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User: WillSeattle

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  1. Amusing when they live with their mistakes on Slashback: Solidarity, Friction, Dreams · · Score: 5

    It's incredibly ironic that:

    A. Californians elected GOP legislators who, fed by fat cat Texan-owned firm campaign contributions, pushed through deregulation.

    B. The world's largest wind energy power facility is being built in Oregon and Washington state, while California refuses to build any power plants.

    C. The first company I ever worked for (as a Power Engineer, actually), Cominco, is selling the power generation from their private dam to save California's butt, since they can make more money selling them hydro power than smelting non-ferrous minerals (yes, that includes gold and silver, but is mostly lead and other alloys).

    D. Washington State dams are running flat out shipping power to California to the point that many of the lakes behind are drying out - this during our worst snowfall year in a decade when we have cold temperatures that force us to use energy.

    and, last, but not least

    E. The feds still try to get you to believe that the answer is to build coal plants, when anyone worth their salt could show you 4.5 cents per KW hour costs to build wind energy plants that have close to zero apian kill ratios and allow the land to be used for farming and other purposes. And even at current pricing, natural gas is still cheaper to use, if you would just build it, than coal. Especially sulfur coal - and I've seen what happens if you're crazy enough to use that -the Trilateral Commission forced Cominco to install scrubbers on all its stacks due to sulfur and lead outputs.

  2. SDMI in French means on French Hackers Break SDMI · · Score: 2

    well, actually, I haven't seen their French acronymn, but SDMI might be read as being Si Dommage' Mais d'Interesse (So Damaged But of Interest).

    Heck, maybe that's why they hacked it - it practically shouted out "Salut, Dommage'-Moi, Intellectuels!"

  3. Luckily for me, I'm a Canadian too on FCC Seeks Comment on Internet Filtering Rules · · Score: 2

    Which means the Canadian Internet Privacy Act applies to me, especially since I'm a dual citizen (USA/Canada).

    You can take away my web links - but you can't take away my freedom!

  4. A similar court case in Canada on Virtual Child Porn: Is It Illegal? · · Score: 3

    There's a similar case being heard by the Canadian Supreme Court about whether a B.C. man can be convicted for possessing such pictures. Without such possession being evidence, it would be very hard to get any convictions.

  5. IP a big issue - Thank Jon for the Intl Courts! on Bush And The Tech Nation · · Score: 2

    All praise to Jon that we have the International Courts to help us in our battle for Intellectual Property, which is only the second highest in the Laws of the Katz. For, as Jon did say:

    "These are my commandments, given unto you, that you may write of them in wordy prose and spread them unto the Geek UberNations of the World:

    First, Thou shalt not attack Privacy, for those who have privacy are like unto me, and thus we must respect it, except where it is the privacy of mine enemies.

    Second, Thou shalt respect Intellectual Property, for should they taketh my words and not pay me, I should have fewer booth babes, and this would displeaseth me. But, if they are Open Source, thou shouldst spreadeth them to the far corners of the earth, and even unto the skies, for such speech is like unto my speech, and not only shall it be wordy, but it shall be distribute with source code and annotations and FAQ as far as Geeks shall rule.

    Third, thou shalt horde thy Karma, for unlike myself thou canst suffer a loss of karma for posting things, especially those posts which are like unto the Troll or do disparage me. For that way leadeth unto the Flamefest, and since I lose those, it displeaseth me.

    Fourth, thou shalt buy Geek products, but weareth not false image of me, for it is a sin.

    More commandments shall I give thee, but they waiteth upon my creation of a new thread."

  6. Re:Rise Up and Protest on Bush And The Tech Nation · · Score: 2

    Those truly devoted to the cause set themselves on fire ala Falun Gong. Please Jon set yourself on fire.

    Jon would never set himself on fire - it would cause too much air pollution and might cut down the length of his posts to the point that they become readable.

  7. Oh, but for tech stocks, only gloom on Bush And The Tech Nation · · Score: 3

    A number of reasons for this:

    1. Tech stocks are priced too high. Even now. Look, when I buy a stock, I expect a P/E (future) of between 12 and 30. Stocks with P/E of 60 or more are priced to the concept that they will explode geometrically, with nary a hiccup.

    2. Tech CEOs gave equally to Dems and Republicans, unlike other industries which gave mostly to Republicans. For this reason they must pay. Even Bill G did this. No easy access to the gravy train for them.

    3. The True West (California, Oregon, Washington) voted against Bush. They must pay, and Cheney will make sure they do. Never mind that they're 25 to 30 percent of the US population and create more than half the goods we export. They will suffer.

  8. The Sleeper Must Awaken! on Bush And The Tech Nation · · Score: 2

    Under Clinton/Gore, most techies thought they could achieve something, so they waited. Under Bush/Cheney, they will reroute around the damage, do cloning and genetic research in the UK, France, and other countries, and hackers will take no quarter.

    The great Privacy Wars will start, as the idealistic Freemen start their CyberJihad against the Old Fogies of the Cheneyites, resulting in the sidelining of politics as a useful social class and the resurgance of Americans as those who fight against all odds for Freedom.

    At first betrayed by the CipherMole Jon of the Katz, who shall rival Benedict Arnold in his duplicity when he takes a job as staff tech policy writer for the Bush/Cheney White House, the movement shall reorganize around a truer and cleaner Open Source Revolutionary Model and ultimately triumph.

    Don't compile until you see the bytes of their i++ statements!

  9. Why this is a Cool idea ... on Crusoe As Server CPU · · Score: 3

    A number of reasons come to mind:

    1. California has too few power plants - anything to save energy is good.

    2. Most servers are redundant ones, hot spares, etc. These would be great with the low-power consumption, especially as the disk access is very low on such boxen until there is a demand spike.

    3. Most servers do a lot of the same things over and over and over - this may turn out to be where the highest return on investment (ROI) is for code morphing chips. That plus their ability to ramp up on demand.

    4. Think about the /. effect - if we all hit these servers asking for the same thing, the code morphing chip will get very good on the third, fourth, fifth request. So in actual practice, a Crusoe server would handle /. effect very well, not to mention many brute force attacks, as it optimizes itself for redundancy. Extra added bonus for the superbowl effect, for those remaining .com advertisers!

    5. Especially useful when reading Jon Katz articles. Lots of excess verbiage, repetition, and waste of space - maybe the Crusoe chip could just go to sleep and save power whenever someone made a mistake and tried to read one of those!

  10. But which do you Need? Beowulf vs HighAvailability on Compaq sells Linux Clusters · · Score: 1

    This is a high-availibility cluster, the idea being that one of the machines can die without losing anything. Kinda like RAID taken to the systems level

    Personally, it's my belief that the vast and overwhelming majority of /.ers are much more likely to need high-availability fall-over systems.

    The main question most of would have now pertains to security. Granted, it's not BSD, or SecureLinux, but is this a buttoned-down failover system or does it come in the vanilla wrapper with all the ports open and services ready to be exploited?

    Let's hope it's fairly buttoned down with some easy admin tools.

  11. Definitely a better solution... on Stuffing Junkmail Postage-Paid Envelopes? · · Score: 2

    Yesterday someone posted the following link:
    http://www.talboa.com/junkmail/index.shtml

    It has forms you can fill in and print out and mail to get you off the majority of mailing lists, and another form for credit cards. The first form is also supposed to get you onto a no-phone solicitation list too.


    Yeah, went to the site, it is useful. And it's really easy to use, for a lot of reward.

    So long as we participate in the system, they'll keep using it against us. If we start opting out, maybe they'll pay attention and realize that their approach is wrong.

  12. Two different problems - two solutions on Stuffing Junkmail Postage-Paid Envelopes? · · Score: 2

    OK, first, let's not take out any anger we may have on the USPS. If you mail dog poo or other things that may open in transit, you are probably making the USPS deal with it. That's not fair - they get told to offer sweetheart deals to those companies, and they do their darnedest to deliver the mail.

    Secondly, think about who gets the replies. It may be an order fulfillment house, or it may be a real company. You are more likely to get real change by viral solutions which take over the resources of the host than by direct attack.

    So sending glitter or other stuff is a direct attack. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, just think about it. The suggestion that you put all the non-identified filler in the envelope (removing codes, names, addresses) as well as other junk paper is a good one - this causes the sender to incur a disposal fee for the true cost of the mailing, instead of you. And maybe buying a stamp which says "USE RECYCLED PAPER" or "TAKE ME OFF YOUR MAILING LIST" and stamping the outside of that filler is good - I have stamps like that myself.

    Or maybe you can say "I DON'T BUY FROM COMPANIES WHICH DON'T USE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE LIKE LINUX" (man, someone do up a stamp for this!) instead.

    But think about who will get it.

  13. Re:Other proven uses of post-paid envelopes and ca on Spammer Gets Spammed · · Score: 2

    I guarantee, no North American tree is ever touched for the sole purpose of making paper. There are mountains of unused wood chips that can be used to produce paper. All byproducts of wood manufacture.

    I grew up in logging communities. Certain types of wood are only useful for paper production, so I don't know that I buy your statement. Kind of like when people keep saying logging at alpine levels will grow back - it's the topsoil destruction that makes it take 100 years for even partial regrowth. I know, I've logged at such heights. Used to spend my summers, as a boy, floating around Kootenay Lake (in Kaslo, B.C., Canada) on logs, which is really cool.

    However, you are correct that almost all trees are used for various purposes. I've made shakes and shingles from redwoods, used cottonwoods (wet buggers) for firewood (long drying period for those). A lot of B.C. trees are used for chopsticks, actually.

    But decreased demand is still decreased demand.

  14. Re:Some useful techniques for fighting spamsters on Spammer Gets Spammed · · Score: 1

    How long have you held your WCOM stock? If it's long enough to be able to make a shareholder's proposal, please consider doing so.

    Since Oct 18, 2000. I'll check the most recent annual report and see if I'm in the filing zone.
    Nothing like a little corporate and media attention to uu.net being a spam haven.

  15. Nintendo may win this, but should they? on Nintendo Sues "Daily Radar" Owners For Pokemon Shots · · Score: 1

    The place where dailyradar runs into problems is in the fact that they used trade marked images to promote the guide. The credible claim that nintendo has is found on pages six and seven of the complaint. DR used a cover that was deceptivly similar to the one of the nintendo book. They used a similar logo to the nintendo book adding the words "100% Unoficial" in small type. They also claim trademark protection on character images. This is the same protection that doesnt allow me to start printing Bart Simpson shirts. Nintendo may very well win on this point. Daily Radar was using images of character's owned by Nintendo to market it's own product.

    The usage of a cover with trademarked images and characters is likely illegal - this was a big no no - especially making it look like the official guides. But, and this is what we need to watch, people do have a right to show a screen shot, especially for a strategy manual, provided it looks like a screenshot.

    Note, I'm kind of biased, since my son owns 10 shares of Nintendo ADRs and I own 90 shares (eventually he'll own them all, if he keeps practicing his Japanese). But we also bought the unofficial guide, so we agree that this is reasonable.

    As an aside, I had a fun time this Christmas in Mexico, where almost every store pops the seal of Nintendo toys (not even a good job resealing them), takes out the Pokemon cards, and replaces them with fake holograph Pokemon cards which they resell for more money. Pretty amateur job, actually.

  16. Re:Postage-paid on Spammer Gets Spammed · · Score: 2

    However, I would feel sorry for the poor postal employees that now have to send junk mail *both* ways.

    Remember that the USPS makes a profit on delivering that postage-paid card. You're helping employ that postal employee ...

  17. Other proven uses of post-paid envelopes and cards on Spammer Gets Spammed · · Score: 5

    About a decade ago myself and a few friends decided to take action to increase the demand side of the economic equation for recycled paper. At the time, supply of post-consumer recycled paper was about three times larger than demand.

    What we did was go to all the libraries and workplaces we could, gather all the postage-paid subscription cards, and write various different economic messages, asking the magazines and software companies to use recycled paper for some of their material. For software companies, it was the manuals; for magazines it was just the insert cards (paper plants to produce clay-content magazine picture quality paper did not exist in North America at the time).

    One of the reasons it worked was we had a limited targetted message asking for something that was not only acheivable, but was cheaper too.

    For some of these we made stamps to stamp all the cards. Then when our group had collected a few thousand of the cards, we'd send off bundles of 100 or so in different mailboxes throughout the city. For a period of five to ten days. Which meant that thousands of these postage-paid cards would flood the target for weeks on end, from various places, and various people, all at the cost of the magazine which published them.

    As a result, a number of positive things happened. Magazines started to send only three or four of those post-paid insert cards in the magazine (before we'd get 20-30 per issue, which kept falling out). They started using recycled paper for the inserts, and sometimes even the magazine (e.g. Science News). And software manuals started being printed on recycled paper.

    And since demand for recycled paper increased ten-fold, new non-chlorine recycled paper plants were built in the US and Canada, saving untold forests from being logged.

  18. Some useful techniques for fighting spamsters on Spammer Gets Spammed · · Score: 2

    First, the FTC is collecting info, for possible action.

    Forward the spam, with All Headers visible (different choices on browsers), to:

    uce@ftc.gov

    Secondly, if it is an attempt to solicit money for supposed investment purposes, it's the SEC's job to police these babies. Go to www.sec.gov and find the email address of your regional SEC office. Mine, for example, is sanfrancisco@sec.gov, but yours may differ. Then forward, with All Headers visible, the spam you get concerning investments (usually fraudulent) to that email address.

    Why make the government do the work? Because until enough people complain and help all those Level 9 operatives, nothing will be done.

    If using PINE, then just bounce the email to that address.

    Also, always forward to the abuse@yourisp.com (or abuse-nonverbose@yourisp.com if they're smart) any such emails. And any legitimate ISPs (hint, not wierd ones, they may be spam collector sites) along the trail the email came. This helps them shut down those loopholes.

    Most of my spam mail originates from a uu.net address. Which is kind of ironic, cause I own 400 shares of Worldcom, who own UU.NET in the first place. If something isn't done soon, I'm filing a shareholder's proposal at the next Annual Meeting ...

  19. But cNet says blackouts are state ordered on Is the Net The Cause of California's Power Problems? · · Score: 1

    Actually its because out of state suppliers are REFUSING to sell to California. Updates on radio, msnbc, cnet. We haven't bent over far enough for the power providers...


    No, we were ordered by federal regulators to provide power in the midst of our under-generation cycle (winter) to California. Which is why Oregon and Washington state are now suffering higher impacts than California is, even though we were responsible and built lots of power plants (wind and gas turbines mostly).

    And the Governor of California, according to the latest cNet article, ordered the rolling blackouts, since Californians aren't cutting back enough on energy use, even with the extra energy taken from Oregon and Washington.

    Hello ... it's called conservation ... shut down some of your hot spares in your server farms and stop setting your heat to 80 fahrenheit with the screen door open (which I've seen some of my relatives do in California, which would get you stoned up here in Washington).

  20. If you don't want non-competes, then why use them? on Non-Competing With Microsoft · · Score: 3

    I've worked at MSFT, through a contracting firm, and MSFT is part and parcel of this problem. If they insist on non-compete agreements themselves, either directly or with a sub-contractor, then they have only themselves to blame for the problem.

    That said, I think non-competes are pretty much a waste, as opposed to non-disclosure agreements, for anyone other than senior execs. You just shoot yourself in the foot for future referrals and good will.

  21. California Blackouts due to Web Farms (news) on Is the Net The Cause of California's Power Problems? · · Score: 2

    According to this Reuters story, California has already triggered blackouts due to excessive energy usage today.

    Which causes other adjacent states to suffer rolling brownouts, plant closures, and blackouts.

    So, it's not some academic theory, since once those drop, a portion of the World Wide Web drops, which has, of course, effects world-wide.

  22. No blank media tax, but definite Net taxes on France Retracts Computer Tax Proposal · · Score: 1

    OK, contrary to everyone who flamed me last year on this subject, the EU has imposed a VAT on sales by non-EU Web corporations to EU citizens. They have, for now, backed down from the blank media CD/RW tax, which is good, but you still face Net taxes there.

    The good news is non-EU Web corps may get to choose which EU country they "belong" to, and thus have a lower VAT tax on sales.

    Expect the CD/RW blank media tax to come up again - major proponents for this are all those people who hate MP3 ...

  23. XML Schema does work, it's the new HL7 standard on Slashback: Pronouns, Acronyms, Abbreviations · · Score: 1

    I was just talking to my boss about implementing HIPPA, and the new XML layer for HL7, and the working groups have already deep-sixed XML DTD for XML Schema.

    Geesh, get with the program, it's the 21st Century. XML DTD is so last millenium ...

  24. What do you mean "the rest of us"? on Is the Net The Cause of California's Power Problems? · · Score: 3

    Hey, Easterner, the entire West Coast is on power saving cutbacks - Washington, Oregon, California. That's 25 percent of the population of this country and more than half of the high tech areas. That's half of the broadband service customers.

    That's like George Bush saying the West supports him, when he lost in all three Western states. Nobody lives in the rest of that area you call the West - I know, I grew up back east in the Rockies.

    That aside, the problem is not so much deregulation as a combination of rate wheeling (the stupidist idea since unsliced bread) and forced divestiture of power plants from power companies. This was a train wreck waiting to happen, paid for by idiots who've never had to switch a high voltage circuit in their lives. I used to be a Power Engineer, and did my best to keep Washington State from going down the drain with those turkeys, and just barely managed to pull it off. But now we get to provide power for those Californians in the middle of our low power generation capacity period, when it gets a bit cold up here and we can't run the dams flat out.

    If it weren't for the fact that Washington and Oregon have put online many megajoules in wind energy over the last couple of years, California would be freezing in the dark right now. That plus the natural gas turbines we bought in anticipation of shortages ...

  25. Forget XML DTD, XML Schema is where it's at on Slashback: Pronouns, Acronyms, Abbreviations · · Score: 2

    I mean, really, why spend 90 percent of the message transferring the DTD description of the data and validation when you can use XML Schema like everyone else and ship the schema only when it changes in header and footer segments.

    Doesn't anyone else go to Sun Tech Days around here?

    If you did, you might get a cool alien t-shirt or alien baby like I did ...

    Or maybe you'd understand HOW to implement XML. Heck, even the MSFT methods are a reasonable implementation, and a lot better than XML DTD would be.