I'm given to understand that they moved their hosting to Israel when Verio terminated their service for violations of Verio's acceptable use policy. Verio doesn't allow folks to host denial of service tools on their network (nor will any normal ISP do so).
Odd that Verio would terminate their service when they have a known policy of openly tolerating criminal activity. I guess that policy only extends to spammers.
More likely Verio cut them off for adversely affecting Verio's other criminal spammer customers.
Second, these are people living depressing lives in a country that's pretty screwed up. From their perspective, every westerner is super rich (makes 100 times more than they do).
WAAAAAAAAAAAH! They're so poor, so it's okay for them to commit fraud!
My sister tried this logic on me. It's crap; it doesn't work.
Yes, many people in Nigeria are dirt-poor. These people aren't the ones running the scams because those people don't live in communities where they can easily get electricity, much less Internet access. The scammers at least have some amount of wealth, or they wouldn't be able to get to the Internet cafes where most of their emailing takes place.
What they are doing is criminal, period. They don't care who they rip off, and they don't care how much money they rip off. And yes, some of them weave fictions of assisting in embezzlement and fraud, but others tell tales of money legitimately owned and held in escrow by corrupt beaurocrats. Not every 419 scammer makes it look like they're soliciting aid for an act of fraud, even if you'd have to be a little dense to fall for their scam.
Making fun of the scammers is not criminal (in most cases; I won't get into the sticky mess that is the rare attempt at a scambaiter soliticing money from the scammer). Stop pretending that those of us who waste their time and sometimes solicit silly pictures are the moral equivilant of someone who doesn't care if we drain a 70 year-old widow or a poor single mother of their life savings. I'm not stupid, I'm not falling for it, and I'll only think less of you for trying it.
There are far worse and more evil criminals out there who take advantage of innocent people rather than those who don't mind helping some evil dictator get away with their money.
And stop pretending that their crime is mitigated either by your perception of their level of poverty or your impression of the typical scam victim. They are still criminals and they should be treated as such, and don't tell me that there's something morally wrong with me attempting to waste their time and hold them up in order to make their criminal enterprise less profitable.
The website will celebrate two years of baiting scammers this September. No word if there will be a contest this year, as there was last year (plugging my prize-winning contest entry there), as Shiver is running a Christmas contest (and already has killer entries).
If they're not, you can always get them to join a church or two.
Case and CPU run at just fine temps (especially now that I have an Antec P180 case, complete with seperate compartment for the power supply to maximize airflow and reduce radiant heat), but my video card, a Nvidia 6800GT, still gets way too hot. Around 70C idle, over 90C with heavy loads. I've even installed an optional 80mm fan on the side exhaust vent (with the air blowing onto the card, as the case manual recommends). I've also tried a PCI fan card, nothing seems to cool that sucker down. Anyone have advice on this?
I think that their rules have since changed. Of course, they're not going to forgive Lucas for breaking the rule at the time (and I doubt that he'd return if they did).
This is still only evidence for speciation (microevolution).
Funny, last I heard "speciation" was the big "macroevolution" barrier. Now it's something else -- something that you don't even define.
This is why creationists never "lose". They keep redefining terms whenever they're shown to be wrong on a front. Oh, and frequently when shown to be wrong on something, they just keep repeating the same erroneous information be it claims that certain observed things have not been observed or dishonestly quoting actual scientists out of context (or fabricating quotes entirely).
Here's the deal. I get irritated by a self appointed elite telling people how they should and shouldn't behave, using the excuse "We're just trying to stop spam".
No one is telling you how to behave. They're simply offering a list of IP addresses belonging to known spam-supporters freely to anyone who wishes to see it for whatever purpose they might have.
You're posting common spammer anti-SPEWS lies. You can tell us. What ISP kicked you off because your constant criminal spamming activities caused their blocks to get listed in SPEWS?
and therein lies the problem... The people who are hurt most have no real power.
Waah. They're giving money to a company that openly supports and abets criminal activity. Cry me a river because their email isn't being delivered to ISPs who have stated that they do not want it.
...and I posted on the offical forum asking if the requirement was a result of the developers being incompetent, or malicious. Naturally, the result was quite a bit of flaming for my rather inflammatory opening question, so I reprhased my question asking why EA would do such a thing and oddly, every person who responded suggested that it could only be malice or incompetence.
The Sims 2 has since been given an update that allows non-Admins to run the game.
No game software should require admin rights. If a CD check scam requires it, then get a noCD crack. If the developers have written totally unnecessary checks to require Admin rights before running the game (Thief 3 delets system files when non-admins run it, yet making the system files read-only to non-admins makes the game run flawlessly), then find some way to circumvent. If you can't circumvent, tell the developers that you cannot in good faith trust their software to run on your computer because their asinine requirement is an indication that they are either malicious, and so you can't trust any code that they write on your computer, or they are incompetent, and so you can't trust any code that they write on your computer.
I was a little brisk with my previous blasting, in part because I get annoyed when people try to claim that religious myths are actually some kind of 'evidence' that the events depicted in the myths actually occured.
Science deals with analysis of physical evidence. Someone telling me that thousands of years ago, the great green arkleseizure sneezed the universe into existence is not, itself, physical evidence. Even if that story has been passed down for generation after generation, it still is not physical evidence. Without physical evidence, there is no means for evaluating that statement as truthful. It might actually be true, but if there's nothing but the words of a bunch of people throughout the ages and nary a shred of physical observation that can be made for it, science cannot analyze it.
To claim that "Intelligent Design" is scientific because "people have believed it for thousands of years" is not only to fail to understand how science works, but it is also the fallacy of appealing to antiquity. The age or popularity of a statement has no bearing whatsoever on its truth value.
We send people to jail on stories and anecdotes. I believe they call it....testimonial evidence
Eyewitness testimony is actually the worst kind of testimony because it is so prone to error, even if the eyewitnesses don't realise it. A good criminal prosecution has solid physical evidence behind it.
But hey, if you want to invoke invalid analogies by trying to compare eyewitness testimony to a recent criminal event used in a court of law to the standards that scientists use when evaluating evidence and their refusal to acknowledge millenia-old myths as "evidence" because only a complete moron would consider it to be evidence of actual events, go ahead. You only further demonstrate your utter unwillingness to accept reality.
It is interesting that Creationists are adopting this Intelligent Design philosophy, as it cannot prove what they think it could.
You need to look at the heart of the ID movement. It's basically the creationist arguments against evolution that are founded in scientific ignorance (or outright dishonesty) with the religious assertions trimmed away and the whole thing repackaged. The ID movement is part and parcel of the creationist movement, it's just an attempt to trojan horse their religious agenda into public schools.
Look at the leadership of the ID movement. Find someone in the ID movement who doesn't ultimately assert that the "designer" was the Christian God.
I found this collection of quotations from MANY pro-evolution scientists/believers to be quite interesting...
I don't. I'm quite familiar with the dishonest creationist practice of quote-mining.
Just looking at #29, a quote from Darwin himself
"I have asked myself whether I may not have devoted my life to a fantasy."
No context beyond that is given. However, if you actually dig up the original reference, you see that a more complete quote is "For myself, also, I rejoice profoundly; for, thinking of so many cases of men pursuing an illusion for years, often and often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may not have devoted my life to a phantasy. Now I look at it as morally impossible that investigators of truth, like you and Hooker, can be wholly wrong, and therefore I rest in peace."
In other words, Darwin was humbly explaining that he had concerns over the validity of his theory, but that he has been reassured of its validity by other scientists who peer-reviewed his work. The creationist mined quote makes it look like Darwin was expressing doubt with his work, when in reality Darwin was explaining that he has been doubly assured of its validity!
It left me puzzled as to why there is even a debate.
Same here. I can't believe that there are so many stupid people who are so easily swayed by the flagrant dishonesty of the creationist camp.
Evolution predicts that small random changes happen over many generations. The "good" changes have a higher tendency to survive and reproduce than the "bad" changes so they dominate.
Actually, this is something that has been observed. The theory is much more than this.
The fossils show that this does in fact happen for tens of thousands of years. Then, suddenly, creatures which are significantly different from what came before appear. They're often similar to prior creatures, but the changes are nearly instantaneous in geologic time. The "missing link" is only the best known of these occurances.
Evolution offers no adequate explanation as to how such sudden major changes happen. According to its predictions, such changes shouldn't happen.
Er, actually there is an explanation. Punctuated Equilibrium. Many creationists think that Gould "invented" this because he needed a means of explaining why the fossil record doesn't look like what Darwin expected. The creationists haven't actually read Darwin's work, or they would see that Darwin himself predicted something like this.
The Scientific Method says that when a theory disagrees with the evidence, the theory is disproven. It's not a weight of the evidence thing. A single valid counter-example disproves the theory.
Sorry, but the theory does not disagree with the evidence. Your ignorance of the theory does not disprove it.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no magic bullet for removing all spam.
But a few non-magical rounds in the heads of spammers would do a good job of it.
I'm given to understand that they moved their hosting to Israel when Verio terminated their service for violations of Verio's acceptable use policy. Verio doesn't allow folks to host denial of service tools on their network (nor will any normal ISP do so).
Odd that Verio would terminate their service when they have a known policy of openly tolerating criminal activity. I guess that policy only extends to spammers.
More likely Verio cut them off for adversely affecting Verio's other criminal spammer customers.
Second, these are people living depressing lives in a country that's pretty screwed up. From their perspective, every westerner is super rich (makes 100 times more than they do).
WAAAAAAAAAAAH! They're so poor, so it's okay for them to commit fraud!
My sister tried this logic on me. It's crap; it doesn't work.
Yes, many people in Nigeria are dirt-poor. These people aren't the ones running the scams because those people don't live in communities where they can easily get electricity, much less Internet access. The scammers at least have some amount of wealth, or they wouldn't be able to get to the Internet cafes where most of their emailing takes place.
What they are doing is criminal, period. They don't care who they rip off, and they don't care how much money they rip off. And yes, some of them weave fictions of assisting in embezzlement and fraud, but others tell tales of money legitimately owned and held in escrow by corrupt beaurocrats. Not every 419 scammer makes it look like they're soliciting aid for an act of fraud, even if you'd have to be a little dense to fall for their scam.
Making fun of the scammers is not criminal (in most cases; I won't get into the sticky mess that is the rare attempt at a scambaiter soliticing money from the scammer). Stop pretending that those of us who waste their time and sometimes solicit silly pictures are the moral equivilant of someone who doesn't care if we drain a 70 year-old widow or a poor single mother of their life savings. I'm not stupid, I'm not falling for it, and I'll only think less of you for trying it.
There are far worse and more evil criminals out there who take advantage of innocent people rather than those who don't mind helping some evil dictator get away with their money.
And stop pretending that their crime is mitigated either by your perception of their level of poverty or your impression of the typical scam victim. They are still criminals and they should be treated as such, and don't tell me that there's something morally wrong with me attempting to waste their time and hold them up in order to make their criminal enterprise less profitable.
The website will celebrate two years of baiting scammers this September. No word if there will be a contest this year, as there was last year (plugging my prize-winning contest entry there), as Shiver is running a Christmas contest (and already has killer entries).
If they're not, you can always get them to join a church or two.
Someone who learned math in a US public school wrote the article.
Case and CPU run at just fine temps (especially now that I have an Antec P180 case, complete with seperate compartment for the power supply to maximize airflow and reduce radiant heat), but my video card, a Nvidia 6800GT, still gets way too hot. Around 70C idle, over 90C with heavy loads. I've even installed an optional 80mm fan on the side exhaust vent (with the air blowing onto the card, as the case manual recommends). I've also tried a PCI fan card, nothing seems to cool that sucker down. Anyone have advice on this?
Since they recovered the files without the key, it looks like the guy wrote his own crypto.
Doesn't this violate the DMCA?
I was gonna say that!
"First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?"
Lucas will have the CG cleaned up in time for the DVD release, just like he did with the previous two movies.
I think that their rules have since changed. Of course, they're not going to forgive Lucas for breaking the rule at the time (and I doubt that he'd return if they did).
The earth, far from rotating on it's axis and around the sun, is infact set on pillars or foundations and immobile
You got that right!
This is still only evidence for speciation (microevolution).
Funny, last I heard "speciation" was the big "macroevolution" barrier. Now it's something else -- something that you don't even define.
This is why creationists never "lose". They keep redefining terms whenever they're shown to be wrong on a front. Oh, and frequently when shown to be wrong on something, they just keep repeating the same erroneous information be it claims that certain observed things have not been observed or dishonestly quoting actual scientists out of context (or fabricating quotes entirely).
...it's called "sin". Sin is deadly. Especially, apparently, to newborn children who presumably are the worst sinners of all.
Here's the deal. I get irritated by a self appointed elite telling people how they should and shouldn't behave, using the excuse "We're just trying to stop spam".
No one is telling you how to behave. They're simply offering a list of IP addresses belonging to known spam-supporters freely to anyone who wishes to see it for whatever purpose they might have.
You're posting common spammer anti-SPEWS lies. You can tell us. What ISP kicked you off because your constant criminal spamming activities caused their blocks to get listed in SPEWS?
and therein lies the problem... The people who are hurt most have no real power.
Waah. They're giving money to a company that openly supports and abets criminal activity. Cry me a river because their email isn't being delivered to ISPs who have stated that they do not want it.
I never claimed any such thing, in fact, I explicitly said that it was not scientific.
So why argue here at all? The issue is over pushing ID into science classrooms.
I am fully aware of the deficiencies involved with eyewitness testimony, but I was countering the statement that there was "no evidence".
And thousand year-old stories are not "evidence" of actual events. They're stories.
Unless you're going to suggest that the Illiad is evidence of a king named Ulysses who was lost on a 20 year oddessey...
...and I posted on the offical forum asking if the requirement was a result of the developers being incompetent, or malicious.
Naturally, the result was quite a bit of flaming for my rather inflammatory opening question, so I reprhased my question asking why EA would do such a thing and oddly, every person who responded suggested that it could only be malice or incompetence.
The Sims 2 has since been given an update that allows non-Admins to run the game.
No game software should require admin rights. If a CD check scam requires it, then get a noCD crack. If the developers have written totally unnecessary checks to require Admin rights before running the game (Thief 3 delets system files when non-admins run it, yet making the system files read-only to non-admins makes the game run flawlessly), then find some way to circumvent. If you can't circumvent, tell the developers that you cannot in good faith trust their software to run on your computer because their asinine requirement is an indication that they are either malicious, and so you can't trust any code that they write on your computer, or they are incompetent, and so you can't trust any code that they write on your computer.
...that it's hard to argue that a spammer has somehow endangered your life.
So you'll need a good story in advance, and no witnesses.
I was a little brisk with my previous blasting, in part because I get annoyed when people try to claim that religious myths are actually some kind of 'evidence' that the events depicted in the myths actually occured.
Science deals with analysis of physical evidence. Someone telling me that thousands of years ago, the great green arkleseizure sneezed the universe into existence is not, itself, physical evidence. Even if that story has been passed down for generation after generation, it still is not physical evidence. Without physical evidence, there is no means for evaluating that statement as truthful. It might actually be true, but if there's nothing but the words of a bunch of people throughout the ages and nary a shred of physical observation that can be made for it, science cannot analyze it.
To claim that "Intelligent Design" is scientific because "people have believed it for thousands of years" is not only to fail to understand how science works, but it is also the fallacy of appealing to antiquity. The age or popularity of a statement has no bearing whatsoever on its truth value.
We send people to jail on stories and anecdotes. I believe they call it ....testimonial evidence
Eyewitness testimony is actually the worst kind of testimony because it is so prone to error, even if the eyewitnesses don't realise it. A good criminal prosecution has solid physical evidence behind it.
But hey, if you want to invoke invalid analogies by trying to compare eyewitness testimony to a recent criminal event used in a court of law to the standards that scientists use when evaluating evidence and their refusal to acknowledge millenia-old myths as "evidence" because only a complete moron would consider it to be evidence of actual events, go ahead. You only further demonstrate your utter unwillingness to accept reality.
It is interesting that Creationists are adopting this Intelligent Design philosophy, as it cannot prove what they think it could.
You need to look at the heart of the ID movement. It's basically the creationist arguments against evolution that are founded in scientific ignorance (or outright dishonesty) with the religious assertions trimmed away and the whole thing repackaged. The ID movement is part and parcel of the creationist movement, it's just an attempt to trojan horse their religious agenda into public schools.
Look at the leadership of the ID movement. Find someone in the ID movement who doesn't ultimately assert that the "designer" was the Christian God.
...and if you look at my posting on the matter, you can see that the quote in question is a prime example of outright creationist dishonesty.
Why do we get nasty against creationists? Because creationists are liars and they deserve to be exposed as such.
I found this collection of quotations from MANY pro-evolution scientists/believers to be quite interesting...
I don't. I'm quite familiar with the dishonest creationist practice of quote-mining.
Just looking at #29, a quote from Darwin himself
"I have asked myself whether I may not have devoted my life to a fantasy."
No context beyond that is given. However, if you actually dig up the original reference, you see that a more complete quote is "For myself, also, I rejoice profoundly; for, thinking of so many cases of men pursuing an illusion for years, often and often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may not have devoted my life to a phantasy. Now I look at it as morally impossible that investigators of truth, like you and Hooker, can be wholly wrong, and therefore I rest in peace."
In other words, Darwin was humbly explaining that he had concerns over the validity of his theory, but that he has been reassured of its validity by other scientists who peer-reviewed his work. The creationist mined quote makes it look like Darwin was expressing doubt with his work, when in reality Darwin was explaining that he has been doubly assured of its validity!
It left me puzzled as to why there is even a debate.
Same here. I can't believe that there are so many stupid people who are so easily swayed by the flagrant dishonesty of the creationist camp.
Evolution predicts that small random changes happen over many generations. The "good" changes have a higher tendency to survive and reproduce than the "bad" changes so they dominate.
Actually, this is something that has been observed. The theory is much more than this.
The fossils show that this does in fact happen for tens of thousands of years. Then, suddenly, creatures which are significantly different from what came before appear. They're often similar to prior creatures, but the changes are nearly instantaneous in geologic time. The "missing link" is only the best known of these occurances.
Evolution offers no adequate explanation as to how such sudden major changes happen. According to its predictions, such changes shouldn't happen.
Er, actually there is an explanation. Punctuated Equilibrium. Many creationists think that Gould "invented" this because he needed a means of explaining why the fossil record doesn't look like what Darwin expected. The creationists haven't actually read Darwin's work, or they would see that Darwin himself predicted something like this.
The Scientific Method says that when a theory disagrees with the evidence, the theory is disproven. It's not a weight of the evidence thing. A single valid counter-example disproves the theory.
Sorry, but the theory does not disagree with the evidence. Your ignorance of the theory does not disprove it.