A friend of a friend used to live downtown, and owned a Jeep. You know, the kind with the fabric tops, that simply could not be fully locked. Well, he never left anything valuable in his jeep. But, living downtown, he was pretty close to an area where there were quite a few prostitutes.
Soon after moving downtown, he started noticing used condoms showing up on the floor of his jeep. It turns out that the girls found his vehicle a pretty convenient place with nice soft seats for doing their business.
He found a good solution though, he walked around and made friends with all the various girls, and explained how he'd appreciate it if they didn't use his jeep that way. Because he was nice about it, and actually tried to be a friend, not only did they not use his car that way anymore, but they also kept a lookout, making sure that nobody else messed with his car.
So... just remember, just because you have nothing valuable to steal in your car doesn't mean someone won't find a good use for it.
Whichever moderator marked that as a troll should be slapped around a bit. It is exactly on-topic, and answers the question the parent post asked, why the Sony Linux kit isn't everything you need.
Shades of grey. Going from black to white we have:
SCO -- completely evil, have never done anything mildly useful and now threaten the GPL
Microsoft -- mostly evil, but have yet to threaten Linux or the GPL except through silly FUD
Nvidia -- respectable because their hardware was really good, but mostly bad because their drivers were closed and they never did much to play nicely with Linux
ATI -- slightly better, for a while their hardware wasn't as good, so they didn't deserve the respect, but they've done a little bit better for Linux
RedHat -- mostly good. They are a corporation, trying to make money, and every once in a while they try to lock customers in by doing things in a non-standard way, but they do give back to the community, and they are "fighting the good fight"
Debian -- almost saintly, no commercial interests, a great package management system, but not as polished an interface or install process.
Linux -- saintly. The one hope of saving the world from the various evil companies, all completely free, open and well designed
You know what we really need? A contest to see who can guess the next ridiculous thing these lawyers will try.
Declare copyright legislation unconstitutional
Declare the US government's authority invalid
Declare that Linus created Linux as a work-for-hire under their pay
Sue Tim Berners-Lee for creating a copyright-circumvention tool
Claim ownership of every bit that has had contact with an infringing product
Sue Santa Cruz for stealing their name
...
I dunno, I'm just not as creative as these people. Every time I think "gee, this really can't get any more laughable", they go and try the chewbacca defence.
See, you're missing the point. Doing that won't help you, because you're concentrating on the machine as if it did something useful. Instead, remember you're being questionned by a skilled interrogator. Forget that you have something strapped to you that they're pretending does something effective. You probably can't beat the skilled interrogator, so unless you can avoid it, don't try.
I did say "clever" didn't I? The only reason we have any luck catching spammers is that the spam they send is pretty obviously spam: obvious keywords, RFC non-compliant headers, lots of HTML, etc.
Good grief, is it really that bad in Windowsland??? I haven't been there in ages, but that's horrible, 5% of machines crashing twice a day!?
Is this an improvement on how it used to be, or is it getting worse? Why would Bill Gates ever admit to that???
And does this mean, it's the same 5% crashing twice a day, every day? Are there some poor, sad, people that have to put up with 2 crashes a day, every day and think that's reasonable??
What percentage of computers crash only once a day? Or more than twice? I'd really like to see a distribution of frequency of crashes.
I'm just so used to rebooting my (OS X) laptop once a month when a new OS or driver patch comes out, and shutting down my Linux desktop only when I want to save power.
I'm lucky enough to have been polygraphed, but not for having done something important. I was actually a guinea pig for police officers being trained to become polygraph operators. I am not sure if polygraphs are completely worthless or not, but I can guarantee that the way they're used is not as a "lie detection device" but more as an interrogation technique.
When they polygraphed me, they used some cheap magicians tricks. They had me choose a random card, then told me to say no for each card when they asked "is this your card?". Using the polygraph they claimed to know what card I had chosen -- but the way they set things up it seemed more like magicians tricks, than it did polygraph operation. They also showed me a wavy line with a spike afterward, claiming that the spike was when they detected me lying... but when I tried to get some more details they avoided the subject.
When it came for the real test, it ran mostly like what you see in the movies. After the test was done they thanked me for cooperating and then started trying to usher me out. I asked if I could see the results and they refused. Later on, I was told that a polygraph operator never shows their results to anybody, not even their partners.
I'm not sure if the machines are completely worthless, or if they can do something, but it certainly isn't a lie detector, it's more a "reaction sensor" if anything. I wouldn't be surprised if the cops get more out of watching someone's face, eyes, and posture than they do out of the device. It's just that the device has such fame from TV and movies that guilty people think it will catch them, making them more nervous (and presumably innocent people feel it will vindicate them, making them more relaxed).
The only think I learned from the experience is that police interrogators are good at getting confessions. That doesn't necessarily mean they're good at getting only guilty people to confess, however. If you ever get accused of something and a cop wants to question you, whether you're completely guilty or completely innocent, insist on a lawyer.
(1..5000).times do
|i|
sender = "gnu_fan#{i}@yahoo.com" ...
end
All it takes is one clever dishonest person. Until PGP signatures become commonplace and people are able to build up a web of trust, it's pretty easy to fake this sort of thing using email.
While on the subject of links, are there any sites we can visit that will show the worm spreading? Like, how network traffic is getting slower and slower in various regions, routers are becoming unresponsive, that sort of thing. I found something showing that
Asia is a little slow, but I would guess there are better sites out there somewhere.
Sure, but do you think they could get away with saying "we refuse to release information on how this problem can be fixed, if you can prove to us you bought the car, we'll fix it, but if you can't, tough luck"
That might work if it were something like the car not starting right, but if it has the potential to endanger other people, I don't think that would fly.
Well imagine that car in question is the infamous Ford Pinto that seemed to enjoy exploding. That car wasn't just a danger to the people driving it, it was a danger to whoever happened to be nearby when it exploded. What if Ford had said to all people who had bought used Pintos: "Tough luck, we only support cars bought directly from us. Figure out how to fix it on your own."
When a flaw in your product can screw things up for people who aren't your direct customers, it's a lot harder to argue that you shouldn't have to fix it for them too, especially when it's just a matter of supplying them with bits.
Anybody know good Internet traffic type sites where you can watch this unfold? I found one showing that
Asia seems to be experiencing some troubles, but I'm not sure how accurate or good the info is.
No, really, I'm serious. Non-nocturnal animals living in the wild evolved in an environment that was incredibly dark. Unless you go inside a closet and close the door, you're not likely to experience that level of darkness in a typical house.
Even if you do turn off the "lights", it's often much harder to turn off the LEDs. In my room I have an iBook with a glowing indicator, the LED ring indicating it's charging, the LED on my monitor, and a few other small sources of light. Many other people have much brighter LEDs in the form of alarm clocks. Besides that, there's the small lights in the courtyard outside that, while not very bright, and not very close, still leak light through my blinds.
Once the sun comes up it's even worse. My blinds don't do enough to block the sunlight. Sure, I don't have direct sunlight on my face, but my room does glow pretty well in the morning. The end result is that I sleep restlessly. I should get around to blocking off all the sources of light, but I never seem to have time -- and the women in the study likely don't either.
I seem to remember that Opera had something like snapback first. And Netscape (and later Mozilla) have been importing IE bookmarks forever. The bookmark manager seems to do what Mozilla does, but not as flexibly -- i.e. in Mozilla you can either add a bookmark or file it, in Safari you can only file it.
In any case, I've never seen the use of snapback once I've started using tabs. To me, Safari just seems like a dumbed-down version of some good features from other browsers. But hey, at least it's pretty quick.
Re:Are you sure the problem is primarily with SMTP
on
Replacing SMTP?
·
· Score: 1
Good points. But there still is that "moron factor". If a solution were available that stopped me from seeing all spam at the MUA level, I think there would still be vast volumes of spam coming at me for years. Why?
Morons and cluebies and such that would take years to upgrade their MUAs and would still receive (and respond to) spam
Moron spammers who take months to figure out that nobody is receiving their email anymore, and would decide "hmm, maybe I'm not sending enough anymore, better double the volume"
That's why I'd like to have a means of stopping spam before it hits my SMTP server.
Re:Former perl, python, java geek gone to Ruby
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Have you ever taken a look at the OO syntax of Javascript? It's damn ugly! I was really impressed at things like Function() though. If it weren't for the browser-specific parts of Javascript then it would be a pretty good language... but used to manipulate browsers it's a real pain.
Re:Former perl, python, java geek gone to Ruby
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Interesting. The Ruby syntax sure looks cleaner to me though. Fewer underscores and parentheses to worry about. =) I also like that "abs" is a Fixnum method in Ruby, whereas in Python it appears to be a top-level function.
Re:Are you sure the problem is primarily with SMTP
on
Replacing SMTP?
·
· Score: 1
You do have a point...
However, if a spammer sends me a message I don't ever want to see it. This means I don't want to see the message in my inbox, but marked as "unsigned email". It shouldn't ever make it to my MUA. In fact, it shouldn't ever use up my bandwidth so that it makes it to my MUA which hides it from me.
I think the focus is on the protocol, because if my MUA throws out 500 spams a day and I only ever see the 10 real messages I'll be happier than I am now. On the other hand, I'll still have spammers wasting my bandwidth. To stop that bandwidth waste, we need to tackle the problem before it hits the MUA.
Re:Former perl, python, java geek gone to Ruby
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
I spent about 2 months total on Python before I found Ruby and abandoned Python. Ruby was just much easier right from the start.
I admit that there are languages that have really cool features that Ruby lacks (like Smalltalk, Lisp,...) but I just don't find them easy to use. Python seems to overwhelm me with underscores, and needless use of "self" in method definitions. I personally find Ruby easier to read and to write.
It looks like Python has changed a lot since the last version I used (2.0 I think). If I didn't have Ruby, I'd consider looking at it again, but why now? I have yet to hear of features I want to use that Python has that are lacking in Ruby.
Re:Former perl, python, java geek gone to Ruby
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Hrm, interesting. After seeing this I went to the Python home page and found
a document on this subject. After initially being overwhelmed with underscores, I tried to understand what was going on. It talked a lot about subclassing things like dictionaries, but I couldn't find anything about subclassing int and such.
Anyhow, I then fired up Python and said dir(1) and it gave me a list of methods. I then tried 1.__add__(2), and it didn't like it. Do I have the syntax wrong? If I do something equivalent in Ruby (1.methods, 1.+(2)) it works like I expect. I admit, I know Ruby much better than Python though so maybe it's just as easy in Python. Is there an easy way to do the equivalent of this in Python?
irb(main):026:0> class Fixnum; def distance_from_42; (self - 42).abs; end; end
=> nil
irb(main):027:0> 3.distance_from_42
=> 39
irb(main):028:0> 43.distance_from_42
=> 1
Anyhow, it's nice to see that Python is slowly becoming more Ruby-like.;)
Re:Former perl, python, java geek gone to Ruby
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, cool ain't it? I knew about these other ways but I guess I was stuck on the "Python doesn't let you subclass built-in types" idea. Of course, I'm sure it doesn't let you extend them or modify instances of them either.
That's a pretty funny comment though: You love Ruby so much it makes you want to learn Smalltalk!;)
As for me, I looked at Smalltalk, hated the syntax, and haven't really felt the interest to go back again.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend of a friend used to live downtown, and owned a Jeep. You know, the kind with the fabric tops, that simply could not be fully locked. Well, he never left anything valuable in his jeep. But, living downtown, he was pretty close to an area where there were quite a few prostitutes.
Soon after moving downtown, he started noticing used condoms showing up on the floor of his jeep. It turns out that the girls found his vehicle a pretty convenient place with nice soft seats for doing their business.
He found a good solution though, he walked around and made friends with all the various girls, and explained how he'd appreciate it if they didn't use his jeep that way. Because he was nice about it, and actually tried to be a friend, not only did they not use his car that way anymore, but they also kept a lookout, making sure that nobody else messed with his car.
So... just remember, just because you have nothing valuable to steal in your car doesn't mean someone won't find a good use for it.
Whichever moderator marked that as a troll should be slapped around a bit. It is exactly on-topic, and answers the question the parent post asked, why the Sony Linux kit isn't everything you need.
Shades of grey. Going from black to white we have:
You know what we really need? A contest to see who can guess the next ridiculous thing these lawyers will try.
I dunno, I'm just not as creative as these people. Every time I think "gee, this really can't get any more laughable", they go and try the chewbacca defence.
See, you're missing the point. Doing that won't help you, because you're concentrating on the machine as if it did something useful. Instead, remember you're being questionned by a skilled interrogator. Forget that you have something strapped to you that they're pretending does something effective. You probably can't beat the skilled interrogator, so unless you can avoid it, don't try.
I did say "clever" didn't I? The only reason we have any luck catching spammers is that the spam they send is pretty obviously spam: obvious keywords, RFC non-compliant headers, lots of HTML, etc.
Good grief, is it really that bad in Windowsland??? I haven't been there in ages, but that's horrible, 5% of machines crashing twice a day!?
Is this an improvement on how it used to be, or is it getting worse? Why would Bill Gates ever admit to that???
And does this mean, it's the same 5% crashing twice a day, every day? Are there some poor, sad, people that have to put up with 2 crashes a day, every day and think that's reasonable??
What percentage of computers crash only once a day? Or more than twice? I'd really like to see a distribution of frequency of crashes.
I'm just so used to rebooting my (OS X) laptop once a month when a new OS or driver patch comes out, and shutting down my Linux desktop only when I want to save power.
Wow.
I'm lucky enough to have been polygraphed, but not for having done something important. I was actually a guinea pig for police officers being trained to become polygraph operators. I am not sure if polygraphs are completely worthless or not, but I can guarantee that the way they're used is not as a "lie detection device" but more as an interrogation technique.
When they polygraphed me, they used some cheap magicians tricks. They had me choose a random card, then told me to say no for each card when they asked "is this your card?". Using the polygraph they claimed to know what card I had chosen -- but the way they set things up it seemed more like magicians tricks, than it did polygraph operation. They also showed me a wavy line with a spike afterward, claiming that the spike was when they detected me lying... but when I tried to get some more details they avoided the subject.
When it came for the real test, it ran mostly like what you see in the movies. After the test was done they thanked me for cooperating and then started trying to usher me out. I asked if I could see the results and they refused. Later on, I was told that a polygraph operator never shows their results to anybody, not even their partners.
I'm not sure if the machines are completely worthless, or if they can do something, but it certainly isn't a lie detector, it's more a "reaction sensor" if anything. I wouldn't be surprised if the cops get more out of watching someone's face, eyes, and posture than they do out of the device. It's just that the device has such fame from TV and movies that guilty people think it will catch them, making them more nervous (and presumably innocent people feel it will vindicate them, making them more relaxed).
The only think I learned from the experience is that police interrogators are good at getting confessions. That doesn't necessarily mean they're good at getting only guilty people to confess, however. If you ever get accused of something and a cop wants to question you, whether you're completely guilty or completely innocent, insist on a lawyer.
|i|
sender = "gnu_fan#{i}@yahoo.com"
end
All it takes is one clever dishonest person. Until PGP signatures become commonplace and people are able to build up a web of trust, it's pretty easy to fake this sort of thing using email.
While on the subject of links, are there any sites we can visit that will show the worm spreading? Like, how network traffic is getting slower and slower in various regions, routers are becoming unresponsive, that sort of thing. I found something showing that Asia is a little slow, but I would guess there are better sites out there somewhere.
Sure, but do you think they could get away with saying "we refuse to release information on how this problem can be fixed, if you can prove to us you bought the car, we'll fix it, but if you can't, tough luck"
That might work if it were something like the car not starting right, but if it has the potential to endanger other people, I don't think that would fly.
Well imagine that car in question is the infamous Ford Pinto that seemed to enjoy exploding. That car wasn't just a danger to the people driving it, it was a danger to whoever happened to be nearby when it exploded. What if Ford had said to all people who had bought used Pintos: "Tough luck, we only support cars bought directly from us. Figure out how to fix it on your own."
When a flaw in your product can screw things up for people who aren't your direct customers, it's a lot harder to argue that you shouldn't have to fix it for them too, especially when it's just a matter of supplying them with bits.
They probably don't have many servers, or won't admit to having many, and it is in their business interests...
Anybody know good Internet traffic type sites where you can watch this unfold? I found one showing that Asia seems to be experiencing some troubles, but I'm not sure how accurate or good the info is.
How dark are your shades?
No, really, I'm serious. Non-nocturnal animals living in the wild evolved in an environment that was incredibly dark. Unless you go inside a closet and close the door, you're not likely to experience that level of darkness in a typical house.
Even if you do turn off the "lights", it's often much harder to turn off the LEDs. In my room I have an iBook with a glowing indicator, the LED ring indicating it's charging, the LED on my monitor, and a few other small sources of light. Many other people have much brighter LEDs in the form of alarm clocks. Besides that, there's the small lights in the courtyard outside that, while not very bright, and not very close, still leak light through my blinds.
Once the sun comes up it's even worse. My blinds don't do enough to block the sunlight. Sure, I don't have direct sunlight on my face, but my room does glow pretty well in the morning. The end result is that I sleep restlessly. I should get around to blocking off all the sources of light, but I never seem to have time -- and the women in the study likely don't either.
You ask this question in the land of hyphens? "Italian-American", "African-American", "Irish-American"...
I seem to remember that Opera had something like snapback first. And Netscape (and later Mozilla) have been importing IE bookmarks forever. The bookmark manager seems to do what Mozilla does, but not as flexibly -- i.e. in Mozilla you can either add a bookmark or file it, in Safari you can only file it.
In any case, I've never seen the use of snapback once I've started using tabs. To me, Safari just seems like a dumbed-down version of some good features from other browsers. But hey, at least it's pretty quick.
Good points. But there still is that "moron factor". If a solution were available that stopped me from seeing all spam at the MUA level, I think there would still be vast volumes of spam coming at me for years. Why?
That's why I'd like to have a means of stopping spam before it hits my SMTP server.
Yup, Numeric.
Have you ever taken a look at the OO syntax of Javascript? It's damn ugly! I was really impressed at things like Function() though. If it weren't for the browser-specific parts of Javascript then it would be a pretty good language... but used to manipulate browsers it's a real pain.
Interesting. The Ruby syntax sure looks cleaner to me though. Fewer underscores and parentheses to worry about. =) I also like that "abs" is a Fixnum method in Ruby, whereas in Python it appears to be a top-level function.
You do have a point...
However, if a spammer sends me a message I don't ever want to see it. This means I don't want to see the message in my inbox, but marked as "unsigned email". It shouldn't ever make it to my MUA. In fact, it shouldn't ever use up my bandwidth so that it makes it to my MUA which hides it from me.
I think the focus is on the protocol, because if my MUA throws out 500 spams a day and I only ever see the 10 real messages I'll be happier than I am now. On the other hand, I'll still have spammers wasting my bandwidth. To stop that bandwidth waste, we need to tackle the problem before it hits the MUA.
I spent about 2 months total on Python before I found Ruby and abandoned Python. Ruby was just much easier right from the start.
I admit that there are languages that have really cool features that Ruby lacks (like Smalltalk, Lisp, ...) but I just don't find them easy to use. Python seems to overwhelm me with underscores, and needless use of "self" in method definitions. I personally find Ruby easier to read and to write.
It looks like Python has changed a lot since the last version I used (2.0 I think). If I didn't have Ruby, I'd consider looking at it again, but why now? I have yet to hear of features I want to use that Python has that are lacking in Ruby.
Hrm, interesting. After seeing this I went to the Python home page and found a document on this subject. After initially being overwhelmed with underscores, I tried to understand what was going on. It talked a lot about subclassing things like dictionaries, but I couldn't find anything about subclassing int and such.
Anyhow, I then fired up Python and said dir(1) and it gave me a list of methods. I then tried 1.__add__(2), and it didn't like it. Do I have the syntax wrong? If I do something equivalent in Ruby (1.methods, 1.+(2)) it works like I expect. I admit, I know Ruby much better than Python though so maybe it's just as easy in Python. Is there an easy way to do the equivalent of this in Python?
irb(main):026:0> class Fixnum; def distance_from_42; (self - 42).abs; end; end
=> nil
irb(main):027:0> 3.distance_from_42
=> 39
irb(main):028:0> 43.distance_from_42
=> 1
Anyhow, it's nice to see that Python is slowly becoming more Ruby-like. ;)
Yeah, cool ain't it? I knew about these other ways but I guess I was stuck on the "Python doesn't let you subclass built-in types" idea. Of course, I'm sure it doesn't let you extend them or modify instances of them either.
That's a pretty funny comment though: You love Ruby so much it makes you want to learn Smalltalk! ;)
As for me, I looked at Smalltalk, hated the syntax, and haven't really felt the interest to go back again.