably has an account with LaSalle Bank, etc). She acts very polite but just a little bit on the senile side. "Hello, this is Ethel Victim and I just had a question about my account. Oh, the number? Lets see... it had a two in it, I think. Or was that my insurance. Insurance, such a nasty business, you pay them every month and never see a dime while you're still alive! Haha, I guess I shouldn't be too sad about not having collected then. What were we talking about again, Dearie? Account number? Oh, let me get my boy Jimmie, he knows a lot about banks. He went to school, you know. Thirty-seventh in his class. Jimmy, come over here and talk to Susan from the bank for a minute" *swap to scammer* "Oh, hello. Listen, I'm really sorry but Mom is moving to a home this week and we're trying to get all her affairs straightened out. I put all the documents in my safe deposit box but forgot to get statements stopped to this address. Social security number? Oh, shoot, her card is in the box, too, and thats the other side of town. Listen, we're sort of busy today... I don't suppose I could ask you to look up her account number for me? Thanks Susan, you're a lifesaver. Yeah, Ethel Victim. V-I-C-T-I-M. 101 Oak Place. Want our phone number? OK, I'll get a pencil. Got it, thanks Susan. You have a nice day, too. Oh, I'll tell mom you said that, she'll be so pleased."
Next time/place you call up you can use the bit of information you gleaned as sort of a privilege escalation attack. i.e. Ethel has her account number written on the paper in front of her but... birthday? Jimmy was born on January 18th, 1974 -- it was the happiest day of her life, save marrying Harold on the 13th of November. But birthday. When was it? I should know my own birthday, but we never really had a party. I lived for the children. Oh, I'm getting old. Just another shriveled old prune who can't remember her own birthday? *sniff* Dearie, you won't tell anyone about this? I wouldn't want Jimmy to worry about me. I'm sure it will come back to me, let me call you back when it does... oh, you can look it up for me? You're so sweet.
Slashdot Mirror
Why spend actual money (even a low-end PC costs you what, a couple hundred dollars) just because of the hype, especially when you know darn well the likelihood of it ever getting booted up is zilch (particularly if technologically less-than-savvy people get an urgent "Don't wait, update your account information today!" email in their inbox -- which, incidentally, leaves them 100% as screwed no matter what Linux distribution you're using)
"Next year to be really, really scary on the computer security front", says a company which makes money from designing Comprehensive Solutions to Security Threats yet cannot decide whether keyloggers are silent but lethal or whether they have observable symptoms like a system slowdown (because you KNOW your 1 GHz Pentium just crawls when it tries to do processor-intensive tasks like parsing keyboard input). Honestly, these kind of folks give security research a bad name. Its like the doctor down the street who says "Hey, AIDS cases are likely to increase next year -- symptoms include coughing or feeling less energetic than you usually do. Be afraid!"
* imputations of criminal conduct
* allegations injurious to another in their trade, business, or profession
* imputations of loathsome disease
* imputations of unchastity in a woman
So if you live in a per-se state you're reasonably secure against being called a baby rapist, regardless of how much of a no-account rat-bastard you actually are (provided, of course, you are not actually raping babies).
Incidentally, even if you don't live in a per-se state its not exactly a high bar to prove the accusation of baby rapery damaged your reputation, although you might have trouble saying it damaged your reputation in the amount you want damages for. Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, blah blah blah.
All I remember is owning Australia is key to world domination. You get to deploy your hordes of Crockodile Dundee, Jeff Corwin, and Mel Gibson in his before-he-got-religion period (well, OK, Passion is probably more violent than Thunderdome, but in a different way). And the beatdown commences.
Lets see, in the last year I've racked up 30 days of /played in WoW (thats, oh, about two hours a night, averaged with some nights being none and some Saturdays being game-sessions) and my guild describes me as "casual".
Step 1: Say the number is prime.
Step 2: Destroy the universe.
Well, OK, so technically this algorithm might not terminate on the correct answer -- but try proving it by counterexample :)
From a security point of view, "less than five seconds on modern hardware" is absolutely unnecessary. After a transmission has been intercepted, and we work under the assumption that essentially all of them are these days, that transmission has to remain secure potentially for a very, very long time (sure, an encrypted radio communication might have no operational significance in two hours -- an encrypted dossier of a field agent had better stay secure until he's dead, and an encrypted report on security breaches in US nuclear command&control protocols better stay unbroken for the better part of the next century). And what takes a beowulf cluster of supercomputers 5 months to do today will be possible to crack on a botneck in less than a week by 2010, I guarantee you (I write distributed applications for a living and worked with a three-letter agency which was rather miffed that a competing TLA had the existence of their own internal distributed cracker leaked to the press back in 2002 or so). A couple years after that it will be a few minutes on dedicated hardware and a few years after that a desktop machine will smash it as a matter of course. Events like this are warning flares to people with serious security needs that you need to start transitioning to harder codes or longer key lengths.
I can never figure out what sort of blind machismo animates C programmers that they *know* pointers are inevitably insecure and feel this makes them Manly Men for overcoming the difficulty ("well, most of the time"). The best C coders in the world get bitten in the hindquarters by pointer math, on a regular basis (see the flaw in the libpng, which was old, stable, open-source, well-tested, written by experts, everything you could want for secure software). You wouldn't go to a doctor who said "Screw the diagnostic protocol that relies on wasting fifteen minutes performing checks to verify that you indeed have tuberculosis instead of silicosis of the lungs, I am a MANLY MAN and n00b doctors who don't immediately notice your lack of dialated pupils don't deserve to be in this profession!"
Thumbs up for "silly languages" that protect ME from the dumbness of the Manly Men who are writing my applications.
To give props to another game company, Three Rings Design has a puzzle game which, while it theoretically involves violence (cannon balls and pirates), is tame enough to be enjoyable both by their typical subscriber (thirty/fourty-something female) and also her young child. The take steps to make sure both the game and the community are family-friendly, including policing the games/forums, encouraging positive behavior in their community, and sticking to their guns on the issue of... well... not allowing guns in the game. And it looks like they're making a boatload of money, which is exactly the take-home lesson I'd like other developers to see: you can make money without being GTA.
My high school (Adlai E Stevenson) had a similar incident with the football team and bananas. They treated it like it was a PR nightmare and went on the full-court hush-it-up-press. And apparently it worked -- I can't easily Google mention of the story unless I go out looking for stories about hazing instead of stories about SHS football.
Where would you point a young engineer with a BS in CS for a good introduction to SQL? Something that explains things from the ground up but not in a way that would insult the intelligence of someone who has been working for a while on non-database CS technologies, with the eventual goal of adding SQL to that big toolbox we all carry around when we get asked to Do The Impossible By Next Tuesday.
Well, technically, the Constitution whitelists a few things (regulating commerce between the several states, conducting foreign policy, etc), blacklists everything else (see any number of laws voided for falling out of scope of defined authorities -- Violence Against Women Act, for one), and then blacklists some exceptions to the few things that were whitelisted (no matter how broadly you construe "regulate interstate commerce" you can't regulate it in such a manner as to establish a state religion, etc). The Chinese governmental system, on the other hand, just gives the government root.
In this case, its more like suing a crowbar manufacturer who produced a product named BurglarBuddy, sent out advertising circulars saying "123 Maple Lane has excellent diamonds and fine silver visible from the window, guarded by a flimsy padlock... Buy Your BurglarBuddy Today!", and had your customer support actively support burglars ("No no, silly, you can't use BurglarBuddy if you haven't disabled the Canine Property Protection Device (CPPD) first. Try ending the CPPD process by applying JuicySteak2000. Then use your BurglarBuddy as described on our website and you'll be at that vine vase in ten minutes or less. Thank you for contacting BurglarBuddy!")
It seems you just can't pull the wool over the eyes of judges after you've had your customer support give directions how to find specific copyrighted material on your network (page 1 of the opinion), positioned yourself as the new Napster by targetting ex-Napster users with a specifically designed client advertised to enable sharing copyrighted music (page 6 -- "Napster has announced that it may start charing a fee. Thats if the court don't order it shut it down first. What will you do to get around it?"), have a CTO who drops brilliant gems like "The goal is to get in trouble with the law and get sued. Its the best way to get in the news" (page 6), built in a feature to search for guaranteed-copyrighted Top40 songs (page 7), identified copyrighted materials you could find on their network by name in a newsletter to users as an enticement to use the network (page 7), etc, etc.
But I'm sure this could all have been a misunderstanding and they really meant to say "Hey, you can get free Shakespeare on this network, and thats why you'd use it, ignore the millions of copyrighted songs which we really can't do anything about like the latest from your favorites Brittney Spears, Usher, and random-boy-band-of-the-week available for free today." You can read that argument in the opinion, too. http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/27jun20051 200/www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/04pdf/04-480.p df
I totally agree on filesharing networks and Bittorrent. However, there are some other P2P networks (which are less used than filesharing, which is not synonymous with P2P just because it is the most popular app) which have socially redeeming features. P2P distributed caches or P2P computation grids, for example. P2P is just a technology, like anything else -- you take the "server" out or mostly out of the client-server paradigm, thats it. What you do with that is as open as any other CS meta-technology.
(rm -rf'ed an hour worth of work yesterday with a typo, so maybe I'm just bitter.)
Your command of English grammar and spelling leaves me utterly mystified as to why a journalism outlet could pass on hiring you.
The pickle brand my mother and I both use are Vlasic Pickles. Google found the right spelling (I had put in another s and a k). Thought you'd like to know. Oh, they really are good pickles -- you pay an absurd amount for them relative to the generic brand right next to them but the taste is worth it, even without the 25 cent off coupon.
OK, so thats the retail environment for you. Now, you'll notice that the price discrimination is enabled by one thing: differential access to information, or the "cost of search" if you want to think of it that way. You're already assuming that the cost of search for a better deal is going to be greater than the savings you'll realize. Question: do you consider $6 an hour for boring tedium a good use of your time? Many, many millions of people whose opinions are very valuable at Wal-Mart world headquarters do. The ultimate nightmare app for Walmart would be a scanner attached to your cellphone (already widely available here in Japan) which would just scan all the items you need and tell you "Buy pickles, diapers, baby formula, and orange juice at Walmart. Go to the Jewel three minutes away for apple juice, note paper, and their 8 for the price of 3 pizza deal."
Another thing retail loves is called a loss leader -- something which is a staple, like milk, priced so low it will actively get people to come into your store, where they'll naturally buy other items which are priced higher. This works because people might know, for example, that $1.50 a gallon milk is an absurdly good deal, but putting together a list of all the items you need is very difficult, so you just get people to comparison shop on a few high-profile items and nickle-and-dime them on, say, cereal. (This is also one thing small stores LOVE to do to Wal-Mart, since it is very, very difficult to beat Wal-Mart's pricing across the board.) You can have loss-leaders which are much more expensive than milk though -- computer monitors, for example. And that + google = scare the pants off of you if you work in retail. Because it will bring people to your store for the purpose of getting the loss leader and *nothing else*. Best Buy calls these sort of customers "demons" (Google it, interesting article on the phenomenon) -- if you can exploit the information gap between you and the store you can tremendously cut into their business.
On behalf of all Americans, I apologize if our screwy patent office has deprived Aussies of their God-given liberty to write bad novels combining MIT and Rip van Winkle.
If your bowels were designed better there wouldn't be any methane left in them, would there?
Yep, and then they condemn their customer support to the fifth circle of CS hell, because Warden is going to immediately start banning thousands of innocent users who have done nothing wrong except run a Sony DRM-protected CD in their computer at some point, ever, and now the included rootkit makes WoW think they are trying to pull a fast one. That generates one account banning, and the world's worst CS situtation -- your temporary worker can't even *understand* the issue that is behind the company policy so he can only follow it to the letter, and if Warden says you're guilty then you're guilty. Remember, WoW has over *one million* US subscribers. The intersection between those one million subscribers and high-selling music is really, really bloody large.
Yeah. NASA's entire budget, every single penny, could be redirected to DARPA/NIS/any other basic research supporting agency and we'd get more of what we want (applied technology and basic science breakthroughs) with less of the pissing billions of dollars into the void. $100 billion dollars it cost us to keep that rickety bucket of bolts up in orbit. ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS. One tenth of one percent of that would kickstart research on any number of causes. Call it the Space Program Memorial Challenge Grant or the We Planted a Flag On The "#$"#%ing Moon Now We're Doing Something Useful Grant if it makes you feel better.
An exhaustive list of cutting-edge scientific experiments conducted on the space station:
Next time/place you call up you can use the bit of information you gleaned as sort of a privilege escalation attack. i.e. Ethel has her account number written on the paper in front of her but... birthday? Jimmy was born on January 18th, 1974 -- it was the happiest day of her life, save marrying Harold on the 13th of November. But birthday. When was it? I should know my own birthday, but we never really had a party. I lived for the children. Oh, I'm getting old. Just another shriveled old prune who can't remember her own birthday? *sniff* Dearie, you won't tell anyone about this? I wouldn't want Jimmy to worry about me. I'm sure it will come back to me, let me call you back when it does... oh, you can look it up for me? You're so sweet.