Don't recommend a rifle for home defense to anyone, unless they have a lot of training not only in tactics but in proper ammo and caliber selection, or unless they live on a rather large chunk of land. Shotguns are good for all the reasons you have stated, and handguns are a decent choice for portability in the car or handbag (if her state allows concealed carry, in which case she probably has to take a course and get certified and whatnot).
Interesting, I'll have to look into that. 300bps would sure beat DTMF's rate, although I would suspect that DTMF is still more robust in the face of line noise and lossage.
I second Capt Nitro here, rubbing alcohol is one of the safest and most effective things you can clean electronics and computers with (Relatively speaking, like he said, there's obviously risks of damage to certain types of components, especially if it manages to pool somewhere where it can't evaporate away realitvely quickly - pull cases open everywhere you can, rotate the equipment around to get excess out, and use lots of fans).
Be *very* careful about the fire hazards. If you manage to somehow ignite the alcohol, things can get ugly quick, as the flames are often almost completely clear with the pure stuff, and you figure it out by burning yourself. Things get really nasty when there is a fire quickly spreading around the room and through the fumes in the air around you, and you don't even realize it and can't see how far it has already spread. If, at some point in this comical adventure, you find yourself sitting in the middle of a room full of fans, computers dripping in alcohol, and heavy fumes, and you even *suspect* that some of the alcohol has just ignited - GET OUT, and call the fire department or hose the room down or something.
Well yes, technically DTMF is a modulation scheme, but encoding and decoding DTMF is way simpler than analog-modem-style modulation, and doesn't involve a lengthy negotiation phase.
ooohhh, I got a better idea instead of modulating digital gps data, much simpler:
You design a GPS request protocol that works like this: The requestor sends a short request tone (which could be one of the unused DTMF tones from the 4th row, the old ABCD keys), and then the phone responds with a quick bursted series of DTMF digits, which is a fixed-length numeric encoding of your GPS location (pretty easy to make). DTMF was design to work well over noisy analog lines, so it should be very robust and quick.
You put gps receivers with this DTMF-request functionality in all the cellphones, voip phones, etc... and you give the user the option of either leaving it on all the time (so travel services or whatever can use it too), only enabling it for certain numbers (or manually), or disabling it completely - but it always turns itself on for the duration of any 911 call. If you're on the move in a car, the 911 operator could even re-request multiple times during the call to track your position in real-time.
My Vonage line has 911 service. It takes them a few days from the time you order to process your physical address, locate the local emergency services that are relevant, and tie it all together into their 911 call center, but once it's set up they claim it all works fine.
Obviously it won't correctly know your location if you pick up your home VoIP box and take it to a hotel or a starbucks access point or something like that - but those sorts of challenges should really be solved by a next generation of 911 technology (which would be as simple as saying that every phone of every type must have a gps receiver, and must send the gps data encoded in some form when dailing 911 (I'm picturing you dial 911 and you hear some high pitched screeches right at first where the call center requests GPS and your phone answers, using analog-modem-like modulation).
Re:One, two, three, four, I declare a flame-war!
on
Assault Weapons Ban
·
· Score: 1
Your arguments are ill-informed. I won't fan the flames, in an attempt to get you to believe me on that point. If you care at all about this issue - please start going to a gun range, get some lessons and education, rent a few guns at the range and get familiar, and perhaps even buy a few at the next gunshow in your area.
Regardless of original political stance, nobody ever "gets" why their anti-gun arguments are wrong until they've really had experience and training with firearms. Universally, everyone I know (even pinko anti-gun nuts) who actually did the above changed their position shortly thereafter, as they became aware of the total disconnect between their previous political statements and the realities of firearms.
Webmail - the webmail provider should generate and handle certs for the accounts. Let's face it, your webmail provider owns your email, not you, and you don't have any great expectation of privacy from them. Cheap webmail account = provider can see your private key, and you have to implicitly trust them as part of the process. Real mail account = you can keep your keys to yourself.
Phishing - Is really a seperate matter, no more valid than saying, "because keyboard sniffer hardware and software makes all passwords vulnerable, no machines should have passwords".
Trust - The cert providers which are trusted by IE/Mozilla are in fact pretty trustable. Have you been through getting an SSL cert for a webserver lately? It's a fairly thorough check that you really are who you say you are. If one of the certificate authorities went rogue and started certing fake entities for spam, it would be pretty trivial for everyone to delete that authority from their email clients. And yes, you could still send "legit spam", from a real email account tied to a real human name or corporate name, but then the spam is fully accountable and traceable, which means you can really take each message's sender to court on each message and prove where it came from - and can really expect to be removed from future mailings, or again you sue, etc...
Your post is very informative for the relatively uninformed, but I have to point out that it is the Glock 18 pistol which is Full-Auto and thus illegal in the US due to the National Firearms Act (and still will be after the clinton gun ban expires). The Glock 17 is a the 18's semi-auto cousin, they look about the same and have interchangeable magazines, but the 17 is not full auto, and it a commonly owned pistol in the US. Glock specifically made slight changes in the dimensions of the parts in the 17 and 18 so that the parts aren't even interchangeable (for the most part).
For lots more info along the lines of the parent post, try the info you can link from www.awbansunset.com, which is a site dedicated to stopping all the mis-information the anti-gun crowd (and many of its unwitting supporters) spread.
Well yes, I agree with the fact that seriously considered political stances indicate deeper differences in worldview. What I'm saying is that these differences in worldview should not be more important to a person than their interpersonal relationships. I strongly believe in the ideology of libertarianism (althought not neccesarily the Libertarian Party), but at the same time I would ahv eno problem dating and/or marrying someone who strongly believed in the party line of the Democrats or Republicans. I feel that those things shouldn't affect interpersonal relationships in a bad way. Variety is the spice of life - be with someone who's not like you, and if anything it should expand your horizons. If the political differences seem to dominate in a negative way, then one or both of you is giving undue importance to the matter.
There's our fictional cross-party/cross-cultural couple, and they seemed to do fine. I think if you care so much about a political party or viewpoint that you would consider only dating/marrying exclusively in that pool of people, you have some serious issues that make you unfit for such things.
Actually, you can have a decentralised free messaging system that's immune to the types of abuses we see today (spam). We already have the smtp email foundation to build it on top of, and it's pretty damn simple to do. If *everyone* would just get valid, signed certificates to authenticate themselves as a given entity with a given email address, then *everyone* could turn on a switch in their mail client that says "reject all mail that isn't signed with a cert which matches the sender's address and that's signed by an authority I trust". If you make spam completely accountable to a real-world entity via cryptography, it largely solves the problem, because the problem is so easy to solve at that point.
There's already some competing standards for this stuff, and Enigmail (in moz and thunderbird) supports at least two of them. I'm pretty sure you can get an email cert from one of a few authorities pretty cheaply.
So, it really comes down to convincing the users, which is largely the job of email client vendors. When you first set up your account in Outlook, Thunderbird, or whatever, there should be a dialog box to the effect of:
Please click "Use Existing" to use an existing email certificate for this account, or click "Create" to create a new certificate....
With pointers to signing authorities and an explanation that the user would be doing their part to prevent spam if they would just take this simple measure.
Eventually everyone notices that all their legit email is signed, and starts turning on that "kill all unsigned mail" option in their mail client, and poof goes the spam problem.
If you have a static, stable address for your mailserver, just run your own DNS from there using djbdns (yay!) or BIND (boo!). You can pay a service like backupdns.net to secondary you for something on the order of 80 cents a month. Run your own dns server = make whatever kind of records you want.
Rifle range == best "team" activity ever. We used to take 2 hour lunches at a gun range from time to time at one of my former companies. It's a great activity for getting to know people better and getting more comfortable working with them. Of course this developed spontaneously, I'm not a fan of fake, pre-planned, "team-building exercises".
Do the American People really want a fair debate as you've outlined, or are they perfectly happy with the two-party debate control that mirrors the two-party government? I'm a big fan of breakign the two-party regime, but I'm not most Americans really care much.
Is it not enough for you that they're willing to get with the times and switch to Linux in general? Find out which distros are supported by all of the software you have to run, and which are supported by whatever hardware vendor you like, and choose from the intersection of those sets. Since your app/db software seems to be all IBM, and IBM happens to be a big Linux pusher, I'm sure they'd be more than happy to architect the whole thing for you on IBM hardware running RedHat or SuSE
Everyone's just gonna dump Sender-ID and implement classic SPF records. This whole marid/sender-id thing is ridiculuous, and smart reasonable people know that classic SPF is unencumbered, extremely simple, and does the job just fine. This popular opinion is evidenced by how quick and widespread the adoption of classic SPF has been to date. I suspect eventually we'll see dns servers implementing a custom record type for SPF to replace the current TXT records, but other than that, you don't really need anything else.
Classic SPF = no forgeries. As it's use becomes more widespread, eventually there will come a breaking point in time where "everyone" knows that when they set up an email server and make theri MX record, they better make an SPF record while they're at it too - and most people will reject email that hasn't passed SPF checks.
It doesn't directly stop spam, but it makes spam accountable, which is a large step in the right direction.
I think that even publicly-held corporations like Google *can* still have a philosophy of doing no evil, if they can realize that this philosophy is important to their business model, and if their investors realize that as well. In Google's case, it's quite likely true.
I'm a registered member of Americans United for the Seperation of Church and State, and I would still vote Bush over Kerry. US Presidential politics is always about choosing the lesser of evils, to think otherwise is delusion.
Uhm... I have a hard time taking that guy's stance on software development seriously when the same site also hosts the following rather, uhm, interesting [whacked the fuck out] paper: http://users.adelphia.net/~lilavois/Seven/bible.ht ml
I use a little tool on my gnome panel that reminds me to take a break from the keys every hour. When the time comes it covers up my screen with a 5 minute countdown timer, at which point I get up and go for a walk. Without it I always end up going way too long without taking a break.
It's called Dr Wright, homepage is http://www.imendio.com/projects/drwright/
There's a gentoo ebuild for it in the standard tree in gnome-extra.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't recommend a rifle for home defense to anyone, unless they have a lot of training not only in tactics but in proper ammo and caliber selection, or unless they live on a rather large chunk of land. Shotguns are good for all the reasons you have stated, and handguns are a decent choice for portability in the car or handbag (if her state allows concealed carry, in which case she probably has to take a course and get certified and whatnot).
Interesting, I'll have to look into that. 300bps would sure beat DTMF's rate, although I would suspect that DTMF is still more robust in the face of line noise and lossage.
I second Capt Nitro here, rubbing alcohol is one of the safest and most effective things you can clean electronics and computers with (Relatively speaking, like he said, there's obviously risks of damage to certain types of components, especially if it manages to pool somewhere where it can't evaporate away realitvely quickly - pull cases open everywhere you can, rotate the equipment around to get excess out, and use lots of fans).
Be *very* careful about the fire hazards. If you manage to somehow ignite the alcohol, things can get ugly quick, as the flames are often almost completely clear with the pure stuff, and you figure it out by burning yourself. Things get really nasty when there is a fire quickly spreading around the room and through the fumes in the air around you, and you don't even realize it and can't see how far it has already spread. If, at some point in this comical adventure, you find yourself sitting in the middle of a room full of fans, computers dripping in alcohol, and heavy fumes, and you even *suspect* that some of the alcohol has just ignited - GET OUT, and call the fire department or hose the room down or something.
Well yes, technically DTMF is a modulation scheme, but encoding and decoding DTMF is way simpler than analog-modem-style modulation, and doesn't involve a lengthy negotiation phase.
ooohhh, I got a better idea instead of modulating digital gps data, much simpler:
You design a GPS request protocol that works like this: The requestor sends a short request tone (which could be one of the unused DTMF tones from the 4th row, the old ABCD keys), and then the phone responds with a quick bursted series of DTMF digits, which is a fixed-length numeric encoding of your GPS location (pretty easy to make). DTMF was design to work well over noisy analog lines, so it should be very robust and quick.
You put gps receivers with this DTMF-request functionality in all the cellphones, voip phones, etc... and you give the user the option of either leaving it on all the time (so travel services or whatever can use it too), only enabling it for certain numbers (or manually), or disabling it completely - but it always turns itself on for the duration of any 911 call. If you're on the move in a car, the 911 operator could even re-request multiple times during the call to track your position in real-time.
My Vonage line has 911 service. It takes them a few days from the time you order to process your physical address, locate the local emergency services that are relevant, and tie it all together into their 911 call center, but once it's set up they claim it all works fine.
Obviously it won't correctly know your location if you pick up your home VoIP box and take it to a hotel or a starbucks access point or something like that - but those sorts of challenges should really be solved by a next generation of 911 technology (which would be as simple as saying that every phone of every type must have a gps receiver, and must send the gps data encoded in some form when dailing 911 (I'm picturing you dial 911 and you hear some high pitched screeches right at first where the call center requests GPS and your phone answers, using analog-modem-like modulation).
Your arguments are ill-informed. I won't fan the flames, in an attempt to get you to believe me on that point. If you care at all about this issue - please start going to a gun range, get some lessons and education, rent a few guns at the range and get familiar, and perhaps even buy a few at the next gunshow in your area.
Regardless of original political stance, nobody ever "gets" why their anti-gun arguments are wrong until they've really had experience and training with firearms. Universally, everyone I know (even pinko anti-gun nuts) who actually did the above changed their position shortly thereafter, as they became aware of the total disconnect between their previous political statements and the realities of firearms.
In reverse order for your confusion pleasure:
Webmail - the webmail provider should generate and handle certs for the accounts. Let's face it, your webmail provider owns your email, not you, and you don't have any great expectation of privacy from them. Cheap webmail account = provider can see your private key, and you have to implicitly trust them as part of the process. Real mail account = you can keep your keys to yourself.
Phishing - Is really a seperate matter, no more valid than saying, "because keyboard sniffer hardware and software makes all passwords vulnerable, no machines should have passwords".
Trust - The cert providers which are trusted by IE/Mozilla are in fact pretty trustable. Have you been through getting an SSL cert for a webserver lately? It's a fairly thorough check that you really are who you say you are. If one of the certificate authorities went rogue and started certing fake entities for spam, it would be pretty trivial for everyone to delete that authority from their email clients. And yes, you could still send "legit spam", from a real email account tied to a real human name or corporate name, but then the spam is fully accountable and traceable, which means you can really take each message's sender to court on each message and prove where it came from - and can really expect to be removed from future mailings, or again you sue, etc...
Your post is very informative for the relatively uninformed, but I have to point out that it is the Glock 18 pistol which is Full-Auto and thus illegal in the US due to the National Firearms Act (and still will be after the clinton gun ban expires). The Glock 17 is a the 18's semi-auto cousin, they look about the same and have interchangeable magazines, but the 17 is not full auto, and it a commonly owned pistol in the US. Glock specifically made slight changes in the dimensions of the parts in the 17 and 18 so that the parts aren't even interchangeable (for the most part).
For lots more info along the lines of the parent post, try the info you can link from www.awbansunset.com, which is a site dedicated to stopping all the mis-information the anti-gun crowd (and many of its unwitting supporters) spread.
Well yes, I agree with the fact that seriously considered political stances indicate deeper differences in worldview. What I'm saying is that these differences in worldview should not be more important to a person than their interpersonal relationships. I strongly believe in the ideology of libertarianism (althought not neccesarily the Libertarian Party), but at the same time I would ahv eno problem dating and/or marrying someone who strongly believed in the party line of the Democrats or Republicans. I feel that those things shouldn't affect interpersonal relationships in a bad way. Variety is the spice of life - be with someone who's not like you, and if anything it should expand your horizons. If the political differences seem to dominate in a negative way, then one or both of you is giving undue importance to the matter.
There's our fictional cross-party/cross-cultural couple, and they seemed to do fine. I think if you care so much about a political party or viewpoint that you would consider only dating/marrying exclusively in that pool of people, you have some serious issues that make you unfit for such things.
Actually, you can have a decentralised free messaging system that's immune to the types of abuses we see today (spam). We already have the smtp email foundation to build it on top of, and it's pretty damn simple to do. If *everyone* would just get valid, signed certificates to authenticate themselves as a given entity with a given email address, then *everyone* could turn on a switch in their mail client that says "reject all mail that isn't signed with a cert which matches the sender's address and that's signed by an authority I trust". If you make spam completely accountable to a real-world entity via cryptography, it largely solves the problem, because the problem is so easy to solve at that point.
There's already some competing standards for this stuff, and Enigmail (in moz and thunderbird) supports at least two of them. I'm pretty sure you can get an email cert from one of a few authorities pretty cheaply.
So, it really comes down to convincing the users, which is largely the job of email client vendors. When you first set up your account in Outlook, Thunderbird, or whatever, there should be a dialog box to the effect of:
Please click "Use Existing" to use an existing email certificate for this account, or click "Create" to create a new certificate....
With pointers to signing authorities and an explanation that the user would be doing their part to prevent spam if they would just take this simple measure.
Eventually everyone notices that all their legit email is signed, and starts turning on that "kill all unsigned mail" option in their mail client, and poof goes the spam problem.
If you have a static, stable address for your mailserver, just run your own DNS from there using djbdns (yay!) or BIND (boo!). You can pay a service like backupdns.net to secondary you for something on the order of 80 cents a month. Run your own dns server = make whatever kind of records you want.
Rifle range == best "team" activity ever. We used to take 2 hour lunches at a gun range from time to time at one of my former companies. It's a great activity for getting to know people better and getting more comfortable working with them. Of course this developed spontaneously, I'm not a fan of fake, pre-planned, "team-building exercises".
He's already made such an impact in his spaceflight business :)
/ Ho me/News?news_id=272
4 8I nchCrash.mpg
Here's the news release on his recent crash:
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo
And here's the video:
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_08_08/
Do the American People really want a fair debate as you've outlined, or are they perfectly happy with the two-party debate control that mirrors the two-party government? I'm a big fan of breakign the two-party regime, but I'm not most Americans really care much.
Is it not enough for you that they're willing to get with the times and switch to Linux in general? Find out which distros are supported by all of the software you have to run, and which are supported by whatever hardware vendor you like, and choose from the intersection of those sets. Since your app/db software seems to be all IBM, and IBM happens to be a big Linux pusher, I'm sure they'd be more than happy to architect the whole thing for you on IBM hardware running RedHat or SuSE
Everyone's just gonna dump Sender-ID and implement classic SPF records. This whole marid/sender-id thing is ridiculuous, and smart reasonable people know that classic SPF is unencumbered, extremely simple, and does the job just fine. This popular opinion is evidenced by how quick and widespread the adoption of classic SPF has been to date. I suspect eventually we'll see dns servers implementing a custom record type for SPF to replace the current TXT records, but other than that, you don't really need anything else.
Classic SPF = no forgeries. As it's use becomes more widespread, eventually there will come a breaking point in time where "everyone" knows that when they set up an email server and make theri MX record, they better make an SPF record while they're at it too - and most people will reject email that hasn't passed SPF checks.
It doesn't directly stop spam, but it makes spam accountable, which is a large step in the right direction.
I think that even publicly-held corporations like Google *can* still have a philosophy of doing no evil, if they can realize that this philosophy is important to their business model, and if their investors realize that as well. In Google's case, it's quite likely true.
I'm a registered member of Americans United for the Seperation of Church and State, and I would still vote Bush over Kerry. US Presidential politics is always about choosing the lesser of evils, to think otherwise is delusion.
Cheap, Effective.
Uhm... I have a hard time taking that guy's stance on software development seriously when the same site also hosts the following rather, uhm, interesting [whacked the fuck out] paper: http://users.adelphia.net/~lilavois/Seven/bible.h
I use a little tool on my gnome panel that reminds me to take a break from the keys every hour. When the time comes it covers up my screen with a 5 minute countdown timer, at which point I get up and go for a walk. Without it I always end up going way too long without taking a break.
It's called Dr Wright, homepage is http://www.imendio.com/projects/drwright/
There's a gentoo ebuild for it in the standard tree in gnome-extra.
You're confusing a Good Programmer, and a Programmer Well-Suited to Corporate Software Development. You do understand the difference right?
What the fuck are you smoking? If you even bothered to comprehend my post, you would see that I was arguing AGAINST copy protection.
AC morons....