Actually, I've received calls lately about getting credit cards (I think..whatever it was, I didn't want it.) and they'll say that they will be recording the call "for clerical reasons". (yeah, if you couldn't understand me the first time, how could you understand me later. And anyway, you have my name and number, you can get my other info.) I suspect that maybe they've had people harass the callers and this might be a way to prove that the callers were harassed.
Anyway, it usually goes something like this:
TM: You have been pre-approved for blah blah blah. I just need to confirm some information here...will you be in school in the next month?
ME: Thank you for calling but I'm not interested in your offer at this time.
TM: Oh but this is a great deal. Blah blah.
ME: No, I'm still not interested.
[hang up]
I once even had a girl continue after my second refusal. I had to say: "Well, I'm *STILL* not interested. I've had this call before and I turned it down then and I'm going to have to turn it down now."
Geesh.
Hint: If there's no answer within the first second or two after you pick up the phone, hang up, the likely just saw light 3 come on and are hurridly looking up and trying to figure out how to pronounce your name.
I don't have a blind spot in my eye. However, every once in a while, I'll get this little blob in my vision (not in the eye, it stays there if I only look out of one or the other eye). I've described to others as having colors like a tiny drop of oil in a puddle of a parking lot. Actually, it looks more like a drop of water or saliva would if you put it on your monitor and watched as it magnified the phosphors of your screen and spread the colors into their basic components.
These blobs appear for no apparent reason and grow and grow and eventually just move off to the side of my vision and go away. However, they are VERY annoying because I just can't see a thing where they are.
I've visited an optomitrist and he didn't see anything out of the ordinary in my eye. I think it's actually something in the nerves between my eyes and brain. Possibly something that occurs where they cross paths. I've also overheard people that say that they get something similar when they get migraines. It also used to be and sometimes still is accompanied by a terrible headache (actually, the pain is more in my eyes) that I sometimes get after not enough sleep. So, perhaps it's like a headache/migraine without the pain.
Nevertheless, they always go away and now I just live with them. I don't think there's an easy way to get rid of them. However, if anyone knows what they could be, I would be interested to know.
Kill the typosquatters!
on
Typosquatting
·
· Score: 1
Hey, this could be a great way to get back at the typosquatters. With the viewership of slashdot being so large, if we all find these sites and post links to them and click them, we could potentially give them so much traffic that they'd go down and actually loose revenue.
Hey, since you'll both be in the same area at the same time, maybe you could get CowboyNeal in the area or just some other random people for a Geeks in Space reunion. This time including Hemos who was absent at the last show. Or you could make your guest the entire crowd that shows up for the talk.
How about a show where 10-20 groups of people (engineers, probably) build robots that race over extreme terrains (sand, wind, cold, hot, water, etc). Say you start at 20 teams. Before each race, the teams are given an explanation of what they are to design and a week(or four) to design it. Every race you could throw out the two slowest robots(or the one slowest if you want to drag it out). After 10-20 shows, you'd have the winning team who would win a chance to build a robot that goes to Mars.
That would be an interesting show and it would get something useful accomplished at the same time.
Perhaps, though, I'm underestimating the time it akes to build something that is ready for space travel? Nahh...hehe.
Also, just like the Audio CDRs are only different in that the RIAA gets royalties, they also get royalties from cassettes. So, copy tapes and share all you want, they got your money, too. Or buy "Audio" CDRs and copy and share those...they won't care.
Perhaps credit card companies should now offer "hacker" insurance.
Possibly. But, unlike earthquakes, fires, flooding, and tornadoes, there are ways of protecting yourself from intruders in your computer systems.
On your house, you put a lock. If you're more protective, you get a noisy security system that alerts the police and you pay a fee. I suppose they could call it a "mandatory security fee" rather than "hacker insurance". Would you buy into a company which would basically be telling you "We know we will get hacked. Pay us if you want protection." ? They would at least have to make it sound nicer. A security fee sounds much nicer than "hacker insurance". And a security fee shouldn't even be NEEDED. This sort of thing should be AUTOMATIC when you got a service involving monetary transactions. There should not be optional security.
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 1
I have a strong belief that juries are intelligent people
Remember, when you're put on trial for a crime, you're trusing your fate to twelve people that were too stupid to get out of jury duty.:)
It might be expensive to get all the equipment (but you guys are supposed to be rich now...or something) but I think a shortwave broadcast could be really cool. Of course, you could also do an MP3 broadcast as well for those of us without SW radios or those who couldn't pick it up. At least for myself, though, radio would be nice as I'm on dialup and streaming doesn't work...even the 28.8 broadcasts don't work too well over a 56k modem. Whatever happens, I hope you continue to keep old broadcasts around for those of us who don't have a broadband connection but would still like to listen to the show at our leisure.
I believe this is also what must be done for cryogenic freezing (see: Dr Evil in the Big Boy rocket-egg-thing in Austin Powers). If you freeze something (say, an ant) in a common household freezer, ice crystals will form and destroy it's bodily cells. Thus, celery is flimsy (but good) when you thaw it out. (Though, my favorite is a frozen apple...haha! disgusting!) However, if you freeze it fast enough to keep the crystals from forming, you could probably thaw it out and it will come back to life. This is a trick that some insects (grasshoppers?) do by producing an antifreeze and then allowing their bodies to freeze during cold times. When it gets warm again, they thaw out and hop away. I guess this could be possible with people, too, if we could develop a drinkable antifreeze that wouldn't kill us.
Ah, another story about having fun in computer class. In my AP computer class in HS, we were using Win95 machines. They had most apps installed (notably, Paint). So, what I did was open My Computer and do an [ALT]-[PRINT SCREEN] which captures the currently active window. I then pasted it into a new image in Paint, making sure the image had the same dimensions as the original window. (Paint will enlarge the image to fit the part you're pasting in.) Then, I saved the picture to a file and set that as the back ground, centered, making sure that no icons overlapped it. So, it looked like a real My Computer window was open. The next day, my teacher said that the person (I think it was a girl) who sat there next was clicking it and clicking it and even she (the teacher) tried clicking and clicking..but nothing would happen. Eventually, they figured out what had happened. Actually, she didn't know that it was me until she said that and my friends and I were laughing about it. Pretty fun.
Hmm. It isn't still done like that? That was actually pretty nifty. If you copied the IP into the Location bar on My Computer in W98 in the form \\127.0.0.1\, you could view other files on their drive. That is, if they didn't disable that. You could probably even change their startup screen if you wanted to. It wouldn't hurt anything, but it would certainly freak them out.
...are you going to have two engines? A hydrogen engine and a gasoline engine for fallback when hydrogen isn't available?
Well, you could use a gas/electric hybrid which are not in great use yet but, I heard that they are supposed to get something like 70mpg.
Hmmm. Try this. The demo looks cool, though it's a windows-only app and requires Matlab and some Simulink program. I know there's Octave but I don't know what Simulink is or if there is a free replacement for *nix for it.
Okay, perhaps I should clear this up. We are currently Earthlink customers who were former Mindspring customers who were former Sprynet customers who were former Compuserve customers.:) Damn mergers.
Earthlink does have a DSL service. Their dialup service can be flakey at times but is generally good and I think the flakiness is mostly due to our crappy phone lines.
While this is certainly an interesting method of protest, it isn't failsafe. Here's a situation where digital media can shoot itself in the foot. If all the protesters are using the same digital-quality file and only deleting the end off so it's the right length, there could probably be a patch for Napster(and other DFSs) to get around it.
What I'm envisioning is that the software comes with a 5-10 second sample MP3 of this cuckoo file. If you'd like, whenever it starts to download a new file, the software would check what it's downloaded with the sample file[s] to make sure that it's not a known fake. This would be quite similar to searching for viruses. In the end, you could even have Napster distributing these under a different name in order to keep people using Napster and to increase revenue. Similar to how people say that some of the companies making the [radar detectors/fuzz busters] were the ones making the radar guns under different names.
The video is in Quicktime format so you might have some trouble viewing it under Linux. But don't worry, the video was VERY crappy and it pisses me off that I wasted so much time downloading that. Don't worry, you didn't miss anything.
Another thing: Wooo....look at me! I'm stealing Linux! I'm a big shoplifter! You'd have to be pretty dumb to think you were getting away with something when you "stole" a Redhat box. My point is that Linux probably costs much less for the store to purchase. And they're marked **WAY** up when they're new (ever noticed how RH6.1 was $69.99 until RH6.2 came out and now RH6.1 is $29.99?).
Heh. Maybe the Linux companies would WANT their product to be stolen! Because in the OSS world, it's not really being stolen...it's being distributed!
What about people with no smell? That's not a joke, BTW.
You know who ELSE doesn't have a sense of smell? You would if you'd listened to every episode of Geeks in Space. Yes! That's right! Our very own Rob Malda. Err. Yeah. So, don't feel like no one knows what you're talking about. I'm sure he does.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I've received calls lately about getting credit cards (I think..whatever it was, I didn't want it.) and they'll say that they will be recording the call "for clerical reasons". (yeah, if you couldn't understand me the first time, how could you understand me later. And anyway, you have my name and number, you can get my other info.) I suspect that maybe they've had people harass the callers and this might be a way to prove that the callers were harassed.
Anyway, it usually goes something like this:
TM: You have been pre-approved for blah blah blah. I just need to confirm some information here...will you be in school in the next month?
ME: Thank you for calling but I'm not interested in your offer at this time.
TM: Oh but this is a great deal. Blah blah.
ME: No, I'm still not interested.
[hang up]
I once even had a girl continue after my second refusal. I had to say: "Well, I'm *STILL* not interested. I've had this call before and I turned it down then and I'm going to have to turn it down now."
Geesh.
Hint: If there's no answer within the first second or two after you pick up the phone, hang up, the likely just saw light 3 come on and are hurridly looking up and trying to figure out how to pronounce your name.
Send in an Ask Slashdot and you just might get it. Good luck!
I don't have a blind spot in my eye. However, every once in a while, I'll get this little blob in my vision (not in the eye, it stays there if I only look out of one or the other eye). I've described to others as having colors like a tiny drop of oil in a puddle of a parking lot. Actually, it looks more like a drop of water or saliva would if you put it on your monitor and watched as it magnified the phosphors of your screen and spread the colors into their basic components.
These blobs appear for no apparent reason and grow and grow and eventually just move off to the side of my vision and go away. However, they are VERY annoying because I just can't see a thing where they are.
I've visited an optomitrist and he didn't see anything out of the ordinary in my eye. I think it's actually something in the nerves between my eyes and brain. Possibly something that occurs where they cross paths. I've also overheard people that say that they get something similar when they get migraines. It also used to be and sometimes still is accompanied by a terrible headache (actually, the pain is more in my eyes) that I sometimes get after not enough sleep. So, perhaps it's like a headache/migraine without the pain.
Nevertheless, they always go away and now I just live with them. I don't think there's an easy way to get rid of them. However, if anyone knows what they could be, I would be interested to know.
Hey, this could be a great way to get back at the typosquatters. With the viewership of slashdot being so large, if we all find these sites and post links to them and click them, we could potentially give them so much traffic that they'd go down and actually loose revenue.
With that, here's a few Google typosquatters:
http://www.hoogle.com/ - redirect to boogle.com; a beautified google.com
http://www.googol.com/ - some guy's personal site
http://www.gppgle.com/ - google.com with register.com ad at bottom
There are lots more. So, post links, click links (repeatedly), and hopefully kill a typosquatter!
Maybe you should write the next Star Wars script?
:)
I'd rather see them act it out.
Hey, since you'll both be in the same area at the same time, maybe you could get CowboyNeal in the area or just some other random people for a Geeks in Space reunion. This time including Hemos who was absent at the last show. Or you could make your guest the entire crowd that shows up for the talk.
..they get random noise.
:P "
And then they say: "Okay, what's the password?"
And then you say: "I'm not telling!
And then they say: "Okay, fine. You plead guilty."
Though, then that brings the "guilty until proven innocent" thing into play. But they would probably conveniently forget about that.
How about a show where 10-20 groups of people (engineers, probably) build robots that race over extreme terrains (sand, wind, cold, hot, water, etc). Say you start at 20 teams. Before each race, the teams are given an explanation of what they are to design and a week(or four) to design it. Every race you could throw out the two slowest robots(or the one slowest if you want to drag it out). After 10-20 shows, you'd have the winning team who would win a chance to build a robot that goes to Mars.
That would be an interesting show and it would get something useful accomplished at the same time.
Perhaps, though, I'm underestimating the time it akes to build something that is ready for space travel? Nahh...hehe.
Also, just like the Audio CDRs are only different in that the RIAA gets royalties, they also get royalties from cassettes. So, copy tapes and share all you want, they got your money, too. Or buy "Audio" CDRs and copy and share those...they won't care.
Perhaps credit card companies should now offer "hacker" insurance.
Possibly. But, unlike earthquakes, fires, flooding, and tornadoes, there are ways of protecting yourself from intruders in your computer systems.
On your house, you put a lock. If you're more protective, you get a noisy security system that alerts the police and you pay a fee. I suppose they could call it a "mandatory security fee" rather than "hacker insurance". Would you buy into a company which would basically be telling you "We know we will get hacked. Pay us if you want protection." ? They would at least have to make it sound nicer. A security fee sounds much nicer than "hacker insurance". And a security fee shouldn't even be NEEDED. This sort of thing should be AUTOMATIC when you got a service involving monetary transactions. There should not be optional security.
I have a strong belief that juries are intelligent people
:)
Remember, when you're put on trial for a crime, you're trusing your fate to twelve people that were too stupid to get out of jury duty.
It might be expensive to get all the equipment (but you guys are supposed to be rich now...or something) but I think a shortwave broadcast could be really cool. Of course, you could also do an MP3 broadcast as well for those of us without SW radios or those who couldn't pick it up. At least for myself, though, radio would be nice as I'm on dialup and streaming doesn't work...even the 28.8 broadcasts don't work too well over a 56k modem. Whatever happens, I hope you continue to keep old broadcasts around for those of us who don't have a broadband connection but would still like to listen to the show at our leisure.
I believe this is also what must be done for cryogenic freezing (see: Dr Evil in the Big Boy rocket-egg-thing in Austin Powers). If you freeze something (say, an ant) in a common household freezer, ice crystals will form and destroy it's bodily cells. Thus, celery is flimsy (but good) when you thaw it out. (Though, my favorite is a frozen apple...haha! disgusting!) However, if you freeze it fast enough to keep the crystals from forming, you could probably thaw it out and it will come back to life. This is a trick that some insects (grasshoppers?) do by producing an antifreeze and then allowing their bodies to freeze during cold times. When it gets warm again, they thaw out and hop away. I guess this could be possible with people, too, if we could develop a drinkable antifreeze that wouldn't kill us.
Ah, another story about having fun in computer class. In my AP computer class in HS, we were using Win95 machines. They had most apps installed (notably, Paint). So, what I did was open My Computer and do an [ALT]-[PRINT SCREEN] which captures the currently active window. I then pasted it into a new image in Paint, making sure the image had the same dimensions as the original window. (Paint will enlarge the image to fit the part you're pasting in.) Then, I saved the picture to a file and set that as the back ground, centered, making sure that no icons overlapped it. So, it looked like a real My Computer window was open. The next day, my teacher said that the person (I think it was a girl) who sat there next was clicking it and clicking it and even she (the teacher) tried clicking and clicking..but nothing would happen. Eventually, they figured out what had happened. Actually, she didn't know that it was me until she said that and my friends and I were laughing about it. Pretty fun.
Yes. They each had the same name... "Hey you."
Hmm. It isn't still done like that? That was actually pretty nifty. If you copied the IP into the Location bar on My Computer in W98 in the form \\127.0.0.1\, you could view other files on their drive. That is, if they didn't disable that. You could probably even change their startup screen if you wanted to. It wouldn't hurt anything, but it would certainly freak them out.
------------
...are you going to have two engines? A hydrogen engine and a gasoline engine for fallback when hydrogen isn't available?
Well, you could use a gas/electric hybrid which are not in great use yet but, I heard that they are supposed to get something like 70mpg.
Hmmm. Try this. The demo looks cool, though it's a windows-only app and requires Matlab and some Simulink program. I know there's Octave but I don't know what Simulink is or if there is a free replacement for *nix for it.
------------
Okay, perhaps I should clear this up. We are currently Earthlink customers who were former Mindspring customers who were former Sprynet customers who were former Compuserve customers. :) Damn mergers.
------------
Earthlink does have a DSL service. Their dialup service can be flakey at times but is generally good and I think the flakiness is mostly due to our crappy phone lines.
------------
While this is certainly an interesting method of protest, it isn't failsafe. Here's a situation where digital media can shoot itself in the foot.
If all the protesters are using the same digital-quality file and only deleting the end off so it's the right length, there could probably be a patch for Napster(and other DFSs) to get around it.
What I'm envisioning is that the software comes with a 5-10 second sample MP3 of this cuckoo file. If you'd like, whenever it starts to download a new file, the software would check what it's downloaded with the sample file[s] to make sure that it's not a known fake. This would be quite similar to searching for viruses. In the end, you could even have Napster distributing these under a different name in order to keep people using Napster and to increase revenue. Similar to how people say that some of the companies making the [radar detectors/fuzz busters] were the ones making the radar guns under different names.
------------
Did I leave anyone out?
Yes.
Slackware (2.2.16)
Mandrake(Hacked Redhat) (2.2.??)
LRP (2.2.16)
Yggdrasil (err..)
------------
"Why didn't thy just make it "'geeks3.1.mp3'?"
.mp3 by default and some users would be wondering what a .1 file was.
Simple! Because Windows truncates the
------------
The video is in Quicktime format so you might have some trouble viewing it under Linux. But don't worry, the video was VERY crappy and it pisses me off that I wasted so much time downloading that. Don't worry, you didn't miss anything.
------------
I guess more people shoplift Windows than Linux.
Another thing: Wooo....look at me! I'm stealing Linux! I'm a big shoplifter! You'd have to be pretty dumb to think you were getting away with something when you "stole" a Redhat box. My point is that Linux probably costs much less for the store to purchase. And they're marked **WAY** up when they're new (ever noticed how RH6.1 was $69.99 until RH6.2 came out and now RH6.1 is $29.99?).
Heh. Maybe the Linux companies would WANT their product to be stolen! Because in the OSS world, it's not really being stolen...it's being distributed!
------------
What about people with no smell? That's not a joke, BTW.
You know who ELSE doesn't have a sense of smell? You would if you'd listened to every episode of Geeks in Space. Yes! That's right! Our very own Rob Malda. Err. Yeah. So, don't feel like no one knows what you're talking about. I'm sure he does.