Um actually I believe you mean the treasury calls this "A new series". You know, like that line of purple spooge they put across some of the new bills.

Ah, good point, that does make a better example than mine. :)

Are you fucking kidding me? Bug fixes for a currency?

Why? The Federal reserve calls these "Quantitative Easing". We've had three major patches in as many years, along with quite a few minor updates to those outside the normal update release cycle.

Bottom line: drugs like this have no place in or penal system, regardless of the ethical ramifications of using them on prisoners.

Our current penal system has no place in our penal system.

What we have now amounts to a mockery of justice-as-rehabilitation, where we give otherwise-good people multi-year "we need to do something" sentences for obvious accidents (involuntary manslaughter, for example, or virtually all victimless "crimes"). They then come out as actual hardened criminals, far more likely to go on to commit real crimes (one well-studied population, nonviolent drug offenders, come out four times more likely to go on to commit a violent crime than the general population).

That said, I have to admit that this woman strikes me as likely a dangerous psychopath herself. Sentencing someone to a thousand years of boredom? "A lot of people seem to get out of that punishment by dying"??? Holy shit, woman, what kind of sick fuck would come up with something like that??? And I say that as someone who supports the death penalty, and personally would rather we use straightforward and effective punishments like caning over merely wasting a decade of someone's life on the taxpayer dime.

But hey, at least you would effectively reduce the cost of prison, since virtually everyone would resort to suicide after their first few "sessions".

"15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance"

Geico Gekko

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racist, narcissistic, caste-based hiring practices to gain jobs they're in no way qualified for in a country thousands of miles from home

Hmm... Iranian? Chinese? Slavic? Israeli? Strange, none of them seem to quite meet your description.


Sounds like you are referring to people of one particular country.

Hmm, yes. Yes, it does sound like you have one particular country in mind. Clearly, one of you has a race card in play, but you might want to check the instant replay before you stick your neck out too far on this one...

Technically, isn't EMACS the granddaddy of all IDEs? In comparison, Eclipse is 'Johnny Come Lately'.

It's amazing what runs scurrying back into the dark when you turn over rocks at "the online encyclopedia any one can edit."

You should set it up so their only ingress is through a reverse ssh tunnel outward. Preferably secured with a key you send to them so their reused passwords aren't the only thing keeping people out. You should also restrict it by IP range to whatever machine they're coming from.

I like to think I would do better today than I did back then - My primary role involves coding, not network hardening. I just tend to get ownership of Linux boxes because, surprisingly, not many folks in the business world (even in IT) know it all that well.

That said, you have to understand the pure obstinacy of some of these vendors - As in, still using Telnet and actively refuse to use SSH (because they had a harder time pre-breaking it, and protested that most of their customers couldn't handle the idea of using preshared keys to authenticate). As in, threw a fit that required me to defend just blocking them at the firewall to not just my boss, but the owner of the company, and painted me as completely paranoid (at least that stopped and I got to gloat for a few days when we finally got hacked - Though I got to spend the 70-hour weekend rebuilding the machine so the company could function come Monday morning... yay).

Partially, no need - You can literally Google "linux $program root password" and get all the names you want.

But more, because I sadly no longer consider this behavior unusual (it floored me the first time I saw it, as I said - I consider it almost standard procedure, now). Vendors look at Linux as an exploitable free resource, a base platform they don't need to license, complete with an impressive collection of development tools. Except Linux has all these pesky permissions, heck, it doesn't even like letting you in without a password, so the first "project" these jokers embark upon consists of gutting the security from Linux.

So not much point in shaming individual companies, for a problem endemic to an entire industry.

I have (grudgingly) admin'ed such a server, and will readily admit it as a form of public shaming (though not of myself, as you'll soon learn).

As TFS points out, the attackers didn't use a zero-day exploit. They didn't use an unpatched old exploit. They didn't even use the fact that huge "trusted" swaths of the filesystem, including standard executable paths (such as /usr/local/bin) had both the directory and everything contained within world-writable (no, I didn't have the option of fixing that - it would have broken "features" of the reason this box existed, as I'll soon explain).

This system ran a fairly popular POS software suite, and absolutely depended on all its serious security flaws. The vendor had even installed what amount to pre-compromised binaries for "convenience" in diagnosing end-user problems (connect to the right port, bam, you can monitor any user's session). But even that egregious level of incompetence didn't cause the breach.

No, the breach came from the fact that the vendor had their own company name as the root password (and had it hard-coded in literally dozens of (world-readable) scripts, so I couldn't just change it). And did I mention, the vendor required this box have a publicly facing IP or they'd refuse to honor their SLA?

Needless to say, my first action on learning all this, I blocked it at the firewall and told the vendor that we'd let them in when, and only when, we needed assistance. That, amazingly, enough kept the box safe for about a year (and floored me that we hadn't gone down long before I got stuck with that albatross)...

Until an upgrade. Took a total of half an hour. Didn't matter, because we had someone in as root in a tenth that time.


But, distant past. Couldn't happen again, and no other vendor would ever have such an extreme level of cluelessness, right?

So, currently, I work with (but thank Zeus, don't have to administer) a CRM system by an entirely different vendor, running on an outdated Linux distro. Pretty much everything I just said applies to this box. But hey the firewall keeps it safe, except the once-a-year the vendor demands access to audit our license compliance...


So yeah, Linux systems get hacked - For reasons that wouldn't protect the otherwise-most-secure system on the planet. You want to make it stop? Tell your vendors to go fuck themselves when they rationalize having a weak root password, and piss-poor system-wide security, and ban patching known vulnerabilities because it "might" break something the vendor used. Really that simple.

How is this about technology Slashdot

Because nuclear explosions at altitude tend to cause computer-destroying EMPs.

That do it for ya?

If you think Putin is stopping at Crimea, you're a fucking moron.

This ain't the Sudetenland. Move along.

Are you comparing defending of a sovereign state

Sorry, come again? I would point out that not a whole month ago, a group of armed insurgents committed a coup against the legitimate, democratically-elected Ukrainian government. So exactly what "sovereign state" do you refer to here? A group of terrorists acting contrary to the legitimate Ukrainian constitution and the will of its people???

And to add insult to injury, our own treasonous congress has approved an aid package for the insurgents, directly contravening US law that specifically bans such aid.

And we think we have any moral right to complain about a landslide popular election by Crimea to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation? Wow. We should have elected Kerry, that bastard's got balls of solid Neutronium!

Neither does what you posted with your crack about "the financial luxury to spend years not toiling in the fields"

"Crack"? Do you have any idea of timescale involved in your original assertion? The oldest still-existant universities predate the Middle Ages. Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbonne, Bologna, all founded by the early 13th century. Al-Karaouine, Al-Azhar University, and Nizamiyya predate the frickin' Battle of Hastings. So no, I didn't include the idea of not spending one's life working the soil as either a joke or rhetorical, I meant it quite literally.


Practical education was scant because the things you scoff at as "arts" were meant to be practical education (I.E. training the mind to think and analyze). It wasn't really practical* by modern standards, but as with so much else, they weren't modern people and had different theories and standards.

Well now, I don't quite know how to respond to that... You should go back and re-read what I said, because you just defended it as thoroughly as I would have. So um... Thanks, I guess?


tldr: "the "college is for broadening the mind" meme is a fairly recent one" vs "the things you scoff at as "arts" were meant to be practical education (I.E. training the mind to think and analyze)". Pick one.

So, because batteries are DC devices, you need to use them where you can use DC to avoid the conversion loss. Data Centers can utilize DC directly, which means that you would want to locate them at the data center.

You realize, of course, that solar panels produce DC?

You make a valid point that, as far as treating these as point-of-use devices, datacenters make a lot more sense than a typical pure-AC home installation. But you can't use that argument against buffering a variable DC supply, which works just as well (if not better, since our existing obsolete-and-decaying grid deals a lot better with variable large consumers than variable large producers).