Brad Ideas - Comments

2-year contracts vs. Prepaid lines

David Monget — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:14:34 -0700

Brad, your blog is just terrific!
It's great the insight you made with the contracts. I have never signed a contract before, but I felt terrified already with the experiences some friends had with termination fees and other silly monthly charges. I found this webpage trying to get some advice from other users to get a plan without signing a 1 or 2-year contract with any company. I just don't like to surrender the freedom of choice and change. I have been used prepaid from T-Mobile To-Go so far, it works well but it's pretty pricey (around an additional 50-70% and there are no free wkds or nights).
Thanks again Brad for sharing this.

The three lies

brad — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:13:25 -0700

The three lies is a well known joke. You start with 2 standard lies and the 3rd is a punchline lie like the ones you name above.

The main two are usually “The cheque is in the mail” and “I’m from the Government, I’m here to help you.”

Hybrid/Nexgen RV

huwman — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:18:52 -0700

There was a very interesting article in the WSJ yesterday about the status of the RV industry and the hard times it is presently experiencing. In response to your "business ventures" comment I am interested to know if you have advanced your interest in a more modern RV since January? Did anyone respond they were interested? Are you still looking to build a new RV business? It occured to me there might be a very viable busiess here if the alternative energy angle is at the forefront. A "green" RV company would be very appealing to the Yuppies about to retire.

What are the other two?

Phillip Helbig — Wed, 14 May 2008 04:28:38 -0700

“The Cheque is in the Mail” became known as one of the 3 great lies.

OK, what are the other two. I seem to recall a documentary about a
hard-rock or heavy-metal group, perhaps Krokus, which mentioned the
other two being "We'll fix it in the mix" and "I won't come in your
mouth". At least in the rock'n'roll world, I guess those are the
other two.

data can go both ways

Anon Y. Mouse — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:48:44 -0700

First, I think it's much more likely the NSA has already
compromised one or more existing botnets, as opposed to
screwing up Windows. That's Microsoft's job!

Try this on for size. Everybody's heard about the
secret room(s) at AT&T et. al. run by the NSA and supposedly
designed to slurp up all the internet packets, telco phone
meta-data, etc. Perhaps they are covertly working with
the backbone operators to provide peering points where
they can *inject* massive amounts of traffic generated
by their own custom dedicated servers. It's more reliable
if you have your own botnet.

This is possible

brad — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:02:42 -0700

But in fact it might be simpler to just assure there are security flaws, and then build the botnets, or have them built by your front organizations, which are of course not in the USA. Or just exploiting those that are already there.

Directly compromising Windows is a dangerous thing for the NSA to do. Aside from the fact it is still not supposed to operate inside the USA at all, this could hurt the security of Americans against foreign spies. In fact, the NSA is supposed to be helping to make U.S. computers more secure, it is part of their mission. To go directly against that mission is not beyond them but scandalous if discovered.

Of course this does not apply to foreign spy agencies, they could compromise Windows without breaking their rules. But since Windows is run in so many countries, again this has the risk of scandal.

On the other hand, paying botnet rings to run secret code on non-domestic computers to spy on the owners of those computers would not be the same sort of major scandal. (Creation of the botnets directly would be a scandal, but one they can hide much more easily.) They would mostly get an “attaboy” for spying on foreign computers. They might create a problem with allies if they spied on the computers of allied governments if they were caught, but frankly everybody knows that each spy agency spies on its allies. It’s part of the game, though still not something to be caught at.

To do this, they would want to build a system that can identify honeypots and make sure never to put spy code into them. That’s hard to do for a criminal hacker ring but easily within the abilities of a big spy agency. Ideally they would use other methods to determine the IP blocks or other attributes of “computers of interest” they wish to spy on, confirm that they really have these computers, and then briefly load spy code in them to rootkit the systems and look for interesting files.

Detection of this would require a very clever honeypot that knows how to look like a “computer of interest” — once we define what a computer of interest is. I would bet that computers in rural Pakistan, for example, and Iraq, are commonly computers of interest.

Spy agencies & software

Anonymous — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:58:11 -0700

There is one other thing that would be too easy for a spy agency to buy off that it is hard to fathom that it hasn't happened: adding some kind of hook to popular closed-source operating systems to leak confidential information into covert channels. The effort required to modify kernel source code so that e.g., passwords or something are encoded into the output of some pseudorandom number generator used for picking e.g., TCP sequence numbers is low enough that a competent coder involved in the process between when the source code is checked out to do the production build and executing the makefile could slip it in with very low probability of detection and nobody would be any the wiser. If spy agencies can spend billions on covert spy satellite programs, surely they can spend a couple million to buy off a programmer involved in production builds to slip in carefully chosen patches. The presence of spy agencies in the world today with these kind of budgets almost guarantees that closed source products (and pre-built open source products) have backdoors. They would be stupid not to.

It follows that if you don't compile your own stuff, you're stuff is probably backdoored. On the positive side, keeping this stuff secret is almost certainly enough of a priority that the spy agencies will probably be keeping your secrets (unless you are doing something they are directly interested in) and third party crackers will probably not be any the wiser.

Nice Job

Beatrice M — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:23:59 -0700

this is gorgeous!

That 3 can reveal who the 5

brad — Sun, 11 May 2008 20:27:16 -0700

That 3 can reveal who the 5 are does not guarantee that they are alive. 3 could have met most of the characters who have died, she lived with the fleet until New Caprica, then became an overseer there.

All Cylons would know Joseph Adama’s face, I suspect, he helped create them.

They might not know Zak’s face. They would know Cain’s. These are the main dead characters under consideration.

However, I do agree, it’s probably not somebody dead, other than Joseph or Zak.

NO DEAD PERSON CAN BE THE LAST CYLON

LEONIDAS — Sun, 11 May 2008 12:38:54 -0700

Itaintrite after seeing the last episode SE4 EP6 the hybrid prophesy STATES CLEARLY THAT THE MISSING 3 (DeeAnna) WILL REVEAL THE FIVE THAT KNOW WHERE EARTH IS: SO ALL OF THEM SHOULD BE ALIVE!!!! Otherwise the writers should improvise to bring from the dead either Jack Adama or Helen or Joseph...
SO JUST LIMIT YOUR THOUGHTS TO LIVING persons......
My vote after last episode goes to Captain ADAMA: He started the quest for EARTH soon after escaping the cylons telling the rest of the crew that he knew where to look for it!!
One more thing on the last supper photo: Can anyone here give us a correllation between BSG characters and DaVinci characters according to the place that each character occupies???? (NO MIRRORING NO REVERSAL PLEASE ..JUST STRAIGHT CORRELLATION)

GE Community with Israel community data

Ilan Toren — Sun, 11 May 2008 10:03:28 -0700

We have made a kmz file for Google Earth that shows some 700 localities in Israel. It might be an idea for the posting of some of your data. Look at the example and let me know what you think: http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=1164471

fjb

Meg Butterfield — Sat, 10 May 2008 20:39:09 -0700

Gosh, just surfing around and am surprised and pleased at the number of articles up about Jim now. He was a super brother to me (though we had our moments in pre-school times), always bought me the very neatest presents, took me to the neatest places, and as I grew older with him, encouraged me gently and endlessly when, at 60-something, I decided to take on the computer world and become much more literate...with Lyman's help the two of them worked online with me and guided me into the world of website building. Patiently.

I miss him. Not a week had gone by after he left us when I had a problem about something or other and said "I need to ask Jim about this"....only to realize there was no Jim to ask any more. Vicki has been superb, and continues to be superb...what a marvelous lady he chose to spend his life with.

Meg

Demand for electricity is

Orion — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:10:08 -0700

Demand for electricity is only going to go UP so to meet that demand utility companies will either have to build new plants or buy power from someone else. Citizenre et al = "someone else". In effect these alternative energy companies offset the long-term capital expenditures that utility companies pay to satify their customers.

Most utility companies would rather be distributors rather than generators anyway. That is, they charge the players a monthly fee to connect to the grid, and let someone else move power across their grid. "Commercial" solar installations pay a monthly connection fee while, at the moment, "residential" solar installations don't and that raises a red flag with me for this kind of scheme. It would take a very small change in policy to declare a scheme like Citizenre's a commercial solar enterprise and start billing the homeowners for access to the grid. That could blow their business model all to smithereens, leaving the company bankrupt and the homeowners with obsolete grid-tied solar systems on their roofs that they can't legally keep connected to the grid.

Nice, Brad

Dave — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:59:06 -0700

Those are some AWESOME ideas Brad, did you submit them to eBay? I really wish they'd take your advice.

-Dave

Actually, I think YOU're the idiot

SellerANDBuyer — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:57:46 -0700

Most people leave honest feedback, and there isn't much of a knee-jerk reaction if you did your job as a seller. Holding your feedback 'for ransom' isn't cool, and it isn't good business.
I can't understand why you'd support this type of a system unless you're one of those rip-off artists holding people's feedback for ransom and then leaving them negative feedback after you shipped them a 50Meg ripped MPEG of LotR when the item description was "NIB Lord of the Rings Trology DVD Collector's Set"
Go insult people who aren't 50 times smarter than you, or at least post something half-way intelligent, instead of pointing out to the entire world how stupid you are. If your parents read that post, it would probably make them cry.