Well, due to all those Hollywood movies which portray tarantulas as deadly, and a pretty high level of arachnophobia being widespread anyway, and those things inherently generating a " HUGE SPIDERS!!!!" reaction in the unsuspecting... they may be harmless (for getting jabbed with fangs the size of icepicks, regardless of their venom being ineffective on humans levels of harmless) but in the words of Ray Stevens hilarious song "Sittin' Up with the Dead"... they can sure make you hurt yourself.
The observation that "The wind blows where it wishes" is at least 2000 years old, and I'm sure the knowledge of that fact is far, far older. It continues to baffle me that some people, for ideological reasons, pretend not to know it.
As someone who finds many of Carter's political ventures horrifying at best, I do have to applaud him for Habitat for Humanity, the Guinea Worm eradication program, and similar efforts.
There are a number of domains that people post links to on Facebook that I've banned from my newsfeed because of their evil scream-in-your-face ad behavior. Yeah. Make the ads on your page offensive enough, and I'll ban your whole domain and never go to it again. (It helps that the sites that do this are pretty solidly all crap sites anyway.)
Mod parent up. I was going to make the same suggestion -- blockers that go "stealth", pretend to load the ad and don't display it or run its filthy malware-laden scripts.
I've never used an ad-blocker, but I do use NoScript. Occasionally I go to one of those gadzillions of web pages with several dozen different scripts from different domains, where I don't know which ones I have to enable in order to see the content, so I hit "temporarily allow all", and I get one of those horrific "jump in your face and scream a sales pitch at you" abominations... Usually when I'm up late and my wife's asleep... So I'm beginning to reconsider not just blocking ads altogether.
I've driven in Boston and Seattle. Give me Seattle any day. Or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or even Atlanta.
Boston has bad driving of the sort I've only seen elsewhere in silly YouTube videos of the "Look how crazy they drive in $thirdWorldCountry, how are any of them still alive?" sort.
I got into this with an audiophule type a few years ago. He, with a completely straight face, asserted that double-blind testing was an inherently flawed methodology for evaluating the objective marvelosity of some silly audiophule crap he was touting. (This obviously being some entirely new definition of the word "objective" that I was previously unacquainted with.) In that case it was 12-gauge solid copper speaker cables at $$$$$/foot. I said "And that is different from $0.12/foot Romex... how, exactly?" He started going on about how these things were oxygen-free rectangular cross section, hand-forged by the Kebler Elves with tiny silver hammers... and then summarily dismissed double-blind testing when I suggested it.
If the web site requires some sort of login, and denies me the ability to use LastPass to manage that login, I do not use that website. No discussion, no arguments, my mind is entirely made up, closed, and locked on this point. I will find someone else to do business with who doesn't think they know better than I do how to secure my access to their site.
... when some web page blasts me with noisy ads at 2AM, is the power from the movie "Scanners" to reach through the Internet with my mind and make their server melt down into a puddle.
Been there, done that, any statute of limitations expired over a quarter of a century ago. And nitrogen triiodide is absolutely not stable when wet. It is more stable when wet than when dry, but I observed some going off, all by itself, in the bottom of a beaker of water sitting on my bookshelf. And the paper towel I was filtering the stuff through earlier that day were sopping wet when some of it went off and spattered me from head to foot with the stuff. Every step was snap, crackle, pop for the next 90 minutes or so.
It should not be possible to make 911 calls and spoof the source as somewhere else. I'm sure "swatting" never occurred as a potential threat to anyone when the 911 system was being built, but it's pretty dang obvious now, and the vulnerability needs to be closed before some idiot's use of it gets someone killed. (Or someone else killed... have there been any deaths caused by swatting? I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't recall one.)
I run into the same thing with my Yahoo address. It's not a very common name... but there's somebody who thinks (or, at one time, thought) that it was his email address. I've gotten emails from his daughter complaining about the kids at school bugging her, Olan Mills appointment confirmations, saxophone enthusiast newsletters, Gamestop emails saying how many points he's earned buying stuff from them. The last one I got was a Fedex delivery confirmation for somewhere over a thousand miles from me; I printed out the confirmations and sent them to him snail-mail, telling him he had the wrong address. I never heard back from him on that (hey, he does have an email address for me) but the misdirected emails seem to have stopped, too.
I'd have thought telling the daughter she was emailing the wrong address would have done it, but nothing she sent acknowledged that... either she's very young and didn't understand, or maybe someone was running some kind of sting against this other guy.
So... yeah, probably just misdirected, but keeping track of your credit reports, and informing the cable company, would be a good idea.
There are a few exceptions. A few. A legitimate business, though, almost always has some sort of presence in the the real world, and wants customers to be able to contact them to transact business. If a business wants to be anonymous, fine, but don't expect me to do business with you. A business with a "privacy protected" whois is inherently very, very suspicious to me.
There's a reason that SpamAssassin is a core component to so many commercial spam filters.
I've been using Gmail for years, and have it popping my mail from a couple of other accounts, or setting them to forward it. For email sent directly to my Gmail address, their spam filtering seems pretty good, but for forwarded or popped email, they get way too many false positives. Their filtering sees the IP address the mail is being popped or forwarded from as the "connecting address" for SPF, DKIM, etc., testing. This is a rather large pain in the butt. There's no way I have found to tell Gmail "These IP addresses are to be considered trusted forwarders for my email." The other conveniences of using Gmail are keeping me there, though. So far.
My old shell account email uses Mailguard, which is yet another SpamAssassin based filter, and it's pretty good, but I do get some false positives, at least, when I set it to the most aggressive setting. The thing I like best about it is that I can view my spam quarantine sorted by SpamAssassin score. Skim the low scoring ones; all the false positives are going to be there.
This would probably be useful only for groups of satellites in the same orbital plane. The application that comes to mind is all the satellites in increasingly crowded geostationary ("Clarke") orbit, with the orbital plane going through the equator. Orbital plane changes are one of the most expensive maneuver there are in orbit. (This was one of the criticisms of the movie "Gravity". The only way a space shuttle can get from the Hubble's orbit to the ISS orbit is to land and get re-launched into the proper orbital plane. Doing it in a backpack? Ludicrous.)
A satellite repair bot making its rounds through Clarke Orbit could be extremely useful.
I'm definitely on the pro-nuclear side in general, but I wonder if, in the case of a probe on a comet, the heat given off by a RTG would be an issue. So much of what the probe is there to study is low sublimation point volatiles.
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Well, due to all those Hollywood movies which portray tarantulas as deadly, and a pretty high level of arachnophobia being widespread anyway, and those things inherently generating a " HUGE SPIDERS!!!!" reaction in the unsuspecting... they may be harmless (for getting jabbed with fangs the size of icepicks, regardless of their venom being ineffective on humans levels of harmless) but in the words of Ray Stevens hilarious song "Sittin' Up with the Dead"... they can sure make you hurt yourself.
The observation that "The wind blows where it wishes" is at least 2000 years old, and I'm sure the knowledge of that fact is far, far older. It continues to baffle me that some people, for ideological reasons, pretend not to know it.
As someone who finds many of Carter's political ventures horrifying at best, I do have to applaud him for Habitat for Humanity, the Guinea Worm eradication program, and similar efforts.
Kerry quote from the article: "...the latest means of spying is to be going after peoples' cyber." I have a cyber? Where is my cyber?.
Cybers are generally kept in tubes.
There are a number of domains that people post links to on Facebook that I've banned from my newsfeed because of their evil scream-in-your-face ad behavior. Yeah. Make the ads on your page offensive enough, and I'll ban your whole domain and never go to it again. (It helps that the sites that do this are pretty solidly all crap sites anyway.)
Mod parent up. I was going to make the same suggestion -- blockers that go "stealth", pretend to load the ad and don't display it or run its filthy malware-laden scripts.
I've never used an ad-blocker, but I do use NoScript. Occasionally I go to one of those gadzillions of web pages with several dozen different scripts from different domains, where I don't know which ones I have to enable in order to see the content, so I hit "temporarily allow all", and I get one of those horrific "jump in your face and scream a sales pitch at you" abominations... Usually when I'm up late and my wife's asleep... So I'm beginning to reconsider not just blocking ads altogether.
I've driven in Boston and Seattle. Give me Seattle any day. Or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or even Atlanta.
Boston has bad driving of the sort I've only seen elsewhere in silly YouTube videos of the "Look how crazy they drive in $thirdWorldCountry, how are any of them still alive?" sort.
I got into this with an audiophule type a few years ago. He, with a completely straight face, asserted that double-blind testing was an inherently flawed methodology for evaluating the objective marvelosity of some silly audiophule crap he was touting. (This obviously being some entirely new definition of the word "objective" that I was previously unacquainted with.) In that case it was 12-gauge solid copper speaker cables at $$$$$/foot. I said "And that is different from $0.12/foot Romex... how, exactly?" He started going on about how these things were oxygen-free rectangular cross section, hand-forged by the Kebler Elves with tiny silver hammers... and then summarily dismissed double-blind testing when I suggested it.
Argh, I tried to mod the above as "funny" and the mouse slipped just as I clicked. Somebody mod it as funny, please.
If the web site requires some sort of login, and denies me the ability to use LastPass to manage that login, I do not use that website. No discussion, no arguments, my mind is entirely made up, closed, and locked on this point. I will find someone else to do business with who doesn't think they know better than I do how to secure my access to their site.
... when some web page blasts me with noisy ads at 2AM, is the power from the movie "Scanners" to reach through the Internet with my mind and make their server melt down into a puddle.
It would still be a useful option for people who don't normally drive trucks -- U-Haul renters, RV drivers, etc.
Been there, done that, any statute of limitations expired over a quarter of a century ago. And nitrogen triiodide is absolutely not stable when wet. It is more stable when wet than when dry, but I observed some going off, all by itself, in the bottom of a beaker of water sitting on my bookshelf. And the paper towel I was filtering the stuff through earlier that day were sopping wet when some of it went off and spattered me from head to foot with the stuff. Every step was snap, crackle, pop for the next 90 minutes or so.
It should not be possible to make 911 calls and spoof the source as somewhere else. I'm sure "swatting" never occurred as a potential threat to anyone when the 911 system was being built, but it's pretty dang obvious now, and the vulnerability needs to be closed before some idiot's use of it gets someone killed. (Or someone else killed... have there been any deaths caused by swatting? I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't recall one.)
Oh, my.... I'm hearing this in my brain as a parody of Ray Stevens' "It's Me Again, Margaret"...
Don't just reset the password -- turn on two-factor authentication.
I run into the same thing with my Yahoo address. It's not a very common name... but there's somebody who thinks (or, at one time, thought) that it was his email address. I've gotten emails from his daughter complaining about the kids at school bugging her, Olan Mills appointment confirmations, saxophone enthusiast newsletters, Gamestop emails saying how many points he's earned buying stuff from them. The last one I got was a Fedex delivery confirmation for somewhere over a thousand miles from me; I printed out the confirmations and sent them to him snail-mail, telling him he had the wrong address. I never heard back from him on that (hey, he does have an email address for me) but the misdirected emails seem to have stopped, too.
I'd have thought telling the daughter she was emailing the wrong address would have done it, but nothing she sent acknowledged that... either she's very young and didn't understand, or maybe someone was running some kind of sting against this other guy.
So... yeah, probably just misdirected, but keeping track of your credit reports, and informing the cable company, would be a good idea.
$ vi reasons-to-never-ever-move-to-chicago.txt
PageDown
PageDown
PageDown
PageDown
PageDown
PageDown
dang... how many pages are there?
PageDown
PageDown
PageDown
PageDown
Shoulda' done this to start with.
G
wait... wait... wait...
ERROR: /tmp file system full
... crap.
There are a few exceptions. A few. A legitimate business, though, almost always has some sort of presence in the the real world, and wants customers to be able to contact them to transact business. If a business wants to be anonymous, fine, but don't expect me to do business with you. A business with a "privacy protected" whois is inherently very, very suspicious to me.
If you are espousing 0 emission energy in the next 35 years, and you don't mention nuclear as a necessary component, then you are lying.
He's typical of the "we can run industrial civilization on sunny days when the wind is blowing energy" types... Arithmetic denialist.
Working exactly as designed, I suspect.
There's a reason that SpamAssassin is a core component to so many commercial spam filters.
I've been using Gmail for years, and have it popping my mail from a couple of other accounts, or setting them to forward it. For email sent directly to my Gmail address, their spam filtering seems pretty good, but for forwarded or popped email, they get way too many false positives. Their filtering sees the IP address the mail is being popped or forwarded from as the "connecting address" for SPF, DKIM, etc., testing. This is a rather large pain in the butt. There's no way I have found to tell Gmail "These IP addresses are to be considered trusted forwarders for my email." The other conveniences of using Gmail are keeping me there, though. So far.
My old shell account email uses Mailguard, which is yet another SpamAssassin based filter, and it's pretty good, but I do get some false positives, at least, when I set it to the most aggressive setting. The thing I like best about it is that I can view my spam quarantine sorted by SpamAssassin score. Skim the low scoring ones; all the false positives are going to be there.
This would probably be useful only for groups of satellites in the same orbital plane. The application that comes to mind is all the satellites in increasingly crowded geostationary ("Clarke") orbit, with the orbital plane going through the equator. Orbital plane changes are one of the most expensive maneuver there are in orbit. (This was one of the criticisms of the movie "Gravity". The only way a space shuttle can get from the Hubble's orbit to the ISS orbit is to land and get re-launched into the proper orbital plane. Doing it in a backpack? Ludicrous.)
A satellite repair bot making its rounds through Clarke Orbit could be extremely useful.
This is probably more legally tenable than my thought, which was to subject the executive staff responsible to decimation.
I'm definitely on the pro-nuclear side in general, but I wonder if, in the case of a probe on a comet, the heat given off by a RTG would be an issue. So much of what the probe is there to study is low sublimation point volatiles.