Re:Keep the smoking gun for LARTing
on
Dorm Storm?
·
· Score: 1
"The guy" should see what a competent lawyer thinks about wiretapping if for some reason he won't be graduating. Even if an institution SAYS "we'll be watching what you do" it doesn't make it legal. Colleges are pretty good for settlements.
That table mixes the subjective and objective deftly, and is as of as much value as the following beer (not free) comparison:
CONTAINS HOPS CONTAINS WATER TASTES GREAT
Bud______Y________________Y____________N
Coors____Y________________Y____________N1
Bass_____?2_______________Y____________Y
1) Some people in the community think Coors tastes great, but considering this is subjective bullshit it doesn't matter.
2) Bass is an 'ale' not a 'lager' like Bud and Coors, and I don't know enough about beer to know if 'ale' contains 'hops.' I know there are 'bugs' in this list (in other words I have little clue as to what I'm talking about and I hope people who do have a clue fill in the blanks for me) but my stupid little occasionally accurate matrix of text made it on/. wahoo!
I have a feeling showing that table to your PHB might give your PHB more clue about YOU than open source code and the associated licenses that a real PHB couldn't care less about. Remember to post a "I got laid off, now what?" 'ask slashdot' request in hope you'll get more brilliant advice.
I should think as compilers go a C compiler would be fairly easy to implement, aren't there just like 14 reserved words, and aren't several of them obsolete/never used? And weren't c++ "compilers" really cross-compilers that converted c++ to plain old c? Giving us that delightful "name mangling"?
I wish people would stop dreaming up new languages and concentrate on enhancing existing languages, Java in particular. As a programmer, I'm not going to keep more than 2 or 3 languages handy on the top of my head and I doubt many other programmers are so inclined either. Java at the moment does the most for me, even if it does compute a FFT slower than asm, perl is nice when you don't have a plan and don't want to think too much, and C is the common tounge of *nix. What's in it for me to learn C#, D, Python, etc. that isn't already covered by perl, C or Java? (That's rhetorical, the answer is nothing.)
Alternate pronunciations, eh? How about "It's spelled 'Raymond Luxury Yacht', but it's pronounced 'Throatwobbler Mangrove.'"
"You're a very silly man, and I'm not going to read you your email."
Is it stealing for a public library to make books, cds, and videos available for public use at no charge? Is it stealing for me to buy a magazine and put it in my waiting room so hundreds of people read it without paying for it? Is it stealing for me to play a CD in my backyard so people who didn't pay for it can hear it? Is it stealing to record a song off the radio?
There are many things that can be interpreted as "copyright infringement," many of which nobody thinks twice about. And there is a major difference between possibly depriving someone of potential revenue based on copyright, and stealing something from them.
1) They come up with these projects like JXTA, give you a philosophy, framework, whitepapers and tons of other stuff to read, and give you zero examples of useful code. My clever idea for embedding base-64 encoded binary data within XML files for file sharing (to facilitate streaming, reduce stupid filenames, allow files to store md5 hash and content length, allow public-key sigs and/or crypto, versioning, and basically any other metadata you could possibly want while still allowing network portability (smtp in particular), XML compliance and still be able to go 'uudecode file.xme' and get useful output) won't get any play whatsoever unless somebody (I suppose me) writes a 'reference implementation' that resembles something useful.
2. They have problems playing nice with de facto standards. The one that pissed me off the most was their deprecation with a vengeance of get/setenv. Any OS worth its salt supports some sort of environment variable, and those that don't could have get/setenv emulated by the jre. They left people trying to deal with bizzare command lines to pass in system properties, which is very nearly a waste of time. Anywho, the cgi-bin crowd read that as "java servlets or no java" and said "no java." Java servlets/jsp are often as good a choice or better for many types of web apps, but Sun doesn't do much to cater to people who think more in perl or ssi's (php).
Before I knew how laminating applied to metal, I used to think the "laminate armor" of fantasy RPG type things probably looked remarkably like a conference room table.
486 and 586-class general-purpose processors are probably fine things to develop and test embedded applications with (to a point) but I doubt they're a great long-term choice, I'm guessing this will only impact people who deserve it.
Every time I've shut down Apache for whatever reason or other I've never even had it cross my mind that I should reboot twice or even once to make sure no vestage of it remains. The *ix-ish model of services running in userspace as daemons makes much more sense than the NT-ish every service is either part of the OS or velcro'ed so tightly to it that you aren't sure where one ends and the other begins. I've seen many a Linux box where random stuff has crashed and the console is either dead or covered with error messages but those 10 httpd threads that were there at startup are still firing out web pages if you ask for 'em, and many an NT box where an error caused by IE or the mouse driver effectively takes the rest of the box with it. The standard spec for NT servers where I work appears to include watchdog cards, I think they're called Hangtime (cute name) cards, that're supposed to automatically reboot the server if something bad happens and can accept remote reboot requests even if the OS is hosed. I think they even work once in a while.
There are approximately zero copywriters now employed at Rythms.
Possibly more than have ever been employed by/. Oh, and I just noticed that according to how slashdot capsules the articles they link to, an infinate number of monkeys punching randomly at calculators would not only approximate pi, they'd get it right on the nose if the decimal place they were starting from was not arbitrary. It's also cute to read threads about the digits 1337 occur at position 199932, therefore an effective compression algorithm would be to tokenize something like 1337 with "position 199932 of pi." That's like saying putting a s p a c e b e t w e e n e v e r y l e t t e r y o u type is more effiecient than not because compression algorithms are very effective on text files with lots of whitespace. viva la brain donors
>Some days, I try to get through to slashdot but I get a "Access to this page is denied" error on my screen.
Have you asked your parents to turn off Cyber Patrol on your home computer? It could be those are the days when CmdrTaco's having a bad day and putting <HIDDEN>slashdot readers are assholes</HIDDEN> and such on the front page to get out his frustrations.
Hmm. I'd hate to call an anonymous coward a liar, but it's hard for me to believe that there's a staff of humans laundering email content from the people's republic, and it'd be a bitch to write a program to change "unhappy due to lack of money" to "unwell, but feeling better because of flowing money" unless some Japanese videogame designers had a hand in it.
If you are using my phone with my consent, yes it should give me the right to record your conversation. It's my phone. What I should do before you use is say, "Jake, sure you can use my phone but I'll be on the receiver in the other room because last time I think you said some nasty things about me." You can then spit in my face and/or use a payphone.
It's actually two separate issues, legally, at least in the US. If I ask to use your phone, I'm asking your consent, you may permit or deny my request. If you wish to wiretap me, you must (with certain unconstitutional IMO exceptions that don't apply in this case) get my consent, and the burden of proof is on you if that consent comes into question. It's like the "this call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes" annoucement. If as soon as you speak to a human you say "I do not consent to having this call montiored or recorded" they should respect that wish. If they continue to monitor or record you, or if they refuse to speak with you as a result of your request, they may be in legal trouble, especially if they have some sort of obligation to talk to you (calling the phone company to report trouble, for instance).
Similar stands must be taken with employers. No employer wants you to sign something for your benefit, it's always for theirs, therefore a lawyer should review anything your employer asks you to sign, and you should never consent to anything that violates your rights without promising not to take arbitrary action against you based on the privilage.
So many vanquished by a blocked port 80! Sad. I personally think it's generally silly to leave outside world low ports open other than ssh over a consumer adsl or cable connection (hang out a sign saying "crack me," why don't you). I can think of a few ways off the top of my head that would work in some contexts:
1. Sign up for a service that redirects http connections for you (dyndns?, pobox, *.to, etc. etc.) Many are free, those that aren't are dirt cheap. Move your apache up to port 8000 on your box, and voila, instead of http://whatever http://whatever:8000 will fulfil your silly desire to leave your machine and data exposed to the world when several services give you webspace for free or dirt cheap.
2. "But where I work they only allow http connections to port 80!" Congratulations on working somewhere that knows better than the rest of the world how the internet should work. Check to make sure they don't allow ftp out. If it works, you can run an ftp server, you can still use your precious browser to access your home ftp. If not, get an account with a webspace provider that allows cgi, and use a cgi script that gives you transparent access to your home machine.
3. Use ssh (which is the only thing you should have open to the outside world IMHO) and portforwarder to access your silly Apache web server.
If you can't implement any of the above, or possibly didn't think of any of the above, you have no business running a web server over your broadband connection anyway. You are the folks the 1337Z are cracking, and it's your fault I get portscanned every 5 minutes from some jerkoff running redhat 6.0 with every default service open, and it's your fault broadband providers reason thus: portscans originating from and directed at our subnets->coming to/from linux servers->linux servers have low ports open->block low ports->no more portscans.
If your intent is to share files with other people, use gnutella. If your intent is to publish information to the world at large, use the webspace your isp provides, a free webspace provider, or (horror!) buy some (it's cheap.) If you need to access your computer at home, use ssh or better yet don't open any incoming ports and dial in. Broadband connections are sold to consumers so they can slurp crap off the internet (I assume mostly porn) damn fast. Anything that works beyond that should probably be regarded as gravy.
Your employer wants the internet to be of little use to you as possible (so you don't waste time with stock applets, downloading files off your computer, hanging out in #slashdot) so they only allow connections to port 80. Your ISP wants to reduce malicious use of their network and/or wants people running web servers to use something other than consumer broadband connections, so they block incoming port 80. You have files at home you'd like to access at work. If you can't devise satisfactory solutions to this problem you probably don't deserve to access your files from work, and probably don't deserve a broadband connection, a computer or work.
AT&T's position seems to be "if you do things that show up on our radar and piss us off we're pulling your plug." They need to tread lightly, as they're working towards an "all your bits are belong to us" strategy (phone, digital cable and ip all over their cable, one big bill) and if they piss anybody off it increases the likelyhood of showing up on the gubbernmint's radar, which is something they don't want.
99.9% of the computer stuff at flea markets is junk, much of it overpriced junk (try explaining to an old guy that nobody's going to pay $500 for his beat up Packard Hell 486). As with most stuff at flea markets, the good deals were sold before you got there.
Computer "shows" suck too, unless you're into stolen, broken, overpriced junk.
Somebody mentioned hamfests. These are generally guys who are collecting and using AM radios made about 50 years ago, and still refer to equipment made this side of the last century as "solid state." These folks bring all sorts of computer junk, too, but you ain't getting any deals here either. These guys will calmly ask $250 for a Tandy 286 'cause it's still good for RTTY (radio teletype for those born within the last 30 years and/or having a life).
If you're half-serious about picking up junk computers, watch around dumpsters in office parks and colleges. If you're really serious about collecting junk computers, buy a business phone and put an ad in the yellow pages offering to take away unwanted computers for free. But have your own dumpster handy (supplied by a company that collects demolition and/or doesn't look too close or ask too many questions), you'll need it.
The cop/gun is a good analogy. The cop doesn't have carte blanche to use his gun (point it, fire it, etc.) and is generally prepared for public and departmental review if the gun's discharged. Spyware is like a cop with a gun pointed at you all the time you're online, and if the cop (spyware) thinks you've made a false move, BANG! your job is dead, no story in the paper, no review by internal affairs. Why someone's ownership of something should compromise my rights is beyond me. If I'm using your phone with your consent, does that give you the right to record my conversation? If I'm using your computer and internet connection with your consent, does that give you the right to my passwords and files in the course of using your computer? And if my employer supplies a computer for me to use with his consent, how is that any different? Are you so agreeable to your employer listening in on all your conversations on your work phone? To my thinking, interactions between employee and employer should be the same as between any other humans, and if a friend of yours asked you to piss in a cup so he could check for drugs or to let him videotape you for 8 hours a day you'd tell him to get bent. A right to privacy shouldn't have ifs, ands or buts, and it shouldn't apply only when somebody isn't signing your paycheck or part of the gubbernmint.
Sometimes we see someone downloading a.mov or.rm file, but unless the site has sexually explicit content we don't bother investigating.
So therefore, you violate your own company policy by using your company computers to verify that an employee is downloading porn. Anyone fired for violation of the policy may be able to use that to their advantage in civil court. Monitoring what an employee is doing is just as dangerous as not. For example, if the policy states "internet usage is monitored for pornographic content" and worker1 spies worker2 viewing Pam & Tommy on his computer, worker1 has a legitimate grievance not only against worker2, but also whoever was supposed to be monitoring, and probably the corporation as a whole. Potentially easy-to-win lawsuit. Basically, if you say you're doing something, or going to do something, and don't do it, you're often responsible. It IS in our company policy that using company computers for downloading pornography is illegal and all employees are made aware of this through a signed statement they return to H.R. upon being hired and through a mention of it at orientation at their first day of work.
I know you're not quoting it, but this is dangerous ground also. Anything an employer requires you to sign after you're hired is beatable to some degree, as it can be argued an employer has undue influence over an employee. Anything that's incorrect contractually is not legally enforcable. Therefore, if the policy is an employee is subject to termination for "downloading" "pornography" the scope legally is extremely limited as to what even liberal definitions of those terms would cover. Despite the 'any clause being deemed illegal or unenforcable' you find in recent boilerplates, in many cases beating a piece of a contract takes lots of the sand out of the whole contract.
Employers have to be very careful dealing with law-savvy, well-compensated employees. Generally, any violation of employee privacy that isn't extremely justifiable, or use of monitoring equipment and information that the employee doesn't know about, or use of gathered information that singles out an individual is dangerous ground to fire someone on.
Asking an employee to leave the place of business if you suspect they're carrying contraband is acceptable. Strip-searching them is not. Terminating an employee for stealing based on footage from a storage room security camera is acceptable. Locksmithing and searching their car in the parking lot is not.
Well, in one benchmark my friend's sister told me about, a friend of a 200-byte message was compressed to 2 bytes and a few bits when he crashed his car into a tree, but they never found his eyes, so they think he always had two glass eyes but never told anybody. True story, ask anyone.
Hey,/. staff, you better check your backs for chalk. Yeah, they can compress a 200 byte xml doc to 2.5 bytes, if it's something like two tags and a bunch of spaces. Get real.
Samba team should 'embrace and extend' existing netbios to be more unix-type filesystem savvy, including file modes, ownership, md5 and plaintext passwords and MIME type and submit rfs calling it smbng or some such and forcing M$ to follow an existing standard or break it. If M$ breaks it provide gpl'ed free client to Win users or jury-rigging to make "web folders" work with samba.
The real solution as I see it is gnutella protocol (short-term) and JXTA or something like it (longer-term). I find private gnutella servers on my network are a nice way to keep files I care about accessible without browsing through a hierarchy of stuff. I can search my network for 'radio' and get back every file with radio in the name in seconds and search and sort in a gnutella client quicker than I can browse all my home machines and the silly directory structures that have evolved on them. Because gnutella is basically http with a few modifications, any http-savvy application (many if not most that I use) can read the file as it comes down the wire. There are problems with the approach (versioning, modifying files, getting entire directories, access control, broadcasting/announcing nodes, redundancy, basically there's no meta-information framework) but with a few modifications to the gnutella protocol there are amazing applications for home and enterprise users.
Actually, increasing effective radiated power may not cause "signal bleed" whatever you meant by that (spurious/harmonic rf, perhaps?) for a number of reasons. Particularly if ERP is increased by means of one or more directional antennae, or even better LOS is increased by placing transceivers at strategic positions above ground level. Some modifications are not permitted for devices intended for unlicensed operation in that band, but effective range can be increased without attracting fcc field officers.
Imagine trying to cite wikipedia for your high school freshman reports. "The earth is one of the planets in our solar system. It is carried on the back of a blue cow, having horns 4000 in number1.
1 www.wikipedia.com/wiki/earth.html (edit) May 9, 2001 7:38 am by stoneco6969@jihad.muslim.org
And as Principal Skinner said, "Webster's dictionary defines laughter as the act of laughing."
Color Computer was by no means tiny, the Sinclair was tiny, maybe. Color Computer introduced me to sort of real operating systems, OS/9 was pretty impressive but not too many people bit for it.
Slashdot Mirror
"The guy" should see what a competent lawyer thinks about wiretapping if for some reason he won't be graduating. Even if an institution SAYS "we'll be watching what you do" it doesn't make it legal. Colleges are pretty good for settlements.
That table mixes the subjective and objective deftly, and is as of as much value as the following beer (not free) comparison:
/. wahoo!
CONTAINS HOPS CONTAINS WATER TASTES GREAT
Bud______Y________________Y____________N
Coors____Y________________Y____________N1
Bass_____?2_______________Y____________Y
1) Some people in the community think Coors tastes great, but considering this is subjective bullshit it doesn't matter.
2) Bass is an 'ale' not a 'lager' like Bud and Coors, and I don't know enough about beer to know if 'ale' contains 'hops.' I know there are 'bugs' in this list (in other words I have little clue as to what I'm talking about and I hope people who do have a clue fill in the blanks for me) but my stupid little occasionally accurate matrix of text made it on
I have a feeling showing that table to your PHB might give your PHB more clue about YOU than open source code and the associated licenses that a real PHB couldn't care less about. Remember to post a "I got laid off, now what?" 'ask slashdot' request in hope you'll get more brilliant advice.
I should think as compilers go a C compiler would be fairly easy to implement, aren't there just like 14 reserved words, and aren't several of them obsolete/never used? And weren't c++ "compilers" really cross-compilers that converted c++ to plain old c? Giving us that delightful "name mangling"?
I wish people would stop dreaming up new languages and concentrate on enhancing existing languages, Java in particular. As a programmer, I'm not going to keep more than 2 or 3 languages handy on the top of my head and I doubt many other programmers are so inclined either. Java at the moment does the most for me, even if it does compute a FFT slower than asm, perl is nice when you don't have a plan and don't want to think too much, and C is the common tounge of *nix. What's in it for me to learn C#, D, Python, etc. that isn't already covered by perl, C or Java? (That's rhetorical, the answer is nothing.)
Alternate pronunciations, eh? How about "It's spelled 'Raymond Luxury Yacht', but it's pronounced 'Throatwobbler Mangrove.'"
"You're a very silly man, and I'm not going to read you your email."
Is it stealing for a public library to make books, cds, and videos available for public use at no charge? Is it stealing for me to buy a magazine and put it in my waiting room so hundreds of people read it without paying for it? Is it stealing for me to play a CD in my backyard so people who didn't pay for it can hear it? Is it stealing to record a song off the radio?
There are many things that can be interpreted as "copyright infringement," many of which nobody thinks twice about. And there is a major difference between possibly depriving someone of potential revenue based on copyright, and stealing something from them.
1) They come up with these projects like JXTA, give you a philosophy, framework, whitepapers and tons of other stuff to read, and give you zero examples of useful code. My clever idea for embedding base-64 encoded binary data within XML files for file sharing (to facilitate streaming, reduce stupid filenames, allow files to store md5 hash and content length, allow public-key sigs and/or crypto, versioning, and basically any other metadata you could possibly want while still allowing network portability (smtp in particular), XML compliance and still be able to go 'uudecode file.xme' and get useful output) won't get any play whatsoever unless somebody (I suppose me) writes a 'reference implementation' that resembles something useful.
2. They have problems playing nice with de facto standards. The one that pissed me off the most was their deprecation with a vengeance of get/setenv. Any OS worth its salt supports some sort of environment variable, and those that don't could have get/setenv emulated by the jre. They left people trying to deal with bizzare command lines to pass in system properties, which is very nearly a waste of time. Anywho, the cgi-bin crowd read that as "java servlets or no java" and said "no java." Java servlets/jsp are often as good a choice or better for many types of web apps, but Sun doesn't do much to cater to people who think more in perl or ssi's (php).
fatchicksinpartyhats.com purports to be by Miguel, of dubious existance and bad grammar, but I believe is written by seanbaby.
Before I knew how laminating applied to metal, I used to think the "laminate armor" of fantasy RPG type things probably looked remarkably like a conference room table.
486 and 586-class general-purpose processors are probably fine things to develop and test embedded applications with (to a point) but I doubt they're a great long-term choice, I'm guessing this will only impact people who deserve it.
Every time I've shut down Apache for whatever reason or other I've never even had it cross my mind that I should reboot twice or even once to make sure no vestage of it remains. The *ix-ish model of services running in userspace as daemons makes much more sense than the NT-ish every service is either part of the OS or velcro'ed so tightly to it that you aren't sure where one ends and the other begins. I've seen many a Linux box where random stuff has crashed and the console is either dead or covered with error messages but those 10 httpd threads that were there at startup are still firing out web pages if you ask for 'em, and many an NT box where an error caused by IE or the mouse driver effectively takes the rest of the box with it. The standard spec for NT servers where I work appears to include watchdog cards, I think they're called Hangtime (cute name) cards, that're supposed to automatically reboot the server if something bad happens and can accept remote reboot requests even if the OS is hosed. I think they even work once in a while.
There are approximately zero copywriters now employed at Rythms. /. Oh, and I just noticed that according to how slashdot capsules the articles they link to, an infinate number of monkeys punching randomly at calculators would not only approximate pi, they'd get it right on the nose if the decimal place they were starting from was not arbitrary. It's also cute to read threads about the digits 1337 occur at position 199932, therefore an effective compression algorithm would be to tokenize something like 1337 with "position 199932 of pi." That's like saying putting a s p a c e b e t w e e n e v e r y l e t t e r y o u type is more effiecient than not because compression algorithms are very effective on text files with lots of whitespace.
Possibly more than have ever been employed by
viva la brain donors
>Some days, I try to get through to slashdot but I get a "Access to this page is denied" error on my screen.
Have you asked your parents to turn off Cyber Patrol on your home computer? It could be those are the days when CmdrTaco's having a bad day and putting <HIDDEN>slashdot readers are assholes</HIDDEN> and such on the front page to get out his frustrations.
Hmm. I'd hate to call an anonymous coward a liar, but it's hard for me to believe that there's a staff of humans laundering email content from the people's republic, and it'd be a bitch to write a program to change "unhappy due to lack of money" to "unwell, but feeling better because of flowing money" unless some Japanese videogame designers had a hand in it.
"INITIATE SUPER DEATH BLOW"
and the $2.56 finder's fee for every typo is still there
If only slashdot offered the same deal, I'd be a rich bastid.
If you are using my phone with my consent, yes it should give me the right to record your conversation. It's my phone. What I should do before you use is say, "Jake, sure you can use my phone but I'll be on the receiver in the other room because last time I think you said some nasty things about me." You can then spit in my face and/or use a payphone.
It's actually two separate issues, legally, at least in the US. If I ask to use your phone, I'm asking your consent, you may permit or deny my request. If you wish to wiretap me, you must (with certain unconstitutional IMO exceptions that don't apply in this case) get my consent, and the burden of proof is on you if that consent comes into question. It's like the "this call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes" annoucement. If as soon as you speak to a human you say "I do not consent to having this call montiored or recorded" they should respect that wish. If they continue to monitor or record you, or if they refuse to speak with you as a result of your request, they may be in legal trouble, especially if they have some sort of obligation to talk to you (calling the phone company to report trouble, for instance).
Similar stands must be taken with employers. No employer wants you to sign something for your benefit, it's always for theirs, therefore a lawyer should review anything your employer asks you to sign, and you should never consent to anything that violates your rights without promising not to take arbitrary action against you based on the privilage.
So many vanquished by a blocked port 80! Sad. I personally think it's generally silly to leave outside world low ports open other than ssh over a consumer adsl or cable connection (hang out a sign saying "crack me," why don't you). I can think of a few ways off the top of my head that would work in some contexts:
1. Sign up for a service that redirects http connections for you (dyndns?, pobox, *.to, etc. etc.) Many are free, those that aren't are dirt cheap. Move your apache up to port 8000 on your box, and voila, instead of http://whatever http://whatever:8000 will fulfil your silly desire to leave your machine and data exposed to the world when several services give you webspace for free or dirt cheap.
2. "But where I work they only allow http connections to port 80!" Congratulations on working somewhere that knows better than the rest of the world how the internet should work. Check to make sure they don't allow ftp out. If it works, you can run an ftp server, you can still use your precious browser to access your home ftp. If not, get an account with a webspace provider that allows cgi, and use a cgi script that gives you transparent access to your home machine.
3. Use ssh (which is the only thing you should have open to the outside world IMHO) and portforwarder to access your silly Apache web server.
If you can't implement any of the above, or possibly didn't think of any of the above, you have no business running a web server over your broadband connection anyway. You are the folks the 1337Z are cracking, and it's your fault I get portscanned every 5 minutes from some jerkoff running redhat 6.0 with every default service open, and it's your fault broadband providers reason thus: portscans originating from and directed at our subnets->coming to/from linux servers->linux servers have low ports open->block low ports->no more portscans.
If your intent is to share files with other people, use gnutella. If your intent is to publish information to the world at large, use the webspace your isp provides, a free webspace provider, or (horror!) buy some (it's cheap.) If you need to access your computer at home, use ssh or better yet don't open any incoming ports and dial in. Broadband connections are sold to consumers so they can slurp crap off the internet (I assume mostly porn) damn fast. Anything that works beyond that should probably be regarded as gravy.
Your employer wants the internet to be of little use to you as possible (so you don't waste time with stock applets, downloading files off your computer, hanging out in #slashdot) so they only allow connections to port 80. Your ISP wants to reduce malicious use of their network and/or wants people running web servers to use something other than consumer broadband connections, so they block incoming port 80. You have files at home you'd like to access at work. If you can't devise satisfactory solutions to this problem you probably don't deserve to access your files from work, and probably don't deserve a broadband connection, a computer or work.
AT&T's position seems to be "if you do things that show up on our radar and piss us off we're pulling your plug." They need to tread lightly, as they're working towards an "all your bits are belong to us" strategy (phone, digital cable and ip all over their cable, one big bill) and if they piss anybody off it increases the likelyhood of showing up on the gubbernmint's radar, which is something they don't want.
99.9% of the computer stuff at flea markets is junk, much of it overpriced junk (try explaining to an old guy that nobody's going to pay $500 for his beat up Packard Hell 486). As with most stuff at flea markets, the good deals were sold before you got there.
Computer "shows" suck too, unless you're into stolen, broken, overpriced junk.
Somebody mentioned hamfests. These are generally guys who are collecting and using AM radios made about 50 years ago, and still refer to equipment made this side of the last century as "solid state." These folks bring all sorts of computer junk, too, but you ain't getting any deals here either. These guys will calmly ask $250 for a Tandy 286 'cause it's still good for RTTY (radio teletype for those born within the last 30 years and/or having a life).
If you're half-serious about picking up junk computers, watch around dumpsters in office parks and colleges. If you're really serious about collecting junk computers, buy a business phone and put an ad in the yellow pages offering to take away unwanted computers for free. But have your own dumpster handy (supplied by a company that collects demolition and/or doesn't look too close or ask too many questions), you'll need it.
The cop/gun is a good analogy. The cop doesn't have carte blanche to use his gun (point it, fire it, etc.) and is generally prepared for public and departmental review if the gun's discharged. Spyware is like a cop with a gun pointed at you all the time you're online, and if the cop (spyware) thinks you've made a false move, BANG! your job is dead, no story in the paper, no review by internal affairs. Why someone's ownership of something should compromise my rights is beyond me. If I'm using your phone with your consent, does that give you the right to record my conversation? If I'm using your computer and internet connection with your consent, does that give you the right to my passwords and files in the course of using your computer? And if my employer supplies a computer for me to use with his consent, how is that any different? Are you so agreeable to your employer listening in on all your conversations on your work phone? To my thinking, interactions between employee and employer should be the same as between any other humans, and if a friend of yours asked you to piss in a cup so he could check for drugs or to let him videotape you for 8 hours a day you'd tell him to get bent. A right to privacy shouldn't have ifs, ands or buts, and it shouldn't apply only when somebody isn't signing your paycheck or part of the gubbernmint.
Sometimes we see someone downloading a .mov or .rm file, but unless the site has sexually explicit content we don't bother investigating.
So therefore, you violate your own company policy by using your company computers to verify that an employee is downloading porn. Anyone fired for violation of the policy may be able to use that to their advantage in civil court. Monitoring what an employee is doing is just as dangerous as not. For example, if the policy states "internet usage is monitored for pornographic content" and worker1 spies worker2 viewing Pam & Tommy on his computer, worker1 has a legitimate grievance not only against worker2, but also whoever was supposed to be monitoring, and probably the corporation as a whole. Potentially easy-to-win lawsuit. Basically, if you say you're doing something, or going to do something, and don't do it, you're often responsible.
It IS in our company policy that using company computers for downloading pornography is illegal and all employees are made aware of this through a signed statement they return to H.R. upon being hired and through a mention of it at orientation at their first day of work.
I know you're not quoting it, but this is dangerous ground also. Anything an employer requires you to sign after you're hired is beatable to some degree, as it can be argued an employer has undue influence over an employee. Anything that's incorrect contractually is not legally enforcable. Therefore, if the policy is an employee is subject to termination for "downloading" "pornography" the scope legally is extremely limited as to what even liberal definitions of those terms would cover. Despite the 'any clause being deemed illegal or unenforcable' you find in recent boilerplates, in many cases beating a piece of a contract takes lots of the sand out of the whole contract.
Employers have to be very careful dealing with law-savvy, well-compensated employees. Generally, any violation of employee privacy that isn't extremely justifiable, or use of monitoring equipment and information that the employee doesn't know about, or use of gathered information that singles out an individual is dangerous ground to fire someone on.
Asking an employee to leave the place of business if you suspect they're carrying contraband is acceptable. Strip-searching them is not. Terminating an employee for stealing based on footage from a storage room security camera is acceptable. Locksmithing and searching their car in the parking lot is not.
Well, in one benchmark my friend's sister told me about, a friend of a 200-byte message was compressed to 2 bytes and a few bits when he crashed his car into a tree, but they never found his eyes, so they think he always had two glass eyes but never told anybody. True story, ask anyone.
Hey, /. staff, you better check your backs for chalk. Yeah, they can compress a 200 byte xml doc to 2.5 bytes, if it's something like two tags and a bunch of spaces. Get real.
Samba team should 'embrace and extend' existing netbios to be more unix-type filesystem savvy, including file modes, ownership, md5 and plaintext passwords and MIME type and submit rfs calling it smbng or some such and forcing M$ to follow an existing standard or break it. If M$ breaks it provide gpl'ed free client to Win users or jury-rigging to make "web folders" work with samba.
The real solution as I see it is gnutella protocol (short-term) and JXTA or something like it (longer-term). I find private gnutella servers on my network are a nice way to keep files I care about accessible without browsing through a hierarchy of stuff. I can search my network for 'radio' and get back every file with radio in the name in seconds and search and sort in a gnutella client quicker than I can browse all my home machines and the silly directory structures that have evolved on them. Because gnutella is basically http with a few modifications, any http-savvy application (many if not most that I use) can read the file as it comes down the wire. There are problems with the approach (versioning, modifying files, getting entire directories, access control, broadcasting/announcing nodes, redundancy, basically there's no meta-information framework) but with a few modifications to the gnutella protocol there are amazing applications for home and enterprise users.
Actually, increasing effective radiated power may not cause "signal bleed" whatever you meant by that (spurious/harmonic rf, perhaps?) for a number of reasons. Particularly if ERP is increased by means of one or more directional antennae, or even better LOS is increased by placing transceivers at strategic positions above ground level. Some modifications are not permitted for devices intended for unlicensed operation in that band, but effective range can be increased without attracting fcc field officers.
Imagine trying to cite wikipedia for your high school freshman reports. "The earth is one of the planets in our solar system. It is carried on the back of a blue cow, having horns 4000 in number1.
1 www.wikipedia.com/wiki/earth.html (edit) May 9, 2001 7:38 am by stoneco6969@jihad.muslim.org
And as Principal Skinner said, "Webster's dictionary defines laughter as the act of laughing."
Color Computer was by no means tiny, the Sinclair was tiny, maybe. Color Computer introduced me to sort of real operating systems, OS/9 was pretty impressive but not too many people bit for it.