Posts by Tom 13

Re: works for a UK bank

Do they collect enough information to pursue the miscreants? I know the average person doesn't have the wherewithall to go after them, but a bank, especially one that has been scammed enough ought to.

Re: No Jail Time? A slap on the wrist?

I'd prefer honey and an ant hill.

Re: Three useful letters, IRS.

Back in the day, maybe. Yes they nail Capone for tax evasion. But if he had listed his income from his rackets as "insurance" and "entertainment" it would have all been good with the IRS. Some of the crooks have figured that out.

Re: A start - just

I had a similar thought. This one was out of New York. The bastages who kept bothering us a few months ago were operating out of Florida.

Re: I bet the "tracked & never know it" guy heard the story.

Right theory, probably the wrong office. I'd bet said lobbyist is one of Jay's biggest contributors, hence his immediate letter about the issue.

Re: impossible for any safety critical system to be certified for use

You'll find that safety critical systems are only required to be certified to some standard which addresses known issues, precisely because of Neoc's point. When a new issue becomes known the standard is updated. In the US this is usually accompanied by a flurry of lawyers asserting that the companies making the products and the certifying agency should have known about the previously unknown issue and therefore each and every one of their million plus clients are do millions in damages. Granted it has been quite a few years since I've interacted in any way with any of these groups, but I don't imagine that has changed.

Re: The media strikes again!

Both the 1966 and 1976 incidents don't count as school mass killings to Americans. The sites are Universities, places where individuals choose to go and for which they pay a princely sum. School shootings in the context Americans think of them (public education) mostly start with Columbine, so yes, they have increased greatly since 1990.

But on the issue of the actual level of risk, yes it is very low and people are overly fearful of it.

Re: Homebrew Computer Club

Yeah, I always figured Woz for the brains of the operation and Jobs for the Charisma.

Re: Better quality than competitors? Probably.

No. Here in the States Heath made a kit that had an actual monitor and case so it's quality was far better.

The problem for me back then was all this stuff was expensive and exotic. As a low income teenager, I couldn't afford it and my parents wouldn't spring for it. My first "computer" was an Oddesey console some guy at the mall talked my dad into buying instead of the TRS-80 or Atari I wanted. Games were decent, but it was no platform on which to learn computers and not nearly as popular as the Atari station was. When the Commodore 64 arrive I finally got my first computer. From there it was off to the races.

Re: thank you to MS for not licensing DOS

If you're headed there, the first thanks you have to offer are to IBM for underfunding their PC initiative. It was that choice that caused the Boca Raton office to build the whole thing entirely from commodity parts with no proprietary hardware. Which in turn allowed Compaq to clone the hardware.

Still Apple was one of the early innovators in home PCs and helped make them cool to own. Back then it was Apple who owned all the really cool video games like Castle Wolfenstein. We couldn't afford one and I envied my friend his IIe. He always let me play it and early on I was always stuck on "You have 1 bullets left."

Re: wouldn't even be an issue if cards had a chip & pin

Shoddy thinking. If the thieves have access to install a skimmer, they have access to install a device to intercept both the chip data and PIN transmission.

I shop in US stores all the time. I for one am happy they no longer engage in the kabuki theater that use to be security for a credit card purchase. I remember the bad old days of a clerk pulling out a month old book to see if my credit card was on the list of stolen credit cards. And having my credit card declined because I made the fatal mistake of buying gas for my one car from the pump before heading inside to pay the clerk for the repair work they finished on my other car.

It's not that I am unaware of the problems. In fact, I've just gone through the process of canceling one of my credit cards and getting a new one because dodgy charges showed up on it. Neither VISA nor I can identify where or how the card was compromised. But they caught it, no goods were exchanged, and the bad guys didn't get money. I don't expect chip and PIN would have prevented it, but their monitoring caught it.

Re: Simple solution

The UK has now admitted Chip and Pin isn't infalible like they claimed it was. All it did was allow banks to dodge responsibility for fraud for a couple of years.

What security checks do you think a minimum wage monkey could actually be trusted to make? Check the signature? Right. I've been to college, I know how easily fake IDs are obtained for getting into bars and bars ARE legally liable for serving minors.

The only solution is to start holding the banks and the businesses with crap security responsible for the full extent of the economic damage they do to the users who are compromised by their failures. If that means the limited liabilities on corporations need to be modified, so be it. I'm all in for holding the officers of the corporation personally responsible for the breaches in cases like this.

Re: Oh, we have a full on, media driven, breakdown in the rule of law

That is precisely the time at which gun rights are most dear.

@Alistair

If it was as easy to kill as you claim, it wouldn't be the threat that it is, even in Africa. It certainly wouldn't have infected healthcare professionals in first world countries who were following Ebola protocols. And it wouldn't be killing so many healthcare professionals in Africa who are treating the disease.

There are multiple problems with trying to combat Ebola. For me the biggest is the Keystone Cops routine the US and especially the CDC have been displaying. Things might be better on that front in Ole Blighty. Next up is that when you compare flu symptoms the only flag you have is previous contact with someone who was know to have Ebola.

So yes, it is something to be concerned about. Not panicked, but not blase either. At least until the Keystone cops start acting like people who have a clue about stopping the spread of a highly lethal communicable disease.

Re: Don't start off being obnoxious

Oddly enough I knew someone who used this line of thinking to masquerade his occasional outburst. By starting every conversation off with "What a maroon!" Or "What a l.user!" he established figured the real outburst would just be part of the pattern.

...

No, it didn't actually work. You could tell when he was really upset by the color of his face. But the language wasn't any worse than his friendly greeting.

@Filippo

That was written with all the confidence of someone who has never been involved from the ground up of a successful, large, volunteer project.

Emotions always come into play. The biggest piece of bullshit anyone ever dishes is that you solve all problems by focusing on only the technical. Human beings don't work that way. The question to the manager is always: Is it worth my effort to deal with their ego at the same time I deal with the technical issue.

It's never fun being on the receiving end of the vulgar and emotional attack. I know I've been there and the accusation was a hell of a lot worse than anything Torvalds ever wrote to any of his devs. The title of the email, sent to the entire group on the mail list was:

YOU FUCKING THIEVES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It went on to accuse the board of directors of colluding to give improper compensation to the friend of the current President of the organization. At the time I was treasurer and the one who was actually driving the decision. The person making the accusation was one of the founders of the group. He was heavily emotionally invested in the success of the group because of the long hours he labored in promoting it. We resolved the issue by forwarding the issue to the lawyer who proceeded to explain the seriousness of the email to the sender. Because of the long distance and indirect communications it required the better part of a month to resolve. Eventually the sender recognized the valid reasons for the decision, withdrew the accusation, and apologized for his emotional outburst. There were complex reasons for the outburst. First up was an underlying animosity between the sender of the message and the person who was being contracted to do work for the NPO. Second up was that the sender considered himself to do the work and said he would have done it for free. Next up was that the sender felt shut out of the decision making process. The key to the resolution wasn't actually focusing on the technical issues. Those were down pretty cold: the person contracted had already written a similar program for a larger organization than we were and was actually being paid a pittance for the work. The pittance was more of a chain for the NPO to ensure it was done on time (always the biggest problem in an NPO). But what actually resolved the issue was showing him that we were taking his concerns seriously, even to the point of having the lawyer handle a fair part of the discussions and openly discussing the issues at meetings. Healing the emotions was as important to the resolution as addressing the technical issue.

While I wouldn't say the two individuals are good friends these days, they are civil to each other, and from time to time invite the other to social events.

Bottom line: programs are mostly written by geeks who for the most part are better at talking to machines than they are to each other. Recognize and accept that and you can deal with it better.

Re: which isn't the same thing.

to stupid and stubborn people, it is. Which is at the heart of the problem with Putterings.

Re: I believe this is a misunderstanding

No, it's skipping the lawyerese and translating it into plain ordinary English ('Merican version, not Brit). When I use to work at a screwdriver type white box IT shop we had a saying: "You can pay us a service contract over time, or you can pay us service rates on demand. Either way it works out about the same for us."

Re: Broadcast and Comercial TV is dead

No, broadcast and commercial tv are why cable survives, at least in the US. We have the FIOS bundle because of the amount of long distance phone calls my roommate makes and because she wants to watch the new broadcast tv episodes more or less as they are released. We DVR everything, but normally watch it within the week. Mostly she likes the DVR for skipping commercials. Hulu et al may eventually change that model, but only when the studios stop depending on the major networks as their primary money source.

I don't follow the logic of this story at all. With the exception of a very, very few acclaimed series and sports, nobody except hotels subscribes to HBO in the US. Their selection is crap and has been for a long time. That's why they are the first ones to head to OTT. I tried HBO about 20 years back. They'd get 5 movies a month that they endlessly cycled. If you want to watch movies Netflix is simply a far better deal. Even Showtime and Skinemax have more fare than HBO. And the line about how expensive it is to buy HBO because of packaging is complete bollux. You can get a basic subscription and add HBO to it. No need for the other packages. Same with Showtime, Skinemax, The Movie Channel, Playboy, and all the other Premium channels. The reason they're called Premium is you pay a substantial price for a single channel. Back when I briefly had the subscription it was $30/HBO or $50/HBO and Skinemax combo. Even if the price has dropped to $10, that's more than the Netflix subscription.

Do I think the industry would do better in full streaming, watch on demand mode? Probably. Structure the season with Release date/times for episodes that resembles the current programming schedule and I think they could make it work. But they aren't ready to make that move yet.

Re: why are they looking for outside investment for this?

There's a great deal of detail missing from the article. If the new production line would cost $10bn to ramp up, even $2.9bn/yr in profits isn't enough to fund it. Even if it pretty much guarantees $6bn/yr after the line is up and running. So you look for investors.

The catch on that is that there is a great deal of detail missing from the article. So they could be selling a perpetual motion machine under another name.

Re: had a fun time in Federal court last year

Sadly, the problem with the current US justice system is that only applies to that particular instance of your particular case. That whole precedent thing is only pulled out if it agrees with the ruling the judge wants to render.

I concur that OUGHT to be sufficient. In fact, I'm of the opinion that it shouldn't be illegal to record any call, only to misuse such a recording in an attempt to blackmail the other party.

Re: pegged my bullshit-o-meter, too.

Yep. Talk about a prime example of a non-apology apology accompanied by a non-denial denial.

Re: @Spartacus (No many times its NOT really their money!)

If the company can borrow against benefits and pensions, the money never belonged to you in the first place.

Re: There was no need to stop it.

Yes there is. The way the game is played is the Trademark Owner must start by saying "you're not allowed to do that, stop it." Then the offender responds "What would it take for me to be able to do that?" At which point you can discuss the license terms. I've been there with a small outfit and a no-name lawyer and they played it the same way as the super expensive lawyer. And the truth of the matter was, we were honored that one of the big boys was tipping their hat to our little convention. It gave us exposure no amount of advertising money possibly could have. If you're a gamer, chances are you've even seen the trademarked character, but probably got the order of appearance wrong. Convention came first, character second.