Ken Wharton's "Divine Intervention" is good, an examination of some interesing ideas about time and cosmology. His short story "Aloha" which was printed in Analog a few months back is a different take on some of the same ideas. (Basically, time-reversal at the endpoints (Big Bang/Gnab Gib) but there's a bit more to it than that. I'm being purposefully vague to avoid spoilers.)
(I don't know if he has time to do much writing these days, alas... Last I heard, he was having to do all his job and his boss's job, too, after his boss died unexpectedly.)
As for Norman Spinrad -- after he says the end of the Soviet Empire was the second worst mistake of our time (second only in his mind to the election of George Bush) I've filed him in the "Loons from Planet Pinko" folder. Leaving all the other issues alone for the moment - Given all the space all of these authors gave to environmental concerns in this interview, did he read none of the reports of the state of the environment in the Eastern Block that came out after the fall of the Iron Curtain? Or did he just continue to dismiss all criticism of the "Peoples Republics" as fascist propaganda?
As God is my witness,
The Star Wars Holiday Special is worse than Manos, the Hands of Fate.
I haven't seen Manos, the Hands of Fate, but I have seen The Star Wars Holiday Special when it was aired, and I believe you. Manos could not possibly be worse. Nothing could possibly be worse. I have seen The Creeping Terror, and The Star Wars Holiday Special is definitely worse than that. The only thing that kept me watching all the way to the end was that I kept saying to myself "Star Wars. George Lucas. It can not possibly be all bad. It has to get better, it has to come to the point. Soon, now."
What a horrible, tragic, unspeakable error in judgement.
As soon as a container corrodes, cracks or otherwise ruptures that waste is going to be headed for the water table
As soon as you write this, it's clear that you are Not Paying Attention. At all. The disposal plan is to mix the waste into molten glass and/or ceramic, and cast solid lumps of this glass or ceramic. This can not corrode (natural glasses (tektites) are known to survive unchanged for over a billion years in sea water) there's nothing to rupture, and if it does crack, so what? You've just got two little lumps of impervious radioactive glass instead of one big one.
What everyone else said about the silly hyperbole of it being dangerous for "a quarter million years"...
No contest. (Well, maybe, "Manos: The Hands of Fate", but I haven't seen that. If it's worse than "The Creeping Terror", count me out, it must be truly brain-rottingly bad.)
Imagine a "creature" that looks like 500 pounds of carpet remnants with tennis balls on the ends of slinky springs for eyes.
Then imagine a space craft that looks like a piece of concrete drainage pipe.
Imagine that the "creature" moves so slowly that the only way it can consume its victims is that they just lie there as it oh-so-slowly galumphs over them.
Now, the crowning touch, the rotting fish head on top of this pile of putrescent garbage: Imagine that they lost the whole sound track, and lacking funds (or blackmail material) to get the actors back to dub some dialog, they brought in (so help me!) a guy whose regular job was narrating those "red asphalt" driver's ed films for high schools to narrate the whole movie in a deadly monotone: "And John told Mary that the monster had eaten the entire cheerleading squad, and Mary agreed that that was really terrible..." while the actors silently flapped their gums.
Not "so bad it's funny." Just bad. Boringly bad, in a completely un-interesting way.
I've kind of liked "Enterprise", too. They have had a few episodes that have plumbed the depths of putridity ("A Night Wasted in Sick Bay") but then, so did the original. ("Spock's Brain"? "And the Children Shall Lead"?) It's been mostly OK. Alas, it hasn't reached the heights that original Trek did, either, but some of the third season has been pretty good.
But when I saw that Nazi alien in the season-ender, I had this feeling.... "Is that Captain Sam Beckett on a motorcycle? In the air? Is that a shark in a tank underneath him? Is he mutting 'Oh, boy'?"
I don't see how they can bring James T. Kirk back with anything resembling any sense. If they didn't jump the shark already, this likely will do it.
Would that there was some way to rewind back to the beginning of the series and start over from scratch, and add two absolute, inflexible, never-to-be-violated Commandments:
I: Thou Shalt Not Time Travel. Never. Ever. There is no such thing. It does not exist. It shall never be mentioned as a possibility.
II: Thou Shalt Not Ride The Transporter. Ideally, the transporter should not have been invented yet. Possibly, it exists as only a cargo-transport device, people are scared of it, and *no one* is willing to ride it. McCoy had an old-fashioned dislike of the transporter; maybe here we could see the fashionable thinking that became old in Kirk's time: The transporter destroys you utterly and makes a copy elsewhere. This is a Bad Thing.
One thing that came up at lunch the other day was that there were a whole lot of tech people employed to "do something about" the Y2K scare. (Remember the Y2K scare?)
Problem solved, on 1/1/2000, they weren't needed any more, so there followed a dip in tech employment. Other factors were probably as large or larger, but I don't think this factor was insignificant. Maybe it was a triggering factor in puncturing the bubble.
Perhaps they lost a word, and it should have been "The Gray Lady is a beautiful clipper ship, but it's losing to steam..." The paper-only news sources are a dying media, and this process will only accelerate. If the Times management can't figure that out... well, how many companies can make a living for their employees by selling slide rules, buggy whips, and whale oil lamps these days? These things work themselves out in the market, but it'll sure suck to be a Times employee.
Truth being said in jest dept: These tags are tiny. I'd love to be able to put one on my wife's glasses, my keys, my cell phone, etc., etc., and yes, most especially the remote controls. Then, with a reader, I could at least get a "warmer... warmer... colder..." guide to where the items were.
Then there's the problem of misplacing the reader. I think I'd want to have it "want" to be in a docking station in a fixed location, and start making noise after a few minutes "away from home".
I worked at the Johnson Space Center for two years, back in 1976-1978, and I was there when they brought in the Saturn V.
This was actual flight hardware that was supposed to have gone to the moon for the Apollo 18 mission. When they brought it in, it still had red "Remove before flight" tags hanging from various places.
I am... really annoyed, saddened, and angry that NASA has let this vehicle rot away.
Assuming we can get by the political hurdles posed by breeder reactors, yes, we can extend things significantly. But Uranium is a non-renewable resource, and if we can find a better way, we should!
The "run out of uranium in 50 years" figure is assuming current reserves are all there is, and assuming we continue the current utterly insanely wasteful once-through fuel cycle.
If we just reprocess, and recycle the remaining U235 and plutonium and other actinides into new fuel rods, there's enough proven reserves for hundreds of years. That's not using specialized breeder reactors, just the plutonium that is bred in normal reactors. Using breeders extends that to over a thousand years, current proven reserves.
Beyond that, uranium is not the only thing you can breed fission fuel from. Thorium is, according to my old CRC handbook, about as common as lead, and "there is probably more energy available from thorium in the earth's crust than from uranium and all fossil fuels put together."
Beyond that, back in the 70s, the Japanese demonstrated an ion exchange process to extract uranium from sea water. It cost, IIRC, about $200/pound in 1970's dollars, so it wasn't cheap. But it's about as infinite as you could ask for.
Way back when (November 1990) an American nuclear engineer wrote up a report on he'd learned from reading Soviet reports on the incident, and from conversations with Soviet nuclear engineers, and posted it on the Jerry Pournelle RT on GEnie.
Fascinating reading.
At the risk of slashdotting my Earthlink account, I'll mention that I saved a copy of the report here.
Every now and then, I get the urge to do some google hacking and make that "French Military Victories" search point to a story about the French blowing up Greenpeace's "Rainbow Warrior" in New Zealand harbor.
(I generally just go lie down until the urge goes away.)
Also in the science fiction side of this, G. David Nordley had a story in Analog back around 1994 or so called "His Father's Voice", which has someone inventing pretty much this technology in order to play a broken record his father had recorded.
Yes, I could buy a brand new multi-gigahertz computer in order to run Open Office. They're actually pretty cheap now; Office Depot had a really nice system on sale for about $500 last week.
I was briefly tempted - but I should spend $500 on a new computer for no other reason than Open Office requires that much horsepower to run? Why? Everything else I run has perfectly acceptable performance on my 600 MHz system. I have a word processor that meets my needs that gives me great performance on my current system.
Why should it be OK for Open Office to require even more resources for acceptable performance than Microsoft's legendarily bloated Office?
I last used OpenOffice 1.0.1, I think it was. Its slowness was horrible. Not just the time it took to load the word processor, but the time it took to open a document, the time it took to do anything. Click "Open", then go outside to watch the continents drift and the galactic spiral whirl while it loads the document.
This on a Pentium III 600MHz with 128MB of RAM.
At work, I have an ancient computer that's less than half this machine, and runs Microsoft Word comfortably. (Well, as comfortable as it gets with Microsoft.)
Eventually, I happened to look in the bag of documentation that came with my PC, and lo and behold, there was a Lotus SmartSuite CDROM that I'd never installed. The Lotus word processor runs very well and very fast. I'm much happier with that than I ever was with Open Office.
Especially since it opens Word for Windows 2.0 documents, which I have zillions of, and which Open Office won't touch.
I'd like to be able to say that Open Office is great. Maybe 1.1 is; 1.0.1 was definitely not.
Well, it begins to show some of the characteristics which become progressively more annyoing in Late Heinlein... However, one of the best stories he ever wrote is the chapter "The Tale of the Adopted Daughter" in this book. It's pretty much a stand-alone story. If you don't read anything else in this book, read "Methuselah's Children" to get to know who Lazarus Long is, then read this chapter of "Time Enough for Love."
>let's not forget that Edward James Olmos has >warned fans of the original series to not watch.
I read his quote way back when, and it seemed to me he was saying that if you're the sort of obsessive fanboy who regards every word of the original series as Holy Writ, and will get upset at the slightest change... Then, no, you should not watch this version, as it will upset you. Otherwise, you might like it.
I never cared much for the original; I only watched it for a while because there was no other SF on the toob. There's only so many "Morons take kid and daggit to uncharted planet, daggit runs away, kid runs off following daggit, morons must spend rest of episode chasing stupid kid" plots I can stand to watch.
It did occasionally have some good stuff. I was interested in seeing more about what was going on with Count Iblis.
The last straw, though, was on one episode where the Badactica had to go back to somewhere they had left earlier, console jocky asks Captain Ben Cartwright what speed to set, and he intones portentiously "Light Speed!" There follows a great deal of anxiety about how they hadn't gone that fast in centons and centons, and the engines canna take tha strain.
Which showed that no one involved in the show had a clue. Not the slightest clue. I couldn't bear to watch it after that, even though it was the only thing barely resembling SF on the toob.
So "Not the same as the old BG" sounds promising to me.
Unfortunately, nothing else I have heard about this wombat sounds like it's going to be good. At all. It sounds <voice=marvin> perfectly dreadful. </voice> I don't plan to watch; if I hear it's really good after all, I'm sure the skiffy channel will re-run any episodes I missed.
I'm coming to the conclusion that what is necessary is to attack the "making money" part of spam. One way that might work is similar to the "release gadzillions of sterile loathsome parasites" method that eradicated the screwworm fly in the U.S.
Or, spam them back.
If the spammers get hundreds of thousands of bogus requests for more information or signups on their web page (signing up other spammers, of course) for every legitimate one, they could never find the dollar bills buried in all the crap.
What it would take would be an Eliza-like program to convert a spam into a request for more information, and (more complicated) a program to download a web page, find the form, and fill it in with data that looks legit enough that it will take a human followup attempt to determine its bogosity.
Yes, this would result in more network traffic wasted in the short run. In the long run, if it were to make spam uneconomical, it might be a net gain.
Re:Another (not so rosy) view of Heinlein
on
New Heinlein Novel
·
· Score: 1
Heinlein was certainly a man of strong opinions, and, like all of us, he had his flaws.
However, sight unseen, I file Earl Kemp's article in the "Jackals scavanging the carcass of a dead lion" folder.
The "Puppet Masters" movie actually wasn't too bad. Donald Sutherland (IMHO) really nailed The Old Man. They got kind of Hollywood with the slugs, the alien ship was just plain wrong, and they cut the infestation down to something relatively local. (Then again, making a movie complete with "Schedue Suntan" is likely impossible; the Good Guys won before that became necessary in the movie.)
I still get chills about that scene with the hagridden chimp. Somehow, they conveyed the sense of malevolent purpose in the chimp's actions. How did they do that?
It's from an entirely different universe than the abhomination Ve'reHeavin' committed against "Starship Troopers".
... Or, when everyone responds, with bogus contact information, so that the spammer or whoever hopes to make money off of spam must follow up on thousands or millions of false leads in order to find the one bite from a real pigeon.
Downside, a few people spamming on behalf of "legitmate" companies will reap a windfall when they get to sell a whole lot of leads. But that will dry up quick when the companies paying for these leads find that the leads are all bogus.
Someone suggested maybe some of them were bogus orders produced by a "form-filler".
If so... Only 6000? How about 6 million, or 6 billion bogus orders? Using all the spammers' "personalization" tricks so that each order must be individually examined or even followed up on to determine whether it's real or not.
Let's get busy, folks!
(And remember the 11th Commandment: Do Not Get Caught.)
Today, I was working on a problem with our spamassassin server running out of memory, and saw something scary in the log file - email from <one of our biggest customers> to <executive who reports directly to the CEO>, subject "Legal action started", marked as spam.
Very bad to get false positives like this!
However, on tracking it down, it was....
You guessed it....
An ad for an herbal product to "Enlarge your P3n1s!!"
Can we start hunting them down and shooting them yet? Please, pretty please?
If a lot of recipients are using greylisting, an open relay will accumulate a *lot* of mail in its outgoing mail queue. Maybe enough to force the irresponsible party to block relaying as the only way to get any of their own email delivered.
.. and MAYBE... just MAYBE... we'll get the scoop on this whole Klingon forehead thing.. No ridges... Ridges... That's a choice in potato chips, not aliens dammit!
Well, according to Gene Roddenberry, Klingons always had ridges. DesiLu just didn't give them the budget to show them back in 1967.
They screwed that up in the otherwise excellent DS9 tribble episode, unfortunately. What they should have done was had Michael Dorn without the snapping turtle shell on his forehead in the "past" scenes, and nobody notices anything different. Better, given mondo bucks, digitially bumpify the foreheads of all the Klingons in the old episode.
Slashdot Mirror
Ken Wharton's "Divine Intervention" is good, an examination of some interesing ideas about time and cosmology. His short story "Aloha" which was printed in Analog a few months back is a different take on some of the same ideas. (Basically, time-reversal at the endpoints (Big Bang/Gnab Gib) but there's a bit more to it than that. I'm being purposefully vague to avoid spoilers.)
(I don't know if he has time to do much writing these days, alas... Last I heard, he was having to do all his job and his boss's job, too, after his boss died unexpectedly.)
As for Norman Spinrad -- after he says the end of the Soviet Empire was the second worst mistake of our time (second only in his mind to the election of George Bush) I've filed him in the "Loons from Planet Pinko" folder. Leaving all the other issues alone for the moment - Given all the space all of these authors gave to environmental concerns in this interview, did he read none of the reports of the state of the environment in the Eastern Block that came out after the fall of the Iron Curtain? Or did he just continue to dismiss all criticism of the "Peoples Republics" as fascist propaganda?
What a horrible, tragic, unspeakable error in judgement.
It never got better.
It got worse.
As soon as you write this, it's clear that you are Not Paying Attention. At all. The disposal plan is to mix the waste into molten glass and/or ceramic, and cast solid lumps of this glass or ceramic. This can not corrode (natural glasses (tektites) are known to survive unchanged for over a billion years in sea water) there's nothing to rupture, and if it does crack, so what? You've just got two little lumps of impervious radioactive glass instead of one big one.
What everyone else said about the silly hyperbole of it being dangerous for "a quarter million years"...
No contest. (Well, maybe, "Manos: The Hands of Fate", but I haven't seen that. If it's worse than "The Creeping Terror", count me out, it must be truly brain-rottingly bad.)
Imagine a "creature" that looks like 500 pounds of carpet remnants with tennis balls on the ends of slinky springs for eyes.
Then imagine a space craft that looks like a piece of concrete drainage pipe.
Imagine that the "creature" moves so slowly that the only way it can consume its victims is that they just lie there as it oh-so-slowly galumphs over them.
Now, the crowning touch, the rotting fish head on top of this pile of putrescent garbage: Imagine that they lost the whole sound track, and lacking funds (or blackmail material) to get the actors back to dub some dialog, they brought in (so help me!) a guy whose regular job was narrating those "red asphalt" driver's ed films for high schools to narrate the whole movie in a deadly monotone: "And John told Mary that the monster had eaten the entire cheerleading squad, and Mary agreed that that was really terrible..." while the actors silently flapped their gums.
Not "so bad it's funny." Just bad. Boringly bad, in a completely un-interesting way.
I've kind of liked "Enterprise", too. They have had a few episodes that have plumbed the depths of putridity ("A Night Wasted in Sick Bay") but then, so did the original. ("Spock's Brain"? "And the Children Shall Lead"?) It's been mostly OK. Alas, it hasn't reached the heights that original Trek did, either, but some of the third season has been pretty good.
But when I saw that Nazi alien in the season-ender, I had this feeling.... "Is that Captain Sam Beckett on a motorcycle? In the air? Is that a shark in a tank underneath him? Is he mutting 'Oh, boy'?"
I don't see how they can bring James T. Kirk back with anything resembling any sense. If they didn't jump the shark already, this likely will do it.
Would that there was some way to rewind back to the beginning of the series and start over from scratch, and add two absolute, inflexible, never-to-be-violated Commandments:
I: Thou Shalt Not Time Travel. Never. Ever. There is no such thing. It does not exist. It shall never be mentioned as a possibility.
II: Thou Shalt Not Ride The Transporter. Ideally, the transporter should not have been invented yet. Possibly, it exists as only a cargo-transport device, people are scared of it, and *no one* is willing to ride it. McCoy had an old-fashioned dislike of the transporter; maybe here we could see the fashionable thinking that became old in Kirk's time: The transporter destroys you utterly and makes a copy elsewhere. This is a Bad Thing.
One thing that came up at lunch the other day was that there were a whole lot of tech people employed to "do something about" the Y2K scare. (Remember the Y2K scare?)
Problem solved, on 1/1/2000, they weren't needed any more, so there followed a dip in tech employment. Other factors were probably as large or larger, but I don't think this factor was insignificant. Maybe it was a triggering factor in puncturing the bubble.
Perhaps they lost a word, and it should have been "The Gray Lady is a beautiful clipper ship, but it's losing to steam..." The paper-only news sources are a dying media, and this process will only accelerate. If the Times management can't figure that out ... well, how many companies can make a living for their employees by selling slide rules, buggy whips, and whale oil lamps these days? These things work themselves out in the market, but it'll sure suck to be a Times employee.
Or investor.
Truth being said in jest dept: These tags are tiny. I'd love to be able to put one on my wife's glasses, my keys, my cell phone, etc., etc., and yes, most especially the remote controls. Then, with a reader, I could at least get a "warmer... warmer... colder..." guide to where the items were.
Then there's the problem of misplacing the reader. I think I'd want to have it "want" to be in a docking station in a fixed location, and start making noise after a few minutes "away from home".
I worked at the Johnson Space Center for two years, back in 1976-1978, and I was there when they brought in the Saturn V.
... really annoyed, saddened, and angry that NASA has let this vehicle rot away.
This was actual flight hardware that was supposed to have gone to the moon for the Apollo 18 mission. When they brought it in, it still had red "Remove before flight" tags hanging from various places.
I am
The "run out of uranium in 50 years" figure is assuming current reserves are all there is, and assuming we continue the current utterly insanely wasteful once-through fuel cycle.
If we just reprocess, and recycle the remaining U235 and plutonium and other actinides into new fuel rods, there's enough proven reserves for hundreds of years. That's not using specialized breeder reactors, just the plutonium that is bred in normal reactors. Using breeders extends that to over a thousand years, current proven reserves.
Beyond that, uranium is not the only thing you can breed fission fuel from. Thorium is, according to my old CRC handbook, about as common as lead, and "there is probably more energy available from thorium in the earth's crust than from uranium and all fossil fuels put together."
Beyond that, back in the 70s, the Japanese demonstrated an ion exchange process to extract uranium from sea water. It cost, IIRC, about $200/pound in 1970's dollars, so it wasn't cheap. But it's about as infinite as you could ask for.
Way back when (November 1990) an American nuclear engineer wrote up a report on he'd learned from reading Soviet reports on the incident, and from conversations with Soviet nuclear engineers, and posted it on the Jerry Pournelle RT on GEnie.
Fascinating reading.
At the risk of slashdotting my Earthlink account, I'll mention that I saved a copy of the report here.
Every now and then, I get the urge to do some google hacking and make that "French Military Victories" search point to a story about the French blowing up Greenpeace's "Rainbow Warrior" in New Zealand harbor.
(I generally just go lie down until the urge goes away.)
Also in the science fiction side of this, G. David Nordley had a story in Analog back around 1994 or so called "His Father's Voice", which has someone inventing pretty much this technology in order to play a broken record his father had recorded.
Yes, I could buy a brand new multi-gigahertz computer in order to run Open Office. They're actually pretty cheap now; Office Depot had a really nice system on sale for about $500 last week.
I was briefly tempted - but I should spend $500 on a new computer for no other reason than Open Office requires that much horsepower to run? Why? Everything else I run has perfectly acceptable performance on my 600 MHz system. I have a word processor that meets my needs that gives me great performance on my current system.
Why should it be OK for Open Office to require even more resources for acceptable performance than Microsoft's legendarily bloated Office?
Yes, speed.
I last used OpenOffice 1.0.1, I think it was. Its slowness was horrible. Not just the time it took to load the word processor, but the time it took to open a document, the time it took to do anything. Click "Open", then go outside to watch the continents drift and the galactic spiral whirl while it loads the document.
This on a Pentium III 600MHz with 128MB of RAM.
At work, I have an ancient computer that's less than half this machine, and runs Microsoft Word comfortably. (Well, as comfortable as it gets with Microsoft.)
Eventually, I happened to look in the bag of documentation that came with my PC, and lo and behold, there was a Lotus SmartSuite CDROM that I'd never installed. The Lotus word processor runs very well and very fast. I'm much happier with that than I ever was with Open Office.
Especially since it opens Word for Windows 2.0 documents, which I have zillions of, and which Open Office won't touch.
I'd like to be able to say that Open Office is great. Maybe 1.1 is; 1.0.1 was definitely not.
> Avoid ... "Time Enough for Love".
Well, it begins to show some of the characteristics which become progressively more annyoing in Late Heinlein... However, one of the best stories he ever wrote is the chapter "The Tale of the Adopted Daughter" in this book. It's pretty much a stand-alone story. If you don't read anything else in this book, read "Methuselah's Children" to get to know who Lazarus Long is, then read this chapter of "Time Enough for Love."
>let's not forget that Edward James Olmos has
>warned fans of the original series to not watch.
I read his quote way back when, and it seemed to me he was saying that if you're the sort of obsessive fanboy who regards every word of the original series as Holy Writ, and will get upset at the slightest change... Then, no, you should not watch this version, as it will upset you. Otherwise, you might like it.
I never cared much for the original; I only watched it for a while because there was no other SF on the toob. There's only so many "Morons take kid and daggit to uncharted planet, daggit runs away, kid runs off following daggit, morons must spend rest of episode chasing stupid kid" plots I can stand to watch.
It did occasionally have some good stuff. I was interested in seeing more about what was going on with Count Iblis.
The last straw, though, was on one episode where the Badactica had to go back to somewhere they had left earlier, console jocky asks Captain Ben Cartwright what speed to set, and he intones portentiously "Light Speed!" There follows a great deal of anxiety about how they hadn't gone that fast in centons and centons, and the engines canna take tha strain.
Which showed that no one involved in the show had a clue. Not the slightest clue. I couldn't bear to watch it after that, even though it was the only thing barely resembling SF on the toob.
So "Not the same as the old BG" sounds promising to me.
Unfortunately, nothing else I have heard about this wombat sounds like it's going to be good. At all. It sounds <voice=marvin> perfectly dreadful. </voice> I don't plan to watch; if I hear it's really good after all, I'm sure the skiffy channel will re-run any episodes I missed.
This has a secondary advantage - using a pay phone will cost the 800 number an extra $.30 or so.
I'm coming to the conclusion that what is necessary is to attack the "making money" part of spam. One way that might work is similar to the "release gadzillions of sterile loathsome parasites" method that eradicated the screwworm fly in the U.S.
Or, spam them back.
If the spammers get hundreds of thousands of bogus requests for more information or signups on their web page (signing up other spammers, of course) for every legitimate one, they could never find the dollar bills buried in all the crap.
What it would take would be an Eliza-like program to convert a spam into a request for more information, and (more complicated) a program to download a web page, find the form, and fill it in with data that looks legit enough that it will take a human followup attempt to determine its bogosity.
Yes, this would result in more network traffic wasted in the short run. In the long run, if it were to make spam uneconomical, it might be a net gain.
Heinlein was certainly a man of strong opinions, and, like all of us, he had his flaws.
However, sight unseen, I file Earl Kemp's article in the "Jackals scavanging the carcass of a dead lion" folder.
The "Puppet Masters" movie actually wasn't too bad. Donald Sutherland (IMHO) really nailed The Old Man. They got kind of Hollywood with the slugs, the alien ship was just plain wrong, and they cut the infestation down to something relatively local. (Then again, making a movie complete with "Schedue Suntan" is likely impossible; the Good Guys won before that became necessary in the movie.)
I still get chills about that scene with the hagridden chimp. Somehow, they conveyed the sense of malevolent purpose in the chimp's actions. How did they do that?
It's from an entirely different universe than the abhomination Ve'reHeavin' committed against "Starship Troopers".
Downside, a few people spamming on behalf of "legitmate" companies will reap a windfall when they get to sell a whole lot of leads. But that will dry up quick when the companies paying for these leads find that the leads are all bogus.
6000 orders?
Someone suggested maybe some of them were bogus orders produced by a "form-filler".
If so... Only 6000? How about 6 million, or 6 billion bogus orders? Using all the spammers' "personalization" tricks so that each order must be individually examined or even followed up on to determine whether it's real or not.
Let's get busy, folks!
(And remember the 11th Commandment: Do Not Get Caught.)
I'm serious.
a 2k /fraud.html
Today, I was working on a problem with our spamassassin server running out of memory, and saw something scary in the log file - email from <one of our biggest customers> to <executive who reports directly to the CEO>, subject "Legal action started", marked as spam.
Very bad to get false positives like this!
However, on tracking it down, it was....
You guessed it....
An ad for an herbal product to "Enlarge your P3n1s!!"
Can we start hunting them down and shooting them yet? Please, pretty please?
http://scs.northwestern.edu/nuilr/peer-net/medi
Yes, but...
If a lot of recipients are using greylisting, an open relay will accumulate a *lot* of mail in its outgoing mail queue. Maybe enough to force the irresponsible party to block relaying as the only way to get any of their own email delivered.
Well, according to Gene Roddenberry, Klingons always had ridges. DesiLu just didn't give them the budget to show them back in 1967.
They screwed that up in the otherwise excellent DS9 tribble episode, unfortunately. What they should have done was had Michael Dorn without the snapping turtle shell on his forehead in the "past" scenes, and nobody notices anything different. Better, given mondo bucks, digitially bumpify the foreheads of all the Klingons in the old episode.