It isn't like they can marry everywhere else in the US, and will leave CA in droves.
No, but California has just joined the ranks of states which explicitly forbid same sex marriage in the state constitution. This is a lot different than just not having a law either way on the matter (which is still the situation in a number of states).
It's worth noting that before the passage of prop 8, the state was one of the few explicitly allowing same-sex marriage. Not civil unions or some form of marriage-under-a-different-name-so-you-remember-it's-not-really-marriage-you-can't-really-be-in-love-you-freaks, but actual marriage.
This could also prevent same sex couples, who already have a legitimate marriage from a state like Massachusetts or Connecticut, from relocating to California, impairing Google's out-of-state job recruitment.
I'm not saying this will scare off all gay people, or even most, but a non-trivial number of gay couples will probably be leaving the state or choosing not to enter it.
This is not the new news you seem to think it is. TPB has always been quite active in removing malicious content, along with every other torrent site that wants to stay relevant. It's quite a necessity, as cleverly disguised trojans and bootable DVD images of Goatse are constantly being uploaded.
Of course "malicious software" is the argument here for removal of the torrent
I would argue this point. The main argument for removal of any torrent is usually "misleading description". Tricking people into downloading/viewing something they don't want is easily the most common form of internet pranksterism, and sites that allow users to post download links have to be ever vigilant. I suspect that a clearly, accurately labeled trojan would be allowed to stay on TBP. "Download and distribute! Infect your friends! Build your own botnet!"
But that raises the question, if it's clearly labeled is it still a trojan?
So long as the gas station had other transactions between his, it probably would go through. As someone who's run a register and credit card machine on a regular basis, I'm familiar with this situation. Usually only back to back, identical transactions are blocked; alternating cards or varying the transaction amount, even by $.01, will prevent this.
That he was able to do this is good news, given the rise of parking meters that accept credit, in my city. Otherwise, the repeated, evenly spaced $1.50 charges made at the same meter would cause massive issues.
A small handful of new games, most notably Left4Dead, show non-trivial performance improvement on quad cores, even at lower clock speeds.
This is a new development, and I wouldn't put a quad in a "budget" gaming box just to improve performance in a very small handful of new games, but all signs point to future games preferring quads.
This doesn't help me serve the clients, but it does help improve our metrics.
This is the cancer killing modern businesses; managing based on artificial performance metrics. Everyone spends time and effort trying to improve their metrics, doing counterproductive things in order to increase their bonus, or improve their employee evaluation, or just to keep the regional manager off their back.
If the numbers look good, no one looks deeper to see what's truly going on. If the numbers look bad, people figure out tricks to improve their metrics, rather than concentrating on serving the customer or providing a quality product.
I am convinced that recent banking crises were caused by the pervasiveness of metric-based bonuses and pay scales, and the bad management and poor decision making such a system encourages.
I was a Cingular customer pre-merger. I started seeing my service degrade slowly; I noticed it more prominently when I got a new 3g capable phone.
I went to an AT&T store, told them my problem. They gave me a new SIM card, and all my reception issues went away. The clerk said it was common; he said that phones with the old pre-merger SIM cards wouldn't connect to all the towers, so they were trying to give everyone new SIM cards. Not sure how much of that was actually technically accurate, but the core of it is that a free, up-to-date SIM card solves all problems.
From the blog linked in TFA (which is very concise, seriously, you can read it in under a minute, fucking do it):
It was the guy handling the IT (and, yes, the same guy who I caught stealing from the company, and who did a slash-and-burn on some servers on his way out) who made the choice to rely on RAID as the only backup mechanism for the SQL server. He had set up automated backups for the HTTP server which contains the PHP code, but, inscrutibly, had no backup system in place for the SQL data. The ironic thing here is that one of his hobbies was telling everybody how smart he was.
This doesn't excuse what happened, though: I should have taken a better look at what he'd left behind, and fixed all of the things that needed fixing.
Spoken like a person who has little practical experience with CONSUMER GRADE small gas engines. Most of these generators have extremely poor oil control, and aren't designed with such long continuous operation in mind. After these gennies have clocked a couple hundred hours, they WILL burn oil, and quite a bit of it. Read your owners manual, and it will probably warn you to check the oil every few hours of operation - this isn't just CYA put in by the lawyers, it's because it will begin burning oil very early in its lifespan.
The little 2 stroke generators, you never have to check the oil on. Premix, and you never have to worry about oil levels.
The biggest problem, beyond attempting to power everyone else who is on the same gang of transformers, is that when the power comes back on, it will be out of phase with your generator.
Because your generator's governor is nowhere near precise enough to hold a steady 60hz, even if you're lucky enough to be in phase the instant it switches back on, you're almost guaranteed to be 180 degrees out of phase in seconds.
Typically this is done via a vulnerable webapp, rather than an exploit of the underlying webserver.
Old versions of various blogging programs are particularly vulnerable - old Greymatter and MovableType versions come to mind immediately. But I imagine there are many other, smaller, niche products that are just as vulnerable but don't get the same kind of attention, so exploits can fly under the radar.
IE does NOT completely stop driveby downloads yet. Holes that allow them are being patched regularly, but they are by no means dead. Most of the zero-day exploits found in the wild these days are driveby type holes - all a user has to do is browse a legitimate website with a sketchy ad network, or better yet, a legitimate website that's been compromised to include a hidden iframe. Something is installed silently, typically avoiding UAC through a privilege escalation exploit. Not that anyone has UAC turned on, anyway. And most home machines are so sloppily patched that exploits from 2 months ago will still work. Assuming the autoupdater isn't still stuck prompting the user for SP1, in which case... they're already hosed.
Honda, however, used a ridiculously small number of key cuts through the late 90's.
I had a '94 Acura Integra, which had those wonderful Honda locks. When it was totaled, I bought another Integra (a '96). My old keys were a perfect match for the new car, and also for my roommate's Accord, and with a little jiggling would work on the Prelude that replaced it. That Prelude is broken into nearly every night - not even a case of motor oil is safe in the trunk.
This company probably didn't have an international calling plan of any sort, so they were stuck paying whatever obscene rate the local phone company charges for international calls, a la carte.
Also, the phreakers probably had multiple lines in action at any given time, so it wouldn't have taken too terribly long to rack up a large number of minutes.
Lastly, HUB probably didn't notice that anything was going on, until they got the paper bill in the postal mail. With a monthly billing cycle, plus an extra two or three weeks to receive the bill after the end of the cycle (and then a few weeks past that for the accounts payable clerk to bring it to the attention of the owner), I can imagine that this slipped by unnoticed for a long time.
I am good at my job. However, I am not a good bargainer. I am not a good negotiator. I am not good at groveling and begging my boss for a raise/better benefits/better hours.
I would much rather pay union dues to have someone else bargain for me, someone who is good at that sort of thing.
So you buy a VHS (or beta or Video2000.. 'tis the 80's, after all), get home, and then curse the heavens that The Corporate Man is keeping you down by not allowing you to magically play back that same video on both TVs, just for the pathetic excuse they bring forth that you would need a 2nd VCR?.. probably not. You'd just eventually get another VCR.
Actually, back in those days, it would be trivial to split the video signal coming out of the VCR and run cables across the house to the second TV(or lazier/cheaper yet, use the RF output for 1 tv, and the composite output for the second TV). I know many people who did just this to avoid buying a second VCR, back when they were still expensive enough for it to matter. The major difficulty was that you couldn't control the VCR from the other room, but the FBI warning and previews gave you plenty of time to press play and walk across the house, get some popcorn, etc.
Now, with modern consumer electronics, it is equally trivially possible to copy your entire movie library onto some networked storage, and play them back from a device anywhere on the network, thus only needing 1 Bluray drive for the house. The only thing in the way are the artificial limitations imposed by DRM.
I guess my point is that how we view these things has not truly changed. There is no "changed mindset that came with going digital"; what can be trivially done with inexpensive consumer electronics is all that has changed.
Your numbers are wrong, Bluray is never more than 54Mbps.
In any case, after you transcode to h.264 at a reasonable bitrate, which you're going to want to do anyway to avoid using 30 gigs of hard drive space per movie, even obsolete network equipment can handle it just fine.
I don't know if power management options are included in the windows group policies (it's been a long time since I took my MCSA class, and they didn't cover power options at all), but Windows lets you set a standby/hibernate/shutdown after XX minutes of idle, in the same menu that lets you set hard drive spindown and monitor standby.
Ok, I can see the argument for saving time when you power up in the morning (although if it takes 10min to power on, you're doing it wrong), but why include shutdown time? Are you sitting there watching it shutdown? Just hit the button and walk away.
People complain about Slackware's usability all the time. What I always see neglected is the fact that Slackware, as a distro, Just Works far more often than any other distro I've played with.
Slackware will install and work on a wide variety of exotic hardware, both modern and obsolete. It can be easily installed on machines that don't boot from CD, or even have a CD drive.
I've never encountered a machine that wouldn't install and boot slackware, with a working command line and network support, just by using the scripts that come on the install discs, and following the instructions.
I recently dropped out of college, where I was studying to be a high school teacher. I'm going into the trades, apprenticing to be a lineworker for the local power company.
Honestly, for the kind of pay teachers get, you really can't expect smart people. Any intelligent people who choose to go into that career are only doing it for moral reasons, lead by their idealism. They are by far the minority.
If you bought it from Steam you can't use any command-line options, unless there is a workaround that someone has figured out.
A highly technical workaround: Right click on the game in Steam. Choose the "properties" menu item. A multi-tab window will appear; the default tab is "General". In this tab, click on the "Set Launch Options..." button. Type your options in the provided box.
This is especially important if you're running something with memory leaks for a long period of time. You can keep using the machine as normal, because all the wasted memory just gets swapped out and there is little slowdown.
And there are a LOT of leaky programs out there for Windows. Keeping a swapfile/pagefile lets you use them.
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It isn't like they can marry everywhere else in the US, and will leave CA in droves.
No, but California has just joined the ranks of states which explicitly forbid same sex marriage in the state constitution. This is a lot different than just not having a law either way on the matter (which is still the situation in a number of states).
It's worth noting that before the passage of prop 8, the state was one of the few explicitly allowing same-sex marriage. Not civil unions or some form of marriage-under-a-different-name-so-you-remember-it's-not-really-marriage-you-can't-really-be-in-love-you-freaks, but actual marriage.
This could also prevent same sex couples, who already have a legitimate marriage from a state like Massachusetts or Connecticut, from relocating to California, impairing Google's out-of-state job recruitment.
I'm not saying this will scare off all gay people, or even most, but a non-trivial number of gay couples will probably be leaving the state or choosing not to enter it.
TPB is taking down torrents they don't like
This is not the new news you seem to think it is. TPB has always been quite active in removing malicious content, along with every other torrent site that wants to stay relevant. It's quite a necessity, as cleverly disguised trojans and bootable DVD images of Goatse are constantly being uploaded.
Of course "malicious software" is the argument here for removal of the torrent
I would argue this point. The main argument for removal of any torrent is usually "misleading description". Tricking people into downloading/viewing something they don't want is easily the most common form of internet pranksterism, and sites that allow users to post download links have to be ever vigilant. I suspect that a clearly, accurately labeled trojan would be allowed to stay on TBP. "Download and distribute! Infect your friends! Build your own botnet!"
But that raises the question, if it's clearly labeled is it still a trojan?
So long as the gas station had other transactions between his, it probably would go through. As someone who's run a register and credit card machine on a regular basis, I'm familiar with this situation. Usually only back to back, identical transactions are blocked; alternating cards or varying the transaction amount, even by $.01, will prevent this.
That he was able to do this is good news, given the rise of parking meters that accept credit, in my city. Otherwise, the repeated, evenly spaced $1.50 charges made at the same meter would cause massive issues.
A small handful of new games, most notably Left4Dead, show non-trivial performance improvement on quad cores, even at lower clock speeds.
This is a new development, and I wouldn't put a quad in a "budget" gaming box just to improve performance in a very small handful of new games, but all signs point to future games preferring quads.
This doesn't help me serve the clients, but it does help improve our metrics.
This is the cancer killing modern businesses; managing based on artificial performance metrics. Everyone spends time and effort trying to improve their metrics, doing counterproductive things in order to increase their bonus, or improve their employee evaluation, or just to keep the regional manager off their back.
If the numbers look good, no one looks deeper to see what's truly going on. If the numbers look bad, people figure out tricks to improve their metrics, rather than concentrating on serving the customer or providing a quality product.
I am convinced that recent banking crises were caused by the pervasiveness of metric-based bonuses and pay scales, and the bad management and poor decision making such a system encourages.
Those look like the most stereotypical dumb jock cops I have ever seen.
Excellent pictures.
This is also the case for me.
I was a Cingular customer pre-merger. I started seeing my service degrade slowly; I noticed it more prominently when I got a new 3g capable phone.
I went to an AT&T store, told them my problem. They gave me a new SIM card, and all my reception issues went away. The clerk said it was common; he said that phones with the old pre-merger SIM cards wouldn't connect to all the towers, so they were trying to give everyone new SIM cards. Not sure how much of that was actually technically accurate, but the core of it is that a free, up-to-date SIM card solves all problems.
From the blog linked in TFA (which is very concise, seriously, you can read it in under a minute, fucking do it):
It was the guy handling the IT (and, yes, the same guy who I caught stealing from the company, and who did a slash-and-burn on some servers on his way out) who made the choice to rely on RAID as the only backup mechanism for the SQL server. He had set up automated backups for the HTTP server which contains the PHP code, but, inscrutibly, had no backup system in place for the SQL data. The ironic thing here is that one of his hobbies was telling everybody how smart he was.
This doesn't excuse what happened, though: I should have taken a better look at what he'd left behind, and fixed all of the things that needed fixing.
Spoken like a person who has little practical experience with CONSUMER GRADE small gas engines. Most of these generators have extremely poor oil control, and aren't designed with such long continuous operation in mind. After these gennies have clocked a couple hundred hours, they WILL burn oil, and quite a bit of it. Read your owners manual, and it will probably warn you to check the oil every few hours of operation - this isn't just CYA put in by the lawyers, it's because it will begin burning oil very early in its lifespan.
The little 2 stroke generators, you never have to check the oil on. Premix, and you never have to worry about oil levels.
The biggest problem, beyond attempting to power everyone else who is on the same gang of transformers, is that when the power comes back on, it will be out of phase with your generator.
Because your generator's governor is nowhere near precise enough to hold a steady 60hz, even if you're lucky enough to be in phase the instant it switches back on, you're almost guaranteed to be 180 degrees out of phase in seconds.
Hilarity ensues.
Typically this is done via a vulnerable webapp, rather than an exploit of the underlying webserver.
Old versions of various blogging programs are particularly vulnerable - old Greymatter and MovableType versions come to mind immediately. But I imagine there are many other, smaller, niche products that are just as vulnerable but don't get the same kind of attention, so exploits can fly under the radar.
IE does NOT completely stop driveby downloads yet. Holes that allow them are being patched regularly, but they are by no means dead. Most of the zero-day exploits found in the wild these days are driveby type holes - all a user has to do is browse a legitimate website with a sketchy ad network, or better yet, a legitimate website that's been compromised to include a hidden iframe. Something is installed silently, typically avoiding UAC through a privilege escalation exploit. Not that anyone has UAC turned on, anyway. And most home machines are so sloppily patched that exploits from 2 months ago will still work. Assuming the autoupdater isn't still stuck prompting the user for SP1, in which case... they're already hosed.
Honda, however, used a ridiculously small number of key cuts through the late 90's.
I had a '94 Acura Integra, which had those wonderful Honda locks. When it was totaled, I bought another Integra (a '96). My old keys were a perfect match for the new car, and also for my roommate's Accord, and with a little jiggling would work on the Prelude that replaced it. That Prelude is broken into nearly every night - not even a case of motor oil is safe in the trunk.
go to www.4chan.org and troll the /b/ forum
lolno. In soviet 4chan, /b/ trolls you.
Here in Washington State, automated tickets don't go on your driving record at all.
Of course, we don't have speeding cameras here yet, only red-light cameras.
Well, there's three reasons I can see.
This company probably didn't have an international calling plan of any sort, so they were stuck paying whatever obscene rate the local phone company charges for international calls, a la carte.
Also, the phreakers probably had multiple lines in action at any given time, so it wouldn't have taken too terribly long to rack up a large number of minutes.
Lastly, HUB probably didn't notice that anything was going on, until they got the paper bill in the postal mail. With a monthly billing cycle, plus an extra two or three weeks to receive the bill after the end of the cycle (and then a few weeks past that for the accounts payable clerk to bring it to the attention of the owner), I can imagine that this slipped by unnoticed for a long time.
I am good at my job. However, I am not a good bargainer. I am not a good negotiator. I am not good at groveling and begging my boss for a raise/better benefits/better hours.
I would much rather pay union dues to have someone else bargain for me, someone who is good at that sort of thing.
So you buy a VHS (or beta or Video2000.. 'tis the 80's, after all), get home, and then curse the heavens that The Corporate Man is keeping you down by not allowing you to magically play back that same video on both TVs, just for the pathetic excuse they bring forth that you would need a 2nd VCR? .. probably not. You'd just eventually get another VCR.
Actually, back in those days, it would be trivial to split the video signal coming out of the VCR and run cables across the house to the second TV(or lazier/cheaper yet, use the RF output for 1 tv, and the composite output for the second TV). I know many people who did just this to avoid buying a second VCR, back when they were still expensive enough for it to matter. The major difficulty was that you couldn't control the VCR from the other room, but the FBI warning and previews gave you plenty of time to press play and walk across the house, get some popcorn, etc.
Now, with modern consumer electronics, it is equally trivially possible to copy your entire movie library onto some networked storage, and play them back from a device anywhere on the network, thus only needing 1 Bluray drive for the house. The only thing in the way are the artificial limitations imposed by DRM.
I guess my point is that how we view these things has not truly changed. There is no "changed mindset that came with going digital"; what can be trivially done with inexpensive consumer electronics is all that has changed.
Your numbers are wrong, Bluray is never more than 54Mbps.
In any case, after you transcode to h.264 at a reasonable bitrate, which you're going to want to do anyway to avoid using 30 gigs of hard drive space per movie, even obsolete network equipment can handle it just fine.
I don't know if power management options are included in the windows group policies (it's been a long time since I took my MCSA class, and they didn't cover power options at all), but Windows lets you set a standby/hibernate/shutdown after XX minutes of idle, in the same menu that lets you set hard drive spindown and monitor standby.
Ok, I can see the argument for saving time when you power up in the morning (although if it takes 10min to power on, you're doing it wrong), but why include shutdown time? Are you sitting there watching it shutdown? Just hit the button and walk away.
Or just hibernate.
People complain about Slackware's usability all the time. What I always see neglected is the fact that Slackware, as a distro, Just Works far more often than any other distro I've played with.
Slackware will install and work on a wide variety of exotic hardware, both modern and obsolete. It can be easily installed on machines that don't boot from CD, or even have a CD drive.
I've never encountered a machine that wouldn't install and boot slackware, with a working command line and network support, just by using the scripts that come on the install discs, and following the instructions.
I recently dropped out of college, where I was studying to be a high school teacher. I'm going into the trades, apprenticing to be a lineworker for the local power company.
I will make 2-3 times what I would have been making in education, and I don't even need 6 years of school and a state certification. I'm doing this because I am growing older and less idealistic, and because I actually want to make a wage that can support my new fiancé.
Honestly, for the kind of pay teachers get, you really can't expect smart people. Any intelligent people who choose to go into that career are only doing it for moral reasons, lead by their idealism. They are by far the minority.
If you bought it from Steam you can't use any command-line options, unless there is a workaround that someone has figured out.
A highly technical workaround:
Right click on the game in Steam. Choose the "properties" menu item. A multi-tab window will appear; the default tab is "General".
In this tab, click on the "Set Launch Options..." button. Type your options in the provided box.
This is especially important if you're running something with memory leaks for a long period of time. You can keep using the machine as normal, because all the wasted memory just gets swapped out and there is little slowdown.
And there are a LOT of leaky programs out there for Windows. Keeping a swapfile/pagefile lets you use them.