Slashdot Mirror

Do you have broadband?

They all come with a free security suite.

http://xfinity.comcast.net/constantguard/Products/CGPS/norton/
http://www.cox.com/css
www.att.com/esupport/article.jsp?sid=KB402441
http://www.rr.com/security
http://www22.verizon.com/home/utilities/security-backup

Perhaps you should do some googling, before claiming that RIAA can't raid your house, or put you in jail.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070117/163531.shtml

http://www.allbusiness.com/retail-trade/miscellaneous-retail-retail-stores-not/4385453-1.html

http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2007/11/albumbase-down/

http://features.rr.com/article/0bAa6maaGCexM?q=North+Carolina

http://www.riaa.net/newsitem.php?news_month_filter=5&news_year_filter=2004&resultpage=&id=482BFD6A-C0C6-71B2-F544-6E181B92A80A

Personally, I would just LOVE to have RIAA invade my home, my place of business, or even to just shake me down at a flea market or some such thing. I'm armed. SOMEONE will die. Hey, it could be me. But, the day that a RIAA rent-a-cop kills a US citizen over a civil matter, all hell will break loose.

Come on, RIAA - try to take me down. I can't lose.

The ISP is responsible for this problem, not Google.

Since when is it an ISP's responsibilty to secure their customers' wireless LANs?

1) Since they started selling wireless LANs to their customers.
2) I'm not talking about wireless, I'm talking about unencrypted access to email servers, which should concern you even if you DON'T use wireless, for the same reason you shouldn't perform financial transactions over an unencrypted connection.
3) Using wireless encryption may be a good idea, but that is NOT enough to provide safe electronic communication.

San Francisco, Ca - Mikhail Borovskiy (GNAP) - Moments after the announcement made by Steve Jobs that Apple would be changing the Macintosh computing platform from a PowerPC based CPU architecture to an Intel Pentium based architecture, GNAA executives jesuitx and timecop were visibly shaken. The announcement confirmed rumors started four days prior when C-Net News reported that this change would be taking place. As C-Net News was the first technical news source to report this story, most people assumed the truth would be somewhere near the polar opposite of their findings.

"Guys what is going on? It seems Apple is trying to market towards 'Straighties'! That's never going to work! Fuck Apple, Apple is dead to me, Apple hit WTC!" said jesuitx upon hearing the news. He was later seen backstage speaking with Apple's Vice-President of Marketing, Phil Schiller, quoted as saying "Phil, baby, this is massively fucked up. As a typical Macintosh user, and as a fellow Vice-President of Marketing [Gay Nigger Association of America], I can tell you there's no amount of spin you could put on this that will save you from losing support from the homosexual installed base [all Macintosh users] that has kept Apple Computer alive for so many years!"

timecop, founder and President of GNAA, is expected to renounce Apple, and order the immediate purchase of Chinese made IBM computers by it's members, 87% of which are Macintosh users, at the July 8th Copperfield Conference to be held in Kyoto, Japan. At the last Copperfield conference, held in Nome, Alaska, timecop had praised Apple for their continuous support of the homosexual community.

About Apple

Until today, Apple Computer was the creator of the Macintosh, popularly known as the "gay computer". 87% of GNAA members were Mac users. Founded in 1974 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Apple was nearly out of business in the mid 90's, when Jobs was rehired. He then started the now infamous iGay marketing scheme which involved both the Step 2 ???? Profit model, and a 100% effort towards marketing to homosexuals. Apple is nowadays run by fuckfaced retards.

About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?

If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY NIGGER community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America and the World! You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today!

Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!

• First, you have to obtain a copy of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it. You can download the movie (~130mb) using BitTorrent.
• Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA First Post on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website.
• Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on irc.gnaa.us, and apply for membership.

Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up tod

I took up the banjo and as the picture shows, it has done wonders for my social life (Safe For Work):

      http://professional-geek.com/personal/images/misc/jammin.jpg

Mark Edwards

If your ISP provided a free service where it would text or phone you and offer to help clean up your systems if it detected malware-ish behavior coming from your computer or network, would you sign up?

I'll take the odds that your cable ISP has a free Internet security bundle for Windows.

Security Center

OK, this is slashdot, so most people would say "no," but how many regular people would say "yes" and would that make much of a difference?

The uncomfortable truth about privacy is that is you are most likely to have it when you don't want it. But that is a lesson lost on the young.

Your Bell Telephone service was monitored for quality control for one hundred years. For most of those years, the phone was your lifeline.

Securing the network was in everyone's best interest.

Looks like it may have gone, but you can still get MLB.com premium audio and video through TW.

Doing the math (and using advertised vs actual transfer rates), that means the user gets only 2 minutes of transfer per day...

I found a screenshot of the new release - looks awesome!

I found a screenshot of the new release - looks awesome!

I hate jacking a high-up post, but it needs to be said that both McCain AND OBAMA were co-sponsors of this bill. "tragedy in chaos" is a hypocritical jackass, and this article's blurb needs amended.

... says a thousand words.

As someone who has bought and sold science fiction first editions on eBay for nigh on a decade now, and who currently has eBay feedback over 1000, I hope that this finally spurs Google to launch an eBay auction competitor to eat eBay's lunch. (Or, as you newfangled kids say these days when you're not getting the hell off my lawn, I hope Google drinks eBay's milkshake.)

The reason is that eBay has gone from being bringing buyers and sellers together to treating them like pinatas to be beaten with a stick to extract the maximum amount of money from them. Fees have only gone up, the changes made to feedback have been asinine, and eBay has let their core auction business language while they've been trying to turn themselves into an inferior clone of Amazon.

It's gotten so bad that I've reduced my listings by 98% since the new fee structure was announced (and most of the remaining 2% are books another writer asked me to sell on eBay on consignment)> It's simply insufficiently profitable for me to deal there anymore.

Since Google already has the infrastructure in place, I hope they come out with a Google Auctions, radically undercut eBay's fee structure (free for the first two years might do it), and either make eBay's repent or else drive them under entirely.

Why not? Certainly Google has enough computing infrastructure to run an auction business as big as eBay's without even noticing the loading, and I know they're smart enough to create an auction system from scratch.

Lawrence Person
Lame Excuse Books
http://home.austin.rr.com/lperson/lame.html

That's not true. See this screenshot. CTRL-C made you scroll down. Arrow keys were not used back then, so E and X were up and down, S and D left and right, A and F word left and right, and R and C scroll up and down.

Since my feedback just recently went over 1,000, eBay keeps sending me e-mail to jon the PowerSeller program. I told them what they could do with it...

Lawrence Person
Lame Excuse Books
http://home.austin.rr.com/lperson/lame.html

Road Runner, is this a good idea?

This sums it up.

Cool.

http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://www.google.com

Lest anyone think this demonstrates that Road Runner is intentionally blocking Google, the trick here is that you can arbitrarily edit the string after ?origURL= to produce a page describing any website couldn't be found.

• http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://www.apple.com
• http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://ww23.rr.com
• http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://slashdot.org

http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://www.google.com

Lest anyone think this demonstrates that Road Runner is intentionally blocking Google, the trick here is that you can arbitrarily edit the string after ?origURL= to produce a page describing any website couldn't be found.

• http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://www.apple.com
• http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://ww23.rr.com
• http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://slashdot.org

http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://www.google.com

Lest anyone think this demonstrates that Road Runner is intentionally blocking Google, the trick here is that you can arbitrarily edit the string after ?origURL= to produce a page describing any website couldn't be found.

• http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://www.apple.com
• http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://ww23.rr.com
• http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://slashdot.org

Coooool... you can make them say anything!

http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://www.google.com

http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://www.google.com

but TW is changing a lot of things recently. I just noticed starting on this past Friday that TW has their own search page load if you type in an invalid domain name. Similar to how IE would load an MSN (now it loads live.com) search page, TW now loads a search page with the domain of ww23.rr.com. Luckily they let users opt out so that your browser's normal error page is displayed but it is just another way for TW to annoy customers when they think they are trying to help. And of course do this unannounced. Their redirected search page is located here for anyone who is curious what it looks like. I hope the pilot project for tiered pricing falls flat on its face.

If we're going to consider systems that were released very recently, I think we should include the retro system that was released recently.

Like many others, I owned an Atari 2600 when I was about 6. I came to acquire a large number of games for it, which somehow I managed to stop my parents from throwing away. I still have those games, but of course the old 2600 doesn't hoot up to any TV I own, nor does it likely still function.

Enter the Atari flashback2. 40 games on a system that still uses my old Atari joysticks. And even better, people have already demonstrated how to hack it to play the original 2600 cartridges!

Now I just have to get my hands on a second one, so that if I screw up the hack, my wife and I can still play pong on the first flashback2 I bought...

-FL

In fact, Fuck, as in "Fuck you," isn't even properly a verb: English sentences without overt grammatical subjects. To summarize: "Fuck you or I'll take away your teddy bear" is not grammatically correct; neither is "Describe and fuck communism."

And, of course, XKCD has something to say about computational linguists.

I didn't read the entire paper, but after looking over the pretty pictures it looks like the sending party has to resend the message? That will only happen 50% of the time.

It could be greylisting, where the resend will be automatic. From the sender's point of view, there was just a delay. It's hard to say -- the article is not terribly well-written. The author's name is familiar, so googling on it turns up some other papers:

http://home.nyc.rr.com/spamsolution/UniversalAuthentication.htm

some discussion can be found here:

http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/asrg/current/msg12403.html

Its hard to tell from his summaries, but assuming the approaches are the same thing, it looks like he reinvented tagged addresses among other things. ALl in all, it looks grotesquely complex.

... such as the subsidence farm.

The unlimited internet promise appears to be made outside the US more than what I see here. I just don't see those claims made much, if at all in the US. A search on google for unlimted internet for me (mostly because google gives geography related search results) gives results for unlimited internet, but by that they mean an unlimited number of dialup internet minutes via 56k modem. Most of the large US ISPs will not show up in the first couple pages of google search results when one searches for the term "unlimited internet"--mostly dialup companies show up. Here are some of the main internet providers in the US--cable and phone companies:

ATT

Charter Communications

Time Warner

Verizon

Cox Cable

Qwest

And even evil Comcast

Find any claims of unlimited internet bandwidth from any major US ISP? Keep looking...you'll even find dislaimers saying explicitly that speed and bandwidth is not in any way guaranteed. Certainly those disclaimers are not front and center, but many have their disclaimers asterisk'd with notes on the main service description pages, so the disclaimers are not hard to find. The US has fairly clear and well enforced truth in advertising laws. Doesn't the UK?

I don't think anyone has any right to unlimited internet if I make no such claims, guarantees, or promises and especially if I specifically disclaim any such guarantee. The vast majority of US companies wouldn't make such a claim for fear of losing a class action lawsuit. It seems companies can make untrue claims about their products in the UK and not get sued? I certainly cannot in the US. That's a problem with your consumer rights laws, if they even exist.

Check this site http://home.rochester.rr.com/jbxroads/interests/al t.sci.math.probability/model.html Doesn't matter whether its muscle or fat -- being big costs you years. Muscle is better than fat for living longer, but you and I are still going to die earlier than if we were lighter. I am 61 years old, work out three times a week, have within the past two years had body fat percentage less than 10% (about 15% now); weigh 220 and am 74 inches tall (obese by their definition, but my waist is 37 inches -- supposedly ideal). All my "health statistics" are in an acceptable catatory, but heart disease will probably develop within the next 10 to 15 years (or maybe terminal senility LOL). Most of us won't live forever anyway. Good luck dude -- stay in shape no matter what they tell you!! Oh yeah, to the other guy, I had a friend who was 6'7" tall and weighed 300 lbs; he ran marathons in under 4 hours; a 6-min mile was no problem for him.

WarCraft III had this. You had to make a custom keys text file which the game would then read and use. This is a frontend to make that file:

http://home.houston.rr.com/keycraft/readme.html

Most people have a basic understanding of the workings -- if not the mechanics -- of a phone system.

The analogy extends nicely to DNS=Directory Assistance, so it's a pretty handy model.

Nothing like having your digital phone,internet,cable going dead all just about every month for hours on end. If you go to http://help.rr.com/ it's almost certain there's some kind of network problem happening at the moment or during the past couple of days. I remember when I first got Internet service from them. I felt kind of bad though, because right after the broadband was installed an entire street lost their cable connections.

• What license do I release my program's manual under if I want to be able to use it as a help file as well?
• Some programs have a significant portion of the work being something other a computer program. For instance, educational or entertainment software will have pictures, sound, scripts, models, etc. What license do I use for each part?

Try this. I also see a link at the top of http://help.rr.com/ marked "server addresses and URLS." Of course, I don't see any mention of help.rr.com anywhere on my local TWC page, so that could have been part of the problem you are having. The folks I have dealt with at RoadRunner and TWC have never been anything but helpful, but that may have a whole lot to do with the local staff.

Try this. I also see a link at the top of http://help.rr.com/ marked "server addresses and URLS." Of course, I don't see any mention of help.rr.com anywhere on my local TWC page, so that could have been part of the problem you are having. The folks I have dealt with at RoadRunner and TWC have never been anything but helpful, but that may have a whole lot to do with the local staff.

I swear, Funk and Wagnall's, Britannica, and World Book must be stepping up with the lobby money...

Yes, Adnan Hajj's unfortunate images were "doctored" as in "given too much medicine," the medicine being dust & scratch removal.

But it was not faked, nor was image content "cloned" with that tool.

This Image Is Not Faked

The next step, if someone was paying me for this, would be to try to replicate the disaster using some readily-available dust & scratch removal software, like Sane for the GIMP.

If Hajj's lawyer or Reuters were laying appropriate bucks at my feet, I would explore the problem through SciPy and PIL.

Hajj's disastrous image is an example of the kinds of errors we will have to get used to recognizing.

In the olden days, we would correct scratches by putting a drop of light mineral oil on the negative and putting glass over that. The oil filled in the scratches similar to the way the DCTs fill in the scratches nowadays.

Reuters deserved some reputation damage, as Hajj's photos aren't all that great and quite obviously Reuters's photo editor was asleep at the switch.

But accusing them of publishing faked photos is in this case fakery itself: pretending to knowledge that nobody has.

(Claimer: I was a photojournalist for various school organs for about a decade. I've done DSP professionally several times, and love doing it in my free time as well. If you count my PWM synth for the Apple ][, I've been doing DSP since 1979.)

Here is the original:
http://home.nycap.rr.com/useless/ponzi/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme

and here is the grand daddy of the modern ones:
http://www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/1997/101697 /news5.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amway

I wrote a Fortran program that printed out a calendar with the year in a banner font at the top. It took 57 cards (no library calls etc, beyound PRINT). Try do anything useful in 57 lines with today's languages.

OK, here's my 44-line version written in C. The only library calls I use are printf(), putchar(), and atoi(). I even inserted several blank lines and separated out the banner printing into a separate function to make it easier to read. I didn't group groups of 3 months together horizontally like /usr/bin/cal does, but I don't think that would take more than an extra 13 lines; I'm just too lazy to do it right now. (And yes, it really works. I used a shell script to test the math against the output of /usr/bin/cal, and it at least gets the day of the week of the first day of the year right from 1753 up through 2499.)

woolworths.com is the "phone number" for the special computer with Woolworths pages on it.

John Jones and Mary Smith both work for the same company. John's telephone number is 555-5123, and Mary's is 555- 5678, but when John wants to call Mary, or Mary wants to call John, they don't dial all those digits - just the last three. In fact, when they need to call someone outside the company, they actually have to dial '9', and then the rest of the phone number, sometimes including 1 and an area code (let's not even go into what they do when they talk to customers in Europe or South America!). Meanwhile, at another company, only the first three digits have to match, and the employees dial the last four.

If you can understand how that works, then you can understand IP addressing....

http://home.hawaii.rr.com/chowfamily/lego/

Over the past few years, eBay has been slowly tightening the screws to get people to switch to "Business" accounts (i.e., the ones they get a percentage of every transaction on) as opposed to "Personal" accounts. First they made it so that you couldn't accept credit card payments on your personal account. (OK, fine, credit cards charge fees.) If you received a credit card payment on a personal account, you had the choice of upgrading the account or denying that charge. Then they made it so that you couldn't sell on eBay accepting paypal and NOT take credit cards, which meant you had to get a business account. (Not so fine.)

But what really pissed me off was the fact that, sometime in October 2006, they changed the rules again without bothering to tell anyone. They disabled the Deny button for PayPal payments for eBay auction if you had a personal account designated for that auction, and also made it impossible for the Payee to cancel the transaction! Before I just denied the charge, then sent a bill from the my business Paypal account. But now neither I nor my winning bidders could cancel the transaction! And both eBay and Paypal customer service (the phone support of which has been is a pay call to a call center that's re-routed to India) refused to do anything about it. I finally had to wait until it aged out of the system after 30 days, because I refuse to upgrade with a metaphorical gun to my head.

There was no e-mail or account notice of this on Paypal or eBay, just an update to the Terms of Service buried somewhere on their respective websites.

Thanks a lot, eBay. Way to ensure that GCash has an audience ready and willing to switch from Paypal at the first opportunity thanks to your heavy-handed tactics. Ditto for a GAuction, when it comes...

So don't do an action game. The Trekverse would be a good place to set an old-fashioned adventure game.

Alas, CBS Paramount will never back such a game. Like all the big media companies, they have no faith in any entertainment that requires actual thinking by the audience to think.

All I need is a magical girl to move in to complete my happiness. :P

This one? http://home.indy.rr.com/kevinandjill/ugly.jpg/