> I've never heard anyone here discuss SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABS.
Yeah, and what I wanna know is, why the hell not? *grumbling about when the hell is there gonna be an honest-to-Dawg old-school SRL show, goddamnit, we're overdue, man!*
The guy's got all the gear he needs, he just needs a place to use it. There are a lot of geeks on Slashdot. Some of us are have access to large areas of otherwise-unused land. Some of us are gearheads. Surely the intersection of the two cannot be the null set!
> What's "completely evil" about this? I want this thing, and have for years!
And why are so many of us geeks worried?
If the Pentagon wants record peoples' lives, fine. It's not as if I'm gonna appear in the database! How could I? I spend all my time reading Slashdot -- I don't have a life!
> Well I like to buy the pretty Kingmax PC-150 sticks with the TinyBGA modules on them, but I only run them @ PC-100 or PC-133.
The other nice thing about buying overspecced components is that you have an upgrade path.
I've got one stick of quality PC3200 RAM that I'm effectively underclocking, even when I overclock my cheapie P4 1.8A. With this CPU, 2700 would be just fine.
But in a year or so, I'll get my money's worth when I hand the 1.8A to a friend and swap in a replacement CPU with a 166 or 200 FSB. Or, if I upgrade the motherboard to do dual DDR, I'll only have to buy one stick of 3200, not two, to have a nice pair.
Like everything, there are good things to overspec and bad things to overspec, and which things those are depends on what you plan to do in the future.
Seriously, if there are significant machines in the collection (and there certainly appear to be), and the alternative is the dumpster (shudder!), the Aussie museum should contact them ASAP and see what can be arranged.
> Why do you live 50 miles from work? Is there no affordable accomodation within 10 miles? If you (and everyone else with similar desires for change) actively sought housing closer to your workplace, you would create a demand for a different type of housing supply, rather than the endless monotony of suburbia.
Yes! Increased demand for housing in urban areas! Just like paying $2000 for a studio apartment in San Francisco during the dot-com years, but with even more demand for living space!
> Depends on where you are going, and what the traffic is like. In a well laid out city, everything you ever wanted would be withing in a short walk or a short transit trip away.
I don't want to go to your idea of what my favorite butcher / baker / theater / nightclub / employer should be. I want to go to what I believe to be the place that offers me the most bang for the buck.
In a non-central-planning-addict's skull, basic observations about the appeal of personal choice and door-to-door mobility shouldn't require repeated applications of a two-by-four.
> > Operate your own smtp server. > > That's great, if you have an ISP that permits it.
Judging from the shitstorm from open proxies from attbi.com, rr.com, comcast.net, cogeco.net, dsl-verizon.net, swbell.net, and damn near every other residental broadband provider, I think you've got it backwards.
ISPs that don't filter/block port 25 are the problem, not the solution.
If it weren't for ISPs who knowingly permit their clueless twit luzers with open proxies or trojans to blast spew to port 25 of every fucking machine on the planet, I wouldn't need to run my own goddamn SMTP server!
ISPs should start by transparent proxying of outbound 25, or just block it outright by default. You wanna run your own SMTP server, you call the damn ISP and ask 'em nicely to open a hole for you.
Or don't, for all I care. Because for me, it's already too late. I've started blocked all residential broadband netblocks from my box as I find them. I've got most of the/8s I don't wanna hear from taken care of (about 30% domestic broadband providers in two/8s, and another 30% South American broadband providers in two more/8s), now it's on to the/16s.
The skills you listed were appropriate for a different time. Times change. Adapt and overcome.
> Of all the possible blunders of parenting that exist, I think that parents, training their children to expect omniscient monitoring, zero privacy, heavy interrogation, and heavy discipline
...are teaching their offspring the core survival skills that will enable them to become productive members of their society, just as your parents taught you a different set of survival skills for your society.
Chip 'em at birth, deeply (maybe even against or into the bone) so it can't be removed with a pocketknife, and make the technology as widespread as possible, as quickly as possible. Let the benefits propagate faster than the drawbacks.
> What do you call 100 spammers, chained together, and tossed into the ocean to drown? > A start...
An environmental disaster. Think of the poor carrion-feeders down there, man! That stuff goes all the way up the food chain!
Re:Right..... and all financial transactions onlin
on
Doubting Electronic Voting
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
> And when 50,000 largely black, largely Democrat voters are denied their legal right to vote because they were falsely accused of being felons by a computerized list that was inaccurate to begin with and encouraged to be more so by the Florida government, then saying an election was stolen isn't flamebait.
As long as you're willing to say the same for 50,000 immigrant (legal or otherwise) non-citizen voters, also largely Democrat, who cannot vote, but sometimes do vote, then we're cool.
(Clarification: Even if I take your 50,000 figure at face value, I don't think the inaccuracies in the list were deliberately engineered. Likewise, neither do I think the problem of aliens voting is deliberately engineered on any widespread scale. I consider both of these to be "error", not "corruption".)
Both parties practice various forms of swinging elections. Some are legal ("gerrymandering"). Others (deliberately disenfranchising legal voters, or designing systems that can be circumvented to allow illegal voters to cast votes) are not.
The goal of any electoral process is to prevent the latter, or at least to ensure that the "noise" introduced by corrupt officials is swamped by the "signal" of the legitimate votes.
In the case of Floriduh, the signal was so close to 50/50 that it was lost in the noise of both manual counting error, mechanical vote-recording error, human voter error in not verifying that their vote was correctly punched and/or in not following instructions on the ballot, legal "error" in that efforts to recount changed the result through mechanical ballot mishandling and the fact that human beings had to rule on whether hanging chads ought to be counted as votes or not, and corruption. Given the large sources of error in any vote, even in Floriduh, error introduced by means of corruption was probably the smallest error factor of the bunch.
> No, the real trick would be to wait until SCO is gasping its last breath, and then buy the rights to the Unix IP for pennies on the dollar, then give the IP to the Open Group on the condition that they make it freely available, while letting them keep the Unix trademark.
If I were the Open Group, I'd seriously consider revoking SCO's license to use that trademark.
SCO's actions towards the developers of software that runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, HP-UX, and other UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems, are endangering the value of the UNIX trademark.
> If I received a letter such as this, I would respond as such: > > Dear Darl McBride, > Suck my balls, and lick my ass.
Huh? Why on earth would you reply with that? I wouldn't want your nutsack and dingleberries subjected to that kind of scooky ordeal from the likes of an SCO IP lawyer, let alone my own! Have some respect for your nether regions, man!
> SCO's bluffing until the bitter end. There is no copyright infringement, and everyone in high level positions at SCO knows it.
I believe you're right. If and when that comes to light during the discovery or trial phase, I hope IBM, who has had the brass ones to stand up and fight this nonsense, will have the further gumption to countersue SCO into ashes.
It's time for the undead to get the wooden stake. Shit, it was time in 1997.
> Actually, *are* there any SCO users out there?:)
Long as we're at it... if there are any developers who have Makefiles that allow compilation on SCO, how about updating your Makefile such that further attempts to compile your code on an SCO box result in an executable that prints an error message indicating that the user ought to try one of the better, cheaper, Freer alternatives.
SCO's finally slipping beneath the waves. It's time for developers to help the few stragglers still adjusting deck chairs for a living to make a run for the lifeboats.
> Your best bets for defense are to keep your nukes well hidded--so your adversaries can't target them--or launching a first strike--use your nukes to destroy this large, obvious, easy-to-hit neutrino generation facility. (An accelerator ring 1000 km across can't be concealed--heck, it won't fit in most countries, let alone be paid for--and it can't be moved to a place of safety.)
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
1) Only a few countries are big enough to hold such a device. They're already nuclear powers, and they're pretty responsible users thereof.
2) Because of how huge it is, it's probably not going to be near a coastal region. So you gotta bomb it or ICBM it (short range ballistic missiles aren't gonna cut it, nor is a flotilla of cargo ships with smuggled weapons.:)
3) It's a lot easier to defend a 1000km ring with anti-ballistic missiles for 15 minutes than it is to defend an entire continent. (You only need to set up your ABM tech every 100km or so around the circumference.)
4) For superpowers, the countermeasure is to build your own 1000 km neutrino ring. (And short of starting WWV, there's no way for Superpower Foo to prevent Superpower Bar from building one!) Two superpowers with such rings have effectively rendered each others' nuclear arsenals obsolete. That's effective deterrence without the sword of mutually-assured destruction hanging over everyone's head.
5) Meantime, all rogue nuclear states' base are belong to the superpowers, because rogue states don't have the land mass to ever build a countermeasure.
6) $100B isn't that pricy if you amortize it out over 10-20 years. And much like nukes, even though the weapons haven't been used in 60 years, one hell of a lot of science has been done along the way. Your MRI and PET scans are as much an offshoot of nuclear weapons research as the fission plants that provides a good chunk of your electricity without a gram of CO2 (for those that believe CO2 is a hazard).
> REDUCE [house.gov]: Rep. Zoe Lofgren and Professor Lawrence Lessig's plan to set a bounty for citizens catching spammers > > CAN-SPAM [senate.gov]: Sen. Conrad Burns et al, requires valid headers and working opt-out, but doesn't allow private lawsuits > > Do-Not-Spam [senate.gov]: Sen. Chuck Schumer's proposal covers everything from CAN-SPAM plus has a national do-not-email registry and bans address harvesting.
The Lofgren bill sounds promising.
As for the other two:
"[Several forged headers, and obviously bogus reply addresses] This mailing is in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act. All headers are valid and our opt-out works. To opt out or to tell us what you think of us, contact our special opt out team at root@127.0.0.1."
"This mailing is in compliance with the Do-Not-Spam act. If we are emailing you in error, we apologize, as our carefully targited mailings are take several [days|weeks|months|years] to prepare and we must have prepared this mailing before you were added to the registry."
I like the RICO angle. Does that allow for asset forfeiture? Seems to me that'd make a lot of municipal governments direct the police to take a harder line against spam, and give the cops a little motivation to join in the party -- after the local police station's got its upgrades, there are plenty of schools that could use some "free" computers too. (Put in a 5-year sunset clause, because there are way more public sector workers who need "free" computers than there are spammers to supply them;)
Space Marine: "Yeah, Bahpomet, if I had that thing in my closet, I'd call in the Space Marines to blow it up too! But just one question, Baph, ol' buddy... [shouldering rocket launcher] Why didn't you just ask me. I mean, you could have saved yourself 30 levels of of your best hellspawned warriors. [*whoosh-thump*]"
> The breadth of story telling or the variety in stories in Bollywood is very small. They cater to a narrow audience of Indian moviegoers who mainly like a "virtuous" woman lead,
Check, check, check
> a clearly spelled out "good vs evil" story, often romantic themes or very narrow social themes. They also often conform to the social stereotypes and tread carefully while dealing with the censors.
Check, check, check, check, check.
> The process of story telling is cumbersome too. There is often a "comic relief" song or a "wet" song that interferes with the story telling.
Check, check.
> Further, the story telling is so in your face, with no scope for alternative interpretations. If the character feels pain, you will be "told so" a dozen times instead of just "showing it" once.
Check, check.
> One more killer is that there is frequently a main story, and a few, unrelated subplots in the
movie.
Che-- oh, to hell with it.
So when we finally get Rick Berman fired for what he's done the Star Trek franchise, we can do so with a clean conscience, knowing he'll always be able to support his family.
> I think a full-semester Finance class in early High School would do a lot to prevent at least some of the bone-headedness. That would catch the kids before they start getting credit cards.
Make that kindergarten.
I just saw an ad for a "Disney card" - it featured kids eagerly hopping in the car and asking Mommy if they could go and get gas, or stop for groceries on the way home from school. (Because if Mommy can rack up enough "points" by spending a few thousand dollars, the closer Sproglina is to seeing a man dressed up in a six-foot tall rat costume, but it'll only cost Mommy $1000 for the trip, versus, say, $1100 without the "points", or $500 at any hotel other than a Disney property. Isn't Mommy wonderful?)
The card itself may be targeted at adults, but the ad was clearly targeted at kids: The message was "Nag Mommy enough until she signs up for our card, and you get to go to Disneyland! Everythin she buys gets you closer to Der Maus."
> It would be most important to obtain the complete list of email addresses they send to. > >That way, the people who own the email addresses on the list can be asked if they had opted in (EMarkerters did state that they ran an opt-in scheme only...)
Yeah, but it'd be like the world's longest, (and most boring) string of amicus curiae briefs ever filed.
Worse, imagine if the defendants asked anyone who'd been spammed by Marin's gang to be called as witnesses. *shudder*
Felchstein: "My clients don't spam, it's all opt-in!"
Victim #1: "No, I didn't opt in to receive your clients' shite. In my eyes, that makes your clients spammers."
Victim #2: "No, I didn't opt in either."
Victim #3: "No, I didn't opt in either. And because of the South Florida spam gang, whenever I see the words 'Boca Raton' on any mailing address, I think 'fraudulent'. Must suck to be one of the few legitimate businesses in Boca, if indeed there are any."
Victim #4: "No, I didn't opt in either. And as long as I'm under oath, I also think Felchstein looks like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag." ...
Victim #5,443,195: "No, I didn't opt in either. And I believe Victim #4 has a gift for understatement."
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and what I wanna know is, why the hell not? *grumbling about when the hell is there gonna be an honest-to-Dawg old-school SRL show, goddamnit, we're overdue, man!*
The guy's got all the gear he needs, he just needs a place to use it. There are a lot of geeks on Slashdot. Some of us are have access to large areas of otherwise-unused land. Some of us are gearheads. Surely the intersection of the two cannot be the null set!
Why, for the love of God, why?
And why are so many of us geeks worried?
If the Pentagon wants record peoples' lives, fine. It's not as if I'm gonna appear in the database! How could I? I spend all my time reading Slashdot -- I don't have a life!
The other nice thing about buying overspecced components is that you have an upgrade path.
I've got one stick of quality PC3200 RAM that I'm effectively underclocking, even when I overclock my cheapie P4 1.8A. With this CPU, 2700 would be just fine.
But in a year or so, I'll get my money's worth when I hand the 1.8A to a friend and swap in a replacement CPU with a 166 or 200 FSB. Or, if I upgrade the motherboard to do dual DDR, I'll only have to buy one stick of 3200, not two, to have a nice pair.
Like everything, there are good things to overspec and bad things to overspec, and which things those are depends on what you plan to do in the future.
Seriously, if there are significant machines in the collection (and there certainly appear to be), and the alternative is the dumpster (shudder!), the Aussie museum should contact them ASAP and see what can be arranged.
Yes! Increased demand for housing in urban areas! Just like paying $2000 for a studio apartment in San Francisco during the dot-com years, but with even more demand for living space!
Gee, sign me up. NOT.
I don't want to go to your idea of what my favorite butcher / baker / theater / nightclub / employer should be. I want to go to what I believe to be the place that offers me the most bang for the buck.
In a non-central-planning-addict's skull, basic observations about the appeal of personal choice and door-to-door mobility shouldn't require repeated applications of a two-by-four.
Or don't buy a Segway. In comparison, a used car is free :)
>
> That's great, if you have an ISP that permits it.
Judging from the shitstorm from open proxies from attbi.com, rr.com, comcast.net, cogeco.net, dsl-verizon.net, swbell.net, and damn near every other residental broadband provider, I think you've got it backwards.
ISPs that don't filter/block port 25 are the problem, not the solution.
If it weren't for ISPs who knowingly permit their clueless twit luzers with open proxies or trojans to blast spew to port 25 of every fucking machine on the planet, I wouldn't need to run my own goddamn SMTP server!
ISPs should start by transparent proxying of outbound 25, or just block it outright by default. You wanna run your own SMTP server, you call the damn ISP and ask 'em nicely to open a hole for you.
Or don't, for all I care. Because for me, it's already too late. I've started blocked all residential broadband netblocks from my box as I find them. I've got most of the /8s I don't wanna hear from taken care of (about 30% domestic broadband providers in two /8s, and another 30% South American broadband providers in two more /8s), now it's on to the /16s.
You mean, like this little fella?
"EX-ter-mi..."
*pause*
"FUCK."
> You'll probably enjoy the oral sex more too.
With the robot, it may not be good, but at least you know you'll get it even after the purchase order's signed.
> Of all the possible blunders of parenting that exist, I think that parents, training their children to expect omniscient monitoring, zero privacy, heavy interrogation, and heavy discipline
Chip 'em at birth, deeply (maybe even against or into the bone) so it can't be removed with a pocketknife, and make the technology as widespread as possible, as quickly as possible. Let the benefits propagate faster than the drawbacks.
> A start...
An environmental disaster. Think of the poor carrion-feeders down there, man! That stuff goes all the way up the food chain!
As long as you're willing to say the same for 50,000 immigrant (legal or otherwise) non-citizen voters, also largely Democrat, who cannot vote, but sometimes do vote, then we're cool.
(Clarification: Even if I take your 50,000 figure at face value, I don't think the inaccuracies in the list were deliberately engineered. Likewise, neither do I think the problem of aliens voting is deliberately engineered on any widespread scale. I consider both of these to be "error", not "corruption".)
Both parties practice various forms of swinging elections. Some are legal ("gerrymandering"). Others (deliberately disenfranchising legal voters, or designing systems that can be circumvented to allow illegal voters to cast votes) are not.
The goal of any electoral process is to prevent the latter, or at least to ensure that the "noise" introduced by corrupt officials is swamped by the "signal" of the legitimate votes.
In the case of Floriduh, the signal was so close to 50/50 that it was lost in the noise of both manual counting error, mechanical vote-recording error, human voter error in not verifying that their vote was correctly punched and/or in not following instructions on the ballot, legal "error" in that efforts to recount changed the result through mechanical ballot mishandling and the fact that human beings had to rule on whether hanging chads ought to be counted as votes or not, and corruption. Given the large sources of error in any vote, even in Floriduh, error introduced by means of corruption was probably the smallest error factor of the bunch.
If I were the Open Group, I'd seriously consider revoking SCO's license to use that trademark.
SCO's actions towards the developers of software that runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, HP-UX, and other UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems, are endangering the value of the UNIX trademark.
>
> Dear Darl McBride,
> Suck my balls, and lick my ass.
Huh? Why on earth would you reply with that? I wouldn't want your nutsack and dingleberries subjected to that kind of scooky ordeal from the likes of an SCO IP lawyer, let alone my own! Have some respect for your nether regions, man!
I believe you're right. If and when that comes to light during the discovery or trial phase, I hope IBM, who has had the brass ones to stand up and fight this nonsense, will have the further gumption to countersue SCO into ashes.
It's time for the undead to get the wooden stake. Shit, it was time in 1997.
Long as we're at it... if there are any developers who have Makefiles that allow compilation on SCO, how about updating your Makefile such that further attempts to compile your code on an SCO box result in an executable that prints an error message indicating that the user ought to try one of the better, cheaper, Freer alternatives.
SCO's finally slipping beneath the waves. It's time for developers to help the few stragglers still adjusting deck chairs for a living to make a run for the lifeboats.
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
1) Only a few countries are big enough to hold such a device. They're already nuclear powers, and they're pretty responsible users thereof.
2) Because of how huge it is, it's probably not going to be near a coastal region. So you gotta bomb it or ICBM it (short range ballistic missiles aren't gonna cut it, nor is a flotilla of cargo ships with smuggled weapons. :)
3) It's a lot easier to defend a 1000km ring with anti-ballistic missiles for 15 minutes than it is to defend an entire continent. (You only need to set up your ABM tech every 100km or so around the circumference.)
4) For superpowers, the countermeasure is to build your own 1000 km neutrino ring. (And short of starting WWV, there's no way for Superpower Foo to prevent Superpower Bar from building one!) Two superpowers with such rings have effectively rendered each others' nuclear arsenals obsolete. That's effective deterrence without the sword of mutually-assured destruction hanging over everyone's head.
5) Meantime, all rogue nuclear states' base are belong to the superpowers, because rogue states don't have the land mass to ever build a countermeasure.
6) $100B isn't that pricy if you amortize it out over 10-20 years. And much like nukes, even though the weapons haven't been used in 60 years, one hell of a lot of science has been done along the way. Your MRI and PET scans are as much an offshoot of nuclear weapons research as the fission plants that provides a good chunk of your electricity without a gram of CO2 (for those that believe CO2 is a hazard).
Hey, Amazon Patent Lawyers, apply your "innovation" to this one: "FU"
>
> CAN-SPAM [senate.gov]: Sen. Conrad Burns et al, requires valid headers and working opt-out, but doesn't allow private lawsuits
>
> Do-Not-Spam [senate.gov]: Sen. Chuck Schumer's proposal covers everything from CAN-SPAM plus has a national do-not-email registry and bans address harvesting.
The Lofgren bill sounds promising.
As for the other two:
I like the RICO angle. Does that allow for asset forfeiture? Seems to me that'd make a lot of municipal governments direct the police to take a harder line against spam, and give the cops a little motivation to join in the party -- after the local police station's got its upgrades, there are plenty of schools that could use some "free" computers too. (Put in a 5-year sunset clause, because there are way more public sector workers who need "free" computers than there are spammers to supply them ;)
> Poor, poor, Romero. He should have stayed with ID software...
Evil-sounding voice: "oremoR nhoJ ,em llik tsrif tsum uoy emag eht etelpmoc oT"
Space Marine: "Yeah, Bahpomet, if I had that thing in my closet, I'd call in the Space Marines to blow it up too! But just one question, Baph, ol' buddy... [shouldering rocket launcher] Why didn't you just ask me. I mean, you could have saved yourself 30 levels of of your best hellspawned warriors. [*whoosh-thump*]"
Check, check, check
> a clearly spelled out "good vs evil" story, often romantic themes or very narrow social themes. They also often conform to the social stereotypes and tread carefully while dealing with the censors.
Check, check, check, check, check.
> The process of story telling is cumbersome too. There is often a "comic relief" song or a "wet" song that interferes with the story telling.
Check, check.
> Further, the story telling is so in your face, with no scope for alternative interpretations. If the character feels pain, you will be "told so" a dozen times instead of just "showing it" once.
Check, check.
> One more killer is that there is frequently a main story, and a few, unrelated subplots in the movie.
Che-- oh, to hell with it.
So when we finally get Rick Berman fired for what he's done the Star Trek franchise, we can do so with a clean conscience, knowing he'll always be able to support his family.
Make that kindergarten.
I just saw an ad for a "Disney card" - it featured kids eagerly hopping in the car and asking Mommy if they could go and get gas, or stop for groceries on the way home from school. (Because if Mommy can rack up enough "points" by spending a few thousand dollars, the closer Sproglina is to seeing a man dressed up in a six-foot tall rat costume, but it'll only cost Mommy $1000 for the trip, versus, say, $1100 without the "points", or $500 at any hotel other than a Disney property. Isn't Mommy wonderful?)
The card itself may be targeted at adults, but the ad was clearly targeted at kids: The message was "Nag Mommy enough until she signs up for our card, and you get to go to Disneyland! Everythin she buys gets you closer to Der Maus."
>
>That way, the people who own the email addresses on the list can be asked if they had opted in (EMarkerters did state that they ran an opt-in scheme only...)
Yeah, but it'd be like the world's longest, (and most boring) string of amicus curiae briefs ever filed.
Worse, imagine if the defendants asked anyone who'd been spammed by Marin's gang to be called as witnesses. *shudder*
Felchstein: "My clients don't spam, it's all opt-in!"
...
Victim #1: "No, I didn't opt in to receive your clients' shite. In my eyes, that makes your clients spammers."
Victim #2: "No, I didn't opt in either."
Victim #3: "No, I didn't opt in either. And because of the South Florida spam gang, whenever I see the words 'Boca Raton' on any mailing address, I think 'fraudulent'. Must suck to be one of the few legitimate businesses in Boca, if indeed there are any."
Victim #4: "No, I didn't opt in either. And as long as I'm under oath, I also think Felchstein looks like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag."
Victim #5,443,195: "No, I didn't opt in either. And I believe Victim #4 has a gift for understatement."