Oh sure, modern cars *can* brake in half the distance they used to.
Under *ideal* conditions, which hardly ever exist. Assuming anti-lock brakes. And decent driving skills.
But some of us live in the real world. Some people live in locales with lots of rain. Or worse, snow and ice. Or poor visibility. Or drunk drivers. Or big fuckin' moose charging into you because they're generally pissed off.
I was about to say something about this, but you did it so much better.
The fact of the matter is that being gay (among other things) is no longer the sort of thing that will lose you your job. If it is, then it's probably a good thing that you don't work for bigoted assheads like that anymore.
The same legal protection afforded GLBT folks also protects those with other "alternative" lifestyles. As it becomes obvious to society that what we do in our bedrooms isn't really all that weird and that *lots* of people do that sort of thing, then keeping it private won't be so very important anymore.
but in the end the are still human and most of them lose their ideals when they get families and things are getting tough. [...] And as long as we are human, we will be freakishly religious... even the ones that think they are not (they just don't see it, because it all seems so normal to think like that)
Hi, I'm an Atheist. My wife is an Atheist. In the past month and a half, we moved into a new townhouse and had our first child. That's a ton of stress all at once. Nevermind the credit card bill. I suppose it could be worse inasmuch that we have the income to pay for it all.
No, we're not getting freakishly religious. In fact, we're not getting religious at all. Funny that how changes in your life don't change your base personality.
You forgot "non-text e-mail". That includes UUE, MIME and HTML. They should be totally disallowed.
If we hadn't strayed from the path of plain text, practically all of its problems wouldn't exist today. Somehow, I think that not being able to make your text pink is a small price to pay for that. We can scan text for spam, but we sure as hell can't scan images.
"We wanted to mobilise net users so that when we lobby certain countries we can say that the concerns are not just ours but those of thousands of internet users around the world,"... Many of those on the internet blacklist are countries that are regularly criticised by human rights groups, such as China and Burma.
Hmm. Let's see what the tradeoffs for China are in this situation.
On one hand, they have total control of 1 billion human beings if they control what they read, hear, and say.
On the other hand, they have a few thousand people whom they can ignore simply by not reading some web page.
I dunno man. Those few thousand people hold a lot of power over the guy who weilds more power than any other person on earth. They might even be able to hurt his feelings and make him look bad to the people who he's controlling, if only he doesn't censor the internet...
The answer to global warming is *very* simple, and *very* well known. We just need to plant massive amounts of biomass to soak up all the excess carbon.
Okay. No problem. Let's work that out then.
We need to plant X number of trees to counteract Y tonnes of CO2 being produced. As CO2 production goesup, we need to increase the number of trees we plant.
Oops. It seems that those numbers aren't exactly favourable to your solution right now. Could it be that currently, the amount of trees is going *down* while the amount of CO2 being produced is going *up*? Oops. Well, okay, let's reverse that trend.
Let's start in America, where most of the world's human contribution to atmospheric CO2 is produced (see earlier citation)? Well, to soak that up, you'd need to have about 146 25 year old pine trees for every (metric) tonne of CO2 produced. Not plant, but *have*. They have to be at least 25 years old before that sort of CO2 absorbtion is being done. And then you'd have to add 146 more 25 year old pine trees per year per ton of CO2 that that amount goes up.
So how many tonnes of CO2 does the US produce? About 5.4 billion, way back in 1997. You would need to *have* 788 billion 25 year old pine trees in 1997, and increase that number by 1.5% every year (11.82 billion) to keep up with growth.
Let's assume each tree needs 4 square meters of land to grow on. That's a wildly optimistic number, by the way, but it makes the math nice and easy. That's 3.154 billion square meters, which means 315 million hectares. Great. According to The World Factbook, that's 34.4% of the total land mass of the US.
Looks like it's time to get out there and start planting.:)
They used to call these guys "reporters". They would do this thing called "research", to find a "story" and "blow the whistle" on people who were trying to "screw the public".
These days though, all the "reporters" are just going after stories that are fed to them by government or corporate press releases, and are totally uninterested in what we used to call "sticking it to the man". So maybe, this is a *good* thing.
SUVs? "Now that cars are safer, drivers take more risks?"
Human beings have this incredible ability to fill capacity as it becomes available. Like how cars are more fuel efficient across the board now, so we drive more, and as a result we now use *more* fuel than we did 30 years ago.
And even with safer cars, the fatality rate is *still* four times that of any other type of accidental death.
Okay, fine. Great. *Now* are you going to do something about the obvious pump and dump stock scams being perpetrated through spam? There should be enough counts of fraud there to put some people away for ever and ever.
Zango's executives pointed a finger elsewhere, claiming that the federal violations were due to third-party distributors
Yeah. And Pfizer isn't responsible for the spam sent by the third party distributors that they turn a blind eye to, and that they "don't control".
#1, you *had* third party distributors. #2, you did nothing when they started doing Bad Things. #3, you specifically set up the relationship in a way where they could basically do whatever they liked. If they did Bad Things, you would say "Shock! Horror! How did *that* happen!?" #4, you're in the advertising business, and "viral marketing" is your favourite buzzword du jour.
he smallest action captures our attention in a way that the largest accident doesn't.
You mean like the Hindenburg, the Titanic, the Andrea Doria, and Swissair flight 111?
Here's a date for you: Dec 26, 2005.
How about Friday the 13th? That's a date that everyone remembers, and they don't even remember why.
Or the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918?
Be careful when you say "the largest accident."
I suspect that we wouldn't really remember the exact date September 11th if the Government and press didn't keep jamming it down our throats, however.
You do have a point though. More people have died in the 20th century from car accidents than have died from both murders and war combined. It is the single most common way to die accidentally, outranking the next reason by four to one, yet noone does anything about that. And yes, influenza is so common that it has a nickname. Most people don't think about it much because despite the danger, it's something we survive year after year.
'There is nothing new on display here. Very few people will need quad cores...'
Uh, hello? You must be a n00b tech journalist. They said the same thing about the 486 DX 66. And remember Bill Gates' quote from back in 1980? What was it again...?
What the hell? This is the third blazingly obvious story on/. in a row! "Politicians have a poor grasp of technology", "Cringley's shamesless self promotions", and now "Smart cameras decect crime, erode privacy."
What's next? Oil and water don't mix? Rain comes from clouds? Ooh! I know! Electrons flow to ground!
but what we have now is what we in the industry call security theater. It's made to make you think you're secure without actually making you secure,' Soghoian said. 'As a member of the academic research community, I consider this to be a public service.'
And you're surprised that the government wants you arrested now? Hell, if I were in your shoes, I would be outright shocked if they *didn't* kick in my door and shoot me in the head the very next day. If I were to pull a stunt like that, I would ensure that I wasn't in the country.
Which is accurate as the script, too. Kind of like "Snakes on a plane".
Something the article missed.
on
An Ode To Al
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
But above all, Al's lyrics are clean. If they're funny while refraining from toilet humour and nonstop obscenities, then the audience is lauging because the content is funny, rather than because you're making it nervous. Case in point: prison bitch by Rodney Carrington. Try searching for other songs by Rodney, and you'll find a bunch of very short or unfinished parodies that aren't anywhere near as funny.
If you search your favourite file-sharing network for "Weird Al" you'll find almost as many songs wrongly attributed to Weird Al as there are actual songs by Weird Al. One of my favourite examples is "Asshole Son", parodying "Blackhole Sun". While the lyrics spring from the same sort of "deliberately mishearing something" as the article puts it, they aren't funny in and of themselves.
So while there's a bit of humor in parodying songs that take themselves entirely too seriously and poking fun at bands and cultural icons, that's not all there is to Al. Because his songs are actually *funny* (which is even more apparent in his original works like "Christmas at Ground Zero", or "You don't love me anymore"), they stand up on their own two feet.
Re:Twenty years from now...
on
An Ode To Al
·
· Score: 1
I wonder what Weird Al will be like 20 years from now... will he be remembered as one of the "greats" of comedy, a name living long after everyone forgets the jokes?
Dude, I'm still going to remember the lyrics to "Yoda" 20 years from now...
Gaa. I feel like a dolt for having to reply to my own post.
The line "Number of messages rejected because they were spam:" represents mail filtered out by SpamAssassin. Mail is filtered in the order seen here, with "wrong e-mail" first, then RBL, then Spamassassin and virus filtering.
I only use an RBL as a final check to hold email that is on an RBL but otherwise passes through the filter.
What, are you fucking stupid? We filter with an RBL *first*. And here's our stats from yesterday:
Total number of messages that attempted delivery: 209758 Total number of connections refused because of incorrect e-mail: 65851 Total number of messages refused by rblsmtpd: 91943 Number of messages rejected because they were spam: 24032 Number of messages rejected because they were viruses: 22 Number of messages that failed (probably No_mailbox): 3718 Projected number of messages actually delivered: 24214 Number of messages actually delivered: 13838
(Number of viruses is actually artificially low, since we've had to turn it off for most of our customers due to heavy load. We're getting more CPU power later this week)
Bouncing mail that comes from a blacklist takes up several orders of magnitude less CPU time than running heuristic tests on the text of the message. When you're dealing with this much e-mail, filtering with a blacklist first means the difference between a mail server that works and a mail server that doesn't. Especially when 50% of *all* your mail is coming from *known* spammers.
Slashdot Mirror
Well perhaps, but I wouldn't recommend it.
It's cold outside at night at this time of year.
Oh sure, modern cars *can* brake in half the distance they used to.
Under *ideal* conditions, which hardly ever exist. Assuming anti-lock brakes. And decent driving skills.
But some of us live in the real world. Some people live in locales with lots of rain. Or worse, snow and ice. Or poor visibility. Or drunk drivers. Or big fuckin' moose charging into you because they're generally pissed off.
I was about to say something about this, but you did it so much better.
The fact of the matter is that being gay (among other things) is no longer the sort of thing that will lose you your job. If it is, then it's probably a good thing that you don't work for bigoted assheads like that anymore.
The same legal protection afforded GLBT folks also protects those with other "alternative" lifestyles. As it becomes obvious to society that what we do in our bedrooms isn't really all that weird and that *lots* of people do that sort of thing, then keeping it private won't be so very important anymore.
but in the end the are still human and most of them lose their ideals when they get families and things are getting tough.
[...]
And as long as we are human, we will be freakishly religious... even the ones that think they are not (they just don't see it, because it all seems so normal to think like that)
Hi, I'm an Atheist. My wife is an Atheist. In the past month and a half, we moved into a new townhouse and had our first child. That's a ton of stress all at once. Nevermind the credit card bill. I suppose it could be worse inasmuch that we have the income to pay for it all.
No, we're not getting freakishly religious. In fact, we're not getting religious at all. Funny that how changes in your life don't change your base personality.
I recommend "Duh" for this article.
You forgot "non-text e-mail". That includes UUE, MIME and HTML. They should be totally disallowed.
If we hadn't strayed from the path of plain text, practically all of its problems wouldn't exist today. Somehow, I think that not being able to make your text pink is a small price to pay for that. We can scan text for spam, but we sure as hell can't scan images.
"We wanted to mobilise net users so that when we lobby certain countries we can say that the concerns are not just ours but those of thousands of internet users around the world," ... Many of those on the internet blacklist are countries that are regularly criticised by human rights groups, such as China and Burma.
Hmm. Let's see what the tradeoffs for China are in this situation.
On one hand, they have total control of 1 billion human beings if they control what they read, hear, and say.
On the other hand, they have a few thousand people whom they can ignore simply by not reading some web page.
I dunno man. Those few thousand people hold a lot of power over the guy who weilds more power than any other person on earth. They might even be able to hurt his feelings and make him look bad to the people who he's controlling, if only he doesn't censor the internet...
The answer to global warming is *very* simple, and *very* well known. We just need to plant massive amounts of biomass to soak up all the excess carbon.
:)
Okay. No problem. Let's work that out then.
We need to plant X number of trees to counteract Y tonnes of CO2 being produced. As CO2 production goes up, we need to increase the number of trees we plant.
Oops. It seems that those numbers aren't exactly favourable to your solution right now. Could it be that currently, the amount of trees is going *down* while the amount of CO2 being produced is going *up*? Oops. Well, okay, let's reverse that trend.
Let's start in America, where most of the world's human contribution to atmospheric CO2 is produced (see earlier citation)? Well, to soak that up, you'd need to have about 146 25 year old pine trees for every (metric) tonne of CO2 produced. Not plant, but *have*. They have to be at least 25 years old before that sort of CO2 absorbtion is being done. And then you'd have to add 146 more 25 year old pine trees per year per ton of CO2 that that amount goes up.
So how many tonnes of CO2 does the US produce? About 5.4 billion, way back in 1997. You would need to *have* 788 billion 25 year old pine trees in 1997, and increase that number by 1.5% every year (11.82 billion) to keep up with growth.
Let's assume each tree needs 4 square meters of land to grow on. That's a wildly optimistic number, by the way, but it makes the math nice and easy. That's 3.154 billion square meters, which means 315 million hectares. Great. According to The World Factbook, that's 34.4% of the total land mass of the US.
Looks like it's time to get out there and start planting.
They used to call these guys "reporters". They would do this thing called "research", to find a "story" and "blow the whistle" on people who were trying to "screw the public".
These days though, all the "reporters" are just going after stories that are fed to them by government or corporate press releases, and are totally uninterested in what we used to call "sticking it to the man". So maybe, this is a *good* thing.
SUVs? "Now that cars are safer, drivers take more risks?"
Human beings have this incredible ability to fill capacity as it becomes available. Like how cars are more fuel efficient across the board now, so we drive more, and as a result we now use *more* fuel than we did 30 years ago.
And even with safer cars, the fatality rate is *still* four times that of any other type of accidental death.
Whoops, wrong. The primary cause of death in the 20th century, some 200 million plus, was murder at the hands of one's own government.
Ahh, right. So the statistics from the WHO were wrong. I guess since that doesn't count as war.
Okay, fine. Great. *Now* are you going to do something about the obvious pump and dump stock scams being perpetrated through spam? There should be enough counts of fraud there to put some people away for ever and ever.
Zango's executives pointed a finger elsewhere, claiming that the federal violations were due to third-party distributors
Yeah. And Pfizer isn't responsible for the spam sent by the third party distributors that they turn a blind eye to, and that they "don't control".
#1, you *had* third party distributors.
#2, you did nothing when they started doing Bad Things.
#3, you specifically set up the relationship in a way where they could basically do whatever they liked. If they did Bad Things, you would say "Shock! Horror! How did *that* happen!?"
#4, you're in the advertising business, and "viral marketing" is your favourite buzzword du jour.
he smallest action captures our attention in a way that the largest accident doesn't.
You mean like the Hindenburg, the Titanic, the Andrea Doria, and Swissair flight 111?
Here's a date for you: Dec 26, 2005.
How about Friday the 13th? That's a date that everyone remembers, and they don't even remember why.
Or the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918?
Be careful when you say "the largest accident."
I suspect that we wouldn't really remember the exact date September 11th if the Government and press didn't keep jamming it down our throats, however.
You do have a point though. More people have died in the 20th century from car accidents than have died from both murders and war combined. It is the single most common way to die accidentally, outranking the next reason by four to one, yet noone does anything about that. And yes, influenza is so common that it has a nickname. Most people don't think about it much because despite the danger, it's something we survive year after year.
I thought Microsoft *was* an undemocratic country...
'There is nothing new on display here. Very few people will need quad cores...'
Uh, hello? You must be a n00b tech journalist. They said the same thing about the 486 DX 66. And remember Bill Gates' quote from back in 1980? What was it again...?
Every time I watch The Tonight Show these days, they're showing some clip that they found on YouTube.
But somehow, *they're* not violating copyright laws, because it was author-uploaded content?
Good god, in 30 years we'll still be using IPv4? A bleak vision of the future indeed!
What the hell? This is the third blazingly obvious story on /. in a row! "Politicians have a poor grasp of technology", "Cringley's shamesless self promotions", and now "Smart cameras decect crime, erode privacy."
What's next? Oil and water don't mix? Rain comes from clouds? Ooh! I know! Electrons flow to ground!
but what we have now is what we in the industry call security theater. It's made to make you think you're secure without actually making you secure,' Soghoian said. 'As a member of the academic research community, I consider this to be a public service.'
And you're surprised that the government wants you arrested now? Hell, if I were in your shoes, I would be outright shocked if they *didn't* kick in my door and shoot me in the head the very next day. If I were to pull a stunt like that, I would ensure that I wasn't in the country.
Honey, I shrunk the kids!
Which is accurate as the script, too. Kind of like "Snakes on a plane".
But above all, Al's lyrics are clean. If they're funny while refraining from toilet humour and nonstop obscenities, then the audience is lauging because the content is funny, rather than because you're making it nervous. Case in point: prison bitch by Rodney Carrington. Try searching for other songs by Rodney, and you'll find a bunch of very short or unfinished parodies that aren't anywhere near as funny.
If you search your favourite file-sharing network for "Weird Al" you'll find almost as many songs wrongly attributed to Weird Al as there are actual songs by Weird Al. One of my favourite examples is "Asshole Son", parodying "Blackhole Sun". While the lyrics spring from the same sort of "deliberately mishearing something" as the article puts it, they aren't funny in and of themselves.
So while there's a bit of humor in parodying songs that take themselves entirely too seriously and poking fun at bands and cultural icons, that's not all there is to Al. Because his songs are actually *funny* (which is even more apparent in his original works like "Christmas at Ground Zero", or "You don't love me anymore"), they stand up on their own two feet.
I wonder what Weird Al will be like 20 years from now... will he be remembered as one of the "greats" of comedy, a name living long after everyone forgets the jokes?
Dude, I'm still going to remember the lyrics to "Yoda" 20 years from now...
Gaa. I feel like a dolt for having to reply to my own post.
The line "Number of messages rejected because they were spam:" represents mail filtered out by SpamAssassin. Mail is filtered in the order seen here, with "wrong e-mail" first, then RBL, then Spamassassin and virus filtering.
I only use an RBL as a final check to hold email that is on an RBL but otherwise passes through the filter.
What, are you fucking stupid? We filter with an RBL *first*. And here's our stats from yesterday:
Total number of messages that attempted delivery: 209758
Total number of connections refused because of incorrect e-mail: 65851
Total number of messages refused by rblsmtpd: 91943
Number of messages rejected because they were spam: 24032
Number of messages rejected because they were viruses: 22
Number of messages that failed (probably No_mailbox): 3718
Projected number of messages actually delivered: 24214
Number of messages actually delivered: 13838
(Number of viruses is actually artificially low, since we've had to turn it off for most of our customers due to heavy load. We're getting more CPU power later this week)
Bouncing mail that comes from a blacklist takes up several orders of magnitude less CPU time than running heuristic tests on the text of the message. When you're dealing with this much e-mail, filtering with a blacklist first means the difference between a mail server that works and a mail server that doesn't. Especially when 50% of *all* your mail is coming from *known* spammers.