Posts by Joe Zeff

@Darling Petunia

I live in California. Sending letters or emails to those two left-wing, elitist hypocrites we have "representing" us in the Senate would be a waste of time. Until a few years ago, I also had the misfortune of living in Waxman's district. I may have lived in the San Fernando Valley, but all he's ever represented was the movie industry. If you aren't in that industry and a big contributor to him, he won't even admit you exist. This is exactly they type of thing I've learned to expect from all three of them over the years, but the liberals keep on voting them back into office and there's nothing the rest of us can do except bend over and @#%@^%&&$*&*

Author is an ignoramus

Of course, we all know that, but I think most of the posters missed the reason. Here in LeftPondia, gun ownership isn't a privilege that the government could revoke at any time, it's a right, built into our Constitution, via the Second Amendment. Now, if he'd written that here in America WE HAVE A RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS, he'd be right, but as it is, he's misstated the facts.

@Bert Ragnarok

I'm a regular on a help forum for Fedora. I've never seen anybody recommend that everybody turn off SELinux, or even that they should always run in permissive mode. At most, this will be offered as a step in trouble-shooting, or a work around for a specific issue. YMMV, and clearly does, but that's what I've seen.

That being said, I'd also like to say that there's no good reason that I can see for anybody to object to UAC asking you to confirm that you're shutting it down. If you did, it's only one more mouse-click, and if you didn't, it stops malicious programs from messing with your system.

He should never have had the chance to do this.

Once he was told that he was being terminated, he should not have had access to any computer on the network. Somebody from management or Security should have gone to his desk, and logged him out on every computer there, and another admin been instructed to disable all of his accounts before he'd left the building.

To me, this doesn't sound like something he did on the spur of the moment. It's too well planned, too well written for that. It sounds more like something he'd done long in advance, so that if and when he was let go, he could get revenge. Even so, it took him time at his computer, logged into the network, to put his plan into action; time he never should have had.

I've been terminated from computer work, once or twice. In all cases, I made sure that the manager knew that I was logged in, and asked him to log me out, so that there'd be no question later of me having done anything malicious.

Oh, that Gnome!

I must be putting too much time and thought into my Linux computer. When I saw the headline, I thought it was referring to the Gnome desktop.

My coat? Oh, it's the icky-green one on my tongue.

Cognative Dissonance

The article's headline threw me for a loop for a moment. I live in Los Angeles, and out here, DWP means "Department of Water and Power."

I hate to be the one to break the news

Much though I hate to admit it, this is not BO's fault. Not only didn't he code the pages, I'm sure he had nothing to do with deciding who did. Still, it does give the impression that his team was more interested in influencing the voters than in getting the job done right. One can only hope that they will learn from this experience and be more careful when they set things up for the new administration. Quite frankly, however, my impression is that BO's main skill is running for office and that he will be more at the mercy of his staff for this kind of thing than many other presidents have been. Only time will tell, and I sincerely hope and pray that I'm wrong.

They were fools to go back on line

McColo was foolish to go back on line and transfer the control data to Russia. Far better would have been to use the old "station wagon filled with mag tapes" method. Yes, it's a little slower, but it does have the advantage of leaving no footprint on the net. Now, of course, we know what they've done, and possibly who the recipients were and we can watch them. If they'd shipped the data by tape, we'd have had no clue what they'd done, or who'd gotten the data. Instead, we'd be dislocating out shoulders patting ourselves on the back about the way we'd shut them down completely right up to the moment they came back on line. Just more proof, if such is needed, that when you come down to it, spammers really are stupid.

This is not science

Once you start fudging the data, or making unrevealed adjustments (or whatever else you want to call it) you're not doing science any more. This is propaganda, plain and simple, and I bet they'd have been perfectly happy to let it stand if they hadn't been outed. i'll bet that if the error had shown a cooling trend, they'd have been all over it, trying to find "the error."

Paris, because this type of thing is about all she can understand

@AC

Your post is titled "They're called speedboats for a reason." In that you say that a frigate would need to get within 10 miles to hit it with a 4.5" gun. I wouldn't know. I do know, however, that back in '72, my ship's 5"/54 naval rifle had a max range of roughly 12.5 nautical miles, and it was very accurate, as the NVA could well attest. Yes, the Knox class wasn't as fast as I would have liked, but it could make it's presence felt quite a way out, especially if it were a night action, because I doubt these pirates have radar worth mentioning. (I could be wrong on that, of course.) What we used, mostly, was AA common at about 70# each. Set as I suggested above for air burst, even near misses are effective. Set for impact, I doubt it would take more than one hit to disable a craft. And, considering that it can, for short periods, fire 40 rounds per minute, there's a good chance that there'd be several hits before the shells stopped landing. All it would take, as somebody else suggested, would be convoys with escorts using long-range weapons and the pirates would be neutralized. Alas, considering BO's obvious contempt for the military, the US isn't going to be doing anything remotely like that, and without US involvement, it's probably not going to happen.

We do things better in California

I helped run the polls in California for over a decade, and I can tell you that we have a better system: only a member of the precinct staff can challenge a voter; only on personal knowledge, and only for a very limited number of reasons. If a poll worker wants to keep somebody from voting because of their party, they're just out of luck. And, if you get a provisional ballot, you don't have to "go down to the auditor's office and fight to get it accepted." They're all processed automatically, by checking the voters rolls and other records.

In all my years, I only saw one provisional ballot that I was sure would be thrown out. The "voter" had told us that he had moved out of the precinct almost a year ago, had never bothered to re-register but insisted on voting anyway. California law says that you can only vote in your old precinct if you moved after registration closed for that election. (about six weeks or so) I let him vote a provisional, but noted his statement on the outside so that whoever processed it would know he'd admitted that he was ineligible.

Kudus to the writer for doing his job well, under trying circumstances. By seeing to it that as many people in his precinct were able to vote, he Did The Right Thing. I only hope that precinct workers in heavily Democrat states like Illinois returned the compliment and allowed Republicans to vote.

What we need next

The next thing we need is for somebody to do the same thing next year at Barak Hussein Obama's inauguration. Regardless of what you think of him or his politics, it'd be the equivalent of the slave saying to the general (during a triumph) "Remember, you too are mortal."

Ya know...

The Royal Society says that you can't use a helicopter. In that case, why don't they just use either an autogyro or a blimp?

It's not going to be possible

They're not going to manage to keep their network pr0n free no matter how they filter it. If nothing else, purveyors of XXX content will work out code words that will skip around any blocking software. After all, this is the Internet we're talking about, and in the long run, it will treat blocking software like any other damaged segment and work around it.

Paris, because she, at least, knows what the Internet is for!

When will the Hurd be here?

The Hurd will come thundering through just as soon as they're done porting Duke Nukem Forever to their kernel.

Is Linux vulnerable?

I use Linux and Firefox with flashblock. Alas, I don't have a webcam, so I can't test it myself. It's not so much, in this case, that I think Linux's security is better, it's just sufficiently different from the Windows model that I can't judge from what's in the article. If anybody tries this with Linux, please post your experience.

@Rafael and AC

Rafael, I don't want to be nasty, but in this case, it's probably just you. I've been running Fedora 9 almost since it came out, 24X7 and it's just fine. I won't pretend that there's nothing about it that isn't wonderful, but for the most part, It Just Works for me. Right now, my uptime is over 12 days; the only real effect of the updates outage was letting my uptime reach 25 days. Have you checked any of the user forums for help?

AC, I can't talk about Samba or NTFS, because I don't need it, but CUPS works just fine for me, and most people. I don't know why the various desktops didn't work for you, but remember: Fedora is based around Gnome, so it's not surprising that it's more likely to work than any other desktop.

As a general comment, I'd like to point out that Fedora (or Fedora Core as it used to be called) was specifically designed as a bleeding-edge testbed for RedHat, supported only by the community. There's nothing new in the announcement; they're just telling us that this isn't going to change, and why should it? Fedora has excellent community support. If you're having trouble with it, don't just switch distros, give the community a chance! There's lots of folks out there who want to help.

@Philip Kroker

You say that the climate has been warming ever since the last Ice Age. Really? I bet that the people who lived during the 16th century through the early 19th (roughly on both sides) AKA "The Little Ice Age" would be interested in hearing that. And, we don't just have lots of physical evidence, such as tree rings, we have historic evidence if you know how to interpret it: numerous monastery records of when they plowed, sowed and harvested, showing how the growing seasons were getting shorter, as well as the fact that they weren't able to grow grapes in England any more.

The big mistake some of the more simple-minded Global Warming fanatics make is thinking that ever since the last Ice Age the climate had been stable and that suddenly, about 100 years ago or so, it started changing, and getting warmer. That, of course, is nonsense, and I hope all El Reg readers understand that. The climate is always changing, and right now, it seems to be getting warmer. The big questions are, how warm is it going to get and how much of this (if any) is man made?

Now, I'd be the last person to deny that it's probably a Bad Idea to continue our open-ended experiment of throwing CO2 into the atmosphere to see what happens, but I'm also skeptical about the need for drastic, irreversible measures. From what I've recently heard, painting your roof white will cancel out quite a bit of "CO2 footprint," and if you don't like the results, all it takes is a few gallons of black paint to reverse it.

Nothing new here

This is just plain, ordinary Contempt of Court. As a former lawyer, he should have known better and now he's paying the price for his stupidity. This isn't an attack on Freedom of Speech, or proof that it doesn't exist in Singapore, it's just a judge insisting that she be treated with respect. He'd get the same treatment (if possibly less severe) in England, Canada or America. Nothing to see here, move along.

@frymaster

I would never run an unsecured wifi router, or recommend one to anybody asking. Granted, it's possible to hack into one, but that's not the point. In principle, at least, a wifi spot is just as much an attractive nuisance as a swimming pool. In California, at least, you must have a fence at least six feet high around your pool, with a locked gate to keep kids from slipping in and (possibly) drowning. Yes, they can still get in if they want to badly enough, but if you have the fence and the locked gate you've made a "good faith" effort to keep them out and your liability is much lower. I think that in the long run, securing your wifi will be the same: a good faith effort to prevent random, drive-by thefts of service.

At this point, the owner of that router has no way of proving that the email wasn't sent with his knowledge and consent; if the sender had had to hack his way in, it would have created a reasonable presumption that the sender was "trespassing," and that might have helped clear the homeowner's name.

@Ashley Pomeroy

As you say, he couldn't "take his punishment like a man." His sentence was 21 months, before any time off for good behavior, ignoring the chance of parole. At most, under two years. But he just couldn't wait. In my book, that shows why he couldn't "take it line a man:" in the most important way, he wasn't a man but an overgrown boy who still had to have everything right now.

I feel sorry for his family, and especially the daughter who escaped. I hope she recovers without scarring and is able to put this behind her and get on with her life. Alas, I'm almost certain that she's going to be forced through so much grief counseling and other therapy that it's going to end up reenforcing what they're trying to dull, and aggravate any emotional scarring.

On a side note, has anybody besides me noticed that people seem to have more trouble getting over disasters like this than they did fifty years ago? Back then, you were expected to grieve, then put it behind you and go on with life, and almost everybody did; they might have a friend or a clergyman to talk with, but that'd be it. Today, there's psychologists, psychiatrists, grief counselors galore, but people are finding it harder and harder to let go. Is there a connection? I have no idea, and hope not. Just wanted to throw that out and see if anybody else wants to comment on it.

@Mark Aggleton

Exactly. Thank you for expanding on my point. Linux is not totally secure, it's just more secure than Windows. Some day the malware writers will decide that it's profitable to target Linux and things will change. For now, however, I'll enjoy my immunity to that sort of junque, TYVM.

Why do we put up with this?

Why do we put up with exploits like this year after year? The only reason they work is because the operating system they're running on is completely insecure. Any "security" is a band-aide, trying to hide the mass of holes underneath. If Windows were really secure, we wouldn't need third-party firewalls, anti-virus programs or malware removers because such things would be impractical. I'm not going to say that everybody needs to switch to Linux (although I recently did) because not everybody wants to learn how to use a new OS and its programs. All I'm asking is that Microsoft come out with a version of Windows that's as secure as Linux is. Considering how much Windows costs, they should be able to make it as safe to use as an OS you can get for free!

@ E

In case you're not aware (and the people behind this abortion obviously aren't) the Sun is a yellow dwarf star. What you're thinking of is probably a neutron star, which can be just a dozen kilometers across or so, but has at least as much mass as the Sun. If one entered our system, we'd know about it long before it impacted (a highly unlikely occurrence, even it it did pass through) because its gravitational effects would have major effects on the orbits of all the planets, including the Earth. Of course, this is Hollywood we're talking about, where they never let the facts get in the way of what they think is a good story.

They knew in advance it was a dud.

I think that the way Microsoft pushed OEMs to claim that low-end machines were "Vista Capable" when they were barely able to crawl with Vista Basic shows that they knew how bad it was in advance. Even before launch, they were preparing for a bad rollout by tricking people into buying machines that weren't really good enough to do the job, just to make sure they sold a lot of copies, and they wouldn't have needed to do that if they had had any confidence in their product.

I've seen it said elsewhere that it may not be that Microsoft is selling badly-written programs because they can get away with it but because that's the best they can manage, and I think that this is the proof that they're no longer capable (if they ever were) of writing world-class software.

@ John

You say that there's a consensus on Global Warming as though that's important. It isn't. All it means is that a large number of scientists are in agreement. It doesn't mean that they are right. I'm sure we can all think of many cases where there was a scientific consensus that turned out to be wrong.

I might add, also, that although the only greenhouse gas the computer models consider is carbon dioxide, it's not only not the only one, it's not the biggest one. That honor goes to water. Not one, single computer model takes it into account, because it makes the model too complex. Maybe that's why none of them can predict the present if you start from twenty years ago. Once they can do that, I'll start thinking that their predictions of the future are nothing more than crystal gazing.

This is why spamming is profitable

Earlier posters laughed at the low response rate, but they ignored the two most important points: except for the cost of the list, the campaign cost the spammer nothing and his costs were only 5% of his gross income from spamming. That's right, his return was 20 times his investment. As long as that's true, we're going to have spammers.

@Ishkander

Those vegetarians and vegans are doing worse than just slaughtering innocent plants; they're dumping them into the pot while they're Still Alive! Seriously, I'm beginning to think that the more wacko of them don't love animals so much as they hate plants.

They're controdicting themselves

They say that they want to provide the best Internet experience for all their customers. How can they do that when they're blocking access to an Internet service many of their customers need/want simply because a small percentage of those customers abuse it? Now, if they said that there was a download cap and that service would degrade for a specified period of time if you exceeded it, there'd be no ground for complaint as long as the cap was reasonably high. Downloading the equivalent of one DVD per month would allow Linux users to get new distros via BitTorrent without trouble, but would limit people pirating movies, and I think most people would find that fair.