Holy crap, redesigning bills every 7-10 years? What the hell are they thinking?
When the current $20 bills came out, I heard of people having trouble using them, because apparently a few people somehow didn't hear that new bills were being released so obviously thought they were counterfeit. The current bills are pretty obvious, though, now that everybody knows about them. Now they're saying there will be subtle changes every few years, so in another decade there will be like 4 different versions of the $20 bill, ALL LEGAL. If you saw a fifth version, which was counterfeit, would it be obvious to you?
Yeah, they're including new security features. That's cool and all, but how often do people really check them? Sure, on a $100, people check. On $20 they usually don't. They still go by appearance and texture, just like they always have.
Sprint Broadband had this years ago (they bought out a company called SpeedChoice that started it). They operated in a couple of markets - Phoenix and Denver I think - and apparently it wasn't successful enough to continue the service.
Wireless microwave works pretty well if you have line-of-sight to the tower, which is not that hard in mostly-flat areas. The hard part is making it commercially viable.
What's the point of getting first post anyways? It's not like it give you more points or anything.
Years ago, the comment number shown for each message (such as #5931989 for yours) used to be relative to the article, so the first post was comment #1. When Slashdot only had a few thousand registered users, getting the first post was something of a status symbol to brag about (for people with way too much time on their hands). Now, the only people getting first port are the trolls who sit around waiting for a new article to be posted just so they can post stupid crap. Slashdot also has taken steps to make first posts less attractive, by changing the comment numbering (so early posts no longer have low numbers), adding delays before comments can be posted, etc.
Re:Now if it was just little faster...
on
Mozilla 1.4b Loosed
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I wish they could make Mozilla a little faster and lighter, than add features to it.
They're working on this. Mozilla is currently one big app that does everything (browser, mail and news client, HTML editor, IRC client, etc. etc.). It's being split into 1) the Gecko rendering engine, 2) a browser code-named Firebird, 3) a mail client code-named Thunderbird, etc. Each application will be able to be installed separately. Once this is done, it should be easier to optimize each component for speed.
> I have a question regarding your translation of the Bible into Klingon: > are you translating from an English translation, or from the original > Greek and Hebrew?
From the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic when we have translators who know these languages. For those who know only English, those of us who do know the languages will check their work against the original.
:: Kevin A. Wilson:: :: Department of Near Eastern Studies:: :: The Johns Hopkins University::
(Extra colons removed from signature to appease the lameness filter)
Re:As much as I hate to make it personal...
on
How to Become A Spammer
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
There you have it. I wonder if there is a way of applying this cost to every spammer.
Yes, this is the answer to spam.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure this isn't legal, so don't do it:
Professional spammers often have families. This guy has a 7-yr-old son. If you can track the spammer down and find out who their family is, where they live, etc., you can contact the spammer - or their family members - and let them know you know who they are and where they are and you and your friends really hate spam. You wouldn't even have to specifically threaten to do anything to them, but the notion that you could if you wanted to would probably be sufficient.
By the way, don't forget that the guy in the article is not a current spammer; he's already stopped, which is what we want spammers to do. Even if the above sounds appealing to you, please do NOT harass this guy.
Note that he didn't necessarily make $1000 a week from people buying the products he advertised. He made $1000 a week from companies who paid him to advertise their stuff. Big difference! He mentioned that mortgage companies would pay him for anyone who requested more informtation, even if that person never actually got the mortgage.
Is the Digital Audio Access Protocol (DAAP) documented anywhere? It would be nice to see an RFC on this. The port number it uses is registered with the IANA and the protocol appears to be mostly identical to HTTP. I'd like to see 3rd-party clients and servers that are compatible with iTunes...
Each track in the iTunes Library is assigned a unique ID number; it makes sense that these would be assigned sequentially in the order that tracks are added - so, if you sort by ID number, the Date Added will also be in order. It also makes sense that there could be gaps in ID numbers if tracks were deleted.
That service gives up all those's peoples public ip addresses. Wonder how many of them know that.
Um, yeah, they all know, and none of them care, because they're all running Mac OS X, which is secure by default (all services turned off) and comes with a nice easy-to-configure firewall (a GUI front end for ipfw). Who cares if you've got their IP addresses? What are you gonna do to them, besides slashdot their bandwidth with iTunes?
They are transmitted in plaintext over non-secure layers (e.g. http).
This is true, and anyone with a packet sniffer on a router can read your cookies (among other things) while you browse the web. However, while you're NOT browsing the web, anyone WITHOUT a packet sniffer who has access to your hard drive can ALSO read your cookies. Encryption here would be a security measure designed to stop one type of snooping, not another.
Besides, aren't cookies also used for HTTPS, which is encrypted on the network?
Why not encrypt them anyway? So the user can readily verify what the cookes are storing. So the user can see where they are from, and delete cookies he doesn't like.
I never do this by editing the raw data file on the hard drive; I do this from a GUI interface within my browser. Obviously my browser would know how to decrypt the file, and can continue to offer me the same level of control over my cookies as I currently have.
Encrypting cookies on the hard drive would simply treat one symptom without addressing the problem
Which problem are you referring to, then?
When I make a web site that stores sensitive information in a cookie, I encrypt the string that gets stored in the cookie, as well as taking other measures to prevent spoofing. Not all sites do this.
(Wouldn't care about anything stored on the disk, or other permanent media, I could get those with this method now.)
But do you really want to have to re-enter your slashdot password everytime you hit refresh, or click on a link to the comments page, or click to read a reply?
Slashdot authentication is stored in a cookie called "user". Browsers typically save cookies to a file on your hard drive, and may do so even if the cookie is set to expire at the end of the current session - the cookie could simply be deleted the next time the browser is launched. I don't know which browsers behave this way, but I suspect at least some do.
Browsers should start encrypting their cookie files, the way many of them encrypt other types of passwords.
I take your point, but it is rather assuming that the user is not going to want to use the command line, for the second they do, they have to start using a load of English directory names that they never use in the GUI.
That seems like a rather stupid approach to me. Why not *actually* localize the directories on international versions of your software, and create symbolic links of the original English directories that point to the localized directories?
So that you don't have to have "international versions of your software". Multiple users on the same system can each have their preferred language settings, and can change them at will. Applications can include all localizations in a single app, and autodetect the user's language preference at launch time.
This allows me to upgrade Mozilla in/usr/local/mozilla without having to reinstall my plugins all the time, and unlike most of the locations you listed, I know where they are because I put them there myself. However, I didn't realize that/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins exists already (I wonder how it got there?) so perhaps I should use that instead.
in other locales will the directory structure still be in english?
Apple somehow managed to make localization work in the GUI, but the everything is still English at the command line. The GUI just recognizes that a particular folder's name should be localized, and uses the appropriate string when displaying it. This makes sense to me, since the rest of the command line is English-based anyway. Perhaps Gobo will figure out something similar for whatever GUI file browser they use?
This is is a terrible idea... It makes a complete mess of the Unix filesystem, just so that the distro maker doesn't need to edit/etc/ld.so.conf to include/usr/lib as well as/lib
You obviously don't get it. This wasn't done to make things easier for the distro maker - this makes things a pain in the ass for the distro maker, I'm sure. This was done to make things logical and orderly for the USER. I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought it would be nice to do something like this, since I'm far too lazy to actually go to the trouble.
You should take a look at what Apple has done with Mac OS X - they've taken a similar approach, except that they just hid the legacy UNIX directories from the GUI, and tacked all their stuff on top. I expect that they'll slowly move things out of the legacy UNIX directories as it becomes practical to do so, taking an approach very similar to Gobo in addition to what Apple has already done - at least I sincerely hope that's the direction they take. It's nice that Apache's DocumentRoot is/Library/WebServer/Documents, but not so nice that the configuration file is/etc/httpd/httpd.conf.
Good point - another thought is, when you hear a person talking and someone else answers, it's immediately obvious they weren't talking to you. When you hear someone talking (especially loudly) and then an expectant pause, they could be talking to you. Of course they're not - but you might have to check, especially if you're not quite sure what they said.
I never will get why people talking on cellphones in a restaraunt is annoying, but people talking just as loudly to people sitting next to them is not a problem.
People talking on cell phones often talk louder than people talking to someone across the table from them, plus you can't eavesdrop on the other half of the conversation. Remember those Sprint PCS commercials with the guy in the trenchcoat helping the poor soul who always yells because he's so used to talking on cell phones?
Slashdot Mirror
Except those who still know how to lie low and run Hotline servers.
It amazes me how many people don't know about Hotline.
Holy crap, redesigning bills every 7-10 years? What the hell are they thinking?
When the current $20 bills came out, I heard of people having trouble using them, because apparently a few people somehow didn't hear that new bills were being released so obviously thought they were counterfeit. The current bills are pretty obvious, though, now that everybody knows about them. Now they're saying there will be subtle changes every few years, so in another decade there will be like 4 different versions of the $20 bill, ALL LEGAL. If you saw a fifth version, which was counterfeit, would it be obvious to you?
Yeah, they're including new security features. That's cool and all, but how often do people really check them? Sure, on a $100, people check. On $20 they usually don't. They still go by appearance and texture, just like they always have.
Good lord, Star Wars as a sitcom, that's really not right.
Only on Slashdot would Amidala naked and petrified be funny, and many here don't even remember why.
Sprint Broadband had this years ago (they bought out a company called SpeedChoice that started it). They operated in a couple of markets - Phoenix and Denver I think - and apparently it wasn't successful enough to continue the service.
Wireless microwave works pretty well if you have line-of-sight to the tower, which is not that hard in mostly-flat areas. The hard part is making it commercially viable.
What's the point of getting first post anyways? It's not like it give you more points or anything.
Years ago, the comment number shown for each message (such as #5931989 for yours) used to be relative to the article, so the first post was comment #1. When Slashdot only had a few thousand registered users, getting the first post was something of a status symbol to brag about (for people with way too much time on their hands). Now, the only people getting first port are the trolls who sit around waiting for a new article to be posted just so they can post stupid crap. Slashdot also has taken steps to make first posts less attractive, by changing the comment numbering (so early posts no longer have low numbers), adding delays before comments can be posted, etc.
I wish they could make Mozilla a little faster and lighter, than add features to it.
They're working on this. Mozilla is currently one big app that does everything (browser, mail and news client, HTML editor, IRC client, etc. etc.). It's being split into 1) the Gecko rendering engine, 2) a browser code-named Firebird, 3) a mail client code-named Thunderbird, etc. Each application will be able to be installed separately. Once this is done, it should be easier to optimize each component for speed.
Is this what you're looking for?
Shameless plug: if you run Squid, here's mine.
Where have you been all this time?
Watch the documentary. It's also available on DVD.
inetd - Google is your friend.
There you have it. I wonder if there is a way of applying this cost to every spammer.
Yes, this is the answer to spam.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure this isn't legal, so don't do it:
Professional spammers often have families. This guy has a 7-yr-old son. If you can track the spammer down and find out who their family is, where they live, etc., you can contact the spammer - or their family members - and let them know you know who they are and where they are and you and your friends really hate spam. You wouldn't even have to specifically threaten to do anything to them, but the notion that you could if you wanted to would probably be sufficient.
By the way, don't forget that the guy in the article is not a current spammer; he's already stopped, which is what we want spammers to do. Even if the above sounds appealing to you, please do NOT harass this guy.
Note that he didn't necessarily make $1000 a week from people buying the products he advertised. He made $1000 a week from companies who paid him to advertise their stuff. Big difference! He mentioned that mortgage companies would pay him for anyone who requested more informtation, even if that person never actually got the mortgage.
Note that he says he DOESN'T SPAM ANYMORE. He's not likely to do it again. Let it go. Find somebody who is currently spamming, and go after them.
Is the Digital Audio Access Protocol (DAAP) documented anywhere? It would be nice to see an RFC on this. The port number it uses is registered with the IANA and the protocol appears to be mostly identical to HTTP. I'd like to see 3rd-party clients and servers that are compatible with iTunes...
Each track in the iTunes Library is assigned a unique ID number; it makes sense that these would be assigned sequentially in the order that tracks are added - so, if you sort by ID number, the Date Added will also be in order. It also makes sense that there could be gaps in ID numbers if tracks were deleted.
That service gives up all those's peoples public ip addresses. Wonder how many of them know that.
Um, yeah, they all know, and none of them care, because they're all running Mac OS X, which is secure by default (all services turned off) and comes with a nice easy-to-configure firewall (a GUI front end for ipfw). Who cares if you've got their IP addresses? What are you gonna do to them, besides slashdot their bandwidth with iTunes?
They are transmitted in plaintext over non-secure layers (e.g. http).
This is true, and anyone with a packet sniffer on a router can read your cookies (among other things) while you browse the web. However, while you're NOT browsing the web, anyone WITHOUT a packet sniffer who has access to your hard drive can ALSO read your cookies. Encryption here would be a security measure designed to stop one type of snooping, not another.
Besides, aren't cookies also used for HTTPS, which is encrypted on the network?
Why not encrypt them anyway? So the user can readily verify what the cookes are storing. So the user can see where they are from, and delete cookies he doesn't like.
I never do this by editing the raw data file on the hard drive; I do this from a GUI interface within my browser. Obviously my browser would know how to decrypt the file, and can continue to offer me the same level of control over my cookies as I currently have.
Encrypting cookies on the hard drive would simply treat one symptom without addressing the problem
Which problem are you referring to, then?
When I make a web site that stores sensitive information in a cookie, I encrypt the string that gets stored in the cookie, as well as taking other measures to prevent spoofing. Not all sites do this.
(Wouldn't care about anything stored on the disk, or other permanent media, I could get those with this method now.)
But do you really want to have to re-enter your slashdot password everytime you hit refresh, or click on a link to the comments page, or click to read a reply?
Slashdot authentication is stored in a cookie called "user". Browsers typically save cookies to a file on your hard drive, and may do so even if the cookie is set to expire at the end of the current session - the cookie could simply be deleted the next time the browser is launched. I don't know which browsers behave this way, but I suspect at least some do.
Browsers should start encrypting their cookie files, the way many of them encrypt other types of passwords.
I take your point, but it is rather assuming that the user is not going to want to use the command line, for the second they do, they have to start using a load of English directory names that they never use in the GUI.
True.
That seems like a rather stupid approach to me. Why not *actually* localize the directories on international versions of your software, and create symbolic links of the original English directories that point to the localized directories?
So that you don't have to have "international versions of your software". Multiple users on the same system can each have their preferred language settings, and can change them at will. Applications can include all localizations in a single app, and autodetect the user's language preference at launch time.
export MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/local/mozplugins
/usr/local/mozilla without having to reinstall my plugins all the time, and unlike most of the locations you listed, I know where they are because I put them there myself. However, I didn't realize that /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins exists already (I wonder how it got there?) so perhaps I should use that instead.
This allows me to upgrade Mozilla in
in other locales will the directory structure still be in english?
Apple somehow managed to make localization work in the GUI, but the everything is still English at the command line. The GUI just recognizes that a particular folder's name should be localized, and uses the appropriate string when displaying it. This makes sense to me, since the rest of the command line is English-based anyway. Perhaps Gobo will figure out something similar for whatever GUI file browser they use?
This is is a terrible idea... It makes a complete mess of the Unix filesystem, just so that the distro maker doesn't need to edit /etc/ld.so.conf to include /usr/lib as well as /lib
/Library/WebServer/Documents, but not so nice that the configuration file is /etc/httpd/httpd.conf.
You obviously don't get it. This wasn't done to make things easier for the distro maker - this makes things a pain in the ass for the distro maker, I'm sure. This was done to make things logical and orderly for the USER. I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought it would be nice to do something like this, since I'm far too lazy to actually go to the trouble.
You should take a look at what Apple has done with Mac OS X - they've taken a similar approach, except that they just hid the legacy UNIX directories from the GUI, and tacked all their stuff on top. I expect that they'll slowly move things out of the legacy UNIX directories as it becomes practical to do so, taking an approach very similar to Gobo in addition to what Apple has already done - at least I sincerely hope that's the direction they take. It's nice that Apache's DocumentRoot is
Good point - another thought is, when you hear a person talking and someone else answers, it's immediately obvious they weren't talking to you. When you hear someone talking (especially loudly) and then an expectant pause, they could be talking to you. Of course they're not - but you might have to check, especially if you're not quite sure what they said.
I never will get why people talking on cellphones in a restaraunt is annoying, but people talking just as loudly to people sitting next to them is not a problem.
People talking on cell phones often talk louder than people talking to someone across the table from them, plus you can't eavesdrop on the other half of the conversation. Remember those Sprint PCS commercials with the guy in the trenchcoat helping the poor soul who always yells because he's so used to talking on cell phones?