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First GSP by Anonymous Coward · 2002-09-20 10:27 · Score: 0 · on Vanishing Mobile Phone Masts

Wow. When you see an article like this, it makes you glad to be alive in an era when such technology exists. My question is, how do think this will affect the Open Source community?

This Generic Slashdot Post was brought to you by The_Messenger

In honor of Richard Stallman by Anonymous Coward · 2002-09-20 02:54 · Score: -1, Flamebait · on Little Green Men

Here's the source of a tribute site:

<html> <head> <title>StallmAnus</title> </head> <body> <center> <img src="stallman.jpg"> <h1> "I am a goat fucker!" -Richard Stallman, 1994 </h1> A bit of MIT/LCS lore here. RMS used to live on the 7th floor of LCS. That's where he used to have his office before he resigned in protest over the commercialization of something or another. But they let him keep his office, and he lives there, because he refuses to have an apartment. (Given the rent rates in Cambridge, the assholeness of most landlords, I don't blame him. Rather than live in my office, I chose to move to Texas, and the change in rent rates and lack of state income tax resulted in an immediate %25 pay raise. RMS doesn't have that option because we have the death penalty for people like him down here.) Anyway, RMS has or had a number or geek chick groupies. I wouldn't call any of the ones I've seen "hot", really -- well except for this one little psycho jewish undergrad from NYC. He would sleep with them on the sofa in his office. That's why he got kicked out off floor 7, and down to the 3 floor, is that the cleaning staff complained about pulling used condoms out from behind the sofas. No joke. You can use this information for trolling if you wish, but it's all true. RMS has a phobia of water that prevents him from showering. This is part of this post I know from first hand experience, because I myself have observed him taking a sponge bath in the 3d floor mens room in LCS. Apparently once he had a girlfriend who he was totally in love with, and she convinced him to take one shower a week. It was a traumatic experience for him each time. RMS also has a phobia of spider plants. When RMS starts bothering a grad student and going to his office and talking to him constantly and getting him to spend all his time writing free software, the grad student will complain to someone on the floor, and they'll let them in on the secrete -- get a spider plant in your office. The next time RMS drops by, his eyes will bulge a little and he'll say " Umm. . . I wanted to talk to you about hacking some elisp code . . . why don't you stop by my office sometime ?" and make a hasty exit. One of his more nasty habits is picking huge flakes of dandruff out of his hair while talking to you. At least he doesn't eat them, like some people I know. Now, I know everyone loves to make fun of RMS, and I'm feeding that a bit here, so I'd just like to say that I think he really is a genius, on the order of Socrates (another filthy slob who couldn't keep a normal living arrangement, and lived in a barrel) or Ghandi or Ezekiel. Everything he has ever said to me, while sounding naive and idealistic and stupid at the time, turned out to later be correct. The only thing I fear in his philosophy is his interest in reducing population growth. Everyone else I know of who was obsessed with that "problem" turned out to have facist or totolitarian tendencies, and I think that the problem will solve itself as more and more of the world moves into a middle class type existence. But on everything else, bitter experiences have taught me he is right. I will not use any non-GPLd or lGPLd software, and I look forward to being able to buy only "open" hardware. I would like to see software patents completely eliminated, and with the development of digitial communication, I see no reason why shouldn't simply repeal all of Title 17 and do away with all copyrights. They just aren't needed. I expect to spend much of my life being paid to write software, and I just don't see copyrights has helping me in anyway. <h3> <a href="mailto:adamtrowe@hotmail.com">Feedback</a&gt ; </body> </html>

helo by Anonymous Coward · 2002-09-20 01:24 · Score: 0 · on Marvel Goes MMPORG

Hi, i ams Randy. commcs are very nice. he in mexioc we dont give hte same comics as the USA. some bad poeple call me a spic because of this. my brother sean loves the camics aswell Come and visut my site on the web. all of the geeks and my brother seanbaby will like my page.

http://www.geocities.com/randythegreatus

-Randy

Piano Tossing by Stigmata669 · 2002-09-18 15:06 · Score: 3, Insightful · on Skydriving

Lets not forget the piano tossing trebuchets , inspiring crazy guys to throw big stuff since the middle ages.

Best News Since the Transistor! by Baldrson · 2002-09-18 04:25 · Score: 2 · on Low-Budget Indian Satellite Launch

As the person who represented the grassroots attempt to reform commercial launch policy in the US, I just want to say this commercial launch by a non-Western nation is the best news since the invention of the transistor!

Sputnik doesn't compare because it was communist grandstanding that created a communist agency within the West, NASA, that succeeded in suppressing progress in space for decades. This challenge from the Dravidian-Aryans hybrids of India is bound to light a fire under the moribund pioneering culture of the West -- particularly the nations of Canada, Australia and New Zealand and hopefully the US (assuming if the US can hold together in the face of such challenges to its pioneering heritage -- which I doubt and hope it cannot for the sake of the remnant of its pioneering subpopulations).

Best News Since the Transistor! by Baldrson · 2002-09-18 04:25 · Score: 2 · on Low-Budget Indian Satellite Launch

As the person who represented the grassroots attempt to reform commercial launch policy in the US, I just want to say this commercial launch by a non-Western nation is the best news since the invention of the transistor!

Sputnik doesn't compare because it was communist grandstanding that created a communist agency within the West, NASA, that succeeded in suppressing progress in space for decades. This challenge from the Dravidian-Aryans hybrids of India is bound to light a fire under the moribund pioneering culture of the West -- particularly the nations of Canada, Australia and New Zealand and hopefully the US (assuming if the US can hold together in the face of such challenges to its pioneering heritage -- which I doubt and hope it cannot for the sake of the remnant of its pioneering subpopulations).

Re: Easy for you to say Tanveer1979 by (v)Jargon(v) · 2002-09-18 03:17 · Score: 0 · on Low-Budget Indian Satellite Launch

Its very easy for you to say this.

Picture of Tanveer

"You may be surprised to know that in 2000 years of indian civilisation, India has never ever attacked another nation."

India has attacked Pakistan and Muslims over and over again. During partition India slaughterd Muslims left and right. If India is such a Democracy, then why did crazed Hindus of Gujrat attack Muslims of that area just months ago. Why did Democratic Hindus, tie-up Muslim women, gang-rape them, pour gasoline on them and set them ablaze. Why did Democratic Hindus or better 'Indians' do the same to entire Muslim families.

Families Burned Alive!

Go back to school, its obvious that in over 2000 years Indians haven't advanced a single bit in terms of Democracy.
What a joke...

Re: Easy for you to say Tanveer1979 by (v)Jargon(v) · 2002-09-18 03:17 · Score: 0 · on Low-Budget Indian Satellite Launch

Its very easy for you to say this.

Picture of Tanveer

"You may be surprised to know that in 2000 years of indian civilisation, India has never ever attacked another nation."

India has attacked Pakistan and Muslims over and over again. During partition India slaughterd Muslims left and right. If India is such a Democracy, then why did crazed Hindus of Gujrat attack Muslims of that area just months ago. Why did Democratic Hindus, tie-up Muslim women, gang-rape them, pour gasoline on them and set them ablaze. Why did Democratic Hindus or better 'Indians' do the same to entire Muslim families.

Families Burned Alive!

Go back to school, its obvious that in over 2000 years Indians haven't advanced a single bit in terms of Democracy.
What a joke...

Re:Code-free programming by leandrod · 2002-09-17 10:00 · Score: 2 · on Charles Simonyi leaves Microsoft

> Another anti-OO "relational alegebra is all we ever need" rant by Tablizer.

Sorry, but Tablizer could never say relational algebra is all we ever need first, because the algebra is not the central point of the relational model, as it is just one of the two ways of manipulating relations, the other being relational calculus: the real points are two-valued predicate logic and set theory.

Second, Tablizer never quite understood the relational model, so how can he properly advocate it? A cursory read at his homepage shows he does not grok that it is based on sets.

He complains that he cannot map sets into his programming models, not realizing that, data being central to programming, sets are the easiest way to view them and that programming should adapt to sets, not the other way round.

That becomes even more clear when, after reading his complaints about SQL, you realize that he wants SQL to be even less relational -- and it is not by any means, being based on bags, not relations.

And he is no hypochrite, having written FoxPro software -- what do you want less relational than that, OO or flat files?

That being said, I should add that bein anti-OO is a very salutary thing to be, seeing how much confusion and fuzzyness OO has brought upon us, making the field even less clear than it was twenty years ago by focusing on programming, not data or even algorithms. We could be in a functional programming, relational data nirvana if it was not for all this OO garbage on us now.

All the gas in Pepsi? by sapped · 2002-09-17 09:37 · Score: 1 · on Drink Pepsi, Go to Space?

Does this work on the theory that if you consume enough Pepsi quickly enough, then the resulting gas will propel you into outer space automatically?

--

Employing incompetence: $35/h
Fixing the resulting mistakes: $1000's
Employing me: Priceless

Re:Then have your soda OPEN SOURCE! by mekkab · 2002-09-17 06:20 · Score: 2 · on Drink Pepsi, Go to Space?

Well, there are some other Alternatives...

P.S.- the recipe is still available from opencola.com, but only until October 31st, 2002-
download that pdf now! (so it can bit rot on your harddrive...)

Re:Ilium 629 by vlad_petric · 2002-09-17 04:20 · Score: 2 · on Ununoctium Wrapup

Did you even bother looking it up on google?

Star Trek particles

Thoughts on going to jail? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-09-17 04:16 · Score: 0 · on Talk To a Convicted Warez Guy

I've heard that being a prison bitch is easier than having to constantly maintain the role of "daddy" (defending turf, keeping bitches in check, etc). Are you the assertive type who will "pull out the shank" before putting out for Bubba?

Also, I realize only one question per post but how do you plan to apply your sysadmin skills to prevent unwanted "viruses" from penetrating your "firewall"?

Finally, not a question but a link you may find helpful:
Prison Survival Guide

Best of luck to you...

Actual Link For FOX's 18-35 Male Demographic by Anonymous Coward · 2002-09-17 01:54 · Score: 0 · on Egyptian Pyramid Rover Finds... Another Door

ex BBC weathercaster

Get your facts straight by DaveWhite99 · 2002-09-16 08:53 · Score: 1 · on More on GM's New Fuel Cell Cars

"We (America) has arguably more oil than the Arab world."

Ummm...Saudi Arabia itself has 25 percent of the world's known oil reserves. The U.S. only has 3 percent of the world's known oil reserves.

"Electric wheels just dont turn as hard as gas-driven ones. (torque)"

Electric motors actually have more torque, pound-for-pound, than gasoline engines do. Furthermore, electric motors have a perfectly flat torque curve from 0 RPMs, whereas most gasoline engines don't hit their peak torque until at least 1,750 rpm. This means electric motors have a MUCH larger area under the torque curve !! Thus, I would argue electric motors have substantially more torque than gasoline engines. If you don't believe me, check out this link and this link.

Re:CART and 5 Gs by BlameFate · 2002-09-16 01:52 · Score: 1 · on New Jersey Officially Limits G-Forces on Coasters

You're forgetting the aerodynamics of an F1 or a CART car.

In an F1 car the aerodynamics generate so much downforce at high speeds that the car could run upside-down (i.e. it exerts more downforce than the weight of the car... far more). Therefore cornering forces well in excess of 3G are normal in F1, especially through Eau Rouge at Spa in Belgium.

Re:Need Inexpensive GPS Unit by arcadesdude · 2002-09-15 07:18 · Score: 1 · on A Better Breed of GPS Software?

The cheepest GPS unit out there (besides the obsolete stuff) is the Garmin eTrex ("lil" yellow base model). It goes for around $80-$120 (used-new) on ebay and is around $115-$125 brand spanking new in stores and catologues. The cable to connect it to pc's can be very inexpensive if you built it yourself. It has various connect modes and could possibly connect to Streetfinder (conformation please?).

Re:New meaning... by abischof · 2002-09-15 06:59 · Score: 2 · on The Porn Of Napster

"Well I know a little kitty kitty who's sleeping with mommy tonight." -- Cartman's Mom

Re:A few things... by di0s · 2002-09-14 19:34 · Score: 1 · on Linux Outpacing Macintosh On Desktops

Fourth, despite the Athlon's creaming the P4s, it takes more than the average "benchmark" to compare Athlons/P4s to G4s. Note: the Megahertz-myth page on apple's site.

AMD pushes the same "megahertz-myth" stuff too. It is true that megahertz is not the only measure of performance, but that unfortunatly isn't common knowledge yet. Things like bus speed, cache sizes, DRAM latency/timing, and disk I/O speeds just don't cross people's minds. When the average Joe goes into CompUSA, do you think he's going to buy a dual 1Ghz Mac or a 2.5 Ghz PC? I thought so, and that's why the Macs are unfortunatly relegated to the back corner of the store. Little does Joe know that if he were to buy that Mac, he'd probably have a lot less headaches. (Dude, you shouldn't be getting a Dell!)

However, I really don't feel that Photoshop is a tell all benchmark. About the only thing it makes use of is the FPU. As The Register points out, the Quicksilver G4 is only able to hold it's own against an old P3 running at 1 Ghz. Any thoughts?

Here's a nice benchmark page of PSBench (a cross-platform Photoshop benchmark tool). Notice the ~20 point lead that the Xeon holds over the Dual G4 1 Ghz? If I even used Photoshop, I'd be interested in what my PC would do.

I totally agree with you on the iApps. It's also nice to be able to delete them if you never use them (unlike Windows).

You're also right about running OS X on a G3, but you didn't mention speed. I installed Jaguar on my friend's B&W G3 Powermac and it was mostly a waiting game. It also runs slowly on the G3 iBook (I'm referring to the older 12" display models. The new ones seem to have adequate performance. I blame the 66 Mhz bus. Come on Apple, my last PC with a 66 Mhz bus was a 233 and that was back in 1998.)

As far as benchmarks go, I'd be interested in knowing what you use to benchmark your Mac. My PC is a dual AMD Athlon MP 2000+, 512 Megs of PC 2100 memory. I took a 430 meg wav file and compressed it to a 48 meg MP3 (128 kbps) in about 2 minutes. CPU usage stayed in the low teens. Pretty impressive I'd say. Can your Mac do that? My Mac is pretty much unusable when I rip music. It's a 400 Mhz "Sawtooth" with 640 Megs memory and 2x 18 Gig SCSI drives.

I think it's safe to say that in the speed department, x86 is the way to go (till Opteron and Itanium come full swing). But in the useability/simplicity department, Apple still reigns supreme. I just hope Apple will fix scrolling/resizing windows in OS X soon.

heads up dsiplay by cpex · 2002-09-13 05:05 · Score: 4, Interesting · on Souped Up Mods for a Souped Up Vehicle?

I know I saw something back in the early 90's on a show called 2000 or something like that a car that used radar to track cars and on a heads up display it would draw a box around the car and outline the lanes on the road for foggy or other hazardous driving conditions. Combine that with your speed, rpm, temperature (engine, outside, iinside) maybe a translucent rearview image, translucent map with driving directions(GPS) let you choose a few engine sensor to display with all controls on the sterring wheel (imagine saying hey I think I want to tweak my air fuel ratio beep-beep. Of course you hsould be able to turn all these off and on at will so you can choose exactly what you want displayed on your HUD at any time

i was really bored at work so i did a quick workup in ps what is could be like here

Re:Remote Object Calls. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-09-12 21:10 · Score: 0 · on Programming PHP

Absolutely.

And if you want free tutorial, it is available at many places including Here.

Re:To anyone complaing because they have old syste by Anonymous Coward · 2002-09-12 19:15 · Score: -1, Troll · on AMD Delays Hammer

Message -----Original Message-----
From: lindaevert [mailto:lindaevert@hotmail.com]
Sent: Friday, September 13, 2002 1:26 AM
To: lick.my.cum.soaked.underwear@fucklick.net
Subject: Goldilocks wants to sit on papa bears cock

Come play papa bear

<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Message</TITLE> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1106" name=GENERATOR></HEAD> <BODY text=blue vLink=#ffffff aLink=#ff0099 link=#ffffff bgColor=white> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV></DIV> <D IV class=OutlookMessageHeader lang=en-us dir=ltr align=left>-----Original Message----- From: lindaevert [mailto:lindaevert@hotmail.com] Sent: Friday, September 13, 2002 1:26 AM To: lick.my.cum.soaked.underwear@fucklick.net Su bject: Goldilocks wants to sit on papa bears cock </DIV><FON T face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <CENTER> &l t ;A href="http://www.geocities.com/daisifrsh">Come play papa bear</A> </CENTER> </BODY></HTML&g t;

Nobody gives a fuck by Anonymous Coward · 2002-09-12 17:44 · Score: -1, Troll · on NetBSD Foundation Board Election Results Posted

Slashdot confirms: NetBSD is boring. It doesn't take a Kreskin to predict that nobody gives a flying fuck

Nigerian David Lee Roth by chimpo13 · 2002-09-12 12:13 · Score: 4, Funny · on Slashback: Segwait, Farscape, Leg-pulling

Here's where a couple guys respond to Nigerian scam pages as David Lee Roth and say they'll send the money. It's pretty good getting Nigerian scammers to go to the airport to meet them holding a sign that says "David Lee Roth" on it.

Sorry it's on geocities, but hey...

http://www.geocities.com/scamjokepage/

I wrote to this guy back on July 25 by Skapare · 2002-09-11 04:08 · Score: 3, Informative · on Internet Vigilante Justice, SPAM, and Copyrights

Here is what I wrote to this guy back on July 25 when the article had just come out. I never received a response from him. Was he totally embarassed by his idiocy once it was explained to him? I guess so.

I just read the article you wrote on New Architect Magazine entitled "Blind Vigilantes; Blackhole lists offer dark prospects". I feel you have missed certain points in your analysis, and as a result, you misunderstand what is going on. That's OK, because the majority of network administrators still do, too. As a lawyer you would not be expected to know this kind of stuff. You clearly know a lot more about it than the average lawyer. I'm writing in hopes of filling in the gaps. I sincerely hope you have the time to read this. It's long, but I think this is important.

First of all, I use these blackhole lists myself, so it is possible that your reply to me could bounce back. I can override it if I know the IP address of your mail server. But I won't know it until there is a server log telling me about it bouncing. What I'll do is get your IP address at that time, add it to the exception database, and you can repeat the reply later on. Or you can send me mail from Hotmail, which I believe is not blocked anymore.

I want to fast forward to the point in your article where I think the main misunderstanding is:

How had it gained access to my mail server? Simple. It had forged the headers on its email to convince my mail server that the email it sent was from a permitted user. You see, my mail servers were set up to pass mail only from a domain name of which I am the only user. It blocks everything else. That's not an open relay. Unless you're a user in my domain, you can't use it.

One of the methods spammers use to send their mail through a mail server configured like yours is to do exactly what you are complaining about. I see upwards of 10,000 of these a day on my servers. The spammers have these massive lists of email addresses, quite many of which are valid. What they do is look up which mail server those users would use, which is not hard because that's exactly what the whole system is designed to be able to do. Every delivered piece of email had to do that. Once they have this information, then they forge that user in their FROM line and start sending mail to the user's server. In the case of a server set up to test only the domain name in the FROM line, it works, and the spam message gets sent on its way.

That's why your mail server is considered to be an open relay, because it is possible for a spammer to use it, despite the fact that they are doing something illegal such as forging your domain name. If it lets a spammer forward mail, it's an open relay.

The group based in Denmark had pretended to be me, forged an email as though it had come from an address that only I am authorized to use, passed it through the mail server in my house, and then placed me on a list of people who should be blocked from sending mail. They circulated that list around the world. ISPs used by my friends and family here the United States subscribed to this list. Now, through no fault of my own and in fact because of the trickery of Danish email activists I was no longer able to send email to many people in my address book.

It is standard practice for every program (there are several available) which does the open relay tests to try dozens of different ways to fool a mail server into forwarding mail. Forging the domain name of the users of that server is one of the simpler tricks. There are some that are more complicated. These programs are simply doing exactly the same thing that a spammer would do. It's the same principle used by security test programs which test whether or not a computer can be broken into. They have to pull all the punches a hacker might try. Otherwise such programs will fail to detect a flaw and the program itself will be worthless.

I periodically run tests on all my mail servers to make sure I have not accidentally configured out the relay controls. I watch these tests take place, and they do this forgery exactly as expected.

It's hard to describe how angry this made me. The Danish consortium had lied about their identity, and I was paying for it.

The worst thing about being blacklisted, however, wasn't that I could no longer send email, but that spammers began actively trying to use my mail server to send their spam. You see, blackhole lists work both ways. ISPs use it to block traffic, but as I've recently discovered, the spammers themselves use the lists as a kind of directory of servers to use for sending their mail.

Actually, that is not true. Read on and this will be explained.

If you look at my mail server logs, you'll see that every few seconds or so, someone, somewhere tries to access my mail server and use it to send mail. Each time, without fail, my mail server declines the request and refuses to relay the requested message. It isn't an open relay. It's just doing its job. But my machine is bombarded with requests from all over the world from spammers seeking to use its minimal capabilities to send their penis enlarging, breast enhancing, get-rich-quick messages.

Last year, one of my client companies, a local web hosting business, had a case of one of their customers running a spamming operation right from the server they were paying my client to use, in violation of their AUP. The customer got cut off, and my client asked me to help him clean up the mess. In so doing, I obtained a copy of not only the spamming software (a special version intended for running from web servers), but also a copy of a big list of about 1.5 million addresses.

There was something very interesting in this list. The first 1000 or so entries were email address that were familiar to me. They were OTHER SPAMMERS. That's right, other spammers have their own names in these lists. What that means is if any spammer discovers an open relay, the others find out about it fairly quickly. The "spammer network" as I might call it is very well connected. They all see the successes of the others. And much like wild animals on the African Savannah when one makes a kill, the others circle around to take their own bite out of the carcass. That's what is happening to your server.

The anti-spam group have some of their addresses on these lists, too. That's how they first find out if your mail server is an open relay. They get spam that some spammer who found it relayed through. That's how you were first put on the list.

The blackhole lists are run through a distributed database called DNS. This is the same thing that allows looking up a domain name to get the numeric IP address which the routers use to send packets to the correct destination. But the point about it is that DNS works as a general distributed database, and unless someone runs the DNS server wrongly, there is no mechanism to get a list of these addresses. All that can be done is to pick and address and do a lookup. Unlike a regular database, there is no means to do a query lookup like "give me all the IP addresses which are open relays".

In reality, there are sometimes some breakdowns in that security and the blocked addresses can get out. I've acquired one such list myself. But for the most part, spammers do one of two things. They scan the net at high speeds looking for open relays, and they scan through their mailbox which is on the lists to check for good pickings in recent spam they received.

But, hey, I'm a lawyer, right? I'm supposed to be able to solve this kind of dilemma. And there are a few things I could do.

For one, the Danish antispam organization falsified an email header to gain access to my mail server. Illegal access to a computer system is, if not a criminal violation, then a trespass on my private property. As I've discussed previously in this space, one of the novel legal theories now catching on for these kinds of unacceptable accesses to computer systems is a centuries-old tort called "trespass to chattels." At a minimum, I ought to be able to sue the Danish company for the damage it caused me from its illegal access.

They have a legal defense. You actually gave them permission to do the scan. Although you did not know the scan involved the address forgery, their defense is that the practice is the only way to test to see if a mail server is an open relay (that is, if it could be used by a spammer who would forge the address). As mentioned above, this and many other tests like it are standard practice in security testing (and testing for an open relay is simply one form of security test).

This is why when an open relay listing is in the database they will not remove it by periodically testing on their own accord. That would truly be illegal. They require you to consent to the test before they will do it. And again, the standard for these tests is to do exactly every know trick a spammer would try.

Granted, the damage caused by my inability to send an email is likely not terribly significant. You can always pick up the phone, print the message out, and fax it or mail it or just use a different mail server. But in spite of all that, I could probably get an injunction, or least a dollar or two to compensate me for my injuries and establish that I have been wronged.

It is not their test that put you in the list in the first place. It was the fact that they received a copy of spam that some spammer relayed through your server first. It is that spammer that trespassed on your server and caused you the real harm.

The problem, of course, is that the loose organization of individuals who compiled the blackhole list is based in Denmark. Who knows whether the organization is a real legal entity or just some name cooked up by a group of self righteous individuals. However, they do have a domain name, and an IP address, and they circulate their work to ISPs around the world. In other words, there is a group for me to sue. But taking legal action on foreign entities is difficult. I would have to translate my legal documents into Danish. I would have to hire someone in Denmark to personally deliver these translated documents to the entity that I would be suing. That costs time and money.

Those who compile the database are just the messengers. But your real problem is that these guys are just the little fish. The big ones are even harder to reach. They are rumored to be in Bulgaria, an Eastern Europe country formerly behind the infamous Iron Curtain.

But I could sue them here in Los Angeles, California, that much I know. By sending their forged email through my mail server, which is located in my den in Los Angeles, they fulfilled certain California legal requirements that would let me sue them here. The connection to Los Angeles is also bolstered by the fact that I live here and my injury was suffered here.

Of course, all of this is starting to sound like the kind of hypothetical legal conundrum that you might find on a law school exam. Problems like mine often remain hypothetical because the expense of bringing them to trial is so great, and the ability to gain any monetary relief from lawsuits is minimal. That's why the black hole providers have been able to get away with their vigilante justice for so long. For any individual user wronged by their efforts and from what I understand, there are a lot of people in similar situations the costs of pursuing these organizations, which are often located overseas, is too great. These groups of volunteer organizations have no assets to speak of they are volunteers after all and plaintiffs' lawyers are hesitant to take a case without the prospect of a lucrative damages judgment.

And there is the risk that they would win if they were present to defend their practice. They would certainly bring up the point that the original listing was due to a spammer discovering your open relay, and that they received permission from you to test their server.

Before you think that this is all just about me and the fact that my father no longer receives any email from me, there are bigger policy implications for private individuals and companies that take steps to block connectivity. Much bigger.

I've long championed the idea that the Internet should remain largely unregulated by governments. But at the same time, any private operator at an end point in the Internet's architecture can restrict the flow of content to a user. What's wonderful about the Internet is that it enables end-to-end communication from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world. For all of the problems caused by spam, email is still the most widely used application on the Internet. So the idea that private parties could get ISPs to block some people from talking to other people should be deeply troublesome.

The choice to use the information from blacklists to reject delivery of email in a mail server is something the owner of the mail server would do. This becomes a private property issue. I have the right to refuse any mail into my mail server I wish (except on the basis of the few parameters law now prohibits, like gender, race, religion, etc). I have the right to get my list of IP addresses to block from anywhere I like. If Joe down the street tells me he blocked email using his private little list of IP addresses and it cut out 90% of his spam, then of course I'd like for him to share it with me.

Could there be an issue of libel here? Sure, there could. But it's a clear line between saying "You are a spammer" and saying "Your mail server allowed a spammer (who uses forgery) to send spam to me, and when you gave me permission to test it, I found that by mimicking just what the spammer would do, it was still allowing it."

The Danish blackhole list operators want to block access to computers that might be used for spam, but it's easy to imagine blacklists used for less noble purposes. For example, imagine that the RIAA compiled a list of IP addresses which, it contended, had at some time used peer-to-peer file sharing programs. Because these peer-to-peer systems could transmit copyrighted materials in a way that infringes on the copyright owner's rights, the RIAA could argue, those IP addresses should be blocked. It isn't difficult to imagine that the RIAA could pressure a sufficient number of ISPs into subscribing to this copyright blackhole list and blocking access to their users, or to any traffic emanating from them.

I do worry that the techniques used to reduce and prevent spam could be put to less noble uses. I also worry that facilities that exist on the internet to allow anonymous communications (which some people sometimes need to have) are abused by spammers (there are techniques to reduce that abuse) and in turn blocked by anti-spammers.

Personally, I don't consider the anti-spam movement to be less noble than peer-to-peer file sharing. The vast majority of what is shared on those networks is copyrighted material being shared well beyond the rights of the copyright owners. While I'm not advocating that those file sharing programs be outlawed, or the networks they use be shutdown, I do consider it to be less noble a thing that the effors of the anti-spam community to help keep mailboxes cleaner.

Breaking end-to-end connectivity for any application, whether email or peer-to-peer or the Web, threatens the very thing that makes the Internet valuable. These are matters of principle. Which reminds me I have a lawsuit to file.

It depends on who is doing the breaking. If I break connectivity in my own server, even if I use information from someone else that I choose to use, who offers that information to me freely (I didn't illegally copy it), then what law have I broken? What tort have I committed? Who have I harmed? If it involves my customers in a service I provide to them, then it's a matter of the business relationship between me and that customer. In practice, my customers want the spam blocking since it proves to be very effective against spam.

As to your mail server. It is an open relay, and it needs to be closed.

If a thief enters a building by opening an unlocked door, it is breaking and entering. Merely opening the closed door was breaking, as opposed to the door being wide open. It does not matter if there was a lock on the door or not. It does not matter if the lock was left unlocked. It is still breaking.

Your mail server has a closed door, but it has no lock. You are making the assumption that spammers won't do the "breaking in" thing with address forgery. But they do. What you need is the equivalent of a lock on your mail server. Instead of just checking the FROM line to see if it has your domain name on it, it needs to check something that a spammer simply cannot forge at all. Usually this is an IP address. If you want to be able to use your mail server from other locations, then the IP address is not good enough. There is another method that is used which requires you to log in to READ your mail first. The way that works is when the mail reading login is done, the server notes what the IP address is from which the successful login came, and puts that IP address in a list which is valid for sending mail for some period of time, say maybe 30 minutes to an hour. Thousands of people use this technique successfully. It's typically called "SMTP after POP" (in reference to the POP protocol used to read mail in most cases).

The following has a number of useful links to help in testing and closing an open relay:

http://www.geocities.com/spamresources/relay.htm

</lettertext>

Is error free HTML a chimera? by imperator_mundi · 2002-09-11 03:29 · Score: 3, Informative · on Are 99.9% of Websites Obsolete?

It seems so altough w3 offer a validator for free.

Maybe learning html in a weekend or in faster don't help keeping the quality of code at high level ; )

Re:Well, for starters... by Wesley+Everest · 2002-09-10 13:13 · Score: 2 · on How Has Post-9/11 Legislation Affected You?

A large minority of civillians (about a third) were loyal to the British Empire and were against the American revolutionaries. Torture and murder of these civillians was pretty common. A quick search on google came up with this.

My personal views run almost as far to the libertarian as you can get -- but when someone tries to murder civilians, I say lock him up and throw away the key. There is most likely a very good reason he's being held as he is -- just because you put a terrorist in prison doesn't mean he can't accomplish things if he's allowed to communicate with his cell. I do think he should have a trial, but I also understand that intelligence agencies have to be cautious with when they release information. Other people's lives are at stake as well, and as I said earlier, he forfeited his rights when he took up arms against the American people.

You do realize that this is precisely the logic used by the Iranians when took the hostages in the American Embassy back in 1979? They had evidence that some of the embassy employees were working for or with the CIA to help prop up the Shah and his infamous secret police. At the time, it was an outrage that the alleged CIA agents were being held incommunicado -- Iranian spokesmen publicly spoke of the need for security and that the captives might pass information back to the U.S. that could result in the death of many Iranians. Are you saying that perhaps the Iranians were right? That holding people incommunicado is justified in the name of national security? Or do you have two standards for actions of governments -- one for governments you support, and a different one for governments you are opposed to?

My personal views run almost as far to the libertarian as you can get

From your post here, I'd say you have a long way to go before you could use the word "libertarian" to describe your views. I suggest you do some thinking about what your ideology really is and either change your outlook to be actually libertarian or be honest to yourself and admit that you are far down the authoritarian end of the spectrum.

Re:BEST POST EVER ON SLASHDOT by Anonymous Coward · 2002-09-10 10:29 · Score: 0 · on Linux Backups Made Easy

Nice try, but I'm neither Y2KBugs, nor a half-breed of any nature.

Also I'd like to ask about the name you use to sign these alleged messages to the place where Y2KBugs works, but I do not.

Oh, and since I know how much you miss my insightful links, I shall give you some more links to Linux.

-Spooge

Re:Why? by IndependentVik · 2002-09-10 05:13 · Score: 0 · on Essential Blogging

Some people create their own blogs as an exercise in applied solipsism.

Europe's population larger than North America by bogomipe · 2002-09-10 03:05 · Score: 1 · on Europe Net Users Now Outnumber US/Canada

Hardly surprising since Europe outnumbers North America in population easily. For example the EU states alone count some 378 million people and the whole of Europe is over 800 million. North America on the other hand is some 318 million.

Figures from http://cf.geocities.com/populationdata/europe.html .

Re:If Ireland can do this, why not the US? by batand · 2002-09-10 01:57 · Score: 1 · on Danish Goal: 50% of Electricity from Wind

A big problem with the Kyoto agreement is that the worst polluters are not included.

What pollutes more: destroying lakes, local agriculture, inhabitat etc. by dumping toxic waste or intense emission of CO2 ? The answer is blowing in the wind so to speak.

If you think toxines are the biggest pollution problem, I guess the US aren't that bad. And the countries you mentioned probably are. On the other hand, when it comes to CO2, the US is one of the major polluters. They emission 23% of the world total, and they account for only 5% of the worlds population. To my knowledge the main issue in Kyoto was CO2. The problem with CO2 emission is that it pollutes globally.

In 1995 every US citizen emissioned 23 tons of CO2. In India it was 1 ton. In China 3 ton. In Japan 11 ton. In Russia 13 ton. The worst polluters are not included ? Japan and Russia are.

The US govt would likely show more support, or even sign such an agreement, if there weren't some apparent economic motivations behind the requirements.

First of, as I stated in an earlier post the US themselves put in the apparent economic motivations.

Secondly, Anyone agrees that there is some relationship between economic growth and the amount of CO2 emission. I think it would be fair if we let the developing countries pollute a little more than they do today, maybe just 10% of what the USA is doing today, and gain some economic growth. Russia had an excuse for not reducing to 1992 level, because in 1992 Russia was at an economic colapse. Well, unfortunately the US was not as lucky ;)

The other industrial countries which signed the treaty were under the same requirements as the US, and it should cost them as much money. They signed it to prevent pollution. Nobody stood to be rich from the (volountary) donations.

As for China, I definitely think they should have signed, but who can expect anything from an arrogant, communist dictatorship. Would you only agree to sign a treaty, if Iraq did ?

Sorry for bashing the US. The reason, I think, many Europeans (like me) do it, is because we are disapointed with the US. The USA is the world's only superpower; they are the world leader militarily, monetarily and culturally (to many). We admire you. But why is it that in everything you do, you only consider your own interest. America, what happened to the New World Order, when you won the cold war ? Why can't you be the world's policeman like we envisioned ?

Each time the US administration does something selfish, shortsighted and damaging, I tell myself that only a majority of US citizens are to blame. A lot of Americans are probably intelligent, well-meaning, responsible people. There just aren't enough.

Re:Damn Humorless Bastards by DrMaurer · 2002-09-09 14:34 · Score: 1 · on BBC Hails "fair" Microsoft XP SP1

"Whose Line is it Anyway" started out on BBC radio station 4 (Source) in '87. Then they moved to TV station 4 in '88. You might only be familiar with the version hosted by Drew Carey, but be aware that the show has a history.

If you read my comment, then you might possibly get the joke. I debated humor "tags" for about five minutes while I was writing the post, but thought that the avg. Slashdot reader would actually read it and be capable of understanding humor. Not the first time I've been wrong.

The fact that I don't have a life doesn't change the fact that you just didn't get it, and instead felt the need to flame randomly, but really, all you did was get yourself burned.

Online links by KingDLROW · 2002-09-09 13:14 · Score: 1 · on Physics Books for the Novice?

Feynman is good for clarifying the "harder" math based books, Asimov, imho, should be overlooked- unless you are scared of math. There are many good online books for Physics which I have not seen any links posted.

Here is a 700+ page book similar in content to a freshman college text MotionMountain

This is a Classical Electrodynamic book at a graduate level Classical Electrodynamics-Bo Thide

A site for Statistical and Thermal Physics with some good notes by Harvey Gould Statistical and Thermal Physics (STP) Curriculum Development Project

Quantum Mechanics--Niels Walet-- see the "Big .ps file

Lecture Notes on General Relativity-- Sean M. Carroll

A list of books to look into Cease's Book List

A few authors I like are A.P. French, Halliday Resnick for intro, Griffiths

A very respectable Oxford Physics booklist can be found in their handbook here

That's CarMAN... CarMAN... by hackwrench · 2002-09-08 15:46 · Score: 1 · on Microsoft to Hire Xbox Hackers?

not Carmen

In the center of the caverns of hell. hidden under layers of evil that have thrived for centurie, sits the morbid domain of the prince of the power of the air. Suddenly, a scaly creature disrupts Satan's ghastly existence with an urgent message. It reads, "Code red problem, conference needed, disaster forecasted!" With a disgusted annoyance this general of evil agrees to confer with his chief demon lieutenant. This is the story of that encounter:

Satan: You may enter.
Demon: My Lord Satan.
Satan: State your business and make it fast.
Demon: Sir, we're having problems of cataclysmic proportions.
Satan: Where?
Demon: In the east sector, sir. The damage is vast.

Satan: Is there something wrong with my abortion clinics?
Demon: No sir that's all fine, we kill 4,000 unborn a day through, shall we say, surgical removal. It's selective breeding, we eliminate human life in the name of convenience like the Nazis and the Jews and with the government's approval.

Satan: Is there a problem with my pet project television violence?
Demon: Sir, it's covered from videos to cartoons. By the time a child graduates high school he's seen 70,000 murders.
Satan: Is this effective enough?
Demon: Sir, just watch the news.

Satan: Is there a disturbance in my false religions?
Demon: No sir business is booming, over 40 million are into New Age and Zen, over 45 million believe in astrology.
Satan: Looks like we're catching up.
Demon: Yes sir, only 50 million claim to be born again.

Satan: Is there a problem with business in general?
Demon: Sir, we're showing tremendous progress, teenage runaways each year a million or more, there's a teen suicide every ninety minutes and your specialty drunk driving will claim more lives this year than the whole Vietnam War.
Satan: Well, is there a disturbance in my...what was that?
Demon: Sir that's the reason all these demons are on crutches and wobbling.
Satan: What's going on?
Demon: Sir that's what I've been trying to tell you.
Satan: What is that?
Demon: Sir, that is our problem.

Satan: Only one thing causes warfare of this magnitude.
Demon: Then sir you know what we're dealing with up there.
Satan: Yes, it's some of those sanctified
Demon: Try blood bought
Satan: Spirit filled
Demon: Saints of God
Satan: Actually
Demon: Presently
Satan & Demon: On their knees in prayer~
Demon: Sir, they're literal holy terrors, they bind us, cast us out. Then they do those disgusting charismatic jigs. They quote scriptures like the Son of God, and sir if you don't intervene we all might wind up in a bunch of pigs.

Demon: Sir, that's the good news, the bad news is the subject of their prayers that threatens our survival. What they're praying for is causing hemorrhaging in the realms of darkness.
Satan: And the bad news is?
Demon: They're praying for revival!

Satan: I hate revival! It just erupts, it's hardly controllable. At the Azusa Street outpouring things got rough.
Demon: Yes sir and when the charismatic movement hit, sir, we were jumping out of windows with all that "untie my bowtie who stolla my honda" stuff.

Satan: Then, I'll come in like a flood.
Demon: But they'll say the Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against you.
Satan: OOOOOHH.
Demon: It's written in the Word.
Satan: I'll form weapons against them.
Demon: Sir, no weapon formed against them shall prosper, that's in the Bible too.
Satan: Yes, I've heard. I'll hit them every filthy, lusty thought you could imagine.
Demon: But it's written resist the devil and he must flee.
Satan: Obviously our opponents are taking the battle more seriously than we are.
Demon: And that's very dangerous, sir. Especially for me.

Satan: It's time to launch my final most vicious attack. I'll remind the saints of their past. How they were liars, cheaters, manipulators and moochers.
Demon: But sir, you know what will happen if you remind the saints of their past.
Satan: And what is that?
Demon: Sir, they'll just remind you of your future.
Satan: NOOOOOO

Found on this page: http://www.geocities.com/ninthsaturn/rev.html
Nice touch, blaming seeing dramatised murders for causing actual ones.

Re:The plural of "Server" is not "Servers" by Anonymous Coward · 2002-09-07 21:53 · Score: 0 · on Xserve Competes With High-End Unix Servers

What's the Plural of `Virus'? What's the Plural of `Virus'? The plural of virus is neither viri nor virii, nor even vira nor virora. It is quite simply viruses, irrespective of context. Here's why.

Sections in this document:

English Inflections
Classical Inflections and References
Journey Into the Fourth Declension (new)
Other Latin Resources
ASM News
ASM News Update (new)
Footnotes

English Inflections First off, the OED gives nothing but viruses for the plural. Here's its abbreviated entry:

Etymology: a. L. virus slimy liquid, poison, offensive odour or taste. Hence also Fr., Sp., Pg. virus.
1 Venom, such as is emitted by a poisonous animal. Also fig.
2 Path. a A morbid principle or poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of some disease, esp. one capable of being introduced into other persons or animals by inoculations or otherwise and of developing the same disease in them. Now superseded by the next sense.
b Pl. viruses. An infectious organism that is usu. submicroscopic, can multiply only inside certain living host cells (in many cases causing disease) and is now understood to be a non-cellular structure lacking any intrinsic metabolism and usually comprising a DNA or RNA core inside a protein coat (see also quot. 1977). [ Formerly referred to as filterable viruses, their first distinguishing characteristic being the ability to pass through filters that retained bacteria. ]

Other sources that support viruses include Birchfield (n Fowler :-) in Modern English Usage (3rd Edition), and also the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language . Classical Inflections While one would hope that the authoritative sources cited above would suffice, some writers prefer to maintain the classical inflections on some English words, particularly in technical writing. For example, conflicting indexes/indices and minimums/minima are both easily found, depending on the intended audience and use. In that case, what's the classical plural of virus?

The simple answer is that there wasn't one. The longer answer follows.

Writers who, searching for a fancy plural to virus, incorrectly write *viri are doubtless blindly applying an overreaching -us => -i rule. This mis-inflects many words. For example, status and hiatus only change the length of the final vowel; genus goes to genera; corpus goes to corpora. Others are even worse if this rule is mis-applied, like syllabus, caucus, octopus, mandamus, and rebus.

Anyway, Latin already had a word viri, but it was the nominative plural not of virus (slime, poison, or venom), but of vir (man), which as it turns out is also a 2nd declension noun. I do not believe that writers of English who write viri are intentionally speaking of men. And although there actually is a viri form for virus, it's the genitive singular[1], not the nominative plural. And we certainly don't grab for genitive singulars for the plurals when we've started out with a nominative. Such hanky panky would certainly get you talked about, and probably your hand slapped as well.

This apparently invariant use of virus as a genitive singular may also imply that it's 4th declension, as some scholars believe.

Those confused souls who write *virii are tacitly positing the existence of the non-word *virius, and declining it as though it were like filius. It's true that l/r are both linguals that sometimes get interchanged, and that f/v are just a change in voicing[2], but that's just reaching. *Virii is still completely silly, so don't do that; otherwise, everyone will know you're just a blathering script kiddie.

The crucial problem here is that, classically speaking, there appears to be no recorded use of virus in the plural. It was a 2nd declension noun ending in -us, which is rather common, but it was also a neuter, which is rather rare. I could only come up with three such 2nd declension neuters: virus (some poison), pelagus (the sea, usually poetically), and vulgus (the crowd). None appear to admit plurals. Perhaps this is because they are mass nouns, not count nouns. [3]

One citation below wonders whether these -us 2nd declension neuters might have inflected -us => -ora, the way the 3rd declension's neuter plurals for tempus and corpus do. There's really not any support for that notion--that I could find at least. If so, that would end up producing *virora. Most other citations think that these plurals just never happened at all, or that if they did, they didn't jump declensions. Perhaps they were invariant as they oddly are for the vocative and accusative cases. In any event, *virora does not fit comfortably in the mouth of an English speaker, which is a good reason to avoid it.[4]

Another theory holds that virus, if it was a 2nd declension neuter, must go to *vira in the plural as do its -um neuter brethren in the 2nd declension. However, that assumes that it works like a -um form, not as a -us form does. And it really seems to do neither. If it were a -us form (again, as a 2nd declension nominative), then its vocative would have to be *vire; but it's really only virus. You also expect an accusative form *viros, but that too is missing; it's still just virus in the accusative. And if it were a -um form, then its vocative would have to be *virum. But it's not--here again, it's only virus. (Vocative examples of virus are not particularly common. Apparently the Romans seldom addressed their slime in a personal fashion. :-)

So what we have here is something of a mixed or invariant declension. Trying to find a plural for something that didn't take a plural (possibly because it was not a count but a mass noun), or at least, one for which no plural is classically attested, is a fruitless endeavour. Best to stick with English and use viruses. Journey Into the Fourth Declension Some scholars, includining Gavin Betts, believe that virus pertained not to the second declension, but to the fourth one. Here is an example or two that support[5] Betts and dispute the 2nd declension theory. The first is classical, from Ammianus:

qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum

That seems to be using virus as a genitive, which contradicts the assertion that it's 2nd declension, which would have lead to viri, and supports the 4th declension position. This was brought to my attention by Andreas Waschbuesch, who went on to write:

Just another note: You must not forget that Ammian's native tongue was Greek, not Latin - so it's (very hypothetical!) possible he understood virus as a so called accusativus respectus and copia as adverbial expression. (A more common phenomenon in Greek.) exuberare was combined that way with lucrum and there was a tendency to use non-transitive verbs in a (active) transitive way - like anhelare or spumare in late antiquity's Latin as well. (The pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium's fourth book is an outstanding exception with its usage of anhelans et spumans in the passage about the denarratio and the following example IF one dates it to 80 a.Chr.n. ...) But - to make a conclusion - it's not classical at all to use the form viri(i), because there isn't any genitive-singular- or nominative-plural-form (*) viri found in the whole Latin literature up to the first century p.Chr.n. as far as PHI-CD-Rom can tell :-)

This recent letter also supports the fourth declension point of view. Of course, even if virus really turns out to have been in the fourth declension, we'll still have vulgus, pelagus, and cetus as irregular -us neuters in the second declension. Let's blame it all on the Greeks. References

Here's what other sources have to say about this matter:

alt.usage.english FAQ Not all Latin words ending in -us had plurals in -i. Apparatus, cantus, coitus, hiatus, impetus, Jesus, nexus, plexus, prospectus, and status were 4th declension in Latin, and had plurals in -us with a long `u'. Corpus, genus, and opus were 3rd declension, with plurals corpora, genera, and opera. Virus is not attested in the plural in Latin, and is of a rare form (2nd declension neuter in -us) that makes it debatable what the Latin plural would have been; the only plural in English is viruses. Omnibus and rebus were not nominative nouns in Latin. Ignoramus was not a noun in Latin.

[...] classical plurals [...] What is the plural of virus? This neuter in Latin lacked a plural; it would presumably [disputable -tchrist ] have been virora like corpora, the plural of neuter corpus. (Like corpora, virora would be stressed on its initial syllable. As indicated earlier, *corpi would be as outlandish--as far beyond the pale--as *rhinoceri and *octopi.)

Latin had several declensions containing neuter, feminine, and masculine words ending in -us; the plurals are different in each one. Incidentally, the singular of mores (pronounced `moh-rehs') is mos, with the same change of `s' to `r' between vowels heard in corpus : corpora and in genus : genera.

Allen and Greenough The authors at the cited reference point out the follwoing:

Many Greek nouns retain their original gender: as, arctus (F.), the Polar Bear; methodus (F.), method.
a. The following in -us are Neuter; their accusative (as with all neuters) is the same as the nominative: pelagus, sea; virus, poison; vulgus (rarely M.), the crowd. They are not found in the plural, except pelagus, which has a rare nominative and accusative plural pelage.
NOTE.--The nominative plural neuter cete, sea monsters, occurs; the nominative singular cetus occurs in Vitruvius.

Whether this leading would lead to ?vire, however, is unclear, since virus does not appear to be of Greek extraction.

Latin inflections And for those who just can't get enough, try this. It is a bunch of inflection tables, more complete than I've seen elsewhere. For a good time, figure out the nominative plural of venus is. Hint: it's not veni. ASM News Apparently this question is `in the air'. The following is from the June 1999 issue of ASM News by the American Society for Microbiology, sent it by Jim Sandoz.

/* Begin Excerpt */

Numerous Latin words have been taken over into the modern scientific vocabulary, most without difficulty. The Latin word virus, however, presents a minor but interesting problem, if one wishes to express a phrase such as Index of Viruses in its Latin form. By analogy with other nouns, one would expect the normal Latin equivalent to be Index Virorum. The difficulty stems from the fact that the Latin noun virus is defective, i.e. does not have a full set of case--forms, singular and plural. The Roman grammarian Priscian (fl. 500 A.D.) states that some claim the word is indeclinable (i.e., has only one form for all the cases in the singular); others, apparently more accurately, that it is declined in the singular according to the second declension neuter and cite two passages from the poet Lucretius in substantiation. All of the ancient grammarians are in agreement, however, that the word is used in the singular only, which indeed appears to be true, for no plural forms are attested in extant Latin works.
In antiquity the word virus had not yet acquired, of course, its current scientific meaning; rather it denoted something like toxicity, venom, a poisonous, deleterious, or unpleasant agent or principle, or poison in the abstract or general sense. (The first meaning given for this word, a slimy liquid, slime, in the most widely used Latin-English dictionaries is inaccurate; the error has been corrected in the more recent Oxford Latin Dictionary.) Nouns denoting entities that are countable pluralize (book, books); nouns denoting noncountable entities do not (except under special circumstances) pluralize (air, mood, valor). The term virus in antiquity appears to have belonged to the latter category, hence the nonexistence of plural forms.
When the word was taken over into modern languages and acquired its current scientific meaning, it changed categories and denoted a countable entity. The modern languages which have adopted the word each pluralize it in their own fashion (e.g., Eng. viruses, Germ. Viren; French and Italian do not distinguish in form between singular and plural, virus). But what to do in neo-Latin, which normally is subject to the rules and constraints of classical Latin?
W. T. Steam in his manual on botanical Latin (Botanical Latin, Newton Abbey, 2nd ed., 1973) gives what would be the normal plural forms of such a second declension neuter noun: nominative vira, genitive virorum, without, however, indicating his authority for those forms. It may be observed that in Latin as in other languages when the plural of noncountable nouns does occur, it generally denotes various kinds of the entity (e.g., wine, honey, oil). Steam may have applied this principle to virus in order to meet the requirements of modern scientific terminology. If Latin had continued to be the common international language of scholars and scientists at the time that viruses were first identified, it appears likely that it would have generated the forms adduced by Steam.
Robert J. Smutny

/* End Excerpt */

ASM News Update The following letter recently appeared in ASM News, from Ton E. van den Bogaard. (Formatting added.)

On the Presence of a Plural of the Latin Noun "Virus"
With interest I read the contribution `On the Absence of a Plural of the Latin Noun ``Virus''' in the June 1999 ASM News, p. 388, by Robert J. Smutny. However, according to my Latin grammar, one of the very few books of my gymnasium (high school) days that is still up to date, the plural of the noun virus in Latin is, like the plural nowadays used for virus in Romance languages (e.g., Italian and French), also virus. The Latin noun virus does not belong to the second declension group but, like the noun fructus, meaning fruit or piece of fruit, belongs to a group of Latin words that is declined according to the fourth declension. Hence, two pieces of fruit is in Latin duo fructus and two viruses would be duo virus. According to the fourth declension the plural genitive of virus in Latin is viruum and therefore an Index of Viruses is in Latin an Index Viruum. Virorum is the plural genitive of the Latin noun vir (second declension) meaning man or husband. Consequently an Index Virorum would indicate a list of husbands or men.
Moreover, because the noun virus belongs to the fourth declension group the study of viruses should have been called virulogy and people practicing that science virulogists. My former professor in virology at veterinary school consequently called himself a virulogist and he lectured virulogy. I am afraid that these words have become extinct since he died.
It is important to realize that Latin and Greek derived expressions in biomedical English have been coined by scientists for convenience and not by scholars based on classical grammar. The old Romans might have said to these scientists modulating their language: ``Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas,'' which means freely translated: ``Despite your lack of knowledge, still appreciated.''
Ton E. van den Bogaard
University Maastricht, the Netherlands

Other Latin Resources One textbook I'd like to recommend Gavin Betts's Teach Yourself Latin, which you can look up on Amazon if you'd like. No, I don't believe in kickbacks.

Here are some Web resources: The Perseus Project Read Caesar, Catullus, Cicero, Hirtius, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Plautus, Servius, and Vergil, plus quite a bit of other useful material. For example, you can look up virus for a definition and forms, or find its citations in literature. Here's one by Vergil.

Latin Textbook: Wheelock's Latin (HTML) Wonderful on-line course notes designed as a study aid for those without formal grammar/linguistics training. Note that `the entire zip archive' he advertises isn't really complete, and so I used these commands to pull in and view the whole thing locally: % cd /tmp % wget -r -l2 http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Lat in/ % netscape /tmp/humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Latin /index.html

The Classics Page Innumerable links, including some to on-line interactive exercises and to various dictionaries.

Transcriptio Nuntiorum Hebdomadalis Read your daily news--in Latin! Also contains sound files for the radio version whence it was transcribed. I'm sure glad that we now write FAQ instead of interrogata usitatissima. :-)

De Meditatione Various Latin snippets and sound clips. Footnotes [1] One examble of an invariant genitive form of virus is attested in Ammianus, which reads: qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum. See the original for details. [2] Well, in English; in Latin it probably wasn't, as their `v' was likely more akin to the intervocalic `v' in today's Spanish, a sound with no equivalent in English but which is often perceived as a `w'. To be even more technical, an English `v' is a voiced labial-dental fricative. An intervocalic Spanish `v' (or `b') such as in aves, is a voiced bilabial fricative, usually represented in IPA as a lower-case Greek beta. [3] Some budding Romance philologist should go research a possible connection between the neuter conceptual nouns versus the gendered discrete ones in asturianu , the only extant Romance tongue with anything aproximating neuter nouns (I'm not counting the nominalized adjectives of Spanish such as lo difcil, since these aren't really nouns the way the so-called nomes de xneru neutru (de materia) are in asturianu.) a [4] The word virora actually appears to exist, but as some sort of South American tree. [5] Yes, I hated this sentence, too. It takes the singular verb "is" because the singular "an example" is the closer of the two elements in the disjunction, but likewise, "support" should be in the plural because the closer thing to it is now "two", which is obviously nonsingular. I think only a rewrite would be tolerable. Silly rules.

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O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit. consul videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? immo vero etiam in senatum venit, fit publici consilii particeps, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum.

Cicero, Oratio in Catilinam Prima, 2

piss@fuck.com Last update: Wed Nov 17 09:20:10 MST 1969

Re:The plural of "Server" is not "Servers" by Anonymous Coward · 2002-09-07 21:53 · Score: 0 · on Xserve Competes With High-End Unix Servers

What's the Plural of `Virus'? What's the Plural of `Virus'? The plural of virus is neither viri nor virii, nor even vira nor virora. It is quite simply viruses, irrespective of context. Here's why.

Sections in this document:

English Inflections
Classical Inflections and References
Journey Into the Fourth Declension (new)
Other Latin Resources
ASM News
ASM News Update (new)
Footnotes