Posts by Scott Pedigo

Aren't Vendors Supposed To NOT Store The CVV?

I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that vendors were not supposed to store the CVV, but rather only use it to validate the CC when it was entered. Is that correct? Or do they need to store the CVV to be able to use it every time they charge against the CC when the customer logs in to his/her account and orders ticket on-line?

His Biggest Mistake Was...

that he didn't call Saul.

This time, said Baron von Harkonnen...

looking hungrily at the enormous tank -- the size of a small moon -- filled with liquefied tax dollars, you aren't going to pull the plug on me!

I Caused A Small Fire In A VMEbus Rack

I was working on a real-time military application where the hardware was a mix of proprietary and bought-in boards in a VMEbus rack. One of the vendors sent us a new model, and at some point I needed to update the firmware.

I was accustomed to a 3-pin connector, let us call the pins a, b, and c, where there was a 2-pin sized jumper. If you put it on a-b, you had the normal 12-volt operation of the memory. If you moved it to b-c, you had 24-volts instead, which allowed you to reprogram the EEPROM.

The new board had *two* sets of 3-pin connectors, for separately enabling the 12v and 24v power, where a given connector enabled or disabled the connection to that power. As usual, I moved the one connector to enable the 24v power, but not realizing there were now two connectors, I didn't disable the 12v power. I put the board back into the VMEbus rack, turned on the power, and there was a nice fireball which destroyed the board (about $2,200 at the time) and singed another board a few slots away. Luckily for me I had spaced the boards apart in the rack.

Fines Up To $40,000 per User?

If only.

If only that would be paid out to me, rather than just go into to the government coffers.

Now if there were enough Mexican Facebook users, then...

The population of Mexico is about 130 million (I rounded up from a 2010 number). Let's assume 50 million are on Facebook (number pulled from thin air, since it is a nice round one) x $40,000 per user = two trillion dollars!

Yes, enough to pay for the wall!!!

But unfortunately 4 or 5 times the market cap of Facebook.

Dammit. Mexicans still won't pay for that wall.

Spawn Spawnned An Evil Clown

My favorite clown is the evil one in the 1997 film Spawn (based on the comic).

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120177/mediaviewer/rm3321600256

Federal Bureau of What?

"University of Cambridge senior research associate Sergei Skorobogatov has laid waste to United States Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) ..."

That would be the Federal Bureau of Investigation

The Old Joke...

Someone asked him if he'd ever seen an eggplant, after he got drunk.

I like to see the show combined with Californication: the XXX Files. Or what those alien grays did to me after they kidnapped me.

Send Frank Miller

Did this remind anyone else of Sin City? I say, send Frank Miller there for inspiration.

Naughty mask, because, that's what the men are going to be forced to wear.

Recycled Pork?

I don't get it. Everyone, even those who prefer spending money on unmanned space probes, more or less accepted, if not promoted, the Orion space capsule + Constellation program development which started back in mid 2000's. In a time frame longer than it took us to go from a V-2 to a Saturn V, and which consumed a good chunk of the NASA budget during the interim, the big aerospace companies working on the project failed to deliver much of anything. The plug got pulled when the expected delivery dates were being pushed back years, if not over a decade, and the emphasis shifted to letting private industry have a shot. Now Boeing and Lockheed-Martin are themselves private companies, yes, but I'm assuming that what was meant by private industry is letting smaller companies propose and develop their own ideas, and then try to sell them, rather than having NASA give out huge development contracts for dream projects. Now that the private industry idea is working, Space X can resupply the ISS with cheaper and reusable rockets which don't use cryogenic fuels, now they want to go back to the old way, and recycle the same type of legacy products which could not be delivered in the Constellation project? I can see the need for a heavy booster, to lift stuff into LEO which has to go in one piece. But how much is that? Wouldn't it be cheaper to, say, launch components for a Mars mission into space using smaller boosters and assemble them in orbit? Or is that not technically feasible? Or are the components all going to be too big for that?

Iron Sky Curtain?

Putin is dreaming of the Helium 3.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034314/

Wasn't This Supposed To Stay In Vegas?

Breaking into a website is one thing, but violating the unwritten rule?

What? No Everquest 2 or Planetside 2 Spying?

It's a sad day for Sony I guess, when the spooks don't think there are enough users in these now free-to-play games to make it worth spying on them.

On the bright side, hackers still think it is worthwhile to hack into the Sony servers to steal usernames and passwords.

I've read a couple of articles referencing the Wozniak piece where he calls for patience in the face of unrealistic expectations of a continuous stream of revolutionary products from Apple. Now that phones and pads have cameras back and front, flashes, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB, 3G, 4G, etc. it seems that the best we can hope for are incremental improvements in the OS, battery life, and camera and screen resolution.

But why should phones be limited to defense? The best defense is a strong offence!

Here's my idea for the next revolutionary product: the iPistol!

Specs: a 14 round, 10mm pistol, with a white plastic inlay in the polished aluminium grip. Integrated MP3 player, phone, camera with integrated targeting sensor, and fingerprint sensor on the trigger. Can be configured to playback your favourite clips, like "Do you feel lucky punk? Well, do ya?" Automatically posts your best shots to Facebook.

You just have to be careful not to press the wrong button when you're having a conversation.

What, No Mention of Trousers?

Thanks to all for your various hints and warnings on what terms American tourists are advised not to use. No one seems to have remembered to tell them that men should use the term trousers, rather than pants.

Why only expand markets to allowing shorting of houses and real-estate? We should be able to short anything. For instance, pants. If I see a polyester bubble-butt, then I should be able to short pants.

The guy should have denied ever having done anything of the sort, and offered to take a lie detector test to prove he was telling the truth.

Change the Name and You've Got Yourself an App

How about a description of how the app was supposed to work. I'm imagining that the app would have taken photos using both the front and rear facing cameras at the same time, pasting the two photos into a side-by-side presentation, with the gawking face on the left, and whatever the rear-facing camera was aiming at on the right. It could be anything, not just a pair of tits. So with a name change to something not involving body parts, it seems to me that it could be a perfectly legitimate app. It would be good for getting 'reaction shots', but instead of just seeing the face, you'd also see what the person was reacting to.

Paris, because I'd have liked to have seen the expression on her former boyfriend's face.

"Dr Afroze Khan ..."

A descendant of Ghengis Khan, with an afro?

Or an aluminium cylinder of beer in the freezer?