If you want to be certain of your PC's "botnet status", simply connect directly to the internet without a firewall or Network Address Translation. Usually you can do this by plugging directly into the port that the cable company gives you. Then enable filesharing in windows to allow "anyone" to read/write. Ignore the warning that pops up. Wait ten minutes. Reboot.
This is almost guaranteed to infect you, and you'll have some certainty about the status. The mean time between attempted attacks is less than five minutes now.
WARNING, do not attempt this if you don't know what you are doing. I am not responsible for any harm if you follow these instructions!!!! (disclaimer for the idiots.)
wow. Finally somebody said it! Why re-install an OS?
We have hired young developers and techs, and, for some reason, many seem to like to do that. It's like step 1 in their troubleshooting: Well, let's wipe the hard drive and re-install - see if the problem goes away. I am constantly amazed at that attitude! I have run many computers over the years, and been responsible for thousands, and I don't recall EVER having to do a wipe and re-install. That's a last resort. Troubleshoot first.
On second thought, I HAVE taken old Windows machines and installed Red Hat over them. But not as part of a troubleshooting process.
We hired a young software developer about 18 months ago, and during his first week, I asked him to perform a fairly simple task, and he told me that he'd have to do it tomorrow, because he was in the middle of a wipe / re-install of his PC. I'm like "WTF????" He didn't last 30 days before we "encourged" him to leave.
I know I tried to validate my VALID windows copy five times and failed each time. So I guess I'm one of the one-in-five. One valid copy that was unable to validate; five invalid attempts.
I think you mean that historically Exit Polls have matched *Reported* Election Results better than other polls.
If you buy into the articles premise that Reported Election Results potentially do not match the *Actual* vote, then have proven nothing.
It's analogous to saying "Jimmy the Greek was a great forecaster of football results. He knew how to set the point-spread so that it didn't move much after the betting." That doesn't make him great at picking the winner. It only makes him great at picking the *favorite and the point spread* that will split the betting. (The results of the game are irrelevant to his job, and so he was hardly a great forecaster of the results.)
I'd really like to compare polls to actual results. But without a paper trail, we'll never know how accurate exit polls are, will we?
Re:Poll workers often adjust the results
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
I live in a relatively large city (top 30 in size in the US), in a conservative part of the country. If I didn't hang out on Slashdot and work in the culturally diverse part of town, I would have known very few people who publicly admitted voting for Kerry. I mean, vocal support in the typical party around town was 20 to 1 in favor of Bush in 2004. Not even close. Signs in the neighborhoods (whether they be upscale suburban, rural, or 50 year old homes) were easily 10 to 1 in favor of Bush. Bumper Stickers were 5 to 1 in favor of Bush. (Highly accurate estimates, I know).
In the very few areas around the local university and in the culturally diverse areas, you could see the Kerry signs. But I remember casually bringing up in conversation MULTIPLE times out in the suburbs: "do you know ANY Kerry supporters?", and people would struggle to name maybe their wife's best friend's cousin or something. I mean, it was so blatently skewed that it was fun and safe to mention.
My point is, if you are sitting in NYC or San Francisco, you probably saw just the opposite, and wonder how Bush could have won. It must have been theft of the election. I was mildly shocked it was so close.
At least these authors seem to take a mathematical view of the results. I know my "polls" were highly flawed but the results were not even close.
Ha, no I didn't notice that FORTRAN was misspelled (must have been early!). I did notice that I misspelled scary though! ah... typos are OK, but I think the industry has fallen from Grace if we have forgotten the origins of COBOL (and the old punch card hopper).
Scarey to think that someone on Slashdot doesn't know that it's spelled with two O's. Not to be a spelling Nazi, but this is Computer Science stuff. We should know it! (...Unless you aren't bilingual and English isn't your language. There, now it's relevant to the thread.)
I wish this software were widely available and widely installed. Always good to have a plausible deniability defense, in case an aggressive prosecutor wants to make an example out of you for whatever.
I think the problem with this defense for slashdot users is that they should know better. You couldn't pleed innocent due to a trojan, because you should, as an "expert" in the field, know to have your defenses up, virus protection in place, etc. Like an accountant would have a hard time battling a tax fraud case claiming he didn't know the law.
oops.... I assumed slashdot users have expertise. My bad.
In addition, since your income is lower, you'll be paying slightly less income tax on the rest of your income.
This is nonsense (as far as the US tax code goes).
Your MARGINAL tax rate may go down, if you decrease your income. But the amount you are taxed on that first dollars does not decrease. As an example, say you were evaluating two scenarios: a $50K salary vs a $60K salary. The tax on the first $50K will be identical.
See tax tables linked above. This is true no matter what figures you select. No matter if you cross into a "new tax bracket". Because the new tax bracket rate ONLY applies to the money that exceeds the base of the tax bracket, NOT on the "first dollar".
Check out the difference between Marginal tax rate and Effective tax rate, and you may understand.
Yes, the shareholders elected the Board. So ultimately you pay for your bad choice (assuming you're a shareholder). Now, if you (as a shareholder) want to go after the individual Board members, have at it.
Give him any super-secret code you want! They're all public. The ballots are public... go pick out a ballot that will make your union manager happy. The only thing that links you to your ballot is the code that you have. If you want to pick out a different one for purposes of "fooling" someone who illegally demands to see your vote - have at it!
Ballot 1 voted: Smith for president
Ballot 2 voted: Jones for president
If you know your code was 1, but you want to tell someone that yours was 2, how hard is that?
Why doens't anyone get this? Make the ballots public info.
I'd prefer a published file that had all the ballots in voter-readable form.
Imagine a website that you could go to (either at the polls, or at home after the election) where you could key in your super-secret code and verify your vote. Imagine a series of PDF's auto-generated (or even more compact and readable than that). Imagine being able to pull up every ballot in your precinct, and being able to verify the ballots against the precinct totals to see how your precinct contributed to the State totals.
In my opinion this would be far more valuable than paper, which may be counted by the same (potentially corrupt) individuals as those who are manning the voting machines. Total transparency. Let the PEOPLE verify the results!
Maybe we could turn to AOL to learn how (not) to "anonomize" all the ballots.
To all you nay-sayers, who think that Web 2.0 (and now 3.0) is just hype and marketing blabber:
Back in the old days, I heard all this talk about "databases". Some new technology that was going to really take off! Come to find out, they're just a collection of files - linked lists, hash tables, data fields and meta data. Maybe a retrieval tool and an editor, with a little API. Nothing new. Certainly nothing revolutionary. We've been doing this for years. Nothing to see here; move along.
Ends up my buddy Larry Ellison didn't see it that way. Now he's on the list of Forbes richest people. And there are very few people who think database is just marketing blabber.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but we know your operating system is a dog.
This is almost guaranteed to infect you, and you'll have some certainty about the status. The mean time between attempted attacks is less than five minutes now.
WARNING, do not attempt this if you don't know what you are doing. I am not responsible for any harm if you follow these instructions!!!! (disclaimer for the idiots.)
We have hired young developers and techs, and, for some reason, many seem to like to do that. It's like step 1 in their troubleshooting: Well, let's wipe the hard drive and re-install - see if the problem goes away. I am constantly amazed at that attitude! I have run many computers over the years, and been responsible for thousands, and I don't recall EVER having to do a wipe and re-install. That's a last resort. Troubleshoot first.
On second thought, I HAVE taken old Windows machines and installed Red Hat over them. But not as part of a troubleshooting process.
We hired a young software developer about 18 months ago, and during his first week, I asked him to perform a fairly simple task, and he told me that he'd have to do it tomorrow, because he was in the middle of a wipe / re-install of his PC. I'm like "WTF????" He didn't last 30 days before we "encourged" him to leave.
Unfortunately we got cut off, so I was unable to receive your last transmission "4. Profit"
It may not immediately start up, but it could soon enough - next reboot. Next time a certain program is run (Word, Excel, IE, etc).
It gives us a way to read stories which share something in common:
- http://slashdot.org/tags/yes
- http://slashdot.org/tags/no
- http://slashdot.org/tags/maybe
Here are sets of stories that all have something in common. Lame questions. And it's funny how many stories are on all three lists!Think about it. You walk into a video store and you see Rot-13 and right next to it you see Rot-7 --which one you gonna spring for?
Not 13. Seven. Seven Little monkeys sitting on a fence...
I know I tried to validate my VALID windows copy five times and failed each time. So I guess I'm one of the one-in-five. One valid copy that was unable to validate; five invalid attempts.
Me? I'm just the internet's 3rd cousin once removed.
If you buy into the articles premise that Reported Election Results potentially do not match the *Actual* vote, then have proven nothing.
It's analogous to saying "Jimmy the Greek was a great forecaster of football results. He knew how to set the point-spread so that it didn't move much after the betting." That doesn't make him great at picking the winner. It only makes him great at picking the *favorite and the point spread* that will split the betting. (The results of the game are irrelevant to his job, and so he was hardly a great forecaster of the results.)
I'd really like to compare polls to actual results. But without a paper trail, we'll never know how accurate exit polls are, will we?
In the very few areas around the local university and in the culturally diverse areas, you could see the Kerry signs. But I remember casually bringing up in conversation MULTIPLE times out in the suburbs: "do you know ANY Kerry supporters?", and people would struggle to name maybe their wife's best friend's cousin or something. I mean, it was so blatently skewed that it was fun and safe to mention.
My point is, if you are sitting in NYC or San Francisco, you probably saw just the opposite, and wonder how Bush could have won. It must have been theft of the election. I was mildly shocked it was so close.
At least these authors seem to take a mathematical view of the results. I know my "polls" were highly flawed but the results were not even close.
Ha, no I didn't notice that FORTRAN was misspelled (must have been early!). I did notice that I misspelled scary though! ah... typos are OK, but I think the industry has fallen from Grace if we have forgotten the origins of COBOL (and the old punch card hopper).
Scarey to think that someone on Slashdot doesn't know that it's spelled with two O's. Not to be a spelling Nazi, but this is Computer Science stuff. We should know it! (...Unless you aren't bilingual and English isn't your language. There, now it's relevant to the thread.)
Quick, somebody tag this article "Yes".
I think the problem with this defense for slashdot users is that they should know better. You couldn't pleed innocent due to a trojan, because you should, as an "expert" in the field, know to have your defenses up, virus protection in place, etc. Like an accountant would have a hard time battling a tax fraud case claiming he didn't know the law.
oops.... I assumed slashdot users have expertise. My bad.
But the commute is so much better. It'd be a 5 hour drive for me to even get to a non-US company.
Your MARGINAL tax rate may go down, if you decrease your income. But the amount you are taxed on that first dollars does not decrease. As an example, say you were evaluating two scenarios: a $50K salary vs a $60K salary. The tax on the first $50K will be identical.
See tax tables linked above. This is true no matter what figures you select. No matter if you cross into a "new tax bracket". Because the new tax bracket rate ONLY applies to the money that exceeds the base of the tax bracket, NOT on the "first dollar".
Check out the difference between Marginal tax rate and Effective tax rate, and you may understand.
<NSFW ALT="http://www.google.com">
This would redirect you to google, if you are browsing in NSFW mode.
Yes, the shareholders elected the Board. So ultimately you pay for your bad choice (assuming you're a shareholder). Now, if you (as a shareholder) want to go after the individual Board members, have at it.
Ballot 1 voted: Smith for president
Ballot 2 voted: Jones for president
If you know your code was 1, but you want to tell someone that yours was 2, how hard is that?
Why doens't anyone get this? Make the ballots public info.
The point is that you can verify EVERY vote, not just your own. RTFP.
If 100% of the people insist that the light was there, perhaps it's YOU that's not seeing it!
I'd prefer a published file that had all the ballots in voter-readable form.
Imagine a website that you could go to (either at the polls, or at home after the election) where you could key in your super-secret code and verify your vote. Imagine a series of PDF's auto-generated (or even more compact and readable than that). Imagine being able to pull up every ballot in your precinct, and being able to verify the ballots against the precinct totals to see how your precinct contributed to the State totals.
In my opinion this would be far more valuable than paper, which may be counted by the same (potentially corrupt) individuals as those who are manning the voting machines. Total transparency. Let the PEOPLE verify the results!
Maybe we could turn to AOL to learn how (not) to "anonomize" all the ballots.
Back in the old days, I heard all this talk about "databases". Some new technology that was going to really take off! Come to find out, they're just a collection of files - linked lists, hash tables, data fields and meta data. Maybe a retrieval tool and an editor, with a little API. Nothing new. Certainly nothing revolutionary. We've been doing this for years. Nothing to see here; move along.
Ends up my buddy Larry Ellison didn't see it that way. Now he's on the list of Forbes richest people. And there are very few people who think database is just marketing blabber.
I should have paid more attention!