Except the NSA has repeatedly admitted it doesn't have the ability to tell the difference between calls where one end terminates in the US and where they don't, so are actually listening to them all.
It's not been 'proven time and time again'. It's been asserted time and time again, with actually no evidence whatsoever to back it up, and in a fact quite quite a lot of evidence that tax rates have almost an unnoticible effect on the economy. See here. That's simply propaganda from rich people who want less taxes, and has never been observed in any form.
And some of the largest periods of economic growth in this country have, in fact, coincided with large tax rates, like the recovery from the Great Depression. Yes, that was WWII, but the reason it got us out of the Depression is that the government taxed people and then spent the money.
There's absolutely no logical reason that taking money from people and spending it in the US would hinder the economy in any way. Yes, going all the way to a place where government orders account for a large proportion of the GDP might result in screwy manufacturing decisions by companies. But if the government pays someone to lay down a new road, or, say, repair a bridge, that is actual money spent that will end up in people's pockets.
What doesn't help the economy is taking money from some people and giving it to others. (It doesn't hinder anything, though, it mainly just confuses things.) Taking money from some people and spending it on actual products that people compete to produce, and then the government consumes, or allows use for free (like the highway system), does help the economy.
Of course, I suggested taking money from people and paying off the debt with it, which is not spending it in the US, but, while that may not help the economy, it will certainly help with increasing government revenue in the future, simply because there will be less interest to pay, so we can pretty much automatically have lower taxes in the future, so I have no idea what the hell you're whining about.
Which demonstrates the silliness of yammering abut 'the economy'...the GDP is an artifical construct that, while useful, is not the end-all and be-all of tax policy. There are ways to get, with the same GDP and the same tax rate, more government revenue to spend, like, as I said, the big one, stop paying so much goddamn interest on the debt.
If the collected taxes actually lowers economic growth, something which is entirely unproven, it will still be a net gain if it reduces interest on the debt more than enough to counter out the decrease in revenue. And as this 'revenue-decreasing effect' has to be incredibly small to never be demonstrated before, that's entirely likely.
And if we really care so much about increasing the GDP, there are a few things we should worry about before taxes, like stopping large companies from leaving this country. And possible stop things like the housing bubble collapse, which is the actual economy instability right now, from happening. We could have, I dunno,
regulation that takes effect when things get out of control and calms things down. Wait, we already have that. Well, we could have an executive branch willing to actually use it five fucking years ago when it might have helped.
No, it's not the fault of the federal Republicans. That would be silly.
It's the fault of the state Republicans, specifically, the governor, who has absurdly vetoed all transportation funding bills (And most funding bills in general), until they were cut almost in half.
Iraq was the wrong thing to do (It destablized the region and made it more fanatical), at the wrong time (It basically made us lose Afganistan), for the wrong reasons (What the hell were the reasons again?), in the wrong way (You listed these above).
Don't go around pretending only one mistake was made.:(
We had a choice between door A (fight terrorism as a military action (in places it actually existed)), door B (fight it at the political level), and/or door C (fight it via the legal system). I'm a big fan of B and C, but A is needed sometimes.
Instead we walked over, shoddily constructed a door Q that obviously didn't open. We then attempted to open it and managed to pull it on top of ourselves (Look how fast Saddam's army surrendered! Look how fast it's coming down right on top of us!), and are now starving to death under it. More and more it's looking less like a mistake and more like some sort of treason. It's very hard to conceive a more harmful thing for us to have done.
Also, we should not, unless there's some sort of emergency depression or something, lower taxes until we have some of this damn debt paid off. Hell, we should raise them.
Actually, the way this bridge was designed, it sounds like part of the support structure for the bridge was, indeed, the surface of it. Not the pavement, of course, but the stuff the pavement was on. Many bridge designs don't care about that, you could take that all away and the bridge would stay up as just steel beams, but this design did need it.
It's not entirely impossible that the stripping and repaving somehow helped the collapse, that it was literally the last straw when added to a full bridge thanks to rush hour. And I suspect the temperature increase in that area also had something to do with it...they mainly worried about cold temperatures that don't exist anymore, and now it's hotter than they expected it to get.
However, I have to suggest that pretending this makes it the fault of the repairs, and if they had not been done it wouldn't have happened, is indeed silly. If it was that close to collapse, it probably would have done so in a month or two, well before it was scheduled to be repaired in 2008.
Yeah, it's amazing how Republican tell us how governments never work, and then constantly prove it whenever they're in charge.
The problem here is that the Republican governor, in his absurd attempt to slash taxes, vetoed transportation funding bills so the bridge didn't get repaired.
This isn't the fault of 'the government'. It's the fault of the people who want to make the government so small they can drown in in the bathtub, and have actually managed to accomplish the first part of that. And you know what they say: You can't drown a government in a bathtub without drowning a few people in a river. (That shall be my new sig.)
And on the 2155923rd day, God got up from his nap, which was much longer than he intended, and was wandering around. He saw nylon, and said 'Hey, you know what would be cool?' and made nylon eating bacteria. And God saw that it was, if not good, at least pretty okay, and went back to sleep.
Technically, it is correct that a probe launched to exit the solar system as fast as possible could do it faster, using certain definations of 'the solar system'. Not because it would go faster, it would go slower, but because to exit the solar system it is much faster to go north or south instead of following the plane of the planets. (But this doesn't help any if you want to exit the heliosphere, which is distorted like a comet tail. The fastest way out is in the direction of the movement of the sun.)
However, this would be utterly pointless, because we don't want to get outside the solar system to measure...we'd have nothing to compare it to. We'd want to send the probe close to the top (or bottom?) of the galaxy.
Getting to the 'top' of the galaxy would require, what, a thousand years of travel at light speed? So we need all the speed we can.
I forget how the solar system plane lines up with the galactic plane, but we could trivially use Jupiter for a speed boost and, at the same time, sling the probe in whatever direction we need. My first assumption is that this would be straight in the direction the sun is going, but actually that's not correct...the sun is mainly orbiting in a circle with tiny up and down movements, thus it's taking 61 million years complete a cycle, whereas it's only three thousand lightyears. And, no, we're not just going really really slow.
Going straight out, with current technology, could easily let us beat the solar system out of the galaxy there and see what's going on. Even with 10% of light speed we could get there in a few thousand years. (Well, pretending we actually had probes that would operate for that long.)
People tend not to realize how flat the galaxy is, at least out here. Remember the Monty Python song. 'It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand lightyears thick, but out by us it's just three thousand lightyears wide.' And we're apparently nearing the edge once again.
Even jumping to another nearby solar system isn't going to help unless we pick one going the other way.:)
Of course, in seven million years, we'll trivially be able to fix any problems in our DNA.
Re:All bank vaults and locks have also been cracke
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DVD43, which I will not in any manner explain how to get thanks to the unconstitutional DMCA, also magically decodes DVDs without any work at all. Any fool can install it once, and it will sit in their system tray completely unnoticed, and they can treat CSS-encoded DVDs like any other DVD and copy whatever video files they want off of them.
Although DVD video files are still rather unwieldy for tossing around networks and stuff, and they usually want some sort of transcoding.
maRBL is a postfix policy server that hooks to, of all things, an Amavisd daemon that runs p0f where it talks to a socket. A policy server is basically something that postfix stays connected to and passes information about connections to, running before it gets the email.
You have to go get the stupid amavis daemon even if you don't run amavisd. Why p0f has absolutely no daemon support, and no one's apparently ever written a frontend to daemonize it except for the amavis people, is completely unknown to me, considering that 99% of the use by other applications would be 'I have this port open, please constantly keep track of each connecting IP on that port and inform me what OS it is'. You'd think that would be builtin in some manner, or at least some third party would have a tool to make that easy, but, no, I have to track down a perl script from a amavis distribution that simply runs p0f and hooks it to a unix socket. (Having to do that somewhat annoyed me, if you can't tell.)
I've set maRBL to, instead of returning a DUNNO or REJECT, it returns is_windows or is_not_windows, which are added restrictions I've set up that postfix then jumps to. (That sentence will make no sense if you don't use postfix.) The is_not_windows restriction then does various dynamic IP checks, oddly enough using maRBL again, although via a different port, which is a different 'policy server'. (Although it's the same process.)
Sendmail can also do it, I've seen.cf files that set it up. (Sendmail can, and will, do anything, even if you don't particularly need or want it to. Even if you desperately want it to stop.)
I don't know about any other servers.
Oh, and amavisd can apparently do it. Or amavisd-new, or one of those things. Whichever one maRBL says you need the script from.
You mean I should look at the diary post...the one in the article...that doesn't mention APEWS at all? Why would I do that?
As for the SANS diary that you did not provide any link to, but I nevertheless managed to find, that claims that APEWS is taking data from SANS...there is no 'proof' there whatsoever, just an assertation. (And it would be damn easy to prove it, by putting, for example, some invalid IPs on the list and see if they get listed by APEWS.) There's absolutely no evidence at all.
The fact that APEWS apparently listed an incident report from SANS as a reason for blocking is due to the fact that APEWS does not expose its spamtraps, so all incident reports are taken from other people. No, you can't claim copyright on posting someone else's spam, and SANS is an ass for even attempting it, because the whole damn point of publicly posting spam is for other people to cite it as evidence of spamming behavior. But there are, yet again, absolutely no links or evidence provided that even what I just said actually happened, much less that something unethical happened. (Nor can you, to cover all bases, claim copyright on factual lists of IP addresses.)
I've decided to sum the discussion so far:
You: APEWS blocks too much, including address that aren't spamming that are hooked to the same ISP as spammers.
Me: APEWS doesn't say it blocks addresses that are spamming, it says it blocks ISPs that allow spammers.
You: Ha, you're obviously working for APEWS because that's in the FAQ and everyone knows that! Plus, I'm going to continue to whine they don't behave the way that I want them to behave instead of the way they clearly state they behave.
My response:
The list is near 100% accurate for a list of spam-allowing ISPs. It is an incredibly bad idea to actually block on such a list. When I used their predecessor, SPEWS, I used it as part of a scoring system, like any responsible person would, to assign a specific negative weight to email from spam-allowing ISPs, which, combined with other indicators, allowed me to detect spam. And I resent your idea that merely because morons use APEWS incorrectly that APEWS is being 'irresponsible'.
You'll notice that APEWS doesn't recommend blocking based on it or provide any directions whatsoever to do so.
You know, there are DNSBLs out there that list all IPs in a country, one for each country. Is that 'irresponsible', or is it, as I call it, 'useful information that allows me to build an anti-spam system', despite the whining of people who tried to email other fools that decided to block all of Mexico?
APEWS does not block spam, or even spammers. APEWS blocks ISPs that allow spammers, and MCI is (was?) one of those.
And APEWS doesn't collect data from anywhere. They run spamtraps. Mail get sent to them to a spamtrap, they start blocking. As mail continues to come in, they continue blocking and add more and more IPs, until they encompass entire companies, and then companies that prove those companies connectivity, and then companies that provide those companies connectivity, until the spammer, or the company hosting them, or someone in the chain, is removed from the internet. (An interesting open question is where this stops, upsteams. No one knows if it would cross the huge peering agreements among the big boys, but luckily it's not gotten to that point.)
And there's absolutely no reason for them to want contact from you. You are not the problem, you cannot solve the problem, you are unrelated to the problem. MCI is (was?) the problem, for continuing to host someone. They are the only ones who can solve it, so it's recommended you contact them.
I've done it. There were no real problems with it. I eventually removed the first record because there were servers out there waiting five minutes before moving on, and some people wanted their email instantly. (Some people are stupid.) I still have the last completely pointless MX record, but I have no idea how much spam it's deflecting.
Something I've considered doing is having two MX records that both attach to the same graylist. So that legit senders will connect to the first one, get a temp error, move on the next one, and get through there. Most mail server go through the entire MX list in order with a very small or no delay, and then pause for 30 minutes or more before starting over, so doing that would reduce the delay quite a lot.
(I only run graylisting on dynamic IPs or connections from Windows boxes, if you're trying to reconcile that with 'people wanted their email instantly'.)
This, of course, could be combined with fake MX records. A fake one at each end, two real ones in the middle.
However, there are MX-preference compliant spammers out there (Otherwise I'd have gotten no spam during the experiment.) and that would let them completely short-circuit my graylisting. With a 30 minute delay, often they don't come back, and, when they are, they are now in blacklists.
Fun tip: Simply moving the mail server to another IP, results in a 10% decrease or so for a time, because when spammers hijack a box, they don't give it a list of email addresses. They give it a list of email addresses and IPs to connect to, the hijacked box doesn't do the lookups. They do, often long in advance.
And some of this lookup software doesn't believe in MX records, and always gives said lists the IP of the A record of the domain. So simply moving the mail server off the same IP as the A record will reduce spam by, in my estimates, 5% permanently, and putting an invalid MX record first and last will do about the same thing, because a lot of software only looks up one to pass on.
I've always wondered if being clever enough with DNS records and enough IPs, and leaping around randomly with a short enough TTL on the MX domain, you could break all spamming software. I'm sure there's some reason this is a very bad idea, but it's still funny to think about. It's not like it would add a lot of overhead...you just need to change the one A record the MX is pointing at, like currentsmtp.example.com, all the other A and MX stuff could get cached like normal. It wouldn't be hard, you'd just need some sort of tiny DNS server (They have SQL-based one right?), a cron job, some clever firewall rules that 'moved' a listening port from IP to IP, leaving old IPs working long enough to catch all legit people, and a class-C network. You wouldn't even have to touch the mail server.
(Let's see if this last paragraph ever ends up being used as prior art in a patent dispute. If so, please drop me a line.)
Well, to be fair to SPEWS, you probably didn't get an actual false positive by their definition. They don't block spammers, they block spam-supporting ISPs, which quite deliberately includes many IPs that never send spam and are extremely unlike to start. I know you weren't attacking SPEWs, but everyone seems to misuse SPEWS and then complain it's blocking exactly what it said it would block, include legit email. Well, yeah, they said it would do that.
It's sorta like complaining that superglue is defective because it won't come off your hands and can even glue you to yourself, unlike 'other wood glue'. That makes it inappropriate to use in many or even most circumstances, not 'defective', because it's not supposed to be 'wood glue', and it quite clearly says it will stick to people.:)
Anyway, I wouldn't use SPEWS or APEWS to block (I wouldn't use any DNSBL to block, but certainly not them.), but I found SPEWS handy for scoring on, in that there is a demonstratable increase in likelihood that if an email is coming from a SPEWS level-1 listed IP that it is spam. It's nowhere near 100%, but it's still useful. (Although at this point I'm not using any DNSBLs to filter except for locating dynamic IPs, and then only to greylist. It's scored in spamassassin, but that's for end users to filter on if they want.)
I haven't looked into APEWS. Am I right in assuming there's a story there about that and SPEWS? I need to start reading NANAE again.
And I, too, love Spamhaus, I've been tempted to actually block entirely on that, despite me generally disliking doing that.
As for the GP, in any discussion about spam-fighting, on slashdot, there will be dozens of people with fucking stupid ideas because they don't actually run a mail server, or run a tiny Linux box on DSL that is their 'mail server' that gets maybe 10 pieces of email a month. Because they are fools who want to 'be in control of their email', they sit around and whine that their email isn't accepted by everyone, which they could fix by simply using their ISP's mail server. Meanwhile, they aren't required by anyone to actually run a functioning mail server that can receive email from unknown people and filter out a large proportion of spam, so have no idea how that actually works. Just ignore them.
As for all the people I was just talking about: Look, I don't walk up to people and tell them how to optimize an heavily-loaded Oracle server, how to write a optimal bytecode interpeter, or how to build a world-wide network, because I don't have any experience doing those fucking things. I'm think I'm smart enough, I could learn how and have useful opinions, I just have no practical knowledge at all right now, so I don't make random suggestions. If you haven't run a mail server, in the past five years, where other people expect to be able to receive random legit email, and complain if they get too much spam, STFU on this discussion, please.
Don't use a non-local blacklist to absolutely block anyone. It's just too dangerous.
Many solutions let you use weighted DNSBLs. maRBL is a good one for postfix. Not only can you do weighted tests based on lists, you can do tests based on OS using p0f. And have multiple tests.
So I have a profile that checks some trusted lists, and you have to be on three or four to get blocked. Then I check the OS. Then I check some dialup regexps and some dialup DNSBLs. If you've either on Windows or apparently a dynamic connection, you get greylisted.
Even if spammers come back, they're blacklisted by then.
This doesn't require any more bandwidth or CPU than the tests by themselves.
Actually, it disables itself after a week. I.e., if you plug it into an unauthorized computer, it waits a week, and then stops accepting a charge from any charger.
If you plug it into an authorized computer before then, it presumably resets the clock. If you do it after then, it will unlock.
The headline here is completely idiotic. (Newflash, slashdot headline misleading.) The iPod never 'bricks' itself.
It just says, if you use some unauthorized computer to change music on the iPod, you'll have to plug it into an authorized computer or it, at some point in the near future, will not charge itself until you do. This doesn't, strictly speaking, sound like it would apply to 'charging', because you don't need a computer to charge it at all, although usually computers that are turned on would automatically mount it as a USB drive which would be enough to trip the protection.
Of course, who this really is going to affect is people who don't use iTunes. Actually, if they never use iTunes, they might be safe, because the iPod won't have an 'authorized computer' and won't care at all. It's the people who have an iTunes install so they can do DRM music, but also, for example, use a Linux computer to put normal mp3s on there. If they don't use their iPod that often, they could take it on a trip only to discover the last computer they plugged it into was their Linux box, two weeks ago, and now it won't charge.
Hell, forget weirdo Linux users and people who prefer to use something besides iTunes to manage their mp3s. People walk around using their iPods as thumbdrives, too, on random computers. (Despite this being somewhat dangerous if that person has iTunes installed, because it might delete all their music because it has decided to 'sync'.)
I suspect that's really the reason it was set up like this. What would have been more useful is password protection. I mean, they already have a custom music database you have to put on there to make music show up, why not just require that database to be 'signed', using a trivial, public, and one-way algorythm that's just a hash of the database and a key that's stored in firmware? It'd have exactly the same results...thieves unable to change the music, and yet any app that handles the somewhat stupid extra database the iPod requires could easily make the hash too, as long as it knew the key.
And this is JJ Abrams of Heroes, where there's a bunch of physical time travel and prophesy, and this is JJ Abrams of Alias, where there's no actual time travel but a bunch of prophesies, and this is JJ Abrams of Felicity, where there's consciousness time travel.
Stating which is more likely in a JJ Abrams production seems rather a crapshot. Although guessing it will include some sort of 'the future altering the past' seems rather easy.
I don't know why people are complaining about the Borg episodes. It'd be one thing if they had them every week, but the two-parter they had was cool and fit into the continuity very well, in a sort of Time's Arrow way, caused by something in the future we already saw, and, in turn, causing something. Yeah, yeah, that means Starfleet should have heard of them, but that's easy to fanwank...either record-keeping was much laxer, or the time police cleaned up the records at some point in time.
The problem isn't the enemies they did have, it was the enemies they inexplicably didn't have, the Klingons and the Romulans. Seriously. The Andorians were lots of fun as an almost enemy, but we should have had at least one of them. Or even both of them, the Romulans acting covertly (Which we did get once.) and the Klingons acting opening.
And the other problem was the stupid temporal war. You know, that could been the greatest idea ever, if they'd actually done it. Just hinting at the damn thing is stupid, have some actual known villain that was actually seen on screen go back in time and manipulate things, specifically because of something Archer was going to do.
I don't know what villain, there was that guy who stole a time machine once, as did Janeway, so it's not like it would have to be someone with advanced technology. The Borg have time travel technology, but would have made a very bad manipulate-the-past villain, because the Borg cannot do subtle manipulation whatsoever. The Marquis might have been fun and nicely morally ambivalent, except Voyager already did it. I dunno, but someone from the 'present' ST universe should have been used if they were going to have a 'temporal cold war', not someone we have no idea of in a plotline that's never wrapped up except to say 'it never happened'.
And I agree with you about the Vulcans. Yet another thing that was patched up to something resembling actual canon in season four, along with the Klingons.
That's nothing, I once watched the first thirty minutes of Robin Hood: Men in Tights on some 'family channel'. They cut out all the sex jokes.
The Entire. Damn. Movie. is a sex joke. Literally half the jokes in the movie are related to sex, or at least nudity. My mind started spinning as to how they actually planned to carry this idea off, or what the hell the point could be, but I had something else coming on I actually would enjoy watching so had to change the channel.
I wish movie producers with a lot of power in the industry would start forbidding cuts from being made to their movies at all. Either air them in their entirety or don't air the damn thing at all.
Not only do they recommend CDNs, which is absurd for any page that gets less than a million hits a day, they also complain about ETags, despite all the stuff I want cached actually having Etags. They whine that 'different servers can produce different etags' or something, like my site is random distributed over a dozen servers where images and CSS randomly get sent from different ones. Um, nope, just one server, as you apparently figured out when complaining about not using CDNs.
Of course, who knows how the hell they'd know if that was true and I'd actually set up the Etags correctly to be in sync.
And they whine about images and stuff that have Expires headers that aren't 'in the far future'. WTF? They're not in the far future for a reason. They're in the near future of a day or two, which is more than enough to handle a single visit. If someone comes back, they can make a damn HEAD request and see if it's changed, using less than 200 bytes. That seems a really dumb thing to complain about.
Some of these tests are good, it's nice to have a gzip and cachability report right there, and some other checks are at least moderately useful, like 'Move Scripts to bottom'. (Although if I had a page with so much javascript it mattered, I'd write a tiny loader function and have it pull in everything after pageload.)
But some of these are just goofy, and they definately need a 'No, the server is not overloaded by a huge amount of traffic, don't invent problems that would only affect, for example, yahoo.com' checkbox. I think the Web Developer Tools/View Speed Report is more useful on the whole, as that actually hits actual causes of slowdown like having the page too damn big!
This distinction is legally dubious. The GPL is a license, without which you couldn't even run the program in most cases (temporary copies in RAM fall under copyright law, see Lessig's "Code"), so clearly some license is necessary for all useful software.
You're a moron. Copyright law explicitly allows program copies made in memory, and thus you need no 'license' at all to use computer programs.
Ah. So instead of six horcruxes and the seventh part remaining in him, which would be a magically significant number and stuff, he divided his soul in seven parts, put six somewhere else, and then accidentally divided the remaining part again so he was only running around with 1/14th a soul or something.
Which not only screwed up the 'divided into seven parts' significance, but he ended up with much less soul in him than if he'd just divided it up into eight parts to start with.
I was just pointing out that many people agree with you, the first few books were 'unchallenging and unstimulating', and that if that is the reason you dislike the series, you may want to try one of the later books.
You certainly don't have to if you don't want to. I was just explaining that what you quite rightly saw as a failing of the series (Although it was, in a sense, done on purpose.) might have only applied to the books you read, and you might enjoy the rest.
And you don't have to start at the first book. Read the wikipedia pages as a summary and start on the third, or even the fourth. (Or, hell, just watch the movies.)
But it's not my job to run around convincing people of what series they might like, as I have honestly no idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Except the NSA has repeatedly admitted it doesn't have the ability to tell the difference between calls where one end terminates in the US and where they don't, so are actually listening to them all.
At least when the Dems cheated, the country got JFK.
It's not been 'proven time and time again'. It's been asserted time and time again, with actually no evidence whatsoever to back it up, and in a fact quite quite a lot of evidence that tax rates have almost an unnoticible effect on the economy. See here. That's simply propaganda from rich people who want less taxes, and has never been observed in any form.
And some of the largest periods of economic growth in this country have, in fact, coincided with large tax rates, like the recovery from the Great Depression. Yes, that was WWII, but the reason it got us out of the Depression is that the government taxed people and then spent the money.
There's absolutely no logical reason that taking money from people and spending it in the US would hinder the economy in any way. Yes, going all the way to a place where government orders account for a large proportion of the GDP might result in screwy manufacturing decisions by companies. But if the government pays someone to lay down a new road, or, say, repair a bridge, that is actual money spent that will end up in people's pockets.
What doesn't help the economy is taking money from some people and giving it to others. (It doesn't hinder anything, though, it mainly just confuses things.) Taking money from some people and spending it on actual products that people compete to produce, and then the government consumes, or allows use for free (like the highway system), does help the economy.
Of course, I suggested taking money from people and paying off the debt with it, which is not spending it in the US, but, while that may not help the economy, it will certainly help with increasing government revenue in the future, simply because there will be less interest to pay, so we can pretty much automatically have lower taxes in the future, so I have no idea what the hell you're whining about.
Which demonstrates the silliness of yammering abut 'the economy'...the GDP is an artifical construct that, while useful, is not the end-all and be-all of tax policy. There are ways to get, with the same GDP and the same tax rate, more government revenue to spend, like, as I said, the big one, stop paying so much goddamn interest on the debt.
If the collected taxes actually lowers economic growth, something which is entirely unproven, it will still be a net gain if it reduces interest on the debt more than enough to counter out the decrease in revenue. And as this 'revenue-decreasing effect' has to be incredibly small to never be demonstrated before, that's entirely likely.
And if we really care so much about increasing the GDP, there are a few things we should worry about before taxes, like stopping large companies from leaving this country. And possible stop things like the housing bubble collapse, which is the actual economy instability right now, from happening. We could have, I dunno, regulation that takes effect when things get out of control and calms things down. Wait, we already have that. Well, we could have an executive branch willing to actually use it five fucking years ago when it might have helped.
No, it's not the fault of the federal Republicans. That would be silly.
It's the fault of the state Republicans, specifically, the governor, who has absurdly vetoed all transportation funding bills (And most funding bills in general), until they were cut almost in half.
The GP was exactly correct. See my signature.
Iraq was the wrong thing to do (It destablized the region and made it more fanatical), at the wrong time (It basically made us lose Afganistan), for the wrong reasons (What the hell were the reasons again?), in the wrong way (You listed these above).
Don't go around pretending only one mistake was made. :(
We had a choice between door A (fight terrorism as a military action (in places it actually existed)), door B (fight it at the political level), and/or door C (fight it via the legal system). I'm a big fan of B and C, but A is needed sometimes.
Instead we walked over, shoddily constructed a door Q that obviously didn't open. We then attempted to open it and managed to pull it on top of ourselves (Look how fast Saddam's army surrendered! Look how fast it's coming down right on top of us!), and are now starving to death under it. More and more it's looking less like a mistake and more like some sort of treason. It's very hard to conceive a more harmful thing for us to have done.
Also, we should not, unless there's some sort of emergency depression or something, lower taxes until we have some of this damn debt paid off. Hell, we should raise them.
Actually, the way this bridge was designed, it sounds like part of the support structure for the bridge was, indeed, the surface of it. Not the pavement, of course, but the stuff the pavement was on. Many bridge designs don't care about that, you could take that all away and the bridge would stay up as just steel beams, but this design did need it.
It's not entirely impossible that the stripping and repaving somehow helped the collapse, that it was literally the last straw when added to a full bridge thanks to rush hour. And I suspect the temperature increase in that area also had something to do with it...they mainly worried about cold temperatures that don't exist anymore, and now it's hotter than they expected it to get.
However, I have to suggest that pretending this makes it the fault of the repairs, and if they had not been done it wouldn't have happened, is indeed silly. If it was that close to collapse, it probably would have done so in a month or two, well before it was scheduled to be repaired in 2008.
Yeah, it's amazing how Republican tell us how governments never work, and then constantly prove it whenever they're in charge.
The problem here is that the Republican governor, in his absurd attempt to slash taxes, vetoed transportation funding bills so the bridge didn't get repaired.
This isn't the fault of 'the government'. It's the fault of the people who want to make the government so small they can drown in in the bathtub, and have actually managed to accomplish the first part of that. And you know what they say: You can't drown a government in a bathtub without drowning a few people in a river. (That shall be my new sig.)
And on the 2155923rd day, God got up from his nap, which was much longer than he intended, and was wandering around. He saw nylon, and said 'Hey, you know what would be cool?' and made nylon eating bacteria. And God saw that it was, if not good, at least pretty okay, and went back to sleep.
Technically, it is correct that a probe launched to exit the solar system as fast as possible could do it faster, using certain definations of 'the solar system'. Not because it would go faster, it would go slower, but because to exit the solar system it is much faster to go north or south instead of following the plane of the planets. (But this doesn't help any if you want to exit the heliosphere, which is distorted like a comet tail. The fastest way out is in the direction of the movement of the sun.)
However, this would be utterly pointless, because we don't want to get outside the solar system to measure...we'd have nothing to compare it to. We'd want to send the probe close to the top (or bottom?) of the galaxy. Getting to the 'top' of the galaxy would require, what, a thousand years of travel at light speed? So we need all the speed we can.
I forget how the solar system plane lines up with the galactic plane, but we could trivially use Jupiter for a speed boost and, at the same time, sling the probe in whatever direction we need. My first assumption is that this would be straight in the direction the sun is going, but actually that's not correct...the sun is mainly orbiting in a circle with tiny up and down movements, thus it's taking 61 million years complete a cycle, whereas it's only three thousand lightyears. And, no, we're not just going really really slow.
Going straight out, with current technology, could easily let us beat the solar system out of the galaxy there and see what's going on. Even with 10% of light speed we could get there in a few thousand years. (Well, pretending we actually had probes that would operate for that long.)
People tend not to realize how flat the galaxy is, at least out here. Remember the Monty Python song. 'It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand lightyears thick, but out by us it's just three thousand lightyears wide.' And we're apparently nearing the edge once again.
Even jumping to another nearby solar system isn't going to help unless we pick one going the other way. :)
Of course, in seven million years, we'll trivially be able to fix any problems in our DNA.
DVD43, which I will not in any manner explain how to get thanks to the unconstitutional DMCA, also magically decodes DVDs without any work at all. Any fool can install it once, and it will sit in their system tray completely unnoticed, and they can treat CSS-encoded DVDs like any other DVD and copy whatever video files they want off of them.
Although DVD video files are still rather unwieldy for tossing around networks and stuff, and they usually want some sort of transcoding.
maRBL is a postfix policy server that hooks to, of all things, an Amavisd daemon that runs p0f where it talks to a socket. A policy server is basically something that postfix stays connected to and passes information about connections to, running before it gets the email.
You have to go get the stupid amavis daemon even if you don't run amavisd. Why p0f has absolutely no daemon support, and no one's apparently ever written a frontend to daemonize it except for the amavis people, is completely unknown to me, considering that 99% of the use by other applications would be 'I have this port open, please constantly keep track of each connecting IP on that port and inform me what OS it is'. You'd think that would be builtin in some manner, or at least some third party would have a tool to make that easy, but, no, I have to track down a perl script from a amavis distribution that simply runs p0f and hooks it to a unix socket. (Having to do that somewhat annoyed me, if you can't tell.)
I've set maRBL to, instead of returning a DUNNO or REJECT, it returns is_windows or is_not_windows, which are added restrictions I've set up that postfix then jumps to. (That sentence will make no sense if you don't use postfix.) The is_not_windows restriction then does various dynamic IP checks, oddly enough using maRBL again, although via a different port, which is a different 'policy server'. (Although it's the same process.)
Sendmail can also do it, I've seen .cf files that set it up. (Sendmail can, and will, do anything, even if you don't particularly need or want it to. Even if you desperately want it to stop.)
I don't know about any other servers.
Oh, and amavisd can apparently do it. Or amavisd-new, or one of those things. Whichever one maRBL says you need the script from.
You mean I should look at the diary post...the one in the article...that doesn't mention APEWS at all? Why would I do that?
As for the SANS diary that you did not provide any link to, but I nevertheless managed to find, that claims that APEWS is taking data from SANS...there is no 'proof' there whatsoever, just an assertation. (And it would be damn easy to prove it, by putting, for example, some invalid IPs on the list and see if they get listed by APEWS.) There's absolutely no evidence at all.
The fact that APEWS apparently listed an incident report from SANS as a reason for blocking is due to the fact that APEWS does not expose its spamtraps, so all incident reports are taken from other people. No, you can't claim copyright on posting someone else's spam, and SANS is an ass for even attempting it, because the whole damn point of publicly posting spam is for other people to cite it as evidence of spamming behavior. But there are, yet again, absolutely no links or evidence provided that even what I just said actually happened, much less that something unethical happened. (Nor can you, to cover all bases, claim copyright on factual lists of IP addresses.)
I've decided to sum the discussion so far:
You: APEWS blocks too much, including address that aren't spamming that are hooked to the same ISP as spammers.
Me: APEWS doesn't say it blocks addresses that are spamming, it says it blocks ISPs that allow spammers.
You: Ha, you're obviously working for APEWS because that's in the FAQ and everyone knows that! Plus, I'm going to continue to whine they don't behave the way that I want them to behave instead of the way they clearly state they behave.
My response:
The list is near 100% accurate for a list of spam-allowing ISPs. It is an incredibly bad idea to actually block on such a list. When I used their predecessor, SPEWS, I used it as part of a scoring system, like any responsible person would, to assign a specific negative weight to email from spam-allowing ISPs, which, combined with other indicators, allowed me to detect spam. And I resent your idea that merely because morons use APEWS incorrectly that APEWS is being 'irresponsible'.
You'll notice that APEWS doesn't recommend blocking based on it or provide any directions whatsoever to do so.
You know, there are DNSBLs out there that list all IPs in a country, one for each country. Is that 'irresponsible', or is it, as I call it, 'useful information that allows me to build an anti-spam system', despite the whining of people who tried to email other fools that decided to block all of Mexico?
You're not being blocked. MCI's being blocked.
APEWS does not block spam, or even spammers. APEWS blocks ISPs that allow spammers, and MCI is (was?) one of those.
And APEWS doesn't collect data from anywhere. They run spamtraps. Mail get sent to them to a spamtrap, they start blocking. As mail continues to come in, they continue blocking and add more and more IPs, until they encompass entire companies, and then companies that prove those companies connectivity, and then companies that provide those companies connectivity, until the spammer, or the company hosting them, or someone in the chain, is removed from the internet. (An interesting open question is where this stops, upsteams. No one knows if it would cross the huge peering agreements among the big boys, but luckily it's not gotten to that point.)
And there's absolutely no reason for them to want contact from you. You are not the problem, you cannot solve the problem, you are unrelated to the problem. MCI is (was?) the problem, for continuing to host someone. They are the only ones who can solve it, so it's recommended you contact them.
I've done it. There were no real problems with it. I eventually removed the first record because there were servers out there waiting five minutes before moving on, and some people wanted their email instantly. (Some people are stupid.) I still have the last completely pointless MX record, but I have no idea how much spam it's deflecting.
Something I've considered doing is having two MX records that both attach to the same graylist. So that legit senders will connect to the first one, get a temp error, move on the next one, and get through there. Most mail server go through the entire MX list in order with a very small or no delay, and then pause for 30 minutes or more before starting over, so doing that would reduce the delay quite a lot.
(I only run graylisting on dynamic IPs or connections from Windows boxes, if you're trying to reconcile that with 'people wanted their email instantly'.)
This, of course, could be combined with fake MX records. A fake one at each end, two real ones in the middle.
However, there are MX-preference compliant spammers out there (Otherwise I'd have gotten no spam during the experiment.) and that would let them completely short-circuit my graylisting. With a 30 minute delay, often they don't come back, and, when they are, they are now in blacklists.
Fun tip: Simply moving the mail server to another IP, results in a 10% decrease or so for a time, because when spammers hijack a box, they don't give it a list of email addresses. They give it a list of email addresses and IPs to connect to, the hijacked box doesn't do the lookups. They do, often long in advance.
And some of this lookup software doesn't believe in MX records, and always gives said lists the IP of the A record of the domain. So simply moving the mail server off the same IP as the A record will reduce spam by, in my estimates, 5% permanently, and putting an invalid MX record first and last will do about the same thing, because a lot of software only looks up one to pass on.
I've always wondered if being clever enough with DNS records and enough IPs, and leaping around randomly with a short enough TTL on the MX domain, you could break all spamming software. I'm sure there's some reason this is a very bad idea, but it's still funny to think about. It's not like it would add a lot of overhead...you just need to change the one A record the MX is pointing at, like currentsmtp.example.com, all the other A and MX stuff could get cached like normal. It wouldn't be hard, you'd just need some sort of tiny DNS server (They have SQL-based one right?), a cron job, some clever firewall rules that 'moved' a listening port from IP to IP, leaving old IPs working long enough to catch all legit people, and a class-C network. You wouldn't even have to touch the mail server.
(Let's see if this last paragraph ever ends up being used as prior art in a patent dispute. If so, please drop me a line.)
Well, to be fair to SPEWS, you probably didn't get an actual false positive by their definition. They don't block spammers, they block spam-supporting ISPs, which quite deliberately includes many IPs that never send spam and are extremely unlike to start. I know you weren't attacking SPEWs, but everyone seems to misuse SPEWS and then complain it's blocking exactly what it said it would block, include legit email. Well, yeah, they said it would do that.
It's sorta like complaining that superglue is defective because it won't come off your hands and can even glue you to yourself, unlike 'other wood glue'. That makes it inappropriate to use in many or even most circumstances, not 'defective', because it's not supposed to be 'wood glue', and it quite clearly says it will stick to people. :)
Anyway, I wouldn't use SPEWS or APEWS to block (I wouldn't use any DNSBL to block, but certainly not them.), but I found SPEWS handy for scoring on, in that there is a demonstratable increase in likelihood that if an email is coming from a SPEWS level-1 listed IP that it is spam. It's nowhere near 100%, but it's still useful. (Although at this point I'm not using any DNSBLs to filter except for locating dynamic IPs, and then only to greylist. It's scored in spamassassin, but that's for end users to filter on if they want.)
I haven't looked into APEWS. Am I right in assuming there's a story there about that and SPEWS? I need to start reading NANAE again.
And I, too, love Spamhaus, I've been tempted to actually block entirely on that, despite me generally disliking doing that.
As for the GP, in any discussion about spam-fighting, on slashdot, there will be dozens of people with fucking stupid ideas because they don't actually run a mail server, or run a tiny Linux box on DSL that is their 'mail server' that gets maybe 10 pieces of email a month. Because they are fools who want to 'be in control of their email', they sit around and whine that their email isn't accepted by everyone, which they could fix by simply using their ISP's mail server. Meanwhile, they aren't required by anyone to actually run a functioning mail server that can receive email from unknown people and filter out a large proportion of spam, so have no idea how that actually works. Just ignore them.
As for all the people I was just talking about: Look, I don't walk up to people and tell them how to optimize an heavily-loaded Oracle server, how to write a optimal bytecode interpeter, or how to build a world-wide network, because I don't have any experience doing those fucking things. I'm think I'm smart enough, I could learn how and have useful opinions, I just have no practical knowledge at all right now, so I don't make random suggestions. If you haven't run a mail server, in the past five years, where other people expect to be able to receive random legit email, and complain if they get too much spam, STFU on this discussion, please.
Don't use a non-local blacklist to absolutely block anyone. It's just too dangerous.
Many solutions let you use weighted DNSBLs. maRBL is a good one for postfix. Not only can you do weighted tests based on lists, you can do tests based on OS using p0f. And have multiple tests.
So I have a profile that checks some trusted lists, and you have to be on three or four to get blocked. Then I check the OS. Then I check some dialup regexps and some dialup DNSBLs. If you've either on Windows or apparently a dynamic connection, you get greylisted.
Even if spammers come back, they're blacklisted by then.
This doesn't require any more bandwidth or CPU than the tests by themselves.
Actually, it disables itself after a week. I.e., if you plug it into an unauthorized computer, it waits a week, and then stops accepting a charge from any charger.
If you plug it into an authorized computer before then, it presumably resets the clock. If you do it after then, it will unlock.
The headline here is completely idiotic. (Newflash, slashdot headline misleading.) The iPod never 'bricks' itself.
It just says, if you use some unauthorized computer to change music on the iPod, you'll have to plug it into an authorized computer or it, at some point in the near future, will not charge itself until you do. This doesn't, strictly speaking, sound like it would apply to 'charging', because you don't need a computer to charge it at all, although usually computers that are turned on would automatically mount it as a USB drive which would be enough to trip the protection.
Of course, who this really is going to affect is people who don't use iTunes. Actually, if they never use iTunes, they might be safe, because the iPod won't have an 'authorized computer' and won't care at all. It's the people who have an iTunes install so they can do DRM music, but also, for example, use a Linux computer to put normal mp3s on there. If they don't use their iPod that often, they could take it on a trip only to discover the last computer they plugged it into was their Linux box, two weeks ago, and now it won't charge.
Hell, forget weirdo Linux users and people who prefer to use something besides iTunes to manage their mp3s. People walk around using their iPods as thumbdrives, too, on random computers. (Despite this being somewhat dangerous if that person has iTunes installed, because it might delete all their music because it has decided to 'sync'.)
I suspect that's really the reason it was set up like this. What would have been more useful is password protection. I mean, they already have a custom music database you have to put on there to make music show up, why not just require that database to be 'signed', using a trivial, public, and one-way algorythm that's just a hash of the database and a key that's stored in firmware? It'd have exactly the same results...thieves unable to change the music, and yet any app that handles the somewhat stupid extra database the iPod requires could easily make the hash too, as long as it knew the key.
And this is JJ Abrams of Heroes, where there's a bunch of physical time travel and prophesy, and this is JJ Abrams of Alias, where there's no actual time travel but a bunch of prophesies, and this is JJ Abrams of Felicity, where there's consciousness time travel.
Stating which is more likely in a JJ Abrams production seems rather a crapshot. Although guessing it will include some sort of 'the future altering the past' seems rather easy.
I don't know why people are complaining about the Borg episodes. It'd be one thing if they had them every week, but the two-parter they had was cool and fit into the continuity very well, in a sort of Time's Arrow way, caused by something in the future we already saw, and, in turn, causing something. Yeah, yeah, that means Starfleet should have heard of them, but that's easy to fanwank...either record-keeping was much laxer, or the time police cleaned up the records at some point in time.
The problem isn't the enemies they did have, it was the enemies they inexplicably didn't have, the Klingons and the Romulans. Seriously. The Andorians were lots of fun as an almost enemy, but we should have had at least one of them. Or even both of them, the Romulans acting covertly (Which we did get once.) and the Klingons acting opening.
And the other problem was the stupid temporal war. You know, that could been the greatest idea ever, if they'd actually done it. Just hinting at the damn thing is stupid, have some actual known villain that was actually seen on screen go back in time and manipulate things, specifically because of something Archer was going to do.
I don't know what villain, there was that guy who stole a time machine once, as did Janeway, so it's not like it would have to be someone with advanced technology. The Borg have time travel technology, but would have made a very bad manipulate-the-past villain, because the Borg cannot do subtle manipulation whatsoever. The Marquis might have been fun and nicely morally ambivalent, except Voyager already did it. I dunno, but someone from the 'present' ST universe should have been used if they were going to have a 'temporal cold war', not someone we have no idea of in a plotline that's never wrapped up except to say 'it never happened'.
And I agree with you about the Vulcans. Yet another thing that was patched up to something resembling actual canon in season four, along with the Klingons.
That's nothing, I once watched the first thirty minutes of Robin Hood: Men in Tights on some 'family channel'. They cut out all the sex jokes.
The Entire. Damn. Movie. is a sex joke. Literally half the jokes in the movie are related to sex, or at least nudity. My mind started spinning as to how they actually planned to carry this idea off, or what the hell the point could be, but I had something else coming on I actually would enjoy watching so had to change the channel.
I wish movie producers with a lot of power in the industry would start forbidding cuts from being made to their movies at all. Either air them in their entirety or don't air the damn thing at all.
Yeah, many of these are stupid.
Not only do they recommend CDNs, which is absurd for any page that gets less than a million hits a day, they also complain about ETags, despite all the stuff I want cached actually having Etags. They whine that 'different servers can produce different etags' or something, like my site is random distributed over a dozen servers where images and CSS randomly get sent from different ones. Um, nope, just one server, as you apparently figured out when complaining about not using CDNs.
Of course, who knows how the hell they'd know if that was true and I'd actually set up the Etags correctly to be in sync.
And they whine about images and stuff that have Expires headers that aren't 'in the far future'. WTF? They're not in the far future for a reason. They're in the near future of a day or two, which is more than enough to handle a single visit. If someone comes back, they can make a damn HEAD request and see if it's changed, using less than 200 bytes. That seems a really dumb thing to complain about.
Some of these tests are good, it's nice to have a gzip and cachability report right there, and some other checks are at least moderately useful, like 'Move Scripts to bottom'. (Although if I had a page with so much javascript it mattered, I'd write a tiny loader function and have it pull in everything after pageload.)
But some of these are just goofy, and they definately need a 'No, the server is not overloaded by a huge amount of traffic, don't invent problems that would only affect, for example, yahoo.com' checkbox. I think the Web Developer Tools/View Speed Report is more useful on the whole, as that actually hits actual causes of slowdown like having the page too damn big!
This distinction is legally dubious. The GPL is a license, without which you couldn't even run the program in most cases (temporary copies in RAM fall under copyright law, see Lessig's "Code"), so clearly some license is necessary for all useful software.
You're a moron. Copyright law explicitly allows program copies made in memory, and thus you need no 'license' at all to use computer programs.
Ah. So instead of six horcruxes and the seventh part remaining in him, which would be a magically significant number and stuff, he divided his soul in seven parts, put six somewhere else, and then accidentally divided the remaining part again so he was only running around with 1/14th a soul or something.
Which not only screwed up the 'divided into seven parts' significance, but he ended up with much less soul in him than if he'd just divided it up into eight parts to start with.
I was just pointing out that many people agree with you, the first few books were 'unchallenging and unstimulating', and that if that is the reason you dislike the series, you may want to try one of the later books.
You certainly don't have to if you don't want to. I was just explaining that what you quite rightly saw as a failing of the series (Although it was, in a sense, done on purpose.) might have only applied to the books you read, and you might enjoy the rest.
And you don't have to start at the first book. Read the wikipedia pages as a summary and start on the third, or even the fourth. (Or, hell, just watch the movies.)
But it's not my job to run around convincing people of what series they might like, as I have honestly no idea.