I know this is a little off topic, but what about game houses? They've been popping up here at a rate of about 1 a month here in San Jose. For the price of a membership fee (usually about 2 hours of play) you can get a reduced hourly rate. Some places also offer pre-paid hours at a reduced rate.
Find a game house near you, i'm sure there are plenty around Sydney. Have your school administrators cut a deal with them. Something along the lines of a reduced rate when a student shows their student body card. Since the school would need a large volume of rental time, any game house would be stupid if they didn't ante up ANY deal the school wants. It works out for everyone because.
A. The game house gets free customers and advertising. B. No real out of pocket expense for the school or you. C. Zero maintenence costs, the gamehouse does all upgrades, takes care of the locking down the machines, upgrading to the latest hardware and software. D. Zero liability for you or the school, since it would be up to the gamehouse to provide the security. Most gamehouses have gig+ speed AMDs or Intels with a nice amount of ram and huge 21" monitors leather chairs, soda's, roaming profiles and the basic office suite of word and excel.
This story reminds me of my earlier years as a indy IT contractor...
One of my first customers was a NAACP trial lawer. Every day one of his jeloppy win95 machines would take a shit, and every day I would fix it. I would constantly remind him how he needed NT workstation instead of 95.
When it came time for billing we would always go around in the same circle, "Now Wobbert (he had the elmer fudd ebonic accent) Why am I gettin chwarged 5 times for the same fix?"
To which I would respond, "Because you broke it 5 times!"
Then his killer statement would come, "Well then shouldn't you have fixed it right the first time so it wouldn't break again?"
To which I would go into why 95 was a POS and NT4.0 was alot better. Then we would go into costs and I would show him how his long term maintenence cost would drop if he made the switch. It never really registered with him though.
I also made the pitch to him about having a centralized server for his employee's to store data on. He just could not understand that this computer wasn't for the employee's to use nilly willy as they pleased.
I feel for you man, just run while you still have some sanity left.
Jeesh it's the truth, I wasn't trying to flame, the truth is there are probably TONS of people out there with 1/2 downloaded mp3's because the person hosting them cut off their download. Whoever modded me down needs a head check.
I have about 1/2 a gig of what I call 1/2mp3's that I got from people cancelling me out in the middle of a download. Yes they are shared, no i'm not doing it to screw with you. It's just that i'm too lazy to go through my share folder to clean them out.
This is a classic tale, one that will stick with me for a while...
My wife went to USF her first semester in college. One of her dorm mates was constantly harrassed by this thin, acne ridden pencil necked geek. After many many shutdowns, he decided he would take revenge.
She wasn't actually mean to the dude, she would just tell him "I'm not interested in you!" This guy may have been a CS genius, but a social retard.
She came back from classes one day, sat down in front of her computer in her dorm room, ready to work on some term paper she had been working on for weeks. She powered the computer on and...
echo The Black Panther Strikes Again!
No windows 3.1, no nothing. The jackass had completely wiped her computer clean just because she turned him down for a date.
Well, after the police checked the dorms log of who had visited, they noticed this guy was in around the same time she was in class. Some quick fingerprinting and they had their bandit. The girl lost years of accumulated work and private journals, he was expelled from school.
Moral of the story is, if a girl doesn't like you, wiping her hard drive is going to make her like you even less.
(In Napoli where love is king When boy meets girl here's what they say)
When the moon hits you eye like a big pizza pie That's amore When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine That's amore Bells will ring ting-a-ling-a-ling, ting-a-ling-a-ling And you'll sing "Vita bella" Hearts will play tippy-tippy-tay, tippy-tippy-tay Like a gay tarantella
When the stars make you drool just like a pasta fazool That's amore When you dance down the street with a cloud at your feet You're in love When you walk down in a dream but you know you're not Dreaming signore Scuzza me, but you see, back in old Napoli That's amore
(When the moon hits you eye like a big pizza pie That's amore When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine That's amore Bells will ring ting-a-ling-a-ling, ting-a-ling-a-ling And you'll sing "Vita bella" Hearts will play tippy-tippy-tay, tippy-tippy-tay Like a gay tarantella
When the stars make you drool just like a pasta fazool) That's amore (When you dance down the street with a cloud at your feet You're in love When you walk down in a dream but you know you're not Dreaming signore Scuzza me, but you see, back in old Napoli) That's amore Lucky fella
When the stars make you drool just like a pasta fazool) That's amore (When you dance down the street with a cloud at your feet You're in love When you walk down in a dream but you know you're not Dreaming signore Scuzza me, but you see, back in old Napoli) That's amore, (amore) That's amore
Well, i'm sure you have a plastic garbage can or dry vegitation somewhere. Believe me if all I had was a lighter, I could set your fence on fire just by using my pocketknife to cut some kindling strips from your fence, I learned that in boy scouts! (Unless it's a cinderblock wall)
And you are wrong about plenum CAT5. Plenum CAT5 isn't designed to be flame retardant, it's designed to not give off as many noxious chemicals when it's burned.
Well, I gotta concede with dave, yeah it looks like shit, but that's just my connection. I'm a geek, not a construction worker. 4 of the other people on our NAN are construction workers, and theirs looks much neater than mine.(neighborhood area network? Is that the right term?) Having it stapled to the backyard fence isn't really that bad. It's small enough and high enough where it isn't really noticable. Heck I spend most of my time indoors anyways. Like I said, I am a geek. And finally, to address your third point of property values and such. I own this house, as do most of my neighbors own theirs. Over a 30 year period our property values will go up no matter what due to inflation. Thing is, i'm teaching all the little kids in the hood wassup with computers. They're taking an interest now. It so damn cool to see the light bulb go on in their heads. These kids will probably be better off in the future than their peers because of the exposure they are getting now.
The biggest problem, I have always seen with technology is the luddite. The luddite is in all of us, its a measure of your comfort with technology. I think the more we teach young kids how to be comfortable with technology the more we will advance as a society.
Click my hoempage, it's on my name. One of the last pictures in in my garage. Kids as young as 8 are scavenging my garage and scrapping together pc's. It's amazing. Older brothers are teaching younger brothers.
Anyways dave, I went a bit off there, but it's cool. I'm doin it cause I know it's making a difference. I see kids getting inspired to do shit with it and well, it melts my heart.
Heck, I could burn your house down just by setting your cat5 on fire.
You know how stupid that sounds? Heck I could burn YOUR house down by setting the fence on fire, not to mention there's more fuel in your fence than my CAT5.
Besides being one of the WORST looking cat 5 installations I've ever seen (electrical tape wrapped all over what appear to be connections
Actually, the electrical tape is where my dog chewed the wire in half. I was too cheap to run a new wire:P We have them secured using staples.
Point of this exercise is that it CAN BE DONE. So what if it looks like shit? You should go outside right now, talk to your neighbor, and do it better if you can. Then take plenty of pics so I can see how to "Do it right"
You could theoretically get permission from the owner of every property the wire crosses
Yup, that's what we did... Sorta funny how it started out. I originally just shared with 1 neighbor, but then a guy on our street (who's also a pushy saleman) wanted to get on our network. Problem was he was 10 doors down from us. So he went door to door and asked all the neighbors in between if they wanted to participate.
We don't get a lot of lighting in silicon valley. Not to mention there are lots of things much higher than the cat5 that the lighting would rather hit first.
I don't know why i'm responding to you, you didn't even bother to use your REAL name. Oh well..
First off, why do you have to be a player hater? Aside from that, you must be a BIG FUCKING MORON because cat5 doesnt carry shittons of voltage, it doesn't need grounding. What are you worried about lightning? Couple of points here for your unedumacted head. 1. There are TONS of taller structures around the neighborhood for lightning to hit. There are rooftop TV antenna's, Power lines, and street lights to name a few. 2. If lightning did manage to hit it, what's the worst that would happen? A blown switch? Big fucking deal, a $40 dollar netgear switch has to be replace.
I can see why you posted as anonymous coward, you knew you didn't know WTF you were talking about when you made your post.
I've said this many times before, why are people in this kind of situation
rolling out DSL? Why not just lay down new copper in the form of CAT5?
It's dirt cheap. I've done it. Just look at these pics
of my neighborhood area network. Currently 10 neighbors share the cost of an
internet connection. We also share stuff we've grabbed from kazza, we have
a intranet that announces the happenings and events on our street. Very cool
stuff. Basically each house has a switch, and we daisy chain houses so we
don't run into the 600' Ethernet limit.
I can give a rat's ass about the AUP of my ISP because the question of packet
ownership has to be asked. At what point do I own that packet? When I request a
document from the web? When it hits my router? When it is on my copper?
People can do this themselves, it's not hard. In a rural area you just
replace the AC transformer brick on the switch with a battery/solar panel combo
every 600', or you could something that has a bit more distance to it like token
ring. Yeah maybe this all sounds silly, but we're doing it out here in silicon
valley and it's been working for the last year.
looks very similiar to that thinktanks name.. Fuckers stole my name, then they "Thinked" about how to change it so I wouldnt get offended, fucking washington buttlickers.
Re:Recommendations? Linux BBS FAQ
on
Remembering the BBS
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Well, if you're pretty good with linux, you could try dosemu under linux and run any old dos based BBS software under there. I searched around and
found this
post on the tux.org. Some further searching took me to the Linux
BBS FAQ. Enjoy!
I'm not going to repost my previous
comment on this, instead I will completely re-write and re-word it for those
that think recycling one's own precious electrons that they themselves created
is a waste.
Let me start by introducing myself. I'm 29, born and raised in san Jose, had
a computer in my house since I was 5. Up until the.com crash I had a nice
7 year long career as a sysadmin for a lot of different companies. So yeah, I do
know a thing or two about computers, networking in general.
Around that same time, a friend of mine told me something rather intriguing.
His father
down in Bakersfield apparently had a T1 line, and was running a spam operation
out of his house and might need my help in making it better. It would be an all
expenses paid trip (gas for his car, 7-11 burritos, big gulps, smokes) I
told him I had sort of a moral objection to eat so let's go!
Well as we started out our trip I talked to my bud about how I was going to
install list managers for his dad and how it would help him stay "legal"
We switched subjects from our acid trippin days as teenagers to who was having
kids these days. It's weird, as you approach 30ish it seems like you and all
your friends wives are just shooting out babies and placenta like AA fire over Baghdad.
Well 5 hours later we arrived at his fathers house and I began to surmise the
situation.
*Thinking to self* Hmm I bet myself any money that it's just DSL... Nono...
wait a minute what is he using that cisco2500 for??? Wait a minute, look at
those orange lights flickering at 60hz Holy SHIT thats a CSU DSU! Wait lemme
count...1.2.3.4 YES!! 4 COPPERS!
I looked over the rest of the room and saw that it was wall to wall
screwdriver shop computers, all of them running win98. Then I opened my
mouth.
"Wow, you really got your act together here!" He started showing me
the different systems and softwares of his operation. To my horror and
shock he was running a windows based open relay SMTP scanner!
*Open mouth, Insert Foot* "Uhhh sir? Using other peoples SMTP
servers without authorization is trespass." Well I opened up the floodgates
of this 53ish former Green Berets patriotic side. Oops!
"THE INTERNET WAS CREATED BY THE GOVERNMENT WITH MY TAX DOLLARS!! IF
THESE SERVERS ARE OPEN RELAY'S THAT MEANS THEY WANT ME TO USE THEM! DON'T TELL
ME I KNOW IT ALL! ALL THESE LAWS THEY'RE PASSING ARE INTERFERING WITH MY
AMERICAN RIGHT TO DO BUSINESS!!"
At that point I had to think quick, c'mon toq, what would you say whenever
someone was absolutely ballistic at the office. Somehow my ramen fed mind
uttered the phrase, "I never thought of it that way, I think you're
right!" Holy shit it worked! He calmed down after that.
The way home was spent driving faster than we had gone going there and
explaining to my friend how what his father was doing was bad. He really didn't
get it until I told him it fucks up his counter-strike and penciled in bandwidth
calculations. 3 days of sleeping on a floor in a run down apartment complex
wasn't really that fun. That and his father tried to shanghai us down to the
army recruiters. Despite the negative involved it was a growing and learning
experience because I saw exactly how the REAL down in the GHETTO spammers live.
It's not pretty.
Sort of an update to the story, my buddies father is out of business. Not
from an ISP shutdown though. His wife left him so he moved to the Philippines to
avoid paying alimony. Myself, I've fully adjusted to eating less, working out
more, and living on a string of contracts for everything from doing web work to
3D renderings of industrial machinery.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh and I guess Apple were real innovators when they stole their UI from xerox
I know this is a little off topic, but what about game houses? They've been popping up here at a rate of about 1 a month here in San Jose. For the price of a membership fee (usually about 2 hours of play) you can get a reduced hourly rate. Some places also offer pre-paid hours at a reduced rate.
Find a game house near you, i'm sure there are plenty around Sydney. Have your school administrators cut a deal with them. Something along the lines of a reduced rate when a student shows their student body card. Since the school would need a large volume of rental time, any game house would be stupid if they didn't ante up ANY deal the school wants. It works out for everyone because.
A. The game house gets free customers and advertising.
B. No real out of pocket expense for the school or you.
C. Zero maintenence costs, the gamehouse does all upgrades, takes care of the locking down the machines, upgrading to the latest hardware and software.
D. Zero liability for you or the school, since it would be up to the gamehouse to provide the security.
Most gamehouses have gig+ speed AMDs or Intels with a nice amount of ram and huge 21" monitors leather chairs, soda's, roaming profiles and the basic office suite of word and excel.
One has to wonder if this allience is from the current relationship Nvidia and MS has with the Xbox.
This story reminds me of my earlier years as a indy IT contractor...
One of my first customers was a NAACP trial lawer. Every day one of his jeloppy win95 machines would take a shit, and every day I would fix it. I would constantly remind him how he needed NT workstation instead of 95.
When it came time for billing we would always go around in the same circle, "Now Wobbert (he had the elmer fudd ebonic accent) Why am I gettin chwarged 5 times for the same fix?"
To which I would respond, "Because you broke it 5 times!"
Then his killer statement would come, "Well then shouldn't you have fixed it right the first time so it wouldn't break again?"
To which I would go into why 95 was a POS and NT4.0 was alot better. Then we would go into costs and I would show him how his long term maintenence cost would drop if he made the switch. It never really registered with him though.
I also made the pitch to him about having a centralized server for his employee's to store data on. He just could not understand that this computer wasn't for the employee's to use nilly willy as they pleased.
I feel for you man, just run while you still have some sanity left.
Jeesh it's the truth, I wasn't trying to flame, the truth is there are probably TONS of people out there with 1/2 downloaded mp3's because the person hosting them cut off their download. Whoever modded me down needs a head check.
I have about 1/2 a gig of what I call 1/2mp3's that I got from people cancelling me out in the middle of a download. Yes they are shared, no i'm not doing it to screw with you. It's just that i'm too lazy to go through my share folder to clean them out.
Would be really neat if you could pop the back off, put the PDA on an overhead projector, and voila.
This is neat, I never knew what a hydrino was before today.
The concept of a hydrino, sounds an awful lot like the concept behind minituration in the book/film Fantastic Voyage. Do I got it right?
This is a classic tale, one that will stick with me for a while...
My wife went to USF her first semester in college. One of her dorm mates was constantly harrassed by this thin, acne ridden pencil necked geek. After many many shutdowns, he decided he would take revenge.
She wasn't actually mean to the dude, she would just tell him "I'm not interested in you!" This guy may have been a CS genius, but a social retard.
She came back from classes one day, sat down in front of her computer in her dorm room, ready to work on some term paper she had been working on for weeks. She powered the computer on and...
echo The Black Panther Strikes Again!
No windows 3.1, no nothing. The jackass had completely wiped her computer clean just because she turned him down for a date.
Well, after the police checked the dorms log of who had visited, they noticed this guy was in around the same time she was in class. Some quick fingerprinting and they had their bandit. The girl lost years of accumulated work and private journals, he was expelled from school.
Moral of the story is, if a girl doesn't like you, wiping her hard drive is going to make her like you even less.
The End
(In Napoli where love is king
When boy meets girl here's what they say)
When the moon hits you eye like a big pizza pie
That's amore
When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine
That's amore
Bells will ring ting-a-ling-a-ling, ting-a-ling-a-ling
And you'll sing "Vita bella"
Hearts will play tippy-tippy-tay, tippy-tippy-tay
Like a gay tarantella
When the stars make you drool just like a pasta fazool
That's amore
When you dance down the street with a cloud at your feet
You're in love
When you walk down in a dream but you know you're not
Dreaming signore
Scuzza me, but you see, back in old Napoli
That's amore
(When the moon hits you eye like a big pizza pie
That's amore
When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine
That's amore
Bells will ring ting-a-ling-a-ling, ting-a-ling-a-ling
And you'll sing "Vita bella"
Hearts will play tippy-tippy-tay, tippy-tippy-tay
Like a gay tarantella
When the stars make you drool just like a pasta fazool)
That's amore
(When you dance down the street with a cloud at your feet
You're in love
When you walk down in a dream but you know you're not
Dreaming signore
Scuzza me, but you see, back in old Napoli)
That's amore
Lucky fella
When the stars make you drool just like a pasta fazool)
That's amore
(When you dance down the street with a cloud at your feet
You're in love
When you walk down in a dream but you know you're not
Dreaming signore
Scuzza me, but you see, back in old Napoli)
That's amore, (amore)
That's amore
Just plug a thermistor into the
joystick port of any computer, instant digital thermometer.
Remember when they found that pic on the survivor show website that had the "winner" circled in red? How do we know this isn't the same kind of hoax?
Well, i'm sure you have a plastic garbage can or dry vegitation somewhere. Believe me if all I had was a lighter, I could set your fence on fire just by using my pocketknife to cut some kindling strips from your fence, I learned that in boy scouts! (Unless it's a cinderblock wall)
And you are wrong about plenum CAT5. Plenum CAT5 isn't designed to be flame retardant, it's designed to not give off as many noxious chemicals when it's burned.
Well, I gotta concede with dave, yeah it looks like shit, but that's just my connection. I'm a geek, not a construction worker. 4 of the other people on our NAN are construction workers, and theirs looks much neater than mine.(neighborhood area network? Is that the right term?)
Having it stapled to the backyard fence isn't really that bad. It's small enough and high enough where it isn't really noticable. Heck I spend most of my time indoors anyways. Like I said, I am a geek.
And finally, to address your third point of property values and such. I own this house, as do most of my neighbors own theirs. Over a 30 year period our property values will go up no matter what due to inflation. Thing is, i'm teaching all the little kids in the hood wassup with computers. They're taking an interest now. It so damn cool to see the light bulb go on in their heads. These kids will probably be better off in the future than their peers because of the exposure they are getting now.
The biggest problem, I have always seen with technology is the luddite. The luddite is in all of us, its a measure of your comfort with technology. I think the more we teach young kids how to be comfortable with technology the more we will advance as a society.
Click my hoempage, it's on my name. One of the last pictures in in my garage. Kids as young as 8 are scavenging my garage and scrapping together pc's. It's amazing. Older brothers are teaching younger brothers.
Anyways dave, I went a bit off there, but it's cool. I'm doin it cause I know it's making a difference. I see kids getting inspired to do shit with it and well, it melts my heart.
--toq
Yeah but don't most electronics (i.e. switches) have fusable links or self healing fuses built in?
Heck, I could burn your house down just by setting your cat5 on fire.
You know how stupid that sounds? Heck I could burn YOUR house down by setting the fence on fire, not to mention there's more fuel in your fence than my CAT5.
Besides being one of the WORST looking cat 5 installations I've ever seen (electrical tape wrapped all over what appear to be connections
:P We have them secured using staples.
Actually, the electrical tape is where my dog chewed the wire in half. I was too cheap to run a new wire
Point of this exercise is that it CAN BE DONE. So what if it looks like shit? You should go outside right now, talk to your neighbor, and do it better if you can. Then take plenty of pics so I can see how to "Do it right"
You could theoretically get permission from the owner of every property the wire crosses
Yup, that's what we did...
Sorta funny how it started out. I originally just shared with 1 neighbor, but then a guy on our street (who's also a pushy saleman) wanted to get on our network. Problem was he was 10 doors down from us. So he went door to door and asked all the neighbors in between if they wanted to participate.
We don't get a lot of lighting in silicon valley. Not to mention there are lots of things much higher than the cat5 that the lighting would rather hit first.
I don't know why i'm responding to you, you didn't even bother to use your REAL name. Oh well..
First off, why do you have to be a player hater?
Aside from that, you must be a BIG FUCKING MORON because cat5 doesnt carry shittons of voltage, it doesn't need grounding. What are you worried about lightning? Couple of points here for your unedumacted head.
1. There are TONS of taller structures around the neighborhood for lightning to hit. There are rooftop TV antenna's, Power lines, and street lights to name a few.
2. If lightning did manage to hit it, what's the worst that would happen? A blown switch? Big fucking deal, a $40 dollar netgear switch has to be replace.
I can see why you posted as anonymous coward, you knew you didn't know WTF you were talking about when you made your post.
I've said this many times before, why are people in this kind of situation rolling out DSL? Why not just lay down new copper in the form of CAT5?
It's dirt cheap. I've done it. Just look at these pics of my neighborhood area network. Currently 10 neighbors share the cost of an internet connection. We also share stuff we've grabbed from kazza, we have a intranet that announces the happenings and events on our street. Very cool stuff. Basically each house has a switch, and we daisy chain houses so we don't run into the 600' Ethernet limit.
I can give a rat's ass about the AUP of my ISP because the question of packet ownership has to be asked. At what point do I own that packet? When I request a document from the web? When it hits my router? When it is on my copper?
People can do this themselves, it's not hard. In a rural area you just replace the AC transformer brick on the switch with a battery/solar panel combo every 600', or you could something that has a bit more distance to it like token ring. Yeah maybe this all sounds silly, but we're doing it out here in silicon valley and it's been working for the last year.
--toq
look at my name,
looks very similiar to that thinktanks name.. Fuckers stole my name, then they "Thinked" about how to change it so I wouldnt get offended, fucking washington buttlickers.
Well, if you're pretty good with linux, you could try dosemu under linux and run any old dos based BBS software under there. I searched around and found this post on the tux.org. Some further searching took me to the Linux BBS FAQ. Enjoy!
Dude, you still can use Zmodem over the net, here's how...
Run any term program that supports telnet and zmodem. Hyperterm in windows is a good start.
Telnet to your shell account, cd to the directory you want to transfer a file from, then if your host was kind enough to install it....
sz filename
Enjoy!
I'm not going to repost my previous comment on this, instead I will completely re-write and re-word it for those that think recycling one's own precious electrons that they themselves created is a waste.
Let me start by introducing myself. I'm 29, born and raised in san Jose, had a computer in my house since I was 5. Up until the .com crash I had a nice
7 year long career as a sysadmin for a lot of different companies. So yeah, I do
know a thing or two about computers, networking in general.
Well, I had been laid off for about 6 months or so. Wife n I bought a house a week before I got laid off, she got laid off 2 weeks later. Everyday this unemployed sysadmin would fax out résumé's trying desperately to get off the top ramen diet I had been on all while the words "Must not eat, must pay mortgage" played out in my head. I had dropped in weight from 240lbs down to 196. Poor desperate and at the end of my rope I decided to try and scrounge up some contract work.
Around that same time, a friend of mine told me something rather intriguing. His father down in Bakersfield apparently had a T1 line, and was running a spam operation out of his house and might need my help in making it better. It would be an all expenses paid trip (gas for his car, 7-11 burritos, big gulps, smokes) I told him I had sort of a moral objection to eat so let's go!
Well as we started out our trip I talked to my bud about how I was going to install list managers for his dad and how it would help him stay "legal" We switched subjects from our acid trippin days as teenagers to who was having kids these days. It's weird, as you approach 30ish it seems like you and all your friends wives are just shooting out babies and placenta like AA fire over Baghdad. Well 5 hours later we arrived at his fathers house and I began to surmise the situation.
*Thinking to self* Hmm I bet myself any money that it's just DSL... Nono... wait a minute what is he using that cisco2500 for??? Wait a minute, look at those orange lights flickering at 60hz Holy SHIT thats a CSU DSU! Wait lemme count...1.2.3.4 YES!! 4 COPPERS!
I looked over the rest of the room and saw that it was wall to wall screwdriver shop computers, all of them running win98. Then I opened my mouth.
"Wow, you really got your act together here!" He started showing me the different systems and softwares of his operation. To my horror and shock he was running a windows based open relay SMTP scanner!
*Open mouth, Insert Foot* "Uhhh sir? Using other peoples SMTP servers without authorization is trespass." Well I opened up the floodgates of this 53ish former Green Berets patriotic side. Oops!
"THE INTERNET WAS CREATED BY THE GOVERNMENT WITH MY TAX DOLLARS!! IF THESE SERVERS ARE OPEN RELAY'S THAT MEANS THEY WANT ME TO USE THEM! DON'T TELL ME I KNOW IT ALL! ALL THESE LAWS THEY'RE PASSING ARE INTERFERING WITH MY AMERICAN RIGHT TO DO BUSINESS!!"
At that point I had to think quick, c'mon toq, what would you say whenever someone was absolutely ballistic at the office. Somehow my ramen fed mind uttered the phrase, "I never thought of it that way, I think you're right!" Holy shit it worked! He calmed down after that.
The way home was spent driving faster than we had gone going there and explaining to my friend how what his father was doing was bad. He really didn't get it until I told him it fucks up his counter-strike and penciled in bandwidth calculations. 3 days of sleeping on a floor in a run down apartment complex wasn't really that fun. That and his father tried to shanghai us down to the army recruiters. Despite the negative involved it was a growing and learning experience because I saw exactly how the REAL down in the GHETTO spammers live. It's not pretty.
Sort of an update to the story, my buddies father is out of business. Not from an ISP shutdown though. His wife left him so he moved to the Philippines to avoid paying alimony. Myself, I've fully adjusted to eating less, working out more, and living on a string of contracts for everything from doing web work to 3D renderings of industrial machinery.