[...] What's the story going to be? That Halvar can only do training in India, and China, and in Europe? Yes, that sounds like a wonderful idea. Everyone else's code gets more secure while ours rots on the vine.[...]
Given that all US software development will be outsourced to India and China anyways, it makes sese to give these folks an advantage in learning about software security.
Since it's a tad unusual to have a radio-active source
Where do people get this nonsense about radioactive sources and quantum-gizmos and whatnot? Your soundcard has a noise-generator - that's just a glorified resistor with a big honking amplifier attached to it to amplify the hell out of thermal noise. Read it out and you get true random numbers. I've been doing this since the old Atari800 and I keep being baffled by so-called "Computer Scientists" who insist that you need some kind of specialized hardware in order to produce real randomness with a computer...
Lame jokes about something-or-other that has allegedly tripled in the last six months according to wikipedia have tripled in the last six months; according to Wikipedia.
Just because the data goes through fiber doesn't mean the disks have to be FC disks. Actually that's usually a bad idea, as the physical operations of the HDD (moving heads around and such) limit the rate at which the disk can actually accept data to much less than FC speeds.
I have a couple local RAID boxes here and I feed data into them through 4Gb fiber channel, but the box just consists of 16 run-off-the-mill SATA drives in a RAID5 config (yielding 14 data disks (plus 1 parity plus 1 hot spare) times 750GB =~10TB storage). From the outside the box looks, works and acts like a 10TB fiber channel drive, but replacing the actual physical drives is much cheaper and since I'm effectively writing to 14 disks in parallel, they can actually digest the ~300MB/sec I'm throwing at them.
Yeah, 300MByte/sec. Which is ~2.4Gbit/sec. Through a single fiber. Sustained. Which isn't even the limit of a 4Gb FC. All commodity hardware. Why does CERN need 500 fibers for moving ~3 times as much data than me? (granted, I do it for hours, not months - but the number of fibers should be a throughput question, not a capacity one).
Agreed withthe sentiment plus one extra thing: there's no point to shell out for 9GB of hosting space for the ONE dvd-iso I'd like make accessible to the ONE person who's ever going to download it. On my home machine it'll clog up the tubes overnight and that's all it ever needs.
And then there is
This is assuming you're not completely hardcore and do all of your PHP/HTML/CSS in vi or emacs instead of a more modern code editor
I use emacs. I never realized that made me "hardcore".
(code collapse, color highlighting, and completion is your friend).
Nothing was actually said, so how can this be "nuff said"?
Markets are measured in dollars. Something that is free has ZERO market share. Zip. Zilch. None. It might be popular with just about anybody, but a market share is a fraction of dollars thay you make out of a total number of dollars that are available to be made. If everybody goes Ubuntu tomorrow and MS and Apple go bankrupt then the market for OS will simply be zero dollars. And Ubuntu will still have zero market share as it is still making zero dollars.
Tech-nerds can be so touchy when non-techies misuse tech-jargon -- and yet they're incredibly happy to mis-use perfectly well-defined and well-understood terms like "market share"...
Speaking purely from a business stand-point and ignoring all philosophical issues, this is not definitively true. That is, it may be true that you're being overcharged but it isn't necessarily so. You're looking at one particular cost - the cost of purchasing the operating system - and assuming that every other cost is the same. It may very well not be, even on identical hardware. It's been well documented that Dell gets paid to load crapware on the system. That's revenue that they do not or may not get on the Linux machine, which means they must increase the price to reach the same margin. Its also quite possible that other cost, such as support cost, are increased for Linux machines.
While all of that is true, I think you're still missing a large part of the question. First off you keep on trying to do cost-based pricing -- you add up all the various costs that Dell incurs and then try to establish a price based on that. Many business that argue that way fail -- and it is almost common knowledge by now that it is the reason the US lost ot Japan in things like the automotive or, yes, digital electronics market.
The inverse is price-based costing -- you start with the amount of money you can realistically expect to get from a product and then try to make it cheaper than that price. For example if such-n-such hardware works well and generated so-and-so many satisfied Ubuntu customers BUT the same hardware is a little slim for Windows users and the marginal cost of upgrading the windows machines to something that compares in user-experience to the Ubuntu machine is less than the expected cost of service calls to Dell then it makes sense for them to pre-emptively bump up Vista machines.
In the same vein: if they expect to ever develop a new system, for example, or fix bugs, or have any kind of cost at all - then they need to have headroom above the sheer cost of making the system. If they can sell x machines for Y dollars with Linux on it then they will optimize Y such that X*Y is maximized. If X*Y is maximized at some other point for Windows, then it'll be placed at that other point. For example many Windows users are laymen when it comes to computers, so they'll buy "whatever is cheap". Many Linux users are more advanced and understand that "the cheapest" is not always "the most desirable" and thus they may well live at a higher price point as a group. I haven't done the market research here.
You will usually find three price points for any tool (from the hammer to the digital camera): the lowball one for the laymen, the way-overpriced one for the amateurs who think they know what's going on and a medium one for the professionals. No real carpenter will buy a $50 hammer with shursqueeze-toubletac[tm] grip -- but he won't buy the $5 toy either. The $5 one is for the rubes who don't know what to look for , so they look for price. The same in computers. The $50 is for the yuppie who's only ever hammered something twice in his life. In the computer world that's the crazed gamers who'll shell out $5k for a PC. And then there's the $15 or so model that is solid, well-made, where you get what you need and you pay for what you get - the item that the pro will buy. And in the computer world, that may well be the Linux folks (again: I haven't done the market research so all this is just a "think along these lines").
There's enough places in the world where $2.50 is not only a decent day's wage (especially if you can do more than one of these) but more importantly where there simply no industrial infrastructure to compete with this job. It's either this or an hour of sitting around and picking your nose. Or maybe an hour of backbreaking ditch digging for $1.
Lots'a people agreeing with this, but it ain't really funny: the coffee machine is where everybody heads firts thing and thus its where I will meet all the people who have something interesting/important workrelated to tell me. "Hey, did you see the email from...". If the gatering space for the ad-hoc morning meet isn't the coffee maker in your company, then head for the water cooler or the fridge or wherever people gather. In five minutes of friendly hellos I know what's up today without actually looking at email.
RTGs are very heavy power points -- currently about 3...5W per kg. 20W means you've used up your mass margin before you've put even marginal shielding, support etc on it. And then there's the need to go to 200 for short periods which would require another additional battery on to of that. In the end, RTGs are great for things like space craft that have no real choice (at least the ones going away from the sun). The Voyagers run off RTGs - for over 30 years now.
But that opens a different question -- isn't that exactly what NASA should be able to do? Power supplies for extremely harsh environments, that can survive being banged around during a rocket launch, in systems where every pound of weight costs a fortune. Sounds like the DoD should give a little phone call to JPL...
I think nasa should make it standard mission procedure to plan several possible missions for each probe they send. Its unfortunate that there isn't more interest in space travel- but they may be able to spark more interest with more ambitious missions.
Anything funded by NASA has both a downscope and an upscope -- and usually several of them. As a matter of fact, during the development of a large project, it is quite normal that the total amount of available money goes up or down by a significant margin. So every part and piece is always planned on the the basis of "what do we want to do here, what could we do with 20% less money, what would be possible if we could get 20% more mass, power, funds...".
There's no subsystem that is just planned as one thing -- there's always a multitude of options that are weighed, various cost-options scoped, many decision points and "what if"s and "maybe we should revert to the xyz design" before something makes it into space. Which means that all involved have a pretty good idea what might be possible if "x fails" or "y succeeds"...
I don't know about fanfic, but I've gel-mounted HDDs since the middle nineties. This is entirely common in the aerospace industry. As a matter of fact, try running "hard disk gel mount" (without the quotes) through google one of these days for a long list of patents already granted for this idea.
I'd be curious to learn where you got the misconception of "4 minutes on average".
It's nonsense, of course.
The minimum distange between the earth and mars is on average ~78 million km (a shade more or less per orbit but no more than a percent or so different). That's your 4(point three) minutes right there. Most of the time, mars is farther away from us, yielding an average that is considerably longer than 4 minutes.
The maximum distance (when mars is behind the sun as seen from us) is about ~378 million km on average which would come to about 21 minutes. Taking the average light travel time to be larger than 10 minutes is probably not a bad guess.
I do not understand what nutcase modded this Troll.
It is somewhat confused about a few details, but it is mostly just a restatement of well-known (and well-known-for-a-long-time) facts.
That said, let me add a few clarifications:
My understanding is that the CIA is releasing information as a public relations gesture.
The CIA collects information when and where they think it is useful for them. They release information when and where they think it is useful for them. This does not distinguish the CIA from any other person, group, corporation, or other identifiable entity (government or otherwise). In particular it does not distinguish them from you or anybody you know.
In the case of the CIA, "collecting information" is their job description. Consequently they are happy to err on the side of collecting and storing too much too early too eagerly since, after all, that's their taxpayer-funded mandate. "Disseminating information" is NOT in their job description and thus they do not go out of their way to hand it to every passer-by on the street.
There are many agencies with names and purposes you are not allowed to know.
You've read too many spy novels. The US (and most other governments) has learned long ago that the easiest way to hide something is in plain view. Yes, there's several dozen intelligence agencies in the US. But there's no point in (trying to) make their existence a secret. Why should anybody try? As long as the operations are classified, why create more black holes for crackpots to spin conspiracy theories around?
Googling "intelligence agency" right now yields a plethora of links, for example this one (the current number three for me) which lists dozens of them. Does it help you to know that there is an "Office for Intelligence" tucked away in the Energy Department? No. Do you know what they're doing that they're not talking about on their webpage? No. Do you care? No, because you're obsessing over "secret agencies" that you imagine you don't even know the identity of.
Your post is nonsense, of course. Free speech is alive and well in Europe and has been for a long time. Contrary to the American model, however, most (all?) European constitutions consider a couple other things more worthy of protection.
In most (all?) European constitutions you will find an article guaranteeing the freedom of expression, the freedom of the press and such; but it will usually be article number four or eight or so (since you mention Germany: it's number five there). The first couple are usually about human life, health, freedom - those kinda things. Americans may think that it is OK to have free speech trump all these, but just because you think so doesn't make it so. In Germany, for example, people thought after WWII that maybe it wasn't such a hot idea to let anybody ask for the genocide of every minority thet can think of. Makes for a crummy kind of society.
The kind we find in the US these days.
There are countries in Europe that are a thousand years old. The US hasn't made it to 250 yet, and under extremely favorable outer conditions (geography etc). And I'm not filled by much hope it'll make it to 500 at the rate at which it is going.
[...]The successful experiment lit a 60-watt light bulb from a power source two meters away, with no physical connection between the power source and the light bulb.
Bullshit.
Electromagnetic transmission is still a physical connection. What did you think it was? A metaphysical connection?
Dunno -- my software says something like "This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL. If you don't know what that means, by all means google it". And then you hit the "next" button and that's all. In 99(point something)% of all cases it doesn't matter either way, in the remaining fraction-of-a-percent of cases you have all the information you need.
You're trolling, but here's the answer to your question:
Nerds are boring. So boring that it brings tears to your eyes. They understand that. They know exactly how mind-bogglingly mundane they are. So they'd like to have "encryption" and "privacy" and all that because they don't want any outsiders to know just how boring they are.
For example the dude who posted the "example" of sending an email to his "girlfriend" -- of course he doesn't have a girlfriend; his private emails are to his nerd-friends and talking about the "mad D&D session" they're planning for the weekend but he thinks he can get away with pretending to have a girlfriend if he has occasional clandestine communication. Even if it's only with his own secondary email account.
Most guys wear pants for the same reason most chicks wear bras: not because they have anything worth mantioning to hide, but because they're ashamed of the fact that they don't.
no google CANT ruin your chances. YOU ruin your chances.
when an employer google's you and finds you are a contributing editor to high times and run the largest Hemp growing blog on the web. Or finds your myspace and tells how you stole 3 laptops at your last job and bragged about screwing the man, drink like a fool and brag about going to work drunk,etc.....
THOSE ruin your chances.
Others have mentioned some of the more obvious caveats here (a rumor is sufficient to ruin a reputation) but there's at least one more that irks at least myself a little: Usenet. Usenet was never supposed to be a life-long archive. I, myself have a history back to the late eighties and while there's nothing out there that I'd be downright ashamed of, I didn't exactly work "on my internet presence" these days. Usenet was for casual chatting - if I had known that folks would be able to read my whining over my current relationship troubles fifteen to twenty years later, I would've edited more carefully.
In my own case this is mostly a wash - the best thing you could find by reading this old crud is that I'm mostly an average person. But I figure there must be people out there with seriously objectionable posts that they wouldn't have posted if there had been the expectation that there'd ever be a world-wide-accessible archive of every word ever posted there. Sure, any one reader out there might have collected any one post - that was always understood. But putting the whole shebang online turned it from what was a vaguely private conversation of a self-selected group of folks into a public exhibition.
(It turns out that there is one other person on the planet with my name who seems nice enough, but boy what a dweeb...)
Slashdot Mirror
Given that all US software development will be outsourced to India and China anyways, it makes sese to give these folks an advantage in learning about software security.
Since it's a tad unusual to have a radio-active source
Where do people get this nonsense about radioactive sources and quantum-gizmos and whatnot? Your soundcard has a noise-generator - that's just a glorified resistor with a big honking amplifier attached to it to amplify the hell out of thermal noise. Read it out and you get true random numbers. I've been doing this since the old Atari800 and I keep being baffled by so-called "Computer Scientists" who insist that you need some kind of specialized hardware in order to produce real randomness with a computer...
Lame jokes about something-or-other that has allegedly tripled in the last six months according to wikipedia have tripled in the last six months; according to Wikipedia.
Just because the data goes through fiber doesn't mean the disks have to be FC disks. Actually that's usually a bad idea, as the physical operations of the HDD (moving heads around and such) limit the rate at which the disk can actually accept data to much less than FC speeds.
I have a couple local RAID boxes here and I feed data into them through 4Gb fiber channel, but the box just consists of 16 run-off-the-mill SATA drives in a RAID5 config (yielding 14 data disks (plus 1 parity plus 1 hot spare) times 750GB =~10TB storage). From the outside the box looks, works and acts like a 10TB fiber channel drive, but replacing the actual physical drives is much cheaper and since I'm effectively writing to 14 disks in parallel, they can actually digest the ~300MB/sec I'm throwing at them.
Yeah, 300MByte/sec. Which is ~2.4Gbit/sec. Through a single fiber. Sustained. Which isn't even the limit of a 4Gb FC. All commodity hardware. Why does CERN need 500 fibers for moving ~3 times as much data than me? (granted, I do it for hours, not months - but the number of fibers should be a throughput question, not a capacity one).
Your units need work: power per velocity is action, not force.
Agreed withthe sentiment plus one extra thing: there's no point to shell out for 9GB of hosting space for the ONE dvd-iso I'd like make accessible to the ONE person who's ever going to download it. On my home machine it'll clog up the tubes overnight and that's all it ever needs.
And then there is
This is assuming you're not completely hardcore and do all of your PHP/HTML/CSS in vi or emacs instead of a more modern code editorI use emacs. I never realized that made me "hardcore".
(code collapse, color highlighting, and completion is your friend).emacs had done all this since the eighties. So?
Someone who uses Hotmail for their mail spends nothing to use that service.
Hotmail is only free if your time is worthless.
What exactly was "good" about this?
Nothing was actually said, so how can this be "nuff said"?
Markets are measured in dollars. Something that is free has ZERO market share. Zip. Zilch. None. It might be popular with just about anybody, but a market share is a fraction of dollars thay you make out of a total number of dollars that are available to be made. If everybody goes Ubuntu tomorrow and MS and Apple go bankrupt then the market for OS will simply be zero dollars. And Ubuntu will still have zero market share as it is still making zero dollars.
Tech-nerds can be so touchy when non-techies misuse tech-jargon -- and yet they're incredibly happy to mis-use perfectly well-defined and well-understood terms like "market share"...
Computers/Printers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1_uvM-5xKs&mode=re lated&search=
"Hi, I'm a PC"
"...and I'm a shredder..."
The iPhone's soul...
Speaking purely from a business stand-point and ignoring all philosophical issues, this is not definitively true. That is, it may be true that you're being overcharged but it isn't necessarily so. You're looking at one particular cost - the cost of purchasing the operating system - and assuming that every other cost is the same. It may very well not be, even on identical hardware. It's been well documented that Dell gets paid to load crapware on the system. That's revenue that they do not or may not get on the Linux machine, which means they must increase the price to reach the same margin. Its also quite possible that other cost, such as support cost, are increased for Linux machines.
While all of that is true, I think you're still missing a large part of the question. First off you keep on trying to do cost-based pricing -- you add up all the various costs that Dell incurs and then try to establish a price based on that. Many business that argue that way fail -- and it is almost common knowledge by now that it is the reason the US lost ot Japan in things like the automotive or, yes, digital electronics market.
The inverse is price-based costing -- you start with the amount of money you can realistically expect to get from a product and then try to make it cheaper than that price. For example if such-n-such hardware works well and generated so-and-so many satisfied Ubuntu customers BUT the same hardware is a little slim for Windows users and the marginal cost of upgrading the windows machines to something that compares in user-experience to the Ubuntu machine is less than the expected cost of service calls to Dell then it makes sense for them to pre-emptively bump up Vista machines.
In the same vein: if they expect to ever develop a new system, for example, or fix bugs, or have any kind of cost at all - then they need to have headroom above the sheer cost of making the system. If they can sell x machines for Y dollars with Linux on it then they will optimize Y such that X*Y is maximized. If X*Y is maximized at some other point for Windows, then it'll be placed at that other point. For example many Windows users are laymen when it comes to computers, so they'll buy "whatever is cheap". Many Linux users are more advanced and understand that "the cheapest" is not always "the most desirable" and thus they may well live at a higher price point as a group. I haven't done the market research here.
You will usually find three price points for any tool (from the hammer to the digital camera): the lowball one for the laymen, the way-overpriced one for the amateurs who think they know what's going on and a medium one for the professionals. No real carpenter will buy a $50 hammer with shursqueeze-toubletac[tm] grip -- but he won't buy the $5 toy either. The $5 one is for the rubes who don't know what to look for , so they look for price. The same in computers. The $50 is for the yuppie who's only ever hammered something twice in his life. In the computer world that's the crazed gamers who'll shell out $5k for a PC. And then there's the $15 or so model that is solid, well-made, where you get what you need and you pay for what you get - the item that the pro will buy. And in the computer world, that may well be the Linux folks (again: I haven't done the market research so all this is just a "think along these lines").
There's enough places in the world where $2.50 is not only a decent day's wage (especially if you can do more than one of these) but more importantly where there simply no industrial infrastructure to compete with this job. It's either this or an hour of sitting around and picking your nose. Or maybe an hour of backbreaking ditch digging for $1.
It appears there is little privacy left when they drink each others urine.
And what exactly do you think you're doing here on earth?
Lots'a people agreeing with this, but it ain't really funny: the coffee machine is where everybody heads firts thing and thus its where I will meet all the people who have something interesting/important workrelated to tell me. "Hey, did you see the email from...". If the gatering space for the ad-hoc morning meet isn't the coffee maker in your company, then head for the water cooler or the fridge or wherever people gather. In five minutes of friendly hellos I know what's up today without actually looking at email.
RTGs are very heavy power points -- currently about 3...5W per kg. 20W means you've used up your mass margin before you've put even marginal shielding, support etc on it. And then there's the need to go to 200 for short periods which would require another additional battery on to of that. In the end, RTGs are great for things like space craft that have no real choice (at least the ones going away from the sun). The Voyagers run off RTGs - for over 30 years now.
But that opens a different question -- isn't that exactly what NASA should be able to do? Power supplies for extremely harsh environments, that can survive being banged around during a rocket launch, in systems where every pound of weight costs a fortune. Sounds like the DoD should give a little phone call to JPL...
Anything funded by NASA has both a downscope and an upscope -- and usually several of them. As a matter of fact, during the development of a large project, it is quite normal that the total amount of available money goes up or down by a significant margin. So every part and piece is always planned on the the basis of "what do we want to do here, what could we do with 20% less money, what would be possible if we could get 20% more mass, power, funds...".
There's no subsystem that is just planned as one thing -- there's always a multitude of options that are weighed, various cost-options scoped, many decision points and "what if"s and "maybe we should revert to the xyz design" before something makes it into space. Which means that all involved have a pretty good idea what might be possible if "x fails" or "y succeeds"...
I don't know about fanfic, but I've gel-mounted HDDs since the middle nineties. This is entirely common in the aerospace industry. As a matter of fact, try running "hard disk gel mount" (without the quotes) through google one of these days for a long list of patents already granted for this idea.
I'd be curious to learn where you got the misconception of "4 minutes on average".
It's nonsense, of course.
The minimum distange between the earth and mars is on average ~78 million km (a shade more or less per orbit but no more than a percent or so different). That's your 4(point three) minutes right there. Most of the time, mars is farther away from us, yielding an average that is considerably longer than 4 minutes.
The maximum distance (when mars is behind the sun as seen from us) is about ~378 million km on average which would come to about 21 minutes. Taking the average light travel time to be larger than 10 minutes is probably not a bad guess.
I do not understand what nutcase modded this Troll.
It is somewhat confused about a few details, but it is mostly just a restatement of well-known (and well-known-for-a-long-time) facts.
That said, let me add a few clarifications:
The CIA collects information when and where they think it is useful for them. They release information when and where they think it is useful for them. This does not distinguish the CIA from any other person, group, corporation, or other identifiable entity (government or otherwise). In particular it does not distinguish them from you or anybody you know.
In the case of the CIA, "collecting information" is their job description. Consequently they are happy to err on the side of collecting and storing too much too early too eagerly since, after all, that's their taxpayer-funded mandate. "Disseminating information" is NOT in their job description and thus they do not go out of their way to hand it to every passer-by on the street.
You've read too many spy novels. The US (and most other governments) has learned long ago that the easiest way to hide something is in plain view. Yes, there's several dozen intelligence agencies in the US. But there's no point in (trying to) make their existence a secret. Why should anybody try? As long as the operations are classified, why create more black holes for crackpots to spin conspiracy theories around?
Googling "intelligence agency" right now yields a plethora of links, for example this one (the current number three for me) which lists dozens of them. Does it help you to know that there is an "Office for Intelligence" tucked away in the Energy Department? No. Do you know what they're doing that they're not talking about on their webpage? No. Do you care? No, because you're obsessing over "secret agencies" that you imagine you don't even know the identity of.
Your post is nonsense, of course. Free speech is alive and well in Europe and has been for a long time. Contrary to the American model, however, most (all?) European constitutions consider a couple other things more worthy of protection.
In most (all?) European constitutions you will find an article guaranteeing the freedom of expression, the freedom of the press and such; but it will usually be article number four or eight or so (since you mention Germany: it's number five there). The first couple are usually about human life, health, freedom - those kinda things. Americans may think that it is OK to have free speech trump all these, but just because you think so doesn't make it so. In Germany, for example, people thought after WWII that maybe it wasn't such a hot idea to let anybody ask for the genocide of every minority thet can think of. Makes for a crummy kind of society.
The kind we find in the US these days.
There are countries in Europe that are a thousand years old. The US hasn't made it to 250 yet, and under extremely favorable outer conditions (geography etc). And I'm not filled by much hope it'll make it to 500 at the rate at which it is going.
They already are. Welcome to America. Nobody here pays cash up front for a house or a car.
From the summary:
[...]The successful experiment lit a 60-watt light bulb from a power source two meters away, with no physical connection between the power source and the light bulb.Bullshit.
Electromagnetic transmission is still a physical connection. What did you think it was? A metaphysical connection?
Dunno -- my software says something like "This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL. If you don't know what that means, by all means google it". And then you hit the "next" button and that's all. In 99(point something)% of all cases it doesn't matter either way, in the remaining fraction-of-a-percent of cases you have all the information you need.
You're trolling, but here's the answer to your question:
Nerds are boring. So boring that it brings tears to your eyes. They understand that. They know exactly how mind-bogglingly mundane they are. So they'd like to have "encryption" and "privacy" and all that because they don't want any outsiders to know just how boring they are.
For example the dude who posted the "example" of sending an email to his "girlfriend" -- of course he doesn't have a girlfriend; his private emails are to his nerd-friends and talking about the "mad D&D session" they're planning for the weekend but he thinks he can get away with pretending to have a girlfriend if he has occasional clandestine communication. Even if it's only with his own secondary email account.
Most guys wear pants for the same reason most chicks wear bras: not because they have anything worth mantioning to hide, but because they're ashamed of the fact that they don't.
when an employer google's you and finds you are a contributing editor to high times and run the largest Hemp growing blog on the web. Or finds your myspace and tells how you stole 3 laptops at your last job and bragged about screwing the man, drink like a fool and brag about going to work drunk,etc.....
THOSE ruin your chances.
Others have mentioned some of the more obvious caveats here (a rumor is sufficient to ruin a reputation) but there's at least one more that irks at least myself a little: Usenet. Usenet was never supposed to be a life-long archive. I, myself have a history back to the late eighties and while there's nothing out there that I'd be downright ashamed of, I didn't exactly work "on my internet presence" these days. Usenet was for casual chatting - if I had known that folks would be able to read my whining over my current relationship troubles fifteen to twenty years later, I would've edited more carefully.
In my own case this is mostly a wash - the best thing you could find by reading this old crud is that I'm mostly an average person. But I figure there must be people out there with seriously objectionable posts that they wouldn't have posted if there had been the expectation that there'd ever be a world-wide-accessible archive of every word ever posted there. Sure, any one reader out there might have collected any one post - that was always understood. But putting the whole shebang online turned it from what was a vaguely private conversation of a self-selected group of folks into a public exhibition.
(It turns out that there is one other person on the planet with my name who seems nice enough, but boy what a dweeb...)