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and, as you said, not all the laws are true. (The archery one is false).

It is illegal to leave baggage unattended.

Airports like Heathrow have constant reminders that unattended baggage may be removed and destroyed, but I've never seen a suggestion it was a criminal offense to leave it. (Under some circumstances I guess it could be wasting police time or behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace).

The Prevention of Terrorism (Additional Powers) Act 1996 and Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1989 don't seem to mention it, though the latter is only a summary. There is a section about searches of unaccompanied goods.

Boycott eToys! on deja.com

Mozilla has been planning since the summer to release a public alpha in December, followed by a beta a few months later. In some cases these two releases were called "mozilla beta" and "netscape beta", admittedly a confusing way of describing the releases, and one which was rectified a while ago.

A few months ago some reporter misunderstood the release schedule and reported Netscape would release a beta in December. Since then this inaccuracy has propagated into all subsequent news articles through the common journalistic practice of re-using previously published work instead of doing original research.

Now suddenly some reporter discovers what's actually going on, but instead of printing a retraction of earlier stories they say the Netscape beta has been "delayed". It isn't true, and while I expect it from the news sites I've been reading it from for months, I figured Slashdot would be able to figure it out. I guess not.

Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself:

The Milestone Chart

Quoting from the article "[ Fwd: The Plan]" (1999 September 24) in the newsgroup "netscape.public.mozilla.porkjockeys":

"When: Mozilla beta-milestone 12/15. Netscape beta later, first things first."

FBI-People are in the IETF-WGs

come think of it: the standards are being made with the participation (but not stated and made public) of some anti-democratic government agency. The IETF is supposed to be an international standards body, but gets votes from hidden FBI-Advocates, and everything said in those meetings gets reported to the FBI.

Just make a bad joke (in addition to the legitimate discussions) about exporting encryption... and boom you get prosecuted for treason. bad luck.

It's also possible that this whole thing ("He's being investigated for treason because of his advocacy of strong crypto on the IETF") is another case of net.journalism jumping the proverbial gun, that there was no investigation per se, and that it's just some (admittedly spooky) stuff from the early '90s.

Furthermore, if the subject matter of the "investigation" dates back 5-6 years, consider that that crypto laws have changed dramatically (though admittedly not as dramatically as many would like!) since the early 90s.

Although the notion of encrypted PPP is regarded as an irritant ("our jobs would be easier if nobody could do this") to the Feds in 1999, the very concept probably scared the living hell ("SOMEONE WANTS TO USE SOMETHING MY BOSS SAYS IS S00PER 3733+ CRYPT0 IN WHAT?!") out of them in 1991.

Consequently, anyone advocating the inclusion of DES (remmeber when DES was the Data Encryption Standard?) in a network protocol intended for worldwide use, particularly at a stage when the FBI was no doubt several orders of magnitude less-net-clued-in than they are today would have, by definition, been regarded as a potential threat to national security.

If that theory is correct, what happened is just as wrong in 1991 as it would be in 1999, of course, but much more understandable.

it should be... Newsgroup for RedHat Linux installation: http://www.deja.com/group/linux.redhat.install

Newsgroup for RedHat Linux installation: http://www.deja.com/group/linux.redhat.install/

Beginners guide for installing Linux: http://www.linux.ie/beginners-linux-guide/

Remember, not everyone will be helpful if you post in a wrong area, like you did here :-) Try to find a relevant site and be sure you first read what's already there since no one likes duplicate postings or being asked a question that's already been answered. I'm jealous of your machine... what a piece of hardware! Did you build it yourself? If so this will help you since you will need a lot of information on your machine once you actually get into setting up Linux. If you didn't build the machine, write down everything you can about what's inside it before you start installing. You don't have any fancy setup to do this for you like Windows does. For an idea of what you need to know, see section 2.1.5 of Linux Installation and Getting Started. When I first installed Linux, I put it on a machine I had built myself and had a second machine next to it constantly logged onto the web for finding information. My "fun" started when the setup couldn't find my SCSI CD/ROM, so I bypassed the situation by plugging an old CD/ROM into a free IDE port and got started. The only other major hang-up after that involved the wrong video card being identified during setup, and my monitor got very hot and made an unwelcome whining noise that sounded like oncoming death (which made me glad it was an older monitor whose loss would be bearable)... fixing this required changing settings on the X-server.

Regarding the posts here on the "6.1" thing, here's a little sidenote. Linux distributors (such as RedHat) have their own numbering system that is best thought of as unrelated to the underlying Linux kernel. You may have RedHat 6.1, TurboLinux 3.6, and Slackware Linux 4.0 all out at the same time using the same Linux kernel, which is version 2.2. The second number indicates whether you have a "stable" or "development" version: if that number is even, it is stable. Thus Linux 2.2 is a stable version, while 2.3 is the current development (unstable) version. While you can download and install 2.3 and think you are getting a "newer" version, don't! Wait until you are way beyond the newbie stage to wander there.

Not that I want to push anyone's products here, but if you are planning to stick with it and get into Linux, you might consider getting a copy of Running Linux. I didn't buy it until I had Linux up and running - reading the first few chapters before I attempted an install would have been helpful, and it is great to have around afterwards to learn from. In the mean time, have fun and hang in there during the installation!

First, I agree entirely.
Second, I wonder how GPL would appear in court - who would plead in favour of it, and how?

Third, a comment from Roblimo's article:
But when Bruce advocates a lawsuit against Corel for violating the GPL, even if he rapidly recants, he's effectively putting any investment Corel has in Linux at risk.

The thing is, that's only half of the story - to be nice and rebellious, if Corel cock things up so badly twice on the trot, and make a distribution that brings the name of Debian into disrepute (as this most surely has, because it's aw ful and broken, then something needs done to sort them out. We *can't* have them going round bungling up the licensing in such a way as to offend the linux community, let alone twice.
The only concern I have with that is whether Corel has invested anything of use in Linux - given that I don't want more lame newbies coming to linux (those who are uninterested in it for its own sake, that is), and throwing money at it doesn't get anywhere... what is there to show, certainly that appeals to me?

I agree that USB = higher CPU utilization is heresy, but look at this post , although it could be a Windows issue.

This fits with what I've heard from others, and if a mouse takes 5% of your CPU, I hate to think what Ethernet does. (Although Intel and AMD might be happy!)
--

It is t here now.
(Why is preview showing me "t here" when I have "there" in the text? View source shows the space. Happens with both HTML Formatted and Plain Old Text. Oh well.)

SUSE's searchable support database is your best
bet when the search in the READMEs/HOWTOs is
exhausted and even Deja scan didn't resolve the problem.

I'll never forget the moment, when I found a
solution for a problem (ISDN driver didn't
change charge interval) in the SuSE support
database for my Redhat Linux 5.1 setup.

This happened after two days of reading docs
(the 110k isdn README contained the word 'Attention!'
more than incredible 40 times), compiling various
package releases, searching news
groups, searching Red Hat's support database
(official RH ISDN support was non existant at this
time).

The solution was that if a (seemingly unrelated
variable) was not defined in a config file, the
thing didn't work.

To be sure that I hadn't missed the solution,
I later grepped the 110 k docu and the FAQ which
came with that software package for thar variable
name. Nothing.

This adventure may be insignificant for the casual
reader, but for me it was like finding water in
the desert after a two day march. So once the SuSE
support database has saved my (emotional) life.
Thank you SuSE people for your professional
attitude.

And this is the reason I feel happy seeing SuSE
getting even more fuel which will help them to
provide even better support.

Go SuSE, Go Linux!

dejanews had a thread on this october the 29th, an anonymous poster refering to crowdedtheater.com on alt.survivalism in a posting named "Y2K Military takeover?"

willem

Sure. This is how TiVo (the Linux-runnin' digital TV recorder) does it. When RMS asked about it on Usenet, the person at TiVo, Inc. who actually makes the source CDs replied with how they fulfill the requirements of the GNU GPL.

Sure. This is how TiVo (the Linux-runnin' digital TV recorder) does it. When RMS asked about it on Usenet, the person at TiVo, Inc. who actually makes the source CDs replied with how they fulfill the requirements of the GNU GPL.

The word is "dumbening", and it was coined by Lisa Simpson. An absolutely cromulent word, I might add.

Is here.

I'd like you to back up this claim (if you can).

You see, serious people like Deja does in fact use Linux software RAID and get it to work. Rather well too. Does zero-point-two-five-percent disk related downtime sound OK to you? It does to them.

I am getting tired about hearing how Linux is immune to computer viri [sic; you mean viruses], it simply isn't. The main thing preventing people from writing a Linux virus is good-will towards the operating system.

You are correct that it is no mean trick to write a program that can damage the system it runs on, largely irrespective of what kind of system we're talking about. And so long as you can hoodwink some unwitting user into executing that program on their system, that program can, of course, cause damages commensurate with the privileges and capabilities of that user.

What you've failed to consider is how the dramatic cultural differences between Unix and the much-maligned consumerist toys serve to affect the issue to our benefit and their detriment.

Probably the most important of these cultural differences is that Unix has historically been a source-only world. Programs are distributed in the form of source code, code which shall be configured, built, and ultimately installed on the target machine. Programs solely accessible in machine language form fall immediately under a taint of mistrust.

Think back to the last time you read a notice from someone whom you've never heard of before that was asking you to go fetch some random binary program from some random place on the net and then to run that program under full sysadmin privileges? I can already see the incredulous Unix sysadmin reading that and bursting out in uncontrollable guffaws. Because the de facto standard for program interchange in Unix is as source code, a Unix programmer will be far less likely to fall for your ploy than would your average Prisoner of Bill, who has been lulled into gullibility by a binary-only culture.

But for the sake of the argument, let's say that you've found a way to effect this trick. Suppose you're an employee of some reasonably respected company that happens to produce a binary-only distribution of their commercial software, and you decide to sneak something wicked into the binary image. You manage to replace the standard, clean copy on your company's ftp or http server, or even floppies or CDs, with your own naughty version. People are accustomed to downloading from your company, or using your company's floppies, so they do as they've always done, run the installation as the superuser, and you thereby have your way with their system.

If this scenario were to play out, just how dangerous--how destructive--could it really prove? Whom could you harm, and who would be immune to your ploy? The answer is that you could only hurt those folks running the exact platform for which your binary had been compiled, and everybody is unassailable. By platform, I mean the whole feature vector that includes processor chip (eg Sparc vs Intel), operating system (e.g. SGI vs BSD), shared libraries (e.g. libc vs glibc), and site-specific configuration (e.g. shadowed vs non-shadowed password files.

Let's not get too full of ourselves and pretend that the Unix culture's predilection for source-only program distribution derives only, or even mainly, from altruism. We have no choice in this matter. Consumer-targetted systems from Microsoft or Apple are two instances are a static monoculture, as vulnerable to mayhap as a field of cloned sweet corn. It only takes one genetically engineered virus to bring down the whole field. Unix is different.

In his acclaimed essay, In The Beginning , Neal Stephenson writes:

It is this sort of acculturation that gives Unix hackers their confidence in the system, and the attitude of calm, unshakable, annoying superiority captured in the Dilbert cartoon. Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.

What made old epics like Gilgamesh so powerful and so long-lived was that they were living bodies of narrative that many people knew by heart, and told over and over again--making their own personal embellishments whenever it struck their fancy. The bad embellishments were shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. Likewise, Unix is known, loved, and understood by so many hackers that it can be re-created from scratch whenever someone needs it. This is very difficult to understand for people who are accustomed to thinking of OSes as things that absolutely have to be bought.

There is no one thing called Unix. Instead, Unix comprises a diverse set of subtly (and often not so subtly) variant platforms. A nefarious binary laced with exquisitely designed evil bullets hidden inside it can hurt only a few of us. When Apple and Microsoft laugh at our diversity, be sure to remind them that is it their lack of the same that contributes to their incredible vulnerability--and to our strength. Hybrid vigor ultimately wins out over a monoculture, for the latter is too in-bred and fragile to prove long viable.

Let me now return to your particular suggestion, that of a malignant Perl program activated by a Makefile rule at installation time. Because you're talking source code, and because Perl tries rather hard to attain a high level cross-platform intercompatibility, this form of subterfuge would appear exempt from the inherent protections stemming from diversity in variant Unix platforms. So, could your trick be done? How much of a problem could this really be? What might happen?

The answer is that of course, it could be done. And in point of fact, a demonstration model is already available, courtesy of Abigail. Guess what? There's no reason to run around like a chicken with its head cut off: the sky isn't falling. This sort of approach stands little chance of making a big splash, because you aren't going to insinuate it into a place that can affect a lot of people. Sure, you might catch a few folks, but just how long to you think this kind of thing will go unnoticed? Remember, it's in source code. That means anybody who wonders what happened can just look at it. There's a very low barrier to entry. And even if the naughtiness removes itself from your copy once its dirty deeds are done, that naughtiness is still sitting there in plain view for easy inspection back wherever you got your copy from.

Is there a way around this? Well, yes, if you're as clever as Ken Thompson. Fortunately, you aren't, and neither are the crackers. If they were, they'd doubtless receive more Turing Awards for their vaunted efforts. :-)

The only way you're going to get good propagation is if your nastiness into a copy that a lot of people will download and install. There's a very fine reason why so many archives contain a checksum of the image. It's to help with this problem. Security of course depends on several matters, including the strength of the algorithm and the integrity of the authenticating agent. But better that than nothing.

Let's talk about propagation some more. I assume that the goal is to have a notable impact, which means you need to spread your bad code as widely as possible. A hacked up install script, even if all goes to your liking, just doesn't have a very high rate of reproduction. First of all, how often do how many people install this software? Secondly, how do you plan to trick them into doing so? It's not really much of a challenge to get one person to this, especially if they trust. If that's your goal, maybe you'll succeed. But the risk of being traced and apprehended is high.

So how come this stuff can spread like wildfire amongst the OS-challenged? Can't whatever mechanism that's used there be used to get at the rest of us, too?

Over the last few years, a frighteningly frequent conduit of contagion for viral infection on toy systems has been the implicit, automatic execution of code with little or not manual intervention on the part of the box's owner. DOWN THIS PATH LIES MADNESS!. That this can ever, ever happen is as a plain a symptom of complete and total cretinization in the toybox world as you are ever going to see. It's stupid, it's crazy, and it's dangerous. Any programmer who even suggests it needs to go back to flipping hamburgers. Any user who asks for this feature needs to be quietly taken into the back room by the doleful men in long trenchcoats, where he will be told in no uncertain terms that his request is not only in the best interest of no one but criminals, but that he also now has a permanent record even for asking about it.

No, I don't care that a customer asked for it. Customers are idiots, just like any other user. So what if they pay you? They're still idiots, and it's your professional responsibility to act responsibly, to refuse to go along with their madnesses. The customer is not always right. In fact, they're very often wrong. A physician or a lawyer doesn't do whatever the customer requests, and neither do you. They, meaning the customers or users, simply don't have the background and training; they don't have the experience of seeing why automatic execution from untrustable source is the work of the Devil.

It's not as though we in Unix have never seen this issue before. In fact, we've seen it time and time again. And guess what? We recognized the problem and we addressed it. And we don't cater to that kind of lunacy anymore.

Here are a few concrete examples.

Remember when vi would--or at least, could--automatically execute macro commands embedded in a file in a specific way? That was a dubious feature called modelines. On my OpenBSD systems, if I type :set modeline, the program comes back and says set: the modeline option may never be turned on.

Another example of learning from our mistakes is the issue of shell archives. Instead of automatically running the sharfile through /bin/sh, there are specially made unshar programs that will do the common things, safely, and nothing else.

When CGI was first getting big, owners of toy systems would blindly install compilers and interpreters in such a way that these would easily execute arbitrary content coming in off the wire. Despite my pleas, both Netscape and Microsoft were actually advocating this! After a year of warning admins not to do this, and sending mail to the companies who were saying to just go ahead, nothing changed. So I released latro. Then and only then did various companies retract their suggestions, even though they'd been aware of the nature of the problem for a long, long time. Sure, you could be equally stupid on Unix, but for some reason, we weren't. History counts.

Implicit execution of untrusted material is simply stupid beyond words. And for some reason, the toybox people keep falling for the same chump moves, from MIME attachments to word processor and spreadsheet macros to embedded active scripting controls. I don't know quite why they just keep doing this crap. My hunch, and it's only a hunch, is that this is happening because Microsoft and their moronic minions simply cannot for the all the tea in China ever manage to think outside of their quaint but completely fictional little single-user universe. Maybe they don't hire people who come from a background in multiuser and/or networked computing systems. Maybe they don't hire people with real experience at all, just script-kiddies trying to make a buck legitimately but with no true understanding. Maybe the software makers simply can't say no to a customer request, no matter how suicidal they know that request to be. I don't know.

Whatever the cause, decades of history are completely and repeatedly ignored. They keep making the same mistakes, and they don't fix the underlying causes. Sure, there are things that are hard. Denial of service attacks are hard. People who know exactly all the ramifications of IP who go sending maliciously hand-crafted packets aren't much fun either.

But these highly technical ploys aren't why most folks on their toyboxes are being screwed up, down, left, right, and sideways. They're being screwed because of very simple matters. They don't have the notion of a protected execution mode. They don't have file permissions or memory protections. They automatically execute content willy-nilly, often with complete access to the whole machine. They expect a program to show up in binary not source form. They don't compare robust checksums from a strongly authenticated sources. They live in an infinitely vulnerable monoculture. They expect things to just magically happen for them without a thought or a care, and guess what? Their wishes are duly granted, much to their eventual dismay.

It is possible that mass-market factors may someday end up plaguing Unix systems in ways not so far removed from the stupidities that the toy boxes are riddled with. We just have to tell them no, and to condemn in the strongest and loudest possible terms any backsliding into insecurities that if we ever had, long ago banished. Looking at the Winix phenomenon, in which a dozen different vendors put together and ship their own Linux operating systems, all specifically constructed to be user-obsequious and Unix-hostile all in order to appease the lowered expectations of a hundred million Windows idiots, who, despite their numbers, really can still be wrong. The stupidity of the masses must never be underestimated.

PS: Congratulations for reading this far. :-)

Check out
www.vlab.org
www.deja.com/~vlab for good resources.

Living under the threat of death

He wasn't anonymous. "Two Buddha" was just a nickname he used to sign the posts, his real name was always in the From: line. See Retiring the Buddha

I followed a link on someone's post and started reading the thread. It seems one of the flamers took to meeting his UseNet opponents IRL and stalking them. Here's a link.

Bad Command Or File Name

I was a regular poster to rec.skiing.alpine for a while. However, I stopped (more or less) when the flamefest started several months ago. A brief history from what I remember:

• Threats of physical violence were made and/or alleged
• Lawsuits were threatened.
• the signal:noise ration went from reasonable to pathetic. I hung around for about three months of crap before splitting; a lot of other regulars split even sooner.
• The flamewar started to die down a month or two ago (if I remember right--my timing might be off); however, it didn't really go away
• By then, most of the regulars who were still around were wearing asbestos suits and carrying pressurized gasoline.
• There was also some contention over events at an actual ski trip where several RSA people met up. Part of the debate was that some people apparently got comps (ie free lift tickets) and some didn't. I don't know; I wasn't there. This seemed to be the point at which all Hell broke loose.

The bottom line? Last I checked, the group was dead compared to the way it had been the winter before all of this crap started.

See Ski Grrl's Page for some RSA stuff, if you'd like to.

Absolutely hilarious!

Leanne did not post the requested nudie pic.

Firstly, something I have to get out of my system ...

FIRST POST!

Yes, it's my first post to Slashdot. I've been here about 18 months now, and never felt compelled to contribute before. But this discussion just makes me sick. I am in a maze of whiny little Slashdotters, all alike -- complaining about Communicator, doomsaying about Mozilla, and no-one doing anything.

So let's cover the whingers' main points.

Navigator/Communicator 4.x is buggy.

Sure it is. Basically, Communicator 4.x is built on the same basic architecture as Navigator 1.0, and has grown like topsy. It's a mess, and it's hard to debug. Which is why, earlier this year, Mozilla.org ditched the old codebase and rewrote nearly all of Mozilla from scratch.

But in the meantime, I'd much rather have a browser with several performance bugs and fewer security bugs, than the other way around.

Communicator hasn't improved since version 4.5.

Yes, that's mostly true (unless you count `Shop' buttons and the like as improvements), except that a number of bugs have been fixed since 4.5. Basically, Netscape are keeping Communicator 4.x ticking over while they work flat out on Mozilla, because Mozilla is where the future is.

Balls. Mozilla 5.0 will far outclass IE5's broken support for HTML 4.0, CSS1, CSS2, and XML. And Mozilla optimized builds are already faster than IE5. To quote Rick Gessner, Netscape's Director of Engineering:

About a year ago, I was asked to present the very early demo on Gecko. As a follow up, we went back to debate with Microsoft on the state of the browser war. The MS guy was nice enough, and credible, too. He seems like he cares about what he was doing ...

But our own Eric Krock was on a mission. Even though he had larengitis (sp), he managed to show a side by side demo of us vs IE, and we killed 'em.

We smoked their demo on size, speed, and mostly on standards compliance. It was really funny to watch.

But even more exciting than Mozilla's standards-compliance and performance, is the fact that it offers the building blocks for constructing any client-side Internet application you like -- using its cross-platform front end of XUL (the XML User Interface Language) and JavaScript. So not only can you change the look and feel of Mozilla, but you can alter the entire user interface, or even create your own app using the Mozilla layout engine and networking code.

Mozilla is doomed.

So if CNet and ZDNet say something often enough, it becomes true? That's sick. Sure, JWZ left. Good! Sure, Mozilla.org had to scrap a lot of their old code. Great! It's an open source project, you can't kill it, you can only delay it ...

And this is the bit which really annoys me. Everyone is standing around moping about how IE is taking over the world, and thinking that talking about it (in usual Slashdot fashion) is enough.

It's not.

Join the Mozilla effort. Do it now. It doesn't matter if you don't know C++. It doesn't matter if you're stuck on Windows. It doesn't matter if you only have two hours a week to spare. Just join in. Download binaries. Report bugs. Suggest enhancements.

I'd like to think that the Slashdot readership were actually interested in the future of both Linux and the Internet. I don't want Linux to be a second-class end-user operating system, simply because it doesn't have the world standard Web browser on it. And I don't want Microsoft, or any company for that matter, to control the Internet.

Do you?

[ Give up ] [ Fight back ]

-- mpt

Finally, this company plans on changing the source to Linux. I quote from their web page:

The Company's extensions to the Linux software kernel will rapidly distinguish its products from all other available Linux software.

Taken from http://www.linuxone.net/companyinfo/ about.html

So what is LinuxOne out to do? Raise money and flee the country, would be my bet. Their CEO, Dr. Wun C. Chiou, Sr., has connections in China. Don't expect him to stay around in the states after he "goes public," because his "investors" are going to be fuming.

When you get it, but not ask for it, it is NOT fine. Period. For example, I asked for mailings from Palm Computing. I did not ask for Real Network mailings of any kind (which it says so many places but one).

A Deja news search gives you the whole story, but just for the heck of it, Wired did a few stories on it: Is RealNetworks a RealSpammer? and RealNetworks Blacklisted Again . I also talked with the author before the last story about the "RealSpams" I got (and I remember not giving concent to 'em).

---
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack

The infomarco home page claims they have technology which connects people who have questions with people who have answers, in radically new ways.

Maybe they do, but I sure didn't see it. Of course, the site is just getting started, but so far, the site seems to be geared toward queries that can be asked in a single question ("How do I cast (sic) a long to a string", "Let me know if you find any bugs on this site").

The same sort of questions that can be answered by a careful search on deja.com, or your favorite search engine, probably with no more work that it would take to turn up the answer on infomarco.

Something like this might work if infomarco would be willing to work as a "reference librarian" type service (or even a "research assistant" type service for those with more complex problems and deeper pockets). As it is, it seems like all they want is to be deja-ebay.com...

-y

Two other things here: first, the only checkbox to not send info to real is when contacting tech support via the app ("Send configuration information when connecting to Technical Support"). There is no "Send NO information to Real." Second, I saw posts talking about different sampling rates (96k max vs 150 and higher): folks, be sure you're talking about the right thing. There's realJukebox (this little flap) and realEncoder (for encoding a/v content only). realJuke (freeware, anyway) has a max encoding rate of 96kbps; realEncoder can be set to do any rate (a/v combined or separate).

If you're that paranoid (as I sometimes am) and want to fsck with real (as I do) then do two simple things; block them at the firewall (or use a fw product.. what, you don't have a cable modem and no protection do you?) and hack the entries in the registry to send false data*. If their data is invalid, what good is it to anyone?

-fester
* note I take no responsibility if you hose your machine. if you don't know what the registry is (or why it's evil, see this as an example) then go back to your little gates-inspired fantasy world.

I can't find the particular article you are referring to, but I found the following posts which seem to indicate that film dvds _are_ progressive:

one
t wo.

According to DeGroof, if a DVD is encoded with 24 fps (_progressive_) data, the _decoder_ does the 3:2 pulldown for interlaced 30fps tv. Everything I see indicates that film dvds _are_ 24 fps progressive.

I can't find the particular article you are referring to, but I found the following posts which seem to indicate that film dvds _are_ progressive:

one
t wo.

According to DeGroof, if a DVD is encoded with 24 fps (_progressive_) data, the _decoder_ does the 3:2 pulldown for interlaced 30fps tv. Everything I see indicates that film dvds _are_ 24 fps progressive.

Take a look at Deja and Google.

Yup, yup, lotsa uptime, lotsa traffic.

If you insist on taxation, then a net asset tax is most appropriate.

A NAT prevents "squatting" on any frontier, be it "cybersquatting" or specious claims of title to real estate in outter space.

There are numerous Deja front ends on the Web. They try to filter out all the crap.

If you use "My Deja" for reading/posting, use this instead:
http://www.deja.com/=dnc/mydn_forums.xp
--

As a first step, I have a grammar-sensitive JavaScript compressor which I'm releasing into open source.

The only thing I find that makes it useable is the hack to sneak it into the classic interface by adding =dnc/ to the url straight after the hostname. So my bookmark to dejanews now points to: http://www.deja.com/=dnc/mydn_forums.xp At least it gets rid of the horrible cringeworthy colours... The free email account also makes a useful spam bucket. ian.

Ac cording to Hason Haas of LinuxPPC Apple was helping the Linux PowerPC folks on getting Linux working.

Please don't automatically assume that Apple is on the wrong side on this.

That link helps keep Altavista as an alternative to Google (which remains my first port of call, though).

There was also an option for quickie plain text Usenet searching, although what comes to returning results it can't touch Dejanews.

Altavist a Usenet (text search)
Altavista Usenet (adv. text search)

Now, wouldn't it be nice if Google started offering Usenet searches too? Right now it seems to be a shoot between useless simplicity or more useful mess-of-a-page.

There was a thread in comp.os.linux.development.system about this very thing called "497.2 days ought to be enough for everybody".

The consensus was that the kernel was okay, except some drivers may still have problems (2.0.x I think). To be on the safe side to get over the 497.2 day "hump", you could unload modules and turn off some daemons, IIRC.

Check it out here

It seems crackers (stereotypically young WASP males not affiliated with violent ethnic gangs) are prime chicken meat when they are put in prison, so they would like to put the previously mentioned governments out of business, unless said crackers are frequently HIV-infected sexual masochists. Are they?

Hmm... guess I should have used the preview button.

This is a known problem with glibc 2.0 and lower.

Read this newsgroup posting for more information.

Also, bug #8849 contains a lot of info:

This is a known problem with glibc this newsgroup posting for more information/

Asset taxation resolves this sort of problem. Who is defending the property rights of those who stake claims? Require speculators to pay for the protection of their claims and all of a sudden people stop making absurd speculative claims.

I'm sure you could find a more specific place to ask any question rather than /.
Sure, suggesting another place for help is great, don't get me wrong. But saying to take it somewhere else seems to me to be against the very nature of /.
OTOH, a question like this probably would be answered more quickly with a judicious search on deja.com.

This is nothing new. About a year ago a huge flamewar erupted in comp.os.linux.x about XFree 4.0, the participents included Jeremy Chatfield and Thomas Roell of Xig (me too). It was all extremely ugly and distasteful. I lost all respect for Xig after this, they acted in a very unprofessional manner (and I wasn't too proud of my own actions, but I wasn't representing a company). The thread is here.


Apologies if this doesn't work right, dejanews has sucked ever since they changed their interface.Just do a search of "XFree86 4.0 /X11R6.4 ".

It seems to me that in our country today it is becoming acceptable for everyone to lambast White Male Christians.

Yes, America is a country that is well-known for its persecution of Christians.

Here are some shocking examples:

Life In Our Anti-Christian America

Look. Many "White Male Christians" have made it their life's work to "lambast" other groups. If it's not calling Muslims the "s pawn of Satan" or advocating killing homosexuals because the book of Leviticus says they should be put to death, it's blasting professional women because they have high-paying corporate jobs instead of a non-paying role as a submissive housewife.

I'm sorry if it offends you when people say that these views are completely full of shit.

But they are. They just don't fly anymore.

No, it's new about nerds.

Its amazing how Google does great searches and if it doesn't go the bloat route like dejanews did, the good life will never end.

The clean Google interface and great results seems to be one of the greatest gifts of the internet. Its gives me great hope that services such as this are given to the community.

Another good resource for new users is http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ which is home the NHF (newbieized help file) and has web-based dicussion forums.

Other good resources for hard-to-find info are http://www.deja.com/ (a usenet search engine), http://www.google.com/ (THE search engine), and http://www.freshmeat.net/ (the canonical software search engine) .. Freshmeat itself doesn't necessarily have the info, but the software packages for any given type of application tend to have useful links. For instance, the xawtv site that I found by searching freshmeat had the drivers necessary for the WinTV 401 card I recently configured, and the cdrecord site, as found on freshmeat, has a ton of useful cd burning resources.

Found the following Air Force press release on sci.space.news on Deja.com:

" To show its commitment, the Air Force is investing 30 percent of its science and technology budget -- more than double its current figure -- to accelerate development of space operations vehicles, space-based radar and laser, and adaptive optics."