Oh come on now... I haven't seen Numb3rs (no TV in years), but TV shows based off of movies can be great. MASH is a good one, but isn't quite the same, since the show is a continuation of the movie's world. However, Millennium, which was by design to be "an episode of Se7en every week", was an excellent show -- at least until Season 3. IMHO, of course.
Original ideas from a book or movie can certainly be adopted and extended by the TV medium, and done very well. Like with most TV, however, there will be 50 stinkers for every decent one. Plots-ripped-from-the-big-screen shows are no different.
See?! It works! This is why the jury system is so beautiful! (And why it sucks so bad for those of us that think a little bit) Most people suck. But the odds of everybody sucking when you get 12 random people together drops rather dramatically.
But it's not a truly random selection of peers. That's a fatal flaw right there. The jury selection process itself is a pitiful glimpse at how the system works. At my selection, there was a pool of possible jurors -- 12 initially selected to sit, and another 12 standing by. Each side was allowed to kick 4 of us to the curb, and if either side *still* wasn't satisfied, after replacing 8 of us, then the entire pool would be re-drawn. And that's what happened to us, so I never got to sit at trial.
I was selected for jury duty in a domestic abuse case. I was actually looking forward for it -- my employer paid my full salary while on jury duty, so long as I gave them the court stipend I received. Anyway, all of my peers jokingly told me before I went, "If you want out, just tell them during selection that you're college educated!" Sure enough, during the selection, everyone was asked (among other things, like "what magazines do you subscribe to" -- WTF?!?) what level of education they had.
I lost (a lot more) confidence in our legal system that day.
I think he's referring to things like "The Gimp," everything that starts with a lower-case "g" or "k" (why call it "gedit" instead of just edit?
That must explain why iPhones and eMachines are such unpopular products. People hate lame, over-used 1-letter prefixes on everything. It all makes so much sense now!
You could ditch (broadcast) TV entirely. Rent movies and quality TV shows on DVD. It takes a few weeks/months to "decompress" from the frenetic need to have some sort of constant visual stimulus to occupy your spare time, but afterwards, you'll both be much better off. Read, play cards, listen to music, or, you know, *talk* with each other.:)
Rubbish. Maybe the hostmaster wanted the zone to be open. Who would know? Before the 'net became such a cesspool of spam and scam, I routinely did "ls" commands via nslookup on specific name servers to see what other hosts were being served by a domain. Back then (this was early 90's when Yahoo had a clean interface, Lycos was "cool", and archie and gopher were sill in service), services were sometimes hard to find and this was a valid tool.
Funny now that bind's standard nslookup no longer implements this command. I guess today's equivalent is "dig axfr example.com @ns1.example.com".
This is an example of some asshat, ignorant sysadmin trying to save face for being stupid. I had a buddy who got sued for "hacking" by an ISP because they noticed he did a "cat/etc/passwd" while on their server working on something. Hello! McFly!/etc/passwd is *meant* to read by all processes -- it's required for tons of programs to work correctly!
What's next? Going after people who look at web server response headers to find out what kind of web server is being used?!? Quick! -- let's sue for using "lynx --head --dump foo.com"! That's obviously malicious hacking! Nevermind that web servers can be configured to change/disable the "Server" response header.
Someone who's registered please tag this article "asshats".
I don't think he's dissing the Linux options. I think he's rightly pointing out how nice ZFS administration is, when compared to Linux's offerings.
I once worked for a university HPC environment. I was primary admin on a large-ish RS/6000 serving 1TB (this was impressive when we bought the machine) of space to NFS/Samba clients, from Beowulf nodes to desktops. AIX's LVM and disk management tools, whether it was the "smit" interface or the command-line tools, were simply a joy to work with. You told the machine what you wanted, and it just did it. You could add/remove devices hot (the hardware as well as the drive devices in the OS), grow the volume and and filesystem on it on the fly. It was really, really nice.
After a few years, when IDE disks started getting really cheap, we began investigating multi-TB fileservers on commodity harware using Linux and the LVM tools. Already a well-seasoned Linux admin, I started to learn the ins-and-outs of these VLM tools. While, at the time, they were *almost* as capable as IBM's (certainly a hell of a lot more cost effective), they weren't nearly as nice to work with. Too many layers and parts to worry about. I just wanted to create space to export to the users, and IBM's tools made that very easy to do reliably. The Linux tools were not as polished, but in the end, you could get a serviceable volume up and exported.
ZFS is the first thing I've used since my RS/6000 admin days that "felt" as robust and was as easy to use as IBM's JFS and LVM.
That was around 2003/2004 when AIX 4.x and Linux 2.4.x were the norm. I've since moved on to admin primarily FreeBSD machines. My opinions on the Linux offerings may be a bit dated. However, seeing the comments in this thread, it would appear that though the technology may be better, the usability hasn't quite gotten there just yet.
Unhappy about what? That the developers were kind enough to port and include ZFS into the mainline 7.0 tree? I can't really imagine that. Yes, some people may bemoan its stability as sub-par when compared to what people have come to expect from FreeBSD. I can't understand people bitching about that, though. It's not like it *must* be used -- it's not even an install option. You have to read up on it and know WTF you're doing to even get it running, never mind set it up as a root/boot volume.
I've been running the 7.0 branch since about October '07, and I've been using ZFS. Granted, it's my home machine, but it's my primary workstation and I *need* this machine to bring home the bacon, working via home office and all. While I don't use it for important data, the file systems I chose were intentional in order to beat it up a lot:/usr/src,/usr/obj, and/usr/ports -- that's where all of the kernel/userlad/ports compiles take place (at least by default). Tons of reads/writes/delete since I update my ports and source trees almost daily. Never once have I had a problem. On a whim, I ran a zpool status once and found a corruption error on/usr/obj, but I never noticed because it just kept on chugging along. Not that/usr/obj is a terribly critical directory, one which I nuke on a regular basis to ensure a pristine system rebuild. Still, I ran a "zpool scrub" on it live, and it fixed the problem w/o ever going offline.
Not only that, I also use the built-in compression (gzip9) on/usr/src and/usr/ports and my machine is amd64. The former really taxes the system, and the latter platform seems to lag slightly behind i386. Sometimes my machine has quick freezes when the ZFS file systems are being beat up, but my machine is only a 2.0GHz w/ 1GB of memory. For pre-release software, FreeBSD 7.0 really kicks some ass.
Of course, anecdotes are not synonymous with data. ZFS obviously has some issues. But then again, so did reiserfs and ext3 when they were first cast into the mainstream kernel and distros. Sure, the BSD userbase with ZFS is *much* smaller than those of Linux, but I expect ZFS will shine in short order.
I'm a fan of mpg123 and shell scripts myself. It needs so few system resources it's silly. But Amarok, which I used when I ran KDE, is quite an excellent piece of software.
Bush and his comrades are proven evil bastards. Just because his administration does something decent once in a while doesn't give them a free pass. Kudos to the saved trees, but Bush is still an ass.
It would be great if what you said is true. That way people who really don't belong in college and who would prefer not to go wouldn't be practically forced to. The reality, however, is that there is a very large pay difference (probably $20-25K/year) between people with degrees versus those who have just a high school diploma
The problem with that logic is, those who do go to college will likely be no better off in overall net worth than someone who didn't go to college (say, worked straight out of high school, vocation/tech school, or community college). The reason? Good financial smarts are not taught any more.
Your *typical* college weenie will go 4 years, racking up a ton of debt. That not only includes the cost of their schooling, but the load of credit cards that are given away with t-shirts and 2-liter bottles of soda. Now, once they get that fancy job, they'll need a fancy car, fancy house/apartment, while eating our for lunch and a quick jaunt into Starbuck's to/from work every day. They'll be working 20 years to pay off that debt, and will be lucky to have a positive net worth by that time.
Now, take your non-college person. They won't get a ton credit, and they won't have the enormous bills. Sure, their first "real job" may be making $10/hour at Bob's Hardware shop or apprenticing as an electrician or auto mechanic. Their rise to the middle class will be slow, but deliberate. And, if they're careful, they'll be in pretty good shape once they're there.
Now.... don't misunderstand me. Most people are financially stupid -- from college grads to high-school drop-outs. Take this lovely housing collapse as a prime example of people from all levels being stupid and greedy with their money and now feeling the pain.
I truly believe that we've reach a tipping point in this country, where a college degree is more of a liability for middle class Americans than an asset. I was given a paid-for education at Purdue by my folks (though I never finished a degree) -- and I'll forever be in their debt for that. However, my wife and I are not only *not pushing* for college (as my folks did with me), we're somewhat discouraging it for our kids, unless they *really* want to pursue a career where you simply cannot get there w/o a college degree (medical, law, etc.). That's not to say that we're slacking on making them learn some real-world knowledge and skills. Guile is what we're pushing on our kids -- that, and financial smarts.
Some people try, but we now have these things called "Free Speech Zones". The media doesn't cover them much, and the objects of protest ignore them.
Now, it would be great if people got out and did some major disruption, like the petrol (or was is diesel) protests a few years back in the UK. Imagine if every independent trucker in the US drove in and grid-locked (even moreso than usual) the DC beltway. That would be too spectacular for words.
People don't care though. I predict we'll see another substantial gas price drop a month or two before the '08 election and people will forget how they're getting screwed. It never fails.
So, let's count the ways The Man can seize one's assets w/o due process. We have the Never Ending War on Drugs, where if you are incidentally present during a drug "crime" (say, you get pulled over for speeding, and the cops find pot on your buddy and you had no idea), they can impound and sell your car. More recently, the SCOTUS has decided that privates citizens are trumped by commercial interests in Imminent Domain cases, where you are given a take-it-or-leave-it pittance offer for your real estate so the next big box store or McMansion developer can break ground.
Now, without a trial and conviction, your computer equipment can be seized by the cops and sold to supplement the donut/hooker/beer petty cash fund. This is just fucking great. I'd love to see this shot down, but I doubt it will.
And I love the "justification". The fact that the US doesn't make anything *real* anymore is not my fault. Ideas are great and all, but when your only product is ideas, and you've outsourced the manufacture of real, durable goods to other places, you will eat your own dog food eventually. I laugh at how they tossed counterfeit meds in there -- nobody will vote that down during an election cycle. "The senator from your state voted *against* protecting seniors from counterfeit medicine on the internet!" Nevermind that they're trying to kill out-of-country medication purchases *anyway*.
Anyone know where I can get a free (or cheap and paid anonymously with cash) shell account overseas where I can SSH in and compile/run TOR? This is getting fucking ridiculous.
Find a local farm/ranch/feed store. A 50-pound bag of rabbit feed will set you back $10, and maybe the same cost for a 6 cubic feet of compressed shavings. That $20 should last the typical pet rabbit for 6 months or more, assuming your treats are veggie scraps from the kitchen. A goat-sized salt and/or mineral lick (couple of pounds, I think) will cost a couple of bucks and be a much better bargain than those little ones at Pet Smart. A ~75-pound bale of grass or alfalfa hay will be $10 (+/- $5 depending on season and location), and is good to give rabbits to provide coarse roughage for "wool block" prevention.
We occasionally raise rabbits for food, so I'm somewhat familiar with the economics.
As a haggard part-time sysadmin, I've grown really (really) weary of spam these days. Google's filter doesn't cut it anymore for my personal acccount. The installation of Spam Assassin (with rule sets updated nightly via 'sa-update') I've deployed at work, while blocking a ton of spam, uses up a *ton* of server resources and generally freaks out the sales department when that 1-in-10,000 false positive resulting in a missed/delayed sales or support inquiry. Note, I don't/dev/null SA-flagged spam -- it's filtered to a "Spam" folder on the client site, so in my best Han Solo impression, "It's not my fault!"
It's gotten to the point where I crafted some procmail recipes that will explicitly override certain messages (in the event they're flagged by SA) given certain subject words.
I decided to give 100% Bayesian (and other statistical) filters a try. I found every package in FreeBSD's ports tree that did such filtering, and whittled away programs that either were scripted (SpamBayes is a Python app) or required a running daemon (for example, dspam and Spam Assassin). That left me with 7 lean, compiled binary programs that *only* used classification.
In procmail, I pipe each message through them, which will yield a unique header. If all 7 unanimously tag that message as spam, it gets dumped into a "spam" folder. Likewise, a unanimous ham message gets a direct trip to the inbox. Next, based on a weighted recipe, I count how many "spam" and "ham" votes, and a score of 4 or more results in the messages I sort into "unsurespam" and "unsureham" folders. After the initial training with your saved mail, plus a day or two of close monitoring, this classification is 99.5% trustworthy. I have a script that runs every 5 minutes that determines which program mis-classified the message and then retrains it to the majority vote (ham or spam). Then the message is removed from it's "unsure..." folder, and relocated to the inbox or spam folder.
A message that doesn't result in a "simple majority" vote in either direction (several of the filters have an "unsure" or similar tag), ends up in the generic "unsure" folder, which is very very low volume (maybe a couple of messages a week), and is reviewed by a human. A couple of 'mutt' macros will move the message to "unsurespam" or "unsureham", where the re-training script will deal with it.
The beauty of this system is that each filter, while alone is not much better/worse than Spam Assassin, continually helps to retrain the others, so that drift in spam patterns/vocabulary, which may throw off a filter or two, doesn't appear to have much of an effect on the overall system.
I've only used this for about a month on 2 accounts: a relatively low-volume personal gmail account (via mutt/fetchmail/postfix) and my day-job account, which gets *tons* of spam since I get all webmaster/postmaster/domainmaster/etc system aliases. The system seems to lean towards false negatives, resulting in maybe 5-to-10% of the number Spam Assassin resulted in. I've yet to see a single false positive, and maybe 1% of the Spam Assassin volume of false negatives end up in the generic "unknown" folder for manual review.
I plan on rolling this system out for the critical high-volume mailboxes (support, sales, etc.) for my company very soon, probably during the lull between Christmas and New Year's.
The programs (in order called from my.procmailrc): bmf, CRM114, Bogofilter, SpamProbe, qsf (Quick Spam Filter), annoyance-filter, and SpamOracle.
All are compiled programs, and each runs very quickly. I wish I had the time and know-how to do a proper statistical analysis of this system, but at a glance it not only works much better than Spam Assassin did, it seems to take up less memory/cpu resources and doesn't use any network resources (DNS, domain keys, or RBL lookups).
The only notable weaknesses so far that I've observed is annoyance-filter. Unlike the others, it doesn't have a dynamic dat
Because making you wait 5 days *might* stop a Va Tech type massacre from happening. I would suggest that anyone who asks this sort of question is putting their own selfish self-gratification before the safety of others.
Rubbish. Those of us who ask such questions have a valid reason to do so. Why disrupt a legitimate, lawful purchase/use/possession of firearms to fight the mere possibility of an illegal use of those firearms? As always, this puts law abiding folks at a distinct disadvantage as compared to a resourceful law breaker.
I recall some chagrin experienced by those liberal California gun control advocates during the Los Angeles riots in the '90s. Seems they had an immediate, legitimate need for firearms, yet couldn't acquire them due to the mandatory waiting periods. Sure, we should all "be prepared" in advance, but we should also recognize that we live in a society where every time the power goes offline or a severe storm hits, grocery store shelves go bare in just a few hours. At least those good folks in California got to eat their own dog food that week.:)
Users who keep logs aren't supposed to make them public without asking.
Then please explain this site. (It's a shame there's no site equivalent for baiting feds and other LEOs -- we have enough LEO funds being wasted w/o entrapment.). As with people posting scans of snail mail to the 'net, I doubt there's much anyone can do about having their IRC chats logged. You say/post/write it, then expect it to surface somewhere at some point. Sure, it may be a breach of social etiquette, but I don't think it's illegal.
And yet our asshat populace continues to pay for it. For shame! As someone who hasn't received broadcast television programming in his household for about seven years now, I find this trend somewhat amusing.
This isn't the power/gas/phone/water company (you know... *essential* services for living) screwing us over -- it's TV. Get over it, tell the cable/satellite company to take a flying leap, subscribe to a DVD-by-mail service, and live a more simple, more peaceful life.
That's because kids don't know any better, as they rarely even encounter quality toys these days.
My kids inherited my G1 Transformers collection. My son got a new one last holiday season, and while he loved just getting a new toy (I mean, what kid doesn't?), both he and his sister both commented about how "crappy" the new ones are as compared to the originals. The new ones may be "cooler" (he's been wanting a Bumble Bee ever since seeing the movie), but they recognize quality (or lack thereof) in construction.
I used to try and push OO on people, but I've completely lost faith in it.
Open Office is fine and dandy -- it's the people you should lose faith in. The issues with OO (or any MS Office competitor) are herd mentality (oh, noes! I need this to collaborate with everyone else!), or techno gluttony (.... but I *gotta* have pivot tables and spreadsheet integration to print out mailing lists!). Sheesh, people... reading all the corporate and personal ass-kissing of MS Office and Outlook/Exchange today, one might be led to believe that 15 years ago we were using stone tablets for intra-office communication. Or at the very least that when we had *other* office and email apps in the office (Word Perfect, Lotus-123, and Eudora or, the horror, 80-column terminals and text email clients), we were an order of magnitude less productive back then than we are today with the mighty MS Office Suite ruling the roost. That's simply not true.
The problem is not technical, but social. The herd will not migrate to better pastures (where "better" means personal freedom and flexibility, not the latest bells and whistles), but will *only* seek alternative when they are forced to abandon Office. Period. Same as with Linux on the desktop.
Last time I checked, buildings moved much slower, yet birds seem to have an affinity for them.;-) Seriously, though... greens worried about birds getting diced by windmills should first solve the problem of tall buildings and cars on freeways killing a lot of avian fauna.
The argument is that this looks an awful lot like Congress saying that you can be taxed on the water that you use on your lawn, but not the water you drink. It's the same water, how could you tell either way?
I know! They can dye the potable water an obnoxious pink color. That way, if you're caught with a pink lawn (remember that experiment in elementary school with the celery and food coloring?), they'll hit you with a big fine.
I just don't get it, this need for compatibility with propriety standards. Why use Linux and then bitch that you can't use Windows-centric (or non-open) codecs/programs? It really makes no sense to me, nor does the push by companies like Linsipre and those commercial WINE forks. It's like buying a diesel automobile for the gas mileage and then complaining about some of the quirks of using such a vehicle, such as having to use a block heater. Or those people who want the 80% reduction in power usage from CF bulbs but then complain about the negligible flicker and different spectrum as compared to incandescents. You know what you're getting into (or at least, you should) -- you should suck it up and deal with it if you want the benefits.
Running FreeBSD/amd64, I can't run Wine, use the mplayer win32 codecs, or run any flash players. But I get by just fine. Yeah, I miss out on some of the dumb fun stuff (youtube -- well, I can use hacks like "youtube_dl" that d/l and convert), but that's the price I pay for using Free/free software.
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Original ideas from a book or movie can certainly be adopted and extended by the TV medium, and done very well. Like with most TV, however, there will be 50 stinkers for every decent one. Plots-ripped-from-the-big-screen shows are no different.
But it's not a truly random selection of peers. That's a fatal flaw right there. The jury selection process itself is a pitiful glimpse at how the system works. At my selection, there was a pool of possible jurors -- 12 initially selected to sit, and another 12 standing by. Each side was allowed to kick 4 of us to the curb, and if either side *still* wasn't satisfied, after replacing 8 of us, then the entire pool would be re-drawn. And that's what happened to us, so I never got to sit at trial.
I was selected for jury duty in a domestic abuse case. I was actually looking forward for it -- my employer paid my full salary while on jury duty, so long as I gave them the court stipend I received. Anyway, all of my peers jokingly told me before I went, "If you want out, just tell them during selection that you're college educated!" Sure enough, during the selection, everyone was asked (among other things, like "what magazines do you subscribe to" -- WTF?!?) what level of education they had.
I lost (a lot more) confidence in our legal system that day.
That must explain why iPhones and eMachines are such unpopular products. People hate lame, over-used 1-letter prefixes on everything. It all makes so much sense now!
You could ditch (broadcast) TV entirely. Rent movies and quality TV shows on DVD. It takes a few weeks/months to "decompress" from the frenetic need to have some sort of constant visual stimulus to occupy your spare time, but afterwards, you'll both be much better off. Read, play cards, listen to music, or, you know, *talk* with each other. :)
Funny now that bind's standard nslookup no longer implements this command. I guess today's equivalent is "dig axfr example.com @ns1.example.com".
This is an example of some asshat, ignorant sysadmin trying to save face for being stupid. I had a buddy who got sued for "hacking" by an ISP because they noticed he did a "cat /etc/passwd" while on their server working on something. Hello! McFly! /etc/passwd is *meant* to read by all processes -- it's required for tons of programs to work correctly!
What's next? Going after people who look at web server response headers to find out what kind of web server is being used?!? Quick! -- let's sue for using "lynx --head --dump foo.com"! That's obviously malicious hacking! Nevermind that web servers can be configured to change/disable the "Server" response header.
Someone who's registered please tag this article "asshats".
I once worked for a university HPC environment. I was primary admin on a large-ish RS/6000 serving 1TB (this was impressive when we bought the machine) of space to NFS/Samba clients, from Beowulf nodes to desktops. AIX's LVM and disk management tools, whether it was the "smit" interface or the command-line tools, were simply a joy to work with. You told the machine what you wanted, and it just did it. You could add/remove devices hot (the hardware as well as the drive devices in the OS), grow the volume and and filesystem on it on the fly. It was really, really nice.
After a few years, when IDE disks started getting really cheap, we began investigating multi-TB fileservers on commodity harware using Linux and the LVM tools. Already a well-seasoned Linux admin, I started to learn the ins-and-outs of these VLM tools. While, at the time, they were *almost* as capable as IBM's (certainly a hell of a lot more cost effective), they weren't nearly as nice to work with. Too many layers and parts to worry about. I just wanted to create space to export to the users, and IBM's tools made that very easy to do reliably. The Linux tools were not as polished, but in the end, you could get a serviceable volume up and exported.
ZFS is the first thing I've used since my RS/6000 admin days that "felt" as robust and was as easy to use as IBM's JFS and LVM.
That was around 2003/2004 when AIX 4.x and Linux 2.4.x were the norm. I've since moved on to admin primarily FreeBSD machines. My opinions on the Linux offerings may be a bit dated. However, seeing the comments in this thread, it would appear that though the technology may be better, the usability hasn't quite gotten there just yet.
I've been running the 7.0 branch since about October '07, and I've been using ZFS. Granted, it's my home machine, but it's my primary workstation and I *need* this machine to bring home the bacon, working via home office and all. While I don't use it for important data, the file systems I chose were intentional in order to beat it up a lot: /usr/src, /usr/obj, and /usr/ports -- that's where all of the kernel/userlad/ports compiles take place (at least by default). Tons of reads/writes/delete since I update my ports and source trees almost daily. Never once have I had a problem. On a whim, I ran a zpool status once and found a corruption error on /usr/obj, but I never noticed because it just kept on chugging along. Not that /usr/obj is a terribly critical directory, one which I nuke on a regular basis to ensure a pristine system rebuild. Still, I ran a "zpool scrub" on it live, and it fixed the problem w/o ever going offline.
Not only that, I also use the built-in compression (gzip9) on /usr/src and /usr/ports and my machine is amd64. The former really taxes the system, and the latter platform seems to lag slightly behind i386. Sometimes my machine has quick freezes when the ZFS file systems are being beat up, but my machine is only a 2.0GHz w/ 1GB of memory. For pre-release software, FreeBSD 7.0 really kicks some ass.
Of course, anecdotes are not synonymous with data. ZFS obviously has some issues. But then again, so did reiserfs and ext3 when they were first cast into the mainstream kernel and distros. Sure, the BSD userbase with ZFS is *much* smaller than those of Linux, but I expect ZFS will shine in short order.
I'm a fan of mpg123 and shell scripts myself. It needs so few system resources it's silly. But Amarok, which I used when I ran KDE, is quite an excellent piece of software.
Indeed.
Bush and his comrades are proven evil bastards. Just because his administration does something decent once in a while doesn't give them a free pass. Kudos to the saved trees, but Bush is still an ass.
The problem with that logic is, those who do go to college will likely be no better off in overall net worth than someone who didn't go to college (say, worked straight out of high school, vocation/tech school, or community college). The reason? Good financial smarts are not taught any more.
Your *typical* college weenie will go 4 years, racking up a ton of debt. That not only includes the cost of their schooling, but the load of credit cards that are given away with t-shirts and 2-liter bottles of soda. Now, once they get that fancy job, they'll need a fancy car, fancy house/apartment, while eating our for lunch and a quick jaunt into Starbuck's to/from work every day. They'll be working 20 years to pay off that debt, and will be lucky to have a positive net worth by that time.
Now, take your non-college person. They won't get a ton credit, and they won't have the enormous bills. Sure, their first "real job" may be making $10/hour at Bob's Hardware shop or apprenticing as an electrician or auto mechanic. Their rise to the middle class will be slow, but deliberate. And, if they're careful, they'll be in pretty good shape once they're there.
Now.... don't misunderstand me. Most people are financially stupid -- from college grads to high-school drop-outs. Take this lovely housing collapse as a prime example of people from all levels being stupid and greedy with their money and now feeling the pain.
I truly believe that we've reach a tipping point in this country, where a college degree is more of a liability for middle class Americans than an asset. I was given a paid-for education at Purdue by my folks (though I never finished a degree) -- and I'll forever be in their debt for that. However, my wife and I are not only *not pushing* for college (as my folks did with me), we're somewhat discouraging it for our kids, unless they *really* want to pursue a career where you simply cannot get there w/o a college degree (medical, law, etc.). That's not to say that we're slacking on making them learn some real-world knowledge and skills. Guile is what we're pushing on our kids -- that, and financial smarts.
How can they be more private than "deleted"?
Now, it would be great if people got out and did some major disruption, like the petrol (or was is diesel) protests a few years back in the UK. Imagine if every independent trucker in the US drove in and grid-locked (even moreso than usual) the DC beltway. That would be too spectacular for words.
People don't care though. I predict we'll see another substantial gas price drop a month or two before the '08 election and people will forget how they're getting screwed. It never fails.
Now, without a trial and conviction, your computer equipment can be seized by the cops and sold to supplement the donut/hooker/beer petty cash fund. This is just fucking great. I'd love to see this shot down, but I doubt it will.
And I love the "justification". The fact that the US doesn't make anything *real* anymore is not my fault. Ideas are great and all, but when your only product is ideas, and you've outsourced the manufacture of real, durable goods to other places, you will eat your own dog food eventually. I laugh at how they tossed counterfeit meds in there -- nobody will vote that down during an election cycle. "The senator from your state voted *against* protecting seniors from counterfeit medicine on the internet!" Nevermind that they're trying to kill out-of-country medication purchases *anyway*.
Anyone know where I can get a free (or cheap and paid anonymously with cash) shell account overseas where I can SSH in and compile/run TOR? This is getting fucking ridiculous.
We occasionally raise rabbits for food, so I'm somewhat familiar with the economics.
It's gotten to the point where I crafted some procmail recipes that will explicitly override certain messages (in the event they're flagged by SA) given certain subject words.
I decided to give 100% Bayesian (and other statistical) filters a try. I found every package in FreeBSD's ports tree that did such filtering, and whittled away programs that either were scripted (SpamBayes is a Python app) or required a running daemon (for example, dspam and Spam Assassin). That left me with 7 lean, compiled binary programs that *only* used classification.
In procmail, I pipe each message through them, which will yield a unique header. If all 7 unanimously tag that message as spam, it gets dumped into a "spam" folder. Likewise, a unanimous ham message gets a direct trip to the inbox. Next, based on a weighted recipe, I count how many "spam" and "ham" votes, and a score of 4 or more results in the messages I sort into "unsurespam" and "unsureham" folders. After the initial training with your saved mail, plus a day or two of close monitoring, this classification is 99.5% trustworthy. I have a script that runs every 5 minutes that determines which program mis-classified the message and then retrains it to the majority vote (ham or spam). Then the message is removed from it's "unsure..." folder, and relocated to the inbox or spam folder.
A message that doesn't result in a "simple majority" vote in either direction (several of the filters have an "unsure" or similar tag), ends up in the generic "unsure" folder, which is very very low volume (maybe a couple of messages a week), and is reviewed by a human. A couple of 'mutt' macros will move the message to "unsurespam" or "unsureham", where the re-training script will deal with it.
The beauty of this system is that each filter, while alone is not much better/worse than Spam Assassin, continually helps to retrain the others, so that drift in spam patterns/vocabulary, which may throw off a filter or two, doesn't appear to have much of an effect on the overall system.
I've only used this for about a month on 2 accounts: a relatively low-volume personal gmail account (via mutt/fetchmail/postfix) and my day-job account, which gets *tons* of spam since I get all webmaster/postmaster/domainmaster/etc system aliases. The system seems to lean towards false negatives, resulting in maybe 5-to-10% of the number Spam Assassin resulted in. I've yet to see a single false positive, and maybe 1% of the Spam Assassin volume of false negatives end up in the generic "unknown" folder for manual review.
I plan on rolling this system out for the critical high-volume mailboxes (support, sales, etc.) for my company very soon, probably during the lull between Christmas and New Year's.
The programs (in order called from my .procmailrc): bmf, CRM114, Bogofilter, SpamProbe, qsf (Quick Spam Filter), annoyance-filter, and SpamOracle.
All are compiled programs, and each runs very quickly. I wish I had the time and know-how to do a proper statistical analysis of this system, but at a glance it not only works much better than Spam Assassin did, it seems to take up less memory/cpu resources and doesn't use any network resources (DNS, domain keys, or RBL lookups).
The only notable weaknesses so far that I've observed is annoyance-filter. Unlike the others, it doesn't have a dynamic dat
Rubbish. Those of us who ask such questions have a valid reason to do so. Why disrupt a legitimate, lawful purchase/use/possession of firearms to fight the mere possibility of an illegal use of those firearms? As always, this puts law abiding folks at a distinct disadvantage as compared to a resourceful law breaker.
I recall some chagrin experienced by those liberal California gun control advocates during the Los Angeles riots in the '90s. Seems they had an immediate, legitimate need for firearms, yet couldn't acquire them due to the mandatory waiting periods. Sure, we should all "be prepared" in advance, but we should also recognize that we live in a society where every time the power goes offline or a severe storm hits, grocery store shelves go bare in just a few hours. At least those good folks in California got to eat their own dog food that week. :)
Then please explain this site. (It's a shame there's no site equivalent for baiting feds and other LEOs -- we have enough LEO funds being wasted w/o entrapment.). As with people posting scans of snail mail to the 'net, I doubt there's much anyone can do about having their IRC chats logged. You say/post/write it, then expect it to surface somewhere at some point. Sure, it may be a breach of social etiquette, but I don't think it's illegal.
This isn't the power/gas/phone/water company (you know... *essential* services for living) screwing us over -- it's TV. Get over it, tell the cable/satellite company to take a flying leap, subscribe to a DVD-by-mail service, and live a more simple, more peaceful life.
My kids inherited my G1 Transformers collection. My son got a new one last holiday season, and while he loved just getting a new toy (I mean, what kid doesn't?), both he and his sister both commented about how "crappy" the new ones are as compared to the originals. The new ones may be "cooler" (he's been wanting a Bumble Bee ever since seeing the movie), but they recognize quality (or lack thereof) in construction.
Or just not use SSH password authentication to begin with and be done worrying about it.
Open Office is fine and dandy -- it's the people you should lose faith in. The issues with OO (or any MS Office competitor) are herd mentality (oh, noes! I need this to collaborate with everyone else!), or techno gluttony (.... but I *gotta* have pivot tables and spreadsheet integration to print out mailing lists!). Sheesh, people... reading all the corporate and personal ass-kissing of MS Office and Outlook/Exchange today, one might be led to believe that 15 years ago we were using stone tablets for intra-office communication. Or at the very least that when we had *other* office and email apps in the office (Word Perfect, Lotus-123, and Eudora or, the horror, 80-column terminals and text email clients), we were an order of magnitude less productive back then than we are today with the mighty MS Office Suite ruling the roost. That's simply not true.
The problem is not technical, but social. The herd will not migrate to better pastures (where "better" means personal freedom and flexibility, not the latest bells and whistles), but will *only* seek alternative when they are forced to abandon Office. Period. Same as with Linux on the desktop.
Last time I checked, buildings moved much slower, yet birds seem to have an affinity for them. ;-) Seriously, though... greens worried about birds getting diced by windmills should first solve the problem of tall buildings and cars on freeways killing a lot of avian fauna.
I know! They can dye the potable water an obnoxious pink color. That way, if you're caught with a pink lawn (remember that experiment in elementary school with the celery and food coloring?), they'll hit you with a big fine.
Running FreeBSD/amd64, I can't run Wine, use the mplayer win32 codecs, or run any flash players. But I get by just fine. Yeah, I miss out on some of the dumb fun stuff (youtube -- well, I can use hacks like "youtube_dl" that d/l and convert), but that's the price I pay for using Free/free software.