I'm talking about simple file servers. There are file depositories out there (FTP servers and others) that serve out gigs of data in response to requests a few kilobytes in size. I'm not doing p2p in the sense that no data on my machine is accessed by anyone else. I'm not running any software that employs bit torrent or any other file sharing protocol. People do, after all, often maintain servers that hand out movies, music, and other files simply out of the goodness of their hearts, without requiring anything in return. Sometimes they're called ftp servers. Sometimes they're called "web sites."
I first became aware of version numbers in hardware. Specifically, the Nikon F competed against the Canon F1. So Nikon introduced the F2. Then Canon came up with a new model that should logically be called the F2...only they couldn't name it the same as the Nikon. So they called it the "New F1". Nikon proceeded to come out with F-series machine up through F6. Canon abandoned the nomenclature and, with the next big design leap, introduced the EOS line. I always thought that stuff was fascinating.
All engineering logic gets tossed when it gets in the way of marketing, apparently. It doesn't matter if it's software or hardware, that's a near-universal truth.
Where I come from, E-class (emergency-class) wrecker license tags, the ones that allow you to legally respond to car wrecks, are highly prized, being considered virtually a license to print money. Because of that, the wrecker drivers are perfectly willing to shoulder the extra burden of post-wreck cleanup. To keep your E-tag, you have to clean up the miscellaneous parts littering the road after a wreck. Generally, the last step in towing away a wrecked car involves the wrecker driver using a large pushbroom to clean off the roadway.
I was making a bit of a joke but if you want to be serious, I can do that, too.
I know of two cases where this scam was successfully overcome by the victim. In both of them, the victim told the guy who knocked on the door to come on in and get his money. When the fraudster stepped inside, the victim's mate (in both these cases, the scammers thought they were dealing solely with a defenseless woman) proceeded to beat the scammer varying degrees of senseless and then walk him back out to the truck to order the cargo unloaded. The cargo was duly unloaded (in one case, they just put everything on the front lawn, but at least they unloaded) and the scammers then beat a hasty retreat, never to be heard from again.
People who pull scams like this generally have been on the wrong side of encounters with the cops before. They don't want to involve them again and are loathe to dial 911 unless the shit has really hit the fan and someone's bleeding. Thus, the judicious application of force or the threat of it, if done properly and in a low-key way, is a valid negotiating tool with cretins like this.
Now, arming yourself and starting a confrontation is probably a bad plan. But arming yourself, finding your stuff, and stealing it back when the bad guys aren't around may be a workable one. YMMV.
Personally, I've only used movers three times in my life and I've been very careful to select established, reputable firms. I don't hook up with dodgy characters to save a few buck. I think that's a better strategy, overall. But I am willing to grant that some physical force or the threat of it, employed properly so that the authorities are never involved, can be a reasonable approach.
Sound better?
PS - I had a scumbag brother-in-law who used this kink in the law to great advantage. He ripped off dozens of old ladies by finding out when coin collectors died. He would then approach the widows, offer to market the collections of their deceased spouses, pay them a small "advance" on what he assured them would be a big return, then leave with the coins. He never paid them another dime. There were a number of criminal complaints filed and his defense was always the same. "I paid her for the coins. There was no deal for anything else. This was not a theft. It's just a contract dispute." He beat the rap several times before, finally, the state got so many complaints that they opened a combined fraud case on him He settled for some pitiful amount of restitution and five years probation. From personal experience, I believe that people who pull these kinds of scams are cowards who won't call the police unless they're forced to and deserve a beating for their actions. So I don't apologize for taking a hard line on these situations.
It's a common scam for fly-by-night moving companies to offer a great price in return for full payment up-front. You pay them and they pick up your stuff. Then they cart it to the new place, park a half a block away, and knock on your door. They tell you they can't unload unless you pay them another thousand dollars or so. (The excuses they come up with range from stupid to outrageous to simply "We've got your stuff and we're holding it for ransom.")
Under the laws of my state, since you've already paid money, their failure to turn over your goods isn't a criminal theft in which the police are willing to become involved. Rather, it's simply a civil contract dispute. After all, you gave them permission to take possession of your goods; now you're just arguing over the price. (Getting a patrol officer to take real, physical action to secure your belongings pursuant to the obvious criminal fraud is theoretically possible but, in practice, almost never happens. All the moving company has to do is drive away when you call the cops. The police aren't going to pursue until they hear what you have to say. Once you've had your say, even if the cop agrees with you, department procedure will probably require the incident be turned over to a detective to make the fraud case. By that time, your stuff is long gone.) You can sue to get your stuff back but that usually doesn't work. The fly-by-night simply flies away and you never see your stuff again.
In those cases, it sure would be nice to know where your stuff is located so you can load up a few friends, grab a couple of shotguns, and go get your stuff back.
Only because I'm one of the good guys, I don't write them down
I work for a gigantic, univerally hated TLA. Our formal password requirements are addressed in two places in the regulations that govern our work. Those regulations are translated into a document that must be signed by every user every time they gain access to or alter their access to a protected system. In one of the formal requirements documents, writing down passwords is discouraged but not forbidden. In the other, as well as the doc that users sign, passwords are required to be kept secure and confidential but writing them down, per se, is not addressed.
Here's how I approach my users when they complain about passwords. First, I make sure they know I feel their pain. No matter how many passwords they have, I have more. Over 60, as a matter of fact.
Second, I tell them it's OK to write down their passwords. I pull out my wallet, slip out a credit card, and point to the account number. I tell them "See that? That number is, in effect, a password to my credit line. I don't mind that it's written down, embossed on a piece of plastic. Why? Because I'm not going to lose it! It's OK if you write down your passwords; just don't lose the thing you wrote them on." As a result, I'd guess that half our users have a slip of paper in their ID badge holder on which they've written down all their passwords. That's fine with us. Even if the badge were lost, every employee has a non-obvious user ID (that nobody writes down because it's the same for every system) that must be paired with every password to gain access to systems, so a baddie with one of those slips of paper is still highly unlikely to be able to gain any meaningful access.
So, why do you indicate that writing down passwords would take you out of the ranks of the good guys? Seems reasonable to me.
You shouldn't assume I mean p2p because I don't. There are plenty of file servers out there set up to be accessible via Tor. Some have mp3s, some have movies. Some have plans for overthrowing the government or blowing up the world. I've never used p2p over Tor. I have, however, tried to download files ranging from a meg to a gig in size with varying degrees of success. I've never, despite trying at all hours of the day and on all days of the week, been able to complete the download of a 1-gig file over Tor. The process usually breaks somewhere under 100 megs. I've found my attempts to download much smaller files to be less than confidence-inspiring, with anything over 5 megs as likely as not to fail.
I guess I should start investigating software that manages and resumes downloads more intelligently than what's built into my current tools - which is simply Ubuntu, Firefox, and the DownThemAll add-on.
But, seriously, I know that Tor wasn't built around the idea of moving large files. My original post was half-meant as a joke. I'm surprised to see all this discussion over a throwaway comment.
Are there still signs on the side? If yes, you have everything you need to get anywhere.
There are places where there are no (useful) signs, even where population densities are pretty high.
Just north of Houston, Texas is a very large "bedroom community" that grew like crazy and has become a full-fledged city of its own. It's called "The Woodlands."
There's a (probably apocryphal) story that one of the driving forces behind the early conceptualization of The Woodlands development said that the community standards for roads, landscaping, and signage should ensure that "if any uppity n****r from Houston comes up here, he'll be too lost to find a house to break into." That's probably not exactly what happened but the result is the same.
In an attempt to create a so-called "livable" environment, everything that anyone might think of as "visual blight" is hidden from view. Street signs are low and/or painted in woodland colors like brown and off-white, instead of high and painted in flourescent white on a contrasting background so that drivers can actually read them. Streets are typically hemmed in by a wide median where the thick pine trees remain uncut, making it impossible to see anything bordering any main route. Frequently, you find yourself driving down the street in front of a shopping center or the large shopping mall in The Woodlands, with large stores literally 50 yards on either side, but you have no clue there are any buildings anywhere near. Added to all this, nearly all the main streets take random curves, changing directions every few miles to create the furtherest possible thing from a simple grid. It's the worst possible "spaghetti bowl" freeway interchange you've ever seen or heard of, flattened out and spread over the surface of many square miles of land. Even if you could find someone to give you directions, you could never follow them on that crazy quilt of streets; it's like civil engineering on acid.
In short, if you don't live there, you cannot find anything. Period.
That is, unless you know how to read a map (very difficult while driving and in The Woodlands, you generally can't see any place to pull off to read the thing) or you have a satnav.
I thought satnavs were silly toys until I started trying to find my way around The Woodlands. There are places where satnav is, frankly, a necessity.
Lots and lots and lots of toll roads here. Not as bad as the NE part of the country, but around here "most" people having an EZ Tag is an exaggeration but not a ridiculous one.
I use Tor regularly and it's really slow. Not unusable, but really slow.
If I understand this correctly (and I'm not at all sure I do, so feel free to correct me), the more people who set up and use Tor the more quickly traffic can propagate. So if the situation in Iran is causing lots of people, both in and outside of Iran, to use Tor, then the whole thing should speed up, right?
So is that why when I visited a few miscellaneous.onion sites last nite, they were far more responsive than usual?
I imagine the Supreme Leader would be pissed if he understood.:-)
The entire point of the SS games...was to swamp you with goons.
I'm a terribly unskilled gamer and I can't handle being swamped with goons. Oddly, I loved Serious Sam. I just turned on all the cheats and treated it as a speed challenge. I tried to find and kill every goon while getting through every level as quickly as possible. Played like that, I thought it was a really fun game.
I don't see how ratcheting up the graphical goodness could make it more fun for me. And if the number of enemies is reduced, the fun factor will definitely go down.
You say you have a PhD then, more than a half-dozen times, you use "site" when you mean "cite," the sort of error that makes profs go bonkers, something you'd know if you'd been to college, which you must have since you have a PhD, but then you show you don't know how to spell "cite"...
Well, you're sorta right and so am I. After doing a bit of research, it's more complex than I realized.
Per the U.S. (nikonusa.com) web site, the FM10 and F6 are current cameras.
Historically, the FM10 was sold all over the world for a long time before it came to the U.S., so I have to keep in mind that distribution patterns can make things seem very different depending on where you are. It's still easily available, being in stock at major dealers. So the FM10 certainly endures.
However, in reality, the F6 is basically unavailable. No one seems to list them as in stock. Maybe a few are being hand-assembled but are any of them getting out of Japan? I dunno but I can't find any U.S. major dealers who have them.
The F100 in non-greymarket, official U.S. trim, is still easily available though. It may be discontinued, but plenty of NOS ("new old stock" as they say in the car parts biz) is floating around. That's why I said the F100 endures. But you're right; it's not a current model.
What surprised me when I did some checking is that there are miscellaneous imported (greymarket) models easily available in the U.S. such as the F65 and F80. I didn't realize that. It appears there's still a market for student-level film cameras, after all.
The final days of Nikon film SLRs were/are interesting.
The F100 had lots of F5 owners wishing they had waited just a while longer and not been stuck with a giant brick of a camera. Not me, though. I love my F5 and still use it. But the F5 is long gone and the F100 endures.
That the FM10 still endures surprises me. Yes, it's a Cosina, but Nikon was so reluctant to bring out a stereotypical "student" camera for so long that when they finally relented and re-badged the Cosina, I figured their heart wasn't in it and the product would be dropped as soon as the winds changed. Boy, was I wrong. It's still around and still a perfectly usable camera. Wasn't that same chassis badged and sold as a Vivitar, too? I preferred the Vivitar's angular styling.
I was surprised that Nikon killed the F6 so quickly. With the advent of digital, I figured a boutique-sensibility, high-end film camera would find a "wealthy poser" niche, just like so many Leicas and field-appointed Linhofs in the past that found their way into the hands of dentists on African photo safaris and then into those dentists closets, never to be used again. Again, I was wrong. The rich-boy toy turned out to be the high-end digital SLR of the moment, not some film-swallowing throwback, no matter how wonderful that throwback was.
It seems I get nothing right when I conjecture about camera marketing. I guess I should just stick to having fun with them. I'm thinking about having my F overhauled (the flash sync went to hell years ago) or buying an F2 body and getting back to my roots; that should be fun enough in the twilight of my years.
This is too bad for a few folks. One of the training companies used extensively by my employer is headquartered in Florida. All of their staff signed up for Clear and said it was either unavailable or pretty much worthless everywhere EXCEPT Orlando. There, seasoned travelers frequently found themselves in line behind hundreds of Disney-vacationing families with little kids, families unused to flying and doing everything wrong while still trying to herd the ankle-biters. It was supposedly a nightmare. For that airport and that airport alone, those guys thought Clear was a godsend.
Everywhere else? Their attitude was...meh.
Photography students in the digital age
on
Kodak Kills Kodachrome
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· Score: 2, Interesting
What is the digital equivalent of the Pentax K1000? For those who don't know, the K1000 was *the* student SLR for the last 25 years of the film era. Everybody had one.
So what do introductory-level photography students use nowadays?
Interesting. I grew up with parents who were not the same age. They were 15 years apart, my dad being older. In fact, mom was exceptionally attractive and dad had been through a physical hell behind japanese lines in the Philippines during WWII and looked far older than his years. As a result, the *apparent* difference in their ages was far greater than the actual. She was routinely assumed to be his daughter and, on one occasion I can remember, his granddaughter.
They were great together. We're talking loving, gentle, inseperable. It was textbook example of what a marriage should be. Thus, I grew up thinking nothing of huge age differences. When I was 35, I was seriously involved with a 50 year old woman. When I was 40, I was seriously involved with a young lady for whom I had to pick out a high school graduation present. Age differences have never meant squat to me. In fact, I find relationships where we have too much in common to be boring. If we're both the same age, same race, same religion, same economic background, same level of attractiveness, then we tend to approach similar situations in similar ways. I find that boring. Women much younger, much older, of a different race or religion, from a different country - they tend to look at any given situation completely different from the way I do. We talk about why. I learn things. I gain perspective. I'm challenged and I have fun.
So give an old guy a shot, will ya? It might not be so bad.
...I'm starting to believe that at least the danger of violence and personal consequences is required or else our politicians will destroy us all...
Welcome to the real world. It's possible to build all sorts of safeguards into a system to protect the people from despots. In the U.S., we did a fairly good job of it, what with all those "checks and balances" and such. But over time, the assholes eventually win. Little by little, the corridors of power see public servants and statesmen replaced by people who just want power. It's inevitable.
The guys who set up the U.S. legal infrastructure (we call them the "Founding Fathers") realized this and built a big ol' reset switch into the system in the form of an amendment to the Constitution specifically designed to make sure the people could possess the means to drag their oppressors into the street and shoot them in the head.
Let me stress: We are not there, yet.
Still, it would be nice to be prepared. Wanna learn something useful, gain a satisfying physical skill, and have some fun, all at the same time? I'm at work and (quite ironically) filtered, so I can't visit sites to find and post specific links, but this site is a fine place to start. Turn your speakers down before you click the link; the drums are nice and the opening riff is brief, but it's still unexpected.
My users resent the fact that their bosses don't know how to measure their competence, just like my IT co-workers. Over time (It's taken me most of a decade.) I've played on my customers shared irritation at the PHBs and convinced them to conspire with me to game the system. They call me first, not the help desk. I fix their problem. Then, they open a ticket, I instantly assign it to myself, document, and close. Voila - super-fast closure.
OK, this is an overstatement. I mostly work the tickets I'm assigned. But in nearly every case where I get a chance (those "meet in the hallway" requests for help, mostly) I'll try to run the procedures I outlined in my first paragraph.
I suppose everybody that reads your post and finds it interesting will head over to the blind search and do their own test. I know I did. Score: Google 3, Bing 3, Yahoo 4. Weird.
The only thing I've learned here is how much I miss the old Dogpile with its results broken out by search engine, the old Northern Light with its ability to parse URLs so wonderfully and the way HotBot just seemed, back in the day, to find stuff.
Anybody know a good URL search engine, one that allows me to search for text strings within URLs, including specifying at what level in the URL the string appears? I *really* miss Northern Light; I hope some current search engine can do the same and I just don't know how to use it.
No matter how innocuous you may think your hard drive is, if you are a heavy internet user there's a chance there's something on there that someone might consider child porn.
I'll go further. If you download porn binaries from usenet, you almost certainly have child porn on your computer. Point any binary leecher at any large sexually-themed binary newsgroup, mark everything for the last week or two for download, kick it off and go to bed. By morning, you'll have, at minimum, dozens of child porn images from spammers advertising whatever it is they're trying to get you to click on.
First job out of college, I was an apartment maintenance man. Commonly, people would call in problems and I'd go into their place to fix things during the day while they were at work. I saw all manner of illegal stuff and it never occurred to me to call the police. I've seen coffee tables literally heaped with a kilo of weed in a very neat pyramid, but I'm not a cop and it's not my job to tattle on other folks, so I just forgot about it.
The only time I did anything to change the status quo was when someone was taking action that damaged the property. I was an agent of the property owner, so if you painted your bedroom black (It takes gallons of expensive Killz to cover black well enough to rent the place after you move out) or if you wallpaper your bathroom with porn (I wonder what kind of impression that made on any female houseguests?), it was my job to report and take action.
Sometimes, the action was pretty simple. For example, someone stole most of the furniture from around a pool. A few days later, I got a ticket to fix a leaky faucet. When I went into the apartment, there was our pool furniture, covered with towels, being used as a living room suite. I didn't say anything to anybody; I just put the furniture back out by the pool. Resident was a little sheepish after that.
Nowadays, I fix computers for a living. When I see something dodgy on an employer-owned computer, it's my job to report it. But on those occasions when I've done work for friends, even when I see something that might be dodgy, I don't take the time to look. It's none of my business. I'm not a cop and outside of work, it's not my job to tattle on you.
Now, here's where I get twisted up. What's the legal obligation of someone who sees something on your computer? I would imagine some jurisdictions have tried to make it illegal to look away when you accidentally stumble across something that might, at first glance, seem a bit to young to be doing what they're doing. In fact, wasn't there a law proposed in Texas that would have required all computer repair shops that do file recovery to have an investigator's license issued by the state just so that they'd hove some idea how to maintain a chain of custody and some legal obligation to actually report what they see rather than ignore things (like I used to do?
I'm not sure what the law is, so I don't work for friends ever since my sisters best friends sons computer needed help and I found, in addition to multiple virus infections and no anti-virus software, a large collection of sexually explicit webcam vids he'd made with his contemporaries. (I'm sure they were all over 18 years old, of course. They may have all been freshmen in high school but I keep telling myself that there were all over 18.) I simply don't want to deal with that stuff so I no longer help people who come to me with "My kids computer is really slow; can you help?"
Likewise, if I worked at Best Buy or some such repair depot, there's flat out no way I'd look at anything on the drive I didn't absolutely have to to get the job done. I just don't need the drama in my life.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm talking about simple file servers. There are file depositories out there (FTP servers and others) that serve out gigs of data in response to requests a few kilobytes in size. I'm not doing p2p in the sense that no data on my machine is accessed by anyone else. I'm not running any software that employs bit torrent or any other file sharing protocol. People do, after all, often maintain servers that hand out movies, music, and other files simply out of the goodness of their hearts, without requiring anything in return. Sometimes they're called ftp servers. Sometimes they're called "web sites."
Interesting definition of p2p you've got there.
I'll be playing with wget and gwget tonite.
I first became aware of version numbers in hardware. Specifically, the Nikon F competed against the Canon F1. So Nikon introduced the F2. Then Canon came up with a new model that should logically be called the F2...only they couldn't name it the same as the Nikon. So they called it the "New F1". Nikon proceeded to come out with F-series machine up through F6. Canon abandoned the nomenclature and, with the next big design leap, introduced the EOS line. I always thought that stuff was fascinating.
All engineering logic gets tossed when it gets in the way of marketing, apparently. It doesn't matter if it's software or hardware, that's a near-universal truth.
Where I come from, E-class (emergency-class) wrecker license tags, the ones that allow you to legally respond to car wrecks, are highly prized, being considered virtually a license to print money. Because of that, the wrecker drivers are perfectly willing to shoulder the extra burden of post-wreck cleanup. To keep your E-tag, you have to clean up the miscellaneous parts littering the road after a wreck. Generally, the last step in towing away a wrecked car involves the wrecker driver using a large pushbroom to clean off the roadway.
I was making a bit of a joke but if you want to be serious, I can do that, too.
I know of two cases where this scam was successfully overcome by the victim. In both of them, the victim told the guy who knocked on the door to come on in and get his money. When the fraudster stepped inside, the victim's mate (in both these cases, the scammers thought they were dealing solely with a defenseless woman) proceeded to beat the scammer varying degrees of senseless and then walk him back out to the truck to order the cargo unloaded. The cargo was duly unloaded (in one case, they just put everything on the front lawn, but at least they unloaded) and the scammers then beat a hasty retreat, never to be heard from again.
People who pull scams like this generally have been on the wrong side of encounters with the cops before. They don't want to involve them again and are loathe to dial 911 unless the shit has really hit the fan and someone's bleeding. Thus, the judicious application of force or the threat of it, if done properly and in a low-key way, is a valid negotiating tool with cretins like this.
Now, arming yourself and starting a confrontation is probably a bad plan. But arming yourself, finding your stuff, and stealing it back when the bad guys aren't around may be a workable one. YMMV.
Personally, I've only used movers three times in my life and I've been very careful to select established, reputable firms. I don't hook up with dodgy characters to save a few buck. I think that's a better strategy, overall. But I am willing to grant that some physical force or the threat of it, employed properly so that the authorities are never involved, can be a reasonable approach.
Sound better?
PS - I had a scumbag brother-in-law who used this kink in the law to great advantage. He ripped off dozens of old ladies by finding out when coin collectors died. He would then approach the widows, offer to market the collections of their deceased spouses, pay them a small "advance" on what he assured them would be a big return, then leave with the coins. He never paid them another dime. There were a number of criminal complaints filed and his defense was always the same. "I paid her for the coins. There was no deal for anything else. This was not a theft. It's just a contract dispute." He beat the rap several times before, finally, the state got so many complaints that they opened a combined fraud case on him He settled for some pitiful amount of restitution and five years probation. From personal experience, I believe that people who pull these kinds of scams are cowards who won't call the police unless they're forced to and deserve a beating for their actions. So I don't apologize for taking a hard line on these situations.
It's a common scam for fly-by-night moving companies to offer a great price in return for full payment up-front. You pay them and they pick up your stuff. Then they cart it to the new place, park a half a block away, and knock on your door. They tell you they can't unload unless you pay them another thousand dollars or so. (The excuses they come up with range from stupid to outrageous to simply "We've got your stuff and we're holding it for ransom.")
Under the laws of my state, since you've already paid money, their failure to turn over your goods isn't a criminal theft in which the police are willing to become involved. Rather, it's simply a civil contract dispute. After all, you gave them permission to take possession of your goods; now you're just arguing over the price. (Getting a patrol officer to take real, physical action to secure your belongings pursuant to the obvious criminal fraud is theoretically possible but, in practice, almost never happens. All the moving company has to do is drive away when you call the cops. The police aren't going to pursue until they hear what you have to say. Once you've had your say, even if the cop agrees with you, department procedure will probably require the incident be turned over to a detective to make the fraud case. By that time, your stuff is long gone.) You can sue to get your stuff back but that usually doesn't work. The fly-by-night simply flies away and you never see your stuff again.
In those cases, it sure would be nice to know where your stuff is located so you can load up a few friends, grab a couple of shotguns, and go get your stuff back.
I work for a gigantic, univerally hated TLA. Our formal password requirements are addressed in two places in the regulations that govern our work. Those regulations are translated into a document that must be signed by every user every time they gain access to or alter their access to a protected system. In one of the formal requirements documents, writing down passwords is discouraged but not forbidden. In the other, as well as the doc that users sign, passwords are required to be kept secure and confidential but writing them down, per se, is not addressed.
Here's how I approach my users when they complain about passwords. First, I make sure they know I feel their pain. No matter how many passwords they have, I have more. Over 60, as a matter of fact.
Second, I tell them it's OK to write down their passwords. I pull out my wallet, slip out a credit card, and point to the account number. I tell them "See that? That number is, in effect, a password to my credit line. I don't mind that it's written down, embossed on a piece of plastic. Why? Because I'm not going to lose it! It's OK if you write down your passwords; just don't lose the thing you wrote them on." As a result, I'd guess that half our users have a slip of paper in their ID badge holder on which they've written down all their passwords. That's fine with us. Even if the badge were lost, every employee has a non-obvious user ID (that nobody writes down because it's the same for every system) that must be paired with every password to gain access to systems, so a baddie with one of those slips of paper is still highly unlikely to be able to gain any meaningful access.
So, why do you indicate that writing down passwords would take you out of the ranks of the good guys? Seems reasonable to me.
You shouldn't assume I mean p2p because I don't. There are plenty of file servers out there set up to be accessible via Tor. Some have mp3s, some have movies. Some have plans for overthrowing the government or blowing up the world. I've never used p2p over Tor. I have, however, tried to download files ranging from a meg to a gig in size with varying degrees of success. I've never, despite trying at all hours of the day and on all days of the week, been able to complete the download of a 1-gig file over Tor. The process usually breaks somewhere under 100 megs. I've found my attempts to download much smaller files to be less than confidence-inspiring, with anything over 5 megs as likely as not to fail.
I guess I should start investigating software that manages and resumes downloads more intelligently than what's built into my current tools - which is simply Ubuntu, Firefox, and the DownThemAll add-on.
But, seriously, I know that Tor wasn't built around the idea of moving large files. My original post was half-meant as a joke. I'm surprised to see all this discussion over a throwaway comment.
Hmmmmm. Will we get an earthly version of DTN that ensures I can successfully download large files over TOR? Now, *that* would be useful.
There are places where there are no (useful) signs, even where population densities are pretty high.
Just north of Houston, Texas is a very large "bedroom community" that grew like crazy and has become a full-fledged city of its own. It's called "The Woodlands."
There's a (probably apocryphal) story that one of the driving forces behind the early conceptualization of The Woodlands development said that the community standards for roads, landscaping, and signage should ensure that "if any uppity n****r from Houston comes up here, he'll be too lost to find a house to break into." That's probably not exactly what happened but the result is the same.
In an attempt to create a so-called "livable" environment, everything that anyone might think of as "visual blight" is hidden from view. Street signs are low and/or painted in woodland colors like brown and off-white, instead of high and painted in flourescent white on a contrasting background so that drivers can actually read them. Streets are typically hemmed in by a wide median where the thick pine trees remain uncut, making it impossible to see anything bordering any main route. Frequently, you find yourself driving down the street in front of a shopping center or the large shopping mall in The Woodlands, with large stores literally 50 yards on either side, but you have no clue there are any buildings anywhere near. Added to all this, nearly all the main streets take random curves, changing directions every few miles to create the furtherest possible thing from a simple grid. It's the worst possible "spaghetti bowl" freeway interchange you've ever seen or heard of, flattened out and spread over the surface of many square miles of land. Even if you could find someone to give you directions, you could never follow them on that crazy quilt of streets; it's like civil engineering on acid.
In short, if you don't live there, you cannot find anything. Period.
That is, unless you know how to read a map (very difficult while driving and in The Woodlands, you generally can't see any place to pull off to read the thing) or you have a satnav.
I thought satnavs were silly toys until I started trying to find my way around The Woodlands. There are places where satnav is, frankly, a necessity.
Lots and lots and lots of toll roads here. Not as bad as the NE part of the country, but around here "most" people having an EZ Tag is an exaggeration but not a ridiculous one.
The U.S. government has long-since established some mechanisms that would accomplish exactly that.
I use Tor regularly and it's really slow. Not unusable, but really slow.
If I understand this correctly (and I'm not at all sure I do, so feel free to correct me), the more people who set up and use Tor the more quickly traffic can propagate. So if the situation in Iran is causing lots of people, both in and outside of Iran, to use Tor, then the whole thing should speed up, right?
So is that why when I visited a few miscellaneous .onion sites last nite, they were far more responsive than usual?
I imagine the Supreme Leader would be pissed if he understood. :-)
I'm a terribly unskilled gamer and I can't handle being swamped with goons. Oddly, I loved Serious Sam. I just turned on all the cheats and treated it as a speed challenge. I tried to find and kill every goon while getting through every level as quickly as possible. Played like that, I thought it was a really fun game.
I don't see how ratcheting up the graphical goodness could make it more fun for me. And if the number of enemies is reduced, the fun factor will definitely go down.
You say you have a PhD then, more than a half-dozen times, you use "site" when you mean "cite," the sort of error that makes profs go bonkers, something you'd know if you'd been to college, which you must have since you have a PhD, but then you show you don't know how to spell "cite"...
Aw, jeez, my head hurts.
Well, you're sorta right and so am I. After doing a bit of research, it's more complex than I realized.
Per the U.S. (nikonusa.com) web site, the FM10 and F6 are current cameras.
Historically, the FM10 was sold all over the world for a long time before it came to the U.S., so I have to keep in mind that distribution patterns can make things seem very different depending on where you are. It's still easily available, being in stock at major dealers. So the FM10 certainly endures.
However, in reality, the F6 is basically unavailable. No one seems to list them as in stock. Maybe a few are being hand-assembled but are any of them getting out of Japan? I dunno but I can't find any U.S. major dealers who have them.
The F100 in non-greymarket, official U.S. trim, is still easily available though. It may be discontinued, but plenty of NOS ("new old stock" as they say in the car parts biz) is floating around. That's why I said the F100 endures. But you're right; it's not a current model.
What surprised me when I did some checking is that there are miscellaneous imported (greymarket) models easily available in the U.S. such as the F65 and F80. I didn't realize that. It appears there's still a market for student-level film cameras, after all.
All in all, fascinating stuff.
The final days of Nikon film SLRs were/are interesting.
The F100 had lots of F5 owners wishing they had waited just a while longer and not been stuck with a giant brick of a camera. Not me, though. I love my F5 and still use it. But the F5 is long gone and the F100 endures.
That the FM10 still endures surprises me. Yes, it's a Cosina, but Nikon was so reluctant to bring out a stereotypical "student" camera for so long that when they finally relented and re-badged the Cosina, I figured their heart wasn't in it and the product would be dropped as soon as the winds changed. Boy, was I wrong. It's still around and still a perfectly usable camera. Wasn't that same chassis badged and sold as a Vivitar, too? I preferred the Vivitar's angular styling.
I was surprised that Nikon killed the F6 so quickly. With the advent of digital, I figured a boutique-sensibility, high-end film camera would find a "wealthy poser" niche, just like so many Leicas and field-appointed Linhofs in the past that found their way into the hands of dentists on African photo safaris and then into those dentists closets, never to be used again. Again, I was wrong. The rich-boy toy turned out to be the high-end digital SLR of the moment, not some film-swallowing throwback, no matter how wonderful that throwback was.
It seems I get nothing right when I conjecture about camera marketing. I guess I should just stick to having fun with them. I'm thinking about having my F overhauled (the flash sync went to hell years ago) or buying an F2 body and getting back to my roots; that should be fun enough in the twilight of my years.
This is too bad for a few folks. One of the training companies used extensively by my employer is headquartered in Florida. All of their staff signed up for Clear and said it was either unavailable or pretty much worthless everywhere EXCEPT Orlando. There, seasoned travelers frequently found themselves in line behind hundreds of Disney-vacationing families with little kids, families unused to flying and doing everything wrong while still trying to herd the ankle-biters. It was supposedly a nightmare. For that airport and that airport alone, those guys thought Clear was a godsend.
Everywhere else? Their attitude was...meh.
What is the digital equivalent of the Pentax K1000? For those who don't know, the K1000 was *the* student SLR for the last 25 years of the film era. Everybody had one.
So what do introductory-level photography students use nowadays?
Interesting. I grew up with parents who were not the same age. They were 15 years apart, my dad being older. In fact, mom was exceptionally attractive and dad had been through a physical hell behind japanese lines in the Philippines during WWII and looked far older than his years. As a result, the *apparent* difference in their ages was far greater than the actual. She was routinely assumed to be his daughter and, on one occasion I can remember, his granddaughter.
They were great together. We're talking loving, gentle, inseperable. It was textbook example of what a marriage should be. Thus, I grew up thinking nothing of huge age differences. When I was 35, I was seriously involved with a 50 year old woman. When I was 40, I was seriously involved with a young lady for whom I had to pick out a high school graduation present. Age differences have never meant squat to me. In fact, I find relationships where we have too much in common to be boring. If we're both the same age, same race, same religion, same economic background, same level of attractiveness, then we tend to approach similar situations in similar ways. I find that boring. Women much younger, much older, of a different race or religion, from a different country - they tend to look at any given situation completely different from the way I do. We talk about why. I learn things. I gain perspective. I'm challenged and I have fun.
So give an old guy a shot, will ya? It might not be so bad.
Welcome to the real world. It's possible to build all sorts of safeguards into a system to protect the people from despots. In the U.S., we did a fairly good job of it, what with all those "checks and balances" and such. But over time, the assholes eventually win. Little by little, the corridors of power see public servants and statesmen replaced by people who just want power. It's inevitable.
The guys who set up the U.S. legal infrastructure (we call them the "Founding Fathers") realized this and built a big ol' reset switch into the system in the form of an amendment to the Constitution specifically designed to make sure the people could possess the means to drag their oppressors into the street and shoot them in the head.
Let me stress: We are not there, yet.
Still, it would be nice to be prepared. Wanna learn something useful, gain a satisfying physical skill, and have some fun, all at the same time? I'm at work and (quite ironically) filtered, so I can't visit sites to find and post specific links, but this site is a fine place to start. Turn your speakers down before you click the link; the drums are nice and the opening riff is brief, but it's still unexpected.
My users resent the fact that their bosses don't know how to measure their competence, just like my IT co-workers. Over time (It's taken me most of a decade.) I've played on my customers shared irritation at the PHBs and convinced them to conspire with me to game the system. They call me first, not the help desk. I fix their problem. Then, they open a ticket, I instantly assign it to myself, document, and close. Voila - super-fast closure.
OK, this is an overstatement. I mostly work the tickets I'm assigned. But in nearly every case where I get a chance (those "meet in the hallway" requests for help, mostly) I'll try to run the procedures I outlined in my first paragraph.
I suppose everybody that reads your post and finds it interesting will head over to the blind search and do their own test. I know I did. Score: Google 3, Bing 3, Yahoo 4. Weird.
The only thing I've learned here is how much I miss the old Dogpile with its results broken out by search engine, the old Northern Light with its ability to parse URLs so wonderfully and the way HotBot just seemed, back in the day, to find stuff.
Anybody know a good URL search engine, one that allows me to search for text strings within URLs, including specifying at what level in the URL the string appears? I *really* miss Northern Light; I hope some current search engine can do the same and I just don't know how to use it.
I'll go further. If you download porn binaries from usenet, you almost certainly have child porn on your computer. Point any binary leecher at any large sexually-themed binary newsgroup, mark everything for the last week or two for download, kick it off and go to bed. By morning, you'll have, at minimum, dozens of child porn images from spammers advertising whatever it is they're trying to get you to click on.
First job out of college, I was an apartment maintenance man. Commonly, people would call in problems and I'd go into their place to fix things during the day while they were at work. I saw all manner of illegal stuff and it never occurred to me to call the police. I've seen coffee tables literally heaped with a kilo of weed in a very neat pyramid, but I'm not a cop and it's not my job to tattle on other folks, so I just forgot about it.
The only time I did anything to change the status quo was when someone was taking action that damaged the property. I was an agent of the property owner, so if you painted your bedroom black (It takes gallons of expensive Killz to cover black well enough to rent the place after you move out) or if you wallpaper your bathroom with porn (I wonder what kind of impression that made on any female houseguests?), it was my job to report and take action.
Sometimes, the action was pretty simple. For example, someone stole most of the furniture from around a pool. A few days later, I got a ticket to fix a leaky faucet. When I went into the apartment, there was our pool furniture, covered with towels, being used as a living room suite. I didn't say anything to anybody; I just put the furniture back out by the pool. Resident was a little sheepish after that.
Nowadays, I fix computers for a living. When I see something dodgy on an employer-owned computer, it's my job to report it. But on those occasions when I've done work for friends, even when I see something that might be dodgy, I don't take the time to look. It's none of my business. I'm not a cop and outside of work, it's not my job to tattle on you.
Now, here's where I get twisted up. What's the legal obligation of someone who sees something on your computer? I would imagine some jurisdictions have tried to make it illegal to look away when you accidentally stumble across something that might, at first glance, seem a bit to young to be doing what they're doing. In fact, wasn't there a law proposed in Texas that would have required all computer repair shops that do file recovery to have an investigator's license issued by the state just so that they'd hove some idea how to maintain a chain of custody and some legal obligation to actually report what they see rather than ignore things (like I used to do?
I'm not sure what the law is, so I don't work for friends ever since my sisters best friends sons computer needed help and I found, in addition to multiple virus infections and no anti-virus software, a large collection of sexually explicit webcam vids he'd made with his contemporaries. (I'm sure they were all over 18 years old, of course. They may have all been freshmen in high school but I keep telling myself that there were all over 18.) I simply don't want to deal with that stuff so I no longer help people who come to me with "My kids computer is really slow; can you help?"
Likewise, if I worked at Best Buy or some such repair depot, there's flat out no way I'd look at anything on the drive I didn't absolutely have to to get the job done. I just don't need the drama in my life.