Ha! The US government has been slashdotted by its' own subjects. Sounds like it's time to write a script that will continuously submit an email until it's accepted (or forever, you know whatever).
I used to work as a tech consultant for a mortgage company. They told me that, since they did government loans, the FTC required them to comply with certain privacy standards. Until I came along they were just deleting all the data on the HD's and then selling old computers. When I showed them how deleted does not necessarily mean gone, they were shocked. Then they started smashing them with hammers and throwing them away. The next time I came by I told them how they could use certain utilities to really the data and avoid tossing the drive in a landfill.
Is there anywhere else? Ebay used to be 'the garage sale to the world'. With in overwhelming amount of corporate sellers, now it's more like 'outlet mall to the world'. And Craigslist is just want-ads with zero protection offered or even implied. Putting an ad is the local paper is sounding more and more like the best option (at least for selling).
Oh, they're still around. Albeit the ownership stopped all the ecommerce because nobody knows how to process 'all those web sales'. They also out-sourced all their IT work to some company called CMIT. They made (IMO) a giant step backward technologically speaking. I have had lunch with my former boss a couple of times since I left. He says things are fine, but he misses having computer problems fixed right away. Instead he has to wait until the tech makes his weekly visit (and paying CMIT nearly the same as he was paying me).
In a past job I worked for a small, $million+/year company with only about 12 employees. I was the IT department of one. I sat in a A/C room with a single rack of servers. Even at this small scale the managers and owners had feeling ranging from apathy to naked disgust for what I did. None of then understood it. All they knew was I was costing the company money and not 'making anything'. I would try to point out that nearly all in revenue the company made was dependent on my systems working properly.....but it was to no avail. Despite getting paid well after about 9 years I was done. They paid me well and handed out bonuses like water, but I finally ended up going to work for a non-profit last year. It's amazing how much more pleasure I get from my work when providing excellent service, not maximizing profit, is what I strive for.
Whatever it is you can bet the scientist community will be quick to publish a theory as to its' identification. And that theory will be immediately disseminated to the public as a fact. And then any following theories (even more plausible ones) will be discarded as foolish.
This obviously raises some questions about creationism..
Since the scientist did the (almost) creating here, what questions would this raise? Now if the (almost) alive protocells had popped into existence by random chance and from a void of nothingness, that would raise some uncomfortable questions.
I agree there is not substitute for educating users about the pitfalls of getting click-happy. But it's a bit naive to just call all AV software BS across the board. There are any number of ways to get 'pwned' without ever having to click a single button - especially in Windows. One that comes to mind is our old friend 'autorun'. Every Windows system since '95 has come with this little chestnut turned on by default. You want to put a keystroke logger or other malicious code on someones' Windows system? Just burn it to a CD and write an autorun.inf file to do whatever you like silently and without user interaction. Without any security software running, the user is totally hosed.
You think you can educate the user(s) to remember to always hold down shift when inserting a CD/DVD? Yeah, good luck with that.
And SLA = "Service Level Agreement" BTW*
*BTW = "By The Way" AFAIK**
**AFAIK = "As Far As I Know"
Wow that's a lot of acronyms! Let me be the first to say: Double You Tea Eff?
What's the purpose of the Free Software Foundation? In my experience working for/with non-profits, I would suspect the entire organization is just a tax-shelter for some high rollers in the industry. Why pay tax on your 6 figure salary, when you can donate 80% to a 501(c)(3) 'foundation' and write it off as a deduction? Then you get hired by the foundation as a manager, consultant, etc....and make all if not more of your money back through car allowances, marginally monitored expense accounts, and things adorably referred to as 'living stipends'. It's really kind of a sweet deal if you can pull it off.
This sounds like one of those made-up names the guys on MST3K would come up with. Ragnar Tornquist? If ring-wraiths were real and were active in the adult film industry, they would have names like this.
I was surprised recently when my back asked for all this type of information (i.e. childhood friend, first school), but didn't have me confirm a single field. There was just a single text field for each question. God help me if I fat-fingered one of the answers. Was my first school All City Elementary...or All City Elemntary? OH CARP!
If it is a GPS they are using then it would never send anything, it would just receive coordinates from satellites (like a car radio is one-way only). Of course they could be using some king of GPS/cellular hybrid to record location and call it into a server somewhere (that's how OnStar works AFAIK)
This would be like a third party mirroring Slashdot's stories without Slashdot's advertisements, costing Slashdot revenue.
I block all the/. script and ads anyway. So I guess I am unethical. And so are people who use the Tivo to skip commercials.
Using the airline's website in this manner is not only illegal....
Now IANAL, but I am reasonably certain it's not. The information on the public Internet and viewable to anyone. It's no more illegal that Best Buy sending 'competitive secret shoppers' to the local Circuit City so they can match their prices. As long as these site are not misrepresenting themselves (i.e. posing as customers, giving fake CC data), I don't see how the law would have any issues with it.
...but it also causes a lot of slowdowns and other problems for the people who actually go to the airline's website.
So can googlebot or any other app that crawls your site. The 3rd party brokers would have to be sending massive requests to the airline server to make any significant difference. And they very well may be doing just that. But any rookie sysadmin could easily block those request if they became a problem.
When a business is run in 'negative profit' mode (Ryanair, like most airlines, loses money on nearly every flight) the logic of business changes. They are no longer interested in making money, but in minimizing how much they will lose. It's kind of like someone who uses bankruptcy as a financial planning tool. They know full well that they are going to file for bankruptcy every 10 years, so than manage their money accordingly.
I have always been surprised to see this. You would think the big game developers would make their people sign no-compete contracts. Do the corporation think that, after showing a developer the secret closet, they are never going to use those secrets to go out on their own?
I have no problem with either of those possibilities. Anything offered free shouldn't be considered stable. Now, if Flickr went south, and they didn't refund my annual 'pro' fee, that could be an issue.
With so much 'stick it to the customer' activity from corporations in the past several years regarding digital music, it is indeed nice to see one of the big players actually offer this without being forced to by a lawsuit. It almost makes up for forcing me to get a Yahoo account to continue using Flickr. Almost.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha! The US government has been slashdotted by its' own subjects. Sounds like it's time to write a script that will continuously submit an email until it's accepted (or forever, you know whatever).
I used to work as a tech consultant for a mortgage company. They told me that, since they did government loans, the FTC required them to comply with certain privacy standards. Until I came along they were just deleting all the data on the HD's and then selling old computers. When I showed them how deleted does not necessarily mean gone, they were shocked. Then they started smashing them with hammers and throwing them away. The next time I came by I told them how they could use certain utilities to really the data and avoid tossing the drive in a landfill.
Is there anywhere else? Ebay used to be 'the garage sale to the world'. With in overwhelming amount of corporate sellers, now it's more like 'outlet mall to the world'. And Craigslist is just want-ads with zero protection offered or even implied. Putting an ad is the local paper is sounding more and more like the best option (at least for selling).
The link in the summary goes to "http://slashdot.org/ahref=". Nice.
Oh, they're still around. Albeit the ownership stopped all the ecommerce because nobody knows how to process 'all those web sales'. They also out-sourced all their IT work to some company called CMIT. They made (IMO) a giant step backward technologically speaking. I have had lunch with my former boss a couple of times since I left. He says things are fine, but he misses having computer problems fixed right away. Instead he has to wait until the tech makes his weekly visit (and paying CMIT nearly the same as he was paying me).
In a past job I worked for a small, $million+/year company with only about 12 employees. I was the IT department of one. I sat in a A/C room with a single rack of servers. Even at this small scale the managers and owners had feeling ranging from apathy to naked disgust for what I did. None of then understood it. All they knew was I was costing the company money and not 'making anything'. I would try to point out that nearly all in revenue the company made was dependent on my systems working properly.....but it was to no avail. Despite getting paid well after about 9 years I was done. They paid me well and handed out bonuses like water, but I finally ended up going to work for a non-profit last year. It's amazing how much more pleasure I get from my work when providing excellent service, not maximizing profit, is what I strive for.
Whatever it is you can bet the scientist community will be quick to publish a theory as to its' identification. And that theory will be immediately disseminated to the public as a fact. And then any following theories (even more plausible ones) will be discarded as foolish.
Fifty bucks says this was written by a dude.
Sure it can. It's done all the time. Like this:
[autorun] open=Autoplay.exe -auto icon=Autoplay\resdata\install.ico,0
With an out-of-the-box default installation of XP pro SP 2, this will bypass all user interaction.
Since the scientist did the (almost) creating here, what questions would this raise? Now if the (almost) alive protocells had popped into existence by random chance and from a void of nothingness, that would raise some uncomfortable questions.
An autorun.inf file can be written to bypass this message.
I agree there is not substitute for educating users about the pitfalls of getting click-happy. But it's a bit naive to just call all AV software BS across the board. There are any number of ways to get 'pwned' without ever having to click a single button - especially in Windows. One that comes to mind is our old friend 'autorun'. Every Windows system since '95 has come with this little chestnut turned on by default. You want to put a keystroke logger or other malicious code on someones' Windows system? Just burn it to a CD and write an autorun.inf file to do whatever you like silently and without user interaction. Without any security software running, the user is totally hosed.
You think you can educate the user(s) to remember to always hold down shift when inserting a CD/DVD? Yeah, good luck with that.
And SLA = "Service Level Agreement" BTW* *BTW = "By The Way" AFAIK** **AFAIK = "As Far As I Know" Wow that's a lot of acronyms! Let me be the first to say: Double You Tea Eff?
So you want to simultaneously discard and store the original DVDs? I think I see a flaw in your process right there....
What's the purpose of the Free Software Foundation? In my experience working for/with non-profits, I would suspect the entire organization is just a tax-shelter for some high rollers in the industry. Why pay tax on your 6 figure salary, when you can donate 80% to a 501(c)(3) 'foundation' and write it off as a deduction? Then you get hired by the foundation as a manager, consultant, etc....and make all if not more of your money back through car allowances, marginally monitored expense accounts, and things adorably referred to as 'living stipends'. It's really kind of a sweet deal if you can pull it off.
This sounds like one of those made-up names the guys on MST3K would come up with. Ragnar Tornquist? If ring-wraiths were real and were active in the adult film industry, they would have names like this.
At least all the Chinese prisons serve Chinese food (or as the Chinese call it, "food").
Aren't those two things universally exclusive? Unless you're a hooker, in which case both would apply.
I was surprised recently when my back asked for all this type of information (i.e. childhood friend, first school), but didn't have me confirm a single field. There was just a single text field for each question. God help me if I fat-fingered one of the answers. Was my first school All City Elementary...or All City Elemntary? OH CARP!
If it is a GPS they are using then it would never send anything, it would just receive coordinates from satellites (like a car radio is one-way only). Of course they could be using some king of GPS/cellular hybrid to record location and call it into a server somewhere (that's how OnStar works AFAIK)
I block all the /. script and ads anyway. So I guess I am unethical. And so are people who use the Tivo to skip commercials.
Now IANAL, but I am reasonably certain it's not. The information on the public Internet and viewable to anyone. It's no more illegal that Best Buy sending 'competitive secret shoppers' to the local Circuit City so they can match their prices. As long as these site are not misrepresenting themselves (i.e. posing as customers, giving fake CC data), I don't see how the law would have any issues with it.
So can googlebot or any other app that crawls your site. The 3rd party brokers would have to be sending massive requests to the airline server to make any significant difference. And they very well may be doing just that. But any rookie sysadmin could easily block those request if they became a problem.
When a business is run in 'negative profit' mode (Ryanair, like most airlines, loses money on nearly every flight) the logic of business changes. They are no longer interested in making money, but in minimizing how much they will lose. It's kind of like someone who uses bankruptcy as a financial planning tool. They know full well that they are going to file for bankruptcy every 10 years, so than manage their money accordingly.
I have always been surprised to see this. You would think the big game developers would make their people sign no-compete contracts. Do the corporation think that, after showing a developer the secret closet, they are never going to use those secrets to go out on their own?
I have no problem with either of those possibilities. Anything offered free shouldn't be considered stable. Now, if Flickr went south, and they didn't refund my annual 'pro' fee, that could be an issue.
With so much 'stick it to the customer' activity from corporations in the past several years regarding digital music, it is indeed nice to see one of the big players actually offer this without being forced to by a lawsuit. It almost makes up for forcing me to get a Yahoo account to continue using Flickr. Almost.