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I therefore have no reason to believe that either major party has any intention of reforming the Code, and the only way I can see the Code being changed is for third parties to gain enough votes to be a threat to the majors.

As I'll keep saying until it happens, the better alternative is to enact Condorcet voting. It is not enough for third parties to act merely as "spoilers". If you think about it, a single vote can represent your true preference between, at most, two people. As soon as you introduce a third option, there's an amibuity: are you really for the person you vote for, are are you against his most popular opponent? We need a system that allows you to express preferences between candidates in this way, one that eliminates incentives for "strategic" voting.

That's Condorcet. Conceptually it is only slightly more difficult than single-vote plurality vote (current US system). Think of it this way: in a multi-way race, the "true winner" is the one that would win all (or at least a majority) of head-to-head races against all contenders. A single vote can determine only one head-to-head race - Condorcet provides a ranking method that allows all head-to-head winners to be determined simultaneously. Do not confuse this with an iterative approach to counting such as IRV. The iterative approach is flawed because it eliminates candidates before they've had a chance to be paired off with all other contenders. It is trivial to demonstrate this once you understand how the vote counting for both methods works.

Write your legislators. Write your editors. Explain to your neighbors and friends. Better yet, run for office. Imagine running on a platform that says, "I intend to make it easier for you to vote me - and other politicians - out of office if you don't like what we do".

I'm already voting for third parties. Of course, we need these same Congress-critters to enact Condorcet voting, so that such "protest" votes get noticed...

This is definitely not the first mobile sauna.
I used one some 20 years ago while I was a student in the Helsinki University of Technology.

There are lot of these in Finland.

This is a vehicle designed for URBAN combat and survellience. Monitoring email? Sounds like TEMPEST stuff. This vehicle would be used against new threats...like domestic terrorism hmmmm? Do you want the US military performing survellience on home soil? THINK about this people instead of making kiddie toy jokes...

Damn.

I'll let Bjarne Stroustrup (creator of C++) answer.

If you're going to complain about casting int to char * without warning, as you do in the second example, you should also complain about converting void * to char * without warning..

I'll let Steve Summit (author of the comp.lang.c FAQ) answer.

Healthy skepticism is a good trait on Slashdot, but it's best to stay polite ("rubbish") unless you know what you're talking about.

And you could do it again.

I've been looking around for a nice simple API to XML parsers, and I've yet to find one. Java and Perl both have clean, native-feeling XML APIs (JDOM and XML::Simple) but so far, the only C++ ones I've found map closely to DOM's overly complicated object model, and don't "feel" like C++ libraries (they don't use the STL and whatnot). Anybody know of a library along the lines of JDOM except for C++?

Someone posted a neat little class to the expat mailing list ~2yrs ago. Basically it was just a Node class with STL list for children and a hashmap for attributes. It was very small, clean, and was in essance a DOM. It used expat but trust me, the code was so tiny you could use any parser with it. It was like 200 lines of code.

I liked it so much I created the same thing in C called domnode.

Search the expat archives. Wish I could give you more to go on.

First off all the King James Version is protestant not catholic.
Acutally the Authorised/King James version is Anglican. You'll hardly ever see it in the US, but King James's translators definitely did translate the Apocrypha and a complete edition of the KJV will include those texts.

Check the
Articles of Religion for the Anglican view of the Apocrypha.

Second the inclusion list for the Kind James isn't arbitrary its following the organization from Martin Luther's Geneva Bible.

The Geneva Bible had nothing to do with Luther. It was the work of English exiles in Geneva during the reign of Mary Tudor. It is much more Reformed (i.e. Calvinist) in outlook than Luther would have been.

The books included in the Protestant canon are those selected in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Arrow's Theorem doesn't draw any such conclusion. Sure, there's no perfect system (by Arrow's set of criteria), but there are systems that are much better than what we've got. Moreover, all that Arrow did was define a set of criteria, and proved that the criteria couldn't be met. He didn't prove that his criteria were correct, because that's a subjective decision that can't be proven.

For more on this, read this rebuttal of Arrow's theorem-based fatalism.

Companies are trying to keep costs down as much as they can, and support is often an area they skimp on. And when you DO get hired by support, you are judged, not on your success in answering questions, but on how many calls you answer in a particular period of time.

If you are in the Seattle area I highly suggest you try out Eskimo North They also have numbers elsewhere. They are a mom and pop ISP that allows shell access and everything.

Voting libertarian will just make the [major] party you disfavor least lose.

A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for evil.

If you don't vote for what you believe, you won't get what you want.

To change your government, change your vote.

The problem today is that people nowadays are unwilling to stand behind their values. Instead of making their own choice, they make the "strategic" choice based on what they think all the other sheep in their district will do. This is stupid - you don't know what other people will do or what they really want. What if they all really want the same third party you want? The rule is still the person with the most votes wins, so vote for who you want, and get others to join you! But I don't see that happening any time soon, so it's a good idea to get a preferential voting system like Condorcet enacted ASAP.

some people bashed /. for posting this, but i think it comes at a perfect time. first, because of the recent ruling in georgia, and second, because it's always good to have a refresher of what evolution IS. lots of good posts clearing up the myth that it is just random deformed offspring superceding their parents.

i also want to point out to any highschool kids that even HS texts can get it wrong. i recall in highschool learning that man evolved from chimps, which is totally wrong! now today i know that the book MEANT to say man and chimps shared a common ancestor which was chimp-and-human-like, and we diverged 5 million years ago. just wanted to point out that even with a century old science, textbooks can still blow it! check out this page for more fun fuckups in school texts.

Science Hobbyist Misconceptions

Look at Crypto++ benchmarks for a concrete example on a desktop machine (32-bit >>100 MHz x86 processor).

I do not have any benchmarks for low end processors. Sorry.

Do we need to translate our questions into d00d speak?

http://www.eskimo.com/~mvargas/hax0r.htm
j00 @r3 31337

Normally I don't comment on sigs, but...

You mean Condorcet voting. IRV has serious problems once you look closely at it that make it unsuitable. With Condorcet, voting is the same, but the counting method is better.

Take a look at the links. If I ever run for office, changing the election method to something fair will be one of my planks.

You want to protect sensitive information? Put it behind a wall.

Just not good enough ...

The Newton group actually thought about and did user testing on their interface, then published interface standards. Unlike most OSes

Sigh. I spend so much of my professional life dealing with poorly thought out languages/systems that I look back very fondly on the Newton.

Actually I still use two of them. One is in the kitchen - I use it to keep track of groceries I need. The other sits by my desktop machine for taking notes.

actually, Star Trek V, the one that Shatner wrote and directed, is by far the worst. It was so bad that some guys did a homebrew version of MST3k on it...Here's a link.

• http://www.phpbuilder.com - PHP, some real world examples.
• http://www.devshed.com - PHP, Perl, Python and more.
• http://www.php.net - PHP
• http://www.perl.com - Perl
• http://www.coveryourasp.com - ASP, all real world examples.
• http://www.builder.com - C, C++, Java, Perl, Python and more.
• http://www.devcentral.com - C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl and more.
• http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html - C FAQ.

• Programming Perl - Perl
• The C Programming Language - C
• The C++ Programming Language - C++
• PHP and MySQL Web Development - PHP and MySQL. All real world examples.

I was gonna say that since we planted a US Flag on the Moon, then basically we claimed it. (At least that's the way it works in cartoons.) But as I recall, we actually brought the flag back with us.

The US has limited outer space jurisdiction, according to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. The treaty limited State sovereignty over outer space. Outer space was declared to be the common heritage of mankind. It prevented certain military operations in outer space and upon celestial bodies, specifically, the placing in orbit of any nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, and the installation of such weapons on celestial bodies. Outer space was otherwise to be reserved for peaceful uses. Various other international conventions, such as the Moon Registration, and Liability Treaties, expand upon provisions found in the Outer Space Treaty.

The Moon Treaty of 1979 essentially stated that the exploration and use of the moon shall be the province of all mankind and shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries.

If water was resonant at 2.4GHz, you would boil all of the water out of your food within the first 10 seconds or so of cooking - not the desired result. You want the water to absorb the energy slowly enough to give the heat time to conduct into the rest of the food. See this and this article.

:)

I'm only going to tell you morons this one more time!

The second law of thermodynamics is an empirical law. It is based upon observations, with no theory backing it up. It's like watching traffic and saying "of the last 100 cars, 20 of them were blue, ergo, 20% of all cars are blue".

So I don't want you losers trotting out that little bit of 19th century superstition when trying to explain why that "anomolous heat" can't possibly exist, hence these fine upstanding chemists are obivious frauds who lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

If you yoyos weren't so busy burying your heads in the sand, you'd have the time to take an honest look at the data and do your own damn experiments to prove or disprove the matter once and for all. Instead you engage in ad hominem attacks rather than doing real science.

With a fist full of T1s at work the thought of dial up a home had lost it's attraction, but my girl friend needed dial-up for work so she signed us up for Qwest. It was only $13 so no big deal. Their tech support turned out to be good and fast for Win platforms. Well, MSN made them a deal they couldn't refuse. QWest said move to MSN or go dark. In a moment of weekness I hit the button to transfer to MSN. After a month of tech support hell and their unwillingness to support win95/Netscape I pulled the plug. Because they were billing my phone account it took 3 weeks of daily phone calls and a director level person at QWest to terminate my account. I did learn one very usefull technique to use on stonewalling service reps: guilt. Just ask them, "how does working for a company that behaves this way make you feel?" The other is to keep them on hold. When they ask for information tell them you're looking for it and then pop back to the phone every 5 minutes and sweetly say, "I'm still looking." One day I kept MSN on the phone for over an hour that way. I finally found Eskimo.com They are cheep and support linux, but their pop provides seem to go out of business every other month. So their dial up numbers keep changing.

The examples he gives for usage of null pointers are both wrong. When a null pointer (whether written as 0 or NULL) is passed to a varargs function, it should be cast to a pointer of the appropriate type. See the comp.lang.c faq for details. The relevant questions are 5.4 and 5.6. But feel free to read them all!

Doesn't your first statement "From what he tells me, they were able to monitor displays from a good distance without any troubles" contradict "I don't know what this guy patented but it's already been deemed useless by 10 year old US Government research"?

Here is a good source of information about TEMPEST attacks, including the "Urban Folklore" LCD displays on laptops eliminate the risks of TEMPEST attacks (answers a few posts in this thread). It may be more than 10 years old as these guys claim to have been around 17 years.

Phillip.

Unofficial Tempest Info site
Just for those who may not know the jist of it, ALSO DIY shielding techniques! :)

All they have to do is multiply the extreme by 2.2169312169312171428571428571429, and then the book will burn prior to the chip.

Does that satisfy your numerical integrity?

For those interested: I used that page to generate the C from 451F (which is 232.7777777777778C), then divided that by 105C to result in the above number. Note that C/C cancels out, so we're left with just a number, no units, for the calculation.

Haven't though that hard since college. Thanks! ;-)

Final jab: your post appears to be missing some formatting. Perhaps you should have hit "Preview" in addition to "thinking" prior to posting?

To be nicer: when you want to put a "&lt" or "&gt" in a post, you need to specify it as "<" or ">", respectively. (And, obviously since I managed to do it, the "&" character is specified by "&". Enjoy!

I was going to put the following in my original response but I decided not to. My oven (topical! See subject line) caught fire last night. Had 2 police cars, fire truck, and ambulance come out. Burned my hand removing the pot, but that'll heal. Aerosmith's bassist had his house burn to the ground last night as well. He's in MA, I'm in FL. No relation.

Police say the felon heated his books to
200C to disable the rights management chip.

The chips work up to an extreme of around 105C, which works out to be 221F (cool converter here ).

All they have to do is double the extreme, and then the book will burn prior to the chip.

I wouldn't have known this if not for Ray Bradbury . Thanks!

This is what campaign finance reform is supposed to fix. But I don't support it; I don't think any amount of campaign finance reform will fix the situation. You need to motivate officials to be honest. I don't know how to do that, but I'm certain adding more rules won't. Until someone comes up with something better, I would rather keep my "freedom of speech".

Here's how you do it. Don't reform campaign finance. That's a red herring, and as you said, it's a free speech issue. Reform the electoral process. Motivate officials to be honest by making the possibility of being voted out a real threat. In the US House, incumbents are reelected like 98% of the time. That's insane.

The system needs to be opened up to challengers, to new ideas, new faces. Right now the Duopoly makes the election laws, so it's not surprising they favor incumbents. Nobody but a Democrat or Republican has a chance, and this is by design.

Freedom of conscience must be restored. If you can't safely vote how you truly feel, then the system is fundamentally flawed. The "wasted vote" problem must be eliminated.

To do this, we must realize that plurality voting is broken, and Condorcet voting must be implemented. It is the only system that is proven to be strategy free and truly express the preferences of the electorate.

Additionally, in presidential elections, the EC votes should not be allocated on a winner-take-all basis, but by district as intended. (You thought the correlation between EC votes and members of Congress was coincidence?)

Work locally. Get active in a minor political party, it doesn't matter which one. In this area (election reform), most have the same goal — fairness. Get these reforms in county and state government. Run for office, and ask why your RepuDem opponents haven't implemented fair voting yet. Educate the electorate about the deficiencies of the system, and how Condorcet is fair to everyone.

What happens is that the air is broken down TO PLASMA between the wires so that it conducts electricity, just like lightning 8-D. The spark then convects upwards due to the very hot air. After it's shot off, air is broken down at the bottom again, and another spark is started.

The best photos are probably HERE, but they're yellow sparks (i think that's to do with the gas) which isn't in my opinion as cool as brilliant blue ones :). TechTV also has a page on it and a cool-ish video if you can view asx files. Their JL is pretty weak though, because it stops before the spark "falls off" the end - meaning the wires are too far apart for the voltage to be that small to be able to turn the air in between into plasma.

If you can't find a decent flash editor but you find one for svg, then you can probably get away with this converter and end up with flash anyway:
http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/svg2swf/

Just read some of those tempest-Sites. They do this for almost twenty years now...

Add a hand drawn hologram to it and it'll be super cool. Maybe the apple on the cover.

Sure, sir.

Climate Model Uncertainties
Cliamte models still wrong
Show me the Evidence: A tale of Two Whoppers
No More Fudge Factor: Unfluxed Model Cools Warming

Now, I leave further research as an excercise to the reader.

I would strongly recommend you do a little research before you attack someone in the way you did. At worst it's slander in and of itself and, at best, it makes you look like an uninformed ass.

The stories are almost shockingly realistic and compelling.

Maybe I just hit the lemons, but neither adjective applied to what I read. If you want compelling, experimental short fiction, by a true master, may I suggest Donald Barthelme.

Sorry, it's not hypertext, or cyber-anything, but it is great literature.

• It's C. You don't need <stdio.h>, a return type for main, or prototypes for anything.

• void main() is wrong (although it usually doesn't hurt anything)

• The correct code to "Hello, world!" is:
  
  main() {
  for (;;) {
  printf("Hello, world!\t\b\b\b\b\b\b");
  }
  }
  To get the right effect, run this on Windows XP for about 30 seconds.

No way. I get a few channels in my apartment via rabbit-ear and UHF loop antenna reception - they're pretty weak, but on a good day and in the absence of major interference, I can watch Ally McBeal. I'm also a longtime notebook computer user, mostly Apple Powerbooks. The TFT LCD screen specifically interferes with the lower-numbered VHF channels on my TV, which also happen to be more poorly propagated at my location. The CPU and motherboard also interfere, but the screen is by far the worst and can't be within twenty feet and/or two interior walls of the antennae without substantial, patterned interference. And this is a low-power laptop with a relatively small 10" screen (800x600, 60Hz refresh), using under seven watts including the 180MHz CPU. Shutting off the screen independently of the rest of the machine greatly reduces the interference.

And if it's causing interference, it's giving out a signal, most likely one that can be intercepted and read. The best solution is to buy TEMPEST certified products.

• You're using a computer that could have a keystroke logger installed. http://www.keyghost.com is an example of a tiny & cheap hardware logger.
• You need to use your personal GPG keys at work, school or a web hosting facility where you don't trust or own the equipment.
• If you maintain a PGP Certificate Authority or signing key and have to have a safe place to use the CA key.
• If you simply don't want to risk putting a PGP key on a hard drive where someone else might have access to it.
• The Illuminati are watching your computer, and you need to use morse code to blink out your PGP messages on the numlock key.

• readme.txt, also on the floppy image
• The source code for files on the floppy
• The tinfoilhat linux floppy image plus disk signature file Transfer this image to disk using rawrite (on windows) , dd on unix (dd if=tinfoil.img of=/dev/floppy ), or Diskcopy on a MAC.

• Q: Why doesn't the floppy I got at codecon match the signature above?
  A: because I screwed up & wrote a nvram.md5 file to the floppy I then used as a master. I had to remove that file from every floppy. The result is that the MD5sum of the codecon floppies should be: 3608290765de7d5283a1a22813677a56
• Q: How do I undo that horrible screen in paranoid mode?
  A: Type "contrast" at the command prompt, or play with ctheme.
• Q: Is this really a 1.0 stable release?
  A: Think of this as a linux kernel 1.0 . Yes, it's stable to the best of my ability, and has been tested, but not for very long or by many people.
• Q: What sort of hardware is required to run tinfoil hat?
  A: Any 386DX or faster IBM compatible with more than 8 megs of RAM. Pretty much any PC made in the last 8 years will work fine.
• Q: where do I send complaints, bugs & feature requests?
  A: anonymous AT nameless DOT cultists.net
• Q: What is the license for this distribution?
  A: The scripts, documentation, and the distribution as a collection are released under a modified BSD license. Obviously, other people's software in this distribution retain their original licenses.

• Aluminum foil deflector beanie from zapatopi
• The man in the Tinfoil Hat . A good example for people confused by the tinfoil hat reference.
• http://www.gnupg.org
• Joelm's comprehensive TEMPEST site.
• Tempest for Eliza A fun tool for observing the radiation from your computer. If anybody ports this to Direct FB, I'll put it on tinfoil hat in a flash.
• Diceware a tool for generating very secure passphrases.

Too bad it will be the last of the legacy-supporting releases from Red Hat. They have now partnered with Compaq to only distribute future versions (7.2 on) with new Compaq hardware, which I am sure means that legacy support will be going away.

OTOH, I won't have to worry about upgrading Blackbox, my 10-node Multia cluster ;-)

I assert that it is not campain finance reform, but campain reform that we need.

I agree completely. Money is not the problem. The process is the problem.

Consider first why candidates need the huge amounts of money to be elected. They in effect need to run two entirely different campains - once for the primary, and once for the election.

There's another reason that (senatorial) candidates need huge amounts of money. Primaries serve a necessary function, and it requires cash to perform it. I have no problem with that.

1. Allow anybody registered to vote to vote in any primary.
2. Require a binding "none of the above" entry on all elections.

I disagree. First, primaries are an internal function for the parties to determine who that party's candidate will be. It should not be regulated, as it is a private function of a private organization. It's entirely fair for a party to limit participation to its own members, IMO. Second, a "none of the above" option just runs up costs as it necessitates another election. What we need to do is make sure the first election works right, in a fair way, that gives us a winner the majority actually desire. Hint: that's not the plurality vote system.

1. The third party candidates wouldn't run in the first race. Instead, they would encourage the voters to vote NOTA in the first race and knock the big boys out.
2. The big parties would no longer be able to take this "This is our guy, take it or leave it" attitude. Thus, they would tend to field more moderate candidates.
3. Because of 1 and 2, more people would feel their vote mattered, and we would get more turnout.

Now this is completely backwards. Why should there be only two choices? First, if five guys think they're each the best person to be president, let them all run, and give each a fair shot! Arbitrarily limiting the field to two is foolish. A fair voting system would give the third party guy a fair chance of election in the first round, instead of wasting time with a second round. Second, there's nothing wrong with a party deciding "this is our guy". If you're going to subscribe to a party because you believe its ideals, that party should pick the person who best represents those ideals to be its candidate. If you don't agree with the ideals, form your own party. The problem you pointed out (in the 2000 election) earlier was caused precisely because both of the candidates were "moderates". The electorate saw no real distinction between the two, and that's why it came down almost to a coin toss. Third, this is the same reason nobody gets out to vote. Why bother? Both the guys are moderates, and there's no distinction, so it doesn't matter.

The only way to revise the system to change voting so that the results accurately reflect voter preferences. Presently there is a false dichotomy, since your one vote can only reflect your preference between "Candidate A" over "anybody else". Since this type of voting encourages a two-way race, we focus only on the two "leading" candidates.

Voters want real choice. Since 1960, presidential election turnout has been on a steady decline - with one exception: 1992. What happened in 1992? Perot. Like him or not, he was a strong, visible, third-party candidate who made people believe they had a choice. Even though his views garnered 20% of the nation's support, we saw absolutely zero change. Why? Because the system is stacked against change.

Until we get rid of campaign contributions and begin doing public funding of campaigns

That's about the worst thing that could happen. Who gets this public money? Anybody that throws his hat in the ring, including my neighbor Jim-Bob who's just doing it for the cash? How do you decide who qualifies, and how it's apportioned? If it's based on previous elections, you've just decided to keep incumbent parties in office forever, which is precisely the current problem. What about third parties? What about people (like me) who object to subsidizing views I don't agree with? Or apolitical types who don't want to fund politicians at all? Why should you steal from (tax) them for politicians' gain? Thomas Jefferson said, "To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical." Some of us still believe that. If I want to support X's campaign, I will...but I don't expect you to, nor would I force you to. If you want to support his opponent Y, you can go ahead, but don't expect or force me to help you.

(The Constitution and Libertarian parties refuse to accept any government money they qualify for on this principle. Rare to find a candidate that is willing to stand on principles these days.)

What we need is not campaign finance reform but electoral process reform. I should be able to give unlimited support to support the views I agree with. There should be no caps, no spending limits. However, current electoral process favors the incumbent Duopoly and discourages third parties. Why are they called "third" parties? Because plurality voting exposes a false sense of a two-party system! Ever heard of the "wasted vote" problem, or voting for "the lesser of two evils"? We should not have to choose between two evils! Condorcet voting gives every contender a fair chance, because voters' freedom of conscience is preserved.

Changing to the Condorcet method would be the single best thing that could happen to American politics. I don't see reforms like this happening any time soon. The entrenched parties have too much to lose, so they're not likely to make it easier to defeat them. But something must be done.

• Condorcet's method
• ElectionMethods.org

You missed a decimal point. (At least, I hope it was you and not the book publisher -- although science textbooks are full of errors.) The Earth is about 4.6 billion years old. (This is the American billion, 10^9 -- in Britain, 1 billion = 10^12.)

Of course, there's a good bit of scientific wild ass guessing in those age estimates. For certain kinds of rock, analysis of radioactive isotopes can give a +/-10% or better measurement of the age when the rock solidified. It is less easy to estimate how long the Earth existed as a ball of molten rock, and it is possible that we haven't found the very first solid rocks yet, or even that we aren't going to find them since they may have all been sucked down into the mantle and re-melted. But it is quite clear that the Earth is _at least_ 4 billion years old, and it's not likely to be much over 5 billion unless astrophysicists' models of solar aging are all way off.

Its bread and butter time for the smaller ISPs, they almost live month to month when they first start out they cant have a burn rate.

Starting at a small BBS turned ISP (cet.com), I seen how the owner would sell a full T1 and split it a dozen ways, scam customers on software packages, replace broken hardware that wasnt broken. I moved onto another ISP, and saw how the salesmen reminded me of car salesmen, "Let me talk to the manager..."

People dont see whats going on behind the scenes, how the young kids are working thier ass off to keep the servers up cause they cant hire professional admins. The systems are always having outages and they blame the larger telcos as a "network problem..."

That was my biggest problem, I couldnt stand being dishonest to a customer, and you cant be a good salesmen without bending the truth, spreading on the bullshit like butter. Even with a good product, its thier job to sell or they dont eat.

Smaller ISP's have to cut costs too, I remember when all the ISPs in Spokane moved into the tel-west building so they could cut out the local exchange. Save 200 bux on federal taxes and transport fees. A T1 that costs 900 bux wholesale could be bought for 500, since all they had to do was run some cable down the hallway (overhead). Sell the T1 (frac) to 10 people paying you 300 bux, and they pay thier own costs, you could out bid. And then charge them for any hourly work needed. (You need help configuring your router? 10 hours billed) Another reason ISPs needed to move into the telco buildings was the digital lines, to have the 56K v90 modems, the ISP has to have digital lines. I remember how everyone and thier brother was buying livingston port masters and running radius. Every ISP was the same, except for the modems on the end of the portmasters.

I think most slashdotters can confirm the shady side of the ISPs. How some run out of computer stores in the back, or BBS's that turned ISP. H

Hell, one of the most popular ISPs Eskimo here in seattle runs out of his living room. When I moved over here to this side of washington state, I went over and met the guy. Typical homegrown ISP, but this guy has shitloads of customers.

Been there done that, now I work for a major wireless telco, millions of customers, and I never have to be shady. Drawbacks? Less ownership in the product. I get paid, but I dont make the choices. Management and Marketing does. Sometimes I just shake my head and say "Umm, if our stockholders only knew....)

Someday Im going to start another business, and try to keep the "mom and pop" attitude. Actually sell what the customer wants, and give it to them. Only thing stands in my way, People are cheap. (-;

-
There is nothing in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and he who considers price only is that man's lawful prey. - John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)

I am not a security expert. Just a laid off SysAdmin.

What you are reffering to is called "Air Gap Security" and is used by the Government on all of their most sensitive computers. Do you think that the President's laptop that he uses to connect to the Internet is the same one that he uses to compose high-level briefings on?

No, of course not. Any computer that you are TRUELY paranoid about keeping the data secure would be:

1. In a seperate room with no possible network connection. The power outlet and the lights are the only wires coming near the room. No wall in the room is an external wall in the building.
2. That room is shielded against stray EM frequencies. Slashdot had an article on Tempest a while back on it.
3. You should frequently search for bugs in that room and the surrounding rooms.
4. Have some form of security system in place.

It seems to me that if you went to all of that trouble to secure a computer system from monitoring, you either have a business that has really outrageous security needs, an organization that really wants it's members to remain confidential, a citizen who is just freakin' fed up with our rights getting trampled on, or someone who is up to no good.

Notice how in the above paragraph only ONE situation warrants a warrant? Without having to go to that extreme of measures to protect our privacy, what reasonable solution can be provided to the average citizen to ensure theirs?

The home of the Little Mermaid, the Submariner or Aquaman?

Still waiting for scientist finding a huge, yellow door at the northpole, a skull shaped cave in deep Africa or at least a portal to the negative zone.

Or, the Taos Hum could just be mass hysteria or attention mongering :-)

Here's a link to a page with some info about it.

-me

Across the darkened street, a windowless van is parked. Inside, an antenna is pointed out through a fiberglass panel. It's aimed at an office window on the third floor. As the CEO works on a word processing document, outlining his strategy for a hostile take-over of a competitor, he never knows what appears on his monitor is being captured, displayed, and recorded in the van below.

But I've been in one of Ross Andersons lectures where him and Markus demonstrated tempest working against a laptop. Just using LCD won't protect you, see Here (google cache - page seems to be missing) and Here