If I got bored, I would see if I could improve the performance of the potato-powered battery by inventing my own.
Here's what I would like to try:
5 Copper rod electrodes 5 Zinc rod electrodes 5 polystyrene cups 6 wires with alligator clips each end ("alligator wires") 1 kilogram of washed potatoes
Tools:
Kitchen blender Steel wool
Instructions:
* Cut the unpeeled raw potatoes into large chunks and place in blender. * Blend until smooth. * Place potato mixture into the polystyrene cups, distributing evenly. * Clean electrodes with steel wool. This removes the oxides. * Place one copper and one zinc electrode into each cup. * Connect the cups together in series by connecting copper electrodes from one cup to a zinc electrode from the next with four of the alligator wires. * Connect the remaining two alligator wires to the free ends.
I would draw a diagram here, but the <PRE> tag is not allowed HTML.
This should give a battery with an output of 7.5 volts. I have no idea of the current, though - the only way of knowing would be to try it.
Scientists believe that singularities are points of infinite density that are produced when a massive star collapses under gravity. What I don't understands about singularities is why they are presumed to be infinite with all the mass at the same place. Heisenburg's uncertainty principle states that the position and momentum of a particle or object cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. Surely this means that the singularity would be "smeared out" somehow? You would still have a singularity, but because it's smeared out, it's no longer infinitely dense, just very large.
Can someone help me out here? Or is the answer to this going to have to wait until we have the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity for which physicists have been seraching for sixty years, and I'm out of luck?
Some of those 300,000 Napster users who have allegedly downloaded MP3's of your music from the Napster web site already have those songs on CD, vinyl and the like. They have therefore already paid royalties on the songs, and would be able to claim that their possession of the music in MP3 format is legal. Will you exclude these people from the lawsuit? If not, why not?
--
Re:Energy from Giant Spliffs
on
Quickies Rock!
·
· Score: 2
An Irish scheme to burn cannabis as a fuel foundered last year because of it was considered too expensive compared with wind-power projects.
Too expensive? They could have offset the cost easily. There's a lot of people who are willing to pay large amounts of money to live downwind of such a power plant.
Here's a way you can permanently cure your marketing droids of the urge to use spam as a marketing tool. Simply use their e-mail address as the "From" address. Strictly speaking, it's their message, so why not say it's from them? Just make sure it's their private e-mail address, because if it's their company e-mail address and you've got to look after the servers, well... --
It is not going to be effective at blocking all spam, and here's why. I have received duplicate spams a number of times from the same source, and what I often see when this happens is that the spams are slightly different.
Examples:
The body of the message might be mangled so that they are slightly different, so that a straight comparison between the message bodies will think that they're different.
The forged "From:" address might be different each time, so filtering on that won't work.
The Subject will also be mangled so it's different.
However, almost all spam that I have received recently has one or more of three defining characteristics that identifies it as spam:
* A web site address. * A US-style telephone number (for example, 1-800-555-7726). * An American address that ends in a state abbreviation and a zip code.
If it also contains "S.1618" in the message, then it's almost certainly spam. (If you've received spam, you'll recognise this as a bogus reference to an American bill that was defeated. Quoting this bill implies that the spammer has a right to send you the crap.)
More on web addresses: spammers usually obfuscate their web site addresses in their spams. The obfuscation is distinctive enough in style to make an effective spam filter.
Examples are URL's with the "@" sign somewhere in them, HTML-style %xx escaping of alphanumeric characters, or a URL that begins with a number like 3141592653. Often, you'll see all these methods mixed together in a futile attempt at obfuscation. If your filter sees a URL like this, the message is almost certainly spam and may be discarded.
90% of all spam that I receive comes from one of two classes of IP addresses: addresses that are on the MAPS DUL (Dialup User List) or on a list of open relays such as ORBS. Block all SMTP connections from these sources, and you'll block 90% of your spam.
Of the remaining 10%, you can stop 90% of that if you filter the message by searching the body of the message for addresses, telephone numbers and obfuscated web site addresses. Your filter might not be perfect, so it might not stop all of it.
Do both of these, and you'll stop 99% of your spam.
Here's another idea I've had that may or may not work. It's based on using the bogus From addresses that the spammer uses against them. If you validate those addresses as the mail arrives, then you can block the mail if the address named in the From header doesn't exist.
Here's how the SMTP might look.
host1 sending to host2 (host1 is a spammer)
host1: HELO host2: response host1: MAIL FROM: bogususer@host3
ok, so now you validate "bogususer@host3". Start SMTP with host3:
host2: HELO host3: response host2: MAIL FROM: postmaster@host2 host3: response host2: RCPT TO:bogususer@host3 host3: response that tells if user exists host2: QUIT host3: response.
(VRFY is now disabled on many hosts so it cannot be used to validate a user.)
Now we continue our original SMTP session. If the user exists, we continue with the SMTP session as normal. If the user does not exist, we assume that "bogususer@host3" is a forgery and terminate the SMTP connection.
host2: error (to host 1) (close connection)
There's probably problems with this method, but I don't see anything wrong with it as a verification tool. It will probably stop another 90% of the spam.
Basically, the battle against spam is finding a series of methods that each stop 90% of spam. This is a 90% rule that I have discovered. Three different 90% filters applied successively will stop 99.9% of all spam that reaches them, thus reducing your spam considerably.
If they have an 800 number, call them repeatedly and waste their time.
This is a bad idea, as you could then be liable for harrassment.
However, calling once is OK. So your aim is to make that single call as long as possible. Tell them why spamming is wrong. Tell them how much spam costs other people. Give them an example of what spam is like. Read them the classifieds from an old edition of your local paper (they must be out of date ads that are not placed by you to dodge telemarketing laws, of course). Read them other bits of the paper. Move on to magazine articles. Explain in detail why proper alignment and collimation of a Newtonian reflecting telescope is essential to get good images of the night sky. Read them the DeCSS source code. When your voice gets tired, leave the phone next to the stereo so you can let them have a sample of your music tastes or your favourite radio station.
Basically, your aim is to make that call very expensive.
I understand that many spammer 1800 numbers go to automated systems that give a recorded message and then hang up. Try pressing 0 on your phone to see if that interrupts the message; if it does, then you might be able to prevent the phone from hanging up. Then you can start emptying that spammer's bank account with your fourteen-hour phone call.
A text message is functionally indistinguishable from a page
And if you've got a GOOD lawyer, he or she might even be able to argue that spamming is functionally indistinguishable from telemarketing: they're both trying to sell something by going through a list of people and contacting each person on that list.
If I received that letter, and I was resident in the United States, here are some paragraphs that I would have sent in my reply:
I have knowledge that your organisation is using a copyright circumvention device commonly known as an e-mailer. E-mailers are software utilities that decode the contents of e-mails (which are commonly coded in the ASCII character set, and which consist of copyrighted electronic communications) or otherwise circumvent the protection afforded by coding the message in ASCII and permit the copying of the e-mail contents and/or any portion thereof. As such, e-mailers are an unlawful circumvention device within the meaning of 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(2),(3).
This e-mail is Copyright (c) 2000 <my name would go here>. All rights reserved.
--
Media manipulation for fun and profit
on
Protesting DMCA
·
· Score: 3
To the media, the protest was a bit lame, and probably not newsworthy enough for inclusion on the evening news. With a bit of planning, though, you can MAKE your protest newsworthy.
What do the media consider newsworthy? The media want sensationalism! They want IMPACT. They want to improve their ratings, sell more newspapers and the like. And what is best? Something that grabs the attention of someone so they watch this channel, or buy that newspaper.
So you need a bit of planning. A peaceful protest with 10,000 people is often good enough to make the news, especially if traffic is blocked, or other peaceful disruption occurs. But if you've only got 25 or 50 people, the protest alone will not be enough to grab the attention of the media.
So you need something that grabs the attention. You need a media stunt.
What constitutes a good media stunt? Look at what Greenpeace does. They sail their boats between whaling ships and factory ships. They climb tall buildings and display huge banners. You need something attention-getting like this.
Often, the attention-getting stunt might involve something like trespassing to display that banner, and it is inevitable that some people might get arrested, so you need a group fund to cover bail if people are arrested. And in fact, getting arrested increases the sensationalism factor, so you might want to get arrested on purpose.
The best stunt in the world won't do anything though if the media isn't there to see it. Don't post stuff on the web and hope the media find it. The media isn't going to come to you. You have to go to the media. Call the news lines of all the major media outlets in the city, and a few others elsewhere for good measure. Tell them what you intend to do, the itinerary if any, and what the protest is about. Aim to have as many television and photographic cameras there as possible.
Once you have the cameras there, the protest is underway, the stunts have been performed and the like, the media want to know why you're doing this. They might interview people at random, so it's best that everyone is coached on what to say. Have everyone issued with flyers as well.
Remember, too, that the television news media operate in "sound bites", five to ten seconds of someone saying something that they can include as a segment on the news. You need to provide that sound bite. At some point in the interview, you need to summarise what your protest is about, in 25 words or less. This is usable as a sound bite, and the television media may then choose to use it.
Above all, treat the news media that show up with great respect. It's often hard work lugging that camera around, because they often meet unco-operative subjects in their day-to-day work. Co-operate with them, and if they want to stand on the roof of your car with the camera for a better shot, let them. This protest is probably not the only one you stage, and if you treat them with respect, they will return the favour.
One last thing. You need to form an organisation. Call yourselves something like "People against DMCA" and always use that name when calling the media to tell them about upcoming protests. If you then organise a series of protests, use of that name will give your protests continuity, and will help your cause. Whatever you do, don't be a disorganised rabble.
These methods are used frequently by the environmental movement when they try to get their message across. And they have succeeded, because you've heard of Greenpeace, and environmentalism is now taught in schools. Follow their methods, and you will succeed.
If you're wondering why religion is relevant to science, I'll quote (or possibly misquote) our hero Albert Einstein: "Science without religion is blind; religion without science is lame." [Lame has its usual meaning here, and not its slang meaning].
This is similar to space telling matter how to move, and matter telling space how to curve. This quote suggests that science and religion help advance each other.
Albert Einstein has often mentioned religion in relation to science. He is also said in relation to quantum mechanics: "God does not play dice with the Universe." He believed that spacetime had an underlying order, and consequently he found it hard to accept that at the lowest level, spacetime behaved more or less randomly.
That's an interesting approach. All you need now is enough people in Delaware to make it work. Recruit friends and relatives. The more noise you make, the better your chance of being heard.
This comment is brought to you by a moderation bug where moderations of "Interesting" sometimes get changed to "Troll" for no apparent reason.
Spamcop works well most of the time, and is useful for tracing a spam quickly if you don't want to spend the time manually running PING and TRACEROUTE and the like. Be aware when using it that complex "Received" chains can occasionally cause it to misidentify the source, so using it with knowledge of how e-mail works gives the best results.
I use it myself and I report up to 10 spams a day with it. It is most satisfying when you receive that e-mail that says the account/web site/domain has been cancelled.
Now who remembers lawyer jokes? I've found that substituting "spammer" for "lawyer" often works well, and gives us a whole new genre of jokes to work with.
Q: What do you call 5,000 spammers on the bottom of the ocean? A: A good start.
How many times a day do you want to press that "Delete" key? 5? 10? 20? 100? 200? 1000? 10,000?...? Spam grows and grows, because once your e-mail address gets on a spam list, you will NEVER get it off. Those "remove" addresses are either fake or tell the spammer "hey, this is a real address!" and the spammer can make more money selling real addresses than removing them from lists.
You probably receive less than 10 spams a day. Lucky you. Many people in the U.S. have been forced to abandon e-mail addresses because they receive too much spam. 200 spams a day is often the number at which e-mail becomes unusable.
How much does each spam cost? When you add up storage costs, transmission costs and the like, you may find that the cost to the recipient of a spam is about one cent (precise currency doesn't matter). Not much? OK, now imagine getting 200 a day (might be over multiple e-mail addresses). Now that's $700 a year. Would you prefer to keep that $700 for yourself, or spend it receiving crap that you never asked for and that you do not want?
Also imagine that you take 5 seconds to identify each spam and delete it. At 200 spams a day, that's 1,000 seconds a day, about 20 minutes per day, 120 hours per year. Would you rather spend that time deleting spams or doing other things?
Receiving a spam is like being bitten by a mosquito. It's annoying in small doses, but intolerable in large doses. If you were being bitten by 200 mosquitoes a day, would you put up with them, or would you put up flyscreens? If you receive 200 spams a day, would you put up with them, or would you want this blatant abuse of the Internet outlawed?
Delphi for Linux will be good for business, because it gives business more choice. One of our major products is software applications written in Delphi, which means our customers have to use Windows NT. Once we have Delphi available for Linux, we'll be able to port these applications to Linux, and our customers would have a choice of Windows NT or Linux.
Borland/Inprise say in the article that they would be hitching a ride on the Linux growth curve to make some money. What they haven't mentioned is the effect of a Delphi for Linux release on that growth curve. Having a product of the good reputation of Delphi released for Linux will mean that more businesses will be able to choose Linux where Windows NT was the only choice before. This will help Linux take market share from Windows NT. This effect is what will help Delphi for Linux become a major player in the market of Linux software development, and as a result, the Borland/Inprise management will be rewarded for their decision.
I wonder how they kept count of all the stories? The boring way of course would be for the computer to keep the count for them. But I like to think that they have a big sheet of paper on a wall where each time they post a story, they mark another line on the paper with a tally pen, whose ink is the blood of trolls.
So you see, trolls are important to Slashdot, because where else are CmdrTaco and Hemos going to get fresh troll blood for the tally pen? And I won't mention the successful meat-supply business that funds the running of Slashdot, where they supply fresh troll meat to various restaurant chains in their local area. Those McDonald's burgers aren't really 100% beef, you know....
The whole point of this is that if all the spam starts containing ADV: that makes for a very easy text filter, which most email programs support.
I am not a lawyer, have not read the law, nor reside in America, but I feel that Colorado residents may have legal grounds to sue if the subject of a spam starts with strings like "Adv:" or "-ADV:". To win such a case, one needs to demonstrate that the string "ADV:" is intended as an aid in filtering the message, and by not quoting the string exactly - identical character for identical character - the spammer is breaking the law. When computers are concerned, a narrow interpretation of the law is necessary because computers are very literal devices. If you win, you can set a precedent (easy if the spammer never shows up in court when you sue) and future plaintiffs can cite the case as a precedent for their own cases if the same circumstances apply.
One problem with GM foods is those that are bred to resist specific herbicides, such as "Roundup-ready" soybeans. Consider the following scenario:
Farmer buys Roundup-ready soybeans and sows the crop.
Farmer indiscriminately uses large doses of Roundup to control weeds. Soybean crop thrives and weeds die in a vegetative Armageddon.
Farmer harvests crop.
Farmer finds that its yield is not quite as large as the previous non-Roundup variety that he or she grew previously.
Next growing season, the farmer reverts to the variety that he or she grew before.
Farmer finds that the crop grows very badly due to Roundup residues in the soil.
Farmer is forced to use Roundup-ready soybeans for future growing because nothing else will grow in the Roundup-contaminated field.
I don't know how long Roundup remains active in the soil. It might break down quickly, or it might persist for more than one growing season.
Monsanto make both the Roundup herbicide and Roundup-ready soybeans. They also want to market "single-use" seeds that cannot be propagated. This is a company whose business practices are in need of serious investigation.
Interesting note: Christian Fundamentalists should neither grow nor eat genetically-modified foods. Mating different kinds of animals is prohibited in the Christian Bible (Leviticus 19:19). Most GM organisms contain sections of DNA from other organisms.
There is one good reason why we should not mine the asteroids, or be selective about the asteroids that we do choose to mine.
And that is the future of the human race.
Sometime over the next thousand million years, the Sun will heat up sufficiently to render the Earth uninhabitable. All the people on Earth will have to find another home somewhere, and that home will ultimately be in another solar system. We will probably need a very large supply of readily-accessible metals so that we can send all the human population of Earth to another world, along with a necessary part of Earth's ecosystem.
If we mine all the asteroids indiscriminately, when the time comes we will be unable to escape the solar system. Squandering the whole of this metal supply so that a select few can live in luxury in their lifetimes may turn out to be the ultimate crime against humanity.
The solution is simple. Make the biggest metal-rich asteroids off-limits, but allow smaller asteroids to be mined. That way, the mercantile interests of asteroid mining companies will be adequately served, and asteroids will be preserved for the inevitable future exodus from the solar system.
Slashdot Mirror
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If I got bored, I would see if I could improve the performance of the potato-powered battery by inventing my own.
Here's what I would like to try:
5 Copper rod electrodes
5 Zinc rod electrodes
5 polystyrene cups
6 wires with alligator clips each end ("alligator wires")
1 kilogram of washed potatoes
Tools:
Kitchen blender
Steel wool
Instructions:
* Cut the unpeeled raw potatoes into large chunks and place in blender.
* Blend until smooth.
* Place potato mixture into the polystyrene cups, distributing evenly.
* Clean electrodes with steel wool. This removes the oxides.
* Place one copper and one zinc electrode into each cup.
* Connect the cups together in series by connecting copper electrodes from one cup to a zinc electrode from the next with four of the alligator wires.
* Connect the remaining two alligator wires to the free ends.
I would draw a diagram here, but the <PRE> tag is not allowed HTML.
This should give a battery with an output of 7.5 volts. I have no idea of the current, though - the only way of knowing would be to try it.
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Scientists believe that singularities are points of infinite density that are produced when a massive star collapses under gravity. What I don't understands about singularities is why they are presumed to be infinite with all the mass at the same place. Heisenburg's uncertainty principle states that the position and momentum of a particle or object cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. Surely this means that the singularity would be "smeared out" somehow? You would still have a singularity, but because it's smeared out, it's no longer infinitely dense, just very large.
Can someone help me out here? Or is the answer to this going to have to wait until we have the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity for which physicists have been seraching for sixty years, and I'm out of luck?
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Some of those 300,000 Napster users who have allegedly downloaded MP3's of your music from the Napster web site already have those songs on CD, vinyl and the like. They have therefore already paid royalties on the songs, and would be able to claim that their possession of the music in MP3 format is legal. Will you exclude these people from the lawsuit? If not, why not?
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An Irish scheme to burn cannabis as a fuel foundered last year because of it was considered too expensive compared with wind-power projects.
Too expensive? They could have offset the cost easily. There's a lot of people who are willing to pay large amounts of money to live downwind of such a power plant.
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Here's a way you can permanently cure your marketing droids of the urge to use spam as a marketing tool. Simply use their e-mail address as the "From" address. Strictly speaking, it's their message, so why not say it's from them? Just make sure it's their private e-mail address, because if it's their company e-mail address and you've got to look after the servers, well ...
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It is not going to be effective at blocking all spam, and here's why. I have received duplicate spams a number of times from the same source, and what I often see when this happens is that the spams are slightly different.
Examples:
The body of the message might be mangled so that they are slightly different, so that a straight comparison between the message bodies will think that they're different.
The forged "From:" address might be different each time, so filtering on that won't work.
The Subject will also be mangled so it's different.
However, almost all spam that I have received recently has one or more of three defining characteristics that identifies it as spam:
* A web site address.
* A US-style telephone number (for example, 1-800-555-7726).
* An American address that ends in a state abbreviation and a zip code.
If it also contains "S.1618" in the message, then it's almost certainly spam. (If you've received spam, you'll recognise this as a bogus reference to an American bill that was defeated. Quoting this bill implies that the spammer has a right to send you the crap.)
More on web addresses: spammers usually obfuscate their web site addresses in their spams. The obfuscation is distinctive enough in style to make an effective spam filter.
Examples are URL's with the "@" sign somewhere in them, HTML-style %xx escaping of alphanumeric characters, or a URL that begins with a number like 3141592653. Often, you'll see all these methods mixed together in a futile attempt at obfuscation. If your filter sees a URL like this, the message is almost certainly spam and may be discarded.
90% of all spam that I receive comes from one of two classes of IP addresses: addresses that are on the MAPS DUL (Dialup User List) or on a list of open relays such as ORBS. Block all SMTP connections from these sources, and you'll block 90% of your spam.
Of the remaining 10%, you can stop 90% of that if you filter the message by searching the body of the message for addresses, telephone numbers and obfuscated web site addresses. Your filter might not be perfect, so it might not stop all of it.
Do both of these, and you'll stop 99% of your spam.
Here's another idea I've had that may or may not work. It's based on using the bogus From addresses that the spammer uses against them. If you validate those addresses as the mail arrives, then you can block the mail if the address named in the From header doesn't exist.
Here's how the SMTP might look.
host1 sending to host2 (host1 is a spammer)
host1: HELO
host2: response
host1: MAIL FROM: bogususer@host3
ok, so now you validate "bogususer@host3". Start SMTP with host3:
host2: HELO
host3: response
host2: MAIL FROM: postmaster@host2
host3: response
host2: RCPT TO:bogususer@host3
host3: response that tells if user exists
host2: QUIT
host3: response.
(VRFY is now disabled on many hosts so it cannot be used to validate a user.)
Now we continue our original SMTP session. If the user exists, we continue with the SMTP session as normal. If the user does not exist, we assume that "bogususer@host3" is a forgery and terminate the SMTP connection.
host2: error (to host 1)
(close connection)
There's probably problems with this method, but I don't see anything wrong with it as a verification tool. It will probably stop another 90% of the spam.
Basically, the battle against spam is finding a series of methods that each stop 90% of spam. This is a 90% rule that I have discovered. Three different 90% filters applied successively will stop 99.9% of all spam that reaches them, thus reducing your spam considerably.
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If they have an 800 number, call them repeatedly and waste their time.
This is a bad idea, as you could then be liable for harrassment.
However, calling once is OK. So your aim is to make that single call as long as possible. Tell them why spamming is wrong. Tell them how much spam costs other people. Give them an example of what spam is like. Read them the classifieds from an old edition of your local paper (they must be out of date ads that are not placed by you to dodge telemarketing laws, of course). Read them other bits of the paper. Move on to magazine articles. Explain in detail why proper alignment and collimation of a Newtonian reflecting telescope is essential to get good images of the night sky. Read them the DeCSS source code. When your voice gets tired, leave the phone next to the stereo so you can let them have a sample of your music tastes or your favourite radio station.
Basically, your aim is to make that call very expensive.
I understand that many spammer 1800 numbers go to automated systems that give a recorded message and then hang up. Try pressing 0 on your phone to see if that interrupts the message; if it does, then you might be able to prevent the phone from hanging up. Then you can start emptying that spammer's bank account with your fourteen-hour phone call.
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A text message is functionally indistinguishable from a page
And if you've got a GOOD lawyer, he or she might even be able to argue that spamming is functionally indistinguishable from telemarketing: they're both trying to sell something by going through a list of people and contacting each person on that list.
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If I received that letter, and I was resident in the United States, here are some paragraphs that I would have sent in my reply:
I have knowledge that your organisation is using a copyright circumvention device commonly known as an e-mailer. E-mailers are software utilities that decode the contents of e-mails (which are commonly coded in the ASCII character set, and which consist of copyrighted electronic communications) or otherwise circumvent the protection afforded by coding the message in ASCII and permit the copying of the e-mail contents and/or any portion thereof. As such, e-mailers are an unlawful circumvention device within the meaning of 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(2),(3).
This e-mail is Copyright (c) 2000 <my name would go here>. All rights reserved.
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To the media, the protest was a bit lame, and probably not newsworthy enough for inclusion on the evening news. With a bit of planning, though, you can MAKE your protest newsworthy.
What do the media consider newsworthy? The media want sensationalism! They want IMPACT. They want to improve their ratings, sell more newspapers and the like. And what is best? Something that grabs the attention of someone so they watch this channel, or buy that newspaper.
So you need a bit of planning. A peaceful protest with 10,000 people is often good enough to make the news, especially if traffic is blocked, or other peaceful disruption occurs. But if you've only got 25 or 50 people, the protest alone will not be enough to grab the attention of the media.
So you need something that grabs the attention. You need a media stunt.
What constitutes a good media stunt? Look at what Greenpeace does. They sail their boats between whaling ships and factory ships. They climb tall buildings and display huge banners. You need something attention-getting like this.
Often, the attention-getting stunt might involve something like trespassing to display that banner, and it is inevitable that some people might get arrested, so you need a group fund to cover bail if people are arrested. And in fact, getting arrested increases the sensationalism factor, so you might want to get arrested on purpose.
The best stunt in the world won't do anything though if the media isn't there to see it. Don't post stuff on the web and hope the media find it. The media isn't going to come to you. You have to go to the media. Call the news lines of all the major media outlets in the city, and a few others elsewhere for good measure. Tell them what you intend to do, the itinerary if any, and what the protest is about. Aim to have as many television and photographic cameras there as possible.
Once you have the cameras there, the protest is underway, the stunts have been performed and the like, the media want to know why you're doing this. They might interview people at random, so it's best that everyone is coached on what to say. Have everyone issued with flyers as well.
Remember, too, that the television news media operate in "sound bites", five to ten seconds of someone saying something that they can include as a segment on the news. You need to provide that sound bite. At some point in the interview, you need to summarise what your protest is about, in 25 words or less. This is usable as a sound bite, and the television media may then choose to use it.
Above all, treat the news media that show up with great respect. It's often hard work lugging that camera around, because they often meet unco-operative subjects in their day-to-day work. Co-operate with them, and if they want to stand on the roof of your car with the camera for a better shot, let them. This protest is probably not the only one you stage, and if you treat them with respect, they will return the favour.
One last thing. You need to form an organisation. Call yourselves something like "People against DMCA" and always use that name when calling the media to tell them about upcoming protests. If you then organise a series of protests, use of that name will give your protests continuity, and will help your cause. Whatever you do, don't be a disorganised rabble.
These methods are used frequently by the environmental movement when they try to get their message across. And they have succeeded, because you've heard of Greenpeace, and environmentalism is now taught in schools. Follow their methods, and you will succeed.
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If you're wondering why religion is relevant to science, I'll quote (or possibly misquote) our hero Albert Einstein: "Science without religion is blind; religion without science is lame." [Lame has its usual meaning here, and not its slang meaning].
This is similar to space telling matter how to move, and matter telling space how to curve. This quote suggests that science and religion help advance each other.
Albert Einstein has often mentioned religion in relation to science. He is also said in relation to quantum mechanics: "God does not play dice with the Universe." He believed that spacetime had an underlying order, and consequently he found it hard to accept that at the lowest level, spacetime behaved more or less randomly.
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That's an interesting approach. All you need now is enough people in Delaware to make it work. Recruit friends and relatives. The more noise you make, the better your chance of being heard.
This comment is brought to you by a moderation bug where moderations of "Interesting" sometimes get changed to "Troll" for no apparent reason.
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Second, it gets noticed, just for being unusual.
Remember that the code is going to be broadcast between 3 am and 4 am. This is not exactly peak time for Australian television.
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Here is a time-lapse image, here is another, and here is a web site with several more images.
Typically, a flare lasts about ten seconds or so.
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Spamcop works well most of the time, and is useful for tracing a spam quickly if you don't want to spend the time manually running PING and TRACEROUTE and the like. Be aware when using it that complex "Received" chains can occasionally cause it to misidentify the source, so using it with knowledge of how e-mail works gives the best results.
I use it myself and I report up to 10 spams a day with it. It is most satisfying when you receive that e-mail that says the account/web site/domain has been cancelled.
Now who remembers lawyer jokes? I've found that substituting "spammer" for "lawyer" often works well, and gives us a whole new genre of jokes to work with.
Q: What do you call 5,000 spammers on the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start.
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How many times a day do you want to press that "Delete" key? 5? 10? 20? 100? 200? 1000? 10,000? ...? Spam grows and grows, because once your e-mail address gets on a spam list, you will NEVER get it off. Those "remove" addresses are either fake or tell the spammer "hey, this is a real address!" and the spammer can make more money selling real addresses than removing them from lists.
You probably receive less than 10 spams a day. Lucky you. Many people in the U.S. have been forced to abandon e-mail addresses because they receive too much spam. 200 spams a day is often the number at which e-mail becomes unusable.
How much does each spam cost? When you add up storage costs, transmission costs and the like, you may find that the cost to the recipient of a spam is about one cent (precise currency doesn't matter). Not much? OK, now imagine getting 200 a day (might be over multiple e-mail addresses). Now that's $700 a year. Would you prefer to keep that $700 for yourself, or spend it receiving crap that you never asked for and that you do not want?
Also imagine that you take 5 seconds to identify each spam and delete it. At 200 spams a day, that's 1,000 seconds a day, about 20 minutes per day, 120 hours per year. Would you rather spend that time deleting spams or doing other things?
Receiving a spam is like being bitten by a mosquito. It's annoying in small doses, but intolerable in large doses. If you were being bitten by 200 mosquitoes a day, would you put up with them, or would you put up flyscreens? If you receive 200 spams a day, would you put up with them, or would you want this blatant abuse of the Internet outlawed?
If you are still unsure as to why spam is a problem, please visit the The Coalition Against Commercial E-mail website for more information.
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Delphi for Linux will be good for business, because it gives business more choice. One of our major products is software applications written in Delphi, which means our customers have to use Windows NT. Once we have Delphi available for Linux, we'll be able to port these applications to Linux, and our customers would have a choice of Windows NT or Linux.
Borland/Inprise say in the article that they would be hitching a ride on the Linux growth curve to make some money. What they haven't mentioned is the effect of a Delphi for Linux release on that growth curve. Having a product of the good reputation of Delphi released for Linux will mean that more businesses will be able to choose Linux where Windows NT was the only choice before. This will help Linux take market share from Windows NT. This effect is what will help Delphi for Linux become a major player in the market of Linux software development, and as a result, the Borland/Inprise management will be rewarded for their decision.
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An excellent idea. If you ever wondered why Tux looks the way he does, just see some fairy penguins....
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Just follow these simple steps:
Oh, damn, Microsoft have beaten me to it....
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I wonder how they kept count of all the stories? The boring way of course would be for the computer to keep the count for them. But I like to think that they have a big sheet of paper on a wall where each time they post a story, they mark another line on the paper with a tally pen, whose ink is the blood of trolls.
So you see, trolls are important to Slashdot, because where else are CmdrTaco and Hemos going to get fresh troll blood for the tally pen? And I won't mention the successful meat-supply business that funds the running of Slashdot, where they supply fresh troll meat to various restaurant chains in their local area. Those McDonald's burgers aren't really 100% beef, you know....
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The whole point of this is that if all the spam starts containing ADV: that makes for a very easy text filter, which most email programs support.
I am not a lawyer, have not read the law, nor reside in America, but I feel that Colorado residents may have legal grounds to sue if the subject of a spam starts with strings like " Adv: " or " -ADV: ". To win such a case, one needs to demonstrate that the string " ADV: " is intended as an aid in filtering the message, and by not quoting the string exactly - identical character for identical character - the spammer is breaking the law. When computers are concerned, a narrow interpretation of the law is necessary because computers are very literal devices. If you win, you can set a precedent (easy if the spammer never shows up in court when you sue) and future plaintiffs can cite the case as a precedent for their own cases if the same circumstances apply.
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Ten reasons why we track down and arrest crackers:
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I don't know how long Roundup remains active in the soil. It might break down quickly, or it might persist for more than one growing season.
Monsanto make both the Roundup herbicide and Roundup-ready soybeans. They also want to market "single-use" seeds that cannot be propagated. This is a company whose business practices are in need of serious investigation.
Interesting note: Christian Fundamentalists should neither grow nor eat genetically-modified foods. Mating different kinds of animals is prohibited in the Christian Bible (Leviticus 19:19). Most GM organisms contain sections of DNA from other organisms.
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There is one good reason why we should not mine the asteroids, or be selective about the asteroids that we do choose to mine.
And that is the future of the human race.
Sometime over the next thousand million years, the Sun will heat up sufficiently to render the Earth uninhabitable. All the people on Earth will have to find another home somewhere, and that home will ultimately be in another solar system. We will probably need a very large supply of readily-accessible metals so that we can send all the human population of Earth to another world, along with a necessary part of Earth's ecosystem.
If we mine all the asteroids indiscriminately, when the time comes we will be unable to escape the solar system. Squandering the whole of this metal supply so that a select few can live in luxury in their lifetimes may turn out to be the ultimate crime against humanity.
The solution is simple. Make the biggest metal-rich asteroids off-limits, but allow smaller asteroids to be mined. That way, the mercantile interests of asteroid mining companies will be adequately served, and asteroids will be preserved for the inevitable future exodus from the solar system.
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