Well, mister, I think they've had their eye on you for some time. Let's see... (flipping through the John Ashcroft[tm] theme Slashdot dossier)
Ah, yes. Well, on the positive side, we have here publically voiced support for an entrenched Imperialist Force of Evil, e.g., Anakin. That may help save you from the "full treatment" down at Gitmo.
However, here on page 207, there're a few references to opposing a certain American Businessman in Utah, who is merely trying to uphold shareholder value through litigation -- a tried and true, nay, even Patriotic tradition. Under that, in John's own hand-writing, there's a note to the effect of "clearly al-Qaida."
Hmmm. tsk, tsk. There it is again, on page 460: it appears you've expressed contempt for entrepreneurial citizens who are utilizing government-to-public transfered technology for marketing and promoting products from the American Pharmaceutical industries. Once again, Mr Ashcroft notes this as "anti-industry" in his notes.
Agreed. The K1000 is an awesome camera -- simple, rugged, and a large number of lenses available.
I had one that traveled many years and many thousands of miles with me, through sandstorms, rain, and snow; it survived all sorts of terrible things like being banged into a granite cliff (doh!) and being grabbed by a powerful electromagnet (separate occasions, I should point out), and it always carried right on working.
Lasts several years on a battery, too, since it's only using it for the internal light meter. It'll keep working fine without the meter, if you're willing to compute exposures some other way, like Sunny 16 rule.
I'd still use it today, if it hadn't been stolen in a burglary.
GIS: John Ashcroft, asshat. Please put this bag over your head, and come with me. We're going on a nice all-expense paid trip for one to Cuba.
herrvinny: Why? What did I do?
GIS: Does posting terrorist plots to Slashdot ring a bell?
herrvinny: But that was just hypothetical. I was critiquing a stupid government decision in a specific case --
GIS (hitting herrvinny with cattle prod, and putting a bag over his head): Shut up! We'll take care of you terrorist swine! You probably pirate mp3s, too.
Christ, man, if you were going to spring for the Expansion Interface, you should have shelled out for the full 48k memory. After all, TRS-DOS used up nearly eight kilobytes.
The smart money was on the 48k upgrade, and running NEWDOS/80, especially when version 2 came out. That, or ProDOS, which had native support for not only SSDD disks, but DSDD disks as well, and no messing around with settings.
It begins way back in the Dawn of Time, before Canter & Siegel spammed Usenet... when the Web was still an obscure little project that handled text documents... It was back in those days (when the Usenet was still a bunch of geek enthusiasts, when email was for communicating, and when online pr0n meant anonymous ftp to East-Coast universities) when I established my email address.
Yeah, hard to believe, but in that distant time, it was not only common to post onto Usenet using your real name, but also your email address. It got out of control sometimes, when you'd actually get five emails a day from people who had read a posting and wanted more information, but we were geeks, we were proud, and we wanted to share our knowledge.
So my email address has been out there in public for about twelve years.
So that same email account today gets maybe 375 spams on the average day. Spam-assassin kills 370 of those, and maybe one innocent bystander each week.
"Stupid!" I hear you say. "Why not change it?"
Well, it so happens that I still get email to that account from people I don't know, based upon code I wrote seven years ago, ray-traced renderings I did ten years ago, or other stuff I posted to alt.conspiracy back in the day. Some of that email is still important to me.
So, in fact, there IS a reason some of us get clobbered by spam other than stupidity.
So I wrote a puzzle game for the Palm Pilot. It involves simple geometry, spacial manipulation of tiles, and a consistent (if arbitrary) set of rules for scoring.
According to all the research, males are supposed to be "better" at spacial organization type operations. Whatever.
In any case, 90% of the people who register the software, write me email, or confess to addition are women. I have no explanation for this. I don't understand it. But more than one woman has said that the game "intrudes into her dreams," and becomes an obsession to the point where it's disturbing. I haven't had one man say either of those things.
Dude, XModem sucks! Use ZModem! But whatever you do, don't even think of using Kermit. After all, if you remember Operation Sundevil back in... what was it... '92? Someone from Steve Jackson Games explains to a Secret Service guy that Kermit's a 7-bit protocol, and they raided the shop because "only a hacker" would know that (that is, after the SS figured out that Kermit wasn't a specific person). Gives you some insight into the United States intelligence services, doesn't it? Talk about oxymorons... and hey, while we're on the subject of morons, what about the Chimp In Chief, eh? I understand he went to Iraq for Thanksgiving... great. Piss off the Kurds by bringing Turkey into the whole situation...
Unless the kids came bundled with the spouse, it seems like you might wish to review the credentials of the medical practitioner who performed that vasectomy.
Time to get out my patriotic hat and pin before it's too late.
Too late? I'm afraid I have to tell you that it's a few years too late. Ashcroft has already subpoenaed your purchase records, and already knows that you don't have that there patriotic hat and pin, now, when it really counts.
Of course, the thing that sucks about putting/etc into CVS, is that CVS doesn't handle symbolic links very well.
I once wrote a bunch of loginfo and modules scripts to make it do what I thought was "the right thing." But it turned out not to be the right thing after all (I wanted the semantics of the link target to be what was revision controlled, not the contents of the target. This doesn't always do what you want either.)
No really, I *was* paying attention. Check out the FAQs I posted elsewhere in this thread, or the one the anonymous coward posted http://www.starwars.com/community/askjc/st eve/askj c20021031.html
Of course, the two FAQs dont' agree exactly, so maybe I should just shut up here;)
But I was a frothing-at-the-mouth Star Wars fanatic back in '77, so I trust my memory that the title wasn't there.
This is what The Glorious Revolution[tm] has been waiting for!
Once the digital-only broadcast law goes into effect in '06, citizens ("the consumers") will suddenly wake up to the fact that they're screwed. They can't record their shows the way they want. They can't timeshift or ffwd through commercials.
The masses will pour into the streets! People will abandon their TVs in droves! The remaining Public Libraries will have record attendance! People will remember that they know how to read!
Then, they'll notice that they weren't just screwed on their choice of opiate^H^H^H^H^H^H entertainment -- the entire political system was sold out from under them while they were watching dramatizations of the Enron debacle on Lifetime. They'll notice that their jobs don't pay well (since all the good jobs went overseas), and that all that cheap crap they buy in mass from Wal*Mart lacks any redeeming qualities. Strangely, buying crap doesn't bring them happiness any more. The void cannot be filled.
Pretty soon, American Civilization as we know it (i.e., late 20th Century consumerism) will utterly collapse because people can't have their MTV and eat it too...
Communities will go to the public squares. People will talk to one another. People will gather in the cafes to talk philosophy and play musical instruments together. No-one will buy CDs or DVDs, because they'll be making their own music, living their own movies (or enacting the stories on a stage).
yes, the definition in proper English is merely to edit, but in the jargon of the "Intelligence Community" redaction is the process of editing out anything you don't want the world to see.
It's not a replacement for RAID, but is good for nightly inter-machine backups.
There's also a related project where the far-end repository is encrypted, so you can have it on any public server without fear of having your data read by the wrong people.
Years ago, I worked for a government-related nonprofit that dealt with a lot of classified information.
I was in an area that didn't have much that was too secret. But wow, did my boss come down on me when he discovered I was making a Wolfenstein 3D (the original, back in '92, not the recent one) level of our building.
And it was a really stupid thing to do. I was young and foolish and (later) happy that my boss had me erase it, rather than have some Other Agency discover it.
The fact is, just because something is not in and of itself secret, it may well aid someone trying to get at something that is. If you're interested in protecting your secrets, this is one case where obscurity is just another layer of your defense.
Slashdot Mirror
I^H ... uh ... *They* just noticed a couple of postings where you expressed less than laudatory opinions towards spammers.
Maybe it was a bit of a stretch, but easily 50% of the spam coming through this neck of the woods is for "medications."
Well, mister, I think they've had their eye on you for some time. Let's see... (flipping through the John Ashcroft[tm] theme Slashdot dossier)
Ah, yes. Well, on the positive side, we have here publically voiced support for an entrenched Imperialist Force of Evil, e.g., Anakin. That may help save you from the "full treatment" down at Gitmo.
However, here on page 207, there're a few references to opposing a certain American Businessman in Utah, who is merely trying to uphold shareholder value through litigation -- a tried and true, nay, even Patriotic tradition. Under that, in John's own hand-writing, there's a note to the effect of "clearly al-Qaida."
Hmmm. tsk, tsk. There it is again, on page 460: it appears you've expressed contempt for entrepreneurial citizens who are utilizing government-to-public transfered technology for marketing and promoting products from the American Pharmaceutical industries. Once again, Mr Ashcroft notes this as "anti-industry" in his notes.
No, I'm afraid it doesn't look good...
Agreed. The K1000 is an awesome camera -- simple, rugged, and a large number of lenses available.
I had one that traveled many years and many thousands of miles with me, through sandstorms, rain, and snow; it survived all sorts of terrible things like being banged into a granite cliff (doh!) and being grabbed by a powerful electromagnet (separate occasions, I should point out), and it always carried right on working.
Lasts several years on a battery, too, since it's only using it for the internal light meter. It'll keep working fine without the meter, if you're willing to compute exposures some other way, like Sunny 16 rule.
I'd still use it today, if it hadn't been stolen in a burglary.
herrvinny: Who's there?
... mmmmph! mmmmph!
Guy in Sunglasses: John.
herrvinny: John who?
GIS: John Ashcroft, asshat. Please put this bag over your head, and come with me. We're going on a nice all-expense paid trip for one to Cuba.
herrvinny: Why? What did I do?
GIS: Does posting terrorist plots to Slashdot ring a bell?
herrvinny: But that was just hypothetical. I was critiquing a stupid government decision in a specific case --
GIS (hitting herrvinny with cattle prod, and putting a bag over his head): Shut up! We'll take care of you terrorist swine! You probably pirate mp3s, too.
herrvinny: mmmmph
(etc)
Christ, man, if you were going to spring for the Expansion Interface, you should have shelled out for the full 48k memory. After all, TRS-DOS used up nearly eight kilobytes.
The smart money was on the 48k upgrade, and running NEWDOS/80, especially when version 2 came out. That, or ProDOS, which had native support for not only SSDD disks, but DSDD disks as well, and no messing around with settings.
Well, my friend, let me tell you a little story.
It begins way back in the Dawn of Time, before Canter & Siegel spammed Usenet... when the Web was still an obscure little project that handled text documents... It was back in those days (when the Usenet was still a bunch of geek enthusiasts, when email was for communicating, and when online pr0n meant anonymous ftp to East-Coast universities) when I established my email address.
Yeah, hard to believe, but in that distant time, it was not only common to post onto Usenet using your real name, but also your email address. It got out of control sometimes, when you'd actually get five emails a day from people who had read a posting and wanted more information, but we were geeks, we were proud, and we wanted to share our knowledge.
So my email address has been out there in public for about twelve years.
So that same email account today gets maybe 375 spams on the average day. Spam-assassin kills 370 of those, and maybe one innocent bystander each week.
"Stupid!" I hear you say. "Why not change it?"
Well, it so happens that I still get email to that account from people I don't know, based upon code I wrote seven years ago, ray-traced renderings I did ten years ago, or other stuff I posted to alt.conspiracy back in the day. Some of that email is still important to me.
So, in fact, there IS a reason some of us get clobbered by spam other than stupidity.
I wrote the first non-scientific program that malloc-ed ONE PETABYTE of data!
... why, I'll change it to malloc an EXABYTE!
Golly, and when someone breaks that record
W00t! Guiness record book, here I come!
I won't mention the fact that there are two perfectly good words for this rhetorical device.
Not only paralepsis, but also apophasis.
Does that mean we'll be able to use the Last Chips Ever Made to run Duke Nuke 'Em Forever?
So I wrote a puzzle game for the Palm Pilot. It involves simple geometry, spacial manipulation of tiles, and a consistent (if arbitrary) set of rules for scoring.
According to all the research, males are supposed to be "better" at spacial organization type operations. Whatever.
In any case, 90% of the people who register the software, write me email, or confess to addition are women. I have no explanation for this. I don't understand it. But more than one woman has said that the game "intrudes into her dreams," and becomes an obsession to the point where it's disturbing. I haven't had one man say either of those things.
I don't get it. But there it is.
OK. I'm always up for a challenge...
... what was it ... '92? Someone from Steve Jackson Games explains to a Secret Service guy that Kermit's a 7-bit protocol, and they raided the shop because "only a hacker" would know that (that is, after the SS figured out that Kermit wasn't a specific person). Gives you some insight into the United States intelligence services, doesn't it? Talk about oxymorons... and hey, while we're on the subject of morons, what about the Chimp In Chief, eh? I understand he went to Iraq for Thanksgiving ... great. Piss off the Kurds by bringing Turkey into the whole situation...
Dude, XModem sucks! Use ZModem! But whatever you do, don't even think of using Kermit. After all, if you remember Operation Sundevil back in
OK. Just needed some clarification...
Unless the kids came bundled with the spouse, it seems like you might wish to review the credentials of the medical practitioner who performed that vasectomy.
Too late? I'm afraid I have to tell you that it's a few years too late. Ashcroft has already subpoenaed your purchase records, and already knows that you don't have that there patriotic hat and pin, now, when it really counts.
Sorry, bub, but you're screwed.
What? Like VMS?
(ducks)
Of course, the thing that sucks about putting /etc into CVS, is that CVS doesn't handle symbolic links very well.
I once wrote a bunch of loginfo and modules scripts to make it do what I thought was "the right thing." But it turned out not to be the right thing after all (I wanted the semantics of the link target to be what was revision controlled, not the contents of the target. This doesn't always do what you want either.)
No really, I *was* paying attention. Check out the FAQs I posted elsewhere in this thread, or the one the anonymous coward postedt eve/askj c20021031.html
;)
http://www.starwars.com/community/askjc/s
Of course, the two FAQs dont' agree exactly, so maybe I should just shut up here
But I was a frothing-at-the-mouth Star Wars fanatic back in '77, so I trust my memory that the title wasn't there.
Your memory is playing tricks on you.
q /g eneral
The "Episode IV" tag didn't get added until the re-release in 1979. For more information, consult the FAQ:
http://www.ncf.ca/ip/sigs/futurist/star-wars/fa
Well, I have heard that aging damages the humor cortex.
But I think the real problem is that my sarcast-o-meter hasn't been fed its morning coffee yet.
Except that was a later edit. When the original screened back in '77, that "Episode IV" wasn't there.
Yes, I watched it in 1977. Yes, I'm old. No, I'm not so old that I'm losing my memory.
This is what The Glorious Revolution[tm] has been waiting for!
Once the digital-only broadcast law goes into effect in '06, citizens ("the consumers") will suddenly wake up to the fact that they're screwed. They can't record their shows the way they want. They can't timeshift or ffwd through commercials.
The masses will pour into the streets! People will abandon their TVs in droves! The remaining Public Libraries will have record attendance! People will remember that they know how to read!
Then, they'll notice that they weren't just screwed on their choice of opiate^H^H^H^H^H^H entertainment -- the entire political system was sold out from under them while they were watching dramatizations of the Enron debacle on Lifetime. They'll notice that their jobs don't pay well (since all the good jobs went overseas), and that all that cheap crap they buy in mass from Wal*Mart lacks any redeeming qualities. Strangely, buying crap doesn't bring them happiness any more. The void cannot be filled.
Pretty soon, American Civilization as we know it (i.e., late 20th Century consumerism) will utterly collapse because people can't have their MTV and eat it too...
Communities will go to the public squares. People will talk to one another. People will gather in the cafes to talk philosophy and play musical instruments together. No-one will buy CDs or DVDs, because they'll be making their own music, living their own movies (or enacting the stories on a stage).
(Yeah, yeah, I know. But a boy can dream...)
It's called the Duplicty project.
http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu/duplicity.html
yes, the definition in proper English is merely to edit, but in the jargon of the "Intelligence Community" redaction is the process of editing out anything you don't want the world to see.
As I always chime in at this point:
Use rdiff-backup!
http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu/
Configurable, secure, distributed, versioning incremental backups.
It's not a replacement for RAID, but is good for nightly inter-machine backups.
There's also a related project where the far-end repository is encrypted, so you can have it on any public server without fear of having your data read by the wrong people.
Very cool. It's saved my ass a few times.
Years ago, I worked for a government-related nonprofit that dealt with a lot of classified information.
I was in an area that didn't have much that was too secret. But wow, did my boss come down on me when he discovered I was making a Wolfenstein 3D (the original, back in '92, not the recent one) level of our building.
And it was a really stupid thing to do. I was young and foolish and (later) happy that my boss had me erase it, rather than have some Other Agency discover it.
The fact is, just because something is not in and of itself secret, it may well aid someone trying to get at something that is. If you're interested in protecting your secrets, this is one case where obscurity is just another layer of your defense.