Umm... I've always thought people were a bit quick to jump on CmdrTaco, but I must admit that this post confused me. There is a line that appears twice in a row. I thought I lost my place, so I went back a little, and ended up thinking that I had lost my place, so I went forward a little, and thought I lost my place... CmdrTaco's got me reading in an infinite loop!
Is that Mountain Dew gun legal?! And if you believe that the company is a friendly neighborhood comic store, think again. Go to the main site, www.birdman.org, and take a look at their products. They range from somewhat scary (300-round Uzi magazines), to just plain frightening -- a cordless phone used in "hostage negotiations". Essentially, you hand them the phone to talk to them, and then remotely enter some code, and the phone will shoot the person in the head -- there's a gun build into the earpiece.
Anyone else a bit creeped out by this whole thing? I live in "peaceful" neighborhood, but imagine walking down a dark alley and noticing that it is littered with Mountain Dew cans... And then being told the phone is for you...
BTW, one quick logistics thing. When was the last time that you saw a hostage situation on TV and the cops walked in and said "Here. Talk to us on this phone."??! I have no firsthand experience (nor do I expect many people to), but in the movies the cops always call the "badguy" from a cell phone. The "badguy" answers the phone inside. Unless they're suggesting that this replace *all* phones in any building likely to be in a hostage situation?
I suggest that you go to a store that actually has the trackballs connected to a computer... Most stores in my area just have trackballs sitting on a shelf... It is very useful to get a feel for how it will act on the computer.
I am particularly fond of my Logitech MarbleMan mouse (I don't remember the exact model number). The main reason that I got the trackball was that the cheap mouse that came with my computer was getting dirty and kept locking up. I decided that a trackball was cool, and I wanted one. I did a (small) bit of research, and found that the "Marbleman" technology worked even if the trackball was all gummed up, and I *love* this feature.
But be warned -- it's like big monitors. Once you get used to it, you'll refuse to back to anything else. Which is a bad thing considering that the 'average' computer has a 15" monitor and whatever mouse the manufacturer gave you...
I can actually see this coming into common use. Perhaps the entire community here should write them letters informing them of our change of terms? Enclosures of this image are optional.;)
I always assumed their servers were run by Windoze, then I read an article somewhere mentioning that they ran some form of BSD, and were going to change over to Windows.
After the switchover, my account worked fine. For a while. Then I started running into server outages. And for some reason, the old Tru64 Alpha I use at school doesn't work. (I don't know why; I think it's either the fact that Netscape uses HTTP/1.0, or that they require you to use Windows. I think the former is more likely). So while Hotmail hasn't necessarily been going downhill steadily as the article suggests, the takeover didn't really help things.
IIRC, if the post office sees this, they may mark you as deceased and just stop delivering mail to you. I'm not too sure about this, but you may want to be careful...
Well, I usually send some wacky reply to any spam I get. What I particularly like to do is start out on some serious sounding note ("Thanks for the message! I'm interested in signing up, but I have a few questions to ask..."), and then suddenly veer off topic and start insane ramblings. That way, they don't just delete it as some hostile reply. Instead, they read part of it, and *then* realize that it's just some bizarre psycho replying to them.
The other thing I want to do is create a mailing list of spammers. Essentially, I will add spam to a mailing list I create that only a script can send to. The script would send out absolute garbage, such as the contents of/etc/fstab, or maybe even random characters. Better yet, have a script that will save any and all images you see in Netscape, and randomly send a few out.:-)
Of course, neither of these ideas will work, becuase almost every address I send mail to is shut down before they get my message... 8(
LOL - Literally. I burst out laughing when I read this. But I agree with the other comment, flour is better.
But what if the DEA intercepts it thinking it's cocaine or something?! I read the article that someone else linked to, and they claim that they mailed a brick (with correct postage). They got a notice about it, and when they went to the post office, it was smashed open. My understanding was that the DEA smashed it open, thinking it contained drugs or something... That must be a fun job. ("Hey, a brick! Let's smash it open!" "Hey, a bunch of AOL CD's! Let's smash those!" "Hey, someone bought Microsoft Windows! Let's do them a favor and smash that!")
FLIP IT AROUND-- sell your stuff back to THEM with their postage
SHEER BRILLIANCE! I love this idea! I wish I owned a company so I could do this. I'm exactly the type of person who would do this... I also claim ownership of the idea of "prank faxing" -- fax companies their junk. When you get their mail, stick it in the fax machine and mail it back to them!
Umm... I'm not speaking out of authority or anything, but I somehow doubt this will work. ("Oh, look, someone crossed out this address and put Bill Gates'. Hmm... I guess he decided to change his address and hand-write it.")
Whoa, you've confused me. Are you talking about a call that a human answers, or a modem dial-up number? The human answering thing is funny (though illegal, I guess), but calling up another modem repeatedly is just dumb. I think you were referring to the former. But then again, if you just do it once, I doubt they'd do anything... ("Oops! Sorry! I put the wrong number in, I guess. I don't know how to work all this newfangled technology. Back in my days..."):-)
Exactly what I was going to say -- you can be fined for "abusing" the Postal Service. There was a link somewhere that mentioned that they went to pick up some rotting thing that they had mailed to themselves, and were warned that they could be fined -- even though they were the recipient. (The PS had no knowledge that they were also the sender.)
There was something in my newspaper about this, probably about a year ago. Someone got this huge order form envelope (think "extra large manila envelope"). They decided to fill it with cat food cans and sent it back.
For those of you who don't know it, this story was inspired by a story last night / yesterday entitled "Spammer Gets Spammed." There were two things that I found to be really funny there, I wanted to repeat them because I don't see them here. Not surprisingly, they were the top two posts. See the story here. Provided that no moderators go and remoderate, the two I liked were the two top posts. I am not claiming credit for them, but they were so funny that I wanted to mention them again...
The first one mentions referring telemarketers to a "Mr. Wolf", who managed donation issues and such. Telemarketers were given the phone number for the local zoo.
But my absolute favorite was this list of things to put in reply envelopes:
Little Plastic Army Men
Out of focus photographs
Change. (Costing more in postage than it's worth)
Lettuce.
A printed warning about the Goodtimes virus.
Again, I'm not claiming credit for this list. (It was posted by "xFox")
When I get spam (electronic junk mail?), I reply to it with some bizarre message. Someone sent me some weight loss offer, and I replied, putting thing like "munch munch" in between phrases... I realize few people will even see it, but it amuses me to no end...
Visa keeps bugging me about sending them stuff, and it really annoys me.
I finally filled an envelope with a bunch of coins and 30 cents Canadian, telling them that they had won an "All expenses paid" vacation to Canada, with a little footnote saying "In the unlikely event that you incur more than 30 cents of costs, you are responsible for paying the remainder." I also added one stipulation -- they had to throw whatever lists they had with my name over the waterfall at Niagra Falls.
I've never understood how companies can put up a page saying that they're down. It's the digital equivalent of responding to someone knocking by saying "No one's home!".
The most obvious solution is that they have an extra server hosting this page. But if that's the case, why doesn't that server just host their site? At least parts of it!
You raise a good point. If I didn't know what Linux was, I would most likething consider it a "crippled" OS for "Internet appliances", that is "easy for beginners to use." I used to love Windows and hate MacOS, because MacOS was "easy for beginners" but not much else; Windows could do everything. Then I found Linux, and my perspective pretty much did a 180...
Perhaps we can patent the process of writing news articles about Linux when you don't know much about it? Then they'll have to get our permission first...:) (JK)
In my high school computer lab, I have some *really* stupid people. After a few hours, our monitors power off. So when you come into the lab in the morning, all the monitors are off, but the computers are on. I've seen several people walk in and hit the power button, expecting the computer to come on, not realizing that they just need to press the keyboard or move the mouse.
These are probably the same people who saw some "weird error message" (consisting of the words "The system Administrator has locked this workstation..."), and decided to sit down, restart the computer, and use it. The teacher (with Admin access) ended up losing a lot of work he had done, and he wasn't all that happy with the moron who shut the computer off.
Slashdot Mirror
It no longer talks about soup morphing into "a Ant"...
Hey, you're good. I couldn't even tell what was written! ;-)
He was redundantly accepted and is now not only a member, but also the president.
Umm... I've always thought people were a bit quick to jump on CmdrTaco, but I must admit that this post confused me. There is a line that appears twice in a row. I thought I lost my place, so I went back a little, and ended up thinking that I had lost my place, so I went forward a little, and thought I lost my place... CmdrTaco's got me reading in an infinite loop!
Anyone else a bit creeped out by this whole thing? I live in "peaceful" neighborhood, but imagine walking down a dark alley and noticing that it is littered with Mountain Dew cans... And then being told the phone is for you...
BTW, one quick logistics thing. When was the last time that you saw a hostage situation on TV and the cops walked in and said "Here. Talk to us on this phone."??! I have no firsthand experience (nor do I expect many people to), but in the movies the cops always call the "badguy" from a cell phone. The "badguy" answers the phone inside. Unless they're suggesting that this replace *all* phones in any building likely to be in a hostage situation?
Umm... Yeah. Sure. The parent post.
I am particularly fond of my Logitech MarbleMan mouse (I don't remember the exact model number). The main reason that I got the trackball was that the cheap mouse that came with my computer was getting dirty and kept locking up. I decided that a trackball was cool, and I wanted one. I did a (small) bit of research, and found that the "Marbleman" technology worked even if the trackball was all gummed up, and I *love* this feature.
But be warned -- it's like big monitors. Once you get used to it, you'll refuse to back to anything else. Which is a bad thing considering that the 'average' computer has a 15" monitor and whatever mouse the manufacturer gave you...
After the switchover, my account worked fine. For a while. Then I started running into server outages. And for some reason, the old Tru64 Alpha I use at school doesn't work. (I don't know why; I think it's either the fact that Netscape uses HTTP/1.0, or that they require you to use Windows. I think the former is more likely). So while Hotmail hasn't necessarily been going downhill steadily as the article suggests, the takeover didn't really help things.
Umm... Won't your friends get billed for it? I don't know that they would really like that.
IIRC, if the post office sees this, they may mark you as deceased and just stop delivering mail to you. I'm not too sure about this, but you may want to be careful...
The other thing I want to do is create a mailing list of spammers. Essentially, I will add spam to a mailing list I create that only a script can send to. The script would send out absolute garbage, such as the contents of /etc/fstab, or maybe even random characters. Better yet, have a script that will save any and all images you see in Netscape, and randomly send a few out. :-)
Of course, neither of these ideas will work, becuase almost every address I send mail to is shut down before they get my message... 8(
But what if the DEA intercepts it thinking it's cocaine or something?! I read the article that someone else linked to, and they claim that they mailed a brick (with correct postage). They got a notice about it, and when they went to the post office, it was smashed open. My understanding was that the DEA smashed it open, thinking it contained drugs or something... That must be a fun job. ("Hey, a brick! Let's smash it open!" "Hey, a bunch of AOL CD's! Let's smash those!" "Hey, someone bought Microsoft Windows! Let's do them a favor and smash that!")
SHEER BRILLIANCE! I love this idea! I wish I owned a company so I could do this. I'm exactly the type of person who would do this... I also claim ownership of the idea of "prank faxing" -- fax companies their junk. When you get their mail, stick it in the fax machine and mail it back to them!
Umm... I'm not speaking out of authority or anything, but I somehow doubt this will work. ("Oh, look, someone crossed out this address and put Bill Gates'. Hmm... I guess he decided to change his address and hand-write it.")
Whoa, you've confused me. Are you talking about a call that a human answers, or a modem dial-up number? The human answering thing is funny (though illegal, I guess), but calling up another modem repeatedly is just dumb. I think you were referring to the former. But then again, if you just do it once, I doubt they'd do anything... ("Oops! Sorry! I put the wrong number in, I guess. I don't know how to work all this newfangled technology. Back in my days...") :-)
Exactly what I was going to say -- you can be fined for "abusing" the Postal Service. There was a link somewhere that mentioned that they went to pick up some rotting thing that they had mailed to themselves, and were warned that they could be fined -- even though they were the recipient. (The PS had no knowledge that they were also the sender.)
For those of you who don't know it, this story was inspired by a story last night / yesterday entitled "Spammer Gets Spammed." There were two things that I found to be really funny there, I wanted to repeat them because I don't see them here. Not surprisingly, they were the top two posts. See the story here. Provided that no moderators go and remoderate, the two I liked were the two top posts. I am not claiming credit for them, but they were so funny that I wanted to mention them again...
The first one mentions referring telemarketers to a "Mr. Wolf", who managed donation issues and such. Telemarketers were given the phone number for the local zoo.
But my absolute favorite was this list of things to put in reply envelopes:
Again, I'm not claiming credit for this list. (It was posted by "xFox")
When I get spam (electronic junk mail?), I reply to it with some bizarre message. Someone sent me some weight loss offer, and I replied, putting thing like "munch munch" in between phrases... I realize few people will even see it, but it amuses me to no end...
I finally filled an envelope with a bunch of coins and 30 cents Canadian, telling them that they had won an "All expenses paid" vacation to Canada, with a little footnote saying "In the unlikely event that you incur more than 30 cents of costs, you are responsible for paying the remainder." I also added one stipulation -- they had to throw whatever lists they had with my name over the waterfall at Niagra Falls.
It took me a minute to realize this was sarcasm!
The most obvious solution is that they have an extra server hosting this page. But if that's the case, why doesn't that server just host their site? At least parts of it!
Umm... Macromedia is a company. Apparently Macromedia can buy a bunch of these and use them if they need support while writing their programs... ;)
Perhaps we can patent the process of writing news articles about Linux when you don't know much about it? Then they'll have to get our permission first... :) (JK)
In my high school computer lab, I have some *really* stupid people. After a few hours, our monitors power off. So when you come into the lab in the morning, all the monitors are off, but the computers are on. I've seen several people walk in and hit the power button, expecting the computer to come on, not realizing that they just need to press the keyboard or move the mouse.
These are probably the same people who saw some "weird error message" (consisting of the words "The system Administrator has locked this workstation..."), and decided to sit down, restart the computer, and use it. The teacher (with Admin access) ended up losing a lot of work he had done, and he wasn't all that happy with the moron who shut the computer off.