Perhaps the Federal "You can Spam" act is a blessing in disguise.
Because after years of inaction against blatant fraud and trillions of spams, we're finally seeing Attorneys General from several States actually nailing some of these pigfuckers to the wall before the Statewide antispam laws all get overturned by the DMA's spam legalization initiative two weeks from now.
(My apologies to any of you who actually do fuck pigs for insulting you with a comparison to to Snotty Richter.)
> The article does refer to the simularities with prohibition, but one of the reasons for it's repeal was that politicos liked a drink as much as the rest of us - I don't see many downloading the latest boy-band.
Which is to say that we won't see the end of the Copyright Wars until 30-40 years from now. When people currently swapping Britney and Eminem MP3z rule the country.
I'm sure there's a lesson somewhere in there about being very careful about what you wish for.
> > dihydrogen monoxide > > We've gotta ban that stuff, all the kids are gonna start using it, and then we'll never get them to stop. It's addictive... I've had like 5 doses today...
You think you're far gone? I'm cutting my DHMO with caffeine!
> Space travel is dangerous. We know this to be so, and we do it anyway. The astronauts knew the risks before they got into that shuttle. THat isn't to say the situation can't be improved, but the mere fact that space travel is dangerous is known and has not deterred us in the past.
Absolutely.
For all the times I bash NASA here, I'd fly on either the Shuttle or an X-Prize vehicle if offered the chance.
My slams against NASA and the Shuttle are largely along the lines of the AC who posted in this thread: With a 1-in-50 catastrophic failure rate and 4 launches a year at a cost of $500M per launch, performing virtually no useful science, the American taxpayer deserves better, the scientific community deserves better, NASA's astronauts need better, and if NASA's engineers won't (because a bureaucracy hasn't and won't, not because the engineers can't) build something better, someone else will.
Hence, X-Prize. Sure it's dangerous. But so were the first aircraft 100 years ago. Bring on the risk.
> You know what? If the choice is between suing a spammer for $1000, or sending them off to a pound-in-the-ass federal prison, I choose the latter for them. Besides, you can't sue someone who breaks into your house, but you can have them sent to jail.
But that's not a choice you ever had. The choice was between suing a spammer for $1000, or writing letters to anonymous bureaucrats, hoping that your pet spammer might be the one spammer whom the Feds decide to prosecute that year.
And "prosecute" doesn't mean the spammer ends up with his ass pounded. It means he pays a token fine of maybe 10% of the profits he gained from his scam, and then signs a letter in which he neither admits nor denies guilt, but that whatever it was that he neither admits nor denies doing, he won't do it again, at least not while anyone's looking.
If you're lucky enough to catch them, you can have burglars put in jail, because your local cops are in charge, and they understand burglary. You can't have spammers put in jail, because your "local cops" don't have jurisdiction over the spammer, and the spammer's local cops are just like yours -- too damn busy dealing with property crime, vice, and revenue enhancement to deal with something that's a Federal offence, even if they could understand what a "traceroute" was.
> Same ol' classic skin for people who want the Winamp 2 feel
Man, I feel old. I remember a bug that came our around 2.5 or 2.somethingorother, and that's when I gave up the upgrade treadmill.
WinAMP 2.09, Playlist/Generate HTML = xxx. Artist - Track [m:ss]
WinAMP 2.higher, Playlist/Generate HTML = xxx. Artist - Track
What's the behavior or Generate HTML Playlist in WinAMP 5?
When WinAMP's Save HTML playlists stopped showing the length of files is when I stopped upgrading. Winamp has always been, for me, "a thing that plays MP3s". 2.09 does that and generates usable HTML playlists. A few months after 2.09, an "upgrade" made it stop doing one of the two things I used it for, so I reverted to the old version.
After all these years, it finally safe to upgrade?:-)
> Try explaining to an AMERICAN widow that the invasion of Iraq somehow made us in America SAFER despite the widow's husband is dead due to some random Islamic idiot's roadbomb. Oh, BUT WE'RE SAFER! FOX NEWS SAYS SO!
"Ma'am, your husband died doing what he volunteered to do. He got killed 'over there' because every Islamic thug we kill 'over there' is one less Islamic thug who can eventually try his luck at killing civilians 'over here', but sometimes the Islamic thugs get lucky 'over there' too. War is hell."
And since I'm really a civilian posting from behind the safety of my keyboard in the States, I'll add one more thing: "Your husband, as someone willing to put more than Slashdot karma points on the line for what he believed in, grew a pair and served, which is more than I ever did."
To all who've served in the past, and who are serving today - at home or abroad - I'll say "w00t", which is the geek equivalent of the Marines' "Semper Fi" (sorry for not knowing the Army, Navy, and Air Force equivalents!), and celebrate another victory with a nice steaming cup of Shut The Fuck Up.
Oh, and Saddam? j00=pwn3d. we>j00. Of course you fail it. Your last spider hole of a base is belong to us. Your people, for several million, welcome their new US overlords. No Natalie Portman and hot grits. All we had left was 50-grit. Your next interview is with Goatse Guy, and I suggest you listen very carefully to his advice.
>.. why do folks perform DOS attacks on legitimate businesses like SCO, but at the same time, leave things like goatse.cx or tubgirl.com perfectly alone?
Because Goatse Guy and Tubgirl aren't the problem. Their bastard offspring, Darl McBride, is.
(Sorry, Goatse and Tubgirl. I know if you two did mate, your kids would still turn out better than Darl did.)
> Seriously, what about the porn industry. Kazaa, usenet, gnutellla etc all have pirated porn. Yet they seem to stay in business even without levies.
Oh, that's easy. Every time you fuck, your wife pays us $5.00.
Every time you beat off, the $5.00 comes out of your wallet. But we'd prefer you pay that with a credit card. We know where your hands have been!
This public service reminder has been brought to you by Comrades for Copyrights in Canadian Pornography. The CCCP is dedicated to ensuring fairness and equality for all Canadian pr0n producers. From you according to our greed, to us according to our lobbying ability.
> You passed between milepost 1 and 15 in under 6 minutes, here's your speeding ticket.
That would make it highly obvious to criminals that everyone was being tracked. Criminals would cease using EZ-Pass.
A properly designed mass surveillance systems must be unobtrusive; you have to give the target the illusion that he or she is not being monitored. If the target is aware they're being tracked, they'll modify their behavior to "look good" for the cameras.
Whether you're more concerned about property rights or nonintrusive government, consider that as implemented, the EZ-Pass tracking system is one where the designers and participating governments have chosen to pass up the huge revenue from 10000 speeders a day, and they did so in order to increase the odds that the sonofabitch who stole your car last week gets nailed to the wall the instant he hits the interstate. Dude, that's a feature, not a bug!
> > officials were in negotiations for the surrender of a second man... > > They're negotiating a surrender? Sounds like something I'd see on prime time USA, with SWAT team and about fifty riflemen with guns trained on a panoramic storefront window. The retard must be shitting in his pants about now... > >Come out slowly, with your email headers unforged!
"Slowly" is not the proper way for a spammer to surrender to law enforcement.
To the "second man[sic -- not a human, actually a spammer]" whose surrender is "under negotation", please disregard the poster's advice.
ATTENTION SPAMMERS: Did you know that if you take a toy gun, and paint over the little fluorescent ring on the end with black paint, or if you dip a water gun in black paint, or if you just carve a potato into the shape of a gun and apply black shoe polish, your surrender can be negotiated much more quickly and efficiently.
Simply opt in to any one of these three easy options, and then run directly towards law enforcement officers while holding your black-colored gun-shaped object. For additional efficiency, scream as loud as you possibly can that you have "just one more free offer to send out" while running towards aforementioned law enforcement officers.
This public service announcement on proper surrender techniques for spammers has been brought to you by the approximately one billion email users of Planet Earth.
> Well, 1 gig per second / 54 megs per access point * 1 access point per 802.11 card equals about 19 cards, not exactly possible in one laptop. And that's if you're using 'g'. For 'b', you'd need almost 100 cards...
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 full of laptops?"
> heheh.. a page with some thumbnails linked to 175k-300K pictures. His site is so dead.
P.
Not as long as the site's being hosted out of the laptop in the Cessna. What better use for 1440 unsecured WAP points?
> It sure is great to see such companies as Microsoft & Macrovision working together, but it sure does make you wonder where the RIAA and the Taliban were during these meetings? Their invitations must have gotten lost in the mail.
One wasn't evil enough for an invite, and the BATF guy got hung up at airport security.
> > Only two? > > OK, and a camel, 3 goats and a small wooden boat.
Joe Geek: "Hey, Fred, what's that you're working on?"
Fred Geek: "New gaming/multimedia box. Radeon 9800XP All-In-Wonder, P4 3GHz, watercooling rig, 1G RAM, and SATA RAID on a pair of 7200 RPM drives. Christmas is coming up, and I wanted to get something for my wife."
Joe Geek: "Dude! Good trade!"
Oh, wait. You're right. In China, they charge you for the bullet. That'd never happen here. As you can see, in America, the bullets are supplied as an integral part of the complete RIAA package.:)
STRA> I got the impression that everyone in New Zealand was too busy licking Peter Jackson's anus clean to
have the time to build a cruise missle. I guess I was wrong. You learn something new every day.
Ring. You keep using that word. I'm rather frightened that that word might actually mean what you think it means.
> Seriously, no trolling, I mean it. I made the switch from Windows to Linux after seeing ME being a step back from 98 and XP being not much better. Now I know why I end up in an argument with every other web designer in the group!
While we're at it - Win9x was much more recoverable than NT/XP/2K. If an XP box dies on boot due to a fux0r3d registry, you reinstall because the "recovery console" doesn't actually let you run any executables that might help you "recover".
Win9x has a corrupt registry? No problem! Boot to DOS off a floppy. Add a line to MSDOS.SYS that that says BootGUI=0.
Poke around in C:\WINDOWS\SYSBCKUP and find the last 4-5 versions of the registry. Extract somewhere safe, use ATTRIB to deprotect the corrupt registry, and overwrite.
CHKDSK/SCANDISK not cooperating? No problem in 9x. Boot to DOS and image the drive with Ghost before CHKDSK can corrupt anything.
Some twit's stupid installer overwrites MSVCRT.DLL with a borked version that breaks half your other applications? On XP, you're screwed - can't overwrite it 'cuz it's always in use. On 9x, boot to DOS and overwrite it yourself with a known "good" version. The same techniques apply to trivially expunge MS Outleak Excess and other borkware.
In this context, 9x is less secure than XP per se, but when the "security" you're trying to break is keeping you from manipulating files on your own bloody hard drive, sometimes that's a Good Thing.
Somewhere between NT and Longhorn, single-user machines that ran Microsoft operating systems ceased to be Your Computers and became Bill's Computers. Because it was based on DOS, a 98SE box is always going to be Your Computer.
> Windows Update? Or are you talking about someone hosting all of the current updates for Win98 elsewhere? If so, that is not a difficult thing for anyone to do. The question is...why? Most users advanced enough to want the patches probably do not use Win98 anymore. If you want them for yourself, burn them all to a cd for future reference.
It's actually nontrivial to get the redist.exe files for IE anymore.
MS, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that a 400K.exe "stub" is all you need. Run the stub, and go away and watch das blinkenlights on der routerbox, und then reboot.
This isn't exactly an option for your Aunt Tilley on dialup. But when she calls you and says "Hey, download the IE5.5 or IE6SP1 redist for me, and burn it to a CD, like you did for DX8 and DX9", you can't.
Anyone know if there's a redist for IE6 on the microsoft.com site the way there are redists for DX8 and DX9?
> Ironically, Win98se has been Microsoft's most secure operating system for the last two years!
Flamebait?
A Win98SE box runs no services. No DCOM, no RPC, no IIS, no "Remote Support", no MSN. With a couple of tweaks to rebind (or unbind) NetBIOS, it listens on no ports.
Use a third-party email client and a third-party browser to avoid the Outleak/IE holes, and the poster's right. For a clued-in user (i.e. someone smart enough not to click on every stupid attachment some bozo mails him), Win98SE is more secure than XP.
Is Win98 a good operating system? Hell no. It's a glorified DOS shell. Get your trojan running anywhere on that machine, and j00 0wn t3h b0x. But in order for that to happen, the end user pretty much has to cooperate.
> Are you sure there are 192 nations participating, and not 192.168 nations? What about the 10.x or the 169.254 nations you insensitive clods?
Someone call the WTO! I'm a 192.168 nation! And those bastards in the rest of the world have embargoed me from trading with anyone but 10.x and 169.254 nations! End the blockade now! To the firewalls, mes amis!
Slashdot Mirror
Because after years of inaction against blatant fraud and trillions of spams, we're finally seeing Attorneys General from several States actually nailing some of these pigfuckers to the wall before the Statewide antispam laws all get overturned by the DMA's spam legalization initiative two weeks from now.
(My apologies to any of you who actually do fuck pigs for insulting you with a comparison to to Snotty Richter.)
Which is to say that we won't see the end of the Copyright Wars until 30-40 years from now. When people currently swapping Britney and Eminem MP3z rule the country.
I'm sure there's a lesson somewhere in there about being very careful about what you wish for.
>
> We've gotta ban that stuff, all the kids are gonna start using it, and then we'll never get them to stop. It's addictive... I've had like 5 doses today...
You think you're far gone? I'm cutting my DHMO with caffeine!
Absolutely.
For all the times I bash NASA here, I'd fly on either the Shuttle or an X-Prize vehicle if offered the chance.
My slams against NASA and the Shuttle are largely along the lines of the AC who posted in this thread: With a 1-in-50 catastrophic failure rate and 4 launches a year at a cost of $500M per launch, performing virtually no useful science, the American taxpayer deserves better, the scientific community deserves better, NASA's astronauts need better, and if NASA's engineers won't (because a bureaucracy hasn't and won't, not because the engineers can't) build something better, someone else will.
Hence, X-Prize. Sure it's dangerous. But so were the first aircraft 100 years ago. Bring on the risk.
Rocket fuel, (PowerPoint-slide obsessed) professionals, and a whole NASA-load of official oversight. Experimentally verified as dangerous.
Anything less than 14 dead is an incredible improvement over the present situation.
But that's not a choice you ever had. The choice was between suing a spammer for $1000, or writing letters to anonymous bureaucrats, hoping that your pet spammer might be the one spammer whom the Feds decide to prosecute that year.
And "prosecute" doesn't mean the spammer ends up with his ass pounded. It means he pays a token fine of maybe 10% of the profits he gained from his scam, and then signs a letter in which he neither admits nor denies guilt, but that whatever it was that he neither admits nor denies doing, he won't do it again, at least not while anyone's looking.
If you're lucky enough to catch them, you can have burglars put in jail, because your local cops are in charge, and they understand burglary. You can't have spammers put in jail, because your "local cops" don't have jurisdiction over the spammer, and the spammer's local cops are just like yours -- too damn busy dealing with property crime, vice, and revenue enhancement to deal with something that's a Federal offence, even if they could understand what a "traceroute" was.
I believe you've confused "April 1st" with "December 25th".
Man, I feel old. I remember a bug that came our around 2.5 or 2.somethingorother, and that's when I gave up the upgrade treadmill.
WinAMP 2.09, Playlist/Generate HTML = xxx. Artist - Track [m:ss]
WinAMP 2.higher, Playlist/Generate HTML = xxx. Artist - Track
What's the behavior or Generate HTML Playlist in WinAMP 5?
When WinAMP's Save HTML playlists stopped showing the length of files is when I stopped upgrading. Winamp has always been, for me, "a thing that plays MP3s". 2.09 does that and generates usable HTML playlists. A few months after 2.09, an "upgrade" made it stop doing one of the two things I used it for, so I reverted to the old version.
After all these years, it finally safe to upgrade? :-)
>
> She isn't complaining! And after 14 years together that makes me proud!
Just because it plugs into a PS/2 port doesn't make it a mouse. Now take that pager motor out of your :CueCat before someone sues you, you pervert.
"Ma'am, your husband died doing what he volunteered to do. He got killed 'over there' because every Islamic thug we kill 'over there' is one less Islamic thug who can eventually try his luck at killing civilians 'over here', but sometimes the Islamic thugs get lucky 'over there' too. War is hell."
And since I'm really a civilian posting from behind the safety of my keyboard in the States, I'll add one more thing: "Your husband, as someone willing to put more than Slashdot karma points on the line for what he believed in, grew a pair and served, which is more than I ever did."
To all who've served in the past, and who are serving today - at home or abroad - I'll say "w00t", which is the geek equivalent of the Marines' "Semper Fi" (sorry for not knowing the Army, Navy, and Air Force equivalents!), and celebrate another victory with a nice steaming cup of Shut The Fuck Up.
Oh, and Saddam? j00=pwn3d. we>j00. Of course you fail it. Your last spider hole of a base is belong to us. Your people, for several million, welcome their new US overlords. No Natalie Portman and hot grits. All we had left was 50-grit. Your next interview is with Goatse Guy, and I suggest you listen very carefully to his advice.
Because Goatse Guy and Tubgirl aren't the problem. Their bastard offspring, Darl McBride, is.
(Sorry, Goatse and Tubgirl. I know if you two did mate, your kids would still turn out better than Darl did.)
Oh, that's easy. Every time you fuck, your wife pays us $5.00.
Every time you beat off, the $5.00 comes out of your wallet. But we'd prefer you pay that with a credit card. We know where your hands have been!
This public service reminder has been brought to you by Comrades for Copyrights in Canadian Pornography. The CCCP is dedicated to ensuring fairness and equality for all Canadian pr0n producers. From you according to our greed, to us according to our lobbying ability.
That would make it highly obvious to criminals that everyone was being tracked. Criminals would cease using EZ-Pass.
A properly designed mass surveillance systems must be unobtrusive; you have to give the target the illusion that he or she is not being monitored. If the target is aware they're being tracked, they'll modify their behavior to "look good" for the cameras.
Whether you're more concerned about property rights or nonintrusive government, consider that as implemented, the EZ-Pass tracking system is one where the designers and participating governments have chosen to pass up the huge revenue from 10000 speeders a day, and they did so in order to increase the odds that the sonofabitch who stole your car last week gets nailed to the wall the instant he hits the interstate. Dude, that's a feature, not a bug!
>
> They're negotiating a surrender? Sounds like something I'd see on prime time USA, with SWAT team and about fifty riflemen with guns trained on a panoramic storefront window. The retard must be shitting in his pants about now...
>
>Come out slowly, with your email headers unforged!
"Slowly" is not the proper way for a spammer to surrender to law enforcement.
To the "second man[sic -- not a human, actually a spammer]" whose surrender is "under negotation", please disregard the poster's advice.
ATTENTION SPAMMERS: Did you know that if you take a toy gun, and paint over the little fluorescent ring on the end with black paint, or if you dip a water gun in black paint, or if you just carve a potato into the shape of a gun and apply black shoe polish, your surrender can be negotiated much more quickly and efficiently.
Simply opt in to any one of these three easy options, and then run directly towards law enforcement officers while holding your black-colored gun-shaped object. For additional efficiency, scream as loud as you possibly can that you have "just one more free offer to send out" while running towards aforementioned law enforcement officers.
This public service announcement on proper surrender techniques for spammers has been brought to you by the approximately one billion email users of Planet Earth.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 full of laptops?"
> heheh.. a page with some thumbnails linked to 175k-300K pictures. His site is so dead. P. Not as long as the site's being hosted out of the laptop in the Cessna. What better use for 1440 unsecured WAP points?
One wasn't evil enough for an invite, and the BATF guy got hung up at airport security.
You mean to say that you, for one, welcome your pr0*BLAM BLAM BLAM*NO CARRIER
>
> OK, and a camel, 3 goats and a small wooden boat.
Joe Geek: "Hey, Fred, what's that you're working on?"
Fred Geek: "New gaming/multimedia box. Radeon 9800XP All-In-Wonder, P4 3GHz, watercooling rig, 1G RAM, and SATA RAID on a pair of 7200 RPM drives. Christmas is coming up, and I wanted to get something for my wife."
Joe Geek: "Dude! Good trade!"
You were saying?
Oh, wait. You're right. In China, they charge you for the bullet. That'd never happen here. As you can see, in America, the bullets are supplied as an integral part of the complete RIAA package. :)
Ring. You keep using that word. I'm rather frightened that that word might actually mean what you think it means.
While we're at it - Win9x was much more recoverable than NT/XP/2K. If an XP box dies on boot due to a fux0r3d registry, you reinstall because the "recovery console" doesn't actually let you run any executables that might help you "recover".
Win9x has a corrupt registry? No problem! Boot to DOS off a floppy. Add a line to MSDOS.SYS that that says BootGUI=0. Poke around in C:\WINDOWS\SYSBCKUP and find the last 4-5 versions of the registry. Extract somewhere safe, use ATTRIB to deprotect the corrupt registry, and overwrite.
CHKDSK/SCANDISK not cooperating? No problem in 9x. Boot to DOS and image the drive with Ghost before CHKDSK can corrupt anything.
Some twit's stupid installer overwrites MSVCRT.DLL with a borked version that breaks half your other applications? On XP, you're screwed - can't overwrite it 'cuz it's always in use. On 9x, boot to DOS and overwrite it yourself with a known "good" version. The same techniques apply to trivially expunge MS Outleak Excess and other borkware.
In this context, 9x is less secure than XP per se, but when the "security" you're trying to break is keeping you from manipulating files on your own bloody hard drive, sometimes that's a Good Thing.
Somewhere between NT and Longhorn, single-user machines that ran Microsoft operating systems ceased to be Your Computers and became Bill's Computers. Because it was based on DOS, a 98SE box is always going to be Your Computer.
It's actually nontrivial to get the redist .exe files for IE anymore.
MS, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that a 400K .exe "stub" is all you need. Run the stub, and go away and watch das blinkenlights on der routerbox, und then reboot.
This isn't exactly an option for your Aunt Tilley on dialup. But when she calls you and says "Hey, download the IE5.5 or IE6SP1 redist for me, and burn it to a CD, like you did for DX8 and DX9", you can't.
Anyone know if there's a redist for IE6 on the microsoft.com site the way there are redists for DX8 and DX9?
Flamebait?
A Win98SE box runs no services. No DCOM, no RPC, no IIS, no "Remote Support", no MSN. With a couple of tweaks to rebind (or unbind) NetBIOS, it listens on no ports.
Use a third-party email client and a third-party browser to avoid the Outleak/IE holes, and the poster's right. For a clued-in user (i.e. someone smart enough not to click on every stupid attachment some bozo mails him), Win98SE is more secure than XP.
Is Win98 a good operating system? Hell no. It's a glorified DOS shell. Get your trojan running anywhere on that machine, and j00 0wn t3h b0x. But in order for that to happen, the end user pretty much has to cooperate.
Someone call the WTO! I'm a 192.168 nation! And those bastards in the rest of the world have embargoed me from trading with anyone but 10.x and 169.254 nations! End the blockade now! To the firewalls, mes amis!