> People like Timothy McVeigh are the reason ignorant members of Congress propose ridiculous legislation like this. I'm not saying what they're doing is right, but don't make Timothy
McVeigh some kind of hero for having the "balls" to stand up to government. He murdered innocent
people. Nothing good came out of what he did. It is just downright disgusting to suggest this is the way to bring about change when we still have the power to do so through democratic elections. I'm also not buying this crap that Congress is trampling all over our rights without our consent. We are the ones that gave them their power. We can take it away. Don't glorify violence. Go out and vote.
*applause*
Our society can be changed (for better or for worse) through the use of four boxes. Soap, ballot, jury, and ammo.
What the kook you're replying to so desperately needs to understand is that there are some Damn Good Reasons why the four boxes are intended to be used in the right order.
> "When they came for the communists, I was silent, because I was not a communist; >
When they came for the socialists, I was silent, because I was not a socialist; >
When they came for the trade unionists, I did not protest, because I was not a trade unionist; >
When they came for the Jews, I did not protest, because I was not a Jew; >
When they came for me, there was no one left to protest on my behalf." > >Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984) In reference to the Nazi governments policy towards 'dissidents'
Now if only they'd come for the trite and the histrionic:-)
> Even Gordon Gekko would have a hard time pulling this off if SCO was offering him 20% of the treasure... weeks after weeks of lawsuits and radical SCO stock prices...
"The point is, ladies and
gentlemen, greed--for the lack of
a better word--is good. Greed is
right; greed works. Greed
clarifies, cuts through, and
captures the essence of the
evolutionary spirit. Greed in all
its forms--greed for life, for
money, for love, knowledge--has
marked the upward surge of
mankind, and greed--you mark my
words-- will not only save Teldar
Paper, but that other
malfunctioning corporation called
the U.S.A."
If there were a sequel to Wall Street, Gordon Gekko would puke in revulsion at what SCO is doing when it comes clarifying, cutting through, and marking the upward surge of technological progress. And then he'd find out when Darl is scheduled to do the perp walk, and he'd short the ever-lovin' fuck out of SCO.
> Here's one suggestion: Stop trying your hardest to piss off the rest of the world to the extent that they want to kill you. I know it's kinda leftfield but hey...thinking outside the box an' all.
Here's one suggestion: Tell your sister to put on a fuckin' burkha instead of trying her darndest to turn guys on to the extent that they want to rape her. I know it's kinda leftfield but hey... you gotta respect other people's cultures an' all.
> Another guy posted a website about this, but it's score in the baloney detector seems pretty bad. As a chemist, could you please detail objectively why I shouldn't worry about that? I have a lot of mercury fillings and I wouldn't like they to reach my brain.
> What I am saying is that the weapons of mass destruction we keep hearing about are laughably
easy to make. Nukes... not so much, but chemical and biological weapons can be assembled easily and without much expense. Granted, these aren't suitable for battlefeild use, but you can put a big notch in the population of LA with this kind of stuff.
Disagree. If what you suggest is true, it would have happened by now. Dispersal is a tough problem for chemical and biological weapons that are intended for battlefield use.
> The system's not without problems, but I'm certainly not advocating overthrowing the entire damn thing and starting over from scratch.
No, you aren't. But the terrorists are. They can't overthrow the government and the society that depends on it in an "honest" fight (in the way that we plan to do with the government of Iraq). They can't destroy us through cultural imperialism because (gang rape of teenage girls, "honor" killings of your children, homicide bombings to celebrate their "holy" month) frankly, their culture sucks camel ass. But they can (and I believe they intend to) destroy us with a decapitation strike against select political and economic targets, knowing full well that the day after nobody knows Who's In Charge, everyone from Thugz tha Mad Gangsta, to Officer Friendly, to Montana Max the Survivalist Liberkookian, will tear down whatever's left of Western Civilization in an orgy of looting, violence, and starvation.
> There comes a point where the government is doing more harm than good by "protecting" us from
the terrorists. I think we've passed that point.
They're not interested in protecting you from terrorists. They're interested in protecting themselves from terrorists. On the grounds that my survival (and yours) are inextricably linked to the continued survival of that government, I think the recent trend is a Good Thing. (Perhaps you have more faith in your countrymen to function without strong leadership than I do, but I told you I was cynical in my first reply:)
> So here's the (hypothetical) trade. A cure for cancer, today. The price: The government gets to tap your phone, confiscate property without due process, track your internet usage, spy on you without judicial oversight, conduct secret searches of your home, and check up on your library readings. Oh, they also get to use your car to spy on you and can detain you indefinitely in a military base with no hope of appeal or civilian trial. Is it worth it? Remember, we're talking about curing cancer here... one of the biggest killers of US citizens of any age.
I wish your trade wasn't hypothetical, because at least we'd have our cure for cancer!:)
> Cripple terrorism? Plunk pool chlorine tablets into a two liter of coke and twist on the cap and you've got a chemical munition.
If those were the only weapons the terrorists had any reasonable probability of gaining access to, you'd be right. Screw the security state, we'll take our chances with the terrorists.
But in case you haven't noticed, however, these fuckers are going for the brass ring, the creme-de-la-creme. 9/11 (if you imagine it as originally planned, namely four cruise missiles delivered on time and on target) wasn't an attempt to kill 50,000 people, it was an attempted decapitation strike at the US government and economic base.
I can be as cynical as anyone when it comes to the motives of that government. I'll start with that kind of cynicism, in fact, for the first duty of any government is to keep itself in power. Your life, my life, and yes, these "freedoms" of which you speak, are all secondary in importance. (I'm a patriot, not an idealist:)
Suppose we decide to keep this "liberty" of which you speak at the cost of further negligence when it comes to the security of our government. We're all geeks here, we know what that means - leave a hole around long enough, and it WILL get exploited. By taking your tack, we ensure that one of these days, we'll be pwn3d.
So, Good Morning. Something happened last night. Both houses of Congress have been obliterated, along with half the Executive branch. Simultaneously, another weapon has taken out, not just an office building, but all of lower Manhattan. Third and fourth weapons take out other major seaport cities, delivering a significant blow to a continent-wide food processing and distribution system that relies on imports and just-in-time inventory processes.
When (if?) it reopens, the Dow is off 4000 (kiss your retirement goodbye). Bonds off 20% (good luck getting a mortgage). Gold is trading at $500 but, good luck getting food in exchange for photocopies of your account statement proving your ownership of 1500 ounces of fallout currently raining into the Atlantic. (The physical metal won't help you in the cities. Even if you have the other two precious metals - lead and copper - in sufficient quantities to keep your gold, no matter how good a shot you are, the street gangs have more lead, copper, and manpower than you.)
And do you think that the provisional government, cobbled together in 24 hours, run by third-rank undersecretaries of the Department of Backwaters, and backed up by scared-shitless National Guard recruits worried about where their families are gonna get their loaf of bread for the day, would preserve your much-vaunted freedoms in a way that's somehow preferable to the present government?
The only reason you, I, or Joe Sixpack down the block are still alive is because someone in government has decided to let us live. The price can be pretty high - 40% of your income if you've got a job like I do. The price can be absurdly low - if you don't have a job, all you have to do is vote for whichever party will give you more of my money.
So I'll take the tapped phones, confiscated property (hey, it's like taxation, but more honest!), network traffic logging (hi guys!), secret searches, car bugs, and disappearances of the S
> Why not install cameras throughout your home, in every room including your bedroom and bathroom, and then broadcast it all over the internet?
Actually, I've thought of that as a pretty cool solution to burglary. If it's a wireless link that uploads in real time to a server in the basement, and that server in the basement uploads to a remote server at a friend's house, Joe Burglar can steal everything in your house, including the security system, but he'll go nuts trying to find "the 10-hour VCR" that holds the "tape". He can even steal the server in the basement (if he can find it) and it won't do him a lick of good, because all the video's on your friend's hard drive.
> That way, not only could the police make sure that no crimes are being committed in your house, but your neighbors could come and help you if you were hurt or in danger.
If I encrypt the video stream with my friend's public key and my public key, it wouldn't be hard to "log out" of my home (encrypt stream with Friend's public key only) when I leave for work, and "log in" when I come back (encrypt stream with both Friend's public and my public key).
1) When I'm "logged out" of my home, Friend and only Friend (assuming he keeps his private key secure) can watch the house while I'm away. House gets broken into while he's watching, he calls cops. Sends video.
2) When I'm "logged in" to my home, Friend can't see anything I do, but he can still give me the encrypted data stream I need to obtain pictures of the perp, should I have the misfortune of being the victim of a home invasion while wanking to g0at pr0^W^W^W^Wdownloading warez^W^Whaving a quiet evening with a significant other.
(Besides, what, you actually think some poor Agent wants to watch a Slashdotter's bedroom all night? Man, talk about a boring assignment!:)
> Because the smart car thieves know that the GPS/cell antenna is very easy to find to and all they have to do is snap it off and suddenly your vehicle is untrackable.
And of the total population of car thieves in your city, how many of 'em qualify as "smart"? If you make it part of the "standard package", you have options like embedding the antenna between the layers of the materials that make up the rear window, much like rear window defrosters work. (Or in the corner of the windshield glass? Or in/behind the driver's side mirror? Or even in the weatherstripping around the windows.)
Even if you go the conventional route and mount the antenna where it can be removed, it's like having a lock on your front door. They present no obstacle to a professional lockpicker, but they keep Joe Thug out. Most criminals, thankfully, are stupid.
>.. but I wonder how long it'll take before any system like this will have to have 2 channels, one for the security "people", and one for you...
I'm surprised it wasn't designed in from the first round, but I'm a cynical motherfucker.
Given advances in technology, it raises an interesting question. Why not just install it by default? Given the advantages it would give law enforcement in tracking vehicle theft (and vehicle theft is often a precursor to everything from simple burglary to drug trafficking and yes, terrorism), why not have the government sponsor the Big Three into supplying a LilbroJack as part of the standard model? Big fat pork contracts for the steel belt, sold as "improving safety by eliminating auto theft" to the voter, and the cash-strapped State governments would likely be onboard anyways to save on highway patrol funding. (ie.. Congress wouldn't have to threaten to withhold highway construction $$$)
As I see it, every car that rolls off the assembly line should get at least one, and preferably two, bugs built into it. 99% of the time the primary bug is off. 1% of the time the car is stolen, and the primary but is turned on when the civilian reports the car as stolen. (And 0.1% of the time, pursuant to the needs of law enforcement, the secondary bug only, is turned on for the sheer hell of it, but that's the price you pay for eliminating Grand Theft Auto across the country, with the exception of your PC/console gaming room:)
The existence of the secondary bug should be withheld from the public for as long as practical. Not sure how to easily integrate a Big Secret(tm) such as the secondary bug into an insecure manufacturing process like vehicle design and assembly, mind you. I'm sure people with a Need To Know have good ideas on solving that problem.
Both bugs could also hold a passive RFID chip containing the VIN(primary) and the VIN encrypted with the public half of an Uber Law Enforcement key (secondary) on it. Remove the primary bug, you've removed the VIN, you've automatically marked the car as stolen. Th33f = pwn3d! (And of course, if you so much as breathe the wrong way on the secondary bug, both bugs trip.
Law enforcement can tell, by looking at which "VIN" (either VIN or VIN+UberKey) was transmitted at phone-home time, which bug was fscked with. Officer Friendly at your local precinct can track your stolen car with the primary bug, but only Law Enforcement of high enough rank to have access to the private half of the UberKey, however, could do anything with transmissions from the secondary bug.
Back to reality for a bit. It'd be a bit of a kludge, but I bet a dirt-simple variation of the primary/secondary bug trick (albeit one not locked to the VIN, not directly accessible to law enforcement, sans crypto, and ultimately based on security through obscurity, namely the vehicle owner's skill in hiding the second bug) could even be designed and sold as a consumer aftermarket add-on to a commercial system like LoJack.
> Following the link in the story, I saw this link on the NSA's main page: Kids' Page > >
NSA Kids page? WTF?? > > Mommy, I want to be a spook when I grow up.
My favorite.sig of all time reads:
"NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas
of advanced mathematics. If you'd like a circular describing these new
research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your mother, and
ask for one."
> Darl McBride is going for broke. The man is fucking insane and I feel for all the stockholders that are gonna lose big when this falls apart.
Ahem. "Fucking insane"? You are so behind the times.
May I cite My comment of Last week in which I was nominated for 'The Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word "Fuck" In A Slashdot Posting' when I encapsulated the history of my evaluation of SCO's mental state over the past few months as follows:
> > > Has SCO gone completely mad? What the fuck? ? > > > > Is SCO completely, utterly, loony? What the fuck? What the fucking fuck fuck?! > > Oh, right. That as me, quoting myself from Septempter, and then from October. > > > So, to bring you all up to date. It's November. The proper question is now: > > "Is SCO completely, utterly, apeshit and batshit, half-a-gig-short-of-a-Debian-ISO, stark, slavering, buggo?!? What the fuck? What the fucking fuck fuck fuck [ several dozen instances of the word "fuck" deleted for brevity ] fuck?!?!"
After taking into account the 12 replies I received, and the additional seven days, and the threats to sue FreeBSD, we're now up to the following:
"Is SCO completely, utterly, apeshit, goatshit and batshit, 649-megabytes-short-of-a-Debian-ISO, stark, slavering, buggo?!? Fuck! Are the fucking fuckers fucking well fucked? What the fuck? What the fucking fuck fuck? What the figgety fucking fuckity fuck fuck?"
There's your update for this Wednesday. I'm off to the Fuck Mines to dig out more copies of the word "fuck" in preparation for next week, when I expect to see that SCO discovered the Cult of Scientology's equivalent of the Bible Code in the comments to malloc.h, and attempts to sue the Town of Occupied Clearwater (and subpoena the Xenu, our Galactic Emperor) for including the complete text of OT III in the Linux source base, thereby making the entire works of L. Ron Hubbard constitute a violation of the SCO Group's intellectual property rights.
In the meantime, I trust you now realize that your referral to Darl McBride as merely "fucking insane" is an understatement akin to describing the Grand Canyon as a "ditch".
Reminder to SCO's landsharks who have a problem with either of our comments regarding your board of directors' collective mental state: truth is an absolute defence.
> I would be somewhat cautious before announcing the end of the standard model - even though it currently does not really play nice with relativity.
Agreed. It's odd. I'd like to see more evidence, too.
> Anyone remember the 17.3Kev neutrino?
Nope. Got a URL? My favorite heavy particle was the Oh-My-God Particle, rest mass 3x10e20 eV, about that of a bacterium and the energy of a brick falling on your toe. Time delay between the flash of light from whatever spawned it and "it", about two weeks... from Milliway's, the Restaurant at the Edge of the Universe.
> First we have region encoded dvds so we can't watch dvds from out of our country or "zone"... and now we won't even be able to fall back on "reverse engineering" our dvd players to play these things! Ugh. Just what we need, more complexity in an already needlessly complex market.
This is Tuesday. China's the Good Guy today.
Seriously - an alternative to DVDs that supports HDTV and has no copy protection, region control, or licensing (CSS) restrictions. How bad is that? If DVD had been invented by geeks, that's what DVD would have been!
Seems this is just the logical successor to VCD or SVCD. It's also backed up by tens of thousands of tanks whose commanders can tell Jack Valenti precisely where to stick it.
> They shoot lame horses, don't they? I don't see why McBride and Boies shouldn't be ground up
into dogmeat, then.
Because the ASPCA would be on your ass for cruelty to dogs. OK, don't feed 'em to the dogs. Leave their ground-up carcasses t on the front lawn of Canopy headquarters. But then the ASPCA would get you for cruelty to maggots.
> Not at all. A pentaquark state is a triplet plus a quark-antiquark pair. This is two quark-antiquark pairs. No need to change QCD at all. Why do you think there is?
Sure, quark-antiquark pairs are fine (mesons). Triplets are fine (baryons). And Pentaquarks are (anti:-)strange, but fine (u,u,d,d,!s).
My "WTF happened to QCD" was in regards to a comment implying that X(3872) was a four-quark static configuration, which I thought was unkosher.
Did someone find the Jaffe tetraquark or hexaquark and I've just been in a cave for the past decade?:) It's been a long time since I seriously studied any of this, and most of the papers I just googled were dated within the last 5 years, so I won't be at all embarassed to be proven dead wrong.
> Yeah, right. I've always been amazed at how Big Science constantly rakes in billions and billions of dollars without any real applications on the horizon. It's like the collider-boys sitting in their comfy chairs have a such an big and expensive machine that there's no way their research will ever be closed down. It would be too embarrasing to the ones who started funding them in the first place... > > Spend the money on Earth sciences or, heck, build a dozen stations on the moon and start beaming energy down here. That would benefit the whole world and it can be done NOW.
~ wavy lines as the Time machine takes us back to 1908, where the poster's great-grandfather is ranting at "Printdot" ~
Right on! Natural Philosophy constantly rakes in the Nobel Prizes without any real applications on the horizon. It's like that damned fool Rutherford sitting in his comfy chair watching his stupid contraption that throws helium ions into gold foil! Who
cares if the atom is like a plum pudding or if it has a nucleus or not? There'll never be any practical application, why, Helium isn't even reactive!
Spend the money on Whaling science, or, heck, just chop down the trees, burn them all, use the heat to boil water, and spin a turbine connected to a bunch of big thick wires, and start sending the energy over here. That would benefit the whole world and it can be done NOW.
> No, they think it is most likely to be a combination of four quarks - charm/anti-charm and up/anti-up. This hasn't been seen before but is perfectly valid under the standard model... they've already seen pentaquark states after all.
Pentaquark, fine, but four quarks?! Time to reinvent QCD. *shudder*
> A spammer can still spam with broken legs, and possibly get out of an arrest. Typing with broken fingers, well... at least they'll be off spamming for awhile until they can toe-type.
OK, back to the Slashdot poll.
"Go all Vlad-the-Impaler on them in front of the Level3 Head Office and let 'em serve as an example to others."
Vlad solved the problem of typing (finger or toe) by binding the arms together and amputating the hands and feet. Legs didn't even have to be broken; all you had to do was chop/chop and bandage, then just sit back and watch the spammer try to "grab" at the greased pole with its stumps as gravity does its inexorable work.
And so long as we use the next spammer to clean up the mess left by the previous spammer, I still don't see any downside.
> > "What other ways can people think of to attack the spammer business models, and what are the expected downsides of such approaches?" > > Break their fucking legs, and arrest.
You didn't completely answer the question.
"Break their fucking legs, and arrest them. I see no downside to this approach."
> The way I read it AOL bought Time-Warner for $112 billion.
> > I'm sure the previous owners of Time-Warner don't trouble themselves with regret too hard.
Actually, a lot of them do.
AOL employees (regardless of where they were located) grew up with a west-coast dotcom culture: OMFG, I'm an options millionaire! Call my broker and sell me out the day the options vest, and I've got fuck-you money, meaning that if my boss gets on my case someday, I can say "fuck you!" and walk out the door!
Contrast that with the east-coast Time-Warner/media culture: "OMFG, we just got bought out by a bunch of n00bz. What is with these kids and that Steve Case guy, and where do they get off selling themselves out like that? Even if I wanted to, I can't really sell my shares, that'd be a demonstration of disloyalty, it's just not the right thing to do. I'll do better by keeping my stock until I retire. After 15 years of leveraging our media properties with the AOL brand, I'll be sitting pretty while those young whippersnappers are all broke. I'm a smart east-coast establishment type!"
So when East met West, and West walked out the door with $1M, and East held on to see the greatest destruction of shareholder value and the worst merger idea in financial history... yeah, there are a lot of Time-Warner drones who do regret it to this day.
(Fuck 'em, I says. Any fool could have seen the merger was a Bad Idea. The right thing to do was to sell both stocks before the deal even closed and put your capital somewhere less dysfunctional. But what do I know, I'm a West-Coast type, my loyalty is to my capital, and nothing else.)
> Keep in mind that if you want to pay commodity prices for a service, you are going to get a service that has been sanitized and developed for the masses. What you're asking is
essentially the same as "How can I get WinXP-home to work as a good server?".
"Easy! Just plug it into a DSL or cablemodem without patching it or using a firewall! Guaranteed your XP Home Edition machine will be transformed into a high-volume SMTP engine in 15 minutes or less!"
> > I work for a major cable ISP here and we are also having problems with spamming trojens. To
solve it we do not want to block the customer's out going smtp completly > >Instead of blocking outbound SMTP, we opted to transparently proxy outbound SMTP sessions to our mail server.
If more residential broadband ISPs did the kinds of things you're doing 18 months ago, I wouldn't have had to block all inbound port 25 traffic from 200.0.0.0/7, 12.0.0.0/8, 24.0.0.0/8, and the various/16s where the Comcast and Cogeco trojan-box armies live.
Keep up the good work. I only wish others would follow your lead. Someday I'd like to be able to remove those/8 blocks altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
*applause*
Our society can be changed (for better or for worse) through the use of four boxes. Soap, ballot, jury, and ammo.
What the kook you're replying to so desperately needs to understand is that there are some Damn Good Reasons why the four boxes are intended to be used in the right order.
> When they came for the socialists, I was silent, because I was not a socialist;
> When they came for the trade unionists, I did not protest, because I was not a trade unionist;
> When they came for the Jews, I did not protest, because I was not a Jew;
> When they came for me, there was no one left to protest on my behalf."
>
>Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984) In reference to the Nazi governments policy towards 'dissidents'
Now if only they'd come for the trite and the histrionic :-)
If there were a sequel to Wall Street, Gordon Gekko would puke in revulsion at what SCO is doing when it comes clarifying, cutting through, and marking the upward surge of technological progress. And then he'd find out when Darl is scheduled to do the perp walk, and he'd short the ever-lovin' fuck out of SCO.
Here's one suggestion: Tell your sister to put on a fuckin' burkha instead of trying her darndest to turn guys on to the extent that they want to rape her. I know it's kinda leftfield but hey... you gotta respect other people's cultures an' all.
The Mercury Amalgam Scam: How Anti-Amalgamists Swindle People outlines the history of the quacks behind the "amalgam is poison" crowd, who make their living turning scientific illiteracy into unnecessary dental procedures.
Disagree. If what you suggest is true, it would have happened by now. Dispersal is a tough problem for chemical and biological weapons that are intended for battlefield use.
> The system's not without problems, but I'm certainly not advocating overthrowing the entire damn thing and starting over from scratch.
No, you aren't. But the terrorists are. They can't overthrow the government and the society that depends on it in an "honest" fight (in the way that we plan to do with the government of Iraq). They can't destroy us through cultural imperialism because (gang rape of teenage girls, "honor" killings of your children, homicide bombings to celebrate their "holy" month) frankly, their culture sucks camel ass. But they can (and I believe they intend to) destroy us with a decapitation strike against select political and economic targets, knowing full well that the day after nobody knows Who's In Charge, everyone from Thugz tha Mad Gangsta, to Officer Friendly, to Montana Max the Survivalist Liberkookian, will tear down whatever's left of Western Civilization in an orgy of looting, violence, and starvation.
> There comes a point where the government is doing more harm than good by "protecting" us from the terrorists. I think we've passed that point.
They're not interested in protecting you from terrorists. They're interested in protecting themselves from terrorists. On the grounds that my survival (and yours) are inextricably linked to the continued survival of that government, I think the recent trend is a Good Thing. (Perhaps you have more faith in your countrymen to function without strong leadership than I do, but I told you I was cynical in my first reply :)
I wish your trade wasn't hypothetical, because at least we'd have our cure for cancer! :)
> Cripple terrorism? Plunk pool chlorine tablets into a two liter of coke and twist on the cap and you've got a chemical munition.
If those were the only weapons the terrorists had any reasonable probability of gaining access to, you'd be right. Screw the security state, we'll take our chances with the terrorists.
But in case you haven't noticed, however, these fuckers are going for the brass ring, the creme-de-la-creme. 9/11 (if you imagine it as originally planned, namely four cruise missiles delivered on time and on target) wasn't an attempt to kill 50,000 people, it was an attempted decapitation strike at the US government and economic base.
I can be as cynical as anyone when it comes to the motives of that government. I'll start with that kind of cynicism, in fact, for the first duty of any government is to keep itself in power. Your life, my life, and yes, these "freedoms" of which you speak, are all secondary in importance. (I'm a patriot, not an idealist :)
Suppose we decide to keep this "liberty" of which you speak at the cost of further negligence when it comes to the security of our government. We're all geeks here, we know what that means - leave a hole around long enough, and it WILL get exploited. By taking your tack, we ensure that one of these days, we'll be pwn3d.
So, Good Morning. Something happened last night. Both houses of Congress have been obliterated, along with half the Executive branch. Simultaneously, another weapon has taken out, not just an office building, but all of lower Manhattan. Third and fourth weapons take out other major seaport cities, delivering a significant blow to a continent-wide food processing and distribution system that relies on imports and just-in-time inventory processes.
When (if?) it reopens, the Dow is off 4000 (kiss your retirement goodbye). Bonds off 20% (good luck getting a mortgage). Gold is trading at $500 but, good luck getting food in exchange for photocopies of your account statement proving your ownership of 1500 ounces of fallout currently raining into the Atlantic. (The physical metal won't help you in the cities. Even if you have the other two precious metals - lead and copper - in sufficient quantities to keep your gold, no matter how good a shot you are, the street gangs have more lead, copper, and manpower than you.)
And do you think that the provisional government, cobbled together in 24 hours, run by third-rank undersecretaries of the Department of Backwaters, and backed up by scared-shitless National Guard recruits worried about where their families are gonna get their loaf of bread for the day, would preserve your much-vaunted freedoms in a way that's somehow preferable to the present government?
The only reason you, I, or Joe Sixpack down the block are still alive is because someone in government has decided to let us live. The price can be pretty high - 40% of your income if you've got a job like I do. The price can be absurdly low - if you don't have a job, all you have to do is vote for whichever party will give you more of my money.
So I'll take the tapped phones, confiscated property (hey, it's like taxation, but more honest!), network traffic logging (hi guys!), secret searches, car bugs, and disappearances of the S
Actually, I've thought of that as a pretty cool solution to burglary. If it's a wireless link that uploads in real time to a server in the basement, and that server in the basement uploads to a remote server at a friend's house, Joe Burglar can steal everything in your house, including the security system, but he'll go nuts trying to find "the 10-hour VCR" that holds the "tape". He can even steal the server in the basement (if he can find it) and it won't do him a lick of good, because all the video's on your friend's hard drive.
> That way, not only could the police make sure that no crimes are being committed in your house, but your neighbors could come and help you if you were hurt or in danger.
If I encrypt the video stream with my friend's public key and my public key, it wouldn't be hard to "log out" of my home (encrypt stream with Friend's public key only) when I leave for work, and "log in" when I come back (encrypt stream with both Friend's public and my public key).
1) When I'm "logged out" of my home, Friend and only Friend (assuming he keeps his private key secure) can watch the house while I'm away. House gets broken into while he's watching, he calls cops. Sends video.
2) When I'm "logged in" to my home, Friend can't see anything I do, but he can still give me the encrypted data stream I need to obtain pictures of the perp, should I have the misfortune of being the victim of a home invasion while wanking to g0at pr0^W^W^W^Wdownloading warez^W^Whaving a quiet evening with a significant other.
(Besides, what, you actually think some poor Agent wants to watch a Slashdotter's bedroom all night? Man, talk about a boring assignment! :)
And of the total population of car thieves in your city, how many of 'em qualify as "smart"? If you make it part of the "standard package", you have options like embedding the antenna between the layers of the materials that make up the rear window, much like rear window defrosters work. (Or in the corner of the windshield glass? Or in/behind the driver's side mirror? Or even in the weatherstripping around the windows.)
Even if you go the conventional route and mount the antenna where it can be removed, it's like having a lock on your front door. They present no obstacle to a professional lockpicker, but they keep Joe Thug out. Most criminals, thankfully, are stupid.
I'm surprised it wasn't designed in from the first round, but I'm a cynical motherfucker.
Given advances in technology, it raises an interesting question. Why not just install it by default? Given the advantages it would give law enforcement in tracking vehicle theft (and vehicle theft is often a precursor to everything from simple burglary to drug trafficking and yes, terrorism), why not have the government sponsor the Big Three into supplying a LilbroJack as part of the standard model? Big fat pork contracts for the steel belt, sold as "improving safety by eliminating auto theft" to the voter, and the cash-strapped State governments would likely be onboard anyways to save on highway patrol funding. (ie.. Congress wouldn't have to threaten to withhold highway construction $$$)
As I see it, every car that rolls off the assembly line should get at least one, and preferably two, bugs built into it. 99% of the time the primary bug is off. 1% of the time the car is stolen, and the primary but is turned on when the civilian reports the car as stolen. (And 0.1% of the time, pursuant to the needs of law enforcement, the secondary bug only, is turned on for the sheer hell of it, but that's the price you pay for eliminating Grand Theft Auto across the country, with the exception of your PC/console gaming room :)
The existence of the secondary bug should be withheld from the public for as long as practical. Not sure how to easily integrate a Big Secret(tm) such as the secondary bug into an insecure manufacturing process like vehicle design and assembly, mind you. I'm sure people with a Need To Know have good ideas on solving that problem.
Both bugs could also hold a passive RFID chip containing the VIN(primary) and the VIN encrypted with the public half of an Uber Law Enforcement key (secondary) on it. Remove the primary bug, you've removed the VIN, you've automatically marked the car as stolen. Th33f = pwn3d! (And of course, if you so much as breathe the wrong way on the secondary bug, both bugs trip. Law enforcement can tell, by looking at which "VIN" (either VIN or VIN+UberKey) was transmitted at phone-home time, which bug was fscked with. Officer Friendly at your local precinct can track your stolen car with the primary bug, but only Law Enforcement of high enough rank to have access to the private half of the UberKey, however, could do anything with transmissions from the secondary bug.
Back to reality for a bit. It'd be a bit of a kludge, but I bet a dirt-simple variation of the primary/secondary bug trick (albeit one not locked to the VIN, not directly accessible to law enforcement, sans crypto, and ultimately based on security through obscurity, namely the vehicle owner's skill in hiding the second bug) could even be designed and sold as a consumer aftermarket add-on to a commercial system like LoJack.
You've never actually been to Floriduh, have you?
>
> NSA Kids page? WTF??
>
> Mommy, I want to be a spook when I grow up.
My favorite .sig of all time reads:
"NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas of advanced mathematics. If you'd like a circular describing these new research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your mother, and ask for one."
Ahem. "Fucking insane"? You are so behind the times.
May I cite My comment of Last week in which I was nominated for 'The Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word "Fuck" In A Slashdot Posting' when I encapsulated the history of my evaluation of SCO's mental state over the past few months as follows:
> > > Has SCO gone completely mad? What the fuck? ?
> >
> > Is SCO completely, utterly, loony? What the fuck? What the fucking fuck fuck?!
> > Oh, right. That as me, quoting myself from Septempter, and then from October.
> >
> So, to bring you all up to date. It's November. The proper question is now:
>
> "Is SCO completely, utterly, apeshit and batshit, half-a-gig-short-of-a-Debian-ISO, stark, slavering, buggo?!? What the fuck? What the fucking fuck fuck fuck [ several dozen instances of the word "fuck" deleted for brevity ] fuck?!?!"
After taking into account the 12 replies I received, and the additional seven days, and the threats to sue FreeBSD, we're now up to the following:
"Is SCO completely, utterly, apeshit, goatshit and batshit, 649-megabytes-short-of-a-Debian-ISO, stark, slavering, buggo?!? Fuck! Are the fucking fuckers fucking well fucked? What the fuck? What the fucking fuck fuck? What the figgety fucking fuckity fuck fuck?"
There's your update for this Wednesday. I'm off to the Fuck Mines to dig out more copies of the word "fuck" in preparation for next week, when I expect to see that SCO discovered the Cult of Scientology's equivalent of the Bible Code in the comments to malloc.h, and attempts to sue the Town of Occupied Clearwater (and subpoena the Xenu, our Galactic Emperor) for including the complete text of OT III in the Linux source base, thereby making the entire works of L. Ron Hubbard constitute a violation of the SCO Group's intellectual property rights.
In the meantime, I trust you now realize that your referral to Darl McBride as merely "fucking insane" is an understatement akin to describing the Grand Canyon as a "ditch".
Reminder to SCO's landsharks who have a problem with either of our comments regarding your board of directors' collective mental state: truth is an absolute defence.
Agreed. It's odd. I'd like to see more evidence, too.
> Anyone remember the 17.3Kev neutrino?
Nope. Got a URL? My favorite heavy particle was the Oh-My-God Particle, rest mass 3x10e20 eV, about that of a bacterium and the energy of a brick falling on your toe. Time delay between the flash of light from whatever spawned it and "it", about two weeks... from Milliway's, the Restaurant at the Edge of the Universe.
This is Tuesday. China's the Good Guy today.
Seriously - an alternative to DVDs that supports HDTV and has no copy protection, region control, or licensing (CSS) restrictions. How bad is that? If DVD had been invented by geeks, that's what DVD would have been!
Seems this is just the logical successor to VCD or SVCD. It's also backed up by tens of thousands of tanks whose commanders can tell Jack Valenti precisely where to stick it.
Because the ASPCA would be on your ass for cruelty to dogs. OK, don't feed 'em to the dogs. Leave their ground-up carcasses t on the front lawn of Canopy headquarters. But then the ASPCA would get you for cruelty to maggots.
Sure, quark-antiquark pairs are fine (mesons). Triplets are fine (baryons). And Pentaquarks are (anti :-)strange, but fine (u,u,d,d,!s).
My "WTF happened to QCD" was in regards to a comment implying that X(3872) was a four-quark static configuration, which I thought was unkosher.
Did someone find the Jaffe tetraquark or hexaquark and I've just been in a cave for the past decade? :) It's been a long time since I seriously studied any of this, and most of the papers I just googled were dated within the last 5 years, so I won't be at all embarassed to be proven dead wrong.
>
> Spend the money on Earth sciences or, heck, build a dozen stations on the moon and start beaming energy down here. That would benefit the whole world and it can be done NOW.
~ wavy lines as the Time machine takes us back to 1908, where the poster's great-grandfather is ranting at "Printdot" ~
~ Thus endeth the flashback ~
Pentaquark, fine, but four quarks?! Time to reinvent QCD. *shudder*
OK, back to the Slashdot poll.
"Go all Vlad-the-Impaler on them in front of the Level3 Head Office and let 'em serve as an example to others."
Vlad solved the problem of typing (finger or toe) by binding the arms together and amputating the hands and feet. Legs didn't even have to be broken; all you had to do was chop/chop and bandage, then just sit back and watch the spammer try to "grab" at the greased pole with its stumps as gravity does its inexorable work.
And so long as we use the next spammer to clean up the mess left by the previous spammer, I still don't see any downside.
Are we settled, then?
>
> Break their fucking legs, and arrest.
You didn't completely answer the question.
"Break their fucking legs, and arrest them. I see no downside to this approach."
There, that's more like it.
>
> I'm sure the previous owners of Time-Warner don't trouble themselves with regret too hard.
Actually, a lot of them do.
AOL employees (regardless of where they were located) grew up with a west-coast dotcom culture: OMFG, I'm an options millionaire! Call my broker and sell me out the day the options vest, and I've got fuck-you money, meaning that if my boss gets on my case someday, I can say "fuck you!" and walk out the door!
Contrast that with the east-coast Time-Warner/media culture: "OMFG, we just got bought out by a bunch of n00bz. What is with these kids and that Steve Case guy, and where do they get off selling themselves out like that? Even if I wanted to, I can't really sell my shares, that'd be a demonstration of disloyalty, it's just not the right thing to do. I'll do better by keeping my stock until I retire. After 15 years of leveraging our media properties with the AOL brand, I'll be sitting pretty while those young whippersnappers are all broke. I'm a smart east-coast establishment type!"
So when East met West, and West walked out the door with $1M, and East held on to see the greatest destruction of shareholder value and the worst merger idea in financial history... yeah, there are a lot of Time-Warner drones who do regret it to this day.
(Fuck 'em, I says. Any fool could have seen the merger was a Bad Idea. The right thing to do was to sell both stocks before the deal even closed and put your capital somewhere less dysfunctional. But what do I know, I'm a West-Coast type, my loyalty is to my capital, and nothing else.)
Don't just get the book, buy a Clifford Stoll Klein Bottle too!
"Easy! Just plug it into a DSL or cablemodem without patching it or using a firewall! Guaranteed your XP Home Edition machine will be transformed into a high-volume SMTP engine in 15 minutes or less!"
>
>Instead of blocking outbound SMTP, we opted to transparently proxy outbound SMTP sessions to our mail server.
If more residential broadband ISPs did the kinds of things you're doing 18 months ago, I wouldn't have had to block all inbound port 25 traffic from 200.0.0.0/7, 12.0.0.0/8, 24.0.0.0/8, and the various /16s where the Comcast and Cogeco trojan-box armies live.
Keep up the good work. I only wish others would follow your lead. Someday I'd like to be able to remove those /8 blocks altogether.