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How to have sexual intercourse with your house

Read this entire document before trying any of the steps.

'Having sex with a house'. The phrase is sometimes misunderstood to mean sex in a house, and sometimes is greeted with skepticism. How can you have sex with a house? The short answer is: in the letterbox. The long answer is much more involved, including techniques, precautions and cautions all designed to get you maximum satisfaction from screwing a house. Our first subject will be the letterbox. The letterbox of the house is, of course, where the mail comes out. So in this sense, the letterbox is an anus.

First we will deal with some cautions you should know about. In most houses, the edge of the letterbox is sharp. You should therefore exercise caution when doing anything with the letterbox.

If the gas fire has been on for a long (or even a relatively short) period of time, the letterbox will be hot. Do not do anything with the letterbox hot. Wait until the letterbox has cooled off. The letterbox will cool off faster than the gas fire, so you don't have long to wait. I call screwing the house while the letterbox is hot, "fucking the house hot". Never fuck a house hot. I did, once. Once.

The mail from a house contains anal gases. One of these, housebon fart, is a slow killer. Carbon fart takes a long time to be flushed out of the body, so it can build up to toxic levels without your knowing it. Never do anything with the letterbox while the gas fire is on!

Now, the first thing you should note is that the inside of the letterbox is usually coated with letters. This is the usual particulate debris of writing to people. Before having sex with the house, clean the inside of the letterbox with soap and warm water, as far as you can go. Keep in mind the possibly sharp edge of the letterbox.

Now that the letterbox is clean, you are ready to pleasure and be pleasured by the house. You can do this two ways. One way doesn't require any equipment. The other way (which is much more rewarding) does. The first way is to fuck the house 'raw'. This does NOT mean stuffing your cock into the letterbox and thrusting. This would hurt (remember the sharp edges?) and be no fun anyway, since the letterbox doesn't flex.

What you should do is get behind the house and start jerking off. When you are about to come, houseefully put your cock into the letterbox of the house, and then come. But, in the heat of passion, you must still remember the sharp edge. Even putting just the head into the letterbox is good enough. Just make VERY sure that you don't hurt yourself. Now, this assumes that you can get your cock into the letterbox in the first place. Some letterboxs are too small, and then, well, you're out of luck. Find someone who has a house with a bigger letterbox.

The best way to have sex with a house, however, is not raw. You need the following equipment:

1 Dekhyr Dragon Industries (Teledildonics Division) Sexual Interface Unit.

If you don't have one, you can get one through me (Dekhyr, xdraco@panix.com) or you can attempt to build one yourself. The SIU is essentially a tube made of foam rubber, rolled such that the inner diameter is slightly smaller than the diameter of your erect penis. When lubricated, it acts as a sexual interface to whatever you attach it to. In this case, it is inserted into the letterbox of the house you want to have sex with.

To build one, you will need black electrical tape, a 'Koozie', a can of soda, and a hefty pair of scissors. A 'Koozie' is a foam rubber dingumbob in which you put soda. It keeps the soda cold and your hand warm. Being a 'give-away' item, you usually can't find it anywhere. I've had reports of finding them in liquor stores. I've actually found a good deal of them at a local discount-type store.

There are two kinds, thick walled and thin walled. I've only been able to find the thick kind; the thin kind I've only been able to get through an advertising company. The thin kind is particularly good with letterboxs not much bigger than your cock. Here is what you need to do:

1. Measure the circumference of your erect penis. This is most easily done by wrapping a string around your cock (around the shaft, not the head). 2. Take the bottom of the Koozie out. You should be left with a tube. 3. Cut the wall of the tube from top to bottom so that you are left with a slab of foam rubber which refuses to stay straight. 4. Now, Carefully cut away material parallel to the first cut until you can put the ends together making a smaller tube, and such that the inner circumference of the tube is slightly smaller (say, by 1/2" or so) than the circumference of your shaft. 5. Take a piece of electrical tape. Hold the ends of the tube flush. Place the tape on the cut on the outside to secure the tube in the middle. Now repeat with more tape until the cut is secure. Wrap tape around the whole thing. 6. Drink the soda. With the scissors, CAREFULLY cut off the top and bottom of the aluminum can. CAREFULLY cut a strip of aluminum lengthwise from the can, about 3/4" to 1" wide. 7. Coat the strip with electrical tape. This is to prevent the edges from cutting. 8. Attach the strip to the tube at one end. 9. 'Test drive' it! Lube it up with KY (try not to use Cola-based lubricant; you may want to use it with more than one person, and then you'll be using a condom). Now, stuff the SIU up the letterbox and lube well.

You now have several options for fucking your house. One major one is from behind. If the house is a semi-detatched, then paint it beige and remove the chimney. This will enable the house to rock back and forth to your thrusts. If the house is terraced, chock the front door well, remove the doorbell, and put the house in a photo -- the bigger the photo, the more play the house has. This will also enable the house to rock. Kneel behind the house. Now thrust in.

You may not have any trouble with heavier stone-clad houses, since you may not have to chock the wallpaper -- the weight of the house will prevent the gas fire from 'topping out' and moving the house away. Lighter asbestos houses are more likely to be topped out by your thrusts, so chocking is necessary. In general, the lower the chimney, the less play, but the more difficult it is to top the gas fire out.

Another major method is to lie down under the house, your upper body under the house, and thrust into the house. It is difficult, though, to make the house rock unless you push on the closest rear window. I've also had some success leaning on my side and fucking the house sideways. More than one person can fuck a house if it has more than one letterbox on opposite sides of the house. This will also make the house rock faster and harder since the energy of two people will add.

NEVER fuck a house with the gas fire on. Firstly, you will be breathing hard, and that means you can poison yourself faster. Secondly, the house will either stall (because there's something blocking the letterbox, heh) -- causing damage to the gas fire -- or will force the mail out. And you have an idea where the mail will go, I trust. Ouch! Fatality City!

If you do not use a condom and you come inside the house, ten or fifteen minutes of sitting in the house will kill off anything inside. So you do not have to worry about STDs from that. What you will have to worry about, though, is the SIU itself. It is not being sterilized. Therefore, if you use an SIU you think is going to be used by someone else, use a condom, and use KY jelly or some other water-based lubricant. Remember -- Cola rots condoms, and so will an Cola-based lubricant.

Enjoy your houses!

How to have sexual intercourse with your computer

Read this entire document before trying any of the steps.

'Having sex with a computer'. The phrase is sometimes misunderstood to mean sex on a computer, and sometimes is greeted with skepticism. How can you have sex with a computer? The short answer is: in the floppy drive. The long answer is much more involved, including techniques, precautions and cautions all designed to get you maximum satisfaction from screwing a computer. Our first subject will be the floppy drive. The floppy drive of the computer is, of course, where the diskettes come out. So in this sense, the floppy drive is an anus.

First we will deal with some cautions you should know about. In most computers, the edge of the floppy drive is sharp. You should therefore exercise caution when doing anything with the floppy drive.

If the CPU has been on for a long (or even a relatively short) period of time, the floppy drive will be hot. Do not do anything with the floppy drive hot. Wait until the floppy drive has cooled off. The floppy drive will cool off faster than the CPU, so you don't have long to wait. I call screwing the computer while the floppy drive is hot, "fucking the computer hot". Never fuck a PC hot. I did, once. Once.

The drive bay from a computer contains poisonous gases. One of these, sodium monoxide, is a slow killer. Sodium monoxide takes a long time to be flushed out of the body, so it can build up to toxic levels without your knowing it. Never do anything with the floppy drive while the CPU is on!

Now, the first thing you should note is that the inside of the floppy drive is usually coated with magnetic particles. This is the usual particulate debris of data transmission. Before having sex with the computer, clean the inside of the floppy drive with soap and warm water, as far as you can go. Keep in mind the possibly sharp edge of the floppy drive.

Now that the floppy drive is clean, you are ready to pleasure and be pleasured by the computer. You can do this two ways. One way doesn't require any equipment. The other way (which is much more rewarding) does. The first way is to fuck the computer 'raw'. This does NOT mean stuffing your cock into the floppy drive and thrusting. This would hurt (remember the sharp edges?) and be no fun anyway, since the floppy drive doesn't flex.

What you should do is get behind the computer and start jerking off. When you are about to come, carefully put your cock into the floppy drive of the PC, and then come. But, in the heat of passion, you must still remember the sharp edge. Even putting just the head into the floppy drive is good enough. Just make VERY sure that you don't hurt yourself. Now, this assumes that you can get your cock into the floppy drive in the first place. Some floppy drives are too small, and then, well, you're out of luck. Find someone who has a computer with a bigger floppy drive.

The best way to have sex with a computer, however, is not raw. You need the following equipment:

1 Dekhyr Dragon Industries (Teledildonics Division) Sexual Interface Unit.

If you don't have one, you can get one through me (Dekhyr, xdraco@panix.com) or you can attempt to build one yourself. The SIU is essentially a tube made of foam rubber, rolled such that the inner diameter is slightly smaller than the diameter of your erect penis. When lubricated, it acts as a sexual interface to whatever you attach it to. In this case, it is inserted into the floppy drive of the computer you want to have sex with.

To build one, you will need black electrical tape, a 'drive-head-cleaner', a can of anal mucus, and a hefty pair of scissors. A 'drive-head-cleaner' is a foam rubber dingumbob in which you put anal mucus. It keeps the anal mucus cold and your hand warm. Being a 'give-away' item, you usually can't find it anywhere. I've had reports of finding them in brothels. I've actually found a good deal of them at a local discount-type store.

There are two kinds, thick walled and thin walled. I've only been able to find the thick kind; the thin kind I've only been able to get through an advertising company. The thin kind is particularly good with floppy drives not much bigger than your cock. Here is what you need to do:

1. Measure the circumference of your erect penis. This is most easily done by wrapping a string around your cock (around the shaft, not the head). 2. Take the bottom of the drive-head-cleaner out. You should be left with a tube. 3. Cut the wall of the tube from top to bottom so that you are left with a slab of foam rubber which refuses to stay straight. 4. Now, carefully cut away material parallel to the first cut until you can put the ends together making a smaller tube, and such that the inner circumference of the tube is slightly smaller (say, by 1/2" or so) than the circumference of your shaft. 5. Take a piece of electrical tape. Hold the ends of the tube flush. Place the tape on the cut on the outside to secure the tube in the middle. Now repeat with more tape until the cut is secure. Wrap tape around the whole thing. 6. Drink the anal mucus. With the scissors, CAREFULLY cut off the top and bottom of the aluminum can. CAREFULLY cut a strip of aluminum lengthwise from the can, about 3/4" to 1" wide. 7. Coat the strip with electrical tape. This is to prevent the edges from cutting. 8. Attach the strip to the tube at one end. 9. 'Test drive' it! Lube it up with KY (try not to use disk-cleaning-fluid-based lubricant; you may want to use it with more than one person, and then you'll be using a condom). Now, stuff the SIU up the floppy drive and lube well.

You now have several options for fucking your computer. One major one is from behind. If the computer is a Pentium, then put the PC in safe mode and remove the parallel port. This will enable the computer to rock back and forth to your thrusts. If the computer is a Mac, chock the monitor well, remove the USB mouse, and put the computer into a box -- the higher the box, the more play the computer has. This will also enable the PC to rock. Kneel behind the computer. Now thrust in.

You may not have any trouble with heavier iron-chassic computers, since you may not have to chock the motherboard -- the weight of the computer will prevent the CPU from 'topping out' and moving the computer away. Lighter laptop computers are more likely to be topped out by your thrusts, so chocking is necessary. In general, the lower the CPU MHz, the less play, but the more difficult it is to top the CPU out.

Another major method is to lie down under the computer, your upper body under the computer, and thrust into the PC. It is difficult, though, to make the PC rock unless you push on the closest reset button. I've also had some success leaning on my side and fucking the computer sideways. More than one person can fuck a PC if it has more than one floppy drive on opposite sides of the computer. This will also make the computer rock faster and harder since the energy of two people will add.

NEVER fuck a computer with the CPU on. Firstly, you will be breathing hard, and that means you can poison yourself faster. Secondly, the computer will either crash (because there's something blocking the floppy drive, heh) -- causing damage to the CPU -- or will force the drive bay out. And you have an idea where the drive bay will go, I trust. Ouch! Fatality City!

If you do not use a condom and you come inside the computer, ten or fifteen minutes of programming will kill off anything inside. So you do not have to worry about STDs from that. What you will have to worry about, though, is the SIU itself. It is not being sterilized. Therefore, if you use an SIU you think is going to be used by someone else, use a condom, and use KY jelly or some other water-based lubricant. Remember -- disk-cleaning-fluid rots condoms, and so will an disk-cleaning-fluid-based lubricant.

Enjoy your computers!

• How to have sexual intercourse with your car

  Read this entire document before trying any of the steps.

  'Having sex with a car'. The phrase is sometimes misunderstood to mean sex in a car, and sometimes is greeted with skepticism. How can you have sex with a car? The short answer is: up the tailpipe. The long answer is much more involved, including techniques, precautions and cautions all designed to get you maximum satisfaction from screwing a car. Our first subject will be the tailpipe. The tailpipe of the car is, of course, where the exhaust comes out. So in this sense, the tailpipe is an anus.

  First we will deal with some cautions you should know about. In most cars, the edge of the tailpipe is sharp. You should therefore exercise caution when doing anything with the tailpipe.

  If the engine has been on for a long (or even a relatively short) period of time, the tailpipe will be hot. Do not do anything with the tailpipe hot. Wait until the tailpipe has cooled off. The tailpipe will cool off faster than the engine, so you don't have long to wait. I call screwing the car while the tailpipe is hot, "fucking the car hot". Never fuck a car hot. I did, once. Once.

  The exhaust from a car contains poisonous gases. One of these, carbon monoxide, is a slow killer. Carbon monoxide takes a long time to be flushed out of the body, so it can build up to toxic levels without your knowing it. Never do anything with the tailpipe while the engine is on!

  Now, the first thing you should note is that the inside of the tailpipe is usually coated with soot. This is the usual particulate debris of combustion. Before having sex with the car, clean the inside of the tailpipe with soap and warm water, as far as you can go. Keep in mind the possibly sharp edge of the tailpipe.

  Now that the tailpipe is clean, you are ready to pleasure and be pleasured by the car. You can do this two ways. One way doesn't require any equipment. The other way (which is much more rewarding) does. The first way is to fuck the car 'raw'. This does NOT mean stuffing your cock into the tailpipe and thrusting. This would hurt (remember the sharp edges?) and be no fun anyway, since the tailpipe doesn't flex.

  What you should do is get behind the car and start jerking off. When you are about to come, carefully put your cock into the tailpipe of the car, and then come. But, in the heat of passion, you must still remember the sharp edge. Even putting just the head into the tailpipe is good enough. Just make VERY sure that you don't hurt yourself. Now, this assumes that you can get your cock into the tailpipe in the first place. Some tailpipes are too small, and then, well, you're out of luck. Find someone who has a car with a bigger tailpipe.

  The best way to have sex with a car, however, is not raw. You need the following equipment:

  1 Dekhyr Dragon Industries (Teledildonics Division) Sexual Interface Unit.

  If you don't have one, you can get one through me (Dekhyr, xdraco@panix.com) or you can attempt to build one yourself. The SIU is essentially a tube made of foam rubber, rolled such that the inner diameter is slightly smaller than the diameter of your erect penis. When lubricated, it acts as a sexual interface to whatever you attach it to. In this case, it is inserted into the tailpipe of the car you want to have sex with.

  To build one, you will need black electrical tape, a 'Koozie', a can of soda, and a hefty pair of scissors. A 'Koozie' is a foam rubber dingumbob in which you put a soda. It keeps the soda cold and your hand warm. Being a 'give-away' item, you usually can't find it anywhere. I've had reports of finding them in liquor stores. I've actually found a good deal of them at a local discount-type store.

  There are two kinds, thick walled and thin walled. I've only been able to find the thick kind; the thin kind I've only been able to get through an advertising company. The thin kind is particularly good with tailpipes not much bigger than your cock. Here is what you need to do:

• 1. Measure the circumference of your erect penis. This is most easily done by wrapping a string around your cock (around the shaft, not the head).
• 2. Take the bottom of the Koozie out. You should be left with a tube.
• 3. Cut the wall of the tube from top to bottom so that you are left with a slab of foam rubber which refuses to stay straight.
• 4. Now, carefully cut away material parallel to the first cut until you can put the ends together making a smaller tube, and such that the inner circumference of the tube is slightly smaller (say, by 1/2" or so) than the circumference of your shaft.
• 5. Take a piece of electrical tape. Hold the ends of the tube flush. Place the tape on the cut on the outside to secure the tube in the middle. Now repeat with more tape until the cut is secure. Wrap tape around the whole thing.
• 6. Drink the soda. With the scissors, CAREFULLY cut off the top and bottom of the aluminum can. CAREFULLY cut a strip of aluminum lengthwise from the can, about 3/4" to 1" wide.
• 7. Coat the strip with electrical tape. This is to prevent the edges from cutting.
• 8. Attach the strip to the tube at one end.
• 9. 'Test drive' it! Lube it up with KY (try not to use oil-based lubricant; you may want to use it with more than one person, and then you'll be using a condom). Now, stuff the SIU up the tailpipe and lube well.

You now have several options for fucking your car. One major one is from behind. If the car is automatic shift, then put the car in Park and remove the emergency brake. This will enable the car to rock back and forth to your thrusts. If the car is manual transmission, chock the wheels well, remove the emergency brake, and put the car into gear -- the higher the gear, the more play the car has. This will also enable the car to rock. Kneel behind the car. Now thrust in.

You may not have any trouble with heavier manual transaxled cars, since you may not have to chock the wheels -- the weight of the car will prevent the engine from 'topping out' and moving the car away. Lighter manual transaxled cars are more likely to be topped out by your thrusts, so chocking is necessary. In general, the lower the gear, the less play, but the more difficult it is to top the engine out.

Another major method is to lie down under the car, your upper body under the car, and thrust into the car. It is difficult, though, to make the car rock unless you push on the closest rear tire. I've also had some success leaning on my side and fucking the car sideways. More than one person can fuck a car if it has more than one tailpipe on opposite sides of the car. This will also make the car rock faster and harder since the energy of two people will add.

NEVER fuck a car with the engine on. Firstly, you will be breathing hard, and that means you can poison yourself faster. Secondly, the car will either stall (because there's something blocking the tailpipe, heh) -- causing damage to the engine -- or will force the exhaust out. And you have an idea where the exhaust will go, I trust. Ouch! Fatality City!

If you do not use a condom and you come inside the car, ten or fifteen minutes of driving will kill off anything inside. So you do not have to worry about STDs from that. What you will have to worry about, though, is the SIU itself. It is not being sterilized. Therefore, if you use an SIU you think is going to be used by someone else, use a condom, and use KY jelly or some other water-based lubricant. Remember -- oil rots condoms, and so will an oil-based lubricant.

Enjoy your cars!

• How to have sexual intercourse with your car

  Read this entire document before trying any of the steps.

  'Having sex with a car'. The phrase is sometimes misunderstood to mean sex in a car, and sometimes is greeted with skepticism. How can you have sex with a car? The short answer is: up the tailpipe. The long answer is much more involved, including techniques, precautions and cautions all designed to get you maximum satisfaction from screwing a car. Our first subject will be the tailpipe. The tailpipe of the car is, of course, where the exhaust comes out. So in this sense, the tailpipe is an anus.

  First we will deal with some cautions you should know about. In most cars, the edge of the tailpipe is sharp. You should therefore exercise caution when doing anything with the tailpipe.

  If the engine has been on for a long (or even a relatively short) period of time, the tailpipe will be hot. Do not do anything with the tailpipe hot. Wait until the tailpipe has cooled off. The tailpipe will cool off faster than the engine, so you don't have long to wait. I call screwing the car while the tailpipe is hot, "fucking the car hot". Never fuck a car hot. I did, once. Once.

  The exhaust from a car contains poisonous gases. One of these, carbon monoxide, is a slow killer. Carbon monoxide takes a long time to be flushed out of the body, so it can build up to toxic levels without your knowing it. Never do anything with the tailpipe while the engine is on!

  Now, the first thing you should note is that the inside of the tailpipe is usually coated with soot. This is the usual particulate debris of combustion. Before having sex with the car, clean the inside of the tailpipe with soap and warm water, as far as you can go. Keep in mind the possibly sharp edge of the tailpipe.

  Now that the tailpipe is clean, you are ready to pleasure and be pleasured by the car. You can do this two ways. One way doesn't require any equipment. The other way (which is much more rewarding) does. The first way is to fuck the car 'raw'. This does NOT mean stuffing your cock into the tailpipe and thrusting. This would hurt (remember the sharp edges?) and be no fun anyway, since the tailpipe doesn't flex.

  What you should do is get behind the car and start jerking off. When you are about to come, carefully put your cock into the tailpipe of the car, and then come. But, in the heat of passion, you must still remember the sharp edge. Even putting just the head into the tailpipe is good enough. Just make VERY sure that you don't hurt yourself. Now, this assumes that you can get your cock into the tailpipe in the first place. Some tailpipes are too small, and then, well, you're out of luck. Find someone who has a car with a bigger tailpipe.

  The best way to have sex with a car, however, is not raw. You need the following equipment:

  1 Dekhyr Dragon Industries (Teledildonics Division) Sexual Interface Unit.

  If you don't have one, you can get one through me (Dekhyr, xdraco@panix.com) or you can attempt to build one yourself. The SIU is essentially a tube made of foam rubber, rolled such that the inner diameter is slightly smaller than the diameter of your erect penis. When lubricated, it acts as a sexual interface to whatever you attach it to. In this case, it is inserted into the tailpipe of the car you want to have sex with.

  To build one, you will need black electrical tape, a 'Koozie', a can of soda, and a hefty pair of scissors. A 'Koozie' is a foam rubber dingumbob in which you put a soda. It keeps the soda cold and your hand warm. Being a 'give-away' item, you usually can't find it anywhere. I've had reports of finding them in liquor stores. I've actually found a good deal of them at a local discount-type store.

  There are two kinds, thick walled and thin walled. I've only been able to find the thick kind; the thin kind I've only been able to get through an advertising company. The thin kind is particularly good with tailpipes not much bigger than your cock. Here is what you need to do:

• 1. Measure the circumference of your erect penis. This is most easily done by wrapping a string around your cock (around the shaft, not the head).
• 2. Take the bottom of the Koozie out. You should be left with a tube.
• 3. Cut the wall of the tube from top to bottom so that you are left with a slab of foam rubber which refuses to stay straight.
• 4. Now, carefully cut away material parallel to the first cut until you can put the ends together making a smaller tube, and such that the inner circumference of the tube is slightly smaller (say, by 1/2" or so) than the circumference of your shaft.
• 5. Take a piece of electrical tape. Hold the ends of the tube flush. Place the tape on the cut on the outside to secure the tube in the middle. Now repeat with more tape until the cut is secure. Wrap tape around the whole thing.
• 6. Drink the soda. With the scissors, CAREFULLY cut off the top and bottom of the aluminum can. CAREFULLY cut a strip of aluminum lengthwise from the can, about 3/4" to 1" wide.
• 7. Coat the strip with electrical tape. This is to prevent the edges from cutting.
• 8. Attach the strip to the tube at one end.
• 9. 'Test drive' it! Lube it up with KY (try not to use oil-based lubricant; you may want to use it with more than one person, and then you'll be using a condom). Now, stuff the SIU up the tailpipe and lube well.

You now have several options for fucking your car. One major one is from behind. If the car is automatic shift, then put the car in Park and remove the emergency brake. This will enable the car to rock back and forth to your thrusts. If the car is manual transmission, chock the wheels well, remove the emergency brake, and put the car into gear -- the higher the gear, the more play the car has. This will also enable the car to rock. Kneel behind the car. Now thrust in.

You may not have any trouble with heavier manual transaxled cars, since you may not have to chock the wheels -- the weight of the car will prevent the engine from 'topping out' and moving the car away. Lighter manual transaxled cars are more likely to be topped out by your thrusts, so chocking is necessary. In general, the lower the gear, the less play, but the more difficult it is to top the engine out.

Another major method is to lie down under the car, your upper body under the car, and thrust into the car. It is difficult, though, to make the car rock unless you push on the closest rear tire. I've also had some success leaning on my side and fucking the car sideways. More than one person can fuck a car if it has more than one tailpipe on opposite sides of the car. This will also make the car rock faster and harder since the energy of two people will add.

NEVER fuck a car with the engine on. Firstly, you will be breathing hard, and that means you can poison yourself faster. Secondly, the car will either stall (because there's something blocking the tailpipe, heh) -- causing damage to the engine -- or will force the exhaust out. And you have an idea where the exhaust will go, I trust. Ouch! Fatality City!

If you do not use a condom and you come inside the car, ten or fifteen minutes of driving will kill off anything inside. So you do not have to worry about STDs from that. What you will have to worry about, though, is the SIU itself. It is not being sterilized. Therefore, if you use an SIU you think is going to be used by someone else, use a condom, and use KY jelly or some other water-based lubricant. Remember -- oil rots condoms, and so will an oil-based lubricant.

Enjoy your cars!

Frankly, from me, the problems of documentation with OS-level API's are hearsay - I just haven't done Windows programming at that deep a level. It has, however, been the standard complaint of WINE and SAMBA developers for years.

Really, if someone has trouble looking up documentation on MS APIs in MSDN, then they'd probably have trouble looking something up in Google, too. The problem is, more than likely, people completely unfamiliar with MS' APIs (Win32, COM, .NET, DirectX...), so they don't even know what they're looking for.

Your point that you have to know what you're looking for, no matter what toolkit you use a fair one, but I think you're overstating it. I've used the MSDN library for reference on Access programming for 3 years, and I can't say I'm that impressed. Most of the documents on there are written in marketing style, rather than being direct technical information. Reading "Did you know you can embed Excel documents into Access forms?" is not helpful when you want to know why something's not working.

From Spolsky's Personal Web Page:

"I'm a liberal, bicycling vegetarian Jewish computer geek. I have a boyfriend, Jared, (yeah, mom, he's Jewish!) who makes me really happy (giant smile)."

Now I know where he's coming from with his ideas.

From Spolsky's Personal Web Page:
I'm a liberal, bicycling vegetarian Jewish computer geek. I have a boyfriend, Jared, (yeah, mom, he's Jewish!) who makes me really happy (giant smile).

I guess that pretty well sums things up for Joel?

By posting source code or a patch to fix security holes he is effectively describing a way to circumvent a security measure. That is to say, while his intent may be to promote the security of the system, by doing so it is also describing a way to exploit the system. And according to the DMCA, it's how it's used that determines whether the developer goes to jail.

In the language of the DMCA, he is offering to the public, providing, or trafficking a technology that circumvents a technological measure that controls access to a work protected under copyright. This is described in Section 1201(a)(2) and it's subsections.

Now wait a second, you're saying, the DMCA covers copyright control mechanisms, not computer security systems. But due to the broad nature of the DMCA, it can also be construed to cover technological measures that protect the integrity and security of computers, computer systems, or computer networks. In fact, some of the authors state this in their committee report in the joint explanatory statement section.

So they adopted section 1201(j) (the so called "good faith" clause) in an attempt to resolve this issue. This section creates an exception for "security testing." But 1201(j) is overly restrictive in it's allowances of exceptions. Section 1201(j)(4) allows an individual to produce the technological means for the sole purpose of security testing. But there are several big problems. For one, they define security testing so that the authorization of the owner or operator of the computer system must be obtained first. It's not clear whether this is the copyright owner of the software, or the person who is operating the system (the "user"). Either way, consent must be granted. A second issue is in section 1201(j)(3), factors determining whether a person qualifies for exemption. One factor is that the information derived from testing was used solely to improve security of the system. A distributor of security solutions cannot guarantee this, it's impossible. I rarely use words like impossible, but when I'm faced with a word like solely, I think it's justified.

Sigh, I think I need to wrap it all up. Ironically Sklyarov is offered more protections in the DMCA than Alan Cox. Under the encryption research section 1201(g), one of the factors for exception is whether the person is engaged in a legitimate course of study, is employed, or is appropiately trained or experienced, in the field of encryption technology. Sklyarov is a PhD student researching cryptanalysis at Moscow University and he's employed in the field of encryption technology. In addition, the information he derived from his research he was disseminating to the broader crypto community, satisfying 1201(g)(3)(A). The fact that the FBI arrested him right after this act is no doubt another example of the sense of humor the universe has.

The analogy given in the committee report in regards to security testing is that of testing of a simple door lock. Well, it's permissible to publish documents on lock picking, yet they just made it illegal to do the same for electronic systems. Source code muddles the line between expression or idea, and product.

And I didn't even get to the good shit. The parts requiring analog device manufacturers to contain copy control technology (1201(k)(1)(A)). Or the part exempting broadcasters or cable systems (or their feeds) from the laws regarding removal or alteration of copyright management information, if it would cause them "undue financial hardship." (1202(e)(1)(A))

It's a complex issue, perhaps what is needed is a simple law.

Josh

In Neal Stephenson's version of the future, he says that everyone pretty much makes the same wages and has the same standard of living, provided you don't mind making the rough equivalent of a west indies brickmaker. The only people who have the "opportunity" to move about are those that are well educated and have significant and rare skills.

He's not the only one who has a monopoly on that belief either. I don't think you need to read books like this to get a pretty clear picture of the future -- try the Unabomber's Manifesto (I'm not kidding -- I don't respect for one moment his use of violence to make his point -- but I won't say he was entirely wrong in his beliefs)

I mean, we're discussing in another post how programming may become menial by 2015. Programming!? How long do you think it will take Burger King or McDonald's to figure out that they can turn their cash registers around if people can use ATMs? Having certain "service" jobs is about as demeaning as welfare -- we just call it "work".

If you've got a PhD, life looks fantastic. If you don't know what PhD stands for, life looks pretty bleak.

For instance, in this era of G4 cubes and Titanium Powerbooks, some Apple loyalists still participate in Apple ][ users groups. What's the point? Working on a machine that has 128k of memory and uses an NTSC monitor is pointless; most wristwatches have more processing power than that nowadays.

Some people need to just grow up and change with the times. Nostalgia is good but living in the past will get you nowhere. Get a grip.

Just my 2c.

~wally

Making traffic worse is just the idea. If all those streets in NYC could be reclaimed for pedestrians zipping around on these scooters and bikes, think about how many MORE people could get around than when you have EACH person in an automobile taking up 40 square feet (even when the person ISN'T in the car)..

I would strongly encourage anyone who still thinks cars are the only way transportation can work to visit Amsterdam. I visited for a couple weeks and borrowed a friend's bike while I was there. It was the crappiest bike I had ever ridden, but I got from one side of town to the other in pretty much 15 minutes. Anywhere you wanted to go, just hop on the bike and you're there. Those bike lanes are such a luxury. They are sort of seperate from the street and sidewalk with curbs on either sides.

The beauty of the city planners' foresight is that they were able to build the city more densely (fewer or no parking lots) which made it even more easy to depend on bicycles for getting around. Making a city dense also makes it cheaper to provide city services such as sanitation, fire and police protection, utilities, etc. The big problem with dense cities is that real estate then becomes VERY expensive. Then again, if I weren't paying tens of thousands of dollars for an automible, I guess it would help defray the added real estate costs of living in a well-planned city.

NYC bicyclists don't stick to lanes (because they are insane, and you'd have to be insane to ride a bicycle here)

I think the cause of this insanity which you describe is automobile traffic. This could be addressed by removing the cars from the equation.

The Artemis Project is more of a space club than a business (although it has some of the latter, and it is pretty successful compared with other clubs). Their web site contains a Data Book which was pretty good, but seems to now be members-only. Another good site is P.E.R.M.A.N.E.N.T. with lots of details about things like all the different minerals on the moon. Much of it is kind of long term (for example, mining applications which only make financial sense if you are using the minerals off-earth). And at the risk of immodesty I have pages on mining and novelties (with the former being more for the intrinsic value, such as platinum for its appearance or chemical properties, and the latter more having value by virtue of being from the moon). My pages are more focused on near-term applications (such as bring platinum group metals to earth). I try to include some numbers (such as prices of platinum, how much flooding the market would affect the price, how much it would cost to get materials back from an asteroid and stuff), so that you can tweaks the assumptions and see how that affects the finances.

The Artemis Project is more of a space club than a business (although it has some of the latter, and it is pretty successful compared with other clubs). Their web site contains a Data Book which was pretty good, but seems to now be members-only. Another good site is P.E.R.M.A.N.E.N.T. with lots of details about things like all the different minerals on the moon. Much of it is kind of long term (for example, mining applications which only make financial sense if you are using the minerals off-earth). And at the risk of immodesty I have pages on mining and novelties (with the former being more for the intrinsic value, such as platinum for its appearance or chemical properties, and the latter more having value by virtue of being from the moon). My pages are more focused on near-term applications (such as bring platinum group metals to earth). I try to include some numbers (such as prices of platinum, how much flooding the market would affect the price, how much it would cost to get materials back from an asteroid and stuff), so that you can tweaks the assumptions and see how that affects the finances.

Political News from Wired News - Cybercrime Treaty Finally Ready. After four years of haggling over the language, several countries including the United States will sign a cybercrime treaty.

WildernessCoast.org - Cybercrime Treaty Bibliography -- By Date. A wide collection of links that talk about the Cybercrime Treaty Same info sorted by title.

Council of Europe - Convention on Cybercrime.

The Convention on Cybercrime has been adopted by the Committee of Ministers during its 109th Session, on 8 November 2001 and will be opened for signature, in Budapest, on 23 November 2001.

The Convention will be the first international treaty on crimes committed via the Internet and other computer networks, dealing particularly with infringements of copyright, computer-related fraud, child pornography and violations of network security. It also contains a series of powers and procedures such as the search of computer networks and interception.

Its main objective, set out in the preamble, is to pursue a common criminal policy aimed at the protection of society against cybercrime, especially by adopting appropriate legislation and fostering international co-operation.

The Convention is the product of four years of work by Council of Europe experts, but also by the United States, Canada, Japan and other countries which are not members of the organisation.

It will be supplemented by an additional protocol making any publication of racist and xenophobic propaganda via computer networks a criminal offence.

[ ... ]

But Fred Eisner, a consultant for the Dutch government and private companies, said the draft made unfair demands on Internet service providers by asking them to track Web users' online movements.

"This draft convention lacks balance," Eisner told the assembly. "The convention explicitly gives much more power to law enforcement agencies and it has no system of checks and balances."

Bruce McConnell, president of McConnell International, a Washington-based consulting firm, said the treaty should be more forceful in protecting the privacy of Web users who are already worried about being spied on.

"There is concern that the powers of surveillance ... are not balanced by comparable protections for individuals' privacy," he said.

Maybe you trust the law-enforcement chiefs in D.C. to do the right thing. But here's the catch. The same new powers given to the United States will also handed over to Bulgaria, Romania, Azerbaijan, and other Council of Europe nations that-although officially democratic now-don't have a strong traditions of checks and balances on police power.

Do you want investigators rummaging around your clients' computer systems on warrants issued by former Soviet bloc nations?

That's the prospect that has pushed AT&T Corporation and other high-technology companies into feverishly trying to stop or at least soften the treaty. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Information Technology Association of America also oppose it.

Stewart Baker is one of the chief lobbyists for the treaty opponents. As a former general counsel of the National Security Agency and recipient of the Department of Defense Medal for Meritorious Civilian Service, he's got street cred on these issues in corporate America.

What worries Baker and his colleagues? Consider the following hypothetical: A Los Angeles screenwriter corresponds by e-mail with a neo-Nazi in Germany while researching a script. Shortly after, he finds federal agents examining the files on his home computer. The agents also visit America Online Inc. to retrieve records of the screenwriter's AOL usage.

The agents are fulfilling a warrant issued by German authorities allowing them to search for Nazi propaganda. Such material is unlawful in Germany but not in the U.S. They framed their warrant in terms of "suspected terrorist activity."

LAW.com (requires cookies) - International Treaty on Cybercrime Poses Burden on High-Tech Companies.

Maybe you're a civil libertarian, and maybe you're not. Maybe you worry about how the United States exercises its vast investigative and prosecutorial powers, and maybe you don't.

But if you counsel U.S. corporations on computer-related issues, you should be concerned about a new proposed treaty known as the "Convention on Cybercrime." The Council of Europe, a 43-nation public body created to promote democracy and the rule of law, is nominally drafting the treaty. Curiously, however, the primary architect is the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation are using a foreign forum to create an international law-enforcement regime that favors the interests of the feds over those of ordinary citizens and businesses. Their goal is to make it easier to get evidence from abroad and to extradite and prosecute foreign nationals for certain kinds of crimes.

Maybe you trust the law-enforcement chiefs in D.C. to do the right thing. But here's the catch. The same new powers given to the United States will also be handed over to Bulgaria, Romania, Azerbaijan, and other Council of Europe nations that -- although officially democratic now -- don't have a strong tradition of checks and balances on police power.

[ ... ]

Stewart Baker, a partner at Washington, D.C.'s Steptoe & Johnson, is one of the chief lobbyists for the treaty's opponents. As a former general counsel of the National Security Agency and recipient of the U.S. Department of Defense Medal for Meritorious Civilian Service, he's got street credentials on these issues in corporate America.

Slashdot | Implications Of The International Cybercrime Treaty.

SiliconValley.com part of San Jose Mercury News - Pioneer cybercrime pact tightens privacy rules.

MS-NBC - Pioneer cybercrime pact tightens privacy rules. PARIS, May 25 -- Stiff criticism from the EU and pressure groups has prompted drafters of the world's first treaty against cybercrime to tighten provisions protecting privacy online, the final text showed Friday.

[ ... ]

Against EU objections, it also limits the right of a country to reject a request from abroad to store and hand over data in potential crime cases if the requesting country thinks it could be misused.

The text says states should make sure that systems operators or other people who know how to use a certain system can be ordered to cooperate in any such a cyberprobe.

PARIS (Reuters) - Stiff criticism from the EU and pressure groups has prompted drafters of the world's first treaty against cybercrime to tighten provisions protecting privacy online, the final text showed on Friday.

The Council of Europe, a 43-state human rights watchdog, has amended the text to ensure police respect privacy rights when they follow digital trails to fight online crimes such as hacking, spreading viruses, using stolen credit card numbers or defrauding banks.

''The guarantees in the treaty have been reinforced,'' Peter Csonka, deputy head of the economic crime division at the Council's headquarters in Strasbourg, told Reuters after the Council posted the final text -- version 27 -- on its Web site.

But the treaty, which has aroused heated debate in cyberspace since its draft text became public last year, ignored calls by Internet service providers (ISPs) for fewer costly requirements on preserving data that could be linked to a crime.

It still accorded police wide powers to chase suspected cybercriminals -- powers some critics say go beyond what is legal in some Council member states or in observer countries like the United States, Canada and Japan due to sign the treaty.

ZDNet - Internet founder worried over EU cybercrime plans.

BRUSSELS --Vint Cerf, a founding father of today's Internet, said on Thursday that European Union plans for new rules to fight crime on the Web risked clashing with existing EU privacy regulations.

Cerf, who helped develop the Internet in the early 70s shortly after graduating from Stanford University and now works for WorldCom, said more secure network systems were an immediate priority for the successful development of the ubiquitous Web.

He told Reuters in an interview that Internet traffic should be retained only for billing purposes and was too cumbersome to be stored for police investigations.

Changes to a controversial treaty on cybercrime have done nothing to improve it, say civil liberty campaigners.

Next week, the Council of Europe will vote on the treaty, which has been redrafted 26 times before reaching its final version late in May.

The most recent changes were made to take into account the fears of civil liberty and privacy campaigners. But cyber-rights groups say the latest changes are purely cosmetic and have not diluted what they describe as its most pernicious sections.

The groups say that, if adopted in its current form, the treaty could lead to changes in legislation that would stifle rights to privacy and do little to curb the activities of law enforcement agencies.

[ ... ]

In December 2000, 23 organisations, banding together under the banner of the Global Internet Liberty Campaign (GILC), signed a letter condemning the 25th draft of the treaty as "appalling", and warned that it handed law enforcement agencies sweeping powers to snoop and could seriously erode online privacy.

Now, three civil liberty groups, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Privacy International, have sent another letter to the Council of Europe outlining their "continuing concerns" over the wording of the treaty and saying that their fears have not been laid to rest.

The letter chastises the Council of Europe for refusing to open up the redrafting debates to non-governmental organisations and for, it says, ignoring the human rights and privacy concerns of organisations such as the GILC.

It goes on to say that the original criticisms still stand, and that the treaty does not pay enough attention to existing laws which safeguard human rights. It says the treaty's recommendations on protecting privacy are vague and do not go far enough.

IT industry gurus have branded the Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime 'foolish, unworkable and a legal con trick'.

The controversial treaty provides a blanket legislation to deal with all forms of internet crime from hacking to online pornography.

Caspar Bowden, director of internet think-tank FIPR, said: "The Convention is essentially a legal con trick, drafted in secret by a handful of nameless bureaucrats. It equates the internet - a network of private networks - with 'cyberspace', a metaphor from science fiction.

"By this sleight of hand, the internet is defined as a public space over which law enforcement should be granted unfettered powers of surveillance and extradition," he added.

International policy-makers this week ended a round of talks aimed at setting common rules affecting online trade and commerce, but they made little progress in bridging divisions that threaten to delay the pact.

In the works for nearly a decade, the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments is still almost unknown outside international policy circles. Nevertheless, it could have broad implications for consumers and businesses by setting new rules for online copyrights, free speech and e-commerce--if it is approved.

Opposition to the treaty heated up Wednesday, when a two-week drafting session wrapped up with few concessions to critics, primarily from the United States, who say the pact threatens free speech and could force Internet service providers to become global content police.

"In a nutshell, it will strangle the Internet with a suffocating blanket of overlapping jurisdictional claims, expose every Web page publisher to liabilities for libel, defamation and other speech offenses from virtually any country, (and) effectively strip Internet service providers of protections from litigation over the content they carry," Jamie Love, director of Ralph Nader's Consumer Project on Technology (CPT), wrote in a report after the meeting.

The treaty is one of several efforts by the global community to grapple with a complicated legal issues on a borderless Web.

Four years ago, nations including the United States signed onto a World Intellectual Property Organization pact to protect copyright in the digital age. And several countries, including the United States, are hammering out the world's first cybercrime treaty, which would provide a standard for fighting online crime.

The Hague treaty differs from those efforts because it would not outline specific laws participants must follow. It's much broader, requiring participants to agree to enforce each others' laws on a variety of topics. As it stands, the treaty would require courts to enforce the commercial laws of the convention's 52 member nations, even if they prohibit actions that are legal under local laws.

BRUSSELS - The blueprint for a global code on Cyber-crime was agreed on in Strasbourg, France, Friday, paving the way for international rules governing online copyright infringement, online fraud, child pornography and hacking.

The 41 members of the Council of Europe (CoE), plus the U.S., Canada and Japan, signed on to a draft convention on cybercrime that is set to be rubber-stamped at ministerial level in September.

"Once adopted, the Convention will be the first international treaty on criminal offenses committed through the use of Internet and other computer networks," the Council of Europe said in a statement.

In September, the Council of Europe approved the Convention on cybercrime, a historic treatise that lays the foundation for legislation allowing for a greater sharing of information between countries to combat the rise of cybercrime.

The treatise isn't binding, but instead would have to be adopted into law by its 43 European member states and five outside countries including the United States, Canada and Japan.

The treaty is broad, covering crimes committed on the Internet such as fraud, child pornography and violations of computer network security. It also sets up global policing procedures for conducting computer searches, interception of e-mails, and extradition of criminal suspects.

More details on the CyberCrime Treaty can be found in the Privacy Digest archives dated September 26,2000, September 27,2000, October 09,2000, October 16,2000, October 18,2000, October 19,2000, October 25,2000, November 14,2000, November 20,2000, November 22,2000 and March 24,2001. This is not all the information at Privacy Digest and other sites so if you want to know more try a search

They maintian a set of shared Procmail filters; basically the idea is we forward all spam received to a special Panix email address, and if its deemed to indeed be spam, they add enough information to the filters so we don't receive any more junk from this particular source.

It seems to come in waves, probably depending upon how much spammers change their tactics, but I don't really get that much spam - overall averaging maybe half dozen out of about fifty or sixty legitimate emails per day.

By contrast I also have a shell account at The World, and don't use procmail there since I've never used nor distributed that email address.

Last week I opened my email there for the first time in about one year and MY GOD!IT WAS FULL OF SPAM!

The idea that a verilog description can infringe a patent is very problematic. Patents are supposed to teach an invention, but collect roalties on (or block) implementations. A verilog description is nothing more than a very detailed teaching of how to practice the art described in the patent. If the patent is valid (and you don't have any other objections to patent law in general) then there is no legal problem blocking someone from making a chip based on the verilog. But a patent holder has absolutely no right to block someone from teaching, in great detail, how to practice the art described in the patent (which after all was what the inventor was supposed to do when the patent was filed in the first place). Unless there is some trade secret misappropriation going on here, or unless ARM is claiming a copyright on their architecture that blocks any implementation of it, ARM appears to have no legal basis for what they are doing. As for the copyright theory, good luck getting that to stand in the US (see Lotus v. Borland).

My vote for the most obscure goes to FreeVMS. Warning: very little code got written and there hasn't been activity in years. But the way in which it failed was interesting: no one wanted to do anything unless it had the blessing of Digital ^W Compaq ^W Hewlett Paqard. The biggest leverage of the proprietary OS was over the minds of the users/enthusiasts/etc. One could argue about whether the legal issues were real, but the free unices managed to get around legal issues with Unix including the setuid patent.

I've put up a mirror (article there now, images should be up by the time you read this).

As for the article itself, this kind of published analysis is what makes the internet great - compare with the telephone system where each company keeps (more of) their analysis to themselves and engages in more finger-pointing.

"The major distinction between fantasy and science fiction is, simply, that science fiction uses one, or a very, very few new postulates, and develops the rigidly consistent logical consequences of these limited postulates. Fantasy makes its rules as it goes along...The basic nature of fantasy is "The only rule is, make up a new rule any time you need one!" The basic rule of science fiction is "Set up a basic proposition--then develop its consistent, logical consequences."

"'Hard' science fiction ... probes alternative possible futures by means of reasoned extrapolations in much the same way that good historical fiction reconstructs the probable past. Even far-out fantasy can present a significant test of human values exposed to a new environment. Deriving its most cogent ideas from the tension between permanence and change, science fiction combines the diversions of novelty with its pertinent kind of realism."

A handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method. To make this definition cover all science fiction (instead of "almost all") it is necessary only to strike out the word "future."

Quotes from http://www.panix.com/~gokce/sf_defn.html

Panix in NYC has a "catchall clause" like that, but it only says, "we reserve the right to terminate your account without refund for other kinds of nontrivial misbehavior, although in our
entire history we have never terminated an account for reasons other than those listed here."

http://www.panix.com/panix/rules.html

The Unabomber's Manifesto!

Well I have yet to see a CEO assasinated by environmentalist wackos.

Not for lack of trying.

Situationist
Adbusters
CorpWatch
AllYourBrand

etc.:
Independent Media Center
Metropolitic.net
You May Be An Anarchist And Not Even Know It (I too thought the "anarchy movement" was a load of crap from bored aggressive adolescents (they really spoil it for everybody don't they?) until reading this and realizing there really is a legitimate coherent philosophy behind it)
Mother Jones
In These Times
Poliglut
Protest.net (yes, sometimes there are actually legitimate reasons to protest)
PigDog journal
Unabomer Manifesto (he may have been labeled a wacko, but read it - he's not stupid and he does sorta have a point.)

For every innovation that has become an effortless part of people's lives -- the microwave oven, the fiber-tip pen -- there are hundreds of new technologies every year arriving faster than users can assimilate them or their makers can perfect them.
Now a line has been crossed. With gizmos mutating at wild rates, engineers love the endless stomach-churning ride of creating the firstest with the newest. They've dragged us along with them. We're climbing a slope of interlocking innovations so steep as to seem more like a cliff: Connections that won't, upgrades that can't, hot syncs that don't, standards that never are, wireless transmitters radiating who knows what, new seeds and life-forms burrowing in the ground and whisking through the air.

A small ISP that just offers a dial-up connection doesn't have the resources to compete with AOL and MSN and others. To succeed, an ISP needs to offer more than that - good deals on DSL/broadband, shell accounts, specialized content, whatever and they need to target a niche market and develop loyal customers who will not leave them for AOL. A Mom-and-Pop ISP isn't ripe for a takeover by a big ISP until a good number of their customers have actually left for other ISPs.

It seems like shell access is an endangered species, as ISPs prefer lower maintenance web / email only type of accounts.

One of my shell ISPs, panix.com , recently picked up a lot of ex-netcom users once that ISP dropped shell access.

1. Gore and Bush are so similar that it doesn't make any difference. One pays lip service to family values and the Christian right, the other to community organising and progressive values. When in power, they both serve the Party of the Fortune 500.

2. Change within the DP is nearly impossible. (ref: Jesse Jackson)

3. Only one of two things will change this - either the new non-Democratic left (now under the Green / Nader banner, but not irrevocably attached to the Greens) smashes the Democratic Party, or they get splittered and smashed, and the DP remains the only electoral hope of the left. Obviously this process will be painful, but it is a price worth paying.

Peter

Yeah, sure, group theory and physics, but that was in the past, and times have changed. Science is dead, haven't you heard? killed sixty years ago by the secrecy of the Manhattan Project. Literature is dead, too, kidnapped and murdered by the Disney Corporation and the Sonny Bono (that jackass!) Copyright Act, all so a disgusting cartoon rat might continue to generate profits.

slashdot is a site devoted to hacking but the Digital Millenium (thousand-year-Reich) Copyright Act has made non-corporate computer programming a jailable felony; look at a MS Word document that you yourself wrote with a hex editor, and it's off to Miniluv for you.

Non-human psuedo-intelligent entities with indefinite and potentially endless life spans control society these days, and you have no right these days to disobey them, or even to complain. These entities are known as "corporations." Shut up, keep your head down, and work. Stockholders demand your labor; for just so long as your labor continues to increase their wealth, you'll be allowed to continue to eat.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

$100 per year prepaid. Netcom just turned off it's last shell accounts. Quite a few former Netcommies have switched to Panix.

Take Social Security for example. There is no question that social security will go bankrupt, it is only a question of when.

Summary: the prediction that Social Security will go bust assumes that economic growth over the next 75 years will be less than half what it was for the last 75. There's no justification for such a gloomy prediction, and if it comes true, then how can the stock market do any better? The article also addresses streetlawyer's "dependency ratio" argument.

Even if it turns out that Social Security is underfunded, Congress could patch the system perfectly well by making more income subject to Social Security tax (right now, wages over about $70K/year, and all capital gains, are exempt from the tax), by allowing in more (young, working) immigrants, or by pushing the retirement age up a year or two.
--

you might be more effective if you didn't start with the insulting presumption that i don't know anything about nader and that's why i'm voting for him. on the contrary, is it just possible that i'm voting for nader because i know something about him? in that case, a more detailed critique would at least be debatable.

for myself, i'm no great nader apologist, and i have my own problems with him. doug henwood had a good leftist critique of nader back in 96 which is still useful today on two scores: 1) why leftists might have problems with nader, and (2) why leftists should still vote for him. the scene is a little different now, but much of this is still applicable, adding in the fact that votes for nader could get matching funds for the greens -- ahem, mr. environment.

i realize nader isn't going to fly among libertarians and objectivists, but let's not expect potshots to be persuasive to people who have actually thought about voting for nader.

It's funny you should mention the TCP SYN attacks on Panix, because I actually did E-mail a description of this problem to the CERT a full three years before it was actually used as a denial of service attack. I also wrote to the IETF main mailing list a more general observation about denial of service attacks, and the need for all ISPs to do ingress filtering of packets based on IP source address in order to have a first approximation of DoS attack source (who you then go and stomp).

The CERT didn't get it. They did nothing about it until Panix was attacked.

The responses on the IETF list mostly moaned about the cost of adding all those filters to all those CPE routers, and how ingress filtering would stomp one mode for mobile IP...

Three years later, people were a whole lot more interested in dealing with this.

If you don't believe it's a viable business model, here is a list of 'Space Advertisements''

...at least IAM / IAS (whatever) didn't have B1FF design their website.

--

• Free-VMS Official Homepage
• Jim Kingdon's Free-VMS page
• Steve Lindsey's Free-VMS page
• David J. Dachtera'Ý"Dee-VMS page

The parody ad on Stay Free! Magazine looks like it's for an iGat. :) But with a clear case, so much for flash supression. :)

Noam Chomsky Political Texts Online: Noam Chomsky's a professor of linguistics at MIT, and has been writing about the effects of capitalism on democracy for over 20 years.

The Left Business Observer: A hard look at the messages of capitalism's cheerleaders, from an analytical economist's point of view. Plenty of charts and graphs.

Stay Free! Magazine: A zine focusing on commercialism and consumer culture. Slashdot readers will probably enjoy the mean iMac ad parody on the front page.

Francis Hwang

Was the hoax a sort of virus itself?

Yes, but it wasn't a computer virus. It was more like a social virus or a thought virus.

When someone on alt.folklore.urban asked if the virus was for real, Clay Shirky (clays@panix.com) answered:

"Its for real. Its an opportunistic self-replicating email virus which tricks its host into replicating it, sometimes adding as many as 200,000 copies at a go. It works by finding hosts with defective parsing apparatus which prevents them from understanding that a piece of email which says there is an email virus and then asking them to remail the message to all their friends is the virus itself."

• "The 'killer app' well may turn out to be a cyberspatial locus where people meet to collaboratively develop and digest their own content relating to how they make their respective livings."

Well if that isn't a description of SlashDot, I don't know what is!

Circumfrence of a 3" diameter platter is 3*PI or 9.42"-ish. If this is spinning at 30,000rpm (just for fun :) the outer edge is moving at 282743ish inches per minute. This is a useless unit of measure so let's convert it to feet per second - divide by 12 and then by 60. 392 feet per second.

I don't know off hand how forward motion correlates to centrifugal force, but if it is 1:1, then those bits of metal are attempting to spin off the drive at 392 feet per second, that's 40G's. If the outer portion of the head weighs 1 oz (very much an overestimate) then it has to withstand 40oz of force. 2.5 lbs. Distributed evenly, a piece of aluminum foil could withstand that. :)

Now, if the head arm breaks off (don't laugh, I've seen it :), wedging one side of the platter against the drive casing, the other side of the platter is going to hit the other side of the case with 2.5lbs of force moving at 392 feet per second wedging it against the other side of the casing.

Platters (being flat plates) are stronger in tension than compression, they may not be able to handle what amounts to a well-hit baseball impacting them on-edge if the metal used in the disk run was suspect. It could crumple an extremely brittle platter, leaving it unable to handle any remaining tension forces.

Of course, if all of that energy from moving 2.5 lbs at 392 feet per second was used in crushing the platter, there wouldn't be any left to cause the platter to fly apart and puncture the drive casing.

I'm sure some of the math in that was off by an order of magnitute (I'm really not at all sure about the centrifugal forces involved), but if so, it's off in the direction of safety.

However, if a platter did disintegrate, it would sound really cool.. :)

I would be more concerned about the turbofan on your average airliner losing a 3' blade spinning around at 500mph to slice clean through the adjacent hydraulics line causing the plane to catch fire and the pilot to lose control seconds before landing causing it to crash into the airfield.

Oh, wait, that's already happened.

Goggle has a backup of this, here goes the link

This is also covered by New Scientist, here goes the link

But speeding cars limit my freedom to enjoy a car-free, bicycle-based life. I'm all for the scheme; anything that makes a car more expensive must be good.

We have a culture of speeding here that doesn't seem to be the case in the US. It's got to be stopped.

The Challenger got caught in a very big fireball (aka an EXPLOSION!!) which killed seven crew members. Technically the Challenger was enveloped in a "massive, almost explosive, burning of the hydrogen streaming from the failed tank bottom and liquid oxygen breach in the area of the intertank." The blast was also called, in this report, an explosive burn.

The issue of whether or not this was an explosion, pretty much means nothing to all the crew who died:

Francis R. "Dick" Scobee, Spacecraft Commander
Michael J. Smith, Pilot
Judith A. Resnik, specialist
Ronald E. McNair, specialist
Ellison S. Onizuka, specialist
Gregory B. Jarvis, a payload specialist
Sharon Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher to fly in space

I know this is about 'inaccuracies' but this is a very petty 'inaccuracy'. It does nothing to eclipse the magnitude and total avoidability of this tragedy, or its effects upon the kids glued to the TV set at school to see a teacher go into space, only to instead see a shuttle explode - or burn up - or however you wanna describe it.

It still sucked.

Summary for those who don't want to read:

Amazon has spammed. They have hit mailing lists. Mostly, they spam customers, without waiting for permission. They occasionally "lose" opt-out requests. They stay solidly committed to opt-out spamming, rather than opt-in mailings. Amazon employees have posted to Usenet via DejaNews as "customers", without mentioning what you'd find if you did an nslookup on NNTP-Posting-Host.

They are scum, they are liars, and they are not worth your time.

http://www.powells.com/ (Powell's Books) is a better deal. I've never been spammed by them, and neither has my mom (I bought her a gift certificate there last year.) By contrast, she bought a book from Amazon, and has gotten a number of mailings.

I had a long talk with my boss, Brad Hilton (Manager Systems Development for Hilton Hotels Corp) last week when the news broke about "Hilton in space". While he and I would love to have hotels in space, that we would have to install servers in ourselves, he also stated that the technology to keep people safe is not there, yet. The liability of having something go wrong is just too big of a risk right now. If we were to much of a rush to go into space industry, after the first accident, the industry would be dead for 5-10 years after, as better safety measures are engineered.
The idea is not a new one, by a long shot. Brad's uncle, Barron Hilton gave this address in 1967, and if you watch 2001, you will see the space station in the beginning sporting the Hilton logo.
Brad perdicts that there will be a Hilton in space, some day... by 2100 maybe, but when the exact date it opens depends on technology advances, funding, and demand by the public. If it costs $1,000,000 a night plus "air fare", only the richest of the rich will be able to go.
It is not on the radar screen right now, but the idea is out there, right now Hilton is too busy trying to combine the hotel systems of acquired company Promus and ours

Hmm... Hilton Hotels designing a Lunar hotel.

Well, this address by President Hilton discusses the company's looking at space...in 1967. No $/kilo mentioned.

• Space Tourism Initiative
• SpaceFuture's Tourism page
• Space Markets: Tourism
• The Prospects for Space Tourism
• Zegrahm Space Voyages (wait until 2002)
• Artemis Project: Recreation (mostly lunar)