Trying to hack, flood or DoS his system could get you in big trouble, and if you don't correctly identify the target, you could be causing a lot of trouble for innocent bystanders.
A better idea would be to complain to the spammer's ISP, and the ISP's ISP, either by manually reading the email headers and tracking the spammer down using traceroutes and abuse.net, or by using SpamCop. I've done that and seen several spam accounts get terminated.
Admittedly there are drawbacks to doing this. Sometimes, the ISP that you complain to will simply forward your complaint directly to the spammer, which may result in more spam. But usually, the spammer is forced to move to another throwaway account, and in some cases, is forced to pay a cleanup fee on the order of hundreds of dollars.
There's too much collateral damage from doing this - you might not be flooding the spammer's account, but you may be hitting innocent bystanders (such as Hotmail & their non-spamming users) with friendly fire.
The only remotely effective way I know of to inconvenience spammers is to dig through the spam's email headers, locate their ISP, and complain to the sysadmins, and if necessary their upstream providers as well. (I use SpamCop to do this - saves a lot of work.) This frequently gets them booted for TOS violations.
Admittedly it's only a minor inconvenience for them - makes them move to another throwaway account, but every little bit of inconvenience helps.
Sysadmins. You can do your part to fight the spam war by hitting spammers with a $500.00 cleanup fee when you terminate their account for TOS violations. After all, the spammer cost you lots of money in terms of bandwidth, loss of good will from others, and time in performing damage control. Get some of that money back and discourage spammers.
Let me get this straight. They're claiming that the press could be allowed to link to DeCSS while 2600 can't. HELLO, 2600is the press - their primary business is publishing a magazine.
Are we getting to the point where the government and big business get to decide what is or isn't a "legitimate" press organization? Say goodbye to freedom of the press, folks.
There's no indication so far that we can create "cloned" organs unconnected from the rest of a body.
This can and has been done already. Scientists have been able to create a dog's bladder purely from muscle, lining, and a couple other types of cells grown in nutrients on a polymer mesh (the same way that the ear was grown on a mouse's back.) When transplanted into a dog, the bladder worked just like the dog's natural bladder. Supposedly, these guys are going to work on creating a heart next. Between this and stem cell research, I see lots of perfectly ethical uses for grown organs.
Actually, I have less problems with the brainless clone in a tube than I do with the creation of "Mini-Me's". If the clone was grown so that the development of the brain was completely supressed (scientists have already done this with frogs), it doesn't have, never had, and never will have a mind. It won't feel pain, it won't feel anything - as far as I'm concerned, it's perfectly usable spare parts. The "Mini-Me" clone mowing the lawn does have a mind, therefore he should be considered a full-fledged human being.
However, I think that a more viable option is to use my stem cells to grow individual parts on demand - quicker and not as many ethical issues.
Of all the lousy ways to save a nickel (literally when talking about mass-produced components), "wall wart" power supplies are the worst! How hard can it be to provide 3 feet of cord, plus a normal 3-prong plug, so you can plug the things in without blocking other outlets. Talk about cheap!
I don't see any way of putting together a Linux system from scratch without some sort of bootstrap. You could always use another Linux box to compile your binaries before moving them to your scratch system.
Linux (and every other OS that I know of) requires some sort of external support in order to put together a distribution from scratch - heck, Linus built the first Linux kernels on a Minix system, before gcc was ported.
(I know you could compile yourself -- but the first time you do "make install" -- you have just blown away the whole advantage of any packaging database...)
In most cases, you can keep your custom built code separate from your packaged code by installing to/usr/local or/opt instead of/usr. OTOH, I see problems when configuration files in/etc or other important places need to be changed, but in most cases, packagers should still work.
OUCH! How can you download ISO images at 26.4? That'd take all month. Go buy a set of CDs from CheapBytes for ~ $10. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a FedEx shipment of CDs.
I can understand disabling ftpd, telnetd and fingerd - they're known security hazards, and I'm not sure, but I think that RedHat's configurable security will let you enable them or disable them at will at this point. ssh and its family of tools accomplish the same thing, but are far more secure AFAIK. I haven't played with 7.1 yet, so I can't say anything about building the kernel. I'll just have to try it myself.
But the bulk of spammers today use throwaway accounts.
IIRC, some ISPs are trying to address the throwaway account problem by slapping spammers with a $500 cleanup fee when they terminate the account for TOS violations. I wish that more ISPs would do this - discourage spammers and make some badly needed cash.
Another problem is if they built the tower with conventional elevators, they would have to fill the entire tower with elevators to have enough transportation capacity for everyone. I suspect that a building like this would have to use elevators that run both vertically and horizontally, like Star Trek's turbolifts. Otis Elevator Company has been developing elevator systams like this - it would be more like a mini-subway system turned vertically than a series of conventional elevators.
I personally like being out of communications. People are bugging me all the damn time for one thing or another, you'd have to pay me a lot to make them be able to bug me when I'm finally alone in my car or shopping.
So get a phone with voice-mail or pager service. Most cell phones have them these days.
When I give people my cell-phone number, it is with the understanding that I can refuse to answer my phone at any time for any reason or no reason at all. If they don't like it, tough. Leave a nasty message in my voice-jail for me to ignore. Since my phone also has Caller-ID, I'm almost always able to make callbacks when I feel more communicative. I do this without a single shred of guilt, and so should anyone else with a cell-phone.
My totally uninformed guess is that "Wrong Way" Wang Wei was attempting a maneuver to disrupt the airflow over the EP-3E's wing. He did this by flying his fighter within feet of the EP-3E, and getting his wing underneath the P-3's wing. This kind of maneuver has been known to throw planes into stalls and spins. For those who aren't clued in at this point, this kind of flying is extremely dangerous and very reckless. Sure enough, the airflow over the EP-3E's wing was disrupted, the wing stalled, and crashed down right on top of Wang's fighter. This would explain why the EP-3E allegedly appeared to make a sudden turn right into Wang's fighter. It also places the blame directly on Wrong Way Wang for flying way too close to the American plane, and attempting a maneuver that was extremely dangerous both to himself and the Americans.
Any aviation experts or ex-fighter-jocks care to confirm or refute this?
Actually, they're on the payroll of the US Navy. But as they're crew of an electronic reconnaissance aircraft, and some of the crew are cryptographers, I'm sure they work pretty closely with the NSA - that's their area of expertise.
The NSA has two jobs to do in order to fulfill their mission of protecting the interests of the United States.
The first one is well, invasion of privacy. They need to be able to read the communications of "Bad Guys". Most people on Slashdot are perfectly aware of this role.
The other role, paradoxically, is protection of privacy. They need to prevent the communications of "Good Guys" from being intercepted by the "Bad Guys". Currently, one of the most annoying threats to national security is industrial espionage. Thus it behooves the NSA to provide tools to American citizens and corporations to protect themselves.
Thus you see the NSA fighting encryption by encouraging export restrictions & key escrow schemes on one hand, while simultaneously promoting encryption by working with PGP, and enhancing the security of Linux.
Trying to think how the NSA reconciles those two roles makes my head hurt.
I'd recommend the book UML Distilled by Martin Fowler and Kendall Scott. It is a very small book that documents only the most necessary, commonly used parts of UML, rather than the whole thing. I tend to use "fuzzy" UML. I don't worry about the anal-retentive nuances of UML, I just use it to draw some quick & dirty diagrams to figure out what I'm doing.
You're rather generous by comparing AT&T's cable box to a 486. A 486 could draw 2D images rather quickly compared to these boxes (You could run DOOM on a 486 after all.) To me, it performs more like a Z80 when it's drawing the guide. This is absolutely ridiculous when technology to do better has been available for more than a decade. On top of that, the "upgrade" to the cable boxes made things worse by filling the screen full of unnecessary eye candy, making poor performance absolutely abysmal. I'm guessing the only reason it displays video images acceptably is because of a specialized MPEG decoder chip.
Also, the guide only holds about 2 days of programming in it, and only half the shows in the guide have blurbs for them. It used to hold a week of programming, and had info on many more shows. Now where do you think AT&T found the memory space to store those ad images, after filling the box's firmware full of code to display useless eye candy?
No offense, but have you actually talked to the women you describe as "fat, ugly, hairy and mean?" We guys hate it when we are reject it because we are fat, skinny, not muscular enough, don't have a nice ass. Girls also hate being judged solely by their cup sizes & waist/hips ratios.
Fact: the most attractive (or unattractive) part of a person is personality. I know several friends who are happily married to women I wouldn't describe as physically attractive. The women are wonderful, incredibly nice people, and my friends are desperately in love with them.
Polizei is a German word. When I lived in Germany, the typical Polizei officer drove in a green and white Opal w/ blue lights on the roof. They usually wore tan uniforms and carried Glock sidearms. In airports, they may be seen with submachine guns.
I put some humility into one of my jr. high school tormenters with a swift kick to the nads. He was much less of a problem after that. Of course, these things have to occur without adults around to avoid being suspended.
Actually, getting in a fight and engineering it so you get caught is a great tactic. You save face because you aren't technically snitching, but at the same time, you force the teachers to do something about the bullying. The only price is a couple days of suspension. Small price if you ask me.
Now that I have kids, I want to make a "Proud Parent of Another Brick in the Wall" bumper sticker, with two walking red hammers to one side.
ROTFLMAO!!! Let me know if you make them, I want one!
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Trying to hack, flood or DoS his system could get you in big trouble, and if you don't correctly identify the target, you could be causing a lot of trouble for innocent bystanders.
A better idea would be to complain to the spammer's ISP, and the ISP's ISP, either by manually reading the email headers and tracking the spammer down using traceroutes and abuse.net, or by using SpamCop. I've done that and seen several spam accounts get terminated.
Admittedly there are drawbacks to doing this. Sometimes, the ISP that you complain to will simply forward your complaint directly to the spammer, which may result in more spam. But usually, the spammer is forced to move to another throwaway account, and in some cases, is forced to pay a cleanup fee on the order of hundreds of dollars.
There's too much collateral damage from doing this - you might not be flooding the spammer's account, but you may be hitting innocent bystanders (such as Hotmail & their non-spamming users) with friendly fire.
The only remotely effective way I know of to inconvenience spammers is to dig through the spam's email headers, locate their ISP, and complain to the sysadmins, and if necessary their upstream providers as well. (I use SpamCop to do this - saves a lot of work.) This frequently gets them booted for TOS violations.
Admittedly it's only a minor inconvenience for them - makes them move to another throwaway account, but every little bit of inconvenience helps.
Sysadmins. You can do your part to fight the spam war by hitting spammers with a $500.00 cleanup fee when you terminate their account for TOS violations. After all, the spammer cost you lots of money in terms of bandwidth, loss of good will from others, and time in performing damage control. Get some of that money back and discourage spammers.
Let me get this straight. They're claiming that the press could be allowed to link to DeCSS while 2600 can't. HELLO, 2600 is the press - their primary business is publishing a magazine.
Are we getting to the point where the government and big business get to decide what is or isn't a "legitimate" press organization? Say goodbye to freedom of the press, folks.
I normally resent record companies going after people with lawyers, but I'd give anything to rid the world of those obnoxious cell-phone tunes.
There's no indication so far that we can create "cloned" organs unconnected from the rest of a body.
This can and has been done already. Scientists have been able to create a dog's bladder purely from muscle, lining, and a couple other types of cells grown in nutrients on a polymer mesh (the same way that the ear was grown on a mouse's back.) When transplanted into a dog, the bladder worked just like the dog's natural bladder. Supposedly, these guys are going to work on creating a heart next. Between this and stem cell research, I see lots of perfectly ethical uses for grown organs.
Actually, I have less problems with the brainless clone in a tube than I do with the creation of "Mini-Me's". If the clone was grown so that the development of the brain was completely supressed (scientists have already done this with frogs), it doesn't have, never had, and never will have a mind. It won't feel pain, it won't feel anything - as far as I'm concerned, it's perfectly usable spare parts. The "Mini-Me" clone mowing the lawn does have a mind, therefore he should be considered a full-fledged human being.
However, I think that a more viable option is to use my stem cells to grow individual parts on demand - quicker and not as many ethical issues.
Of all the lousy ways to save a nickel (literally when talking about mass-produced components), "wall wart" power supplies are the worst! How hard can it be to provide 3 feet of cord, plus a normal 3-prong plug, so you can plug the things in without blocking other outlets. Talk about cheap!
Linux (and every other OS that I know of) requires some sort of external support in order to put together a distribution from scratch - heck, Linus built the first Linux kernels on a Minix system, before gcc was ported.
(I know you could compile yourself -- but the first time you do "make install" -- you have just blown away the whole advantage of any packaging database...)
In most cases, you can keep your custom built code separate from your packaged code by installing to /usr/local or /opt instead of /usr. OTOH, I see problems when configuration files in /etc or other important places need to be changed, but in most cases, packagers should still work.
OUCH! How can you download ISO images at 26.4? That'd take all month. Go buy a set of CDs from CheapBytes for ~ $10. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a FedEx shipment of CDs.
I can understand disabling ftpd, telnetd and fingerd - they're known security hazards, and I'm not sure, but I think that RedHat's configurable security will let you enable them or disable them at will at this point. ssh and its family of tools accomplish the same thing, but are far more secure AFAIK. I haven't played with 7.1 yet, so I can't say anything about building the kernel. I'll just have to try it myself.
But the bulk of spammers today use throwaway accounts.
IIRC, some ISPs are trying to address the throwaway account problem by slapping spammers with a $500 cleanup fee when they terminate the account for TOS violations. I wish that more ISPs would do this - discourage spammers and make some badly needed cash.
Another problem is if they built the tower with conventional elevators, they would have to fill the entire tower with elevators to have enough transportation capacity for everyone. I suspect that a building like this would have to use elevators that run both vertically and horizontally, like Star Trek's turbolifts. Otis Elevator Company has been developing elevator systams like this - it would be more like a mini-subway system turned vertically than a series of conventional elevators.
I personally like being out of communications. People are bugging me all the damn time for one thing or another, you'd have to pay me a lot to make them be able to bug me when I'm finally alone in my car or shopping.
So get a phone with voice-mail or pager service. Most cell phones have them these days.
When I give people my cell-phone number, it is with the understanding that I can refuse to answer my phone at any time for any reason or no reason at all. If they don't like it, tough. Leave a nasty message in my voice-jail for me to ignore. Since my phone also has Caller-ID, I'm almost always able to make callbacks when I feel more communicative. I do this without a single shred of guilt, and so should anyone else with a cell-phone.
My totally uninformed guess is that "Wrong Way" Wang Wei was attempting a maneuver to disrupt the airflow over the EP-3E's wing. He did this by flying his fighter within feet of the EP-3E, and getting his wing underneath the P-3's wing. This kind of maneuver has been known to throw planes into stalls and spins. For those who aren't clued in at this point, this kind of flying is extremely dangerous and very reckless. Sure enough, the airflow over the EP-3E's wing was disrupted, the wing stalled, and crashed down right on top of Wang's fighter. This would explain why the EP-3E allegedly appeared to make a sudden turn right into Wang's fighter. It also places the blame directly on Wrong Way Wang for flying way too close to the American plane, and attempting a maneuver that was extremely dangerous both to himself and the Americans.
Any aviation experts or ex-fighter-jocks care to confirm or refute this?
Actually, they're on the payroll of the US Navy. But as they're crew of an electronic reconnaissance aircraft, and some of the crew are cryptographers, I'm sure they work pretty closely with the NSA - that's their area of expertise.
The NSA has two jobs to do in order to fulfill their mission of protecting the interests of the United States.
The first one is well, invasion of privacy. They need to be able to read the communications of "Bad Guys". Most people on Slashdot are perfectly aware of this role.
The other role, paradoxically, is protection of privacy. They need to prevent the communications of "Good Guys" from being intercepted by the "Bad Guys". Currently, one of the most annoying threats to national security is industrial espionage. Thus it behooves the NSA to provide tools to American citizens and corporations to protect themselves.
Thus you see the NSA fighting encryption by encouraging export restrictions & key escrow schemes on one hand, while simultaneously promoting encryption by working with PGP, and enhancing the security of Linux.
Trying to think how the NSA reconciles those two roles makes my head hurt.
Would the sphere be abel to cook anything like a Thanks Giving turkey?
I don't know, but it would give you one hell of a tan.
I'd recommend the book UML Distilled by Martin Fowler and Kendall Scott. It is a very small book that documents only the most necessary, commonly used parts of UML, rather than the whole thing. I tend to use "fuzzy" UML. I don't worry about the anal-retentive nuances of UML, I just use it to draw some quick & dirty diagrams to figure out what I'm doing.
A certain cable company I was using (by lack of other choice)
Oh, do you mean AT&T Digital Cable?
There's no need to withhold names to protect the guilty.
Also, the guide only holds about 2 days of programming in it, and only half the shows in the guide have blurbs for them. It used to hold a week of programming, and had info on many more shows. Now where do you think AT&T found the memory space to store those ad images, after filling the box's firmware full of code to display useless eye candy?
No offense, but have you actually talked to the women you describe as "fat, ugly, hairy and mean?" We guys hate it when we are reject it because we are fat, skinny, not muscular enough, don't have a nice ass. Girls also hate being judged solely by their cup sizes & waist/hips ratios.
Fact: the most attractive (or unattractive) part of a person is personality. I know several friends who are happily married to women I wouldn't describe as physically attractive. The women are wonderful, incredibly nice people, and my friends are desperately in love with them.
Polizei is a German word. When I lived in Germany, the typical Polizei officer drove in a green and white Opal w/ blue lights on the roof. They usually wore tan uniforms and carried Glock sidearms. In airports, they may be seen with submachine guns.
I wonder what they were doing in Spain.
I put some humility into one of my jr. high school tormenters with a swift kick to the nads. He was much less of a problem after that. Of course, these things have to occur without adults around to avoid being suspended.
Actually, getting in a fight and engineering it so you get caught is a great tactic. You save face because you aren't technically snitching, but at the same time, you force the teachers to do something about the bullying. The only price is a couple days of suspension. Small price if you ask me.
Now that I have kids, I want to make a "Proud Parent of Another Brick in the Wall" bumper sticker, with two walking red hammers to one side. ROTFLMAO!!! Let me know if you make them, I want one!