Not so fast, there. I live in a ZIP code where there are about 10^4 people. Now, take your birth date, which is shared by one person in 365, and your birth year, which is shared by one person in roughly fifty, and tell me that if I give correct birth date, ZIP code and age, I cannot be pretty confidently identified from those data alone. I'd say that makes the data somewhat sensitive, so I always lie about both my age and birth date, and often about my ZIP code, when I'm asked for those data on most web forms.
You're on the road to hell, boyo
on
Mac mini to PC Hack
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That's why I bought my iBook, and because of the iBook I bought a MDD G4. Hell, I figured OSX was just a curiosity, and I ran OpenBSD on the iBook for a while, but then... I had to try OSX... and got hooked. If you start right out with OSX you'll be amazed, like I was when IPhoto recognized my camera without configuring -anything-. That's what did it for me.
From a column of George Orwell's, 3 November 1944:
"TO the lovers of useless knowledge (and I know there are a lot of them, from the number of letters I always get when I raise any question of this kind) I present a curious little problem arising out of the recent Pelican, Shakespeare's England. A writer named Fynes Morrison, touring England in 1607, describes melons as growing freely. Andrew Marvell, in a very well-known poem written about fifty years later, also refers to melons. Both references make it appear that the melons grew in the open, and indeed they must have done so if they grew at all. The hot-bed was a recent invention in 1600, and glass-houses, if they existed, must have been a very great rarity. I imagine it would be quite impossible to grow a melon in the open in England nowadays. They are hard enough to grow under glass, whence their price. Fynes Morrison also speaks of grapes growing in large enough quantities to make wine. Is it possible that our climate has changed radically in the last three hundred years? Or was the so-called melon actually a pumpkin?"
http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/ O/ OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19441103.html 3 November 1944 - As I Please - George Orwell, Book, etext
We still don't know what's driving climate change. Whether it's anthropogenic or otherwise is more worthy of debate. The climate has changed in the past, and the climate will change in the future. We do not even know whether climate change is bad.
I'm with sfb (whoever called the parent a troll is an ass). I have a 1G iPod because I liked the idea of the HDD-based player, but it's an idiotic DRM-crippled piece of work and every iPod purchase is a vote for DRM - and iTunes is needlessly complicated and stupid to boot. With iRiver, Cowon and X-Clef offering DRM-free hardware, I will probably only have to wait another six months for one of those manufacturers to get their act together and supply a box as easy to use as the iPod but without the DRM.
I don't even have anything in particular against Apple: I have a MDD G4 and an iBook 800 G3 that has had no problems at all. The iPod is, within its design details, a fine piece of work, but the DRM is annoying in the extreme.
The environmental "issue" is a smokescreen. The rule is a ploy by the EU to raise trade barriers against non-EU suppliers. The way the EU regs are written, if a non-EU company ships a lead-bearing PCBA to the EU and gets caught, that company can get -banned- from supplying to EU countries thenceforth; while if a EU company does the same thing its Minister of Trade has to stand up at the Hague and sing "I'm a Little Teapot".
All the rule does for the rest of the world is eviscerate forty years' worth of reliability development in electronics assembly. I will wait five years before purchasing any electronics, in the hope that by then the processes will be fixed or assembly reverts to lead-based solder.
So all yahoo has is my yahoo email address which they know anyway (the one I signed up with was on usa.net which went TU), and I looked at the marketing preferences which were all set to 'no' as in don't send it; and I freely admit I lied like a rug when they asked me for my physical address and stuff like that as I lie to everyone about my physical address and stuff like that.
It is the initial loss of control of your information that you should worry about. Subsequent changes are to be expected. Just lie, and maintain a throwaway email account.
I had this problem with my Windows-formatted iPod after trying to mount it, exactly once, on a Mac. The cure is to restore it. It doesn't seem you do any permanent damage this way.
If you are building a house this is so cheap and easy that you'd be crazy not to do it - after the framing is done but before the drywall goes in. My house has eight Cat 5e runs that all end up in a little closet where the router and the servers are. It was incredibly inexpensive to put in. The drywall guys charge next to nothing for the wall penetrations (maybe $3 per extra hole). The cost to me was about $200 for all the bits and pieces plus about an hour per run (45 minutes to install each one and 15 minutes to wire and test).
Code compliance, even in strict Santa Cruz county (.ca.us) was not an issue except the wall plates had to be on before occupancy. A blank wall plate meets code so you can leave all the cables unterminated, stick on a blank plate, and then go around and install the jacks whenever you want.
Certainly not! Google's ads are the one example I can think of, of a useful and relevant service (the rest are in-your-face crap, of which 99+% are filtered by Junkbuster). I don't filter -anything- on Google, since all of the stuff on the page is worthwhile.
Latest example: I'd never heard of headphone.com had it not been for Google. They got -revenue- from that ad. Two days ago.
There are lots of reasons why.cn would want to do this. First, being able to build -any- microprocessor means they have to build the infrastructure, which will probably not be just like Intel's. You have to have that infrastructure to be able to build microelectronics in general. Second, they get to miss all the blunders made earlier on that have accreted in modern fabs. Third, don't forget that a lot of H-1 holders are going home, and AMAT for one was full of.cn nationals..cn will find a ready market by doing what any mercantile entity does - slap nice fat tariffs on imported microelectronics. How they do this is irrelevant, they'll do it.
Do you get any traffic you want from.cn? No? Then just block it. All of it. Every IP address you can find in the.cn TLD. Anyone who looks at intrusion logs will have come to a similar conclusion..cn addresses have a very high bullshit-to-business ratio, so why even bother? If you want traffic from.cn, sorry, you are probably going to be hurt if this report is right.
the real problem in most systems is actually a lack of knowledge on the part of designers on how to really build good systems
Wrong-o. The problem is good systems don't sell. Adequate systems sell. We learn over and over again that rushing crap to market, and then advertising, works better (i.e. returns more revenue) than offering good products. You will find any number of technically meritorious products (Betamax, Lancia Fulvia, Alpha chip, OS/2) that died in spite of their design excellence and the fact they delivered real value.
The miracle today is some good designs actually get to market. However, Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap) has not been repealed.
This would not happen if the crew were paying attention to their job, but this ship had serious morale problems
Seaworthiness therefore depends in part on the crew. This is common sense. Is it taken into account in your ratings?
It's the same with computer systems. Asking a person, who might or might not know his job, to set up a ship's computer system on any particular OS will produce widely varying reliability results. If you were to do a very careful FMECA (failure modes, effects and criticality analysis) and iterate the design of a ship's computer you would probably find that a simple system designed to do the job was the right thing to use. Using a general-purpose computer for anything connected to navigation seems to be a definite request for a screwing.
Ever since Buckley's "Overdrive", where he used (and bragged about using) an HP-65 calculator to do his sight reductions, I have been very concerned about the idea that people are depending on electronics to do their navigation. Sounds as though the watch officer(s) were actionably slack in this case, if they weren't conscious of the quality of their fixes.
I believe you are asking the wrong question here. Perhaps what it is you need to know is "how well are computers integrated into ship's management, and how dire are the consequences of failure?" A job like this done well is probably nearly invariant with OS, but this job is bound to be done poorly in a lot of cases. That's why I suggest FMECA and a safety-based, rather than OS-based, review of critical systems.
It used to be called 'content analysis' and it was used as far back as WWII. You could tell -something- was going to happen if trains were consistently late, if people were getting turned back from an area, if grain was in short supply here but not there.
Example: Imagine you want to know when a vessel is leaving port. Who do you ask to find out?
The answer is the local whores. They know, and they'll tell. This is easy stuff, but it helps when you can analyze more content. Trouble is there's so much more content now that it's hard to figure out which sources are useful; therefore you have to sort of vote (correlate). Very much like detecting cracking attempts.
Delegates to China's parliament are reproaching Western Internet administrators...
Look up 'reproach'.
I have been blocking.cn for years, and I won't stop until the spam does. It is.cn's problem. Let them fix it.
SSSCA offers some -opportunities- too
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The SSSCA is the biggest opportunity for corporate jujitsu ever offered consumers. I assert that iff the SSSCA is written so that the -ability to assert controls- is not specific to a few, but is available to the many, it is a recording industry death blow.
The recording industry consists of specialists of various kinds. Some of these even have (or had) to do with the sound quality of recorded music (I'll just talk about recorded music and forget about movies, try extending what I say yourself). People who knew how to run a disc cutter, for example, were contributors to the sonic excellence - or lack thereof - of a given disc.
These specialists' work has largely been outmoded by digital copying. Much recorded music is only ever represented digitally until it's played back. And as the recording industry has become aware, digital storage and retrieval is something many consumers can do.
The recording industry -hires- talent. It does not have the talent as 'employees' but as a sort of hybrid of employees, contractors and indentured servants. The talent, not the recording industry, provides the product. The recording industry provides the package. For this service they receive the bulk of the money paid for the product generated by the talent.
Such a package isn't needed any more. When talent itself realizes this, they may decide the recording industry doesn't help them, and -iff they can assert their own content controls-, the recording industry can be cut out of the value equation. This means that talent will be able to -write their own contracts- based on the type and severity of copy controls they themselves wish to assert.
This does not mean copy controls won't be broken. It does, however, mean that less-severe copy controls will be seen as they should be, enhancement of the work's value, and below a certain point it won't be economically feasible to infringe the work's copyright at a profit. It will then fall to the -talent- to decide what point they will accept as correct.
Look at what else it does: imagine a perfect means exists of forcing a one-cent direct payment to listen to a recorded work of Bill Nelson's. (I am not saying this is good, I am just asking your suspension of disbelief for a few seconds.) Now, if Bill earns a million euros from people listening to "Atom Man Loves Radium Girl" he may conclude that he can wring more money out of that song, right? Wrong. If the content controls are a contract, they aren't subject to change. Your copy grants specific rights, -whatever they happen to be-. Would they be change-able? Impractical and probably fraudulent. Now Bill might re-issue the song with a more interesting mix, and raise the bar, but the existing work comes with a -contract- the artist himself said was OK.
Bill might price himself out of the market with the re-mix. In that case, he'd get lots of pennies from the old version and hardly any from the new. That is OK, right? "Oops, too much for that song, next one better be cheaper."
This is distribution, all right, and it lets the artists decide what they get for their work. All it takes is that the ability to assign content controls be available to anyone who wants to do it.
Therefore, if you are going to write to your favorite politician about SSSCA, please, don't ask them not to pass it. Ask them instead to make sure evenhanded assertion of copyright is available to everyone through the mechanism of SSSCA, and that the copyright agreements mediated or enforced by SSSCA mechanisms be considered contractual.
I'm no net.ghod, I may be missing something very elementary, but let me ask this: if an entity decided to do DNS, and -your- nameserver field pointed to that entity, would DNS not continue to do the right thing if the domain space controlled by ICANN were a subdomain of the one served by the new entity? If you decided that 'legacy addresses extant 25 Feb 02 would be resolved via ICANN, newer would be resolved by (new.net|novus|whatever)', would that not allow existing addresses to be served, while opening new TLDs and drawing ICANN's teeth at one swell foop?
It wouldn't even matter if ICANN tried to trump this - that won't work unless they do what we want (expand the TLD space enough) anyway.
"If it weren't for time, everything would happen at once, and we would all be very confused." - G. G. Kay
And if, as we are seeing, the value of most of this pap is $0, well, go figure.
The amazing thing is that anyone would want to watch a sitcom -again-. The only weekly shows I ever made a fetish of taping were "Twin Peaks" and "Max Headroom". They were worth it (well, only the first four or five Headroom shows was). Not much else is.
Didja see the part where he doesn't disclose his diagnosis, so he can keep collecting disability benefits? His scam goes:
1) Whine a lot about a man-made phenomenon.
2) Get good at malingering.
3) See a doctor, claiming 1) makes you "sick".
4) Vote for your living from that day forward. (The louder you bitch, the more you cash in!)
Really, this guy deserves a kick from every Californian, because we are supporting this bullshit with our taxes.
TdR's imprimatur is on an -operating system-. That imprimatur has value: Theo sells what Darren is giving away. Darren's imprimatur is on a wonderful -component-. And it takes the OS I value to run whatever packet filter is used. I'm not good enough to evaluate what Darren might have changed to make his distro work, so my choices are 1) get an OS with unknown provenance, with at least one known good component, from Darren; 2) get one with known provenance, but a less-proven packet filter, from Theo; 3) stick with 2.9+ipf (which was my choice).
I happen to think the whole ipf license 'clarification' issue was slimy, and Sturm und Drang aside, I have to admire TdR for sticking to principle and having the guts to go with a new packet filter. But I'll wait to upgrade until pf matures a bit.
Companies I've "worked for":
Big Bag of Stuff, Inc.
Other Things and Things.
Inquisition Software.
Blowme Inc.
Come on, do you say -anything- truthful on an online reg? Giving away your name, DOB and zip code are usually enough to get you personally identified via databases.
There are some times (esp. where big databases are concerned) when it is moral to lie.
Slashdot Mirror
Not so fast, there. I live in a ZIP code where there are about 10^4 people. Now, take your birth date, which is shared by one person in 365, and your birth year, which is shared by one person in roughly fifty, and tell me that if I give correct birth date, ZIP code and age, I cannot be pretty confidently identified from those data alone. I'd say that makes the data somewhat sensitive, so I always lie about both my age and birth date, and often about my ZIP code, when I'm asked for those data on most web forms.
That's why I bought my iBook, and because of the iBook I bought a MDD G4. Hell, I figured OSX was just a curiosity, and I ran OpenBSD on the iBook for a while, but then... I had to try OSX... and got hooked. If you start right out with OSX you'll be amazed, like I was when IPhoto recognized my camera without configuring -anything-. That's what did it for me.
From a column of George Orwell's, 3 November 1944:
/ O/ OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19441103.html
"TO the lovers of useless knowledge (and I know there are a lot of them, from the number of letters I always get when I raise any question of this kind) I present a curious little problem arising out of the recent Pelican, Shakespeare's England. A writer named Fynes Morrison, touring England in 1607, describes melons as growing freely. Andrew Marvell, in a very well-known poem written about fifty years later, also refers to melons. Both references make it appear that the melons grew in the open, and indeed they must have done so if they grew at all. The hot-bed was a recent invention in 1600, and glass-houses, if they existed, must have been a very great rarity. I imagine it would be quite impossible to grow a melon in the open in England nowadays. They are hard enough to grow under glass, whence their price. Fynes Morrison also speaks of grapes growing in large enough quantities to make wine. Is it possible that our climate has changed radically in the last three hundred years? Or was the so-called melon actually a pumpkin?"
http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors
3 November 1944 - As I Please - George Orwell, Book, etext
We still don't know what's driving climate change. Whether it's anthropogenic or otherwise is more worthy of debate. The climate has changed in the past, and the climate will change in the future. We do not even know whether climate change is bad.
I'm with sfb (whoever called the parent a troll is an ass). I have a 1G iPod because I liked the idea of the HDD-based player, but it's an idiotic DRM-crippled piece of work and every iPod purchase is a vote for DRM - and iTunes is needlessly complicated and stupid to boot. With iRiver, Cowon and X-Clef offering DRM-free hardware, I will probably only have to wait another six months for one of those manufacturers to get their act together and supply a box as easy to use as the iPod but without the DRM.
I don't even have anything in particular against Apple: I have a MDD G4 and an iBook 800 G3 that has had no problems at all. The iPod is, within its design details, a fine piece of work, but the DRM is annoying in the extreme.
this device respects the broadcast flag or not? I've seen this device hyped several places but no one seems to be saying.
The environmental "issue" is a smokescreen. The rule is a ploy by the EU to raise trade barriers against non-EU suppliers. The way the EU regs are written, if a non-EU company ships a lead-bearing PCBA to the EU and gets caught, that company can get -banned- from supplying to EU countries thenceforth; while if a EU company does the same thing its Minister of Trade has to stand up at the Hague and sing "I'm a Little Teapot".
All the rule does for the rest of the world is eviscerate forty years' worth of reliability development in electronics assembly. I will wait five years before purchasing any electronics, in the hope that by then the processes will be fixed or assembly reverts to lead-based solder.
He's supposed to be working on "Again: Dangerous Visions"; he hasn't got time for this stuff.
Imagine being underneath the hail of bullets that didn't reach their mark. That is an idea from a certified nitwit.
They've spammed me twice. Imagine, not only can you sign up for an AOL clone, but you can get it already loaded with spam.
I'm starting to associate Netscape with lousy marketing, AOL and stupidity.
So all yahoo has is my yahoo email address which they know anyway (the one I signed up with was on usa.net which went TU), and I looked at the marketing preferences which were all set to 'no' as in don't send it; and I freely admit I lied like a rug when they asked me for my physical address and stuff like that as I lie to everyone about my physical address and stuff like that.
It is the initial loss of control of your information that you should worry about. Subsequent changes are to be expected. Just lie, and maintain a throwaway email account.
I had this problem with my Windows-formatted iPod after trying to mount it, exactly once, on a Mac. The cure is to restore it. It doesn't seem you do any permanent damage this way.
If you are building a house this is so cheap and easy that you'd be crazy not to do it - after the framing is done but before the drywall goes in. My house has eight Cat 5e runs that all end up in a little closet where the router and the servers are. It was incredibly inexpensive to put in. The drywall guys charge next to nothing for the wall penetrations (maybe $3 per extra hole). The cost to me was about $200 for all the bits and pieces plus about an hour per run (45 minutes to install each one and 15 minutes to wire and test).
Code compliance, even in strict Santa Cruz county (.ca.us) was not an issue except the wall plates had to be on before occupancy. A blank wall plate meets code so you can leave all the cables unterminated, stick on a blank plate, and then go around and install the jacks whenever you want.
Certainly not! Google's ads are the one example I can think of, of a useful and relevant service (the rest are in-your-face crap, of which 99+% are filtered by Junkbuster). I don't filter -anything- on Google, since all of the stuff on the page is worthwhile.
Latest example: I'd never heard of headphone.com had it not been for Google. They got -revenue- from that ad. Two days ago.
There are lots of reasons why .cn would want to do this. First, being able to build -any- microprocessor means they have to build the infrastructure, which will probably not be just like Intel's. You have to have that infrastructure to be able to build microelectronics in general. Second, they get to miss all the blunders made earlier on that have accreted in modern fabs. Third, don't forget that a lot of H-1 holders are going home, and AMAT for one was full of .cn nationals. .cn will find a ready market by doing what any mercantile entity does - slap nice fat tariffs on imported microelectronics. How they do this is irrelevant, they'll do it.
Do you get any traffic you want from .cn? No? Then just block it. All of it. Every IP address you can find in the .cn TLD. Anyone who looks at intrusion logs will have come to a similar conclusion. .cn addresses have a very high bullshit-to-business ratio, so why even bother? .cn, sorry, you are probably going to be hurt if this report is right.
If you want traffic from
the real problem in most systems is actually a lack of knowledge on the part of designers on how to really build good systems
Wrong-o. The problem is good systems don't sell. Adequate systems sell. We learn over and over again that rushing crap to market, and then advertising, works better (i.e. returns more revenue) than offering good products. You will find any number of technically meritorious products (Betamax, Lancia Fulvia, Alpha chip, OS/2) that died in spite of their design excellence and the fact they delivered real value.
The miracle today is some good designs actually get to market. However, Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap) has not been repealed.
This would not happen if the crew were paying attention to their job, but this ship had serious morale problems
Seaworthiness therefore depends in part on the crew. This is common sense. Is it taken into account in your ratings?
It's the same with computer systems. Asking a person, who might or might not know his job, to set up a ship's computer system on any particular OS will produce widely varying reliability results. If you were to do a very careful FMECA (failure modes, effects and criticality analysis) and iterate the design of a ship's computer you would probably find that a simple system designed to do the job was the right thing to use. Using a general-purpose computer for anything connected to navigation seems to be a definite request for a screwing.
Ever since Buckley's "Overdrive", where he used (and bragged about using) an HP-65 calculator to do his sight reductions, I have been very concerned about the idea that people are depending on electronics to do their navigation. Sounds as though the watch officer(s) were actionably slack in this case, if they weren't conscious of the quality of their fixes.
I believe you are asking the wrong question here. Perhaps what it is you need to know is "how well are computers integrated into ship's management, and how dire are the consequences of failure?" A job like this done well is probably nearly invariant with OS, but this job is bound to be done poorly in a lot of cases. That's why I suggest FMECA and a safety-based, rather than OS-based, review of critical systems.
It used to be called 'content analysis' and it was used as far back as WWII. You could tell -something- was going to happen if trains were consistently late, if people were getting turned back from an area, if grain was in short supply here but not there.
Example: Imagine you want to know when a vessel is leaving port. Who do you ask to find out?
The answer is the local whores. They know, and they'll tell.
This is easy stuff, but it helps when you can analyze more content. Trouble is there's so much more content now that it's hard to figure out which sources are useful; therefore you have to sort of vote (correlate). Very much like detecting cracking attempts.
Less judgmental, huh?
Delegates to China's parliament are reproaching Western Internet administrators...
Look up 'reproach'.
I have been blocking .cn for years, and I won't stop until the spam does. It is .cn's problem. Let them fix it.
The SSSCA is the biggest opportunity for corporate jujitsu ever offered consumers. I assert that iff the SSSCA is written so that the -ability to assert controls- is not specific to a few, but is available to the many, it is a recording industry death blow.
The recording industry consists of specialists of various kinds. Some of these even have (or had) to do with the sound quality of recorded music (I'll just talk about recorded music and forget about movies, try extending what I say yourself). People who knew how to run a disc cutter, for example, were contributors to the sonic excellence - or lack thereof - of a given disc.
These specialists' work has largely been outmoded by digital copying. Much recorded music is only ever represented digitally until it's played back. And as the recording industry has become aware, digital storage and retrieval is something many consumers can do.
The recording industry -hires- talent. It does not have the talent as 'employees' but as a sort of hybrid of employees, contractors and indentured servants. The talent, not the recording industry, provides the product. The recording industry provides the package. For this service they receive the bulk of the money paid for the product generated by the talent.
Such a package isn't needed any more. When talent itself realizes this, they may decide the recording industry doesn't help them, and -iff they can assert their own content controls-, the recording industry can be cut out of the value equation. This means that talent will be able to -write their own contracts- based on the type and severity of copy controls they themselves wish to assert.
This does not mean copy controls won't be broken. It does, however, mean that less-severe copy controls will be seen as they should be, enhancement of the work's value, and below a certain point it won't be economically feasible to infringe the work's copyright at a profit. It will then fall to the -talent- to decide what point they will accept as correct.
Look at what else it does: imagine a perfect means exists of forcing a one-cent direct payment to listen to a recorded work of Bill Nelson's. (I am not saying this is good, I am just asking your suspension of disbelief for a few seconds.) Now, if Bill earns a million euros from people listening to "Atom Man Loves Radium Girl" he may conclude that he can wring more money out of that song, right? Wrong. If the content controls are a contract, they aren't subject to change. Your copy grants specific rights, -whatever they happen to be-. Would they be change-able? Impractical and probably fraudulent. Now Bill might re-issue the song with a more interesting mix, and raise the bar, but the existing work comes with a -contract- the artist himself said was OK.
Bill might price himself out of the market with the re-mix. In that case, he'd get lots of pennies from the old version and hardly any from the new. That is OK, right? "Oops, too much for that song, next one better be cheaper."
This is distribution, all right, and it lets the artists decide what they get for their work. All it takes is that the ability to assign content controls be available to anyone who wants to do it.
Therefore, if you are going to write to your favorite politician about SSSCA, please, don't ask them not to pass it. Ask them instead to make sure evenhanded assertion of copyright is available to everyone through the mechanism of SSSCA, and that the copyright agreements mediated or enforced by SSSCA mechanisms be considered contractual.
I'm no net.ghod, I may be missing something very elementary, but let me ask this: if an entity decided to do DNS, and -your- nameserver field pointed to that entity, would DNS not continue to do the right thing if the domain space controlled by ICANN were a subdomain of the one served by the new entity? If you decided that 'legacy addresses extant 25 Feb 02 would be resolved via ICANN, newer would be resolved by (new.net|novus|whatever)', would that not allow existing addresses to be served, while opening new TLDs and drawing ICANN's teeth at one swell foop?
It wouldn't even matter if ICANN tried to trump this - that won't work unless they do what we want (expand the TLD space enough) anyway.
"If it weren't for time, everything would happen at once, and we would all be very confused." - G. G. Kay
And if, as we are seeing, the value of most of this pap is $0, well, go figure.
The amazing thing is that anyone would want to watch a sitcom -again-. The only weekly shows I ever made a fetish of taping were "Twin Peaks" and "Max Headroom". They were worth it (well, only the first four or five Headroom shows was). Not much else is.
Didja see the part where he doesn't disclose his diagnosis, so he can keep collecting disability benefits? His scam goes:
1) Whine a lot about a man-made phenomenon.
2) Get good at malingering.
3) See a doctor, claiming 1) makes you "sick".
4) Vote for your living from that day forward. (The louder you bitch, the more you cash in!)
Really, this guy deserves a kick from every Californian, because we are supporting this bullshit with our taxes.
This story made me laugh my bag off.
TdR's imprimatur is on an -operating system-. That imprimatur has value: Theo sells what Darren is giving away. Darren's imprimatur is on a wonderful -component-. And it takes the OS I value to run whatever packet filter is used. I'm not good enough to evaluate what Darren might have changed to make his distro work, so my choices are 1) get an OS with unknown provenance, with at least one known good component, from Darren; 2) get one with known provenance, but a less-proven packet filter, from Theo; 3) stick with 2.9+ipf (which was my choice).
I happen to think the whole ipf license 'clarification' issue was slimy, and Sturm und Drang aside, I have to admire TdR for sticking to principle and having the guts to go with a new packet filter. But I'll wait to upgrade until pf matures a bit.
Cartoonist.
Gigolo.
Roofer.
Unemployed.
Pickle packer.
Vintner.
Companies I've "worked for":
Big Bag of Stuff, Inc.
Other Things and Things.
Inquisition Software.
Blowme Inc.
Come on, do you say -anything- truthful on an online reg? Giving away your name, DOB and zip code are usually enough to get you personally identified via databases.
There are some times (esp. where big databases are concerned) when it is moral to lie.