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learning science became the "cool" thing to do

On what planet or alternate reality? There are still very few kids who want to learn about science, and very few American public school teachers qualified to help. Nerds are still bullied today, as they were back when this geezer (who was 5 when Sputnik launched) was still a kid. They read crap like "People Magazine", not Popular Science. They think being a rap star or sports star and going to jail is cool, not studying science (actually not studying period).

IINM I was the first nerd ever (and maybe the only one ever) to be respected, if not accepted, by my classmates. Two things happened in the 7th grade.

The first was my "hydrogen bomb". I wanted to make some floating balloons, so I researched how to make helium, found it impractical, and decided on hydrogen. Of the two methods I found, chemical seemed the easiest, so I used it. When the balloon wouldn't float (a very small one passed the "extremely flammable" test) I brought it to school, meaning to ask my science teacher why it wouldn't float.

"You have WHAT in your locker?!?!?!?!" he exclaimed, horrified, and took me to the principal's office. I was very nearly expelled. Today I'd probably been sent to jail, but the teachers finally realized that they had run across something they seldom saw - a kid with curiosity and literacy. I suffered no punishment.

However, news soon spread that "mcgrew brought a hydrogen bomb to school!" and was going to blow it up and burn it down! 7th graders being 7th graders, well, I was cool in their eyes.

The second was when a kid taller and heavier than me bullied me for a couple of months until I snapped and beat the holy hell out of him. Even the gangster types (yes, they were around then, but they were all white) respected me.

But I was the only one. All the other nerds got laughed at and beat up - and they still do.

-mcgrew

(Mod points don't affect AC, but you may note that "bad moon rising" is the first sentence in the linked article)

You say that like it's a bad thing. I, for one, do NOT welcome our money worshiping corporate WTO overlords.

The worst thing about communism was that it wasn't really. Money is a tool. Only fools worship their tools, and only tools follow fools, foolish tool.

mcgrew (Linux using free-love dope-smoking hippie. Get the hell off my lawn you damned yuppies!)

I'm not thanking them.

I have friends in bands, with CDs, none of who would be caught dead with an RIAA label contract. The biggest fools are those foolish enough to sign with a major label. See Courtney Love Does The Math, among other articles, none of which paint a very rosy picture of the monsters who run the labels.

These guys, like every other artist, WANT their music to be heard. They will be more than happy to let you serve MP3s from eDonkey or Kazaa. P2P and internet radio are all the indies have.

Meanwhile, the RIAA lies about Piracy, when in fact if you want far better quality copies of each and every top 40 song there is, all you have to do is tune your radio to a top-40 station, plug it into your computer and sample it for a couple of hours, then spend 10 minutes editing. Far easier and less time consuming even than iTunes, with better quality rips! But the RIAA labels control what goes on the radio; they can keep indies off. What they can't control is internet radio, which they have effectively killed, and P2P, which they are trying desperately to kill.

At the risk of repeating myself (better than not getting the point through), this is about crushing the cartel's independant competetion, not about "piracy". Yes, P2P costs them sales - but not because you won't buy that Britney Spears CD after downloading all the songs. It's because after you buy those four indie CDs by that band you found on P2P or internet radio for five bucks apiece, you no longer have the twenty to buy Britney's drek. If you like it, you'll buy it, and only a fool or a damned thief would believe otherwise.

-mcgrew

I'm not thanking them.

I have friends in bands, with CDs, none of who would be caught dead with an RIAA label contract. The biggest fools are those foolish enough to sign with a major label. See Courtney Love Does The Math, among other articles, none of which paint a very rosy picture of the monsters who run the labels.

These guys, like every other artist, WANT their music to be heard. They will be more than happy to let you serve MP3s from eDonkey or Kazaa. P2P and internet radio are all the indies have.

Meanwhile, the RIAA lies about Piracy, when in fact if you want far better quality copies of each and every top 40 song there is, all you have to do is tune your radio to a top-40 station, plug it into your computer and sample it for a couple of hours, then spend 10 minutes editing. Far easier and less time consuming even than iTunes, with better quality rips! But the RIAA labels control what goes on the radio; they can keep indies off. What they can't control is internet radio, which they have effectively killed, and P2P, which they are trying desperately to kill.

At the risk of repeating myself (better than not getting the point through), this is about crushing the cartel's independant competetion, not about "piracy". Yes, P2P costs them sales - but not because you won't buy that Britney Spears CD after downloading all the songs. It's because after you buy those four indie CDs by that band you found on P2P or internet radio for five bucks apiece, you no longer have the twenty to buy Britney's drek. If you like it, you'll buy it, and only a fool or a damned thief would believe otherwise.

-mcgrew

I'm not thanking them.

I have friends in bands, with CDs, none of who would be caught dead with an RIAA label contract. The biggest fools are those foolish enough to sign with a major label. See Courtney Love Does The Math, among other articles, none of which paint a very rosy picture of the monsters who run the labels.

These guys, like every other artist, WANT their music to be heard. They will be more than happy to let you serve MP3s from eDonkey or Kazaa. P2P and internet radio are all the indies have.

Meanwhile, the RIAA lies about Piracy, when in fact if you want far better quality copies of each and every top 40 song there is, all you have to do is tune your radio to a top-40 station, plug it into your computer and sample it for a couple of hours, then spend 10 minutes editing. Far easier and less time consuming even than iTunes, with better quality rips! But the RIAA labels control what goes on the radio; they can keep indies off. What they can't control is internet radio, which they have effectively killed, and P2P, which they are trying desperately to kill.

At the risk of repeating myself (better than not getting the point through), this is about crushing the cartel's independant competetion, not about "piracy". Yes, P2P costs them sales - but not because you won't buy that Britney Spears CD after downloading all the songs. It's because after you buy those four indie CDs by that band you found on P2P or internet radio for five bucks apiece, you no longer have the twenty to buy Britney's drek. If you like it, you'll buy it, and only a fool or a damned thief would believe otherwise.

-mcgrew

I'm not thanking them.

I have friends in bands, with CDs, none of who would be caught dead with an RIAA label contract. The biggest fools are those foolish enough to sign with a major label. See Courtney Love Does The Math, among other articles, none of which paint a very rosy picture of the monsters who run the labels.

These guys, like every other artist, WANT their music to be heard. They will be more than happy to let you serve MP3s from eDonkey or Kazaa. P2P and internet radio are all the indies have.

Meanwhile, the RIAA lies about Piracy, when in fact if you want far better quality copies of each and every top 40 song there is, all you have to do is tune your radio to a top-40 station, plug it into your computer and sample it for a couple of hours, then spend 10 minutes editing. Far easier and less time consuming even than iTunes, with better quality rips! But the RIAA labels control what goes on the radio; they can keep indies off. What they can't control is internet radio, which they have effectively killed, and P2P, which they are trying desperately to kill.

At the risk of repeating myself (better than not getting the point through), this is about crushing the cartel's independant competetion, not about "piracy". Yes, P2P costs them sales - but not because you won't buy that Britney Spears CD after downloading all the songs. It's because after you buy those four indie CDs by that band you found on P2P or internet radio for five bucks apiece, you no longer have the twenty to buy Britney's drek. If you like it, you'll buy it, and only a fool or a damned thief would believe otherwise.

-mcgrew

You are lucky it even boots you bastards! LEAVE VISTA ALONE!

Erm, I am leaving Vista alone, so it won't, in fact, boot for me. I mean, you actually have to have a copy of it for it to boot, right?

Now XP, OTOH, boots. And boots. And boots. And boots. As soon as it gets past LILO into "loading windows" the screen flashes blue and the computer restarts. Sometimes it does this for hours on end.

I mean, Linux really really pisses me off because whenever I need to boot Linux, I know when I need to run Widows; I mean, WINDOWS again it will be literally HOURS before Windows will stop booting! At least when I'm in Linux I can actually turn the computer off when I'm done with it, because Linux will only boot ONCE when I boot it (what kind of crap OS does that?) while windows will boot and boot and boot and boot and boot and boot a bunch more times before it gets to the desktop.

Yep, XP boots! I'm so lucky! I hope some bastard doesn't come by and say "oh, there's a setting in your BIOS" or "There's a configuration in LILO" or "You have to do X and Y and Z to Microsoft's wonderful DRM"... then XP would be just as bad as Linux and only boot once when I told it to boot.

And as far as costing too much, I don't think it costs enough. It should cost ten thousand dollars per copy! I mean, no reason to let the riff raff have this ownderful operating system!

-mcgrew

I learned from Star Trek that if you shoot a computer with a phaser, it will explode. Also if you wire it wrong it will explode.

I learned from The Prisoner that if you ask a computer "why" it will shake and smoke much like the generator in TFA before exploding. Clearly, some of the materials essential to the construction of computers is C-4 and/or TNT.

I learned from a redneck I know that if you read a tabloid, your head will assplode.

-mcgrew

Are engineers all so God damned short sighted, or is it their managers? There should be no connection allowed in! Gees, fellow nerds, some of you are really fucking dense. Yes, it's desirable for your generator to communicate to the corporate (or in Springfield's case, city) network. But the damned thing should have been designed so that only outgoing signals are allowed; a human at the generator end should have to initiate any changes.

I curse some of my fellow nerds whenever I'm in my car; the power windows piss me off to no end. I'm waiting for someone, but I can't roll the windows up or down without turning the key. If the damned bridge I'm crossing collapses (because some dimwit designed the thing badly) and the car goes into the river, there's going to be no way out of the car at all, as I won't be able to open the door (pressure) OR roll the window down! This is just fucking stupid! PLEASE redesign this, mkay? While you're at it, make it so I can roll windows up with the remote!

I'm glad that they started using knobs in car radios again, finally. What fucktard decided that having a volume BUTTON on a car radio was a good idea? From the linked article (mine), "Thank God they invented cell phones so you can call an ambulance after you wreck your car trying to turn the volume down to answer your cell phone!"

But even the digital knob is inferior to the old fashioned potentiometer. Back in the day, I'd turn the volume down before starting the car, bacause if I didn't it would blast me into the back seat (I like to rock). But you can't do that any more; the volume control only works when the damned radio is on!

-mcgrew

PS- get the hell off my lawn. And no, you can't have your balls back!

My PC dual-boots XP and Mandriva. I've set it to default to Windows, because windows boots over and over, sometimes for hours, before it finally relents and comes to life. I've suspected a BIOS setting it doesn't like, or that Windows wants its own FAT instead of LILO, but could it be that Windows is trying to phone home, even though my internet access has been shut off for a couple of months? Even though it's a fresh install and the PC hasn't been connected to the internet since before the install?

And do thay have any idea what a pain in the ass it is to "register" that God damned OS without internet access? If I could get the S-Video out to work with Linux, XP would be history on my PC.

I only hate Microsoft because I've used their shitty programs and operating systems. Funny, their stuff was pretty good fifteen or twenty years ago! I loved DOS 6.2!

-mcgrew

"The difference is that in the US, we have had unemployment rates around 4% to 5% for most of the last twenty years. It got really bad in the early 2000's (2000 to sometime in 2003) and got all the way up to a horrific 6.3%. While in the EU-15 the rate was at its lowest in 2006 (I don't have numbers for 2007) at 7.9%. Basically, the answer is supply and demand. The US has had what was considered "full employment" in the 1970's for most of the last 20+ years. "

Europe measures unemployment rates differently!
If the U.S. measured it's rate using a similar metric, US unemployment rates would be in excess of 15%.

Surging Jobless- and Fake Unemployment Numbers

~20% Unemployment Rate

For the most part.. The US government's published unemployment rate is now a work of pure fiction.
They could state almost any number and Wall street would not catch the deception..
The similar misdeeds apply to the published CPI and GDP numbers.

P.S. If you measure GDP using the traditional method (worker income) it comes out to be ~47%(6.3T, 2006$) that of the administrations munged spending numbers(13.3T, 2006$) .

But your complaint is absurd. If one is unable to resist the feminine wiles of an online-character, then it's his own fault, not fault of the the person playing the female character.

But if I were still into gaming and the very idea of RPGs didn't bore the hell out of me (my real life is far more weird than anybody else's fiction), would it be my fault that you gave her an unfair advantage because you were a sucker for her "feminine wiles"? From my perspective, it doesn't matter if she got the Magic Gizmo by killing the Big Badlie Monster or by suckering you out of it; she still has it and can kick my ass with it.

-mcgrew

But your complaint is absurd. If one is unable to resist the feminine wiles of an online-character, then it's his own fault, not fault of the the person playing the female character.

But if I were still into gaming and the very idea of RPGs didn't bore the hell out of me (my real life is far more weird than anybody else's fiction), would it be my fault that you gave her an unfair advantage because you were a sucker for her "feminine wiles"? From my perspective, it doesn't matter if she got the Magic Gizmo by killing the Big Badlie Monster or by suckering you out of it; she still has it and can kick my ass with it.

-mcgrew

Dude, this is a site where "loose" is a synonym for "lose", where an apostrophe is used for a plural, but never for a posessive or a contraction, where nobody can tell there from their from they're, and nobody but noboody can spell. Ewe muss bee knew hear, wee owl ewes spill chuckers sew wee no wee or spilling crack lie. You know, "news for illiterates, stuff that OOH LOOK! SOMETHING SHINY!

-mcgrew

The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit group that monitors and reports on the ethics of public officials, supporters of liberal causes, and labor unions in the United States. Among the NLPC's more high-profile targets have been hip hop mogul Sean Combs,[1] Reverend Jesse Jackson, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (while she was first lady), and Senator Lisa Murkowski. The Center files complaints with government agencies, legally challenges what they view as abuse and corruption, and publishes reports. For its efforts, the NPLC has been praised by such media personalities as Rush Limbaugh.[2]

They're just trying to get some publicity (And thus funding), so good work Slashdot

Arr, this be olde news! Avast, Talk Like A Pirate Day be last Wednesday! Shiver me timbers, if this be a dupe then we be makin' CmdrTaco walk the plank, me hearies!

And methinks this NLPC needs be scuppered.

-Graybeard the Pirate

Not only is all new RIAA music DRM-free, it is also cost-free. And the cost-free, DRM-free music is completely legal in most countries, including the USA.

Just plug your radio into your sound card and sample for a couple of hours, then spend a few minutes editing and you will have the entire top 40. Much easier than downloading, either legal or illegal.

Of course, you still need either a download or a used record store to legally acquire good RIAA music; music that should no longer be under copyright in the first place.

And for the good new music, Kazaa and eDonkey are perfectly legal. I'm talking indie music here, bands who WANT you to hear them. Just be careful not to download that putrid RIAA drek by mistake, or they might sue you.

-mcgrew (there are links to free MP3s from the linked page)

Not only is all new RIAA music DRM-free, it is also cost-free. And the cost-free, DRM-free music is completely legal in most countries, including the USA.

Just plug your radio into your sound card and sample for a couple of hours, then spend a few minutes editing and you will have the entire top 40. Much easier than downloading, either legal or illegal.

Of course, you still need either a download or a used record store to legally acquire good RIAA music; music that should no longer be under copyright in the first place.

And for the good new music, Kazaa and eDonkey are perfectly legal. I'm talking indie music here, bands who WANT you to hear them. Just be careful not to download that putrid RIAA drek by mistake, or they might sue you.

-mcgrew (there are links to free MP3s from the linked page)

Jeez. Please turn in your geek card NOW.

Well, there must be a couple of those laying there, I turned mine in last year after I got laid.

Now if you could get all the illiterates here to turn them... what? You mean there really ARE two "o"s in "loser" and you really ARE supposed to use an apostrophe for a plural?

-mcgrew
Today's on-topic link to my name is Fun with offline trolls (May 2003). Well ok, almost on-topic. Oh wait, LinuxAte My Diary (August 2003) fits the topic better.

Jeez. Please turn in your geek card NOW.

Well, there must be a couple of those laying there, I turned mine in last year after I got laid.

Now if you could get all the illiterates here to turn them... what? You mean there really ARE two "o"s in "loser" and you really ARE supposed to use an apostrophe for a plural?

-mcgrew
Today's on-topic link to my name is Fun with offline trolls (May 2003). Well ok, almost on-topic. Oh wait, LinuxAte My Diary (August 2003) fits the topic better.

Laugh anyway. It's Monday.

"It must be Thursday," Aurthur said. "I never could get the hang of Thursdays."

And I don't do Monday very well. Of course, Aurthur was wrong - he was having an incredibly GOOD day compared to everybody else on the planet (except Patricia, who was having a damned good time and didn't know WTF was happening at home).

If it were me, it would happen on Monday and the damned gizmo my friend brought wouldn't work... but at least I'd be full of beer.

Now in the other universe I get laid five times a day. Wake me up when somebody finds a way for me to trade places with the me in the other universe...

-mcgrew

From Wikipedia: Thompson describes himself as a Christian conservative and a Republican.

"Christian Conservative" is an oxymoron. So is "Christian Republican". From The Bible (King James Version):

Luke 6:24 "But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation."

Luke 11:46 "And he [Jesus] said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers."

Luke 11:52 "Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered."

And that's just a few choice quotes from a single book. And guess what? God doesn't like bankers much, either (but that's a different topic).

-mcgrew

The Video Professor is a total jerkwad, an asshole, an asshat and an asstunnel. And just an ass. And his ads are garbage, and his "course" surely is as well.

-mcgrew

PS- Fuck you and the pig you rode in on, professor!

PPS- Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha sued God Almighty, and apparently God responded to his lawsuit. I guess you really CAN sue anybody! God should countersue, for slander.

Sounds like another storm in a tea cup.

No, it sounds like either 1) a troll or (more likely IMO) 2) A shill. No, make that BOTH a trol and a shill.

I haven't RTFA and I don't intend to. ZD is a Windows-only publication, and has been for the last several years. The only thing they want from Linux users is someone to troll. Christ, thay gave that damned "reader talkback" troll John Carroll a fucking JOB trolling!

Make no mistake about it, ZD net is not about tech, it's not about news, it's not about anything nerdy, it's about PROFIT. And it makes its profits not from sales of magazines but advertising. And Microsoft is one of its biggest, if not THE biggest, advertisers.

ZDNET works for Microsoft. I will not read it; it has nothing of interest for me. I used to be the world's biggest troll biter, but I reformed myself Fri Apr 22, 2005 at 10:38:29 AM EST. Well, ok, sometimes like any addict I relapse (like I'm doing now) but I'm damned not going to bite ZD's trolls. At least, I'm not going to be trolled any farther than the /. blurb; I will NOT RTFA.

stay geeky and appeal to the advanced tech guru in all of us; go mainstream and leave the advanced functionality and reliable kernel behind to compete with Microsoft and Apple; or face a "civil war" that could lead to total Linux annihilation.

Bullshit. Stay geeky? Hell yes, I don't see the command prompt going away any time soon. Having advanced functionality isn't "anti-geek", and no true nerd could ever write such bullshit. And even if a "civil war" happened, there would not be "total Linux annihilation" but a simple and unneccessary fork.

TFA is a fucking troll, fellow Linux nerds. "Linus and his minions?" I never saw "Bill Gates and his minions". Troll!

God damn it, I bit. I'm such a fucking loser!

-mcgrew

Sounds like another storm in a tea cup.

No, it sounds like either 1) a troll or (more likely IMO) 2) A shill. No, make that BOTH a trol and a shill.

I haven't RTFA and I don't intend to. ZD is a Windows-only publication, and has been for the last several years. The only thing they want from Linux users is someone to troll. Christ, thay gave that damned "reader talkback" troll John Carroll a fucking JOB trolling!

Make no mistake about it, ZD net is not about tech, it's not about news, it's not about anything nerdy, it's about PROFIT. And it makes its profits not from sales of magazines but advertising. And Microsoft is one of its biggest, if not THE biggest, advertisers.

ZDNET works for Microsoft. I will not read it; it has nothing of interest for me. I used to be the world's biggest troll biter, but I reformed myself Fri Apr 22, 2005 at 10:38:29 AM EST. Well, ok, sometimes like any addict I relapse (like I'm doing now) but I'm damned not going to bite ZD's trolls. At least, I'm not going to be trolled any farther than the /. blurb; I will NOT RTFA.

stay geeky and appeal to the advanced tech guru in all of us; go mainstream and leave the advanced functionality and reliable kernel behind to compete with Microsoft and Apple; or face a "civil war" that could lead to total Linux annihilation.

Bullshit. Stay geeky? Hell yes, I don't see the command prompt going away any time soon. Having advanced functionality isn't "anti-geek", and no true nerd could ever write such bullshit. And even if a "civil war" happened, there would not be "total Linux annihilation" but a simple and unneccessary fork.

TFA is a fucking troll, fellow Linux nerds. "Linus and his minions?" I never saw "Bill Gates and his minions". Troll!

God damn it, I bit. I'm such a fucking loser!

-mcgrew

Sounds like another storm in a tea cup.

No, it sounds like either 1) a troll or (more likely IMO) 2) A shill. No, make that BOTH a trol and a shill.

I haven't RTFA and I don't intend to. ZD is a Windows-only publication, and has been for the last several years. The only thing they want from Linux users is someone to troll. Christ, thay gave that damned "reader talkback" troll John Carroll a fucking JOB trolling!

Make no mistake about it, ZD net is not about tech, it's not about news, it's not about anything nerdy, it's about PROFIT. And it makes its profits not from sales of magazines but advertising. And Microsoft is one of its biggest, if not THE biggest, advertisers.

ZDNET works for Microsoft. I will not read it; it has nothing of interest for me. I used to be the world's biggest troll biter, but I reformed myself Fri Apr 22, 2005 at 10:38:29 AM EST. Well, ok, sometimes like any addict I relapse (like I'm doing now) but I'm damned not going to bite ZD's trolls. At least, I'm not going to be trolled any farther than the /. blurb; I will NOT RTFA.

stay geeky and appeal to the advanced tech guru in all of us; go mainstream and leave the advanced functionality and reliable kernel behind to compete with Microsoft and Apple; or face a "civil war" that could lead to total Linux annihilation.

Bullshit. Stay geeky? Hell yes, I don't see the command prompt going away any time soon. Having advanced functionality isn't "anti-geek", and no true nerd could ever write such bullshit. And even if a "civil war" happened, there would not be "total Linux annihilation" but a simple and unneccessary fork.

TFA is a fucking troll, fellow Linux nerds. "Linus and his minions?" I never saw "Bill Gates and his minions". Troll!

God damn it, I bit. I'm such a fucking loser!

-mcgrew

Is all this paranoia actually making us safer?

Google is your friend.
871,500 Americans die yearly from heart disease
Over half a million die yearly from cancer
41,000 Americans die yearly in traffic fatalities
Fewer than 3,000 people have died from terrorist attacks on American soil this entire CENTURY.

So I'd say the answer is a resounding "no". I'd personally like to see some of that Homeland Security money go to safer highways, cancer research, etc.

-mcgrew

you've successfully used the same logic social conservative idiots use against gay marriage

He has, I don't. My argument is quite different, quite like my argument against capital punishment is quite different from the liberals' arguments.

My take is that first, gays ARE allowed to marry. They're just not allowed to marry members of the same sex, since "marriage" has been defined since its inception as a union between a man and a woman (or a man and a harem depending on time and place).

See, you've got a gay man there who quite obviously can't find a woman he can fall in love with and who can fall in love with because he's gay.

I, on the other hand, am a divorced heterosexual who can't find a woman to fall in love with who can fall in love with me, bacause I'm a nerd and the only women who would fall in love with me are alcoholics, crackheads, and whores. No thanks! So why should YOU, a gay man, get special treatment? Look, I'm spending shitloads of money of crackwhores, why can't I get a "civil union" (my marriage was never very civil) with all of them and deduct them from my taxes? As well as all the shit the goddamned theiving bitches steal? Damned crackhheads...

You're gay and can't find a woman. I'm a nerd and can't find a woman. Sucks to be us. The biggest difference is that you think you're special.

-mcgrew

doesn't the store have a right to stop shoplifting?

No. The store only has the right to attempt to stop shoplifting provided they obey the law while doing so. I remember you from K5, CTS, you've always been a facist and a lunatic. Remember me telling you to take your meds?

To others: this guy has some mental issues. One of his personalities is a libertarian, one is a commie, and one is a facist. His name is Legion and he really should take his meds, like I told him to do many times (before his friend and K5 admin jongular pissed me off enough to leave the site in disgust).

okay: you're obligated to show your receipt

He's also a fucking illiterate. CTS, you are NOT obligated to show your reciept! ...as a previous poster tried vainly to tell you. They can ask for it, you are NOT obligated to comply. I'm sorry that I can't find small enough words for your tiny little neocon facist mind to comprehend.

i would suggest that such people who think so have no idea what fascism really is!

I would suggest that YOU have no more of an idea what facism is than you have an idea what literacy and sanity are.

-mcgrew (link is to an argument with CTS I found in Google).
My home page
The Paxil Diaries

doesn't the store have a right to stop shoplifting?

No. The store only has the right to attempt to stop shoplifting provided they obey the law while doing so. I remember you from K5, CTS, you've always been a facist and a lunatic. Remember me telling you to take your meds?

To others: this guy has some mental issues. One of his personalities is a libertarian, one is a commie, and one is a facist. His name is Legion and he really should take his meds, like I told him to do many times (before his friend and K5 admin jongular pissed me off enough to leave the site in disgust).

okay: you're obligated to show your receipt

He's also a fucking illiterate. CTS, you are NOT obligated to show your reciept! ...as a previous poster tried vainly to tell you. They can ask for it, you are NOT obligated to comply. I'm sorry that I can't find small enough words for your tiny little neocon facist mind to comprehend.

i would suggest that such people who think so have no idea what fascism really is!

I would suggest that YOU have no more of an idea what facism is than you have an idea what literacy and sanity are.

-mcgrew (link is to an argument with CTS I found in Google).
My home page
The Paxil Diaries

No, not for real, nor a grumble from the grave.

Browse or search through the indexes of available Archives' documents. Select those documents you wish to buy and add them to the Cart.

This is just a disgusting move by his heirs to make money from a dead man. If you hear a rumble from his grave, it's him spinning in it.

Again, I'm just disgusted. If my family uses me like that after I'm dead (and I use the word "use" in the harshes sense; as in "I've been used and abused") I'm going to haunt them!

mcgrew

PS- Did I mention my disgust? We seriously need to reform copyright; most of Heinlein's works date back to before I was born, and I'm over the half century mark. none of Heinlein's works should still be under copyright.

I'me even more disgusted with "my" congress (AKA "corporate lapdogs).

your value system is not unlike that of my opponents

Your opponents who know full well who their primary enemies are; slashdot readers, ars technica readers, "et al" (as you lawyers say).

I of course have no proof, but strongly believe that the RIAA has a small army building up mod points by bashing SCO in the SCO stories, bashing MS in the MS stories, praising Apple in the Macintosh stories, etc.

Not just karma whores, but professional karma whores, who are whoring just so they can fuck up slashdot's mod system on an RIAA story.

In short, I call shenanigans (and I applaud you, NYCL!)

-mcgrew (mcgrew.info, not the mcgrew from McGrew Security)

I wrote about this prospect back in 2004 -- it all seemed on the cards then, and I was surprised that no-one was really talking about it. Of course not too much happened -- the Fed raising interest rates steadily since around that time managed to keep things in check and everything puttered along happily. Eventually, though, the higher rates cut in, and the housing market went down, and so finally the chickens are starting to come home to roost.

What is remarkable, to me, is that this was all clearly an issue 3 years ago (more than that really), and not only was little or nothing done, little or nothing was ever really said about it as a problem. Since I wrote that pretty much all the numbers in that piece have gotten significantly worse as the US continued blithely on its economic course. This really should have been an election issue in 2004, and it definitely should have been an election issue in 2006. Why exactly do so few Americans seem to know or care about the very serious issues here?

Who said Sci-Fi never becomes reality? Whoever they are, they lied.

No, more likely they were just ignorant. Usually, the science fiction stuff is surpassed by reality! Look at Asimov's "Multivac", the closest any writer ever came to predicting the internet. Look at the Star Trek stuff that wasn't supposed to happen for another 150 years - the self-opening doors were an impossibility in 1965, but now they're at every grocery store. Their "communicators" are now called cell phones. The flat screens on their computers are probably sitting on your desk now.

In one of the Star Trek movies, McCoy gives Kirk a pair of reading glasses because he's allergic to whatever drug the future has to soften geezers' hard focusing lenses, being unable to cure age related farsightedness. But I'm 55, and no longer either nearsighted or farsighted in my left eye, I had surgery to implant an artificial lens in that eye that can focus like a young person's. That eye is now better than 20-20 at all distances!

Although I'll grant that they're not likely to come up with Thiotimoline.

-mcgrew

You forgot the Secret Police.

Fortunately, we've got a constitution that protects Americans from living under such a 'police state.'

How true!

-mcgrew

Oh, you kids!

They tried it with alcohol, remember what happened?

That's what they said about marijuana back in the 1970s. It seemed that 99% of everybody under 40 smoked pot, and those who didn't smoke pot, including a good number of those over 40, didn't care. Even the cops looked the other way, and geezers I knew remerked that it was "just like the tewnties". When my grandmother heard I had pot plants, she mentioned that my grandfather had brewed beer in his barn in the 20s.

Any rock concert's air was filled with the sweet smell of reefer. It was going to be legalized "any day now".

But then Wrongy Reagan and his wife Nannystate was elected President. The rest is history- you can't get a low paying job without being tested for (some) drugs. I know people who stopped smoking pot and started smoking crack because pot can be detected for a month while cocaine can only be detected for 3 days. Today's "war on (some) drugs" is no different than alcohol prohibition, with a few key differences:

1. For some reason I can't fathom, it took a Constitutional Amendment to legalize the prohibition of alcohol, but other drugs needed no such amendment.

2. The entire corporate-run US government is anti(some)drug.

The fact that both wings of the Republicrat Party is against a harmless plant that I used to greatly enjoy daily but can no longer afford is the biggest reason I vote "third party" whenever possible. But most Americans are brainwashed, with little more reasoning power than Ronnie Reagan (AKA "Al Shiemers").

-mcgrew>

...almost. It's still too early for McCoy to repeat his trademarked phrase, Jim, since the patient is still on life support (although it's apparently been brain dead for years).

I'll cheer more when Sony dies. All SCO did was to rattle sabers at the Linux community, not unlike when Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on the table at the UN yelling "we will bury you!" Even though I'm a Linux user and booster, there was no way SCO was going to bury Linux; SCO was little more than an annoying joke.

So I'm kind of sad, I like jokes. Even bad jokes like SCO. Here's hoping McBride's new job will be CEO of Sony. Then when he he kills that damned demon, maybe he can get a job with Microsoft?

-mcgrew

Even novice users would probably find some piece of software they wanted to run that wasn't in the system and get annoyed at symantec for breaking their computer while more technical users would likely never want to be early adopters of something like this.

If you want a real-world illustration of this, on July 26, 2005 the mydoom virus made google and other search engines unavailable. I wrote and article about it named Mom brought Google to its knees" and posted it to K5 (and note that I am not a security expert; the McGrew from McGrew Security is a different guy).

I had installed a firewall on her new shiny eMachines PC. The pertinent part of MFA: "Mom called me a week ago. 'I want you to take this firewall off of my computer.'"

I finally showed her how to whitelist, but as I said in TFA, I fully expected to have to rebuild her machine, as it was sure to be compromised.

-mcgrew

If I can't add a program to the whitelist myself, I don't want it.

All it will take is for one rogue program to rewrite the whitelist. So the whitelist is at symantic's site? Great, what happens when Symantic is hacked? How do you get your computer to work when your internet connection is down?

Far better would be giving your programs and libraries human readable names! Right now I'm in windows at work, Windows' task list lists "Internet Security Moving Toward 'White List'" as a program, instead of Intenet Explorer. So you Windows users will all have to downgrade from XP to Vista. Access is also running, it's called... OK it's called the name of an application I wrote. Windows Explorer is named after the folder it's showing.

Processes are all non-readable gobbledygook; shstat.exe, dpmw32.exe, etc. A few you can figure out, but most are ciphers. Windows hasn't had the 8.3 limitation in well over a decade now, why in the hell aren't DLLs given English names? I can't stop a process if I don't know what it's for, or I may hose the whole system and cause a cold boot.

If Symantic serves the whitelist, how in the hell are you supposed to write your own programs?

What's to stop me from writing a virus called IE.exe?

And finally, when did they start smoking crack at symantic?

-mcgrew (not the mcgrew from McGrew Security)

No, the first time it was posted, it was theoretically possible to create positronium. Now they've actually made some - a tiny, tiny teensy little bit.

They were only able to make a few atoms.

It's going to be quite a while before they make any lasers with this stuff. TFA (which I saw yesterday) isn't clear how they're going to make gamma ray lasers out of the stuff. The only guess I (a layman) can make is that they'll use the decaying positronium to create the gamma rays, and conventional crystals as in existing lasers to beam them coherently.

I also can't figure out WTF anybody would do with a gamma ray laser, except perhaps for nuclear fusion or particle accelerators. And killing sharks!

-mcgrew

The network stack in Vista uses 40% CPU time for simple file transfers - up from 15% in XP and 9% in Linux. This proves that the design deision to rewrite the BSD-stack was a flawed approach, and not a BUG.

Unless Microsoft can demonstrate superior performance with Vista on identical hardware, users will conclude that DRM is such a burden on resources, and avoid using Vista as long as they practically can. This isn't FUD, it's FACT.

In the video, Kuehnlein, a St. George officer for about two years, approaches a young man who was sitting in a parked car about 2 a.m. in a commuter lot near Spokane and Reavis Barracks roads. Kuehnlein asks for identification. When Darrow asks whether he did anything wrong, the officer orders him out of the car and begins shouting.

"You want to try me? You want to try me tonight? You think you have a bad night? I will ruin your night. ... Do you want to try me tonight, young boy?"

Darrow says no.

"Do you want to go to jail for some (expletive) reason I come up with?" the police officer says. Later, Darrow says, "I don't want any problems, officer."

"You're about to get it," Kuehnlein is heard saying. "You already started your (expletive) problems with your attitude."

After the officer notices the camera, he says, "I don't really care about your cameras, 'cause I'm about ready to tow your car, then we can tear 'em all apart."

Sure, mod me Troll, but this guy - he's a meatspace Troll. Geesh, what a fob.

Troll? No, he isn't (and neither are you). This is what meatspace trolling looks like.

No, I think the fellow has some psychaitric issues. However, TFA says that Kerry himself thought the crazy student's questions were "very important".

But sometimes trolling cops in meatspece is fun! But this guy wasn't trolling, he was just stupid. Real trolls usually don't suffer consequenses of their trolling.

And often people are accused of trolling when they're sincere.

-mcgrew

Sure, mod me Troll, but this guy - he's a meatspace Troll. Geesh, what a fob.

Troll? No, he isn't (and neither are you). This is what meatspace trolling looks like.

No, I think the fellow has some psychaitric issues. However, TFA says that Kerry himself thought the crazy student's questions were "very important".

But sometimes trolling cops in meatspece is fun! But this guy wasn't trolling, he was just stupid. Real trolls usually don't suffer consequenses of their trolling.

And often people are accused of trolling when they're sincere.

-mcgrew

It seems that we talk about completely different things. Anycast that you describe is very different from anycast as I understand it: the one described in the RFC 3513 (IPv6 addressing) and one used in IPv4 networks :-/

> Anycast is not routed to the nearest device

RFC 3513, point 2.6
"packet sent to an anycast address is routed to the 'nearest' interface having that address [...]"

> anycasting is multicast to ALL devices

RFC 3513, point 2.6
"Anycast addresses are allocated from the unicast address space, using any of the defined unicast address formats. Thus, anycast addresses are syntactically indistinguishable from unicast addresses."

> There is no single point of failure.

Agreed, this is probably the greatest advantage of anycast, and the main application of anycast IPv4.

> No, IPv4 does not support anycast except as a userspace layer on top of multicast

IPv4 does support anycast. Anycast works exactly like unicast. The only thing that differs anycast from unicast is that more than one server has the same IP address, but device sending traffic doesn't even need to know about it. The whole "magic" happens thanks to routers and routing to the nearest server with that destination address.

> there are no anycast-aware applications in IPv4 that I am aware of.

Application doesn't even need to be aware of anycast in IPv4. It just accepts requests at one of it's configured addressess. An example of anycast application is DNS. It is publicly known that F-root uses IPv4 anycast.

A great article about what IPv4 anycast is can be found here:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/12/31/173152/86

> Network programmers and ISPs should feel utterly ashamed with themselves at the pathetic, tardy and haphazard use of one of the most elegant networking tools available to software engineers.

Agreed :(

> You are also incorrect about the hardcoding. Anycasting doesn't require a hardcoded address for the service.

You need to have service identifier hardcoded somewhere, otherwise how do you select the service? Say, device wants to register to FAFU service and obtain information specific to that service. What should be destination IPv6 address? And what about service DANDY? the same, or a different address? With DHCP you just receive all necessary information within the DHCP reply.

> Let us say you have a hundred IP phones, all in factory default state. You pneous DHCP hits is going to more than inconvenience most servers. You'd damn-near melt them.

That would be a hundred DHCP requests, once, upon a boot of every phone. If the server cannot handle this, even after simultaneous restart of all equipment, I'd be surprised.

I mean, this thread, nit the tech party; I'm 55. My internet connection at home is down, I've been throwing away too much money on booze and hookers and haven't paid my bill lately...

But at any rate, you youngsters might be interested in an article I wrote back in 2005, Growing Up With Computers. Other young folks were interested enough to vote it up to the front page.

Come to think of it, and also on-topic, I wrote a few geezertech articles back then. Useful Dead Technologies might amuse you (How many of you young nerds can use a slide rule?), as might Good Riddance to Bad Tech.

-mcgrew

I mean, this thread, nit the tech party; I'm 55. My internet connection at home is down, I've been throwing away too much money on booze and hookers and haven't paid my bill lately...

But at any rate, you youngsters might be interested in an article I wrote back in 2005, Growing Up With Computers. Other young folks were interested enough to vote it up to the front page.

Come to think of it, and also on-topic, I wrote a few geezertech articles back then. Useful Dead Technologies might amuse you (How many of you young nerds can use a slide rule?), as might Good Riddance to Bad Tech.

-mcgrew

I mean, this thread, nit the tech party; I'm 55. My internet connection at home is down, I've been throwing away too much money on booze and hookers and haven't paid my bill lately...

But at any rate, you youngsters might be interested in an article I wrote back in 2005, Growing Up With Computers. Other young folks were interested enough to vote it up to the front page.

Come to think of it, and also on-topic, I wrote a few geezertech articles back then. Useful Dead Technologies might amuse you (How many of you young nerds can use a slide rule?), as might Good Riddance to Bad Tech.

-mcgrew

On Sunday nights they started the "7th Day" show, where they would play seven full albums back to back, uncut. They would always prompt the audience to cue their tape recorders before starting, and convieniently left a few seconds of dead air before and after each album side.

Yes, listeners were encouraged to record these LPs off of the radio, uncut and in their entirety.

On Sunday nights they started the "7th Day" show, where they would play seven full albums back to back, uncut. They would always prompt the audience to cue their tape recorders before starting, and convieniently left a few seconds of dead air before and after each album side.

Yes, listeners were encouraged to record these LPs off of the radio, uncut and in their entirety.