Seriously though, you don't need a huge success rate for this to be a profitable endeavour. That guy was an unusual case -- I imagine that it usually takes about thirty seconds to figure out that your target is unsuitable, at which point you hang up and move to the next phone book entry.
As a pedant I am compelled to point out that, if you're on an 18-hour flight, you'll definitely have in-seat power. (I do agree that LCD sucks for extended reading, though. And there are plenty of >10-hour flights without in-seat power.)
Holy shit, that's incredible. They've invented a Captcha that's easier for a bot than for a human. I can only assume that they never figured out what CAPTCHAs were for, and assumed that their sole purpose was to annoy users.
I'm no big fan of the "viewing platform" toilet myself (FWIW, they're not common throughout Europe -- I've only seen them in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands). But could you explain to me how I use an American toilet without dunking my dangleberries into the water a few scant centimetres beneath the rim? European toilets (of both the German and "normal" design) have a great deal more clearance.
Then again, Assange also said that Sweden was a great place where he felt totally safe,
right up until the whole rape thing happened, at which point Sweden was suddenly declared
a notorious US lackey...
Is that a thinly veiled insinuation that he is mentally deficient? To quote Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
What facts have changed? If Sweden would (as alleged) be happy to hand him over to the USA now, they would presumably have been happy to do so before the rape case. Assange's penis doesn't really have much bearing on Sweden's extradition policy.
Then again, Assange also said that Sweden was a great place where he felt totally safe,
right up until the whole rape thing happened, at which point Sweden was suddenly declared
a notorious US lackey...
Is that a thinly veiled insinuation that he is mentally deficient? To quote Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
What facts have changed? If, as Assange claims, Sweden would delightedly offer him up to the US, then they would presumably also have done so before the rape case, when he was happily living there. Sweden's extradition policy didn't (AFAIK) change radically at exactly the time Assange was charged with rape.
So... mentally deficient? I don't know. I think that the most charitable interpretation would be that he simply didn't bother checking whether Sweden was "safe" (according to his judgement) before publicly declaring it safe and deciding to live there -- I wouldn't say that that's mentally deficient, but it's certainly astonishingly careless behaviour for such a paranoid man. The other interpretation is, of course, that he's using the "extradition" argument to avoid being tried for rape.
Indeed -- but it's very important for the Assange narrative to bury that unfortunate period when he actually wanted to live in Sweden, because it blows an embarrassing hole in the "rape case concocted by US agents" conspiracy theory. If the US really wanted Assange in Sweden so they could have him arrested and extradited at their convenience, they needed to do absolutely nothing -- that's where he intended to live anyway. Supposing for a moment that the rape allegations were made at the instigation of the US, they're 100% counterproductive: well done shadowy CIA conspiracy, you've expended enormous effort to scare him off, with zero benefit to yourselves.
Quite apart from any supposed CIA attacks, Assange had better make sure he only says nice things about President Correa. From the Human Rights Watch Report:
Those involved in protests in which there are outbreaks of violence may be prosecuted on inflated and inappropriate terrorism charges. Criminal defamation laws that restrict freedom of expression remain in force and Correa has used them repeatedly against his critics... Impunity for police abuses is widespread... Ecuador’s Criminal Code still has provisions criminalizing desacato (“lack of respect”), under which anyone who offends a government official may receive a prison sentence up to three months and up to two years for offending the president... journalists face prison sentences and crippling damages for this offense... In a draft decree announced in December 2010, domestic NGOs, including those working on human rights, would have to re-register and submit to continuous government monitoring. The decree would give the government broad powers to dissolve groups for “political activism,”
Then again, Assange also said that Sweden was a great place where he felt totally safe, right up until the whole rape thing happened, at which point Sweden was suddenly declared a notorious US lackey...
Holy moley, I think it's finally time for me to buy an e-reader! If I had points, I'd mod you down to increase my chances of getting one before they run out...
In any case, given the vast variation in paper composition and atmospheric conditions during fires I'm somewhat amazed that ALL paper ALWAYS combusts at exactly the exact same temperature to within one degree of an obsolete measuring system.
Care to elaborate? Because it seems at least one of us is fucking thick and needs educating.
You need to hand in your geek card. Had you read the novel by Ray Bradbury, you would understand, but I will be kind and explain it to you. The novel is titled "Fahrenheit 451". In this dystopian view of the future, all books are burned and the writer explains that paper needs to get to 451 degrees to burn..
Unfortunately, the writer is wrong, and it turns out that science fiction novels are not always a reliable source of technical data. Ten out of ten for geek posturing, but minus several million for good thinking.
It should not really surprise you that Linus actually had well-thought-out reasons for his choice of Xfce over Mate. It's not that he never heard of Mate, or just tossed a coin or something.
Huh?
1. Mate had not been released when Linus wrote that post, so yes, it's pretty probable that he hadn't heard of it.
2. Mate basically *is* GNOME 2, and Linus explicitly says that he consideers Xfce "a step down from gnome2", so it seems reasonable that he'd prefer gnome2.
3. The first line of that very posting reads: "While you are at it, could you also fork gnome, and support a gnome-2 environment?". -- so, the subsequent release of Mate was in fact exactly the thing that he explicitly asked for so he wouldn't have to use the second-best Xfce.
As far as I can tell from his more recent postings, he's now using and hating GNOME 3, and his latest take on Xfce is
And for all the people wasting everybodys time with "Why don't you use Unity/KDE/xfce/xyz" - I've tried them. They are even worse...
If you know why he's excluded Mate from consideration, please do share.
[iMacs] will clock themselves down to a point where the machine is excruciatingly slow... DC/SATA Cable - on early 27" (and some 21.5") iMacs, these would short out somewhere along the cable and cause all sorts of shutdown and sleep issues. It was a bitch to fix... faulty power supply could cause this issue... The inverter board on early 27" units would fail regularly, causing the screen to go black, and making standard luddite users think the whole machine powered off...
So, in short, "your Mac died of something else, therefore it doesn't count"? I'm not sure whether you've technically won the argument, but your post isn't exactly a great advert for the reliability of Macs.
Why not just encrypt the drive? Seems more secure to me -- remote wipe presumably won't work if the target machine doesn't have net access.
(Of course, the drive will be unlocked if your machine is stolen while switched on and logged in, but the solution to that is to lock the screen whenever you're not at the computer.)
"In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification."
All industry standard I know of is to hide the 12 foremost digits with * and show the last 4 or 5 (yes better would be to hide all, but client might need to recognize the CC number for some reason). Who in their right mind would consider that secure ? Apple apparently.
Indeed, the article itself makes this point: And it’s also worth noting that one wouldn’t have to call Amazon to pull this off. Your pizza guy could do the same thing, for example. If you have an AppleID, every time you call Pizza Hut, you’ve giving the 16-year-old on the other end of the line all he needs to take over your entire digital life..
Till receipts also commonly show this information.
Given the recent "1 million Android devices activated daily" statistic, I assume they're using the bathroom-related definition of "emergency"; that is to say, "we're crapping ourselves".
The article does mention that you can rm -rf it from the command line, but cautions that this "could result in abnormal system behavior or improper functionality".
Turned out it was QtiPlot (see other post). I have in fact apt-got and used PyMol in the past but had no idea that it used the paid-binaries model. Come to think about it, I only realized that QtiPlot did it when I was recommending it to a Windows user. Which might say something about the viability of this model for operating systems with extensive, standard software repositories. Would be interesting to see how these models work out if^H^Hwhen Ubuntu bug #1 is fixed.
I think I've seen a large scientific graphic package with similar terms. It was easy for me to find third-party binaries, but evidently brand-name recognition was sufficient to keep some people buying from the developer.
"By subscribing to a binaries maintenance contract you receive the right to download all releases available during the subscription period together with technical support. When your subscription period ends, the binaries you have downloaded and installed on your system remain fully functional and you can still use QtiPlot, but if you wish to have access to the updated versions, you will need to renew your maintenance contract."
So the maintenance contract might be the main draw actually. There's a legally built binary in the Ubuntu repos, and presumably Debian, Fedora et al. as well, but I can imagine that on Windows or Mac it would be pretty appealing to download the official build rather than trusting the third-party build you found on www.legitdownloads.ru or similar.
Am I right in thinking that this is basically the deal with Red Hat Enterprise Linux? Seems to work for them despite the existence of White Box Linux.
I think I've seen a large scientific graphic package with similar terms. It was easy for me to find third-party binaries, but evidently brand-name recognition was sufficient to keep some people buying from the developer.
I support Wikileaks. I stand for freedom of speech. That doesn't change what Assange did.
Amen. Because manyt people hate the brainhurt that comes from dividing the world into anything but "good" and "bad", this debate often seems to get framed as "is Assange a brave defender of transparency and free speech, or a sleazy hypocritical rapist?". The answer (IMHO, of course) is: both. Why should be mutually exclusive?
Slashdot Mirror
So.... what happens when these scammers call someone who actually knows something about computers, or runs a Macintosh, or run Linux?
He keeps them talking and sets up an instant honeypot to study their modus operandi.
Seriously though, you don't need a huge success rate for this to be a profitable endeavour. That guy was an unusual case -- I imagine that it usually takes about thirty seconds to figure out that your target is unsuitable, at which point you hang up and move to the next phone book entry.
It's important to be Earnest.
"A handbook!?"
A subsequent RaspberryPi story shouldnt take long now, so strap yourselves in guy's!
Business plan:
1. Mine bitcoins with your Raspberry Pi.
2. Store the bitcoins on your Raspberry Pi
3. Use those bitcoins to buy another Raspberry Pi
4. ?
5. Profit!
As a pedant I am compelled to point out that, if you're on an 18-hour flight, you'll definitely have in-seat power. (I do agree that LCD sucks for extended reading, though. And there are plenty of >10-hour flights without in-seat power.)
Holy shit, that's incredible. They've invented a Captcha that's easier for a bot than for a human. I can only assume that they never figured out what CAPTCHAs were for, and assumed that their sole purpose was to annoy users.
I'm no big fan of the "viewing platform" toilet myself (FWIW, they're not common throughout Europe -- I've only seen them in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands). But could you explain to me how I use an American toilet without dunking my dangleberries into the water a few scant centimetres beneath the rim? European toilets (of both the German and "normal" design) have a great deal more clearance.
Is that a thinly veiled insinuation that he is mentally deficient? To quote Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
What facts have changed? If Sweden would (as alleged) be happy to hand him over to the USA now, they would presumably have been happy to do so before the rape case. Assange's penis doesn't really have much bearing on Sweden's extradition policy.
Is that a thinly veiled insinuation that he is mentally deficient? To quote Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
What facts have changed? If, as Assange claims, Sweden would delightedly offer him up to the US, then they would presumably also have done so before the rape case, when he was happily living there. Sweden's extradition policy didn't (AFAIK) change radically at exactly the time Assange was charged with rape.
So... mentally deficient? I don't know. I think that the most charitable interpretation would be that he simply didn't bother checking whether Sweden was "safe" (according to his judgement) before publicly declaring it safe and deciding to live there -- I wouldn't say that that's mentally deficient, but it's certainly astonishingly careless behaviour for such a paranoid man. The other interpretation is, of course, that he's using the "extradition" argument to avoid being tried for rape.
Indeed -- but it's very important for the Assange narrative to bury that unfortunate period when he actually wanted to live in Sweden, because it blows an embarrassing hole in the "rape case concocted by US agents" conspiracy theory. If the US really wanted Assange in Sweden so they could have him arrested and extradited at their convenience, they needed to do absolutely nothing -- that's where he intended to live anyway. Supposing for a moment that the rape allegations were made at the instigation of the US, they're 100% counterproductive: well done shadowy CIA conspiracy, you've expended enormous effort to scare him off, with zero benefit to yourselves.
Quite apart from any supposed CIA attacks, Assange had better make sure he only says nice things about President Correa. From the Human Rights Watch Report:
Those involved in protests in which there are outbreaks of violence may be prosecuted on inflated and inappropriate terrorism charges. Criminal defamation laws that restrict freedom of expression remain in force and Correa has used them repeatedly against his critics... Impunity for police abuses is widespread... Ecuador’s Criminal Code still has provisions criminalizing desacato (“lack of respect”), under which anyone who offends a government official may receive a prison sentence up to three months and up to two years for offending the president... journalists face prison sentences and crippling damages for this offense... In a draft decree announced in December 2010, domestic NGOs, including those working on human rights, would have to re-register and submit to continuous government monitoring. The decree would give the government broad powers to dissolve groups for “political activism,”
Then again, Assange also said that Sweden was a great place where he felt totally safe, right up until the whole rape thing happened, at which point Sweden was suddenly declared a notorious US lackey...
Holy moley, I think it's finally time for me to buy an e-reader! If I had points, I'd mod you down to increase my chances of getting one before they run out...
-1, no Bitcoins.
You need to hand in your geek card. Had you read the novel by Ray Bradbury, you would understand, but I will be kind and explain it to you. The novel is titled "Fahrenheit 451". In this dystopian view of the future, all books are burned and the writer explains that paper needs to get to 451 degrees to burn. .
Unfortunately, the writer is wrong, and it turns out that science fiction novels are not always a reliable source of technical data. Ten out of ten for geek posturing, but minus several million for good thinking.
It should not really surprise you that Linus actually had well-thought-out reasons for his choice of Xfce over Mate. It's not that he never heard of Mate, or just tossed a coin or something.
Huh?
1. Mate had not been released when Linus wrote that post, so yes, it's pretty probable that he hadn't heard of it.
2. Mate basically *is* GNOME 2, and Linus explicitly says that he consideers Xfce "a step down from gnome2", so it seems reasonable that he'd prefer gnome2.
3. The first line of that very posting reads: "While you are at it, could you also fork gnome, and support a gnome-2 environment?". -- so, the subsequent release of Mate was in fact exactly the thing that he explicitly asked for so he wouldn't have to use the second-best Xfce.
As far as I can tell from his more recent postings, he's now using and hating GNOME 3, and his latest take on Xfce is
And for all the people wasting everybodys time with "Why don't you use Unity/KDE/xfce/xyz" - I've tried them. They are even worse...
If you know why he's excluded Mate from consideration, please do share.
Torvalds said "I'm using Xfce. I think it's a step down from gnome2, but it's a huge step up from gnome3. Really"
In that case, he should probably be using Mate.
The old G4/G5 towers were also pretty impressive for fan noise.
[iMacs] will clock themselves down to a point where the machine is excruciatingly slow... DC/SATA Cable - on early 27" (and some 21.5") iMacs, these would short out somewhere along the cable and cause all sorts of shutdown and sleep issues. It was a bitch to fix... faulty power supply could cause this issue... The inverter board on early 27" units would fail regularly, causing the screen to go black, and making standard luddite users think the whole machine powered off...
So, in short, "your Mac died of something else, therefore it doesn't count"? I'm not sure whether you've technically won the argument, but your post isn't exactly a great advert for the reliability of Macs.
If your device is lost or stolen.
Why not just encrypt the drive? Seems more secure to me -- remote wipe presumably won't work if the target machine doesn't have net access.
(Of course, the drive will be unlocked if your machine is stolen while switched on and logged in, but the solution to that is to lock the screen whenever you're not at the computer.)
"In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification."
All industry standard I know of is to hide the 12 foremost digits with * and show the last 4 or 5 (yes better would be to hide all, but client might need to recognize the CC number for some reason). Who in their right mind would consider that secure ? Apple apparently.
Indeed, the article itself makes this point: And it’s also worth noting that one wouldn’t have to call Amazon to pull this off. Your pizza guy could do the same thing, for example. If you have an AppleID, every time you call Pizza Hut, you’ve giving the 16-year-old on the other end of the line all he needs to take over your entire digital life..
Till receipts also commonly show this information.
Given the recent "1 million Android devices activated daily" statistic, I assume they're using the bathroom-related definition of "emergency"; that is to say, "we're crapping ourselves".
I mean, MS included a BROWSER in their OS. ...and they didn't even give you a way to uninstall it! Now THAT is pure evil.
Absolutely! Good thing I can uninstall Safari from my Mac, easy as -- wait, what's this?
”Safari.app” can’t be modified or deleted because it’s required by Mac OS X.
The article does mention that you can rm -rf it from the command line, but cautions that this "could result in abnormal system behavior or improper functionality".
Turned out it was QtiPlot (see other post). I have in fact apt-got and used PyMol in the past but had no idea that it used the paid-binaries model. Come to think about it, I only realized that QtiPlot did it when I was recommending it to a Windows user. Which might say something about the viability of this model for operating systems with extensive, standard software repositories. Would be interesting to see how these models work out if^H^Hwhen Ubuntu bug #1 is fixed.
I think I've seen a large scientific graphic package with similar terms. It was easy for me to find third-party binaries, but evidently brand-name recognition was sufficient to keep some people buying from the developer.
Replying to myself because I found it: QtiPlot.
"By subscribing to a binaries maintenance contract you receive the right to download all releases available during the subscription period together with technical support. When your subscription period ends, the binaries you have downloaded and installed on your system remain fully functional and you can still use QtiPlot, but if you wish to have access to the updated versions, you will need to renew your maintenance contract."
So the maintenance contract might be the main draw actually. There's a legally built binary in the Ubuntu repos, and presumably Debian, Fedora et al. as well, but I can imagine that on Windows or Mac it would be pretty appealing to download the official build rather than trusting the third-party build you found on www.legitdownloads.ru or similar.
Am I right in thinking that this is basically the deal with Red Hat Enterprise Linux? Seems to work for them despite the existence of White Box Linux.
I think I've seen a large scientific graphic package with similar terms. It was easy for me to find third-party binaries, but evidently brand-name recognition was sufficient to keep some people buying from the developer.
I support Wikileaks. I stand for freedom of speech. That doesn't change what Assange did.
Amen. Because manyt people hate the brainhurt that comes from dividing the world into anything but "good" and "bad", this debate often seems to get framed as "is Assange a brave defender of transparency and free speech, or a sleazy hypocritical rapist?". The answer (IMHO, of course) is: both. Why should be mutually exclusive?