And for $300, he would tell you exactly where you should dig, precisely how far you should dig, how much water you were going to get (GPM), how long it would last, whether it was subject to drought or could be relied upon during dry spells. He could also eliminate sources with salt, sulfur, iron, calcium and anything else you don't want in your water.... The Dowser gave his guarantee in writing, with a quadruple your money back if anything was less than what he promised. Goes dry? Not enough flow? Muddy, salty, iron, sulfur? He'll pay you $1200.
When I heard the story from my co-worker, the old fellow hadn't needed to pay anyone back in the 20 years he'd been doing it.
Maybe your co-worker wanted to find out if you were gullible enough to entertain the possibility that it was true. Or maybe he was getting kickbacks for promoting the guy to you. How did you or your co-worker verify that the guy hadn't needed to give any refunds? Crooks who make false claims like that are very common.
Many many people believe strongly in dowsing, but none of them have ever been able to demonstrate any dowsing ability in blind tests. I can't imagine any reasonable conspiracy that could cover up the evidence for such a common and easily tested phenomenon. The only dowser I ever met wanted to prove to me that he could do it. But the method he suggested wouldn't prove anything. Even when I explained why, he still couldn't understand why it wouldn't prove anything. Dowsers think they have good reason to believe in their skills, but they don't even know the difference between good evidence and worthless evidence.
Example: The Lord of the Rings is the Greatest Series Ever Written
TLotRitGSER This is actually a decent-security password, you've got decent length, 11 characters, and some upper/lower goodness.
I'd suggest just using the whole sentence. It would have at least as much entropy and would be more resistant to simple brute force breakage.
And I'm considering giving up on upper case in passwords. The lower case alphabet requires about 5 bits to encode, while adding uppercase only requires one more bit. I suspect that just making the password 25% longer would be about as easy to remember, and a lot faster to type.
I don't see why it would be unethical to do a double blind trial in the elderly. Simply find a bunch of elderly people who haven't taken the vaccine for the last few years, and talk enough of them into it to make a trial. They very likely weren't going to get the vaccine anyway, so if they end up in the placebo group, they won't be missing out on anything they wouldn't have missed anyway. Consult the skeptical researchers during the design of the study, and put this debate to rest.
If you can settle for G instead of N then you might want to look at the Asus WL-520GU for only $45. Asus is also friendly to dd-wrt and other firmwares. Unlike the Linksys WRT54GL, the 520GU also has a USB port you could plug a hard drive into and do your backups or download torrents or share a printer. Another advantage of getting one with a USB port is that your router's operating system can be any size and isn't limited to the router's 4MByte flash. I've had my 520GU for a few months now and haven't had any problems. I've had uptimes of more than a month, limited only by how long I've been able to go without somebody mistakenly unplugging it.
You seriously think only 30% of your hearing comes through the air into your ears but most - 70% comes in through your bones? That's absurd. Turn on your stereo and compare the volume with ear plugs in and with them out. Does that sound like only a 30% reduction in volume? It's less absurd to suggest that 70% of your own voice is heard by bone conduction, but I'd even be skeptical of that.
These things are pathetic. The salesmen and users would like you to fear them, but good earplugs are all you need unless you are very close. These LRADs are just arrays of powerful conventional tweeters, and are not focused any more than a conventional speaker the size of the array. They're only 150 dB at one meter in front of the device. The sound level will drop off rapidly according to the inverse square law as you get farther away. Plugging your ears with your fingers would probably prevent hearing damage while you go to get some good earplugs. An LRAD was used on some anti-whaling protesters and the protesters earplugs rendered the LRAD ineffective. However, that looked to be at a distance of something like 50 meters. See the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Range_Acoustic_Device for some good info.
I agree that the idea is ingenious. But on the only one I ran into, the word was completely indecipherable. I don't mean that it was really hard, I mean that it was a word so thoroughly mangled that it was clearly impossible to read by anyone, especially without context. The lack of context is one of the big weaknesses of the system. When a word is unclear, it's the words around it that give critical clues to what it is.
Isn't that basically suing yourself. How can anyone but the lawyers gain anything?
I was wondering that myself. The only thing I can think is that maybe the suit was to get money out of the insurance company. I still don't know why anyone would insure against something like that. The suit would have made more sense to me if it had been to recover money from the personal funds of the former CEO.
While the author of the page you linked to was trying to say that it's not called the tray, one of the commenters fired up spy++ and found that in fact the Microsoft named window classes down there still (as of 2003) have names like "Shell_TrayWnd", "TrayNotifyWnd", and "TrayClockWClass". Microsoft might not like it to be called the tray, but even Microsoft is stuck using the name themselves.
It seems like this function should be performed in the operating system. The firmware should just make available the info and commands an OS needs to do the right thing.
High winds can generate surprisingly large forces on a door, and thereby make outward opening doors much more challenging, or even dangerous, especially for small people. The hydraulic dampers found on many commercial doors can help keep doors moving slower and safer when caught by the wind.
For companies that don't allow simple incrementing of the password at each change, but rather require almost every character to be changed, I would suggest using a hash function to create a seemingly random but easily regenerated password. For example on Ubuntu the following command will give an easily reproducible password:
Just changing the month will give an entirely different password. Such a password will be dictionary and brute force proof unless the hacker knows this little generator scheme. And even if the hacker knows this scheme, using an easy to remember but long enough base password, will keep it dictionary and brute force proof. Even if someone knows that your little generator scheme increments the date, they still won't be able to predict next month's password by shoulder surfing this month's password. Unfortunately this may leave an unencrypted record of your password in your command or standard output log, which may also get copied to backup machines. Under windows these command line tools may not be available, so it may be necessary to create a small javascript program or something with similar functionality. That might also keep this input and output out of your logs. This might also be good for creating a completely different but easily reproducible password for every web site you log into, and prevent a hacker who obtains the web site's password file from brute forcing the site's hash of your password and getting your password to use on other sites.
And how would that card talk to the remote site? Through the OS, which is compromised. So that gains you nothing, and just creates a big target.
With public key cryptography you can authenticate yourself without revealing your private key to the other party or even to your own computer. The key can stay safely on your smart card. That doesn't solve all problems, but it has big advantages. For example, when you remove the card or shut down your computer, the hacker can no longer impersonate you or login to your servers, at least not until you power back up again. Also, with a button or keypad on the card, the number of authorizations can be limited to the ones you actively authorize by pushing the button or entering your pin code. If the smart card or similar device has a display, it can show you what you are authorizing, such as a bank transfer, including how much it's for and where it's going.
Hackers could adapt to the top few ftp client's storage formats and get 90% of passwords with little extra effort. On the other hand a key logger wouldn't capture your password often if it was stored on disk and therefore typed infrequently. The key logger could corrupt the password store and force the user to re-enter the password while logging the input at certain times or to certain dialog boxes. A man in the middle attack run from the infected computer could also extract the password from a secure ftp protocol. I could go on and on about easy ways to defeat ftps when an attacker has malware running on the target machine. Secure ftp protocols are for untrustworthy networks, not compromised hosts.
This is why I think everyone needs something like a smart card to store credentials. Modern operating systems are far to complex and vulnerable to be well secured, but a smart card can have a relatively small and simple operating system that can stand a decent chance of keeping your secret keys secret.
It is claimed that although on Airbus aircraft the computer usually prevents the pilot from doing anything stupid, the pilots can still override the computers if necessary. And furthermore, Boeing has apparently adopted similar computer controls as well.
So what if the employer is a Republican and you're a Democrat (or vice versa) and you've been participating in private Internet forums where you discuss political strategy? What if you've been communicating with your lawyer over a private Internet forum? What if you've been collaborating with partners on an invention you plan to patent over a private Internet forum. Does your prospective employer have a right to access all your private Internet communications? Why not just insist that all prospective employees put video cameras in every room of their house for a month before hiring?
If you have public accounts in your own name then they might be able to get away with this for those accounts. But if you use a fake name then I'd think you'd have some expectation of anonymity.
Do these election officials realize that law enforcement has an array of software available to secretly take control of cell phones? They use it to turn the microphone on so they can listen in on what's being said in the room. The software keeps the display and power lights off so the target doesn't even know the cell phone is listening in. The only way to stop this is to remove the battery from the phone. Should we just trust the CIA to tell us who won the election? Are we supposed to trust that this cellphone spyware won't make it into the wrong hands?
I love computers, but computer and cell phone voting are extremely dangerous to democracy. Even if it's not happening in your area, It's a great danger to the entire country.
Until the Linux community stops whining about the evils of Microsoft and begins to deliver a Linux-based desktop OS that is as simple and user-friendly as Microsoft Windows there will be no real deployment of Linux on the desktop.
No, ease of use is no longer the problem with Linux. The problems are; drivers, software, and familiarity. If by some magic the world were instantly altered so that Linux drivers were as common as Windows drivers, and as much software was available for Linux as Windows, and all the friends and coworkers had spent as much time getting to know Linux as Windows, then Linux would quickly dominate, even as it is.
Without such magic, Linux faces a very hard road. But even with such gigantic obstacles against Linux, Microsoft still recognizes Linux as a threat.
I think what Linux needs is excellent driver support. The biggest difficulty in using Linux is just getting it to work. If Linux came installed on everyone's computer with all the hardware working, and Windows had a patchwork of partially functioning drivers, it would be Windows that people would consider hard to use. The good news is that driver support seems to be getting better and better as time goes by. I think it will eventually get to the point that driver support will no longer be a major problem. Then Linux will take over.
Actually it might be Apple that comes to dominate as Linux drags down Windows, because Apple could easily implement full compatibility with Linux though it probably can't with Windows.
...
The letter of the law is what the law is, not the "intent" of the law.
Which means it would be illegal to withhold payments specified by law, and any lawsuit challenging such an act would likely succeed, with penalties. ...
After all, if the government can choose to not obey this law that you dislike, what's to prevent them from disobeying a law you like?
I want to make clear that I don't think the President shouldn't just ignore any law he thinks is a bad idea. Only in exceptional circumstances should the President disregard the letter of the law.
If the letter and consequences of the law were Congresses intent, the President must respect it.
If Congress has realized the consequences of the law and had ample opportunity to change it, but hasn't, then the President should let it be.
The letter of the law shouldn't and I think doesn't always prevail over the intent. In a criminal prosecution the defendant should be given the benefit of the letter of the law, but the executive branch isn't required to enforce a law that has an insane unintended consequence. When it is obviously the right thing to do, the President can invoke the "Necessary and Proper" clause of the Constitution.
A lawsuit against the IRS would be unlikely to prevail because Congress could just pass a law halting the lawsuit before it reached its conclusion.
I'm not advocating the President disobey a law just because he or I don't like it, but rather only when it has insane UNINTENDED consequences.
In the short term the solution for this is for the president to order the IRS to withhold these payouts until congress can close the loophole. If the paper companies sue, they would get laughed at or scolded by the judges as this is an obvious and evil perversion of the intent of the law.
Noonan v Staples is a bizarre but informative case. Noonan v Staples seems to be, but really isn't a precedent against truth as a defense for defamation. The reason it isn't is because for some strange reason Staples apparently didn't try to use the First Amendment to defend its statements. Because the parties didn't argue the issue before the court, the court refrained from deciding the case on the First Amendment issue. Instead the court just assumed the Massachusetts law was constitutional under the First Amendment. So whenever you're reading a court opinion, remember that the court's opinion might be bad law if the parties didn't argue all the relevant issues before the court.
On the other hand, truth actually may not always be a defense. A classic example is the case of a first officer writing in a log book "the captain is sober today".
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe your co-worker wanted to find out if you were gullible enough to entertain the possibility that it was true. Or maybe he was getting kickbacks for promoting the guy to you. How did you or your co-worker verify that the guy hadn't needed to give any refunds? Crooks who make false claims like that are very common.
Many many people believe strongly in dowsing, but none of them have ever been able to demonstrate any dowsing ability in blind tests. I can't imagine any reasonable conspiracy that could cover up the evidence for such a common and easily tested phenomenon. The only dowser I ever met wanted to prove to me that he could do it. But the method he suggested wouldn't prove anything. Even when I explained why, he still couldn't understand why it wouldn't prove anything. Dowsers think they have good reason to believe in their skills, but they don't even know the difference between good evidence and worthless evidence.
Journalists never went into journalism for the low pay, they want to be read.
I'd suggest just using the whole sentence. It would have at least as much entropy and would be more resistant to simple brute force breakage.
And I'm considering giving up on upper case in passwords. The lower case alphabet requires about 5 bits to encode, while adding uppercase only requires one more bit. I suspect that just making the password 25% longer would be about as easy to remember, and a lot faster to type.
I don't see why it would be unethical to do a double blind trial in the elderly. Simply find a bunch of elderly people who haven't taken the vaccine for the last few years, and talk enough of them into it to make a trial. They very likely weren't going to get the vaccine anyway, so if they end up in the placebo group, they won't be missing out on anything they wouldn't have missed anyway. Consult the skeptical researchers during the design of the study, and put this debate to rest.
If you can settle for G instead of N then you might want to look at the Asus WL-520GU for only $45. Asus is also friendly to dd-wrt and other firmwares. Unlike the Linksys WRT54GL, the 520GU also has a USB port you could plug a hard drive into and do your backups or download torrents or share a printer. Another advantage of getting one with a USB port is that your router's operating system can be any size and isn't limited to the router's 4MByte flash. I've had my 520GU for a few months now and haven't had any problems. I've had uptimes of more than a month, limited only by how long I've been able to go without somebody mistakenly unplugging it.
You seriously think only 30% of your hearing comes through the air into your ears but most - 70% comes in through your bones? That's absurd. Turn on your stereo and compare the volume with ear plugs in and with them out. Does that sound like only a 30% reduction in volume? It's less absurd to suggest that 70% of your own voice is heard by bone conduction, but I'd even be skeptical of that.
These things are pathetic. The salesmen and users would like you to fear them, but good earplugs are all you need unless you are very close. These LRADs are just arrays of powerful conventional tweeters, and are not focused any more than a conventional speaker the size of the array. They're only 150 dB at one meter in front of the device. The sound level will drop off rapidly according to the inverse square law as you get farther away. Plugging your ears with your fingers would probably prevent hearing damage while you go to get some good earplugs. An LRAD was used on some anti-whaling protesters and the protesters earplugs rendered the LRAD ineffective. However, that looked to be at a distance of something like 50 meters. See the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Range_Acoustic_Device for some good info.
I agree that the idea is ingenious. But on the only one I ran into, the word was completely indecipherable. I don't mean that it was really hard, I mean that it was a word so thoroughly mangled that it was clearly impossible to read by anyone, especially without context. The lack of context is one of the big weaknesses of the system. When a word is unclear, it's the words around it that give critical clues to what it is.
I invite anyone who claims pure water is not a pollutant to sit in a room full of it for 10 minutes.
Maybe we should have something like Rock Ridge for permissions on FAT32.
Use NTFS?
I was wondering that myself. The only thing I can think is that maybe the suit was to get money out of the insurance company. I still don't know why anyone would insure against something like that. The suit would have made more sense to me if it had been to recover money from the personal funds of the former CEO.
While the author of the page you linked to was trying to say that it's not called the tray, one of the commenters fired up spy++ and found that in fact the Microsoft named window classes down there still (as of 2003) have names like "Shell_TrayWnd", "TrayNotifyWnd", and "TrayClockWClass". Microsoft might not like it to be called the tray, but even Microsoft is stuck using the name themselves.
It seems like this function should be performed in the operating system. The firmware should just make available the info and commands an OS needs to do the right thing.
High winds can generate surprisingly large forces on a door, and thereby make outward opening doors much more challenging, or even dangerous, especially for small people. The hydraulic dampers found on many commercial doors can help keep doors moving slower and safer when caught by the wind.
For companies that don't allow simple incrementing of the password at each change, but rather require almost every character to be changed, I would suggest using a hash function to create a seemingly random but easily regenerated password. For example on Ubuntu the following command will give an easily reproducible password:
echo -n "LongUnchangingBasePasswordSiteNameJan2009" | sha512sum | xxd -r -p | tr -cd [:print:]
Just changing the month will give an entirely different password. Such a password will be dictionary and brute force proof unless the hacker knows this little generator scheme. And even if the hacker knows this scheme, using an easy to remember but long enough base password, will keep it dictionary and brute force proof. Even if someone knows that your little generator scheme increments the date, they still won't be able to predict next month's password by shoulder surfing this month's password. Unfortunately this may leave an unencrypted record of your password in your command or standard output log, which may also get copied to backup machines. Under windows these command line tools may not be available, so it may be necessary to create a small javascript program or something with similar functionality. That might also keep this input and output out of your logs. This might also be good for creating a completely different but easily reproducible password for every web site you log into, and prevent a hacker who obtains the web site's password file from brute forcing the site's hash of your password and getting your password to use on other sites.
With public key cryptography you can authenticate yourself without revealing your private key to the other party or even to your own computer. The key can stay safely on your smart card. That doesn't solve all problems, but it has big advantages. For example, when you remove the card or shut down your computer, the hacker can no longer impersonate you or login to your servers, at least not until you power back up again. Also, with a button or keypad on the card, the number of authorizations can be limited to the ones you actively authorize by pushing the button or entering your pin code. If the smart card or similar device has a display, it can show you what you are authorizing, such as a bank transfer, including how much it's for and where it's going.
Hackers could adapt to the top few ftp client's storage formats and get 90% of passwords with little extra effort. On the other hand a key logger wouldn't capture your password often if it was stored on disk and therefore typed infrequently. The key logger could corrupt the password store and force the user to re-enter the password while logging the input at certain times or to certain dialog boxes. A man in the middle attack run from the infected computer could also extract the password from a secure ftp protocol. I could go on and on about easy ways to defeat ftps when an attacker has malware running on the target machine. Secure ftp protocols are for untrustworthy networks, not compromised hosts.
This is why I think everyone needs something like a smart card to store credentials. Modern operating systems are far to complex and vulnerable to be well secured, but a smart card can have a relatively small and simple operating system that can stand a decent chance of keeping your secret keys secret.
It is claimed that although on Airbus aircraft the computer usually prevents the pilot from doing anything stupid, the pilots can still override the computers if necessary. And furthermore, Boeing has apparently adopted similar computer controls as well.
So what if the employer is a Republican and you're a Democrat (or vice versa) and you've been participating in private Internet forums where you discuss political strategy? What if you've been communicating with your lawyer over a private Internet forum? What if you've been collaborating with partners on an invention you plan to patent over a private Internet forum. Does your prospective employer have a right to access all your private Internet communications? Why not just insist that all prospective employees put video cameras in every room of their house for a month before hiring?
If you have public accounts in your own name then they might be able to get away with this for those accounts. But if you use a fake name then I'd think you'd have some expectation of anonymity.
Do these election officials realize that law enforcement has an array of software available to secretly take control of cell phones? They use it to turn the microphone on so they can listen in on what's being said in the room. The software keeps the display and power lights off so the target doesn't even know the cell phone is listening in. The only way to stop this is to remove the battery from the phone. Should we just trust the CIA to tell us who won the election? Are we supposed to trust that this cellphone spyware won't make it into the wrong hands? I love computers, but computer and cell phone voting are extremely dangerous to democracy. Even if it's not happening in your area, It's a great danger to the entire country.
No, ease of use is no longer the problem with Linux. The problems are; drivers, software, and familiarity. If by some magic the world were instantly altered so that Linux drivers were as common as Windows drivers, and as much software was available for Linux as Windows, and all the friends and coworkers had spent as much time getting to know Linux as Windows, then Linux would quickly dominate, even as it is.
Without such magic, Linux faces a very hard road. But even with such gigantic obstacles against Linux, Microsoft still recognizes Linux as a threat.
I think what Linux needs is excellent driver support. The biggest difficulty in using Linux is just getting it to work. If Linux came installed on everyone's computer with all the hardware working, and Windows had a patchwork of partially functioning drivers, it would be Windows that people would consider hard to use. The good news is that driver support seems to be getting better and better as time goes by. I think it will eventually get to the point that driver support will no longer be a major problem. Then Linux will take over.
Actually it might be Apple that comes to dominate as Linux drags down Windows, because Apple could easily implement full compatibility with Linux though it probably can't with Windows.
I want to make clear that I don't think the President shouldn't just ignore any law he thinks is a bad idea. Only in exceptional circumstances should the President disregard the letter of the law.
If the letter and consequences of the law were Congresses intent, the President must respect it.
If Congress has realized the consequences of the law and had ample opportunity to change it, but hasn't, then the President should let it be.
The letter of the law shouldn't and I think doesn't always prevail over the intent. In a criminal prosecution the defendant should be given the benefit of the letter of the law, but the executive branch isn't required to enforce a law that has an insane unintended consequence. When it is obviously the right thing to do, the President can invoke the "Necessary and Proper" clause of the Constitution.
A lawsuit against the IRS would be unlikely to prevail because Congress could just pass a law halting the lawsuit before it reached its conclusion.
I'm not advocating the President disobey a law just because he or I don't like it, but rather only when it has insane UNINTENDED consequences.
In the short term the solution for this is for the president to order the IRS to withhold these payouts until congress can close the loophole. If the paper companies sue, they would get laughed at or scolded by the judges as this is an obvious and evil perversion of the intent of the law.
Noonan v Staples is a bizarre but informative case. Noonan v Staples seems to be, but really isn't a precedent against truth as a defense for defamation. The reason it isn't is because for some strange reason Staples apparently didn't try to use the First Amendment to defend its statements. Because the parties didn't argue the issue before the court, the court refrained from deciding the case on the First Amendment issue. Instead the court just assumed the Massachusetts law was constitutional under the First Amendment. So whenever you're reading a court opinion, remember that the court's opinion might be bad law if the parties didn't argue all the relevant issues before the court.
On the other hand, truth actually may not always be a defense. A classic example is the case of a first officer writing in a log book "the captain is sober today".