Don't forget the unintentional stack smashing, which is all too easy to do when you're writing tricky pointer code in C, and damned hard to find, especially when you barely understand the code you just wrote in the first place.
IBM getting out of the PC business is a sad day for all of us. They commoditized the PC and made it possible for all of us to have cheap gaming and porn platforms right in our living rooms and bedrooms. Not to mention they built some pretty good computers. I still love my ThinkPad despite its occasional ACPI-related problems. I don't think "Lenovo" is going to be quite the same...
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which vary from state to state.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it (x) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends and is counterintuitive ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business ( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever worked ( ) Other:
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (x) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP (x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook ( ) Other:
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures cannot involve wire fraud or credit card fraud (x) Countermeasures cannot involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Sending email should be free (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email (x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough ( ) Other:
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Nice try, dude, but I don't think it will work. (x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
...which is typical of government. Or any large bureaucracy for that matter.
The whole idea behind open source is "open," and that's the part GOCC lacks. Nobody can contribute to it without significant restrictions like accepting liability for the code. Open source has NO WARRANTY for a reason. You want a warranty or technical support, you buy it. In addition they have provided no way to build a community around their offerings.
GOCC is virtually unchanged from when I looked at it six months ago, and I wouldn't be too surprised if everybody just kind of ignored it.
This sort of thing happened to my R40 as well, but only when using ACPI. After I changed to using APM, everything is fine. But it works in XP with IBM's drivers. My current thinking is IBM has something non-standard in their ACPI implementation and the kernel people haven't worked around it yet.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which vary from state to state.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it (x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends and is counterintuitive ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business (x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever worked ( ) Other:
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (x) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (x) Technically illiterate politicians (x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook ( ) Other:
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures cannot involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures cannot involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email (x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough ( ) Other:
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Nice try, dude, but I don't think it will work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
eBay's ID Verify service uses this exact same line of questioning. When I went through it, strangely enough, the answer to every question turned out to be "I do not have (or never had) an account with this institution."
I live in a tornado-prone area, but the trailer park a block away from where I live already has been wiped off the map. No more trailer park, no more tornadoes...
I do not know anyone that has downloaded a "screen saver" for their computer in the last year.
In Korea only old people run screensavers.
Anyway, most people I know only use the screensavers that Windows came with. They never bother to find any other screensaver, and if they do, it's by random surfing. But I suspect most computers out there have a black screen with a Windows XP logo dancing around on it, because nobody ever changes the defaults!
GSM phones cannot be used to dial anything, not even 911, without a SIM card which is/was valid for the home service area of the phone. So if you donate your old GSM phone, be sure and leave the (expired) SIM card in it, and make sure you're donating it somewhere that's in the same home service area that the SIM card was originally used for.
And forget dialing 911 while on the road with one of these. It would work with an analog phone, but the GSM one will tell you "No service" even while you stand in the middle of downtown Des Moines and everyone else's GSM phone works just fine. I actually had this happen to me in Des Moines a few months ago.
If you really want a phone strictly for 911, go get an old analog phone off of eBay. It might cost more to ship it than the phone's worth, but how much IS that 911 access worth to you?
And how many people use the same username and password everywhere already? There are so many websites out there, each wanting you to sign up, that it's impossible for any human to memorize hundreds of usernames and passwords. They all wind up being the same, or very close to the same. Or worse, they get written down on a piece of paper under the keyboard.
Anyone ever notice that the product advertisments being passed off as stories contain more positive comments by the editors on average if that same product is being sold by Thinkgeek?
Yes, it's called promotion, and any good advertiser does it. I think this article is a case of negative promotion though. Or demotion maybe.
I do occasional remote sysadmin stuff for some friends who have small servers and web hosting packages. Not a lot of cash but not a lot of time either.
hides its "check for updates" window (without a tab on the XP app bar), and locks up the PDF-viewing window in IE until the "check for updates" box is dealt with.
This really needs to be dealt with. In the meantime you can workaround it by hitting Alt-Tab until you get the "check for updates" box to the front.
Ever go sniffing in places that are... well, less then suitable to carry around a laptop (or conceil one while sniffing)?
Oh yes. I just keep the laptop running while inside its nice leather carrying case. I use Kismet and it will tell me the SSID, MAC address, and GPS coordinates so I can find it again later.
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Help, I'm not a lawyer. What makes this license not GPL compatible?
I hope I'm still doing my own stunts when I'm 62 years old.
Don't forget the unintentional stack smashing, which is all too easy to do when you're writing tricky pointer code in C, and damned hard to find, especially when you barely understand the code you just wrote in the first place.
Open relays, zombie Windows boxes, and bandwidth costs definitely are a consideration here, though. The rest, it's debatable.
IBM getting out of the PC business is a sad day for all of us. They commoditized the PC and made it possible for all of us to have cheap gaming and porn platforms right in our living rooms and bedrooms. Not to mention they built some pretty good computers. I still love my ThinkPad despite its occasional ACPI-related problems. I don't think "Lenovo" is going to be quite the same...
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (x) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which vary from state to state.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends and is counterintuitive
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever worked
( ) Other:
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
( ) Other:
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures cannot involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures cannot involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
( ) Other:
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Nice try, dude, but I don't think it will work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Looks like Lycos is /.ed...this time forever.
The whole idea behind open source is "open," and that's the part GOCC lacks. Nobody can contribute to it without significant restrictions like accepting liability for the code. Open source has NO WARRANTY for a reason. You want a warranty or technical support, you buy it. In addition they have provided no way to build a community around their offerings.
GOCC is virtually unchanged from when I looked at it six months ago, and I wouldn't be too surprised if everybody just kind of ignored it.
Grandma has gone down the stairs. I will drive Grandma out into the snow...
This sort of thing happened to my R40 as well, but only when using ACPI. After I changed to using APM, everything is fine. But it works in XP with IBM's drivers. My current thinking is IBM has something non-standard in their ACPI implementation and the kernel people haven't worked around it yet.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which vary from state to state.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends and is counterintuitive
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever worked
( ) Other:
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
( ) Other:
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures cannot involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures cannot involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
( ) Other:
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Nice try, dude, but I don't think it will work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
In Redmond only old people sue spammers.
The point is, that when some asshole comes along and DDOS's the trackers (yesterday), you can still get connected and find peers to download from.
You watch way too much TV.
eBay's ID Verify service uses this exact same line of questioning. When I went through it, strangely enough, the answer to every question turned out to be "I do not have (or never had) an account with this institution."
I live in a tornado-prone area, but the trailer park a block away from where I live already has been wiped off the map. No more trailer park, no more tornadoes...
Back in 1964 Lyndon Baines Johnson declared "War on Poverty." It isn't going so well. The problem, as we all know, has gotten worse. This seems to happen anytime government declares "war" on something.
only old people have IT jobs.
In Korea only old people run screensavers.
Anyway, most people I know only use the screensavers that Windows came with. They never bother to find any other screensaver, and if they do, it's by random surfing. But I suspect most computers out there have a black screen with a Windows XP logo dancing around on it, because nobody ever changes the defaults!
And forget dialing 911 while on the road with one of these. It would work with an analog phone, but the GSM one will tell you "No service" even while you stand in the middle of downtown Des Moines and everyone else's GSM phone works just fine. I actually had this happen to me in Des Moines a few months ago.
If you really want a phone strictly for 911, go get an old analog phone off of eBay. It might cost more to ship it than the phone's worth, but how much IS that 911 access worth to you?
And how many people use the same username and password everywhere already? There are so many websites out there, each wanting you to sign up, that it's impossible for any human to memorize hundreds of usernames and passwords. They all wind up being the same, or very close to the same. Or worse, they get written down on a piece of paper under the keyboard.
Yes, it's called promotion, and any good advertiser does it. I think this article is a case of negative promotion though. Or demotion maybe.
You forgot the URL: xe.com currency calculator
I do occasional remote sysadmin stuff for some friends who have small servers and web hosting packages. Not a lot of cash but not a lot of time either.
This really needs to be dealt with. In the meantime you can workaround it by hitting Alt-Tab until you get the "check for updates" box to the front.
Oh yes. I just keep the laptop running while inside its nice leather carrying case. I use Kismet and it will tell me the SSID, MAC address, and GPS coordinates so I can find it again later.