By definition, hoaxes are forgeries, and forgeries require originals from which to copy. So what is this 'unknown force' that creates genuine crop circles?
If you buy that, I've got a nice screen capture from C-Span of George W. Bush shaking hands with Osama Bin-Laden on the floor of the Senate last Monday, 2003. Contact me and we'll discuss the price, I'm quite good with Photoshop.
My personal theory on what creates genuine crop circles has to do with the chemical action of certain fermented biomasses on carbon based bipedal life forms. More amazing than those odd creatures who create this art is those who find need to invent amazingly complex theories to prove the phenomenon "genuine".
I've always wondered why idealism and youth were so closely associated... and why people have weird ideas about what a "grown up" is (boring).
Grab one of Disney's "family" movies and watch for concepts they are pushing. These ideas are being pushed into your brain from a very young age. Are they really worth anything? Are they even harmless? (I would have to argue that they aren't.)
Unless I'm missing something, the full version of Adobe Acrobat can do all that. Annotations in text, voice, file attachments, etc. and a file indexing service "Adobe Catalog". Any PostScript output can be turned into a PDF, there are even free tools to do this on Linux. But if you're using Macintosh or Windows, you can print directly to PDF format. Acrobat 5 can even render web pages into PDF format, preserving links. IIRC Adobe also has a fully functional time limited demo available.
Now, getting those dead-tree file cabinets into PDF format is another problem alltogether. Possibly using overseas data-entry companies?
If the spammer advertises a web site, that could be a useful countermeasure. If all the spammer does is leave a phone number, every pissed off person could call them and ask about their product as if they were interested and then just hang up.
This would be essentially creating a cost per spam. The idea has been discussed in other venues such as requiring systems sending mail to compute a small token in order to connect, or doing micro-payments that get refunded on the user's acceptance of the message as legitimate.
I dare say they do. The Thai restaurant down the block puts a menu on my doorknob every couple of weeks, sometimes more often. The Herbalife guys love to lurk in the grocery store parking lot and stick reply cards under windshield wipers.
They also do so at considerable expense in comparison to spam. They also have some reason to believe that you might be interested in their product, i.e. you eat and they have a convenient location to you, and the expense of advertising will return in patronage. If people were really honked off, you could also go down to their building and return the menu/flyer/whatever. Whereas a spammer doesn't give a flying turd if most people don't want their product, and go to pains to insure that people can't find them.
In short, there are huge differences in both content and delivery here. If a local store was duct taping penis-enlargement ads to neighborhood windows, they probably wouldn't be in business very long.
That sets a dangerous precedent. The purpose of a networked computer-- well, one of the primary purposes, anyway-- is to receive messages. Trying to draw an arbitrary line and say that these messages are okay while these aren't is tricky at best.
It's not an arbitrary line. If you have a window popping up regularly requiring dismissal, that depreciates the value of your property, the computer. This is a very specific abuse, and many would argue destruction, of a sometimes useful service.
So it's not the method of messaging you have a problem with, but the content of the messages? That's a problem. Regulating message content has always been a dicey proposition.
Yes and no. The method is a problem because Microsoft's MO is to allow any networked system to send data to several services on their systems, no questions asked. The method needs to be fixed. The message is a problem if the computer user cannot opt out. Most users cannot opt out because they don't know how (if they knew enough to know how, M$ probably wouldn't be so "popular"). And together, the message and the method are problems because the method was designed to enhance the utility of the computer, and such utility has essentially been destroyed by spammers.
but what you're basically saying is, "Some people are saying something that I don't like. I know that I can just stop listening to them, but I want to do more. How can I fight back to ensure that they have to stop saying what they're saying?
I disagree with your interpretation. He's asking: "how can I help others who don't want to have their computers disabled with this crap popping up all the time?", not "how can I stop their speech?"
People don't have the right to go up to the windows on your house and tape an advertisement to it. They do, however, within proper zoning laws, have a right to put up an advertisement on their own property, even if it's across the street from you and you see it every day. Additionally, the cost and time to vandalize millions of windows is essentially nil, whereas a pamphlet costs some fraction of a dollar and minute to post.
Basically, if we hold that people don't have the right to shoot at the dogs on my front porch, they also shouldn't have the right to shoot their packets at any defenseless computer on my property, essentially destroying the usefulness of said property/dog.
So, I maintain that 1. it can and should be done, and 2. Microsoft shouldn't have allowed the Messenger service to be compromised in this manner in the first place. Its default should be to only accept messages from the local network and machines that it has a file share, printer queue, or other authenticated relationship with.
BTW: I think an automated messenger script that directs people to a web site with free instructions on both how to turn off the Messenger service and the possible ramifications of (miss out on broadcasted UPS shutdown warnings, etc.) is an excellent idea.
Or hunter's deer urine, or playing with your friend's pets, or walking through a cow pasture, or having sex (with another person), or any medication or other injected/swallowed chemical which may disturb your hormonal balance...
Methinks someone should make a web page with instructions on how to turn Messenger off (with pros and cons, i.e. lose file & print sharing in Win9x) and then broadcast that to all the Windows machines on the internet.
"Sick of these pop-up ads? Instructions on how to disable this Windows service at http://some.url/ . Nothing to buy, ever."
Yes, do click on the spamvertised web site, see where it goes. (Use Mozilla, get a tcpdump, whatever you need to do. Learn HTML and read framesets, learn JavaScript and "decrypt" pages (where it says "document.write( var )", change it to "document.write('<form><textarea>'+ var +'</textarea></form>')", you can do similar things with eval( var ).). Also fake an order form to see if they use a shopping cart service. Find out where their forms go. Track everything associated down and report it.
Don't just report where the spam came from. That's like putting a band-aid on a broken leg.
As with km790816's comment, this interests me. I find pre-emptively scheduled OS's to not schedule I/O according to process priority. Thus a lower priority process can tie up the hard drive and slow down a higher priority process, possibly causing it to fail in its performance (skip audio/video). This seems to be a problem on both Windows and *nix. Does anyone have an answer / solution to this?
Unless you specify the exact model and time period for DOA, and DOA trends in relation to current hardware, the relevance to this Slashdot discussion of if a piece of hardware is worth the cost is highly questionable. At a minimum it is anecdotal evidence without weight.
Remember, you can create almost any statistic by carefully selecting sample size and selection. 100% of people who read this post (within the next 10 seconds) agree.
Forgive my iptables/smtp interaction ignorance, but wouldn't we want to deny the packet instead of reject it? Better yet might be a rule or patch that allows the connection to come partially up before it disconnects, forcing the sending system into a timeout situation. Might not have a nice effect on those whose systems were compromised to send spam, but could cut down the success rate of the spammer.
Imagine a distributed set of these systems, with spam poison sites feeding those addresses to spammers.
You could also probably identify the vehicle by the characteristic radio frequencies given off by the electronics. If not the style, at least the manufacturer and model year.
Then calculate and display its location on the heads-up display on your windshield. But someday vehicles will all be RF tagged anyway... "CowboyNeal's Pinto at 5 o'clock and closing fast."
However, it could be in the employee's contract that if they agree to such an EULA they will have also agreed to cease their employment with the company and then be no longer representing the company.
Such employee could also be an "independent contractor" for the company and thus only bind themselves.
Or the employee may have found themselves taking an "unauthorized break" and breaking the law by illegally installing personal software on a company computer.
If all else fails, "MacroSoft" could always buy a "regime change" in Panama.
Slashdot Mirror
I like this line from the third "2" link:
By definition, hoaxes are forgeries, and forgeries require originals from which to copy. So what is this 'unknown force' that creates genuine crop circles?
If you buy that, I've got a nice screen capture from C-Span of George W. Bush shaking hands with Osama Bin-Laden on the floor of the Senate last Monday, 2003. Contact me and we'll discuss the price, I'm quite good with Photoshop.
My personal theory on what creates genuine crop circles has to do with the chemical action of certain fermented biomasses on carbon based bipedal life forms. More amazing than those odd creatures who create this art is those who find need to invent amazingly complex theories to prove the phenomenon "genuine".
just my idealism (read: youth)
I've always wondered why idealism and youth were so closely associated... and why people have weird ideas about what a "grown up" is (boring).
Grab one of Disney's "family" movies and watch for concepts they are pushing. These ideas are being pushed into your brain from a very young age. Are they really worth anything? Are they even harmless? (I would have to argue that they aren't.)
Unless I'm missing something, the full version of Adobe Acrobat can do all that. Annotations in text, voice, file attachments, etc. and a file indexing service "Adobe Catalog". Any PostScript output can be turned into a PDF, there are even free tools to do this on Linux. But if you're using Macintosh or Windows, you can print directly to PDF format. Acrobat 5 can even render web pages into PDF format, preserving links. IIRC Adobe also has a fully functional time limited demo available.
Now, getting those dead-tree file cabinets into PDF format is another problem alltogether. Possibly using overseas data-entry companies?
Yep, head on over to www.adobe.com and research.
There's more than enough injustice in real life, and you're wasting your time whining about this?!?!
If the spammer advertises a web site, that could be a useful countermeasure. If all the spammer does is leave a phone number, every pissed off person could call them and ask about their product as if they were interested and then just hang up.
This would be essentially creating a cost per spam. The idea has been discussed in other venues such as requiring systems sending mail to compute a small token in order to connect, or doing micro-payments that get refunded on the user's acceptance of the message as legitimate.
I dare say they do. The Thai restaurant down the block puts a menu on my doorknob every couple of weeks, sometimes more often. The Herbalife guys love to lurk in the grocery store parking lot and stick reply cards under windshield wipers.
They also do so at considerable expense in comparison to spam. They also have some reason to believe that you might be interested in their product, i.e. you eat and they have a convenient location to you, and the expense of advertising will return in patronage. If people were really honked off, you could also go down to their building and return the menu/flyer/whatever. Whereas a spammer doesn't give a flying turd if most people don't want their product, and go to pains to insure that people can't find them.
In short, there are huge differences in both content and delivery here. If a local store was duct taping penis-enlargement ads to neighborhood windows, they probably wouldn't be in business very long.
That sets a dangerous precedent. The purpose of a networked computer-- well, one of the primary purposes, anyway-- is to receive messages. Trying to draw an arbitrary line and say that these messages are okay while these aren't is tricky at best.
It's not an arbitrary line. If you have a window popping up regularly requiring dismissal, that depreciates the value of your property, the computer. This is a very specific abuse, and many would argue destruction, of a sometimes useful service.
So it's not the method of messaging you have a problem with, but the content of the messages? That's a problem. Regulating message content has always been a dicey proposition.
Yes and no. The method is a problem because Microsoft's MO is to allow any networked system to send data to several services on their systems, no questions asked. The method needs to be fixed. The message is a problem if the computer user cannot opt out. Most users cannot opt out because they don't know how (if they knew enough to know how, M$ probably wouldn't be so "popular"). And together, the message and the method are problems because the method was designed to enhance the utility of the computer, and such utility has essentially been destroyed by spammers.
but what you're basically saying is, "Some people are saying something that I don't like. I know that I can just stop listening to them, but I want to do more. How can I fight back to ensure that they have to stop saying what they're saying?
I disagree with your interpretation. He's asking: "how can I help others who don't want to have their computers disabled with this crap popping up all the time?", not "how can I stop their speech?"
People don't have the right to go up to the windows on your house and tape an advertisement to it. They do, however, within proper zoning laws, have a right to put up an advertisement on their own property, even if it's across the street from you and you see it every day. Additionally, the cost and time to vandalize millions of windows is essentially nil, whereas a pamphlet costs some fraction of a dollar and minute to post.
Basically, if we hold that people don't have the right to shoot at the dogs on my front porch, they also shouldn't have the right to shoot their packets at any defenseless computer on my property, essentially destroying the usefulness of said property/dog.
So, I maintain that 1. it can and should be done, and 2. Microsoft shouldn't have allowed the Messenger service to be compromised in this manner in the first place. Its default should be to only accept messages from the local network and machines that it has a file share, printer queue, or other authenticated relationship with.
BTW: I think an automated messenger script that directs people to a web site with free instructions on both how to turn off the Messenger service and the possible ramifications of (miss out on broadcasted UPS shutdown warnings, etc.) is an excellent idea.
cheap cologne
Or hunter's deer urine, or playing with your friend's pets, or walking through a cow pasture, or having sex (with another person), or any medication or other injected/swallowed chemical which may disturb your hormonal balance...
That plastic grocery bag was made from Soylent Green...
I wouldn't just ignore it, I think you should report it to the feds... it sounds like extortion.
I can't believe no-one's posted this yet: "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberry."
And not consuming useless crap? AdBusters
You want a great gift: add a vacation day, or a half day if that's too much.
Methinks someone should make a web page with instructions on how to turn Messenger off (with pros and cons, i.e. lose file & print sharing in Win9x) and then broadcast that to all the Windows machines on the internet.
"Sick of these pop-up ads? Instructions on how to disable this Windows service at http://some.url/ . Nothing to buy, ever."
Imagined steps, for some constrain to Sept. 15-Nov. 22 timeframe:
Correlate data and publish.
Yes, do click on the spamvertised web site, see where it goes. (Use Mozilla, get a tcpdump, whatever you need to do. Learn HTML and read framesets, learn JavaScript and "decrypt" pages (where it says "document.write( var )", change it to "document.write('<form><textarea>'+ var +'</textarea></form>')", you can do similar things with eval( var ).). Also fake an order form to see if they use a shopping cart service. Find out where their forms go. Track everything associated down and report it.
Don't just report where the spam came from. That's like putting a band-aid on a broken leg.
As with km790816's comment, this interests me. I find pre-emptively scheduled OS's to not schedule I/O according to process priority. Thus a lower priority process can tie up the hard drive and slow down a higher priority process, possibly causing it to fail in its performance (skip audio/video). This seems to be a problem on both Windows and *nix. Does anyone have an answer / solution to this?
Good idea... also consider charity, just be sure to label them clearly.
If you don't have a better argument than that...
Unless you specify the exact model and time period for DOA, and DOA trends in relation to current hardware, the relevance to this Slashdot discussion of if a piece of hardware is worth the cost is highly questionable. At a minimum it is anecdotal evidence without weight.
Remember, you can create almost any statistic by carefully selecting sample size and selection. 100% of people who read this post (within the next 10 seconds) agree.
Forgive my iptables/smtp interaction ignorance, but wouldn't we want to deny the packet instead of reject it? Better yet might be a rule or patch that allows the connection to come partially up before it disconnects, forcing the sending system into a timeout situation. Might not have a nice effect on those whose systems were compromised to send spam, but could cut down the success rate of the spammer.
Imagine a distributed set of these systems, with spam poison sites feeding those addresses to spammers.
"Some periods" is ambiguous.
50% DOA means 50% of delivered systems are DOA on some models over some finite period referred to by the poster.
So, out of a sample of two, one may have been ("up to") dead...
Yeah, and from the looks of Mouse's work (see story link), I'm certain that his character would have been exactly like "Mike". </sarcasm>.
You could also probably identify the vehicle by the characteristic radio frequencies given off by the electronics. If not the style, at least the manufacturer and model year.
Then calculate and display its location on the heads-up display on your windshield. But someday vehicles will all be RF tagged anyway... "CowboyNeal's Pinto at 5 o'clock and closing fast."
Yeah, it's probably more like 300 people splitting 5 mil and 25 executives plundering^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsplitting the rest.
However, it could be in the employee's contract that if they agree to such an EULA they will have also agreed to cease their employment with the company and then be no longer representing the company.
Such employee could also be an "independent contractor" for the company and thus only bind themselves.
Or the employee may have found themselves taking an "unauthorized break" and breaking the law by illegally installing personal software on a company computer.
If all else fails, "MacroSoft" could always buy a "regime change" in Panama.