It's baby_jesus_real_butthole(first_half_of_needle, haystack, last_half_of_needle), duh. But don't blame php for that, that's the name of the function straight from libjesus.

Who's stealing the identity?

The drive walks away one evening, then the next morning it shows up and oh hey it looks like Doctor Death is coming up for release, he's served 999.9 years of his 1000 year sentence, it says so right in this excel spreadsheet, and excel never lies.

No, just lying in bed, working from home at my highly paid job, wondering when it was that slashdot got so lame. Used to be people came back with facts. Or counter arguments. Or opinions of their own. Or experiences of their own.

But it's been reduced to the point where the only opposition I ever get to my statements is from idiots who try to paint me as something I'm not and attack that. It's sad. You're sad.

I'm everything I ever said that I was. My life is stranger than fiction most of the time anyway, I have no need to lie to get people excited.

I agree... there should be a color for this. In between "Free" and "Partly free"; there should be a "Technically Free but de-facto censored" category

Why are you so afraid to call a spade a spade? The USA is NOT a free country. They censor people, they incarcerate more of their population than any other country, they make debt slaves of the people that remain... they are NOT FREE, and they're using war to spread their NOT FREEDOM everywhere they can because they hate OUR freedom.

Eh, $6 is cheaper than most movie tickets and non-bargain blurays these days and I can watch the movie whenever, however, and wherever I want so it's more than a rental. The selection is underwhelming but if they ever get something I wanted to see in HD I'd probably do it.

I cant believe more people aren't pointing out how potentially dangerous what the TechCrunch author, Regardt van der Berg, did was. He gave a potential unknown attacker a beachhead inside the TechCentral network, even if only for a few minutes. That is long enough for someone to potentially have compromised other machines on the network.

The article says: "We have a spare PC in the TechCentral office that has been newly installed and that contains no personal information. I used this machine for the next part of the ploy. I installed the Support.me application and provided "John" with the access details. ... Because I did not furnish my PayPal or credit card details, the scammers turned nasty and proceeded to my documents folder. I saw the engineer poking around in some folders, but I promptly disconnected the office Wi-Fi connection. After some research, I found out that they'll delete system files and users' personal documents. Fortunately, I disconnected before they managed to delete files on the dummy PC -- not that there was anything of value for them to delete."

At that point, regardless of what was done to that specific PC, they have to assume the attacker could compromise every machine on their network by exploits launched immediately from that machine in the background at all other computers on the network, like through potentially zero-day exploits such as for unpatched Microsoft issues relating to local workgroup file sharing or other services. They cant assume they knew everything the attackers were doing. That's why it's been said that firewalls, like some lollipops, are "crunchy on the outside and chewy in the middle". The article author does not say he re-imaged the PC either. Granted, his informative article that may help many other potential victims was maybe worth the risk, but he should at least make clear to his readership what those risks are and that he understood them and accepted them on behalf of helping his readership.

Contrast with what your setup, where the VM was on its own virtual LAN and so presumably could not get to other machines on your local network. And as a snapshotted VM, you can easily roll it back. Still, if you had installed software, how risky that was would also depend on the exact network configuration and how that VM's VLAN interacts with your gateway to the internet -- as in whether the VLAN to gateway interface via whatever virtualization software you were using was set up like guest networking with isolation from other guests. One mistake somewhere in configuration (or even with no mistakes and buggy virtualization software), and your production network could have been compromised. And as you said, there could be credentials on a test machine like SSH keys and such. You did the right thing by not installing anything.

Granted, it doesn't sound like these examples of scammers are doing internal network attacks, but you never can know for sure what they really intend...

Your ad hominem attack is irrelevant to the topic at hand. It's also flat out wrong; I've traveled to numerous different countries, and spent several years living outside my home country.

You talk about infrastructure like it's the be-all-and-end-all of everything. It's not.

Takes some seriously Orwellian doublethink to pretend copyright enforcement isn't censorship. The idea that the USA is a bastion of freedom... wake me up when there's a study made by people who aren't batshit crazy.

Get her addicted to cigarettes and cocaine. And pull out her molars. That'll get the weight off.

Interesting, thanks! Good point on the container.

BTW, I recall an old mystery story where the one clue was that there was no clues (seemingly no information), and the investigator correlated that among other crimes with no clues to find the culprit...

Romulan spacecraft in Star Trek: TNG were supposedly powered by an artifical quantum singularity (a black hole).

Robin Williams' life and comedy can only be understood in light of a deep depression and related suffering throughout his life. No doubt many other artists and creators have that sort of (negative) inspiration.

Michael Ende's "The Neverending Story" has an expanding "Nothingness" that drives the plot.

Jack Chalker's sci-fi Well World series, specifically "The Return of Nathan Brazil", has a spreading nothingness as a rip in space-time created via powerful weapons (the Zinder Nullifier) as a major driver of the plot.

Other examples?

Guess I've watched too much "Cheers". :-) Sorry about that.

I'm moving more of my own work from Java to JavaScript, but that is mainly because JavaScript is easiest to deploy almost every where. I generally like Java+Eclipse better for big projects otherwise. However, with tools that compile other languages to JavaScript, and browsers that can get near native performance from JavaScript if written in a certain way, I'm hoping the "JavaScript" approach will continue to gain in benefits because it is just easier to deploy than Java. It's too bad Java app deployment to the desktop was never a real priority (even with Java Web Start). As an example of the difference (including in sandboxing), some school teachers can get fired for installing new software without permission (which could include a Java app which can do anything), but they can use a web browser to load up an educational web page which uses JavaScript to run a simulation without too many worries.

I fought against Java back in the late 1990s compared to using Smalltalk. Back then Java was just a mess and a mass of hype. But I can accept Java is now a half-way-decent solution for many things now that many of the worst rough edges of Java have been smoothed off. I still miss Smalltalk though, and to some extent (not all), JavaScript recaptures some of the Smalltalk flavor and community -- if I squint just right, I can kind of see the entire Web as one big multi-threaded Smalltalk image. :-)

it's very difficult for the algorithm to determine the difference

Again. They aren't false positives. You buy stuff like that. The system doesn't care who you buy it for, or why you buy it. If you bought it for others before, you're likely to do it again, and while you may have never wanted it in the first place, you clearly wanted to buy it, or you wouldn't have purchased it.

Except for the case where I bought something from a wishlist and had it shipped to the person who put it on the wishlist. Then

A) it should be trivial to determine that this is a gift
2) The appropriate response is to show me other things that person also wished for.

Personally, I think both of you are wrong.