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Comment Re:tax dollars at work (Score 1) 74

we have been bouncing a laser off the moon since the late 60's

And receiving back only a few photons out of billions, making any meaningful data transfer impossible, unless you consider 1 bps meaningful.

can we please for the love of god end the multimillion dollar experiments that a 12 year old does on instructables?

Can we please educate people enough so that they understand that shining a light across a room is much easier than detecting it from 250,000 mies away?

Comment It's not extortion (Score 3) 279

Obviously anyone giving you legal advice has failed due diligence. From their site: "Every IP listed will expire 7 days after the LAST abuse is detected, and FREE of charge."

So, find out whoever is spamming, and put a stop to it. It might be different if your ASN is listed, but I'd still be looking for spam sources on your own network.

Comment Re:This is pointless... (Score 2) 59

It can't be trivially reduced, though. Remember you're travelling _through_ a point, with speed, direction, momentum and orientation dependent on the point _before_ that.

So if you have 12 points, there are 10 different 'distances' between the last two. For example, in points A through L, the distance from K to L depends on whether you arrived at K from A, B, C, etc.

The original table would have 11 entries for each point, while the current challenge would require a table of 110 entries for each point.

The complexity increases from (n-1) to (n-1)*(n-2). Not quite squared, but close enough. IMHO that's the opposite of a trivial reduction.

Comment Re:It wasn't a lineup. (Score 1) 227

Sorry, but _you_ need to read more carefully and thoroughly.

FTFA:
"She described it as "outrageous" that someone could "scroll down the friends list for the bar and point out someone that had brown hair and bangs" and that would be enough to enter someone into the justice system."

Note the "friends list for the bar" bit. Meaning, she must have friended the bar to be on its friends list.

You seem to have failed at either reading comprehension, or simple deductive logic.

Comment They agreed to it when they signed up (Score 4, Insightful) 301

There are many things you are not allowed to accept money for on PayPal. Most of them are illegal, but some, like guns and erotica, are not. But I do remember in PayPal's TOS that they did exclude sellers from taking payments for adult material.

So yeah, don't take PayPal and then complain because YOU didn't follow the rules.

However I will grant that the definition of what is, and isn't 'erotica', could be subject to wild swings of interpretation. However any merchant with enough volume has their own merchant account and doesn't need PayPal anyhow, so shouldn't need to worry about PP's interpretation.

Comment Political agenda? (Score 4, Funny) 775

"Sullivan, while making it clear he opposes Santorum's views, nonetheless suggests Google is long overdue to implement a disclaimer for the 'Santorum' search results. 'They are going to confuse some people,' he explains, 'who will assume Google's trying to advance a political agenda with its search results.'""

If Google _were_ to include a disclaimer, it would be pushing a political agenda. Unless the disclaimer was something like: "The search results below may indicate that the candidate of your choice is so hopelessly clueless about the web that they are unable to grab the top search result for their own name." Unless of course the Luddites now have a political party....

Comment Talking greeting card hack (Score 3, Interesting) 399

Just hack one of those talking greeting / birthday cards. Yank the electronics and put them in your own card. I know there are cards that let you record exactly what you want on them, but they're a bit more expensive than the others. You could even personalize each voice invitation to match the person being invited.

It's different enough to be geeky and novel, but not so far-left-geeky that it'll have everyone wondering if they need to show up to your wedding in cosplay garb.

Comment Don't expose the server to the web at all. (Score 1) 333

If you really want to go above and beyond, don't let anyone access the web server directly at all. Instead, they would connect to an OS session on a machine you control via VNC, or perhaps Citrix Metaframe, etc.

The 'desktop' they're accessing can only access your 'web' server. Your server can't be accessed from, nor can it access the internet at large. The 'desktop' they access can be as locked down as you want, probably only showing a single app or browser running in a 'kiosk mode'.

In one swell foop (grin), you'll have eliminated almost all attack vectors, and as long as you have good input sanitizing between your 'kiosk app' and database, you should be fairly safe, even from future 0-day attacks.

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