Comment Re:The real crime is within... (Score 1) 282
I know I'm not the popular guy here asking the Government to actually spend MORE money
we don't really need to spend more, just waste a whole lot less.
Comment Re:I read it as... (Score 1) 156
insane in the membrane. so did I.
Comment Re:Oh, great (Score 2, Insightful) 314
statistics say you still made the right choice.
Comment not metaphor examples (Score -1) 151
The world is a stage; Time is money Both simalies, genius.
Comment Re:Already a fan, but how valid is it? (Score 4, Insightful) 42
While I don't really question the results of my own sleep diagnosis, I certainly question the methods. One nights sleep at the diagnostic center is really just one data point. From a purely statistical perspective, this is already lame. Add to that the stress of having to do the test with a strange bed and all the wires and you would seemingly have a recipe for disaster. Yet somehow, it does kinda work out for some people.
I agree that having some sort of cheap, easy home monitoring device that is not decades behind in sensor and transmitter tech would be really nice.
Comment Re:Beats the normal method (Score 1) 42
electric shocks?
Comment Re:Great News for Environment! (Score 1) 179
I prefer to see the estuary as being half full.
Comment Re:Great News for Environment! (Score 2) 179
I would gladly trade this for the aging coal power plant that currently sits on the banks of my local estuary. I am inclined to believe that this will be better for my local environment than the coal burning.
Submission + - Bank software bug being exploited?
An anonymous reader writes: My friend called last night and recounted a peculiar tale. For six months now there have been automated transfers happening to his checking account that "disappeared", yet he'd never authorized any automated payments, ever. He was puzzling over his discrepant account balance and went to his bank, engaging the fraud department to help him. He showed them that there were three currently pending transactions, two for $18.95 followed by one transaction where he was refunded $18.95. While they were looking at his account information all three transactions seemingly evaporated and the balance was now $18.95 less. The only proof the banker had that these transactions ever existed was that he had seen them himself. Puddling through archived data they were able to see that these triplet transactions had been ongoing for six months, but they didn't appear in any normal views of the account, they were only found by searching past records and specifically looking for them. The only information available from the records was an 800 number of a company my friend had never heard of.
The bank covered the losses and his money is moving to another account so he is, for the moment, okay.
So, it occurs to me that someone knows of a bug in the banks software. When two debit transactions and one credit transaction are done quickly the money is moved to and fro but the one 'refund' makes both charges fall off the monthly statement. This seems reminiscent of the "half cents" sort of scam, if these knotheads are dinging hundreds of accounts for petty amounts like this, they stand to rake in a ton. I assume that if the refund transaction happens quickly enough that the code sees it as some sort of merchant error and then goes to clear the whole transaction out, and in doing so it sweeps by merchant info and snags both earlier debits. The money actually moving out of the account seems to counter that logic, though.
I'm concerned that since the amount involved was chump change and the complaining customer has gone away, the bank is going to let this go and we will all remain vulnerable until it becomes so frequent that they can no longer ignore it. Naturally I've been nosing around the net looking for anything similar, but haven't encountered anything close to what my friend described. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Has anyone heard of a scam like this? You do reconcile your accounts reasonably frequently, I trust?
The bank covered the losses and his money is moving to another account so he is, for the moment, okay.
So, it occurs to me that someone knows of a bug in the banks software. When two debit transactions and one credit transaction are done quickly the money is moved to and fro but the one 'refund' makes both charges fall off the monthly statement. This seems reminiscent of the "half cents" sort of scam, if these knotheads are dinging hundreds of accounts for petty amounts like this, they stand to rake in a ton. I assume that if the refund transaction happens quickly enough that the code sees it as some sort of merchant error and then goes to clear the whole transaction out, and in doing so it sweeps by merchant info and snags both earlier debits. The money actually moving out of the account seems to counter that logic, though.
I'm concerned that since the amount involved was chump change and the complaining customer has gone away, the bank is going to let this go and we will all remain vulnerable until it becomes so frequent that they can no longer ignore it. Naturally I've been nosing around the net looking for anything similar, but haven't encountered anything close to what my friend described. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Has anyone heard of a scam like this? You do reconcile your accounts reasonably frequently, I trust?
Submission + - No Sleep, Better Mood (abcnewsradioonline.com)
anonymousNR writes: Matthew Walker at the University of California, Berkeley, and his team found some interesting things about people with no sleep.
There is a nature article with probably more details but its behind a pay wall.
Given the amount of sleeplessness slashdot community suffers, you may want to know that if you didn't sleep last night "it is good for you"
There is a nature article with probably more details but its behind a pay wall.
Given the amount of sleeplessness slashdot community suffers, you may want to know that if you didn't sleep last night "it is good for you"
Submission + - Digital Easter Egg Hunt (slashdot.org)
An anonymous reader writes: I'm asking the slashdot community, how would they go about setting up a digital easter egg hunt. I've got ideas ranging from a very complex web based solution, to just modding Diablo 2, but some ideas are too complex, and then diablo only allows 8 players in at a time. I mean I suppose you could run multiple instances and make the eggs a boss drop, but ehh, its not ideal. I'm looking for something thats fairly easy to set up, hard to abuse/hack, and fun for people to play. Any ideas would be great. Thanks. :)
Submission + - Oil at sea is recoverable with greasy wool (bloomberg.com)
tchernobog writes: "Sometimes simple ideas are the best ones. An Italian group from Biella has developed a new method to clean oil spilled at sea by using greasy wool. Up to 950,000 tons of oil can be collected with 10,000 tons of inexpensive wool, without the risk of polluting the sea any further. The method has been presented to BP to be employed in the recovery of the Gulf of Mexico."
Comment Safety is not Logical (Score 3, Informative) 510
Sadly, safety is something that is not handled rationally by the masses. It is mostly an emotional judgement.
Submission + - Convicted Terrorist Relied on Single Letter Cipher
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Register reports that the majority of the communications between convicted terrorist Rajib Karim and Bangladeshi Islamic activists were encrypted with a system which used Excel transposition tables which they invented themselves that used a single-letter substitution cipher invented by the ancient Greeks that had been used and described by Julius Caesar in 55BC. Despite urging by the Yemen-based al Qaida leader Anwar Al Anlaki, Karim rejected the use of a sophisticated code program called "Mujhaddin Secrets" which implements all the AES candidate cyphers, "because 'kaffirs', or non-believers, know about it so it must be less secure." "Tough communication interception laws [RIPA] were passed in the UK 10 years ago on the basis that they were needed to fight terrorism," says Duncan Campbell, who acted as an expert witness for the defense during the trial. "The level of cryptography they used was not even up to the standards of cryptology and cryptography in the Middle Ages, although they made it look pretty using Excel.""
Submission + - What A Cyberwar with China Might Look Like (computerworld.com)
CWmike writes: "It's August 2020. A powerful and rising China wants to bring the city-state of Singapore into its fold as it has with Hong Kong, Macau and Taipei. Its first physical attacks against Singaporean assets are still weeks away. But already, China has launched a massive cyber campaign, designed largely to degrade and disrupt the communications capabilities of the U.S., Japan and other allied nations. Members of the Chinese military's 60,000 strong cyber warfare group have deeply penetrated U.S. defense, government and corporate networks and are already manipulating and controlling them. The hypothetical scenario is described in detail in a report, authored by Christopher Bronk, a former diplomat with the U.S. State Department and a fellow in IT policy at Rice University's Baker Institute, in the latest issue of Strategic Studies Quarterly (PDF document). Speaking with Computerworld this week, Bronk downplayed popular perceptions of a cyber Pearl Harbor, in which critical infrastructure targets such as the electrical grid are attacked and taken out. 'I did not try to make the case that it would be some sort of an apocalyptic event. I did not make the case that it would occur in isolation,' he said. Instead, a cyberwar will most likely always be part of a broader war, or broader campaign as they were in Georgia and Estonia, he said. 'Most likely, cyber conflict will be an always-on engagement, even if international policy is enacted to forbid it,' Bronk writes in the article. 'The only certainty in cyber conflict is that conflict there will not unfold in the ways we may expect.'"
