Hi there, I've got a degree in economics, you're wrong. That shit's retarded.

Canada and the US share a boarder, so it is somewhat ridiculous for them to charge more in Canada than in Hawaii, that's a fair complaint. However, what I think is even more ridiculous is a car that's made in South Australia, the Pontiac G8 is cheaper to buy in the US than in South Australia. The average price in South Australia is around $50,000 the average price in the US is around $30,000. Remembering that the dollar was at parity or close to parity. This means it was $20,000 cheaper to purchase a car that had been shipped to the US. GM has consistently done this to us, and just about every large company does this to us.

Valve actually doesn't do it that much, though some game producers that use Steam do.

Sometimes I need to pretend I am a rambling mad man as a joke amongst friends. The problem is I can never quite pull of something which is coherent enough to actually be said by someone, yet insane enough to actually stand out as this guy is obviously a rambling mad man.

My go to response used to be some mish-mash of an Allen Ginsberg poem, something like...
"I passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, if I was expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull..."

It's good, but it's hard to memorise. Like myself, most of my friends have at least some university level economics/finance education, so from now on, I'm just going to memorise your comment, as my go to rambling mad man impersonation.

In other words, thanks!

I do what I said above all the time (note that I only need to remember 2 passwords though), and the bad grammar and punctuation makes little to no difference, because in my mind the badness still follows a pattern which is predictable, as if someone who doesn't know English well was writing this. These make it predictable for you.

Lies. I used to do this too, when I was in primary and high school, on my Cyrix 200. It used to take me about a week to crack 95-98% of the passwords, you never got to 100% unless everyone there had really weak passwords. There were always _some_ passwords which I couldn't crack in a reasonable amount of time. They were often the passwords of my friends who were doing similar things.

Over the years I had figured out a lot of different ways to break into machines. But the best way I got the hashes was by bringing along a bootable linux diskette (or CD in the later years), booting in off of that (sometimes had to get around BIOS protections first), then we could grab the sam file (or the sam.bak file). I also found some code which we compiled to a DLL, which pretended to be a Novell logon manager, and would simply dump the login and password to a text file when someone logged in. They didn't realize for a long time, and it seems even Symantec didn't become aware of this till 2002. Which was many many many years later. This ensured that if we lost an admin password, we'd just have to wait for them to log back in, and we'd have it again.

Eventually I got wise and figured out how to terminal into the domain server with one of the admin passwords, at which point I created a very official sounding domain admin account, which had permissions for just about everything. At which point I'd then brag and show my friends that I could access network shares which were off limits and print to fancy colour printers reserved only for teachers... like a gangsta.

Use a password manager then. Problem solved.

Even if the master database is stolen, they'd need a keylogger or similar to get your password so they can unlock it. Most of the password managers like KeePass or LastPass aren't crackable, if you use a good password.

Why is everyone limiting themselves so much with possibilities for correct horse battery staple?

Add some spaces in there first of all, then throw in some punctuation, preferably bad punctuation and grammar.

Throw in some slang and perhaps some more obscure words.

Throw in some random junk for fun, I recommend a mathematical formula. Also, don't place it on the end, as this is the most common place for random junk. Instead put it at the start, or somewhere random in the middle.

Password managers are a VERY GOOD idea, as they allow you to easily maintain complex passwords for each website/application/etc, separately. Especially when those managers are like KeePass, LastPass, or similar, such that the data is encrypted to a ridiculous extent. If you take an application like KeePass or LastPass, and try to guess the hash, it is going to be slow due to the usage of secure hash functions like SHA512, Whirlpool, and similar. They also salt properly, can use 2 factor authentication, and use PBKDF2, which will eliminate the ability to use rainbow tables and slow down each and every guess such that a machine which can usually do "350 billion password attempts a second" can now only do "350 thousand attempts per second".

Then if you use a pass phrase like "correct horse battery staple" with some added bad grammar numbers and symbols, you'll have 1 easily rememberable password, that will not be broken in a reasonable amount of time.

Instead, if you don't use a password manager, you'll likely use the same or a limited number of passwords for different websites, and when one goes down, they all go down. With a password manager you limit the attack to breaking into your password manager, and breaking into a single site.

No, that's electrolytes.

Of course. The only problem I have with that is that the assumptions, are of such wide a scope, that they can never be perfectly met in reality.

For example, lets look at the assumptions of the BS model, and you'll see that most can't be satisfied. To satisfy the fee less, risk-free borrowing and lending, and unlimited restrictions on buying and selling, you need to apply some logic and theories, which themselves only hold up in specific situations.

Saying 'it has predictive power in the proper set of circumstances' while true, leaves most of these theories with little predictive power, in reality.

It was when I was working with some postgrad econ students trying to do some money market and goods market modelling that I realized there was a self-validating nature of a lot of the theories. Where all they needed to do was take certain axioms, throw in a little ceteris paribus magic, and you've got a self-validating theory.

With the right axioms, everything can be true, and yet incorrect.

Or as a caricature of a Nobel laureate once said in Dilbert...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJwwAVM1Auc

I studied economics at university, the only thing I learnt was how little predictive power the theories have, and how they use certain axioms to ensure their rightness, regardless of the outcome. The one thing I liked were the philosophical aspects of economics, such as the Austrian School, except they don't teach those much, as they have little to no predictive power.

You're posting this on Slashdot, your point is invalid.

I pay a LOT of money to pirate. Probably more than the books cost. I also probably spend more on movies, TV, and possibly books, than you and your girlfriend put together. So that's not it.

There's many reasons why, they've been discussed in every pirating thread on Slashdot, ad nauseam.

So from the sounds of it, you think waiting a week is reasonable.

How about waiting a month?
How about waiting a couple of months?
How about waiting a year?

Before pirating in Australia, it used to be a regular thing to have to wait up to a year, before you'd get the latest movies and TV. Even then, we'd only get a small fraction of what was in the US.