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"It requires entering your full name, address, and date of birth, and then proceeds to submit it via an unencrypted HTTP POST"

If I wanted a list of names, birth dates and addresses to use for nefarious purposes I don't need to steal yours from some dinky website or sniff packets. I'd just take one of the plentiful lists of birth records on the internet like this one then cross reference it with property tax records of the area which are more plentiful than the birth records and it'll give probable name, dob, and address combinations. A good portion of probable matches can be confirmed through freely available court records. All of that data is fairly trivial to collect in bulk (i used to collect databases, was a pretty fun hobby actually), is perfectly legal and will provide a much better profile of matches than just name/dob/addr combinations stolen from a website or data stream.

Being that anal about your name, birth date and address is actually quite silly. Theres so much low hanging fruit as far as collecting that type of data is concerned (and you're probably already included in it) that all you really did by not continuing with that form was taking yourself out of the running for a Wii.

The best thing you can really do is just keep close tabs on your credit report and get signed up for all the fraud alerts or freezes they offer. Thats the best place to prevent and quickly repair most identity theft. Stop being so anal about info thats almost guaranteed to be out there already, set up your defenses where they're most effective and go get your Wii.

We have a family camp on Lake Utopia in New Bruswick. So my favorite monster would have to be the Lake Utopia Monster.

http://www.rootsweb.com/~nbpstgeo/stge8n.htm

Of course, we always take Lake Utopia monster sightings with a grain of salt. The lake is near the ocean, so when the fog rolls in it is hard to see your hand in front of your face at times. In addition, like most lakes, you have people who have been out all day fishing in the sun drinking beer...

David

You just need to mount the turbine with the axis vertical. The principle's quite old.

Billing information and shipping information must be provided by deCODEme users in order to buy a Genetic Scan. Both of these information are collected by PayPal ; however only the shipping information is stored in the deCODEme database. Once the buccal swab kit has been sent to users, they are free to delete their shipping information from their profile (my settings).

deCODE may disclose your personal information only if we believe such action is necessary to: comply with the law or legal process served up on deCODE or to protect and defend the rights or property of deCODE in relation to your agreement with deCODEme. Except for the above, deCODE will under no circumstances provide any 3'rd party, including insurance companies, health management organizations, hospitals, and government agencies, access to any of your personal data or data derived from your samples unless you grant us an explicit authorization in your privacy settings.

I contacted the support team at deCODEme this morning. You will receive the raw data along with reference numbers for the SNPs.

CLEARLY, Jobs would not make a very good Ferengi. He doesn't have the LOBES...

He's violating # 1 and #299:

1. Once you have their money, never give it back *
299. Whenever you exploit someone, it never hurts to thank them. That way, its easier to exploit them the next time.

BUT I wonder how many of these go through the minds of board room execs....:

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~wakefield /ferenghi.html

1. Once you have their money, never give it back *

2. You can't cheat an honest customer, but it never hurts to try

12. Anything worth selling is worth selling twice
13.Anything worth doing is worth doing for money
14. Anything stolen is pure profit
16. A deal is a deal (...until a better one comes along) *
19. Don't lie too soon after a promotion
20. When the customer is sweating, turn up the heat
23. Never take the last coin, but be sure to get all the rest
53. Sell first; ask questions later
55. Always sell at the highest possible profit
64.Don't talk shop; talk shopping
65.Don't talk ship; talk shipping
67. Enough is never enough
68.Compassion is no substitute for profit
70. Get the money first, then let the buyers worry about collecting the merchandise
82.A smart customer is not a good customer

115.Greed is eternal

125. A lie isn't a lie until someone else knows the truth
144. Theres nothing wrong with charity... as long as it winds up in your pocket

161. Never kill a customer, unless you make more profit out of his death than out of his life

162.His money is only your's when he can't get it back.

208. Give someone a fish, you feed him for one day. Teach him how to fish, and you lose a steady customer

http://members.tripod.com/~ds9promenade/Ferengi_Ru les.html

299. Whenever you exploit someone, it never hurts to thank them. That way, its easier to exploit them the next time.

If V. Tech (like may schools) didn't ban firearms on its grounds, it's probable that some people in either group would have been armed and could have defended themselves.

What a can of worms this opens. If someone is disturbed enough and really wants to kill lots of people in a school, they will find a way.

Putting more guns in more hands won't stop someone determined enough. It just changes their game plan. I'll leave it up to your imagination on how you stop gun violence lest I open another can of worms altogether.

Thanks to democrats (neo-luddites?), the US doesn't already have this technology. Know your (recent) history.

http://www.rootsweb.com/~txecm/super_collider.htm

http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/03/ssc-and-clinton- administration.html

Pullman was a piker compared to the mining companies. You ever hear this old song?

Sixteen Tons
Sang by Tennesse Ernie Ford

Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man's made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal
And the straw boss said "Well, a-bless my soul"

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

I was born one mornin', it was drizzlin' rain
Fightin' and trouble are my middle name
I was raised in the canebrake* by an ol' mama lion
Cain't no-a high-toned woman make me walk the line

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

If you see me comin', better step aside
A lotta men didn't, a lotta men died
One fist of iron, the other of steel
If the right one don't a-get you, then the left one will

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

" This song could definately be the battle cry of the American Miner. Miners were usually paid monthly. By the end of the month, they owed the company for the company house they were living in, for the tools they used to mine, for groceries to feed their family, and for any doctor bills. Miners had no choice but to buy from the companies. They were paid in scrip, not real money and this could only be spent at the company store.

        Naturally this enabled the company to charge the miners whatever they wished. Most miners with families were constantly in debt to the company. When the miners did get paid at the end of the month, if there was any money left after they paid their employers, it was certainly not enough to last them another month. So it was a viscious cycle, and the next month, they again had to pay the company first and were lucky to have anything left for their families. "

Taken from http://www.rootsweb.com/~wvcoal/sixteen.html

When I heard the phrase "Life: brought to you by mining" it reminded me of one of my favorite songs "Sixteen Tons".

"You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt..."

Sixteen Tons

I think the facts you state are a bit distorted. This would have occurred in an internment camp or prison camp, where the inmates could only posses radios incapable of long-range SW reception. Thus people in the camps would have voluntarily modified radios to meet the requirements, so they could at least listen to local broadcasting. You make it sound like electrical engineers were sneaking into houses to make modifications out in the general public. Considering how strained resources were during WWII that is ludicrous.

According to this site,
Prisoners could attend censored motion pictures and possess and operate a standard radio receiver that was incapable of shortwave reception. Prisoners were also allowed to attend religious services within the camp and were permitted to receive visitors twice a month who were related to the prisoner as wife, child, parent, brother, sister, grandparent, uncle, or aunt.

Further up in that article it states that Wisconsin had at least one such camp. If you've got any references to the contrary I'd be interested in reading through them (seriously).

Dan East

Real rail guns have names like "Big Bertha", "Julie" or "the Paris Gun".

Physics geeks need to make up a new name for their amped-up jacob's ladders and stop stealing googlespace and wikishare from World War veterans.

Why can't it be a spark gun? A jake gun? A Tesla gun? Oh, that last one's taken.

Don't forget about unions. They are all about letting the cream rise to the top... Wait a second, no they aren't. Oh well.

How about looking up tax records or real estate assessments?

Roland's in Sequoyah County. Here's their web site (best I could find):

http://www.rootsweb.com/~oksequo2/

Here in Central Illinois, the story is well known of a circuit riding preacher who was caught out in the sub-sero temperatures of the initial blizzard that started on December 20th, 1830. He managed to survive the night by killing his horse and using it's body warmth. For over two weeks the temperature stayed below -12 degrees F. The article here doen't have that story, but it does describe the conditions that Winter.

No, not virtual slaves.

In the 1860s, a typical laborer in the United States or Canada might make $.50 to $4 US a day, while say a teacher would make $500-600 a year or $1.36-$1.64 dollars a day and a professor might make $1200-1500 a year

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~wjmartin/ schools.htm
http://www.vmi.edu/archives/records/smith/60may003 .html

For Genealogy data, the de-facto standard file format is GEDCOM. Originally created by the LDS Church (the Mormons), virtually any decent genealogy program will support the format.

While it's a somewhat ugly text-based, flat-file format, it does permit organization of information in ways that will be useful to genealogists and researchers.

did somebody say black, matt and angular?

You know nothing, spelling Nazi

Shew, fly

Gates is providing a valid reason for patenting as much as possible since innovation is grinding to a halt because of patenting. So, he is saying the patent system is bad, but that MS needs to patent as a result.

Stallman is pointing out that innovation is grinding to halt because of patents. So he is saying the patent system is bad, and hence patents are bad.

So they both actually agree that patents are bad, and they are both acting according to their principles in this bad system.

This is a the tragedy of the commons situation, where the intellectual "property" commons is being fenced off by people now standing on the shoulders of giants of the past. The people fencing off the property are preventing others from wandering into what used to be an open knowledge commons, a commons which in the past used to be shared. Because the resources of this commons are inexhaustible, there is no fundamental reason to restrict it. There is no fundamental reason to have a system of patents that make human knowledge subject to a land run.

That is why intellectual "property" is intellectual theft when you actually start examining the premises.

Gate's intellectual landgrab is quite legal, and hence not regarded as theft. Indeed, he is doing absolutely and clearly the right and sensible thing in the current system.

The way to fix the problem would actually be to do away with the patent system.

Show me a group bigger than 100 people that has "no politics"

Here you go.

This Sunday times article starts with the latter part of the story. Complete, but brief, story can be found here and here.

This article gives a list of kings, but nothing about the disaster.

In the article comments at Blue Lemur:

69. can anyone confirm the manner and date of raymond lemme's death?

Editor's Note: We're waiting on approval to publish details from the police reports tomorrow. We've confirmed that he was found dead on July 1, 2003 at a Knights Inn, Room 132, Valdosta GA according to the police report. This end was actually one of the first things we sought to check to determine whether the source was credible in his other claims.

Checking SSDI sites (props to a poster on DU who found this info), you can come up with:

Raymond C. Lemme
Born: Feb 21 1947
Died: Jul 1 2003
Issued: Michigan
ssdi search

I don't know what Issued: Michigan means though.

this old fashioned enough for you?

The company in Ohio that made the bulb, Shelby Electric, is no longer operating as an independent entity because they were absorbed by GE back in 1914. And somehow, GE doesn't seem to produce any 100 year light bulbs! I wonder why...

This is something most people never think about. You actually could have several passwds that work for a given account...anything that hashes to the same thing is a working passwd.

Another neat example of this principle at work is the soundex hash function, which was designed for the US Census to lookup names. It encodes a name such as Johnson as an alphanumerical code J525. Other, similar names, such as Jonsson, Joganson and even Jamieson and Jenkins are converted to J525 as well. In this way, even if people's names are misspelled in some way in the census (or when they were registered at birth; family names tend to evolve over time) they can still be found by a reasonable approximation.

And because the soundex hash is computed when the records are stored, there isn't the kind of overhead that you'd get from a regular expression/glob search over all the records.

The modest computational requirements for what amounts to a very clever phonetic lookup mechanish aren't surprising in a way; Soundex was patented in 1918.

You can play with soundex on this page.

Now imagine your password was stored as a soundex hash.. Ouch! Even if someone looking over your shoulder when you type in your password got half the letters wrong, he'd still get in!

This is exactly why it's so important that cryptographic one-way hashes don't regularly produce the same hash. The name for finding a password that's not the same, but hashes the same is a birthday attack, named after the birthday paradox.

This is the reason why you should salt!

Anyway, dear /. editors, it's a great way to ruin a story. 90% of posts in this discussion are offtopic, just because you did a typo (for those who plan to mod me down - I did posted a serious comment already, have mercy!).

The development of the BSDs is handsomely illustrated here.

Could you send some of those photos to The BCGS

In the comments of 39 days ago, this story from a year earlier was mentioned- it celebrated the 25th anniversary of spam, and the 10th of the first description of Usenet spam as "spam." So now we're up to the 11th and 26th anniversaries!

The traditional gift for the 11th anniversary is steel (knives? axes?), and while I'm not seeing one for the 26th, I'm thinking a hand carved wooden stake would be appropriate, given just how evil spam is... assuming that current spammers even have hearts through which a stake could cure their demonic afflictions.

Dude, it's true. Give the dead some respect, eh?

Here's a link to it

Trust me, those religious nuts will have you arrested.

I don't want to argue about what word to use. You first used the word exploitation. I used exploitation instead of rape to distinguish between something wrong and something illegal and wrong. The real point: I say no exploitation/RAPE was committed. You say it was. Putting it in bold isn't going to elucidate anything. I would rather continue with less rhetoric.

Does that matter? She was still WAY TOO YOUNG. Quit changing the subject.

I say: Such-and-such is why she was not too young. You say: Does that matter? She was still too young. Then you say I'm changing the subject.

Show me the references which state that it was "culterally acceptable" for 40 year old men in the US to marry 14 year old girls. Show me!

Okay, this is tedious, and I'm beginning to doubt that you care to learn anything on this subject, but I'll do it. My method: search Google for "19th century marriages". First result I found of marriage records in the time in question: here. Of course, there are a variety of ages. Very common are marriages of men in their twenties marrying teenaged girls. Here are some age disparities you might find to be comparable to the one you sheesh'ed in the original post:

21 June 1852, Port Huron
William Sanderson, 31, Port Huron
Catherine Lane, 15, Port Huron
William Weaind & Abigail Richmond, both of Port Huron; William Taylor, Minister

17 May 1840, Algonac
Charles L. Poole, 36, Clay, Boot Shoemaker
Mariene Chortie, 16, Clay, Seamstress, P: Charles Chartier & Elizabeth Meny
Flora Stafford & Betsey Ainsworth; John K. Smith, JP

24 June 1841, Clyde
Abraham Sprague, 28, Port Huron
Nancy Osmer, 14, Port Huron
George W. Palmer & Mary Palmer, both of Port Huron; James I. Vincent, JP

How about Effi Briest? Set in the late 19th century, it's a novel about a teenaged girl who marries a man who is about forty years old. That's not Effi's problem, though, it's that her husband works too much and she doesn't have any friends in the town where they move to. People call the novel "typical of 19th century Victorian morality" and the marriage "a not untypical 19th century marriage."

There. If the first links I find on Google aren't good enough, then I say it's your turn to look it up in a source that pleases you. But don't worry; I don't expect to admit that you're wrong. In fact, chances are so slim, it won't be worth checking back here. Have a nice life, though.

Well, before I go, I should say that I found a couple of non-related points you made amusing, and since you seem to like me to comment on your irrelevancies, I would be remiss to fail to oblige. First, on changing subjects. My first post merely pointed out that in the 19th century it wouldn't have been strange for a young girl to marry an older man. As it (all too slowly) seemed to dawn on you that you were absolutely wrong, instead of taking it like a man, you ignored my point, and started attacking me (implying that I condoned rape (and that if I disagreed with you I wanted to rape your children?)) and Joseph Smith (with the whole coercion issue, about which I am ignorant, and am not particularly interested in), as if it were our fault that you had made a fool of yourself. Second, you seem to have assumed that I am a Christian, and, probably, a Mormon. Funny that you should rationalize that the only way that someone could possibly tell you that you were wrong would be if he adhered to a different ideology.

Thanks for all of the EMPHASIS ,

AC

My parents were heavily involved in politics in Oak Ridge, Tennessee from the late 1960s. From roughly the 1920s until Estes Kefauver and Al Gore, Sr. broke their back in the 1950s, the Crump Machine ran TN politics the way the Daley Machine ran Chicago. The bizarre thing about the Crumps was that they were a Democratic machine in West and Middle TN and a Republican machine in East TN (goes back to the Civil War, East TN was pro Union). The remnants of this bunch still ran Roane County until 1970. The end of the local bunch came when my parents helped build a county wide coalition to oppose the machine in the local elections of 1970 (IIRC). The coalition had left wing McGovern types, Segregationist George Wallace American Party members, and right wing Republicans who thought Richard Nixon could do no wrong. The one thing this disparate group had in common was a desire for honest elections and honest local government. Although nowhere near as dramatic as the Battle for McMinn County, Tennessee, winning did require the coalition to liberate some of the ballot boxes from machine clutches in order to have a fair accounting of votes.

Having personally witnessed what can be required to prevent election shenanigans by dishonest politicians, I want open voting systems with auditable paper trails.

I agree about the silly placement of Tallahassee. However, while Apalachicola would have been a nice town to choose as the capital, I'm not sure it would have grown as easily into a city with a 100,000+ population. Maybe they should've chosen Two Egg instead... :^)

I've been in Boston before, only for a short while when I was a kid though. All I can remember was the road leading into Logan Int'l -- a billion lanes, a billion cars, all moving about one billionth of a mile per hour... I hope all of Boston isn't like that! :^) Thankfully, I've heard great things otherwise.

You gotta invide to Canada first in order to pick me up. And last time USA has invided Canada in 1812-1814 war it was the most shameful disaster in the history of all american miltary loses.

Yes, there's a lot of kooky stuff there. But it's not 100% kooky.

1. Depleted uranium has been classified by the UN (yeah, yeah) as an illegal weapon. The more I read on DU, the more concerned I get. Check this interview and this site for some info.

2. Please don't confuse criticism of the policies of the Israeli administration with 'Jew-hating'. It's a diservice to all concerned. Including those of us whose ancestors lived through anti-Semitic pogroms, but who may not think that the Israeli government has the right idea.

I would consider it fundamental to at least have basic knowledge of the last 500 years of political history...

Well you'd know that the US didn't exist 500 years ago, right? But that's beside the point. Let's have a little history lesson.

Remember the 80's, when the USSR was touted as having the best health care system in the world, since it was all free? I mean, the government paid for it, but it was free! And all the doctors were women! It was like a democrat's wet dream. But then the Berlin wall came down, and the USSR collapsed in on itself... and we learned the truth. They had third-world style hospitals and most people never got the care they needed. But obviously that was something that was specific to the USSR, and the same thing would never happen here, right? So let's just suck up the money from the people that work for a living, and give it a try! After all, the only thing we have to lose is our lives!

How about taxes? Since YOU said you like to go back 500 years for reference, maybe you'd like to know that the Founding Fathers specifically stated that Congress "no tax shall be laid unless in proportion to the census". Oh, and about the 16th amendment? Before the Democrats passed it in 1913, the Supreme Court found it Unconstitutional. Imagine that. So, Federal Income Tax is Unconstitutional. While we raise the federal income tax, we should also probably raise the state income tax... just in case there isn't enough money being drained out of "working families" pockets.

Education? Well, let's consider. Here's a test that was actually given to 8th graders in 1895. Can you pass it now? Can you get over 50%? Maybe our current education system isn't working then. Maybe it's time to hold children accountable for what they know, and what they don't know. If they can't pass a test, they don't pass the grade. Period. I don't see what's so hard about that. If more than 50% of the class doesn't pass a test, then fire the teacher. No more teacher's unions and whining about money. There are PLENTY of people out there looking for jobs as teachers that would be more than happy to show you how much children can learn.

Environment? The earth, according to all kinds of scientists, is over 10,000,000,000 years old. Do you REALLY think that us driving SUV's is going to kill the environment? The earth has survived earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, meteor showers, explosions, fires, radiation from the sun, UV rays, etc. Do you really think using 0.0005% more gasoline to get from point A to point B is REALLY going to make Mother Nature shiver in her boots?

Any other questions?

so the sinking of the Caroline was actually 25 years AFTER the war of 1812, and done by British troops, not Canadians, so if you're using this as a "precedent" for the doctrine of anticipatory self-defence, it doesn't stand up, just like the ever-changing reasons for invading Iraq.

from: A short history of Newport news

The background of Newport News is unique, complex and colorful.

Origins of the city's name are uncertain, but references to its existence are found as early as 1619. The name may commemorate English mariner Capt.Christopher Newport who made five voyages to Virginia between 1607 and 1619. Capt. Newport was among the most important men connected with the permanent settling of Virginia, having been "in sole charge and command" of the small squadron of three ships making the historic voyage which landed at Jamestown in 1607.

One popular explanation of the city's name holds that when the first Jamestown colonists set out to return to England after the Starving Time of 1610, they encountered Captain Christopher Newport's ship in the James River off Mulberry Island (now Fort Eustis). From Capt. Newport, they learned it was not necessary to abandon Jamestown, as reinforcements of men and supplies had arrived - thus the city was named for "Newport's good news."

Numerous early documents and maps verify the city's name was formerly recorded as "Newport's News" and "Newportes News." The change to "Newport News" may have resulted from language usage. In 1851 "New Port News" was sanctioned as the name of the first post office by the Post Office Department, and in 1866 the department approved the name as "Newport News." No matter how the city came by its name, seafarers played an integral role in founding Newport News, which began as a fishing village and is now among the finest natural harbors in the world.

Shakespear(no 'e')

Friend, you might want to look that up.

My Ancestors and their offspring.

Visit Rootsweb

If, for instance, the democratic process was subverted in some way, We The People were expected to take up our arms and restore proper government.

And it has happened. More than once.

The poster-child for this is the Battle of Athens, where returning WW II veterans overthrew a pair of political machines by force of arms.

Another less reputable example is the San Francisco Vigilance Committee's "Second Clensing" in which the cleaned out the Barbary Coast political machine.

But there are plenty more.

Note that "law and order" is just the institutionalization of vigilantism, with checks against misapplying penalties in the heat of the moment. If the instution breaks down, the people often will take the power back into their own hands, from which (according to the US's legal theories) it originates.

People in the US are normally loathe to do this except under extreme circumstances, and generally use their power to restore the institutions to proper function rather than replace them outright. (Even the Revolution started as a battle to recover what the colonists perceived as the "Rights of Free Englishmen")

Mmm. Bundled Software. This is what made the Osborne sell (in addition to it luggability)

CP/M, Wordstar, MailMerge, SuperCalc, CBASIC, MBASIC. Here is a picture of an ad for the Osborne. link

a great screenshot of it.

Haha. Piqua was always the "Shelbyville" to Troy's "Springfield".

FUNFACT: when Troy was picked as the county seat, back in the day, the rivalry was already so bad that Troy built the courthouse so that the statue on top had its ass pointed at Piqua.

This thread is the funniest article I ever read on slashdot, just because it's so fun to watch Piqua get creamed so bad by people who have never even had to set foot in it to trash-talk...

Hey, don't get me wrong, Troy's no prize-pig itself, resembles the real 'Springfield' in far too many ways, but you can't grow up there without picking up the old rivalries from your entire community... teachers, parents, neighbors, ministers, mayor... They're going to be laughing at the library gaffe for a long time.

Haha so am I... =)

They tell that same joke in Wales and Scotland (scroll down each page until you see it).

It harkens back to an even earlier generation WKRP

Hey, you're young and swingin',
No time to think about tomorrow
But there ain't no way to deny it
Some day, you're gonna buy it.
Plan today,
Go with Googleman
Tomorrow!
Googleman, Googleman,
he's the man with the plot, the man with the plan!
Googleman, Googleman,
He's the search man who loves you!
A lot!"

PGPDisk from PGP 6.5.8ckt (Build 8) should work under WinXP. I don't know how well PGPdisk works, since I had a few problems with the ckt version and uninstalled it after a short while.
You may try it. Maybe it works well for you.
PGP ckt Homepage