US Patent law traditionally offers the patent only to the first inventor -- any recorded prior art invalidates it. There are some details about the two distinct points in time the law recognizes -- the moment when you conceived of it, and the moment when you reduced it to practice, i.e., made a prototype or proof of concept. Reduction to practice before the other guy may decide the case, particularly as in many bogus patents the "inventor" never reduced it to practice.
The more bureaucratically oriented EUian law offers it to the first filer, but that is against the US Constitution because our Congress only has the authority to offer patents to inventors, not "first to filers." (Not that you can expect the Federal Judiciary to pay much attention to that -- those joyless communists are scheming to reduce our society to the point where parasites can make their living sleeping outside the doors of bureaucracies to grab a spot in line to sell to honest citizens.)
"Patents are necessary to cure sick people" is a Republican myth. A new drug that works comes out once a decade -- these companies are making fat profits off the ones that merely didn't kill enough people to fail FDA approval. A limitation of patents to only drugs that make people live longer would have a good effect, but then so would eliminating patents completely.
You didn't try the command, did you ? Just put the alias in, start using it, and stop complaining.
I find that what is most lacking is clear examples that cover the simple %80 of cases where someone is looking at the documentation. And those should be near the top. cdrecord and mkisofs have good examples sections, but the standard man page layout puts them at the end. Thankfully less can search.
The only thing I was trying to prove was that you can prove anything with stock charts; so, don't put too much weight in the fact that SCOX went up today.
Ok, a note here before you loons all get too excited; if you take any two stocks, bring up the comparision chart, and start moving around the start date, you can pretty much make it look like what you want. In statistics this called "optional stopping" (or "optional starting" would be more appropriate here). There is a reason I picked a 5 day chart.
Remember this next time someone throws a bunch of graphs at you and tells you to invest in something.
Specifically, I would like to see a Word Perfect 5.1 port or clone for linux. Screw a front end to the whole of Open Office. I want something that can fit on a floppy linux.
One a port of WP 5.1 was done, but you can't find it anywhere. It was part of a "Professional" edition of one of the Corel Linuxes. There are also instructions on the web on how to get the SCO Unix WP 5.1 working on Linux. But what we really need is a Free version.
If there were a possibility of buying the WP 5.1 source code (it is supposedly well documented, modular assembly) I woudl contribute to the fund. Maybe we could free it as Blender was freed. However, I am not hopeful given the lack of immagination and stifling bureacracy that characterizes the copyright owners.
If you hate your phone company, consider what it would be like if that phone company was Microsoft.
Xbox Live, presumming MS manges to talk enough people into installing it, could become a way of using long distance especially for kids away at college (great excuse to get an xbox, too). Sony can try the same thing. Eventually one of them is going to offer a gateway of POTS to VoIP; this will be a number or 1-800 number and extension you can get for a few dollars a month, and they will have outgoing gateways in every areacode so they never pay long distance.
In fact, YOU will pay the long distance, by buying your bandwidth. This is exactly the kind of shady high-margin shit that attracts MS types like flies (actually now that I think about it maybe that explains a lot of the character of telecoms). You pay for everything, you can shop around for bandwidth and ISPs so those guys get to live on razor thin margins, and MS (or sony,or whoever else gets their paws in there) just reaps a huge margin for maintaining a database and a routing table.
You don't need to worry about the real telecoms offering any competition. Ed Whitacre's 80 Million a year salary is exactly why this opportunity is there. (What the fuck is the economy going to look like when SBC and their ilk shed a half million jobless into into the market ? But that's another issue.)
Needless to say this is a nightmare for anyone who believes in an open society.
What we need to do is build our own peer-to-peer VoIP telecom. We need to setup and easy to install package, or a run-from-cd that requires a dedicated box, to allow someone to set up their own VoIP gateway, voice mail with as many extensions as they want, etc. That will get us part of the way.
But what we really need to do is make it worth people's while to run gateways into the regular telephone system, until we grow so large that they need to offer gateways to us. For this we need a distributed tit-for-tat minutes bartering system and clearing house.
For example, you could hook up your new GnuTelephone and set it to allow the use of your SBC line for local calls only from midnight to 6 am, 1 cent a minute; during the day it would be annoying to have the phone in use so you charge 8 cents a minute; and in the evening you might want to have your phone available, so you would not allow it at all. After a few months you have racked up several hundred dollars credit with the system, in reality with a variety of other individuals whose credit can be exchanged in a clearing house for where you want to spend your minutes.
About that time you would get a nasty letter from your telecom; but you can just cancel the line and spend out your credit for a few months.
The real way to make money in the system would be to set up gateways in high volume areas. Ultimately some enterprising individuals would have to begin using 802.1x to provide some of their own bandwidth, starting with connecting across national borders (biggest difference in phone rates that way). But that might be out of the reach of most of the hobbiests.
After that you would have to buy credit in the system, or get another phone to build up credit, or whatever. Hopefully if you were careful with your minutes you could last until the phone companies imploded into a moldering heap of stolen pension plans.
The final result would be a society which spent much less on communications, but people who actually did real communications (lay wire, setup routers, etc) would get paid a lot more (as independents, of course).
Most of the current people in telecom companies won't be there of course. They will be in the labor market somewhere because their pensions will have been stolen and they can't retire, but these people are not wired right to be able to do business on their own; they couldn't even go door to door with a lawn mower mowing lawns for $20. (Because they'd spend the first week of summer seeing lawyers about the liability issues, or some shit.)
If we don't do this, MS/AOL/Sony is going to take over raping us for telephone service where Verizon/SBC/WorldCom left off.
When he talks of "too much complexity, lack of sufficient policies or standards, or cultural and political issues" he is not talking about problems that are solved being able to list open file handles and bound ports.
He is talking about the CULTURAL immpedances to efficiency. A group of developers needs special setups on their machines, and the company computer services refuses or takes forever to set things up, so the developer group ends up with one developer actaully being the groups personal sysadmin, and in a constant war to hide and block computer services from getting in and screwing things up. A manager try XP at home and likes it, and mandates a department wide upgrade without realizing that custom software the company uses doesn't work on XP. The company web page designer insists on using a weird html creator mostly to maintain her job as the only person who can change the web page.
Introducing the best software in the world won't fix these problems. After you switch to linux, computer services will try to grab turf by insisting on being the sole controller of root access, and then not install things developers need fast enough, so the developers boot up with a floppy, copy/etc/passwd and/etc/shadow aside, reboot and do their work and then fix it, and engage in hiding the strategy from CS; managers will still try and mandate crappy software that they learned about in a hotel bar somewhere; web page designers will use jakarta or j2ee or whatever to lock in their positions; etc.
If you work with shit people you will pay a price and linux can't save you. It's a valid point.
On the other hand, the fact that this observation applies so generally to Gartner's customers is incredibly amusing to me. They are basically admitting that buying Gartner reports is a sign of a broken organization.
Hopefully the economic slowdown and rise of cheap Free Software will result a lot of that dead weight being shed from our society. Perhaps companies will either become leaner, more practical, more thrifty and more efficient, or else find themselves out of jobs. It's high time we left the telephone dis-infectors adrift in space.
For a "Renaisance Geek", you sure are tough on a guy using voice recognition. Take it easy, just because this guy has carpral tunnel or whatever, is no reason to exclude him from the exchange of views and ideas that makes slashdot great.
Once you read it out loud, it's no worse than the average post here.
Anyway, I'll be dressing up in full interview/funeral suit, black ropers, real tie not the string one. As a friend observed, the best way to get them to listen is to be mistaken for a representative of SBC. I'm glad I cut the mullet when it got hot.
Of course the place is packed with restaurants that feed off of the legislature business.
I would go west from the capitol to Lavaca, and then turn right (north) and look for the Texas Chili Parlor. If that's crowded, keep going north and where it makes a T intersection with MLK blvd. there is a place called Players which has a decent burger.
If I go down there to testify, is it better to dress as an ordinary citizen ( jeans and button shirt, brown ropers ) or should I get slacks and the red polished boots and maybe a tie ?
This paper just gives an overview of some general trends and current buzzwords. I can't write any new software because I read this paper. I can't even avoid a dead end because now I know it didn't pan out. It doesn't even outline potential work for the edification of those who might be about to duplicate it.
Normally I wouldn't give a fuck. I don't bitch every time Robert X. Cringely cranks out another "hey I somebody sent me a link which is probably bullshit but anyway . . . " column. However,
"Our work was sponsored in part by the NSF GriPhyN Project."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that means my tax money was spent to produce this sorry excuse of a back page magazine article. Why ? Isn't the debt big enough as it is ? I thought the NSF was supposed to underwrite basic research so that Russkies or Al Qeada or whoever didn't pass us up ? Can we get our money back until these guys make it so these gnutella hosts quit refusing my connections ?
I'd like to also point out, the name "GriPhyN" is gayer than Jar-Jar Binks in pink spandex on unicycle. Not that there's anything wrong with that, just pointing it out.
Articles like this expose the sunshine patriots for what they are. All emails to public officials should be public data. If you want to keep an email secrete from me, DON'T EMAIL MY EMPLOYEES FROM THAT ADDRESS. That's right, public officials are my employees. My boss can read my email, and I can read my employees email. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; I don't care whose ox is being gored so long and it is good and dead.
Let me start off by saying that is a sign of a very bad economy that so many of the responses say "don't bother with region X . .." We are really and truly fucked economically, and we all better learn to sell dumpster-dived trash on ebay.
With that cheerful intro, I'll say that the specific circumstances you find matter more than the general state or region. Sure, one state may have a sales tax 2% higer than another, but a sweet deal on rental space will more than make up the difference. In fact, if you find living space a walkable distance from a small, cheap office just saving on gas may make more difference. You have to have an idea of your cash resources and burn rate and look for a place to maximize them.
I would just search for cities where the culture felt right to you. Culture varies as much within a region as it does from region to region. A small college town in the south may be more intellectual and tolerant than South Boston, Massachusetts. (Ok, maybe Nazi Germany was more tolerant than S.B., but you get my point.)
When you arrive in an area and think "I might be able to live here a couple of years" start looking for that specific sweet deal on space and infrastructure that will stretch your budget out another year. The trailer park with OC3 available, for example.
And then to actually give you some real advice rather than just "look for a good place son", if it were me I'd focus on a cheap, low class, dangerous part of Houston, Dallas, Austin, or San Antonio, which was walking distance from a cheap-ass industrial park and served by Grande Communications for cable/telephone. ( I'd definitely use Grande for personal telephone, but perhaps not for running a business broadband. Their availability means you can bargin more with the other providers.)
Well, pieces of the shuttle will soon be back on ebay. (I just searched, none of them have popped up yet . . . I may try to sell some peices of my neighbors trailer home which burned down three years ago, not that I would accept the money, but just as a troll exercise.)
I just drank an entire pot of cold coffee
on
DDoS for Fun and Profit
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
and in addition to needing to piss and shit like crazy, I just became too paranoid to go to the bathroom.
That set me thinking -- windows XP activation is 30 days, right ? If you don't activate, what happens in 30 days ? It demands you activate or it locks up.
How many people when installing or starting up a new computer for the first time ignore the activation because they've got to try it out right now ? A lot. What day was 30 days ago ? December 25th. What day probably features more people opening up new computers than any other ?
Perhaps they didn't try to attack the activation servers specifically, but simply thought of bringing down the net to stop the wave of Jan 25th activations, and got the activation servers as a lucky bonus.
If you want to do this as a business, then find mailing lists that are filled with spam, hand-remove them, and charge people something cheap to sign up for the de-spammed feed. This is a way you can bootstrap yourself, because there are mailing lists you can just sign up on and do it, and you can get paid multiple times for the same work.
Some thoughts:
-- It has to be cheap; after all, one subscriber could turn around and mirror it to a lot of people, so it has to be like $5 a year so it's just not worth the trouble.
-- You have to be extremely honest and painstakingly ethical, because if you are ever involved in anything with a hint of slime them people will begin to suspect you are pointing spammers at the unfiltered list to drive people to your filtered one.
-- It'll take more bandwidth than you think.
-- As long as you are mirroring a mailing list, go ahead and provide archives as with mailman and a newsfeed that mirrors it to your paying customers.
-- provide access to everything you filtered for 30 days or so
Think in terms of the kernel mailing list or the piclist -- high volume, newsfeed mirror is worth money; look at the cypherpunks mailing list ( http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/ ) -- if you can filter cypherpunks usefully I might sign up !
Some of the people who sign up for the mailing list service will like it enough to have it done to their personal mailbox.
You can explore the usenet mirror thing, by adding popular but heavily spammed newsgroups to your server and filtering them too.
Also, one last thing -- free mail accounts such as hotmail and yahoo add advertising links to the bottom of the emails. Remove them.
That no one has mentioned the infamous Dead Sea Scroll Decoding which used hypercard. I think that was a great example of computers actually living up to the promise of the computer revolution -- if the Defense Department had used a super computer to do a complecated reverse mapping on an index of fragments, no one would be surprised. But the computer revolution put the tools of giant institutions in the hands of individuals, and with some simple tools to use them in powerful ways (i.e., hypercard) the results leveled the playing field.
Too much of the rest of the computer revolution has not followed that promise.
Several people have pointed out that by the time spam reaches you to be filtered, it has already used resources.
That's why the large ISPs such as AOL and the DSL/Cable providers need to put this on their _outgoing_ connections, just to be able to quickly identify a machine which suddenly begins to produce spam. This would, of course, presume that they are responsible enough to care.
A lot of spam comes from open relays, hacked machines, unscrupulous ISPs here and in asia, etc. Obviously all connections to the internet can't be filtered. But I think that as ISP can save itself time and money by eliminating their own occasional problems.
That Graffiti Writing Robot won't be just writing chic indymedia slogans about working wages and legalized pot. If this guy has his way, it will be spewing herbalife ads and multilevel marketing.
In spite of the fact that slashdot's editors got it completely wrong and this robot doesn't spray anything but just sends signals to the air conditioning system, this development is just one in a flood of recent advances in the robot field that will ultimately create the real-world equivalent of pop-up ads.
What if Toshiba talked Apple into licensing iTunes for this device, to connect it to windows (or maybe even linux/BSD, as long as we are fantasizing) ?
Perhaps Apple could be cajoled into it, because it would be less risky for them than porting some of their other good software to other platforms. And then if it was successful, it might plant the seeds that lead to a full OS X with aqua for intel hardware, sold as a boxed set.
But I have a feeling the hardware dongle idea is so entrenched in Cupertino that a vulcan mind-meld overseen by Catholic excorcists would not remove it.
Slashdot Mirror
US Patent law traditionally offers the patent only to the first inventor -- any recorded prior art invalidates it. There are some details about the two distinct points in time the law recognizes -- the moment when you conceived of it, and the moment when you reduced it to practice, i.e., made a prototype or proof of concept. Reduction to practice before the other guy may decide the case, particularly as in many bogus patents the "inventor" never reduced it to practice.
The more bureaucratically oriented EUian law offers it to the first filer, but that is against the US Constitution because our Congress only has the authority to offer patents to inventors, not "first to filers." (Not that you can expect the Federal Judiciary to pay much attention to that -- those joyless communists are scheming to reduce our society to the point where parasites can make their living sleeping outside the doors of bureaucracies to grab a spot in line to sell to honest citizens.)
"Patents are necessary to cure sick people" is a Republican myth. A new drug that works comes out once a decade -- these companies are making fat profits off the ones that merely didn't kill enough people to fail FDA approval. A limitation of patents to only drugs that make people live longer would have a good effect, but then so would eliminating patents completely.
You didn't try the command, did you ? Just put the alias in, start using it, and stop complaining.
I find that what is most lacking is clear examples that cover the simple %80 of cases where someone is looking at the documentation. And those should be near the top. cdrecord and mkisofs have good examples sections, but the standard man page layout puts them at the end. Thankfully less can search.
The only thing I was trying to prove was that you can prove anything with stock charts; so, don't put too much weight in the fact that SCOX went up today.
Ok, a note here before you loons all get too excited; if you take any two stocks, bring up the comparision chart, and start moving around the start date, you can pretty much make it look like what you want. In statistics this called "optional stopping" (or "optional starting" would be more appropriate here). There is a reason I picked a 5 day chart.
Remember this next time someone throws a bunch of graphs at you and tells you to invest in something.
I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Specifically, I would like to see a Word Perfect 5.1 port or clone for linux. Screw a front end to the whole of Open Office. I want something that can fit on a floppy linux.
One a port of WP 5.1 was done, but you can't find it anywhere. It was part of a "Professional" edition of one of the Corel Linuxes. There are also instructions on the web on how to get the SCO Unix WP 5.1 working on Linux. But what we really need is a Free version.
If there were a possibility of buying the WP 5.1 source code (it is supposedly well documented, modular assembly) I woudl contribute to the fund. Maybe we could free it as Blender was freed. However, I am not hopeful given the lack of immagination and stifling bureacracy that characterizes the copyright owners.
If you hate your phone company, consider what it would be like if that phone company was Microsoft.
Xbox Live, presumming MS manges to talk enough people into installing it, could become a way of using long distance especially for kids away at college (great excuse to get an xbox, too). Sony can try the same thing. Eventually one of them is going to offer a gateway of POTS to VoIP; this will be a number or 1-800 number and extension you can get for a few dollars a month, and they will have outgoing gateways in every areacode so they never pay long distance.
In fact, YOU will pay the long distance, by buying your bandwidth. This is exactly the kind of shady high-margin shit that attracts MS types like flies (actually now that I think about it maybe that explains a lot of the character of telecoms). You pay for everything, you can shop around for bandwidth and ISPs so those guys get to live on razor thin margins, and MS (or sony,or whoever else gets their paws in there) just reaps a huge margin for maintaining a database and a routing table.
You don't need to worry about the real telecoms offering any competition. Ed Whitacre's 80 Million a year salary is exactly why this opportunity is there. (What the fuck is the economy going to look like when SBC and their ilk shed a half million jobless into into the market ? But that's another issue.)
Needless to say this is a nightmare for anyone who believes in an open society.
What we need to do is build our own peer-to-peer VoIP telecom. We need to setup and easy to install package, or a run-from-cd that requires a dedicated box, to allow someone to set up their own VoIP gateway, voice mail with as many extensions as they want, etc. That will get us part of the way.
But what we really need to do is make it worth people's while to run gateways into the regular telephone system, until we grow so large that they need to offer gateways to us. For this we need a distributed tit-for-tat minutes bartering system and clearing house.
For example, you could hook up your new GnuTelephone and set it to allow the use of your SBC line for local calls only from midnight to 6 am, 1 cent a minute; during the day it would be annoying to have the phone in use so you charge 8 cents a minute; and in the evening you might want to have your phone available, so you would not allow it at all. After a few months you have racked up several hundred dollars credit with the system, in reality with a variety of other individuals whose credit can be exchanged in a clearing house for where you want to spend your minutes.
About that time you would get a nasty letter from your telecom; but you can just cancel the line and spend out your credit for a few months.
The real way to make money in the system would be to set up gateways in high volume areas. Ultimately some enterprising individuals would have to begin using 802.1x to provide some of their own bandwidth, starting with connecting across national borders (biggest difference in phone rates that way). But that might be out of the reach of most of the hobbiests.
After that you would have to buy credit in the system, or get another phone to build up credit, or whatever. Hopefully if you were careful with your minutes you could last until the phone companies imploded into a moldering heap of stolen pension plans.
The final result would be a society which spent much less on communications, but people who actually did real communications (lay wire, setup routers, etc) would get paid a lot more (as independents, of course).
Most of the current people in telecom companies won't be there of course. They will be in the labor market somewhere because their pensions will have been stolen and they can't retire, but these people are not wired right to be able to do business on their own; they couldn't even go door to door with a lawn mower mowing lawns for $20. (Because they'd spend the first week of summer seeing lawyers about the liability issues, or some shit.)
If we don't do this, MS/AOL/Sony is going to take over raping us for telephone service where Verizon/SBC/WorldCom left off.
When will slashdot get a search engine that works ?
Until you do, could you at least take away robots.txt so that google can do it ?
When he talks of "too much complexity, lack of sufficient policies or standards, or cultural and political issues" he is not talking about problems that are solved being able to list open file handles and bound ports.
/etc/passwd and /etc/shadow aside, reboot and do their work and then fix it, and engage in hiding the strategy from CS; managers will still try and mandate crappy software that they learned about in a hotel bar somewhere; web page designers will use jakarta or j2ee or whatever to lock in their positions; etc.
He is talking about the CULTURAL immpedances to efficiency. A group of developers needs special setups on their machines, and the company computer services refuses or takes forever to set things up, so the developer group ends up with one developer actaully being the groups personal sysadmin, and in a constant war to hide and block computer services from getting in and screwing things up. A manager try XP at home and likes it, and mandates a department wide upgrade without realizing that custom software the company uses doesn't work on XP. The company web page designer insists on using a weird html creator mostly to maintain her job as the only person who can change the web page.
Introducing the best software in the world won't fix these problems. After you switch to linux, computer services will try to grab turf by insisting on being the sole controller of root access, and then not install things developers need fast enough, so the developers boot up with a floppy, copy
If you work with shit people you will pay a price and linux can't save you. It's a valid point.
On the other hand, the fact that this observation applies so generally to Gartner's customers is incredibly amusing to me. They are basically admitting that buying Gartner reports is a sign of a broken organization.
Hopefully the economic slowdown and rise of cheap Free Software will result a lot of that dead weight being shed from our society. Perhaps companies will either become leaner, more practical, more thrifty and more efficient, or else find themselves out of jobs. It's high time we left the telephone dis-infectors adrift in space.
For a "Renaisance Geek", you sure are tough on a guy using voice recognition. Take it easy, just because this guy has carpral tunnel or whatever, is no reason to exclude him from the exchange of views and ideas that makes slashdot great.
Once you read it out loud, it's no worse than the average post here.
But this is a committee, not the floor.
Anyway, I'll be dressing up in full interview/funeral suit, black ropers, real tie not the string one. As a friend observed, the best way to get them to listen is to be mistaken for a representative of SBC. I'm glad I cut the mullet when it got hot.
Of course the place is packed with restaurants that feed off of the legislature business.
I would go west from the capitol to Lavaca, and then turn right (north) and look for the Texas Chili Parlor. If that's crowded, keep going north and where it makes a T intersection with MLK blvd. there is a place called Players which has a decent burger.
If I go down there to testify, is it better to dress as an ordinary citizen ( jeans and button shirt, brown ropers ) or should I get slacks and the red polished boots and maybe a tie ?
Normally I wouldn't give a fuck. I don't bitch every time Robert X. Cringely cranks out another "hey I somebody sent me a link which is probably bullshit but anyway . . . " column. However,
"Our work was sponsored in part by the NSF GriPhyN Project."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that means my tax money was spent to produce this sorry excuse of a back page magazine article. Why ? Isn't the debt big enough as it is ? I thought the NSF was supposed to underwrite basic research so that Russkies or Al Qeada or whoever didn't pass us up ? Can we get our money back until these guys make it so these gnutella hosts quit refusing my connections ?
I'd like to also point out, the name "GriPhyN" is gayer than Jar-Jar Binks in pink spandex on unicycle. Not that there's anything wrong with that, just pointing it out.
the kill command.
Articles like this expose the sunshine patriots for what they are. All emails to public officials should be public data. If you want to keep an email secrete from me, DON'T EMAIL MY EMPLOYEES FROM THAT ADDRESS. That's right, public officials are my employees. My boss can read my email, and I can read my employees email. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; I don't care whose ox is being gored so long and it is good and dead.
Let me start off by saying that is a sign of a very bad economy that so many of the responses say "don't bother with region X . . ." We are really and truly fucked economically, and we all better learn to sell dumpster-dived trash on ebay.
With that cheerful intro, I'll say that the specific circumstances you find matter more than the general state or region. Sure, one state may have a sales tax 2% higer than another, but a sweet deal on rental space will more than make up the difference. In fact, if you find living space a walkable distance from a small, cheap office just saving on gas may make more difference. You have to have an idea of your cash resources and burn rate and look for a place to maximize them.
I would just search for cities where the culture felt right to you. Culture varies as much within a region as it does from region to region. A small college town in the south may be more intellectual and tolerant than South Boston, Massachusetts. (Ok, maybe Nazi Germany was more tolerant than S.B., but you get my point.)
When you arrive in an area and think "I might be able to live here a couple of years" start looking for that specific sweet deal on space and infrastructure that will stretch your budget out another year. The trailer park with OC3 available, for example.
And then to actually give you some real advice rather than just "look for a good place son", if it were me I'd focus on a cheap, low class, dangerous part of Houston, Dallas, Austin, or San Antonio, which was walking distance from a cheap-ass industrial park and served by Grande Communications for cable/telephone. ( I'd definitely use Grande for personal telephone, but perhaps not for running a business broadband. Their availability means you can bargin more with the other providers.)
Well, pieces of the shuttle will soon be back on ebay. (I just searched, none of them have popped up yet . . . I may try to sell some peices of my neighbors trailer home which burned down three years ago, not that I would accept the money, but just as a troll exercise.)
and in addition to needing to piss and shit like crazy, I just became too paranoid to go to the bathroom.
That set me thinking -- windows XP activation is 30 days, right ? If you don't activate, what happens in 30 days ? It demands you activate or it locks up.
How many people when installing or starting up a new computer for the first time ignore the activation because they've got to try it out right now ? A lot. What day was 30 days ago ? December 25th. What day probably features more people opening up new computers than any other ?
Perhaps they didn't try to attack the activation servers specifically, but simply thought of bringing down the net to stop the wave of Jan 25th activations, and got the activation servers as a lucky bonus.
If you want to do this as a business, then find mailing lists that are filled with spam, hand-remove them, and charge people something cheap to sign up for the de-spammed feed. This is a way you can bootstrap yourself, because there are mailing lists you can just sign up on and do it, and you can get paid multiple times for the same work.
Some thoughts:
-- It has to be cheap; after all, one subscriber could turn around and mirror it to a lot of people, so it has to be like $5 a year so it's just not worth the trouble.
-- You have to be extremely honest and painstakingly ethical, because if you are ever involved in anything with a hint of slime them people will begin to suspect you are pointing spammers at the unfiltered list to drive people to your filtered one.
-- It'll take more bandwidth than you think.
-- As long as you are mirroring a mailing list, go ahead and provide archives as with mailman and a newsfeed that mirrors it to your paying customers.
-- provide access to everything you filtered for 30 days or so
Think in terms of the kernel mailing list or the piclist -- high volume, newsfeed mirror is worth money; look at the cypherpunks mailing list ( http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/ ) -- if you can filter cypherpunks usefully I might sign up !
Some of the people who sign up for the mailing list service will like it enough to have it done to their personal mailbox.
You can explore the usenet mirror thing, by adding popular but heavily spammed newsgroups to your server and filtering them too.
Also, one last thing -- free mail accounts such as hotmail and yahoo add advertising links to the bottom of the emails. Remove them.
Too much of the rest of the computer revolution has not followed that promise.
Several people have pointed out that by the time spam reaches you to be filtered, it has already used resources.
That's why the large ISPs such as AOL and the DSL/Cable providers need to put this on their _outgoing_ connections, just to be able to quickly identify a machine which suddenly begins to produce spam. This would, of course, presume that they are responsible enough to care.
A lot of spam comes from open relays, hacked machines, unscrupulous ISPs here and in asia, etc. Obviously all connections to the internet can't be filtered. But I think that as ISP can save itself time and money by eliminating their own occasional problems.
In spite of the fact that slashdot's editors got it completely wrong and this robot doesn't spray anything but just sends signals to the air conditioning system, this development is just one in a flood of recent advances in the robot field that will ultimately create the real-world equivalent of pop-up ads.
What if Toshiba talked Apple into licensing iTunes for this device, to connect it to windows (or maybe even linux/BSD, as long as we are fantasizing) ?
Perhaps Apple could be cajoled into it, because it would be less risky for them than porting some of their other good software to other platforms. And then if it was successful, it might plant the seeds that lead to a full OS X with aqua for intel hardware, sold as a boxed set.
But I have a feeling the hardware dongle idea is so entrenched in Cupertino that a vulcan mind-meld overseen by Catholic excorcists would not remove it.