The difference being, the Christian Americans arent forming together into terrorist groups, planning to kill as many other Americans as possible.
The KKK was killing a good number of Americans at the height of their power. Terror was definitely their game, and they had a couple of massacres under their belt.
The tobacco industry isn't built on terror -- quite to the contrary, they spent decades ensuring Americans that there was no conclusive evidence that cigarettes were unsafe while fighting a ferocious rear-guard battle, spending millions of dollars discourage or discredit the publication of those studies which did present such proof.
The tobacco industry causes more US deaths in the averate week than died in the attacks of 9/11. Unlike the terrorists, tobacco executives don't do it for ideological reason -- unless you consider greed an ideology.
More americans are killed by Christian Americans every year than have been killed by Muslim extremists in the last decade. Focusing on on the 'muslim' threat is little more than an excuse to infringe on constitutional and human rights across the board.
Here's an analogy for you, before you label me a "flamebait" or "troll". Imagine that there's been a 300lbs asian male running around with a pistol shooting people. Are you going to search every single person for a pistol, or are you going to look out for a 300lbs asian male?
Hatred, terrorism and extremism knows no racial, national or religious bounds. Pretending otherwise is both stupid and dangerous.
If the 300lb gun-wielding idiot is known to be in jail or dead (e.g. blew his own head off), I'd be inclined to stop looking for him, and just go back to looking for idiots with guns.
If you use the existence of the first idiot to 'prove' that only 300lb asians are homicidal maniacs, then you're setting yourself up to get 'capped by a 110lb redhead with a smoldering hatred for trolls -- or just ripped apart by the next sumo wrestler you try to strip-search.
Hmm.. looks like you define a cubit to be 18 inches...
according to units.dat:
irishcubit = 18 irishinch romancubit = 18 romaninch # units. egyptianroyalcubit = 20.63 in # plus or minus.2 in egyptianshortcubit = 6 egyptianpalm greekcubit = 1.5 greekfoot # said to be 3|5 of a 20.75 in cubit. homericcubit = 20 greekfingers # Elbow to end of knuckles. shortgreekcubit = 18 greekfingers # Elbow to start of fingers. olympiccubit = 25 remendigit # These olympic measures were not as northerncubit = 26.6 in # plus/minus.2 in sumeriancubit = 495 mm assyriancubit = 21.6 in persianroyalcubit = 7 assyrianpalm hashimicubit = 25.56 in # Standard of linear measure used
in Persian dominions of the Arabic empire 7-8th cent. Is equal to two
French feet.
blackcubit = 21.28 in biblicalcubit = 21.8 in hebrewcubit = 17.58 in
You mean like the passengers beating the crap out of some dorks with box cutters, rather than sitting like the trained sheep the left has been attempting to turn them into?
It's not the left that's been trying to do that... More like the right -- specifically "the establishment". I don't know how many times, I've seen news reports where the police have thanked some random 'citizen' for arresting some violent creep then followed up by saying that these things sre best left to police.
Even right-wing militia types seem well trained to follow orders.
Left wing types, on the other hand, are much more likely to chafe under orders, start mouthing off the attackers and lead a 'popular revolt' against them.
I don't understand why Dell doesn't grab the bull by the horns and partner up with somebody.
One of the possible explanations (and hinted at in the article) is that Del has partnered up with somebody -- a spyware supplier.
If Dell is pre-installing software that includes spyware, and the distribution agreement of that software includes a provision that the spyware not be removed, then giving customers any sort of assistance in removing that same (pre-installed) spyware is the one scenario under which Dell would have reasonable cause to fear a lawsuit.
Unless you got an extra 10grand to spend on a 5" screen that needs a small nuclear power plant to run..
Back when the MacII first came out, I realized that it could handle 2GB of ram, so I did some paper napkin calculations to figure out how to go about it... The state of the art for RAM were 1megabit chips, with a rated power consumption of 1watt each. I figured you could camolflage the memory unit as a desk... The entire top of the desk would contain cards of ram chips. One pedestal would be a cooling unit. The other would be a 16kilowatt power supply.
But archiving in a RAID disk system would be robust to failure of drives,
That's just fine, until Microsoft brings out LongHorn and prevents you from making backup copies of anything -- or prevents you fram accessing that data after you upgrade your machine, etc.
About the only thing that was even vaguely surprising about this is that AOL gets and logs Caller Id (call display) information. Normally that's extra cost from the phone company, but I'm betting that AOL gets a nice bulk discount from their telco.
For my part, if I was going to steal a computer, I think that I'd wipe the harddrive and install a new OS (read: Linux) before I even thought about connecting it to the net. That wouldn't necessarily stop all the call-home tricks that I can think of, but I'm not about to trust my freedom to the computing safety of a stranger.
ISPs usually knows ARP address of computers (network interfaces actually) that are connected to their gateways because DHCP-servers are caching them. I don't have details about this but I'm pretty sure about that DHCP stuff.
Machines which dial in don't use ARP. ARP only applies to Ethernet
. Nontheless, I can easily see a machine with sensitive information wanting to report it's IP address to a central location whenever it connects. Cookies in the web browser might also help identify a stolen machine.
Using the default account and password stored on a machine seems stupid at first, until you consider that the guy had ID theft equipment... I don't use AOL, but I wouldn't be to surprised if you could fetch some ID-associated info by logging into the account of a stolen computer. In this case, the computer was of special interest, so the guy was picked up.
I wouldn't be surprised if more people could be caught by this same method, it's just that police aren't interested enough in following such tracks for 'normal' owners.
Missed the morris worm?
on
20 Years of Virii
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Perhaps I just
didn't notice, but I think we managed to go past the 15'th anniversary of The Morris worm without noting it.
For many people in the UNIX community, the Morris worm was the great wakeup call that the 'net was no longer a safe space where you could trust all the other sysadmins (( as was especially the case when your 'net was really only a LAN )).
As a result of the Morris worm, people started to lock down their systems and software, including simple things like using fgets(3) instead of gets(3).
(This lesson was also available to Microsoft, but they chose to ignore it until very recently.)
Render to Caesar the
things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are
God's.
-- Jesus
There are advantages to both the web and physical books. The web is easy to search, but -- as a recent article pointed out -- it's very ephemeral. Web pages have an average lifespan of 100 days, and the WhiteHouse is limiting searches of articles about Iraq. Modulo problems like that, it's possible to find anything you want -- as long as there's stil a valid pointer to it, and it hasn't been changed.
Many years ago, I was doing a school report on Fidel Castro's revolutionary activities. My mother had an encyclopedia that had been bought in 1959 -- Just about the time that Castro was starting his second (and successful) revolution. The Encyclopedia Brittanica had about one paragraph on him -- describing him as little more than a failed revolutionary.
For me, this historical view of Castro (the view itself being of historical nature) was rather interesting... and unlikely to have been repeated in later versions of the encyclopedia. Today, even the
teaser for the Fidel Castro's entry in the encyclopedia is as long as the entire original
. I'm very glad that my mother bought the original Encyclopedia, and that my sister has seen fit to keep it. I would also encourag anybody who has such old works to keep them as historical record, much less likely to change than the 'net.
For Umberto's third record form -- organic memory -- I live in BC, which still has a reasonably active Native culture. There are still a small handful of people in BC who grew up trained almost exclusively in the pre-european style of the various nations that are now British Columbia. The Native tradition is very much an oral one, and they had methods and customs designed to keep such histories constant over time... Present day researchers were surprised to find that centuries after first contact in the far north, the native oral histories of the episodes were pretty much in agreement with the written logs of the explorers of that time.
I remember one native elder recalling how his (then) elder scoffed at the european tradition of writing everything down...
"If it's that important, why do they have to write it down to remember it?"
Those people need to wake up and redesign their broken software instead of introducing yet more brokenness to the standards for work-arounds that (the standards) unfortunately now follow broken implementations. Cough BIND cough.
It's not the software that's broken. The protocol defines (a subset of) printable ASCII, and that's what properly designed software filters for. DNS was (if I remember correctly) designed in the pre-UTF days. At that time, international character defs were something of a hodge-podge, and I think that printable ASCII-7 was chosen as a least-common-denominator.
Even now, redefining the protocol to accept other printable characters without such hacks as they're using now could lead to some interesting problems (i.e. what's printable???
Am I going to start seeing domain names with smiley faces and chinese characters in them?). In many ways, limiting domain names to european scripts would be no less (perhaps even more) ego-centric than the old decision to use ASCII-7.
I mean if SCO wasn't going to sue Google before... At least Slashdot and Linux World gave them the idea to do it now.
Given SCO's history of straight-shooting legal maneuvers, I'm thinking that in their sights, might be one of the safest locations on this planet. (expensive, but safe).
Why not extend dns to support unicode? That way they'd be no translation or other crap to go through.
Sounds like a great idea.... If you're willing to re-implement the DNS code in my Win-95 box.... or on my Amiga-4000. How about my 10 year old Apollo workstation or the SUN-3 that's still working just fine, thank you. etc. etc.
A lot of old DNS implementations would choke (and properly so) on UTF-8 encoded DNS names. We probably could have seeded the needs of the
future by saying that IP-6 DNS servers should support unicode, but I think that even that boat has been missed. (or is quickly leaving dock).
In the meantime the old DNS and it's anglo-centric presumptions and restrictions are with us for the next few years (or decades, as the case may be). Clearly some people feel the need to live within those restrictions.
the only way to fight spam is by attacking their business model.
The CAN-SPAM act includes provisions for
forfieture of proceeds from spamming, and hefty fines... this seems like an attack on the economics of spam to me.
Also: I'd say that there are multiple ways of attacking spam. Each little bit helps. There are some people who feel that this law was enacted to head off the much nastier California law, but I'll take what I can get.
Note: The California law apparently goes into effect in January, while the US law (which pre-empts the CA law) goes into effect at the end of March -- so, if you live in California, get ready to avail yourself of the provisions of that law in the (small) window that you have.
Why are businesses allowed to do things that individuals aren't?
What the Canadian spammers are doing is probably illegal as well... The problem is that it's just not quite as clear how illegal it is and precisely what law to use against them.
On the bright side (if you can think of it that way), if the guy ends up in jail, he'll have lots of time to research a lawsuit against these people... One thing that probably comes out of his arrest is that these people are pobably very specifically identified.
Has anybody looked up the papers on this case to ID the company??? If they're in Vancouver, I can even pay them a personal visit.....
One must learn to eke the most profit out of every defeat.
I hope the RIAA pays well. Some people think that the Mob is 'cool' (stuid but true). On the other hand, if girls finds out you work for the RIAA, you'll never get a date -- much less laid.
You would think that an organization of, well, music companies would have something better to do than attack individual users for a crime that doesnt really matter.
You obviously don't understand the nature of a company.. For all intents and purposes, a company is it's balance sheet. Whatever works for the balance sheet works for the company. Companies which consistently do things that don't have prospects of either a long term or a short term profit (even if it's just good PR) are a definite oddity these days.
The RIAA sees the possibility of profits in suing 15 year olds, so they're doing it. End of story.
Unless you have shareholders/owners who are seriously sympathetic to, and supportive of, your non-fiscal intentions, you could be in deep trouble (and liable to a hostile takeover by somebody who sees the possibility of larger profits).
Slashdot Mirror
The KKK was killing a good number of Americans at the height of their power. Terror was definitely their game, and they had a couple of massacres under their belt.
The tobacco industry isn't built on terror -- quite to the contrary, they spent decades ensuring Americans that there was no conclusive evidence that cigarettes were unsafe while fighting a ferocious rear-guard battle, spending millions of dollars discourage or discredit the publication of those studies which did present such proof.
The tobacco industry causes more US deaths in the averate week than died in the attacks of 9/11. Unlike the terrorists, tobacco executives don't do it for ideological reason -- unless you consider greed an ideology.
I was thinking:
Linux: For the best in sound development methodologies.
More americans are killed by Christian Americans every year than have been killed by Muslim extremists in the last decade. Focusing on on the 'muslim' threat is little more than an excuse to infringe on constitutional and human rights across the board.
Hatred, terrorism and extremism knows no racial, national or religious bounds. Pretending otherwise is both stupid and dangerous.
If the 300lb gun-wielding idiot is known to be in jail or dead (e.g. blew his own head off), I'd be inclined to stop looking for him, and just go back to looking for idiots with guns.
If you use the existence of the first idiot to 'prove' that only 300lb asians are homicidal maniacs, then you're setting yourself up to get 'capped by a 110lb redhead with a smoldering hatred for trolls -- or just ripped apart by the next sumo wrestler you try to strip-search.
You seem to forget that the second worst terrorist attack on US soil was comitted by a blonde-haired, blue-eyed ex-marine.
Should we start presuming blondes are terrorists, or ex-marines?
It's not the left that's been trying to do that... More like the right -- specifically "the establishment". I don't know how many times, I've seen news reports where the police have thanked some random 'citizen' for arresting some violent creep then followed up by saying that these things sre best left to police.
Even right-wing militia types seem well trained to follow orders.
Left wing types, on the other hand, are much more likely to chafe under orders, start mouthing off the attackers and lead a 'popular revolt' against them.
George Bush was a hippie ?????!!!!!
One of the possible explanations (and hinted at in the article) is that Del has partnered up with somebody -- a spyware supplier.
If Dell is pre-installing software that includes spyware, and the distribution agreement of that software includes a provision that the spyware not be removed, then giving customers any sort of assistance in removing that same (pre-installed) spyware is the one scenario under which Dell would have reasonable cause to fear a lawsuit.
Back when the MacII first came out, I realized that it could handle 2GB of ram, so I did some paper napkin calculations to figure out how to go about it... The state of the art for RAM were 1megabit chips, with a rated power consumption of 1watt each. I figured you could camolflage the memory unit as a desk... The entire top of the desk would contain cards of ram chips. One pedestal would be a cooling unit. The other would be a 16kilowatt power supply.
That's just fine, until Microsoft brings out LongHorn and prevents you from making backup copies of anything -- or prevents you fram accessing that data after you upgrade your machine, etc.
For my part, if I was going to steal a computer, I think that I'd wipe the harddrive and install a new OS (read: Linux) before I even thought about connecting it to the net. That wouldn't necessarily stop all the call-home tricks that I can think of, but I'm not about to trust my freedom to the computing safety of a stranger.
Machines which dial in don't use ARP. ARP only applies to Ethernet
. Nontheless, I can easily see a machine with sensitive information wanting to report it's IP address to a central location whenever it connects. Cookies in the web browser might also help identify a stolen machine.
Using the default account and password stored on a machine seems stupid at first, until you consider that the guy had ID theft equipment... I don't use AOL, but I wouldn't be to surprised if you could fetch some ID-associated info by logging into the account of a stolen computer. In this case, the computer was of special interest, so the guy was picked up.
I wouldn't be surprised if more people could be caught by this same method, it's just that police aren't interested enough in following such tracks for 'normal' owners.
For many people in the UNIX community, the Morris worm was the great wakeup call that the 'net was no longer a safe space where you could trust all the other sysadmins (( as was especially the case when your 'net was really only a LAN )).
As a result of the Morris worm, people started to lock down their systems and software, including simple things like using fgets(3) instead of gets(3).
(This lesson was also available to Microsoft, but they chose to ignore it until very recently.)
Many years ago, I was doing a school report on Fidel Castro's revolutionary activities. My mother had an encyclopedia that had been bought in 1959 -- Just about the time that Castro was starting his second (and successful) revolution. The Encyclopedia Brittanica had about one paragraph on him -- describing him as little more than a failed revolutionary.
For me, this historical view of Castro (the view itself being of historical nature) was rather interesting... and unlikely to have been repeated in later versions of the encyclopedia. Today, even the teaser for the Fidel Castro's entry in the encyclopedia is as long as the entire original
. I'm very glad that my mother bought the original Encyclopedia, and that my sister has seen fit to keep it. I would also encourag anybody who has such old works to keep them as historical record, much less likely to change than the 'net.
For Umberto's third record form -- organic memory -- I live in BC, which still has a reasonably active Native culture. There are still a small handful of people in BC who grew up trained almost exclusively in the pre-european style of the various nations that are now British Columbia. The Native tradition is very much an oral one, and they had methods and customs designed to keep such histories constant over time... Present day researchers were surprised to find that centuries after first contact in the far north, the native oral histories of the episodes were pretty much in agreement with the written logs of the explorers of that time.
I remember one native elder recalling how his (then) elder scoffed at the european tradition of writing everything down...
It's not the software that's broken. The protocol defines (a subset of) printable ASCII, and that's what properly designed software filters for. DNS was (if I remember correctly) designed in the pre-UTF days. At that time, international character defs were something of a hodge-podge, and I think that printable ASCII-7 was chosen as a least-common-denominator.
Even now, redefining the protocol to accept other printable characters without such hacks as they're using now could lead to some interesting problems (i.e. what's printable??? Am I going to start seeing domain names with smiley faces and chinese characters in them?). In many ways, limiting domain names to european scripts would be no less (perhaps even more) ego-centric than the old decision to use ASCII-7.
Given SCO's history of straight-shooting legal maneuvers, I'm thinking that in their sights, might be one of the safest locations on this planet. (expensive, but safe).
Sounds like a great idea.... If you're willing to re-implement the DNS code in my Win-95 box.... or on my Amiga-4000. How about my 10 year old Apollo workstation or the SUN-3 that's still working just fine, thank you. etc. etc.
A lot of old DNS implementations would choke (and properly so) on UTF-8 encoded DNS names. We probably could have seeded the needs of the future by saying that IP-6 DNS servers should support unicode, but I think that even that boat has been missed. (or is quickly leaving dock).
In the meantime the old DNS and it's anglo-centric presumptions and restrictions are with us for the next few years (or decades, as the case may be). Clearly some people feel the need to live within those restrictions.
It's a legal thing -- Once they warn you, the rest is your fault.
Besides, ATMs aren't critical. Any failure isn't life-threatening, just expensive.Besides, if you think that that's bad, I hear that Mak the Knifeless has a virus installed and waiting for voting day.....
The CAN-SPAM act includes provisions for forfieture of proceeds from spamming, and hefty fines... this seems like an attack on the economics of spam to me.
Also: I'd say that there are multiple ways of attacking spam. Each little bit helps. There are some people who feel that this law was enacted to head off the much nastier California law, but I'll take what I can get.
Note: The California law apparently goes into effect in January, while the US law (which pre-empts the CA law) goes into effect at the end of March -- so, if you live in California, get ready to avail yourself of the provisions of that law in the (small) window that you have.
What the Canadian spammers are doing is probably illegal as well... The problem is that it's just not quite as clear how illegal it is and precisely what law to use against them.
On the bright side (if you can think of it that way), if the guy ends up in jail, he'll have lots of time to research a lawsuit against these people... One thing that probably comes out of his arrest is that these people are pobably very specifically identified.
Has anybody looked up the papers on this case to ID the company??? If they're in Vancouver, I can even pay them a personal visit.....
One must learn to eke the most profit out of every defeat.
I hope the RIAA pays well. Some people think that the Mob is 'cool' (stuid but true). On the other hand, if girls finds out you work for the RIAA, you'll never get a date -- much less laid.
I guess that that's part of what it takes to work for the mob.... A weak moral compass, and slightly stupid.
Theda has an incredible voice that she shows off in the tracks I have online (and more music available).
Phat Tank is more hip-hop in style. Enjoyable in a completely different style. There are other sites where you can go to find far more good music.
You obviously don't understand the nature of a company.. For all intents and purposes, a company is it's balance sheet. Whatever works for the balance sheet works for the company. Companies which consistently do things that don't have prospects of either a long term or a short term profit (even if it's just good PR) are a definite oddity these days.
The RIAA sees the possibility of profits in suing 15 year olds, so they're doing it. End of story.
Unless you have shareholders/owners who are seriously sympathetic to, and supportive of, your non-fiscal intentions, you could be in deep trouble (and liable to a hostile takeover by somebody who sees the possibility of larger profits).