I guess that he could bring some CDs for the whole class. Its hard to justify pounding someone who just gave YOU something.
My guess is that he would be more likely to get suspended for bringing "pirated" software to school. Back in my high school days this was a major offence, and the BCTFH kept his eyes open. I would bring a printed copy of the GPL just in case. If anyone there has two clues, they should be impressed by a high school kid handing out a legal document and a free clone of UNIX.
How about this as a backdoor around the $40K limit:
All you need to do is install a new program called Hymen. As you might guess, Hymen is a firewall that is automatically destroyed when attackers forcefully probe your network. Once someone has penetrated your Hymen, the only way to repair it is by purchasing a $40K patch file. Now you can get the FBI involved... Of course you forty grand would be returned after the sucessful prosecution of the hackers.
I wouldnt be surprised to see something like this on Freshmeat in a couple of days.
Anonymity is really a matter of concealing your activities from those who are in an position of power over you. Probably the entity with the greatest amount of power over citizens at large is the government. Furthermore, it is the government who is calling for these measures. If anonymity is erased, it is the government that has the most to gain. All of the pieces of the puzzle fit together if you consider them as a whole.
Now take a step back and don't think of the Internet as a network. Think of it as a library, conference room and shopping center. Now imagine being assigned a FBI agent who monitors everything that you read, say, and buy. How do you feel then? If this were the "real world" there would be a rabid pack of ACLU lawyers cutting a swath of destruction on the way to the capitol.
There is something deeper here. The amount of impact that the monitoring has is directly related to its degree of centralization and the authority it wields. Right now, people are monitored every day by websites that log connections. Rob can probably use my IP or email addy and figure out who I am pretty quickly. Do I care? No, because he has no authority over me and probably isnt trying to combine all of my data into one profile. Lets look at the other end of the spectrum, and give the government complete power to collate and log all Internet activities. Now everything is centralized, complete, and in the hands of the only authority that can legally take my life. This is a much more dire situation.
When you think of anonymity, also think about who you want to be anonymous from.
I've died a lot in my dreams. My most vivid dream death was getting shot in the head execution style at the movies. Next thing I knew, I was in the surf in Malibu trying to figure out if I was in heaven or hell. Pretty cool.
If they ever perfect these immersive 3d environments, I hope that someone codes a good afterlife. That would be much classier than a giant GAME OVER screen.
Although it might interfere with my recovery, I can at least admit to having seen the innards of countless Compaqs. Based on my experience, I think that the Compaq engineers are forced to design their systems to the following specifications:
1. Every PC must be built around a new form factor. Designs may not be reused, and should change faster than the model numbers.
2. All power supplies and motherboards must use unique power connectors that vary from model to model.
3. Motherboards may only include three of the following: a. CPU Socket b. SIMM/DIMM slots c. PCI/ISA slots d. IDE/Floppy connectors
Everything else must be placed on a daughtercard. Extra points for including more than one daughtercard in a system.
4. Adding a drive must involve the removal of one of the following: a. Motherboard b. Daughtercard c. Secret Panel d. All of the Above (preferred)
5. The case must not be penetrable by anyone (except its designer) in less than 20 minutes. A minimum of five removable panels should be utilized. One of the panels should not look like it could possibly ever be removed. The chief case engineer must have completed a terminal degree in Chinese Puzzle Box Design, with emphasis in Sadism.
6. If opening the case is a tooless operation, three different obscure fasteners must secure everything inside. If case design includes traditional screws, they must be of mixed types and too numerous to count.
7. Access to the drives should be obscured by at least one sliding plastic door. Bonus points for using multiple doors, or very brittle plastics.
8. Every obscure multimedia connector known to man must extend from the front of the case. These are never intended for use, but are mandated by the marketing department. Proceed accordingly.
9. All power control functions should be performed by the software. No button on the front of the case may do anything more drastic than put the PC in sleep mode. Reviving from sleep mode should take longer than a reboot, and cause random errors.
10. Not all systems may follow these guidelines. Select at random which rules apply to your current design. Invention of new design criteria are encouraged, so long as they do not match any published specifications.
Glad you folks are getting these boxen for free. Working on a Compaq plus being forced to view advertising may lead to insanity.
Dell on the other hand tends to make fairly good PCs that use standard components. There may have been a time before the end of the 486 epoch that things were messier. ISTR that early pentiums could have had their own quirks as well, but my memory is a bit foggy. Glad its not my problem anymore...
That's right. This has nothing to do with copy protection or secure distribution of digital content. Pretty much all copy protection schemes are damned from the beginning anyway. So what is Intel up to now?
They want to sell more CPUs to the people who want to try to brute force the keys. Here you go, buy our monitor and video card. Now you need a brand new Itanium XXX with the special Decrypticon instruction set so you can make a fair use copy of your movies (wink wink). Searching the entire keyspace has never been so fast...
Why would Slashdot want to do it at all? Caching websites takes disk space. Serving cached websites takes bandwidth.
What does VA (Or whoever the fuck owns slashdot today) pay for? Disk space and bandwidth... Throw in the potential legal problems and the business decision becomes pretty clear. Plus someone would need to code up the proxy and integrate it with SLASH.
What would they have to gain? Not a whole lot. Slashdot users expect some of the links to go down for awhile. The linked sites probably wouldnt pay for the service.
If great output quality isnt a huge issue, a LaserJet II or III can be a good choice. The best part is the construction. I bought almost 1000 of these once. Stacked them up and used them to cover up a radiation "incident". The sarcophagus around Chernobyl is decaying, but the HP's still provide containment and occasional print services.
Reasonable prices for toner, fuser and so on. I have seen LJ II's with 200000+ pages on the engine that were still going strong.
The LJ 4 was also a pretty sweet printer. As far as the newer models go, I like the ones with the horizontal paper trays. Generally those are a bit more pricey though.
No alarm, the front door is almost always unlocked.
Where in your home is your computer?
Go into the front door. Walk through the foyer into the hallway to the right. There is one computer in the office on your immediate left. In the room at the end of the hall there is another computer and a few grand worth of scanner equipment.
When will you be away from home?
I do not plan on being around for at least a couple of weeks starting today. There might be some people in and out, but I am going out of town.
See, that is not too hard now is it? Please note that I do NOT give you permission to take anything. HTH HAND!
I'm using them right now. They seemed to offer the lowest price for hosting mysql and php without real bandwidth limits. Plus you get a shell account with very few restrictions. Not a bad deal for 10-15 bucks a month. Their website and documentation is pretty clueful and was not written by marketing types or lawyers.
After using them for awhile, I don't know if I would recommend them. In the past two months I have seen them suffer from DNS troubles. Telnet is down right now as far as I can tell, and has been down for awhile. Sometimes it is grindingly slow. Security seems to be another issue. The motd described some problems with DOS attacks. If you want a cheap place to stick your personal/hobby site it might be an economical choice. I would stay away from them for buisness hosting. I am thinking of leaving sometime in the next few months.
So has anyone used Datarealm (www.serve.com) or Web2010? They seem to be fairly large and offer PHP and mysql for around 25 bucks a month.
Even better, does anyone know of a web host that offers the following features:
Hmmmm, Playstation 2 has firewire? All you need is a firewire hard drive and digital video camera. Nonlinear editing on a game console, now that would be a cool hack!
Exactly. Here is a little story for you. Back in elementary school my mom was taking a medical terminology class. I got a hold of her flashcards and was going through them. Only one word really amused me: Vulva. I thought that it would be a great name for a car from Volvo. After explaining my great new idea to my folks, they told me to turn over the card. It was embarrasing, but funny as hell.
Now why is this funny? Mostly its the irony. Only a child would suggest naming a vehicle after genitalia. We are laughing at the products of the cluelessness, and not the stupidity behind it. There is a big difference there. It strikes me as sad when someone is dumb as a stump. It stirrs feelings of compassion, not humor. Now if the same person sues Toshiba because the CDROM door retracted and spilled his beer, I will laugh my ass off. Since even really bright people will do phenominally stupid stuff sometimes, its not like the humor is always picking on the tail end of the bell curve.
Another component that goes into the success of UserFriendly is that it explores the characteristics that differentiate us from others. Every group has its own terminology, in-jokes and even prejudices. Userfriendly plays to the geek culture, it takes up our worldview in order to show that it is one of us. When we read it, we see the characters as being part of our group. With that connection established, some of the jokes are funny because they are the same sort of in-jokes that we respond to at the water cooler. Sure these jokes poke fun at outsiders sometimes, but they provide cohesiveness to the group that we are a part of. Other jokes are funny because they relate directly to our lives. Most of it is simply amusing, because we see part of ourself reflected from the page. There is nothing sinister about that.
Sure, I am going to stand there five minutes. I think I would rather be irradiated. No germs and a nice healthy glow.
I can just see you standing at the sink when some guy comes in to take a dump. Man will he be surprised when he walks out of the stall to find you still scrubbing away.
Drifting further offtopic: When I am in a restraunt and I see the chef go into the bathroom, I always check to see how he washes his hands. Even in the better places splash and go is the norm. Of course around here they usually lick themselves clean. Im pretty sure that everyone is with me on this one: If you find pubic hair in the Chinese food, send out for pizza instead.
And now for my half serious top ten gadgets:
10. Canned air. It sucks at its intended task, but turn one upside down and watch the antics.
9. Pocket calculators. Arithemetic for dummies and less burdensome calculation for the inspired.
8. Cameras. Ruin the moment and save it forever
7. Cell phones. Cool idea, but they should come with an "Inconsiderate Bastard" forehead tatoo kit.
6. Multi-tools (Leatherman and others) Many tools, one small package. Fix stuff anywhere.
5. Night vision goggles. Fun at the movies, and out on the street. The funny looks you get all glow green!
4. GPS. Damn, I had to park 300 meters away!
3. Recorded music and stuff to play it on. Better than having an orchestra pit in your living room. Well, maybe not, but cheaper.
2. Digital camcorders. Only because I lust for a 3CCD camera with firewire. BWPII here I come.
1. Wearable computers. OK, not quite yet, but when these become mainstream I am having mine implanted.
Lets say that Gary Coleman and friends decide that they dont like the bulge in your pants. Once they take you into the back room to do the search, can you tell them to sod off? What happens if you do not consent to the search? Can you tear up your ticket, go to the parking lot and go home? If not, why?
When you buy a plane ticket, do you implicitly give consent for a strip search if the security detail deems it necessary? I can see them trying to justify it through probable cause arguments, but if you decide not to get on the plane the airport security shouldn't have one ounce of power over you.
Furthermore, how can we trust that no records are being kept. Wouldn't a nice black and white photo be handy for prosecution purposes... I know I don't want my ass on airportscannergayporn.com. Id also really rather not have the lowest denominator security guard squeezing my sack either, thank you. Depending on the nature of the trip, I just might decide to stay home and spend my vacation with a lawyer.
Why bother asking such a leading question? You trimmed the field down so much, it seems like you want them to come out and sing the praises of Linux or a BSD variant. Fine, I have little doubt that they would. Yet in an interview I want to hear what they have to say, not what the interviewer wants to hear. Who knows, they could be sick bastards with an AIX fetish. If so, I want to hear about why they like it. Hell they might even like SCO UNIX (which I seem to remember is partially owned by Microsoft). An interesting answer would be something offbeat, not necessarily something that agrees with your preconceptions.
No, it took a few months of reading slashdot. And yes some of the explanations are silly. Come on, picture your local underground parking garage. Then imagine Pat Morita doing Tai'chi in the middle of Level 4. Or step back, if you will and get an image of a washed up renegade of an elementary school principal. That copy of Swank means something to him. A serious example? No, its porn for goodness sake. Have you always taken things so seriously?
Yes, I did read the article. However I remain a bit suspicious of thier claims. This was a bit of a general overview that didnt offer the level of detail I was looking for. What exact conditions did they use to achieve the one percent rate of false alarms? Spotting congestion is one thing, telling the difference between a mugging and settling the dinner check by the car is another. Are those conditions applicable to other situations? Sorry, but I refuse to swallow their claims whole.
Guess police officers shouldn't worry if they see someone fleeing another preson. _Could_ just be a couple playing tag so lets not risk bothering them. Don't bother that guy who's got someone pinned up against the wall and screaming. Maybe they're just having a tickle fight.
Yeah, maybe they are, maybe they aren't. Its up to the police officer to decide. I am fine with human surveliance. People understand the behavior of others and can discern the difference between fight and play. A machine can only analyze and criminalize. Sorry folks, but crime isn't a big enough problem to go pissing away our privacy and freedom over.
There are some good aspects to this technology. The security force will have more incident reports to file and spend more time doing paperwork. That should open some positions for has been child actors. Might as well pick from the finest to fill the uniform of our protectors.
There are some profoundly dangerous aspects to survelliance. Why dont you go back and read the article again. Pay special attention the paragraphs that begin It is here, provided the system can be perfected, that Maybank sees the potential for sinister uses of the technology and Simon Davies, director of the human rights group Privacy International, is scathing about the technology. "This is a very dangerous step towards a total control society," They pretty much sum-up everything that I wanted to say. Having your every action electronically analyzed for normalcy just sounds too Orwellian for me. You may be a socialist pinko who wants to control society, but I dont want to trade my freedom for an electronically mediated sense of security.
On a lighter note, can't you see these things at the drug store. I'm just waiting for a pharmacist to come up to me and say: "Hey, the security folks told me that you have that I-just-know-Im-gonna-score-tonight swaggar. Have you thought about using this fine brand of Durex condoms?"
I walked slowly to my car looking around the garage and checking for passengers in the car.
I am a young woman in an unfamillair parking garage. Recently a woman was raped there by an attacker who had broken into the car and waited for her to return. I dont trust George and want to make sure no one is there for myself.
I stood still with my hands in the air.
Stretching?
Trying to contact the mothership.
Parking Garage Tai'chi
I bumped into someone and started running away.
I accedentially bumped into the kind of guy who has Bad Motherf**ker written on his wallet. He looks pissed and Im a little wussy man. Better part of valor and all that.
I sat down at an airport, checked my bag, and got up calmly and walked away without it.
Im an idiot who loses stuff.
Im a stud who wants to pick up on the woman over by the phones
Im a travelling dominatrix with my gear in the bag. The duty free shop has a sign that says they reserve the right to inspect all bags. I want to get a magazine but want to avoid a scene like the one at the security checkpoint.
I walk around with a paper, briefcase, or other object hiding my face.
My girlfriend dumped me and I cried like a little wussy boy. I just want to take the train home
I redefine ugly everywhere I go
I am famous
I am a nearsighted compulsive reader
I stood at the edge of the tracks and watched 5 trains go by.
Im way too early to get on the train, but too late to do anything else productive. Time is the only thing I am planning on killing
I think that I can see the cover of a tattered copy of Swank behind the tracks. Im waiting for everyone to go away so that I can grab a little on-train entertainment
I stood on or climbed onto the railings of a bridge, skyscraper, or other tall structure.
Darwin Award contender: Hey guys check this out!
The secretary in the building across the way is changing her shirt and I'm angling for a better view
I am very uncomfortable with machines becoming the arbitrers of normal behavior. Once, I broke into a car in a garage in Downtown LA. The security guys actually showed up and confronted me. All that I had to say was that I had locked my keys in the car, and they went on their way. Hell, I even asked them to call for a tow and they just told me where the payphones were. About half an hour later, the tow got my keys for me. He never checked out my story, I simply sold it well enough that he trusted me.
Really, all this system does is to persecute people who are outside of the mainstream. I sit in the car sometimes while my wife shops. Sometimes I get out an wander. Guess I cant do that anymore. Criminals who are worth thier salt will be able to fool them, or the meat processors that they summon. Dress nice, blend in, and dont look suspicious. How hard is that?
Plus, if you catch a guy before he commits a crime, what are you going to charge him with?
Yeah, and what happens when your Xerox machine runs out of ultraviolet toner? Do you have to change the ultraviolet toner cartridge every once in a while? Maybe I should go into the ultraviolet toner business. A guy could really clean up there.
Diamonds sometimes are fluorescent in the UV. This is undesirable because it can cause dullness in some types of light. I sure dont want the copies of my business plan detailing my ultraviolet toner operation to look dull when I hand them to the VC's. What if I want to do business at my local titty bar? Will the blacklights render my fantastic income projections unreadable?
Nice thought, and probably very workable. However there are some things you need to consider when you add a new color of ink.
Even though your post has a tongue in cheek sort of feel, you address some vital issues. Im sure that a lot of the people in power right now are wishing that the Internet genie would get back in the bottle. The free exchange of information and the quality of digital recordings is what makes this possible. Think back even just ten years. Trading tapes would be pretty much confined to a circle of friends. To do it on a large scale would take a dead tree mailing list and some sort of coordination. A BBS might have helped out, but there is still a rather limited number of participants. All of this adds up to being too much trouble unless you are trading bootlegs. Burning CD's was not a consumer technology back then. To some extent we needed the record companies to distribute the music. The empire of recorded music was pretty much unassailable, and they got fat on the profit.
As we have seen over the past few years, the Internet changes things. Now we don't need a record company to distribute music. Really, record lables are finance and marketing outfits, and they charge way too much for their services. Lawsuits are part of their last stand to hang on to the old way. Its not Napster that has made these changes, its the steady march of technology. You are right, we are getting to the point that the facilities for distributing music are ubiquitous. Hell, you could probably hack together something in a weekend to serve a similar function. Sorry Mister Record Label Man, we dont need your technical services anymore, the barrier to entry has been removed.
The sooner that you labels wake up to the reality of the situation and quit these shenanigans, the better. There really isnt a secure way to distribute music electronically without black box hardware. And no, we wont buy the black boxen, see what happened to DIVX if you dont believe me. If you want to continue to distribute for money, you have to make it so easy that the added convenience is worth the money. Make it too hard or restricted and I will go elsewhere. Time to realize that you arent really needed as distributors anymore and focus on what you do well. The cluetrain is pulling into the station, are you going to take delivery or play on the tracks?
I have a nagging feeling that crimes would drop *extremely* fast.
Right behind it you would find freedom falling just as fast. Would you really want to live in this kind of totalitatian state? Sure, you could walk the streets and not be afraid of muggers. It would the police who would make you cower in fear.
Your values system is fubar. Death for major theft? What is the dollar value of a human life? On the other end of the spectrum, random acts of violence are treated with kid gloves. Lashes heal, but you dont grow a new hand. Just out of curoisity, I have an opening for the position of dictator is a Southeast Asian country. Would you be interested?
Simple answer. Don't kill anyone. Just because I think that a crime is worthy of execution, that does not mean the sentence needs to be carried out.
Let me explain more:
I believe that there are crimes heinous enough that death would be a just penalty. Yet I am against anyone implementing capital punisment for any crime. My reasoning for the apparent inconsistency? I do not believe that anyone should be granted the right to kill anyone for any reason. Vigilantes are no exception. Granted, the administration of justice is about as valid of a reason that I can can think of to allow the taking of a life. Even so, I still do not think that it is compelling enough to warrant the empowerment of anyone to carry out the sentence. Throw in a government or a lynch mob with its own agenda, and there the possibility that justice will be perverted. In that case, execution is a weapon of control or revenge and not an instrument of justice. Overall, I dont think that anyone should be empowered to kill another, and I wouldnt trust anyone with the responsibility anyway.
Overall, I agree with your points. I used to be very strongly for the death penalty. Even now, I think that there are crimes that are worthy of execution. However I do not trust ANY government with the responsibility of killing its citizens. If a nation such as China can kill someone for a trivial amount of money, that act devalues human life across the board. You only get one chance to apply capital punishment correctly. Is there any government on the planet that can get it right the first time, every time?
Celeron-- This one breaks down into "Sell her Ron!"
So the story goes: One day an Intel engineer was talking with a marketing rep. He asked what the hell were they doing with the cacheless chip he was working on. The response? Yep, you guessed it.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess that he could bring some CDs for the whole class. Its hard to justify pounding someone who just gave YOU something.
My guess is that he would be more likely to get suspended for bringing "pirated" software to school. Back in my high school days this was a major offence, and the BCTFH kept his eyes open. I would bring a printed copy of the GPL just in case. If anyone there has two clues, they should be impressed by a high school kid handing out a legal document and a free clone of UNIX.
-BW
How about this as a backdoor around the $40K limit:
All you need to do is install a new program called Hymen. As you might guess, Hymen is a firewall that is automatically destroyed when attackers forcefully probe your network. Once someone has penetrated your Hymen, the only way to repair it is by purchasing a $40K patch file. Now you can get the FBI involved... Of course you forty grand would be returned after the sucessful prosecution of the hackers.
I wouldnt be surprised to see something like this on Freshmeat in a couple of days.
-BW
-BW
Anonymity is really a matter of concealing your activities from those who are in an position of power over you. Probably the entity with the greatest amount of power over citizens at large is the government. Furthermore, it is the government who is calling for these measures. If anonymity is erased, it is the government that has the most to gain. All of the pieces of the puzzle fit together if you consider them as a whole.
Now take a step back and don't think of the Internet as a network. Think of it as a library, conference room and shopping center. Now imagine being assigned a FBI agent who monitors everything that you read, say, and buy. How do you feel then? If this were the "real world" there would be a rabid pack of ACLU lawyers cutting a swath of destruction on the way to the capitol.
There is something deeper here. The amount of impact that the monitoring has is directly related to its degree of centralization and the authority it wields. Right now, people are monitored every day by websites that log connections. Rob can probably use my IP or email addy and figure out who I am pretty quickly. Do I care? No, because he has no authority over me and probably isnt trying to combine all of my data into one profile. Lets look at the other end of the spectrum, and give the government complete power to collate and log all Internet activities. Now everything is centralized, complete, and in the hands of the only authority that can legally take my life. This is a much more dire situation.
When you think of anonymity, also think about who you want to be anonymous from.
-BW
-BW
I've died a lot in my dreams. My most vivid dream death was getting shot in the head execution style at the movies. Next thing I knew, I was in the surf in Malibu trying to figure out if I was in heaven or hell. Pretty cool.
If they ever perfect these immersive 3d environments, I hope that someone codes a good afterlife. That would be much classier than a giant GAME OVER screen.
-BW
-BW
Who moderated the comment above? It is obviously offtopic :)
How do I count processes, it just says that I have 38911 basic bytes free...
-BW
Although it might interfere with my recovery, I can at least admit to having seen the innards of countless Compaqs. Based on my experience, I think that the Compaq engineers are forced to design their systems to the following specifications:
1. Every PC must be built around a new form factor. Designs may not be reused, and should change faster than the model numbers.
2. All power supplies and motherboards must use unique power connectors that vary from model to model.
3. Motherboards may only include three of the following:
a. CPU Socket
b. SIMM/DIMM slots
c. PCI/ISA slots
d. IDE/Floppy connectors
Everything else must be placed on a daughtercard. Extra points for including more than one daughtercard in a system.
4. Adding a drive must involve the removal of one of the following:
a. Motherboard
b. Daughtercard
c. Secret Panel
d. All of the Above (preferred)
5. The case must not be penetrable by anyone (except its designer) in less than 20 minutes. A minimum of five removable panels should be utilized. One of the panels should not look like it could possibly ever be removed. The chief case engineer must have completed a terminal degree in Chinese Puzzle Box Design, with emphasis in Sadism.
6. If opening the case is a tooless operation, three different obscure fasteners must secure everything inside. If case design includes traditional screws, they must be of mixed types and too numerous to count.
7. Access to the drives should be obscured by at least one sliding plastic door. Bonus points for using multiple doors, or very brittle plastics.
8. Every obscure multimedia connector known to man must extend from the front of the case. These are never intended for use, but are mandated by the marketing department. Proceed accordingly.
9. All power control functions should be performed by the software. No button on the front of the case may do anything more drastic than put the PC in sleep mode. Reviving from sleep mode should take longer than a reboot, and cause random errors.
10. Not all systems may follow these guidelines. Select at random which rules apply to your current design. Invention of new design criteria are encouraged, so long as they do not match any published specifications.
Glad you folks are getting these boxen for free. Working on a Compaq plus being forced to view advertising may lead to insanity.
Dell on the other hand tends to make fairly good PCs that use standard components. There may have been a time before the end of the 486 epoch that things were messier. ISTR that early pentiums could have had their own quirks as well, but my memory is a bit foggy. Glad its not my problem anymore...
-BW
That's right. This has nothing to do with copy protection or secure distribution of digital content. Pretty much all copy protection schemes are damned from the beginning anyway. So what is Intel up to now?
They want to sell more CPUs to the people who want to try to brute force the keys. Here you go, buy our monitor and video card. Now you need a brand new Itanium XXX with the special Decrypticon instruction set so you can make a fair use copy of your movies (wink wink). Searching the entire keyspace has never been so fast...
-BW
Why would Slashdot want to do it at all?
Caching websites takes disk space.
Serving cached websites takes bandwidth.
What does VA (Or whoever the fuck owns slashdot today) pay for? Disk space and bandwidth... Throw in the potential legal problems and the business decision becomes pretty clear. Plus someone would need to code up the proxy and integrate it with SLASH.
What would they have to gain? Not a whole lot. Slashdot users expect some of the links to go down for awhile. The linked sites probably wouldnt pay for the service.
-BW
If great output quality isnt a huge issue, a LaserJet II or III can be a good choice. The best part is the construction. I bought almost 1000 of these once. Stacked them up and used them to cover up a radiation "incident". The sarcophagus around Chernobyl is decaying, but the HP's still provide containment and occasional print services.
Reasonable prices for toner, fuser and so on. I have seen LJ II's with 200000+ pages on the engine that were still going strong.
The LJ 4 was also a pretty sweet printer. As far as the newer models go, I like the ones with the horizontal paper trays. Generally those are a bit more pricey though.
-BW
Where do you live?
1444 West Garvey Ave
West Covina, California
If you have an alarm system, how do I disable it?
No alarm, the front door is almost always unlocked.
Where in your home is your computer?
Go into the front door. Walk through the foyer into the hallway to the right. There is one computer in the office on your immediate left. In the room at the end of the hall there is another computer and a few grand worth of scanner equipment.
When will you be away from home?
I do not plan on being around for at least a couple of weeks starting today. There might be some people in and out, but I am going out of town.
See, that is not too hard now is it? Please note that I do NOT give you permission to take anything. HTH HAND!
-BW
After using them for awhile, I don't know if I would recommend them. In the past two months I have seen them suffer from DNS troubles. Telnet is down right now as far as I can tell, and has been down for awhile. Sometimes it is grindingly slow. Security seems to be another issue. The motd described some problems with DOS attacks. If you want a cheap place to stick your personal/hobby site it might be an economical choice. I would stay away from them for buisness hosting. I am thinking of leaving sometime in the next few months.
So has anyone used Datarealm (www.serve.com) or Web2010? They seem to be fairly large and offer PHP and mysql for around 25 bucks a month.
Even better, does anyone know of a web host that offers the following features:
I would like to pay $25 bucks a month or less...
I guess I can scratch c|host off of the list.
-BW
Hmmmm, Playstation 2 has firewire? All you need is a firewire hard drive and digital video camera. Nonlinear editing on a game console, now that would be a cool hack!
Exactly. Here is a little story for you. Back in elementary school my mom was taking a medical terminology class. I got a hold of her flashcards and was going through them. Only one word really amused me: Vulva. I thought that it would be a great name for a car from Volvo. After explaining my great new idea to my folks, they told me to turn over the card. It was embarrasing, but funny as hell.
Now why is this funny? Mostly its the irony. Only a child would suggest naming a vehicle after genitalia. We are laughing at the products of the cluelessness, and not the stupidity behind it. There is a big difference there. It strikes me as sad when someone is dumb as a stump. It stirrs feelings of compassion, not humor. Now if the same person sues Toshiba because the CDROM door retracted and spilled his beer, I will laugh my ass off. Since even really bright people will do phenominally stupid stuff sometimes, its not like the humor is always picking on the tail end of the bell curve.
Another component that goes into the success of UserFriendly is that it explores the characteristics that differentiate us from others. Every group has its own terminology, in-jokes and even prejudices. Userfriendly plays to the geek culture, it takes up our worldview in order to show that it is one of us. When we read it, we see the characters as being part of our group. With that connection established, some of the jokes are funny because they are the same sort of in-jokes that we respond to at the water cooler. Sure these jokes poke fun at outsiders sometimes, but they provide cohesiveness to the group that we are a part of. Other jokes are funny because they relate directly to our lives. Most of it is simply amusing, because we see part of ourself reflected from the page. There is nothing sinister about that.
-BW
Sure, I am going to stand there five minutes. I think I would rather be irradiated. No germs and a nice healthy glow.
I can just see you standing at the sink when some guy comes in to take a dump. Man will he be surprised when he walks out of the stall to find you still scrubbing away.
Drifting further offtopic: When I am in a restraunt and I see the chef go into the bathroom, I always check to see how he washes his hands. Even in the better places splash and go is the norm. Of course around here they usually lick themselves clean. Im pretty sure that everyone is with me on this one: If you find pubic hair in the Chinese food, send out for pizza instead.
And now for my half serious top ten gadgets:
10. Canned air. It sucks at its intended task, but turn one upside down and watch the antics.
9. Pocket calculators. Arithemetic for dummies and less burdensome calculation for the inspired.
8. Cameras. Ruin the moment and save it forever
7. Cell phones. Cool idea, but they should come with an "Inconsiderate Bastard" forehead tatoo kit.
6. Multi-tools (Leatherman and others) Many tools, one small package. Fix stuff anywhere.
5. Night vision goggles. Fun at the movies, and out on the street. The funny looks you get all glow green!
4. GPS. Damn, I had to park 300 meters away!
3. Recorded music and stuff to play it on. Better than having an orchestra pit in your living room. Well, maybe not, but cheaper.
2. Digital camcorders. Only because I lust for a 3CCD camera with firewire. BWPII here I come.
1. Wearable computers. OK, not quite yet, but when these become mainstream I am having mine implanted.
-BW
What can we do as a society to promote the profession of teaching?
-BW
Lets say that Gary Coleman and friends decide that they dont like the bulge in your pants. Once they take you into the back room to do the search, can you tell them to sod off? What happens if you do not consent to the search? Can you tear up your ticket, go to the parking lot and go home? If not, why?
When you buy a plane ticket, do you implicitly give consent for a strip search if the security detail deems it necessary? I can see them trying to justify it through probable cause arguments, but if you decide not to get on the plane the airport security shouldn't have one ounce of power over you.
Furthermore, how can we trust that no records are being kept. Wouldn't a nice black and white photo be handy for prosecution purposes... I know I don't want my ass on airportscannergayporn.com. Id also really rather not have the lowest denominator security guard squeezing my sack either, thank you. Depending on the nature of the trip, I just might decide to stay home and spend my vacation with a lawyer.
-BW
Why bother asking such a leading question? You trimmed the field down so much, it seems like you want them to come out and sing the praises of Linux or a BSD variant. Fine, I have little doubt that they would. Yet in an interview I want to hear what they have to say, not what the interviewer wants to hear. Who knows, they could be sick bastards with an AIX fetish. If so, I want to hear about why they like it. Hell they might even like SCO UNIX (which I seem to remember is partially owned by Microsoft). An interesting answer would be something offbeat, not necessarily something that agrees with your preconceptions.
-BW
Have you always been this paranoid
No, it took a few months of reading slashdot. And yes some of the explanations are silly. Come on, picture your local underground parking garage. Then imagine Pat Morita doing Tai'chi in the middle of Level 4. Or step back, if you will and get an image of a washed up renegade of an elementary school principal. That copy of Swank means something to him. A serious example? No, its porn for goodness sake. Have you always taken things so seriously?
Yes, I did read the article. However I remain a bit suspicious of thier claims. This was a bit of a general overview that didnt offer the level of detail I was looking for. What exact conditions did they use to achieve the one percent rate of false alarms? Spotting congestion is one thing, telling the difference between a mugging and settling the dinner check by the car is another. Are those conditions applicable to other situations? Sorry, but I refuse to swallow their claims whole.
Guess police officers shouldn't worry if they see someone fleeing another preson. _Could_ just be a couple playing tag so lets not risk bothering them. Don't bother that guy who's got someone pinned up against the wall and screaming. Maybe they're just having a tickle fight.
Yeah, maybe they are, maybe they aren't. Its up to the police officer to decide. I am fine with human surveliance. People understand the behavior of others and can discern the difference between fight and play. A machine can only analyze and criminalize. Sorry folks, but crime isn't a big enough problem to go pissing away our privacy and freedom over.
There are some good aspects to this technology. The security force will have more incident reports to file and spend more time doing paperwork. That should open some positions for has been child actors. Might as well pick from the finest to fill the uniform of our protectors.
There are some profoundly dangerous aspects to survelliance. Why dont you go back and read the article again. Pay special attention the paragraphs that begin It is here, provided the system can be perfected, that Maybank sees the potential for sinister uses of the technology and Simon Davies, director of the human rights group Privacy International, is scathing about the technology. "This is a very dangerous step towards a total control society," They pretty much sum-up everything that I wanted to say. Having your every action electronically analyzed for normalcy just sounds too Orwellian for me. You may be a socialist pinko who wants to control society, but I dont want to trade my freedom for an electronically mediated sense of security.
On a lighter note, can't you see these things at the drug store. I'm just waiting for a pharmacist to come up to me and say: "Hey, the security folks told me that you have that I-just-know-Im-gonna-score-tonight swaggar. Have you thought about using this fine brand of Durex condoms?"
-BW
I stood still with my hands in the air.
I bumped into someone and started running away.
I sat down at an airport, checked my bag, and got up calmly and walked away without it.
I walk around with a paper, briefcase, or other object hiding my face.
I stood at the edge of the tracks and watched 5 trains go by.
I stood on or climbed onto the railings of a bridge, skyscraper, or other tall structure.
I am very uncomfortable with machines becoming the arbitrers of normal behavior. Once, I broke into a car in a garage in Downtown LA. The security guys actually showed up and confronted me. All that I had to say was that I had locked my keys in the car, and they went on their way. Hell, I even asked them to call for a tow and they just told me where the payphones were. About half an hour later, the tow got my keys for me. He never checked out my story, I simply sold it well enough that he trusted me.
Really, all this system does is to persecute people who are outside of the mainstream. I sit in the car sometimes while my wife shops. Sometimes I get out an wander. Guess I cant do that anymore. Criminals who are worth thier salt will be able to fool them, or the meat processors that they summon. Dress nice, blend in, and dont look suspicious. How hard is that?
Plus, if you catch a guy before he commits a crime, what are you going to charge him with?
-BW
Yeah, and what happens when your Xerox machine runs out of ultraviolet toner? Do you have to change the ultraviolet toner cartridge every once in a while? Maybe I should go into the ultraviolet toner business. A guy could really clean up there.
Diamonds sometimes are fluorescent in the UV. This is undesirable because it can cause dullness in some types of light. I sure dont want the copies of my business plan detailing my ultraviolet toner operation to look dull when I hand them to the VC's. What if I want to do business at my local titty bar? Will the blacklights render my fantastic income projections unreadable?
Nice thought, and probably very workable. However there are some things you need to consider when you add a new color of ink.
-BW
Even though your post has a tongue in cheek sort of feel, you address some vital issues.
Im sure that a lot of the people in power right now are wishing that the Internet genie would get back in the bottle. The free exchange of information and the quality of digital recordings is what makes this possible. Think back even just ten years. Trading tapes would be pretty much confined to a circle of friends. To do it on a large scale would take a dead tree mailing list and some sort of coordination. A BBS might have helped out, but there is still a rather limited number of participants. All of this adds up to being too much trouble unless you are trading bootlegs. Burning CD's was not a consumer technology back then. To some extent we needed the record companies to distribute the music. The empire of recorded music was pretty much unassailable, and they got fat on the profit.
As we have seen over the past few years, the Internet changes things. Now we don't need a record company to distribute music. Really, record lables are finance and marketing outfits, and they charge way too much for their services. Lawsuits are part of their last stand to hang on to the old way. Its not Napster that has made these changes, its the steady march of technology. You are right, we are getting to the point that the facilities for distributing music are ubiquitous. Hell, you could probably hack together something in a weekend to serve a similar function. Sorry Mister Record Label Man, we dont need your technical services anymore, the barrier to entry has been removed.
The sooner that you labels wake up to the reality of the situation and quit these shenanigans, the better. There really isnt a secure way to distribute music electronically without black box hardware. And no, we wont buy the black boxen, see what happened to DIVX if you dont believe me. If you want to continue to distribute for money, you have to make it so easy that the added convenience is worth the money. Make it too hard or restricted and I will go elsewhere. Time to realize that you arent really needed as distributors anymore and focus on what you do well. The cluetrain is pulling into the station, are you going to take delivery or play on the tracks?
-BW
I have a nagging feeling that crimes would drop *extremely* fast.
Right behind it you would find freedom falling just as fast. Would you really want to live in this kind of totalitatian state? Sure, you could walk the streets and not be afraid of muggers. It would the police who would make you cower in fear.
Your values system is fubar. Death for major theft? What is the dollar value of a human life? On the other end of the spectrum, random acts of violence are treated with kid gloves. Lashes heal, but you dont grow a new hand. Just out of curoisity, I have an opening for the position of dictator is a Southeast Asian country. Would you be interested?
-BW
Simple answer. Don't kill anyone. Just because I think that a crime is worthy of execution, that does not mean the sentence needs to be carried out.
Let me explain more:
I believe that there are crimes heinous enough that death would be a just penalty. Yet I am against anyone implementing capital punisment for any crime. My reasoning for the apparent inconsistency? I do not believe that anyone should be granted the right to kill anyone for any reason. Vigilantes are no exception. Granted, the administration of justice is about as valid of a reason that I can can think of to allow the taking of a life. Even so, I still do not think that it is compelling enough to warrant the empowerment of anyone to carry out the sentence. Throw in a government or a lynch mob with its own agenda, and there the possibility that justice will be perverted. In that case, execution is a weapon of control or revenge and not an instrument of justice. Overall, I dont think that anyone should be empowered to kill another, and I wouldnt trust anyone with the responsibility anyway.
-BW
Overall, I agree with your points. I used to be very strongly for the death penalty. Even now, I think that there are crimes that are worthy of execution. However I do not trust ANY government with the responsibility of killing its citizens. If a nation such as China can kill someone for a trivial amount of money, that act devalues human life across the board. You only get one chance to apply capital punishment correctly. Is there any government on the planet that can get it right the first time, every time?
-BW
Celeron-- This one breaks down into "Sell her Ron!"
So the story goes:
One day an Intel engineer was talking with a marketing rep. He asked what the hell were they doing with the cacheless chip he was working on. The response? Yep, you guessed it.
-BW