The sad part is that this isn't funny since its all too close to the truth. Look at the RIAA/MPAA flacks like Rep. Howard Berman who are willing to sell out any of our rights to get a campaign contribution from Hollyweird. What's the old maxim from the detective/police shows (appropriate quote)? In any crime, follow the money. Most politicians would gladly sell their own soul, their mother's, their grandmother's and yours and mine at the drop of a campaign contribution. They make all sorts of nice noises when there's a demonstration or a petition or something that seems to indicate that we, the public, have an opinion but they'll vote with the people who give them money.
The bottom line is the bottom line. The way to get things to change is to make enough money that the people who make the laws listen to you (and your money).
I'd like to see someone even get W2K or Windows XP to install, run and do ANYTHING useful on a system with only 32MB of memory. I'm inflicted with running W2K under VMware at work when I need some windoze specific application and its swap city with a 64 MB virtual machine. I need a quad esspresso just thinking about how slow Windows would be with only 32MB.
BTW, I too was running RedHat on a K5 box but with 64MB of memory, Micronix 486 motherboard, Orchid VLB video and an Adaptec VLB SCSI card. What finally drove me off the box was the video card was no longer supported in current XFree86 revs but I could still run it as a super VGA. My guess is that nothing from Microsquish more recent than Windows 95 would even install on the box.
The treeware edition had a similar article a month or two ago about several folks who had dropped out of the dot com, high tech world to work at various ski areas. Lift operator, ski instructor, etc. About the only one who was doing anything at all close to their career was working as a marketing intern at Vail (sounded like an unpaid position) and wanted to actually get into marketing. Sounded like making living expenses (barely) but having fun.
Kind of a hoot if you can swing it financially. At least it makes being "underemployed" fun. Sounded like some had an oppotunity to "go back" under less than favorable condition and just said "no".
Yeah. But this time Martha Stewart is the one showing you how to turn old hard disk drives into speakers. Same with turning the laundry basket and a "speak and spell" into a Segway. She's gotta come up with bail money somehow.
You should try reading the definition before makeing such a brash pronouncement. The word actually fits where it was used. In case you're interested, The definition is here. Some of us actually enjoy the English language as it was meant to be spoken; not just as monosylabic sound bites.
Oh my God. Somebody else who actually read the story before commenting.
The only "rant" in the story was from the anonymous author of the story (Reuters wasn't kind enough to let us know who the RIAA/MPAA hack was that wrote the story). This cowardly bastard quotes Mullen about whether it is ethical to hack back at a computer that is attacking one of yours and also mentions his use of an attack to push out a patch to his own network. Both interesting subjects but totally irrelevant to allowing the RIAA/MPAA to attack someone's computer because they think it is being used to possibly violate a copyright.
The tie in between what Mullen would like to do (hack back at hackers) and has done (hijack an attack to push out a patch) and what Howard Berman, the RIAA and MPAA want is strictly in the author's mind. Mullen, unfortunately, must have given an interview to a "journalist" who makes Jeraldo Rivera look like a candidate for a Pulitzer. Shame on him for talking to such a low life.
Some thoughts:
1) More people should read the story before they comment.
2) The few that do read the story need to read it more carefully (including the submitter who seems to have confused an anonymous author quoting someone out of context with statements by that person).
3) My guess is Mr. Mullen's comments on the story wouldn't be printable in a "family" publication. If I were in his position, I know mine wouldn't be.
Why is it that/.er's rally to all sorts of left wing causes like denial of intellectual property rights, anti-defense establishment, "rights" at the expense of security, anything anti-authority, etc. but, when it comes to a threat from the Global Economy to their job, they sound like a bunch of unionized, America firsters? I can't believe the number of posts I've read that assert that the author deserves a job over someone who is more qualified, more experienced and/or willing to work for less simply because "I iz an Americun" and the other applicant isn't.
...And you also have to advertise the position and show that it can't be filled with any available local talent.
As to exporting jobs overseas, join the rest of middle class America. We techies have had the benefit of all the manufacturing jobs getting exported overseas in low prices, etc. Now techies are whining because its THEIR job that might end up getting exported. Welcome to the global economy! The way not to have your job exported is to do it better than anyone else. We all thought it was great when we could buy cheap cars, stereos, computers, etc. that were manufactured overseas. Guess what? People over there have moved up the intellectual food chain when it comes to jobs and its a hell of a lot easier to put a bunch of PCs and a couple of servers on a LAN in Timbuktu than it is to move a steel mill or auto plant.
There's another post on this subject elsewhere in which the author brags about making $70K during the tech boom and only having to work about an hour and a half a day for it. This could be a contributing factor to that job not being "here" anymore. Especially when his or her management could probably get a Computer Science or EE Ph.D. for half of that in India.
I've had pretty good luck running ORDB and SpamCop as Sendmail filters. Next I want to get wPoison set up on my web page... oops first I need a web page. Its coming when I have something worth saying.
Check out wPoison if you want to make harvesting e-mail addresses painful and pointless.
I'm still confused as to how this has affected so many web sites out there.
Yahoo groups hosts a number of discussion groups that then get mirrored around the internet. In particular, they host the CVS GUI group. Not sure of any others but I ended up subscribed to that one when I was researching some stuff for a CVS implementaion. I'm guessing that there are more than a few others that then get mirrored and indexed.
Given the subject of this group in particular, I would get rather steamed if something I posted about how to do a retrieval became instead about doing a retrireview.
I just realized that I'm going to have to find some new bad habits. My old bad habits all turning out to be good for me. Coffee prevents alzheimers and red wine prevents heart disease. What's next? Sitting in front of a computer monitor prevents skin cancer?
...but I still have to ban domains like yahoo.com, hotmail.com, mail.com
My e-mail address was recently harvested by a spammer. I started getting SPAM from the listed domains but the only problem was the mail didn't show up as from yahoo, hotmail or mail in my mail log. Turns out the spammer was forging the return address and sending through an open relay. So I learned about how to set up sendmail to filter incoming mail through the Open Relay Database (ORDB). That particular spam problem has now disappeared. It helps when you run your own mail server but if I can figure this out in less than a day then a paid sysadmin at an ISP, company or school should also be able to do it.
You can find out more about the ORDB here and this site has very simple instructions for setting up sendmail to use the ORDB filter. Sendmail.org has quite a bit of additional stuff you can do to filter SPAM and still let legitimate e-mail through. ORDB also has solutions for people who don't run their own mail server and just connect someplace with a mail client to get their mail.
Let's see... I will assume that any metric time system will still be based on "natural" time periods relating to the planet earth. That is, we won't try to mess with the concept of a day (one earth rotation) or a year (approximately one earth orbit around the sun). I guess you could mess with these and replace them with some arbitrary units but I can guarantee that no one will want any part of a system that doesn't relate to good old terra firma and its inherent time periods.
So that leaves carving up the day into different parts or carving up the year into different parts. The French tried to go with a decimal month system after the French Revolution but it never caught on. You can try again but months are just an arbitrary way to divide up the year and the existing system (squirrely as it is) seems to work.
Now you can mess with dividing days into different arbitrary periods but I would point out that 24 has some nice properties (like being divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 12) that make it kind of handy. 60 has the same divisors going for it but in addition is also divisible by 5, 10, 15, 20 and 30. Systems based on 10 don't have nearly as many divisors and thus force you to work in some fairly messy decimals to get any kind of similar lengths of time (e.g., the 8 hour work day does not fall naturally out of any 10 based time divisions; instead you end up working 3.333333333 DecHours to put in the same amount of time: one third of a day). If you swap in such a system and either reduce or increase the workday to make the numbers nicer, it will not fly 'cause I'm not going to work a greater portion of a day to make math easy for some people and my employer isn't going to be happy about a system that has me working less. Looks like you're stuck with a 24 hour day. You can try 100 decMinutes to and hour and 100 decSeconds to a decMinute but making the decimal fractions easy to compute hardly compensates that some of these are messy because 100 doesn't have as many divisors as 60 or 3600.
I guess you could also mess with the 7 day week but I think that would fail for the same reason as a day divided into 10 parts: to much social upheaval to swap in a different "work week." I don't know about you but working 5 days out of 7 is about all I can do. Working 7 days and getting 3 off keeps about the same proportion of work and off time but working 7 days straight doesn't sound good to me.
Bottom line, don't mess with the length of a year or day. Don't mess with the way a day is divided up (hours) or the way hours are divided up into minutes and seconds. Also, don't mess with the number of days in the week. I guess that means you can try the old French experiment again and try to only have ten months but, since 365 isn't divisible by ten, you're stuck with 5 months with 36 days and 5 moths with 37 days plus you still have to tweak the number of days in a month once a year for leap year. Sounds like a far better system than we have now. Let me know if you can find more than ten people who think so.
1) Move to a state such as Colorado that has an official opt out list for telemarketing calls. The law here just went into affect on July 1st. I seem to remember that something like 15 or 20 other states have such laws. Supposedly, the state will go after telemarketers who violate the no call list.
2) Hit the Direct Marketing Assocaion's web site for consumers and jump through the hoops to get on their "Telephone Preference List". This is a list of people maintained by the Direct Marketing Association who do not wish to receive telemarketing calls. It won't cut them all out but it will cut down on the volume. While you're there, they also have a "Direct Mail Preference List" which will likewise cut down on the amount of junk mail you receive. (They also have a spam preference list but most spammers are too slimey to bother with the DMA. I surprised more spammers haven't bought the no spam list just to get the valid e-mail addresses from the list and then spam people anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
The sad part is that this isn't funny since its all too close to the truth. Look at the RIAA/MPAA flacks like Rep. Howard Berman who are willing to sell out any of our rights to get a campaign contribution from Hollyweird. What's the old maxim from the detective/police shows (appropriate quote)? In any crime, follow the money. Most politicians would gladly sell their own soul, their mother's, their grandmother's and yours and mine at the drop of a campaign contribution. They make all sorts of nice noises when there's a demonstration or a petition or something that seems to indicate that we, the public, have an opinion but they'll vote with the people who give them money.
The bottom line is the bottom line. The way to get things to change is to make enough money that the people who make the laws listen to you (and your money).
I'd like to see someone even get W2K or Windows XP to install, run and do ANYTHING useful on a system with only 32MB of memory. I'm inflicted with running W2K under VMware at work when I need some windoze specific application and its swap city with a 64 MB virtual machine. I need a quad esspresso just thinking about how slow Windows would be with only 32MB.
BTW, I too was running RedHat on a K5 box but with 64MB of memory, Micronix 486 motherboard, Orchid VLB video and an Adaptec VLB SCSI card. What finally drove me off the box was the video card was no longer supported in current XFree86 revs but I could still run it as a super VGA. My guess is that nothing from Microsquish more recent than Windows 95 would even install on the box.
The treeware edition had a similar article a month or two ago about several folks who had dropped out of the dot com, high tech world to work at various ski areas. Lift operator, ski instructor, etc. About the only one who was doing anything at all close to their career was working as a marketing intern at Vail (sounded like an unpaid position) and wanted to actually get into marketing. Sounded like making living expenses (barely) but having fun.
Kind of a hoot if you can swing it financially. At least it makes being "underemployed" fun. Sounded like some had an oppotunity to "go back" under less than favorable condition and just said "no".
Yeah. But this time Martha Stewart is the one showing you how to turn old hard disk drives into speakers. Same with turning the laundry basket and a "speak and spell" into a Segway. She's gotta come up with bail money somehow.
Quote:
Hmmm...mm...uhh...I guess I'm not really as creative as I thought.
Damn. I don't have any mod points to mark this as "insightfull."
So, did you also register these addresses at Crushlink and SomeoneLikesYou?
You should try reading the definition before makeing such a brash pronouncement. The word actually fits where it was used. In case you're interested, The definition is here. Some of us actually enjoy the English language as it was meant to be spoken; not just as monosylabic sound bites.
Too bad someone modded this down as flamebait. Fix the OS; don't patch the applications. Slashdot is like that though.
Too bad you got modded down for being off topic. Good response though.
Like I said, noise.
Noise
Oh my God. Somebody else who actually read the story before commenting.
The only "rant" in the story was from the anonymous author of the story (Reuters wasn't kind enough to let us know who the RIAA/MPAA hack was that wrote the story). This cowardly bastard quotes Mullen about whether it is ethical to hack back at a computer that is attacking one of yours and also mentions his use of an attack to push out a patch to his own network. Both interesting subjects but totally irrelevant to allowing the RIAA/MPAA to attack someone's computer because they think it is being used to possibly violate a copyright.
The tie in between what Mullen would like to do (hack back at hackers) and has done (hijack an attack to push out a patch) and what Howard Berman, the RIAA and MPAA want is strictly in the author's mind. Mullen, unfortunately, must have given an interview to a "journalist" who makes Jeraldo Rivera look like a candidate for a Pulitzer. Shame on him for talking to such a low life.
Some thoughts:
1) More people should read the story before they comment.
2) The few that do read the story need to read it more carefully (including the submitter who seems to have confused an anonymous author quoting someone out of context with statements by that person).
3) My guess is Mr. Mullen's comments on the story wouldn't be printable in a "family" publication. If I were in his position, I know mine wouldn't be.
Will the digital drivel be more interesting and compelling than the analog drivel I'm watching now?
I can hardly wait.
Why is it that /.er's rally to all sorts of left wing causes like denial of intellectual property rights, anti-defense establishment, "rights" at the expense of security, anything anti-authority, etc. but, when it comes to a threat from the Global Economy to their job, they sound like a bunch of unionized, America firsters? I can't believe the number of posts I've read that assert that the author deserves a job over someone who is more qualified, more experienced and/or willing to work for less simply because "I iz an Americun" and the other applicant isn't.
...And you also have to advertise the position and show that it can't be filled with any available local talent.
As to exporting jobs overseas, join the rest of middle class America. We techies have had the benefit of all the manufacturing jobs getting exported overseas in low prices, etc. Now techies are whining because its THEIR job that might end up getting exported. Welcome to the global economy! The way not to have your job exported is to do it better than anyone else. We all thought it was great when we could buy cheap cars, stereos, computers, etc. that were manufactured overseas. Guess what? People over there have moved up the intellectual food chain when it comes to jobs and its a hell of a lot easier to put a bunch of PCs and a couple of servers on a LAN in Timbuktu than it is to move a steel mill or auto plant.
There's another post on this subject elsewhere in which the author brags about making $70K during the tech boom and only having to work about an hour and a half a day for it. This could be a contributing factor to that job not being "here" anymore. Especially when his or her management could probably get a Computer Science or EE Ph.D. for half of that in India.
So, tell us, how do YOU really feel about Mozilla. Don't worry. We can take it.
Check out wPoison if you want to make harvesting e-mail addresses painful and pointless.
NOT!!!!
Just don't ask them to re-evaluate their policy! They'll never understand what re-reviewulate means and will simply ignore your request.
Given the subject of this group in particular, I would get rather steamed if something I posted about how to do a retrieval became instead about doing a retrireview.
I just realized that I'm going to have to find some new bad habits. My old bad habits all turning out to be good for me. Coffee prevents alzheimers and red wine prevents heart disease. What's next? Sitting in front of a computer monitor prevents skin cancer?
My e-mail address was recently harvested by a spammer. I started getting SPAM from the listed domains but the only problem was the mail didn't show up as from yahoo, hotmail or mail in my mail log. Turns out the spammer was forging the return address and sending through an open relay. So I learned about how to set up sendmail to filter incoming mail through the Open Relay Database (ORDB). That particular spam problem has now disappeared. It helps when you run your own mail server but if I can figure this out in less than a day then a paid sysadmin at an ISP, company or school should also be able to do it.
You can find out more about the ORDB here and this site has very simple instructions for setting up sendmail to use the ORDB filter. Sendmail.org has quite a bit of additional stuff you can do to filter SPAM and still let legitimate e-mail through. ORDB also has solutions for people who don't run their own mail server and just connect someplace with a mail client to get their mail.
Let's see... I will assume that any metric time system will still be based on "natural" time periods relating to the planet earth. That is, we won't try to mess with the concept of a day (one earth rotation) or a year (approximately one earth orbit around the sun). I guess you could mess with these and replace them with some arbitrary units but I can guarantee that no one will want any part of a system that doesn't relate to good old terra firma and its inherent time periods.
So that leaves carving up the day into different parts or carving up the year into different parts. The French tried to go with a decimal month system after the French Revolution but it never caught on. You can try again but months are just an arbitrary way to divide up the year and the existing system (squirrely as it is) seems to work.
Now you can mess with dividing days into different arbitrary periods but I would point out that 24 has some nice properties (like being divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 12) that make it kind of handy. 60 has the same divisors going for it but in addition is also divisible by 5, 10, 15, 20 and 30. Systems based on 10 don't have nearly as many divisors and thus force you to work in some fairly messy decimals to get any kind of similar lengths of time (e.g., the 8 hour work day does not fall naturally out of any 10 based time divisions; instead you end up working 3.333333333 DecHours to put in the same amount of time: one third of a day). If you swap in such a system and either reduce or increase the workday to make the numbers nicer, it will not fly 'cause I'm not going to work a greater portion of a day to make math easy for some people and my employer isn't going to be happy about a system that has me working less. Looks like you're stuck with a 24 hour day. You can try 100 decMinutes to and hour and 100 decSeconds to a decMinute but making the decimal fractions easy to compute hardly compensates that some of these are messy because 100 doesn't have as many divisors as 60 or 3600.
I guess you could also mess with the 7 day week but I think that would fail for the same reason as a day divided into 10 parts: to much social upheaval to swap in a different "work week." I don't know about you but working 5 days out of 7 is about all I can do. Working 7 days and getting 3 off keeps about the same proportion of work and off time but working 7 days straight doesn't sound good to me.
Bottom line, don't mess with the length of a year or day. Don't mess with the way a day is divided up (hours) or the way hours are divided up into minutes and seconds. Also, don't mess with the number of days in the week. I guess that means you can try the old French experiment again and try to only have ten months but, since 365 isn't divisible by ten, you're stuck with 5 months with 36 days and 5 moths with 37 days plus you still have to tweak the number of days in a month once a year for leap year. Sounds like a far better system than we have now. Let me know if you can find more than ten people who think so.
2) Hit the Direct Marketing Assocaion's web site for consumers and jump through the hoops to get on their "Telephone Preference List". This is a list of people maintained by the Direct Marketing Association who do not wish to receive telemarketing calls. It won't cut them all out but it will cut down on the volume. While you're there, they also have a "Direct Mail Preference List" which will likewise cut down on the amount of junk mail you receive. (They also have a spam preference list but most spammers are too slimey to bother with the DMA. I surprised more spammers haven't bought the no spam list just to get the valid e-mail addresses from the list and then spam people anyway).