For me the odd things are that they happened thousands of miles away. In the case of 9/11 it was odd for me to be awake and concerned around 6:00am local time (PST). At that point in my life I was consulting and have always tended to be a night owl. Left to my own devices I would usually roll out of bed around 8:00-9:00am. If I had to wake up to an alarm I'd wake up groggy and take a good 15-30 minutes to actually get out of bed. Yet on that morning, I was wide awake with this sense of anxiety and concern, like something was really wrong.
The 7/7/05 actually had a visual component where I saw the woman in the tunnel and felt her panic and fear and wanted to help her. Like 9/11/01, the timing matched up. That's the strange, irie part about it.
I guess you can easily write them off as coincidences. That's fine. It doesn't mean that they didn't happen and doesn't make them any less significant. There have been plenty of attacks since I slept soundly.
On another tangent, it's pretty common for people to tell stories about thinking of someone out of the blue, and then having the phone ring and the person they thought about is on the other end. As human beings we are connected with each other in ways that are odd and easy to dismiss, but no less real.
What do I tell them to look for? It's not like I can just meditate or something along those lines and suddenly have "psychic" experiences. It would be great if one day it were possible to control, or even predict the occurances.
It doesn't mean that you aren't psychic either. There are a lot of phenomena that happen that science can't explain. For example on 9/11/01 I woke up suddenly with a sense of something being horribly wrong, like someone close to me had just died. My family was okay. A few thousand other people weren't. On 7/7/05 I had this nightmare where I saw a woman trapped in a tunnel, surrounded by panicked people. When I woke in the morning, I of course learned that the London subways had been bombed.
I'm not psychic and I'm not claiming to be capable of anything that other people aren't. However I will state that there are things science can't account for. The mind is tuned into and able to perceive things that can't be rationally explained.
Has anyone been able to announce a reasonaby random event before it happened while experiencing a deja vu? Something like "Bob will walk in though that door now" or "Bob is going to spill his drink".
In my experience it isn't possible to do that. By the time the mind recognizes, "I know what is going to happen." and then takes the split second or so to confirm what it thinks will happen is actually happening, the event has begun to happen.
How do you explain when it doesn't happen after the fact? For example there are times when I have a second or two advance warning. I know exactly what someone is going to say, and then they say it. I never know more than a few words, but I know exactly what those few words will be.
Now more likely you just have a really active imagination. Your conspiracy theory is lacking a couple of key motivators. You forgot the part where the NSA was secretly wiretapping the internet connections of a bunch of "internet activists" (be sure to throw in some corresponding, FBI supported real world physical surveillance). Their unConstitutional surveillance measures revealed the danger of the extent of their "real" (in your story) activities were about to be revealed. They made a phone call, and in a back room some guy flipped the magic influence coin. This time it came up heads, Microsoft instead of tails, Google (both are owned by the NSA you know). They sent Jack Bauer out to gather up the appropriate Microsoft personnel and "do whatever it takes" (because that's what Jack Bauer does) to make sure that they first leak, then retract the doctored version of the document regarding their evil menu of law enforcement options.
The summary makes it sound like Google is trying to do yet another end run around actually paying publishers to access their content. Every single major publisher out there already has their article content in an advertisement free format. They have templates that they copy the content (and advertisements) into when it comes time to print. If Google wants the content, they can pay the publishers for it. They don't need to reverse engineer the final printing. They need to stop being cheap and pay content creators.
Given that he is talking about his "partner" and running a coffee shop that caters to hipsters, your comment about business owners catering to the gay community is probably more spot on than you recognize.
If Apple starts to allow multiple third party apps to run at the same time then they are going to lose their "it just works" image. They will have to admit that their OS isn't really better than the other guy's OS because when you get right down it, you can have the best OS in the world, but if a third party developer doesn't follow your programming recommendations, it can lead to a "poor user experience".
I bought an OSX box a couple of years ago to see what the hype was all about. If you're running only Apple products, it runs fine. As soon as you start running a few other programs that aren't from Apple, it's just another computer. The latest headache I had to help sort out for a friend was the tangled mess that is Apple "Sync Services", Microsoft Entourage, and the Blackberry Desktop software. At least with Windows problems, or Linux problems, you can search for a solution. With Apple problems, often times the "answer" seems to be, "If you were using an iPhone instead of a Blackberry, and Mail instead of Entourage..."
Beyond that, the recording software will most likely have a filter for credit cards. Ie, 4xxx..., 5xxxx..., 6xxxx..., etc. It's been a while since I spent any time with people into that sort of thing, but each card type (Visa, MasterCard, Amex, etc) has their own sequence. The first digit denotes card type. The first sequence of three or four digits denotes the issuing bank.
As others have said, a mag stripe reader will read the card. The only hang up is finding a reader with the right number of tracks. Where as your library card probably only has one or two tracks, most credit cards and drivers licenses will have 4-5+.
The big issue comes in when you want to BUY a 5+ track reader. Of course if you're doing that, you probably also have a fake ID.
After getting bit in the butt twice, I opened a second account with an attached debit card. I transfer a couple of hundred dollars in there every pay check and use it for gas, groceries and online purchases. If the account gets compromised I am only temporarily out whatever is in there.
FWIW, the first time my account was compromised Wells Fargo contacted me. The second time I recognized the fraud and contacted them. Both times I had the money back in my account in less than three days. Both times it was only a couple of hundred dollars. I'm sure if I had lost thousands the remediation process might have dragged a bit more.
The reality is that you have a couple of choices. As others have said you can carry around cash. Or you can simply accept fraud as a fact of life and mitigate the threat. Financial institutions are well aware of how prevelant fraud has become and they have processes in place to deal with it. I know half a dozen people who have been victims of fraud and not a single one of them has a horror story to tell about being held liable for charges they didn't make.
Finally, those pharmaceutical interests you don't like are the same ones selling you the vitamins and supplements. Lots of money to be made in an unregulated market. Oops.
I'd sure hope so. I appreciate the quality and processes followed by those organizations. I'd hate to buy amino acid precusors that some random guy cooked up in his bath tub. There might be money to be made in an unregulated market, but that doesn't preclude the pharmaceutical companies from shutting it down. I'm sure they'd much rather have me and my insurance paying through the noise for Prozac, rather than picking up some L-Tryptophan.
Completely off topic, but have you ever spoken to your parents about the way the FDA handles vitamins and supplements and their seeming propensity to force anything off of the market that threatens pharmaceutical interests?
The following article discusses the FDA's handling of L-Tryptophan because it produced similar clinically observed effects as Prozac and other SSRIs.
How are they developing effective tests without engineering talent to guide the creation of those tests? How are they validating simulated tests if they don't even have the theoretical and practical knowledge that engineers would give them? It isn't like the NHTSA should be doing all of the testing or code audits for the auto makers. However they should have some talent on hand so that when Toyota says, "It isn't the electronics.", someone at the NHTSA can begin to verify it.
It has to be deeper than just the President. The NHTSA lacking EE's and SE's is institutionalized fail. They don't even have the talent to meet their mandate. It required a full blown Congressional investigation into dozens of fatalities for someone to stand up and basically say, "By the way, we can't do our job."
If the statement in the article is true then this country is in even worse shape than I thought. It seems like rarely a handful of months can go by without the realization that yet another Federal department is completely incompetent. How in the hell does the NHTSA even do their job?! They are supposed to ensure that vehicles are safe but they don't even have the staff to do that.
The problem is real. Windows boxes are inherently insecure and are frequently being exploited. Symantec is one of the many vendors selling mitigation tools. We use Symantec here, both Endpoint Protection and the Exchange scanning component. It's surprising how many viruses make it through Postini/Google but end up getting caught by Symantec when they come through the front-end server.
Everyone knows that anti-virus is last line of defense, and often an only sometimes effective one. Most of the malicious code is coming in through the web these days, so a product like Websense is a better investment than client AV. In a perfect world you want both, plus some sort of IPS/IDS and gateway AV built into the firewall.
To say that Symantec is scare mongering to create a market that wouldn't otherwise be there is just FUD. There isn't a conflict of interest there. They are selling a product that addresses a real problem.
Now if they were selling Symantec AV for Ubuntu desktop, they might be blowing smoke. That isn't what they are doing. Windows = Big Fat Target for malware.
My video card is a 256MB GeForce 8600 and the CPU isn't much better. I didn't want to settle for fine. I wanted smooth, kick ass, glitch free gaming. I knew that I would get that with a console. The only problem I have with the game is when I have a slow connection, and that's a network issue, not a symptom of the hardware being unable to render the frame fast enough.
Can you stop by and have a conversation with my HR department? The finance department seems to be stripping security out of the network under the guise of "controlling costs", yet I can't get an HR policy to make it a termination worthy offense to bypass the few controls that are left.
You did much better than I could. I know Firefox and IE because those are the two browsers that I can manage via GPO on my network. I know Safari because that is the default OSX browser that some people in the design department use. Beyond that I know about Opera and Opera-Mini through friends and because O-Mini is what I use on my Blackberry. Do SeaMonkey and IceWeasel even work on Windows? I only hear Linux users talking about those. Of course there is Chrome. It's pretty much impossible to not know about Chrome.
I challenge you to name the top 11 browsers off the top of your head without searching for them. Go. 11 browsers. Other users of "this space" are waiting.
Slashdot Mirror
For me the odd things are that they happened thousands of miles away. In the case of 9/11 it was odd for me to be awake and concerned around 6:00am local time (PST). At that point in my life I was consulting and have always tended to be a night owl. Left to my own devices I would usually roll out of bed around 8:00-9:00am. If I had to wake up to an alarm I'd wake up groggy and take a good 15-30 minutes to actually get out of bed. Yet on that morning, I was wide awake with this sense of anxiety and concern, like something was really wrong.
The 7/7/05 actually had a visual component where I saw the woman in the tunnel and felt her panic and fear and wanted to help her. Like 9/11/01, the timing matched up. That's the strange, irie part about it.
I guess you can easily write them off as coincidences. That's fine. It doesn't mean that they didn't happen and doesn't make them any less significant. There have been plenty of attacks since I slept soundly.
On another tangent, it's pretty common for people to tell stories about thinking of someone out of the blue, and then having the phone ring and the person they thought about is on the other end. As human beings we are connected with each other in ways that are odd and easy to dismiss, but no less real.
What do I tell them to look for? It's not like I can just meditate or something along those lines and suddenly have "psychic" experiences. It would be great if one day it were possible to control, or even predict the occurances.
It doesn't mean that you aren't psychic either. There are a lot of phenomena that happen that science can't explain. For example on 9/11/01 I woke up suddenly with a sense of something being horribly wrong, like someone close to me had just died. My family was okay. A few thousand other people weren't. On 7/7/05 I had this nightmare where I saw a woman trapped in a tunnel, surrounded by panicked people. When I woke in the morning, I of course learned that the London subways had been bombed.
I'm not psychic and I'm not claiming to be capable of anything that other people aren't. However I will state that there are things science can't account for. The mind is tuned into and able to perceive things that can't be rationally explained.
Has anyone been able to announce a reasonaby random event before it happened while experiencing a deja vu? Something like "Bob will walk in though that door now" or "Bob is going to spill his drink".
In my experience it isn't possible to do that. By the time the mind recognizes, "I know what is going to happen." and then takes the split second or so to confirm what it thinks will happen is actually happening, the event has begun to happen.
How do you explain when it doesn't happen after the fact? For example there are times when I have a second or two advance warning. I know exactly what someone is going to say, and then they say it. I never know more than a few words, but I know exactly what those few words will be.
That would be sweet.
Now more likely you just have a really active imagination. Your conspiracy theory is lacking a couple of key motivators. You forgot the part where the NSA was secretly wiretapping the internet connections of a bunch of "internet activists" (be sure to throw in some corresponding, FBI supported real world physical surveillance). Their unConstitutional surveillance measures revealed the danger of the extent of their "real" (in your story) activities were about to be revealed. They made a phone call, and in a back room some guy flipped the magic influence coin. This time it came up heads, Microsoft instead of tails, Google (both are owned by the NSA you know). They sent Jack Bauer out to gather up the appropriate Microsoft personnel and "do whatever it takes" (because that's what Jack Bauer does) to make sure that they first leak, then retract the doctored version of the document regarding their evil menu of law enforcement options.
You're off topic. The article is about ACTA. You're talking about health care reform.
The summary makes it sound like Google is trying to do yet another end run around actually paying publishers to access their content. Every single major publisher out there already has their article content in an advertisement free format. They have templates that they copy the content (and advertisements) into when it comes time to print. If Google wants the content, they can pay the publishers for it. They don't need to reverse engineer the final printing. They need to stop being cheap and pay content creators.
Given that he is talking about his "partner" and running a coffee shop that caters to hipsters, your comment about business owners catering to the gay community is probably more spot on than you recognize.
If Apple starts to allow multiple third party apps to run at the same time then they are going to lose their "it just works" image. They will have to admit that their OS isn't really better than the other guy's OS because when you get right down it, you can have the best OS in the world, but if a third party developer doesn't follow your programming recommendations, it can lead to a "poor user experience".
I bought an OSX box a couple of years ago to see what the hype was all about. If you're running only Apple products, it runs fine. As soon as you start running a few other programs that aren't from Apple, it's just another computer. The latest headache I had to help sort out for a friend was the tangled mess that is Apple "Sync Services", Microsoft Entourage, and the Blackberry Desktop software. At least with Windows problems, or Linux problems, you can search for a solution. With Apple problems, often times the "answer" seems to be, "If you were using an iPhone instead of a Blackberry, and Mail instead of Entourage..."
The mirror site doesn't have a working link to the document referenced in TFA.
It's easier for me to practice fiscal discipline with a debit card because it is real money.
Beyond that, the recording software will most likely have a filter for credit cards. Ie, 4xxx..., 5xxxx..., 6xxxx..., etc. It's been a while since I spent any time with people into that sort of thing, but each card type (Visa, MasterCard, Amex, etc) has their own sequence. The first digit denotes card type. The first sequence of three or four digits denotes the issuing bank.
As others have said, a mag stripe reader will read the card. The only hang up is finding a reader with the right number of tracks. Where as your library card probably only has one or two tracks, most credit cards and drivers licenses will have 4-5+.
The big issue comes in when you want to BUY a 5+ track reader. Of course if you're doing that, you probably also have a fake ID.
After getting bit in the butt twice, I opened a second account with an attached debit card. I transfer a couple of hundred dollars in there every pay check and use it for gas, groceries and online purchases. If the account gets compromised I am only temporarily out whatever is in there.
FWIW, the first time my account was compromised Wells Fargo contacted me. The second time I recognized the fraud and contacted them. Both times I had the money back in my account in less than three days. Both times it was only a couple of hundred dollars. I'm sure if I had lost thousands the remediation process might have dragged a bit more.
The reality is that you have a couple of choices. As others have said you can carry around cash. Or you can simply accept fraud as a fact of life and mitigate the threat. Financial institutions are well aware of how prevelant fraud has become and they have processes in place to deal with it. I know half a dozen people who have been victims of fraud and not a single one of them has a horror story to tell about being held liable for charges they didn't make.
Finally, those pharmaceutical interests you don't like are the same ones selling you the vitamins and supplements. Lots of money to be made in an unregulated market. Oops.
I'd sure hope so. I appreciate the quality and processes followed by those organizations. I'd hate to buy amino acid precusors that some random guy cooked up in his bath tub. There might be money to be made in an unregulated market, but that doesn't preclude the pharmaceutical companies from shutting it down. I'm sure they'd much rather have me and my insurance paying through the noise for Prozac, rather than picking up some L-Tryptophan.
Completely off topic, but have you ever spoken to your parents about the way the FDA handles vitamins and supplements and their seeming propensity to force anything off of the market that threatens pharmaceutical interests?
The following article discusses the FDA's handling of L-Tryptophan because it produced similar clinically observed effects as Prozac and other SSRIs.
http://www.qhi.co.uk/features/feat_002.asp
How are they developing effective tests without engineering talent to guide the creation of those tests? How are they validating simulated tests if they don't even have the theoretical and practical knowledge that engineers would give them? It isn't like the NHTSA should be doing all of the testing or code audits for the auto makers. However they should have some talent on hand so that when Toyota says, "It isn't the electronics.", someone at the NHTSA can begin to verify it.
It has to be deeper than just the President. The NHTSA lacking EE's and SE's is institutionalized fail. They don't even have the talent to meet their mandate. It required a full blown Congressional investigation into dozens of fatalities for someone to stand up and basically say, "By the way, we can't do our job."
If the statement in the article is true then this country is in even worse shape than I thought. It seems like rarely a handful of months can go by without the realization that yet another Federal department is completely incompetent. How in the hell does the NHTSA even do their job?! They are supposed to ensure that vehicles are safe but they don't even have the staff to do that.
What the hell is wrong with our country?
The problem is real. Windows boxes are inherently insecure and are frequently being exploited. Symantec is one of the many vendors selling mitigation tools. We use Symantec here, both Endpoint Protection and the Exchange scanning component. It's surprising how many viruses make it through Postini/Google but end up getting caught by Symantec when they come through the front-end server.
Everyone knows that anti-virus is last line of defense, and often an only sometimes effective one. Most of the malicious code is coming in through the web these days, so a product like Websense is a better investment than client AV. In a perfect world you want both, plus some sort of IPS/IDS and gateway AV built into the firewall.
To say that Symantec is scare mongering to create a market that wouldn't otherwise be there is just FUD. There isn't a conflict of interest there. They are selling a product that addresses a real problem.
Now if they were selling Symantec AV for Ubuntu desktop, they might be blowing smoke. That isn't what they are doing. Windows = Big Fat Target for malware.
My video card is a 256MB GeForce 8600 and the CPU isn't much better. I didn't want to settle for fine. I wanted smooth, kick ass, glitch free gaming. I knew that I would get that with a console. The only problem I have with the game is when I have a slow connection, and that's a network issue, not a symptom of the hardware being unable to render the frame fast enough.
Can you stop by and have a conversation with my HR department? The finance department seems to be stripping security out of the network under the guise of "controlling costs", yet I can't get an HR policy to make it a termination worthy offense to bypass the few controls that are left.
You went back that far, but didn't mention Mosaic? Come on now..
You did much better than I could. I know Firefox and IE because those are the two browsers that I can manage via GPO on my network. I know Safari because that is the default OSX browser that some people in the design department use. Beyond that I know about Opera and Opera-Mini through friends and because O-Mini is what I use on my Blackberry. Do SeaMonkey and IceWeasel even work on Windows? I only hear Linux users talking about those. Of course there is Chrome. It's pretty much impossible to not know about Chrome.
I challenge you to name the top 11 browsers off the top of your head without searching for them. Go. 11 browsers. Other users of "this space" are waiting.