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/me puts on tinfoil hat

That's a commercial for Bristol-Myers-Squid... spelling intended... I didn't say that life-saving drugs don't exist or can't be created. I said they _aren't_ the focus of pharmaceutical companies because they are genuine challenges that take more capital than the shareholders will permit. Instead, they make up stupid problems that never existed before or were nameless annoyances.

Case in point: acid reflux disease. Prior to the arrival of this disease, people generally called it a "nasty burp." Is this worth the time and energy of our scientists?

If you followed last week's congressional hearings on the pharmaceutical industry, you'll find serious corruption going on.

Porn, pot are keys to NASA salvation

The intent was to help NASA but with this brave new world of private space industry, I'm sure the ideas can be adopted.

Porn, pot are keys to NASA salvation

In December 2001, I interviewed the Medical Director of the Mars Society for Cyberista. The story is here. Everybody in that organization is superb in their field. Dr. Czarnik was an excellent interview subject.

We've upped our standards so up yours.

Free Classifieds

We know which companies sell their email listings, right?

More than a few of us can write a script...

A clandestine server running in an undisclosed location--perhaps a public wireless hotspot--can go forever properly filling out the forms of these companies with complete and total gibberish.

It won't crash servers... nobody will even know until it's pretty much too late and the offended databases are loaded with utter garbage.

Recently, I wrote about passively doing this to spambots. I keep the page on the server for good measure.

My tech articles are geared to a nontech audience so don't give me crap if they sound lame. I don't preach to the choir except when hanging out at Slashdot.

That said, I don't see why this concept can't be expanded. They have no defense against form scripts.

We know which companies sell their email listings, right?

More than a few of us can write a script...

A clandestine server running in an undisclosed location--perhaps a public wireless hotspot--can go forever properly filling out the forms of these companies with complete and total gibberish.

It won't crash servers... nobody will even know until it's pretty much too late and the offended databases are loaded with utter garbage.

Recently, I wrote about passively doing this to spambots. I keep the page on the server for good measure.

My tech articles are geared to a nontech audience so don't give me crap if they sound lame. I don't preach to the choir except when hanging out at Slashdot.

That said, I don't see why this concept can't be expanded. They have no defense against form scripts.

The future is now, brother. The future is yesterday.

It runs deep and Slashdot isn't the place to have a mature, philosophical conversation.

That said, I'm glad Salon is going down. These guys have an ability to offend across the political spectrum. Primarily, they act as if they are the end all, be all of liberal or objective journalism. They are not.

Their readers are posers that read Salon because it's cool to read salon. They didn't get the newsflash about fiscal responsibility. They didn't get the newsflash about keeping your point short and sweet. They didn't get the newsflash about keeping yourself out of your stories.

kuro5hin and Cyberista and at least a dozen others are, far and away, better than Salon.

Salon's demise will be a good thing for independent, objective media.

Porn, pot are keys to NASA salvation

Since our design is standardized, the alt tag automatically takes the name of the column for the article. This creates slight discrepancies but nothing worth getting upset about.

For example, if you go to an article by Uzal in his column "Real Politik", you will see the graphic as the column title but the alt tag will say "Uzal"... this is simply so I can use the same code for each section.

ASP programming, or any dynamic programming, is absolutely the most efficient way to run a site. Database calls have to be extremely high to show any slowdown in the page generation.

The point is that putting a little planning into design has major, major, major payoffs. Site maintenance gets reduced and you can focus on improvements rather than minutiae. I programmed Cyberista so I could write and edit... not do more programming.

The fear of doing more programming is probably what is driving these anti-accessibility comments today. Web accessibility is really no big deal and requires only a bit of foresight. As I've said in a previous post, the people with major issues are not programmers. If these same people run sites, they are probably heavily invested in bad design.

Sort of like those Counter-Strike people...

Seriously, IF this is real then it reveals a major weakness in the industry.

"IF" is an important qualifier because given the MP/RIAA "right to hack", it's certainly possible that the need is real.

However, it is improbable that they would look to the market to fill their need for a P2P "warfare" expert. Hollywood is a place of connections and "I know a guy..." nonsense.

This falls into the "don't pet the sweaty stuff" category regardless of truth.

Chris Uzal, Editor, Cyberista

People are into video games but not into the complexity of modern games.

As for being a "gray" app, there are plenty of freely availabe ROMs at Classic Gaming[classicgaming.com].

MAME belongs on the CD.

The only drawback--like most OSS programs--is that it requires a scope of seemingly unrelated skills to get started.

M$ codes for morons. OS Developers code for their peers. Until "coding for morons" becomes the mantra of the movement, the CD will remain simply a demo and not a tool for revolution.

--Chris Uzal, Editor, Cyberista