I wonder how much time the employees collectvely spend smoking cigarettes -- a colossal waste of time, not to mention the associated health issues.
You're missing the fact that smoking is as much a social activity as it is an unhealthy one. I can't fault you for this, most non-smokers (at least most of the ones who aren't ex-smokers) don't notice this.
It's hard to explain to non-smokers, but smokers tend to have a subconscious yet very strong social bond with one another. Smokers are generally relegated to a single location (standing just outside of the back entrance, for example) and upon encountering other smokers there, will engage in conversation. It's almost universally true, even with folks like me who for the most part are shy and wouldn't otherwise strike up conversations with random strangers.
If someone bums a cigarette from me, I won't turn them down, and I've never been turned down the few times I've had to ask others. I've never given a cent to the homeless guys standing at the busy intersections with cardboard signs, but the ones who ask for a smoke will get one, along with an offer of a light. We smokers may indeed be a bunch of arrogant assholes who think that the world is our ashtray, but we look out for each other - and we have something in common.
What I'm getting at here is that having a few workers go out for a smoke break isn't necessarily a bad thing. They're getting face time with each other that they may not otherwise have had the opportunity to get. This helps to build and reinforce positive relationships between employees; it allows the peons see and interact with the PHBs as real people, and vice versa. Who knows, maybe one day you'll step out for a smoke and run into the C[ETF]O? You'd never have had the chance to speak with him otherwise, but a quick conversation over a cigarette, and you've got "synergy."
Some co-workers socialize between cubicles. Some co-workers socialize at lunch. Some co-workers socialize on the golf course. Some co-workers socialize at the water fountain. And some of us socialize in the smoking area. Everybody "wastes time" at work (though not to the extent where 50% of their computer time is wasted, maybe I should apply for a job at the IRS!).
I'm not trying to glorify smoking. If anyone reading this doesn't smoke but finds it appealing, allow me to be the first to say DON'T START. It's filthy, it's expensive, and it will probably eventually kill you after it kills me. But if you're already a smoker and you aren't taking advantage of this to network with other smokers around you (assuming there are others), you _should_ start doing that.
BTW I've never heard of any company which gave smokers - and only smokers - breaks. Everyone gets a break, the smokers spend it smoking, the non-smokers spend it playing Solitaire...
Aside from the personal opinion that this is typical propagandist BS, I'd absolutely love to see the raw data for whatever survey they're basing these claims upon. I want to know the questions, I want to know the size and demographics of the population, and I want to know the raw answers from respondents.
A lot of people have no idea who or what Scientology is. Some people have heard of Scientology, but only in the context that $FAMOUS_PERSON is involved. If you took 100 random people off the street and asked them "do you believe in Scientology," you would probably get 0 out of 100 who said yes. If you took 100 random people off the street and asked "Do you rabidly oppose Scientology," you would probably also get 0 people who said yes. The fact that they found 2 out of 100 people who "rabidly oppose" Scientology says something, IMO.
Meanwhile, if you asked the same 100 people "Did the US find WMDs in Iraq," or "Was Iraq behind 9/11," you'd probably get a lot more than 2% who said yes!
Yet another example of lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I agree entirely. Which other "religion" copyrights its sacred doctrines and intentionally tries to restrict access to them? Nobody objects when people quote passages from the Bible, or the Koran, or the Torah. Gideons are tripping over themselves trying to make sure that your hotel room has a Bible.
In my opinion, Scientology uses its copyrights to bilk people out of money.
From what I understand, the way that you progress through the various levels of Scientology is to spend money on expensive "cleansing" sessions, e-meters, etc. Only after spending large sums of money do you actually get access to the highest-level religious texts. Only after spending large sums of money do you learn that the "religion" you're participating in is based on what I would call a fairy-tale about aliens, other planets, and various tenets which do not even remotely agree with current knowledge in the fields of biology, physics, and astronomy (three real Sciences).
It is my belief that the reason there are so many "high profile" Scientologists is that by the time they've spent thousands or even millions of dollars to learn what their religion is really about, they don't want to admit being duped or taken for a ride. Instead, they stick with the story, perhaps even convincing themselves that it's true.
Compare to the elderly people you see in the news now and then who fall for the 419 scam. First they send $5,000 to some guy in Nigeria. When nothing happens, they don't want to believe that they were scammed, so they send another $2,500 to cover the "duty fees" on their pending "$10,000,000.00 (TEN MILLION DOLLARS U.S.)" payment. Several months later after they've wired their entire life savings into a black hole, many of them still refuse to believe they were conned.
As far as I'm concerned, Scientology operates the same way. I think that Scientology is a business, not a religion, and should not have the benefits granted to religion in the US (especially the tax-exempt status).
You probably noticed how many disclaimers I've put into this post. That's because I've heard that Scientology is sue-happy, will show up and picket your house, will intimidate people you know, and will use other tactics to try and seek revenge for those who make negative comments about them. I don't want to be sued, and I'd rather not have my house picketed, so I'm doing my best to make it abundantly clear that this post contains my opinions based upon what I've heard. If you want to re-read my post and pretend that the italicized parts aren't there, that's your business.
Meanwhile, you might want to check out this petition.
I think it's "stuff that matters" because it generally pertains to copyright law. I think it's "news for nerds," or at least for Slashdot nerds, because Scientology has well-deserved a bad rap here.
To the best of my knowledge, Slashdot has only deleted comments three times. Once at the request of the United States Secret Service (maybe that was kuro5hin, I can't seem to find a reference). Once under legal pressure from Microsoft. And once under legal pressure from Scientology.
I'll back this up completely. Given good sunlight and an amply warm environment (i.e. not resting under an air conditioning duct), small pepper varieties are easy and rewarding to grow. Do them from seed if you can; that way you get to see the plant(s) come alive, flower, and fruit.
Small is the key for an indoor setting. Just about any chile pepper will work inside as long as the sunlight is sufficient. Most common chiles grown in the US will stick to approximately 3ft tall by 2ft wide max (there are exceptions). Bonus: if you like spicy food, pick when ripe and take home to cook with!
Pick up a copy of Organic Gardening magazine at your local bookstore and check out the seed swap in the back. Write to some of the folks offering pepper seeds, enclose $1 (or some seeds, if you happen to have what they want) and they'll send back the goods.
I can tell you that I had to clean a machine today that had 56,000 instances of 'Claria' (GAIM aka Gator)
I'd call bullshit even if you'd said 5,600 instances.
I've dealt with a lot of fubared systems. I've dealt with systems that were so full of nefarious DLL hooks that using the machine was literally impossible; ads would pop up, IE instances would launch instead of the action the user was trying to perform. I've dealt with systems that barely managed to boot outside of safe mode due to spyware infestation. And through all this, I've never had the holy triumvirate (AdAware, SpyBot, HijackThis) come up with more than a couple of hundred individual spyware objects. I haven't kept a particular running "high score," but I don't think I've ever seen more than 500, and I know I've never seen 1,000.
I'm not counting cookies, I'm talking about actual spyware, though cookies are often included in the "spyware" reports of popular programs. Still, I don't believe that Windows could even keep up with 56,000 cookies, let alone processes. I'd like to see a screenshot from any spyware removal tool showing anywhere near 56,000 objects found. I simply don't think it's possible.
I've tried Microsoft Anti-Spyware, and it's really not that bad, but it does generate false positives. On my own system, among other things, it claimed to find a "WhenU SaveNow" infestation inside of a batch file with the following contents:
@ECHO OFF ECHO --- BearShare Usage Statistics --- if not exist.\WebStats MD.\WebStats if not exist.\Logs MD.\Logs if not exist.\Logs\access.txt goto errend .\WebStats.exe Start.\Webstats\index.html goto end
:errend Echo Upload logging is now activated, but there ECHO isn't any upload activity to report yet. PAUSE :end exit
While BearShare does arrive with stowaways like SaveNow and Weathercast, I nuke that junk manually after installation, and neither of those cretins get installed into BearShare's working directory to begin with. There is nothing in that directory infested with any sort of spyware, but MSAS really, really wanted me to quarantine or delete the batch file (along with most of the other files in the BearShare directory). It just makes me curious.
MSAS is not a bad app. I kind of like its "Tracks Eraser" feature. I wrote an app a few years ago called WinSanitizer which does a lot of that, and if I ever decide to finish it up and give it to anyone else, I might include a few of the new ideas that MSAS's "Tracks Eraser" has given me. The "System Explorers" feature is beautiful, and IMO more useful than the anti-spyware feature of the program.
Overall I'd say MSAS is one more tool for the toolbox. I wouldn't dare trust it alone any more than I trust the apps which comprise the triumvirate alone. But I hope during the beta process, they weed out the false positives.
"People" are getting upset. The people getting upset are the usual suspects, though: RIAA trying to shutdown P2P by scaring Congress into believing that P2P is a giant conspiracy to spread child porn around the world. From the article,
"RIAA President Cary Sherman cautioned the U.S. Senate that Kazaa could be a tool for adults to lure children into having sex."
Might as well outlaw the internet itself, then; as well as telephones, public parks, and candy stores.
[Posting on this topic, I should specifically point out that my sig is a joke I got from Last Comic Standing.]
I know that this is off-topic, but Monday was the lovely Gillian's birthday (August 9, 1968), and this past Saturday was David Duchovny's birthday (August 7, 1960). No, I can't believe that she's 36 either, or that he's 44. And it's interesting that among all the other "cognitive, rich, next-generation synergy" between the characters, they celebrated birthdays merely two days apart.
Who did the casting for that show again? Chris Carter was my almighty god for some years, but whoever was in charge of casting possessed pure genius, on more levels than one...
They also have a web-based Java interface, so anyone on a platform with Java can play! Definitely not limited to Windows.
Even better, you can play with the Java interface and the Win32 client at the same time, with the same account (so you can be at 2 tables at once). Be careful though, the Java applet's window won't make any attempt to steal focus like the client does; you have to watch it closely to avoid the timeout checkfold.
Your modem activity light is, I suppose, the most foolproof method.
Back when I had my old Motorola CybrSurfr cable modem, this was a decent way of judging network activity. That modem had a "Send" LED and a "Receive" LED, and while the "Receive" light was typically flashing most of the time, the "Send" light was only blinking if someone on the network was doing something. Unfortunately, when Nimda struck, this method became totally unreliable and has stayed so ever since. The "Send" light was on solid, as my machine dealt with the flood of incoming traffic in one manner or another.
My Motorola Surfboard's orange "Activity" light (this model doesn't have separate LEDs for TX/RX) is almost always solid, even when I'm not doing anything at all. As if the constant flood of ARP traffic over the cable system wasn't enough, the constant hammering of any number of worms brings the traffic to a steady buzz. I still get Nimda and Code Red attempts on a daily basis, and lots of hits to 3306, which I presume are Slammer. In fact, here's the most recent attempt,
About 8 minutes ago. From a worm that came out in, what, 2001?
tcpdump or Ethereal are probably the best ways to determine if you've been turned into a zombie. tcpdump | grep smtp, or leave Ethereal running for awhile and scan the output for connections to port 25. If either comes up with a shitload of outbound SMTP traffic, you've probably got a trojanned box.
It doesn't have to have been anyone affiliated with the project. I think the OP was suggesting that perhaps someone had tried to brute-force their way into the PayPal account, using proxies to hide the trail; PayPal caught on and froze the account.
Suppose you want to destroy Freenet, or scare people away from it. Or suppose you're part of some oppressive regime, and you want to see which dissidents in your Homeland are providing financial support to terr^Wanonymous networking. Or, maybe you own a lot of copyrights, and you want to bypass that complicated "John Doe" process and figure out straight away who to hit with subpoenas and fishing expeditions.
A list of the people who have made (and, in some cases, are repeatedly making) financial contributions to the project would be very valuable to some people/organizations.
This is all speculative, and I probably have my tin-foil hat on a little too tight. At least I hope so, because my name would be on the list.
Explain to me again why the project can't continue without donations in the meantime?
Because no independently wealthy, talented Java programmer with a lot of free time on his hands has stepped forward. If you know of one, I imagine that the Freenet folks would love to hear from him. Freenet doesn't have the benefits of a userbase, developer pool, or audience anywhere near the size of the larger, more "popular" OSS projects out there. Thus, it has to make do with the developer resources it has.
Is there anyone who actually volunteers to work on this project WITHOUT getting paid?
Not on a full-time basis, at least not that I know of. (I'm just a user, not a developer.) There are a handful of frequent contributors, but they can't devote a lot of time. Usually someone will spot a bug, one of the contributors will edit a few lines of code to fix the problem, and commit to CVS.
Toad, the lead coder for Freenet, does most of the heavy lifting. He's doing it as a full-time job, and for what he's earning, some among us would probably consider it volunteering.
I wonder if maybe that has something to do with the freeze? Everyone's first guess seems to be that PayPal cut off Freenet because they didn't approve of the project, but the whole bit about "use of an anonymous proxy" has me curious.
The Freenet project leaders have said they've never logged into PayPal through a proxy. Maybe someone else was trying to brute-force the project's PayPal password through a proxy? Maybe a large percentage of Freenet's donors, being generally privacy-minded types, used proxies when they logged into PayPal to send money to the project? PayPal is known to freeze accounts which have been sent fraudulent funds, whether they know it or not; maybe now they're freezing accounts which receive funds sent from someone using a proxy.
I really hope PayPal provides an official explanation.
Under his influence, Freenet took the path of the closed source projects - pump out new features, do not debug existing ones, do not provide support, all for the single goal of profit.
You clearly haven't been following Freenet latley. Debugging old problems is _all_ that's been going on for the last month. Two major insertion bugs were recently fixed, one that's apparently been around for years. Bugs in the next-gen routing system are being fixed almost daily. Releases are being pumped out like they're going out of style.
And profit? Are you out of your fucking mind? Toad makes the equivalent of US$1500/month. He could earn more working at McDonald's. Twice within the last six months, the project has had to send out pleas for donations just to afford to pay him that much... And now PayPal, in its infinite wisdom, has gone and screwed the project out of - at the very least - the time it's going to take to find a new method of accepting donations.
a.a-s was indeed there, and once you were looking at the actual Usenet group names, finding it was no problem. The default AOL setting, though, was to present "friendly" names for newsgroups. For example, a.a-s appeared in the groups list as something like "Discussion about America Online," even if you searched specifically for alt.aol-sucks.
In AOL's defense, they didn't just sugar-coat controversial group names; pretty much everything outside of alt.binaries had a "friendly" name. Some of them came from the "For your newsgroups file" line in the newgroup messages. Some seemed to be custom-written. a.a-s fell into the latter category, I'm positive that the friendly name for it was not "Why we hate AOL and its users."
I don't remember the exact option, but you had to toggle the default setting in Newsgroup Preferences to _not_ "display friendly newsgroup names." After doing that, finding and subscribing to a.a-s was a piece of cake.
Ray, the guy who sells me beer, Me, the guy who drinks the beer, Fa, a long way to get beer, So, I drink a lot of beer, La, I can't drive after beer, Te, no thanks, I'm drinking beer
Happy holiday of choice everyone... Just be sure it involves some (free) beer:)
Everything that's illegal "on the internet" was already illegal to begin with, offline. Copyright infringement ("piracy")? It was illegal long before the internet came around. Fraud? That was illegal before computers were even invented. Breaking and entering ("cracking")? Already prohibited by law. Child porn? That wasn't OK before the Intarweb either.
No, we don't NEED internet law, the current laws already apply to just about any internet crime imaginable. The new [insert existing crime] "on the internet" laws are just yet another powergrab with longer sentences. But try convincing your congresscritter of that, without making a campaign contribution.
If you RTFA you'll find that what they did was use a fake ID with the name of a real participant to obtain a badge. Nothing very clever about that.
You'll also find that they should have been required to produce their letter of invitation and a registration number. They had neither, but got in anyway. Perhaps not so much clever as scary, this place is hopping with "important people" and anybody can walk right in with no invite and a fake ID.
The security at freaking MacWorld was better (or worse, depending on your perspective) than this the last time I went! Unless you got your badge via mail, you had to produce not only your ID but also the credit card that you used to register. Not infallible, but at least a challenge - and Javits wasn't full of diplomats, either.
>All I want to know is, if spires are fair game, then does "the triple-stage >anti-overshooting system failed, and the elevators shot through the >roof and went 100 yards straight up" count towards the height of >the building?
Only if you're talking about the RIAA building. In which case, because it was a triple-stage system instead of a "standard" system, those 100 overshot yards actually count as three hundred yards of height...
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to explain to non-smokers, but smokers tend to have a subconscious yet very strong social bond with one another. Smokers are generally relegated to a single location (standing just outside of the back entrance, for example) and upon encountering other smokers there, will engage in conversation. It's almost universally true, even with folks like me who for the most part are shy and wouldn't otherwise strike up conversations with random strangers.
If someone bums a cigarette from me, I won't turn them down, and I've never been turned down the few times I've had to ask others. I've never given a cent to the homeless guys standing at the busy intersections with cardboard signs, but the ones who ask for a smoke will get one, along with an offer of a light. We smokers may indeed be a bunch of arrogant assholes who think that the world is our ashtray, but we look out for each other - and we have something in common.
What I'm getting at here is that having a few workers go out for a smoke break isn't necessarily a bad thing. They're getting face time with each other that they may not otherwise have had the opportunity to get. This helps to build and reinforce positive relationships between employees; it allows the peons see and interact with the PHBs as real people, and vice versa. Who knows, maybe one day you'll step out for a smoke and run into the C[ETF]O? You'd never have had the chance to speak with him otherwise, but a quick conversation over a cigarette, and you've got "synergy."
Some co-workers socialize between cubicles. Some co-workers socialize at lunch. Some co-workers socialize on the golf course. Some co-workers socialize at the water fountain. And some of us socialize in the smoking area. Everybody "wastes time" at work (though not to the extent where 50% of their computer time is wasted, maybe I should apply for a job at the IRS!).
I'm not trying to glorify smoking. If anyone reading this doesn't smoke but finds it appealing, allow me to be the first to say DON'T START. It's filthy, it's expensive, and it will probably eventually kill you after it kills me. But if you're already a smoker and you aren't taking advantage of this to network with other smokers around you (assuming there are others), you _should_ start doing that.
BTW I've never heard of any company which gave smokers - and only smokers - breaks. Everyone gets a break, the smokers spend it smoking, the non-smokers spend it playing Solitaire...
Aside from the personal opinion that this is typical propagandist BS, I'd absolutely love to see the raw data for whatever survey they're basing these claims upon. I want to know the questions, I want to know the size and demographics of the population, and I want to know the raw answers from respondents.
A lot of people have no idea who or what Scientology is. Some people have heard of Scientology, but only in the context that $FAMOUS_PERSON is involved. If you took 100 random people off the street and asked them "do you believe in Scientology," you would probably get 0 out of 100 who said yes. If you took 100 random people off the street and asked "Do you rabidly oppose Scientology," you would probably also get 0 people who said yes. The fact that they found 2 out of 100 people who "rabidly oppose" Scientology says something, IMO.
Meanwhile, if you asked the same 100 people "Did the US find WMDs in Iraq," or "Was Iraq behind 9/11," you'd probably get a lot more than 2% who said yes!
Yet another example of lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I agree entirely. Which other "religion" copyrights its sacred doctrines and intentionally tries to restrict access to them? Nobody objects when people quote passages from the Bible, or the Koran, or the Torah. Gideons are tripping over themselves trying to make sure that your hotel room has a Bible.
In my opinion, Scientology uses its copyrights to bilk people out of money.
From what I understand, the way that you progress through the various levels of Scientology is to spend money on expensive "cleansing" sessions, e-meters, etc. Only after spending large sums of money do you actually get access to the highest-level religious texts. Only after spending large sums of money do you learn that the "religion" you're participating in is based on what I would call a fairy-tale about aliens, other planets, and various tenets which do not even remotely agree with current knowledge in the fields of biology, physics, and astronomy (three real Sciences).
It is my belief that the reason there are so many "high profile" Scientologists is that by the time they've spent thousands or even millions of dollars to learn what their religion is really about, they don't want to admit being duped or taken for a ride. Instead, they stick with the story, perhaps even convincing themselves that it's true.
Compare to the elderly people you see in the news now and then who fall for the 419 scam. First they send $5,000 to some guy in Nigeria. When nothing happens, they don't want to believe that they were scammed, so they send another $2,500 to cover the "duty fees" on their pending "$10,000,000.00 (TEN MILLION DOLLARS U.S.)" payment. Several months later after they've wired their entire life savings into a black hole, many of them still refuse to believe they were conned.
As far as I'm concerned, Scientology operates the same way. I think that Scientology is a business, not a religion, and should not have the benefits granted to religion in the US (especially the tax-exempt status).
You probably noticed how many disclaimers I've put into this post. That's because I've heard that Scientology is sue-happy, will show up and picket your house, will intimidate people you know, and will use other tactics to try and seek revenge for those who make negative comments about them. I don't want to be sued, and I'd rather not have my house picketed, so I'm doing my best to make it abundantly clear that this post contains my opinions based upon what I've heard. If you want to re-read my post and pretend that the italicized parts aren't there, that's your business.
Meanwhile, you might want to check out this petition.
I think it's "stuff that matters" because it generally pertains to copyright law. I think it's "news for nerds," or at least for Slashdot nerds, because Scientology has well-deserved a bad rap here.
To the best of my knowledge, Slashdot has only deleted comments three times. Once at the request of the United States Secret Service (maybe that was kuro5hin, I can't seem to find a reference). Once under legal pressure from Microsoft. And once under legal pressure from Scientology.
Scientology threatened the Wayback Machine to the point where its maintainers deleted a bunch of archived content from a site critical of Scientology.
Scientology threatened Google and forced Google to remove listings for that same site which is critical of Scientology.
What Scientology's lawyers are up to is certainly news for nerds.
I'll back this up completely. Given good sunlight and an amply warm environment (i.e. not resting under an air conditioning duct), small pepper varieties are easy and rewarding to grow. Do them from seed if you can; that way you get to see the plant(s) come alive, flower, and fruit.
Small is the key for an indoor setting. Just about any chile pepper will work inside as long as the sunlight is sufficient. Most common chiles grown in the US will stick to approximately 3ft tall by 2ft wide max (there are exceptions). Bonus: if you like spicy food, pick when ripe and take home to cook with!
Pick up a copy of Organic Gardening magazine at your local bookstore and check out the seed swap in the back. Write to some of the folks offering pepper seeds, enclose $1 (or some seeds, if you happen to have what they want) and they'll send back the goods.
I've dealt with a lot of fubared systems. I've dealt with systems that were so full of nefarious DLL hooks that using the machine was literally impossible; ads would pop up, IE instances would launch instead of the action the user was trying to perform. I've dealt with systems that barely managed to boot outside of safe mode due to spyware infestation. And through all this, I've never had the holy triumvirate (AdAware, SpyBot, HijackThis) come up with more than a couple of hundred individual spyware objects. I haven't kept a particular running "high score," but I don't think I've ever seen more than 500, and I know I've never seen 1,000.
I'm not counting cookies, I'm talking about actual spyware, though cookies are often included in the "spyware" reports of popular programs. Still, I don't believe that Windows could even keep up with 56,000 cookies, let alone processes.
I'd like to see a screenshot from any spyware removal tool showing anywhere near 56,000 objects found. I simply don't think it's possible.
I've tried Microsoft Anti-Spyware, and it's really not that bad, but it does generate false positives. On my own system, among other things, it claimed to find a "WhenU SaveNow" infestation inside of a batch file with the following contents:While BearShare does arrive with stowaways like SaveNow and Weathercast, I nuke that junk manually after installation, and neither of those cretins get installed into BearShare's working directory to begin with. There is nothing in that directory infested with any sort of spyware, but MSAS really, really wanted me to quarantine or delete the batch file (along with most of the other files in the BearShare directory). It just makes me curious.
MSAS is not a bad app. I kind of like its "Tracks Eraser" feature. I wrote an app a few years ago called WinSanitizer which does a lot of that, and if I ever decide to finish it up and give it to anyone else, I might include a few of the new ideas that MSAS's "Tracks Eraser" has given me. The "System Explorers" feature is beautiful, and IMO more useful than the anti-spyware feature of the program.
Overall I'd say MSAS is one more tool for the toolbox. I wouldn't dare trust it alone any more than I trust the apps which comprise the triumvirate alone. But I hope during the beta process, they weed out the false positives.
(BTW, I presume you meant GAIN and not GAIM...
"RIAA President Cary Sherman cautioned the U.S. Senate that Kazaa could be a tool for adults to lure children into having sex."
Might as well outlaw the internet itself, then; as well as telephones, public parks, and candy stores.
[Posting on this topic, I should specifically point out that my sig is a joke I got from Last Comic Standing.]
Ah, a fellow X-Phile.
I know that this is off-topic, but Monday was the lovely Gillian's birthday (August 9, 1968), and this past Saturday was David Duchovny's birthday (August 7, 1960). No, I can't believe that she's 36 either, or that he's 44. And it's interesting that among all the other "cognitive, rich, next-generation synergy" between the characters, they celebrated birthdays merely two days apart.
Who did the casting for that show again? Chris Carter was my almighty god for some years, but whoever was in charge of casting possessed pure genius, on more levels than one...
They also have a web-based Java interface, so anyone on a platform with Java can play! Definitely not limited to Windows.
Even better, you can play with the Java interface and the Win32 client at the same time, with the same account (so you can be at 2 tables at once). Be careful though, the Java applet's window won't make any attempt to steal focus like the client does; you have to watch it closely to avoid the timeout checkfold.
My Motorola Surfboard's orange "Activity" light (this model doesn't have separate LEDs for TX/RX) is almost always solid, even when I'm not doing anything at all. As if the constant flood of ARP traffic over the cable system wasn't enough, the constant hammering of any number of worms brings the traffic to a steady buzz. I still get Nimda and Code Red attempts on a daily basis, and lots of hits to 3306, which I presume are Slammer. In fact, here's the most recent attempt, About 8 minutes ago. From a worm that came out in, what, 2001?
tcpdump or Ethereal are probably the best ways to determine if you've been turned into a zombie. tcpdump | grep smtp, or leave Ethereal running for awhile and scan the output for connections to port 25. If either comes up with a shitload of outbound SMTP traffic, you've probably got a trojanned box.
Suppose you want to destroy Freenet, or scare people away from it. Or suppose you're part of some oppressive regime, and you want to see which dissidents in your Homeland are providing financial support to terr^Wanonymous networking. Or, maybe you own a lot of copyrights, and you want to bypass that complicated "John Doe" process and figure out straight away who to hit with subpoenas and fishing expeditions.
A list of the people who have made (and, in some cases, are repeatedly making) financial contributions to the project would be very valuable to some people/organizations.
This is all speculative, and I probably have my tin-foil hat on a little too tight. At least I hope so, because my name would be on the list.
Toad, the lead coder for Freenet, does most of the heavy lifting. He's doing it as a full-time job, and for what he's earning, some among us would probably consider it volunteering.
The Freenet project leaders have said they've never logged into PayPal through a proxy. Maybe someone else was trying to brute-force the project's PayPal password through a proxy? Maybe a large percentage of Freenet's donors, being generally privacy-minded types, used proxies when they logged into PayPal to send money to the project? PayPal is known to freeze accounts which have been sent fraudulent funds, whether they know it or not; maybe now they're freezing accounts which receive funds sent from someone using a proxy.
I really hope PayPal provides an official explanation.
And profit? Are you out of your fucking mind? Toad makes the equivalent of US$1500/month. He could earn more working at McDonald's. Twice within the last six months, the project has had to send out pleas for donations just to afford to pay him that much... And now PayPal, in its infinite wisdom, has gone and screwed the project out of - at the very least - the time it's going to take to find a new method of accepting donations.
Google is definitely cracking down on duplicate content. In fact, they've recently patented the concept.
Insert software patent debate (where Google is the default hero due to its geek factor) here...
a.a-s was indeed there, and once you were looking at the actual Usenet group names, finding it was no problem. The default AOL setting, though, was to present "friendly" names for newsgroups. For example, a.a-s appeared in the groups list as something like "Discussion about America Online," even if you searched specifically for alt.aol-sucks.
In AOL's defense, they didn't just sugar-coat controversial group names; pretty much everything outside of alt.binaries had a "friendly" name. Some of them came from the "For your newsgroups file" line in the newgroup messages. Some seemed to be custom-written. a.a-s fell into the latter category, I'm positive that the friendly name for it was not "Why we hate AOL and its users."
I don't remember the exact option, but you had to toggle the default setting in Newsgroup Preferences to _not_ "display friendly newsgroup names." After doing that, finding and subscribing to a.a-s was a piece of cake.
-s
Ray, the guy who sells me beer,
:)
Me, the guy who drinks the beer,
Fa, a long way to get beer,
So, I drink a lot of beer,
La, I can't drive after beer,
Te, no thanks, I'm drinking beer
Happy holiday of choice everyone... Just be sure it involves some (free) beer
>At one time we didn't NEED internet law.
We still don't NEED internet law.
Everything that's illegal "on the internet" was already illegal to begin with, offline. Copyright infringement ("piracy")? It was illegal long before the internet came around. Fraud? That was illegal before computers were even invented. Breaking and entering ("cracking")? Already prohibited by law. Child porn? That wasn't OK before the Intarweb either.
No, we don't NEED internet law, the current laws already apply to just about any internet crime imaginable. The new [insert existing crime] "on the internet" laws are just yet another powergrab with longer sentences. But try convincing your congresscritter of that, without making a campaign contribution.
>Screw that, I wanna play Red Alert!
On the CHINUSRUSNET? You got it! Hmm, shit, what did I did with my Soviet Disc??
The security at freaking MacWorld was better (or worse, depending on your perspective) than this the last time I went! Unless you got your badge via mail, you had to produce not only your ID but also the credit card that you used to register. Not infallible, but at least a challenge - and Javits wasn't full of diplomats, either.
>All I want to know is, if spires are fair game, then does "the triple-stage
>anti-overshooting system failed, and the elevators shot through the
>roof and went 100 yards straight up" count towards the height of
>the building?
Only if you're talking about the RIAA building. In which case, because it was a triple-stage system instead of a "standard" system, those 100 overshot yards actually count as three hundred yards of height...