i have nothing useful to say on real recycling, but as for reuse, there are a number of creative things you could do...:
there is the ever-popular AOL/Earthlink/Bad-Burn Coaster Collection, popular in dorm rooms, bachelor pads, and finely decorated homes and gardens. (available from IKEA for only $399.95)
there is a car in my friend's neighborhood which has quartered CDs glued to it so they look like fish scales.
you could make a giant heliograph and signal (or blind) your friends for miles around.
having just watched A View to a Kill, i can imagine a Bond villain collecting millions of them and threatening to destroy the moon with a concentrated blast of solar energy.
sell them on eBay as Dreamcast/PS2 games.
there was a guy in Hellraiser II who had a bunch of CDs in his head, and who killed people by whizzing these CDs at them, Tron-like.
or, for a semi-serious suggestion, you might check the art departments at local schools to see if they need lots of raw material to make lovely centerpieces and mother's day cards.
first off, i'd like to thank everyone for their replies. you've given us some issues to think about.
now, if i may reply to a few ideas in the thread:
re: analogies
i have to agree with the poster who pointed out that we can analogy ourselves to death and never really accomplish anything. the Texas story about looking into cars made for interesting reading, though:).
re: valid uses
port scanning for the purposes of understanding the security of your box cannot be overrated. we've found lots of problems by playing with nmap (sendmail's listening on what port? portmap is still running on that debian machine?).
but as someone else pointed out (i'm far too lazy to assign credit; my apologies), how about just for the purpose of pure learning? most of us grew up (or are still growing up) hacking on computers. if the Internet had been as widespread when i was 11 as it is now, i'm sure i would have done a good deal of exploration and learned a lot about networks by doing it. as it is, i'm still trying to learn more and more about network infrastructure and good sysadminning practices and the like. learning by example and experimentation are some of the best ways to learn. and for someone who had less guidance in system administration than i first did, it might be the only way to learn anything at all.
how about port scanning as market research?
not too long ago i used nmap on the primary webserver of a webspace provider my friends were thinking of using. the nmap showed me a default Redhat box, complete with telnet, linuxconf, lpd, and NFS running (and clearly not tcp wrappered or firewalled)! in this case, maybe i could have just asked the admin what she was running, but do you think she would have told me, even if she'd known? i'd wager she would have told me she was running apache and ColdFusion and whatever else she thought i might care directly about, but wouldn't feel the need to mention that her company used telnet for authentication. as it was, i strongly recommended my friends look elsewhere for a webspace company that had some competent sysadmins. unfortunately, my friends' webmaster thinks that ssh is only useful "if you run the government of a small nation," so my advice may go unheeded. and yes, i've tried edumakating this webmaster, but he's the one trying to write the site in ColdFusion, so...
what about port scanning out of idle curiosity? what if i'm sitting in my dorm room and i want to know what kinds of boxes are plugged into the local network? nmapping the subnet tells you all kinds of neat stuff. this is not something i need to do for any reason, but i also don't really see the harm in it. i personally would inform people if i found insecure services on their boxen, but i realize this doesn't apply to everyone.
what if i happen to go to a particular website a lot, and just sort of wonder what's kicking around under the hood? nmap slashdot.org and i now have more information than i did before. (slashdot might be a bad example since they publish most of their setup already, but this is all very pedantic anyway.) i'm well aware of what is said about curiosity and felines and grisly murder, but learning is nonetheless something i very much enjoy.
the harsh reality
this debate is very interesting, and i'm glad to have had it with a larger community than just my colleagues here. it seems that the comments are about evenly split between the "always bad" and "generally innocent" camps. the problem is that as long as there are "always bad" types out there, it will be hard for us not to have to deal with people who experiment with port scanners, because a complaint means someone has to look into it and deal with it. this means someone playing around and looking at stuff could generate a large amount of work for someone to deal with, which is bad, as all but a few of us are overworked students as it is (that is, all but a few of us are students; i'd wager that for all X where X is a student, X is overworked...but i digress).
anyway, i see this as an unfortunate state of affairs. i don't like having to institute a policy i don't agree with, but, to quote Radiohead (though it is uttered ironically in "fitter happier"), "Pragmatism Not Idealism."
hopefully this reply isn't too late to be viewed by a few of the discussion's participants. again, thanks for your thoughts.
Because of how hackable (not the bad kind) Linux is, there is more than enough room for them [militant linux geeks], as well as mainstream users like your parents, sister, or girlfriend.
i really enjoy the irony here. elitist linux hackers are bad for linux's reputation, but it's okay for the author to stereotype my parents, sister, and girlfriend (what about my boyfriend, anyway?) as clueless lusers. that's the way to get more people interested in technology! k-r4d d00d.
Slashdot Mirror
I would much rather see Mastodon in front of a deer hoof.
Why not simply do a quick & dirty bad job of it?
because it's a small industry, and the chances of your earlier choices coming back to haunt you are quite good?
> How does it compare to rail/car/ship travel?
Airplanes are much, much faster.
"Hello, airplanes? Yeah, it's blimps. You win!"
http://xkcd.com/927/
The reason the article doesn't explain how Microsoft crash dumps work is because no one understands them.
This guy seems to be closest to understanding of anyone I've found:
http://www.wintellect.com/CS/blogs/jrobbins/archive/2009/05/11/pdb-files-what-every-developer-must-know.aspx
> John Hancock famously signed his huge ass signature on the Declaration of Independence because he WANTED it to be known that he supported it.
Snopes does not agree: http://www.snopes.com/history/american/hancock.asp
i agree with the parent's other points but i strongly disagree with this one:
Use autoconf to handle platform idiosyncrasies.
autoconf is gross and difficult to use on Windows.
i use CMake at work and like it well enough. it works well enough with Qt that KDE uses it for their build system.
or, for a semi-serious suggestion, you might check the art departments at local schools to see if they need lots of raw material to make lovely centerpieces and mother's day cards.
first off, i'd like to thank everyone for their replies. you've given us some issues to think about.
now, if i may reply to a few ideas in the thread:
re: analogies :).
i have to agree with the poster who pointed out that we can analogy ourselves to death and never really accomplish anything. the Texas story about looking into cars made for interesting reading, though
re: valid uses
port scanning for the purposes of understanding the security of your box cannot be overrated. we've found lots of problems by playing with nmap (sendmail's listening on what port? portmap is still running on that debian machine?).
but as someone else pointed out (i'm far too lazy to assign credit; my apologies), how about just for the purpose of pure learning? most of us grew up (or are still growing up) hacking on computers. if the Internet had been as widespread when i was 11 as it is now, i'm sure i would have done a good deal of exploration and learned a lot about networks by doing it. as it is, i'm still trying to learn more and more about network infrastructure and good sysadminning practices and the like. learning by example and experimentation are some of the best ways to learn. and for someone who had less guidance in system administration than i first did, it might be the only way to learn anything at all.
how about port scanning as market research? not too long ago i used nmap on the primary webserver of a webspace provider my friends were thinking of using. the nmap showed me a default Redhat box, complete with telnet, linuxconf, lpd, and NFS running (and clearly not tcp wrappered or firewalled)! in this case, maybe i could have just asked the admin what she was running, but do you think she would have told me, even if she'd known? i'd wager she would have told me she was running apache and ColdFusion and whatever else she thought i might care directly about, but wouldn't feel the need to mention that her company used telnet for authentication. as it was, i strongly recommended my friends look elsewhere for a webspace company that had some competent sysadmins. unfortunately, my friends' webmaster thinks that ssh is only useful "if you run the government of a small nation," so my advice may go unheeded. and yes, i've tried edumakating this webmaster, but he's the one trying to write the site in ColdFusion, so...
what about port scanning out of idle curiosity? what if i'm sitting in my dorm room and i want to know what kinds of boxes are plugged into the local network? nmapping the subnet tells you all kinds of neat stuff. this is not something i need to do for any reason, but i also don't really see the harm in it. i personally would inform people if i found insecure services on their boxen, but i realize this doesn't apply to everyone.
what if i happen to go to a particular website a lot, and just sort of wonder what's kicking around under the hood? nmap slashdot.org and i now have more information than i did before. (slashdot might be a bad example since they publish most of their setup already, but this is all very pedantic anyway.) i'm well aware of what is said about curiosity and felines and grisly murder, but learning is nonetheless something i very much enjoy.
the harsh reality
this debate is very interesting, and i'm glad to have had it with a larger community than just my colleagues here. it seems that the comments are about evenly split between the "always bad" and "generally innocent" camps. the problem is that as long as there are "always bad" types out there, it will be hard for us not to have to deal with people who experiment with port scanners, because a complaint means someone has to look into it and deal with it. this means someone playing around and looking at stuff could generate a large amount of work for someone to deal with, which is bad, as all but a few of us are overworked students as it is (that is, all but a few of us are students; i'd wager that for all X where X is a student, X is overworked...but i digress).
anyway, i see this as an unfortunate state of affairs. i don't like having to institute a policy i don't agree with, but, to quote Radiohead (though it is uttered ironically in "fitter happier"), "Pragmatism Not Idealism."
hopefully this reply isn't too late to be viewed by a few of the discussion's participants. again, thanks for your thoughts.
tyler
i really enjoy the irony here. elitist linux hackers are bad for linux's reputation, but it's okay for the author to stereotype my parents, sister, and girlfriend (what about my boyfriend, anyway?) as clueless lusers. that's the way to get more people interested in technology! k-r4d d00d.
tyler