> I don't know, your description wants to make me go play the game. "Mommy I can't feel my legs" would have also been good. Postal 2 is out soon.
Postal had a great premise, lousy execution. Imagine something with all the notoriety of GTA, but without the graphics, the plot, or the gameplay. *shudder*
> Incidentally, what about "Adventure"? Better hope one of the three dragons is on the right (not
left) side of the room when you enter, cause your sword sticks out that way and you can't turn
around. Aaaah, run!
Yeah, but 2600 Adventure gets a pass because of the easter egg put in by the programmer as a thorn in the side of Atari's senior mangl^H^Hagement.
> I'm sorry, I believe that the cops should have to WORK for a living, to PROVE guilt by solid conventional means of investigation. It's worked for 220 years.
I'm sorry, I believe that artillery should be targeted by means of tables worked out by rooms full of people with pens and pencils, to PROVE accuracy by solid conventional means of calculation. It's worked for 400 years.
> The only difference is, now they have computers that sift through information to figure out with whom you sleep, what you read, how often you pick your nose (and with which digit), and whether you might post incitefully to forums such as Slashdot.
"No, no! I meant a Bud Light!"
- Final words of User 765, after having been moderated (-6, Inciteful) instead of (+1, Insightful) by some half-asleep HomeSec d00d who wasn't paying attention.:)
> "Resolved: That it is better to die free men than to live as slaves." > -Thomas Jefferson
1) Thomas Jefferson was a great man, but he didn't make any claims to infallibility.
2) It's up to each of us to decide whether our government's (IMHO limited and measured) response to the terrorist threat qualifies as placing us under "slavery".
From this, I draw the following conclusion:
3) If you believe you're being enslaved (IMHO a highly questionable belief), and you believe Jefferson was right about slavery (hey, that's your call, but 200 million Britney Spears listeners would probably disagree, and between them all, that's at least one brain's worth of neurons:-), then I'd remind you that (at least in the United States), the First Amendment grants you a right to shoot yourself in protest, and many believe the Second Amendment protects your right to do so with a really gr00vy-looking gun. *G*:-)
> Compare our political climate today to the "Red Scare" of the 50's - replace Communism with Terrorism, and you're right there. Was there a Red Menace? Apparently not...
Really? Some might disagree with that:
"As I described in my book "Radical Son," I had my own encounters with a KGB agent in London in the mid-'60s, when I shared the New Left faith. [...] In fact, the number of New Leftists who actively worked with communist regimes and their intelligence agencies probably runs into the thousands. The Venceremos Brigades, composed of New Leftists who went to Cuba ostensibly to harvest sugar cane, were operated by the DGI, the acronym for Cuban intelligence. How many of them came home with more than a piece of cane as a souvenir? The CISPES committees (Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador), which were very active during the Reagan years, were affiliated with the communist guerrilla movement in El Salvador. New Left radicals, like Tom Hayden, met in Eastern Europe and Cuba with communist officials from Hanoi and South Vietnam's National Liberation Front to plot the fall of the "Amerikan" empire. [... ]
And as long as we're on the subject - while 9/11 could have been stopped by having (with several billion more dollars in extra defence spending, but would those on the Left have supported such flights before 9/11? All that JP4 being turned into noise, all those evil military planes everywhere) 24/7 combat air patrols over all major cities - I'd point out that just as there was a Red Menace in the 50s, there is now an Islamokazi Terrorist Menace (tm).
Perhaps, as with McCarthy, some elements of our response to the ITM(tm) may, 50 years from now, be seen as disproportionate to the threat, but if you dispute that there's an ITM(tm), there are 2800 ghosts in the vicinity of lower Manhattan who will respectfully disagree. (And around the world, several thousand from the preceding 20 years, and a few hundred more since then.)
> There's an old saying that goes something like the master swordsman doesn't fear another master, he fears the amateur. > > I feel the same way about Big Brother. I don't consider them to be a threat about what they might intentionally find out about me or my friends/family. I fear what they might "think" they found in a fit of total incompetence.
Amen to that. I heard the swordsman comment phrased a little less elegantly:
"Evil has to sleep at night. Stupidity is 24/7."
At least Big Brother as depicted in Orwell's 1984 was competent - it was staffed by dedicated bellyfeeling Party members who were capable of doing a pretty good job of hunting down and exterminating those who presented a threat to the Party, while leaving the proles alone.
A Big Brother staffed by the cluel^H^H^H^H^H fucknoz^H^H^H^H^H^H^H twit^H^H^H^H individuals presently working at INS, or even your local DMV, scares me far more than the one in 1984.
But compared to either of those alternatives, I'll take a Big Brother staffed by NSA and CIA any day. Heck, I'll even give the FBI a shot at joining in and redeem itself.
Short of spending trillions to achieve the 1984 total security state, the way you achieve the optimum balance between freedom and security is that you have your police force be just a little bit stupid, and just a little bit slow.
We got hit on 9/11 because we went for very slow and very stupid. Bureaucratic stonewalling (no information sharing between FBI, CIA, and NSA) was part of it, as were politically-motivated fuckups like diverting FBI resources away from the Islamokazi whackjob terrorist threat to investigate the domestic militia whackjob terrorist threat. As for stupidity, it doesn't get much dumber than giving visa confirmations to the 9/11 hijackers six months after all hell broke loose - only the INS could pull something like that. And only in the INS could Ashcroft himself not fire those responsible.
IMNSHO, the proposed Big Brother composed of our intelligence agencies (NSA, CIA, post-9/11 FBI design goal) has the potential to achieve the right degree of stupidity and slowness for the job -- and I don't mean that as an insult. Any stupider and slower (pre-9/11 FBI, current INS), and we'd have another 9/11. Any smarter and faster (Stasi, KGB, Gestapo), and it'd be 1984.
> The article said the man was without his liver for only 11 minutes.. Surely this is the time that it was completely out of his body, and the time it was "disconnected" was much longer. Other organs, like the lungs and especially the brain, can't be so readily removed.
Lungs: How 'bout hooking the guy up to a heart-lung machine and letting it oxygenate his blood for him?
> Legitimate users like us can't keep changing IP addresses because SPEWS is too aggressive and has no organized process. If you want to use a spam advisory system, use MAPS RBL [mail-abuse.org]. > > Spews is worse than the spammers, because at least I can ignore the spammers.
If you want an effective spam advisory system that actually lists spamhausen, use SPEWS.
SPEWS is better than MAPS, because the spammers discovered they could ignore MAPS.
> In Brin's vision, society is transparent to everybody. I think that may be an acceptable tradeoff: I'd be willing to trade my privacy if in return we all can finally know what's going on inside the government, military, corporations, police, etc.
"The Pope? How many divisions does he have?"
- Uncle Joe.
Why do people care about Brin's vision as anything other than a cool premise for a sci-fi novel?
> Uhhh, you've heard of the American Civil War right? The war was over states rights and since the North won that means your crappy little state laws don't mean shit. Ashcroft scoffs at you.
So does Trent Lott, but he doesn't scoff from the position of Senate Majority Leader anymore. *giggle*
> If you can point out where the constitution allows spying on its own citizens (be careful not to look at amendment 4 while you're in there), I'll gladly concede that they have that power.
"...against unreasonable searches and seizures..."
If the people elect Congress, and Congress introduces a bill enabling widespread Internet surveillance, and the polling numbers are good, and the bill passes, is that not, in effect, the public saying through their elected Representatives that "yes, we believe this search is reasonable and therefore within the limits of the Fourth Amendment"?
Moreover - the Legislative branch can pass any law it wants without regards to the Constitution. Last time I read the Constitution, it was up to the Judiciary to decide whether a law actually met Constitutional standards.
If you wanna invoke the Constitution, you gotta play by its rules. And those rules are pretty clear that the Legislature passing such a law is constitutional, and directing the Executive to enforce such a law is legitimate until such time as the Supreme Court rules otherwise.
> All communication over freenet is anonymous. Unless you tell someone, there is no way for anybody to know what information you are inserting or requesting. Your isp knowing your IP won't tell them anything beyond the fact that you might be running a freenet node.
Bullshit! Freenet's non-trivial to break, but a sufficiently-motivated government would have no trouble convincing a judge of the following:
"The ISP's logs of the TCP/IP traffic from the suspect's node at 192.168.0.10 made about 500 requests from 5pm to 7pm, every night, for three weeks. 90% of these requests had a TTL of 25, whereas very few requests outside these hours had a TTL of 25. It is highly probable that any given request with a TTL of 25, from 5pm to 7pm, originated from a user at this node. Here are the keys we believe this user requested. [ long list ] "
And since the packet logs will record what keys are requested...
"...here, we see that the defendant's node requested key FOOBARBAZ. Two of our nodes happens to have cached key FOOBARBAZ locally. We know this because our data store is actually a burned DVD-R, and when we request key FOOBARBAZ from the node's console, we see no network traffic, but the CD drive spins up and we get the picture of George Orwell being buggered by a goat."
And thus...
"We have probable cause to believe that the user at 192.168.0.10 is into Orwellian Goat Pr0n. If, when we image his hard drive and put his datastore on a network of two machines, we find that requests for known Orwellian Goat Pr0n keys from a FreeNet client running the second machine can be served from his datastore, then all his base are belong to us. We'll need a warrant to be sure, and that's what we're asking for, Your Honor."
Re:A better story exploring these ideas..
on
Deadly Perversions
·
· Score: 2
> If you want something a little closer to reality, look at the Spiderman movie. This kid is bitten by a spider, gets super strong, and can shoot web from his WRISTS?? Why not from his ass,
Because if the guy could shoot stuff out of his ass like that, he wouldn't be Spiderman, he'd be Goatseman, and... well, if he was Goatseman, do we really want to know Goatseman gets into anyone's ass?:)
> All file formats are safe, it's just the programs that read them.
The article was interesting, though: (Emphasis is mine)
"A buffer overflow exists in
Explorer's automatic reading of MP3 or WMA (Windows Media Audio) file attributes in Windows XP. An attacker could create a malicious MP3 or WMA file, that if placed in an accessed folder on a Windows XP system, would compromise the system and allow for remote code execution. The MP3 does not need to be played, it simply needs to be stored in a folder that is browsed to,
What I really wanna know is why the fuck Explorer is "automatically reading" an MP3 or WMA when it's not playing it?
Building thumbnails for JPEGs, OK, I can understand that. But examining the content of a fucking audio file during a copy/move operation? What the fuck?
Ironically, the only possible use I can see for that behavior would be DRM. The OS sees "MP3" or "WMA" and says "I know you asked me to just copy some files full of bits from one directory to another, but I'm going to examine the bits in the files and process whatever metadata I find, because you might not be allowed to copy these special bits."
If that's the rationale, I can see a whole new market opening up: "Norton Copy! Works just like COPY.EXE used to do in DOS 1.0!" competing against "GNU CP! Has a few more command line switches, a 2GB file size limit, but unlike paying $49.99 for Norton you get the source code to/bin/cp!")
> Actually, filters may turn out to be the ultimate block. If we can filter out even 95% of spam, which is pretty easy, we decrease the response rate for spam by a factor of 20. Spammers send spam because it makes money. How many would still do it for 1/20th as much as they make now? Not many, I suspect.
No, they'd just send 20 times as much spam, in the hopes of getting the same amount of spew past the filters.
Filtering helps, but the long-term solution is going to involve the FTC putting lots of heads on pikes.
> ahh some rational thoughts. The gandhi way is the WAY, to resist. to fight back with guns is to be a "pussy". To resist violence with non-violence.. that takes the most guts of all.
Nice sentiment, but I think it's as naive as the guy who thinks it's right to resist law enforcement with force.
Earlier in the thread, was some guy's Tasteless.Sig: "In Nazi Germany, the showers took you."
In the grand scheme of life, I say Mr. Tasteless.Sig gets the (+1, Has Gotten The Point) for his joke, and both of you get (-1, Hopelessly Naive) for your sentiments, with an option to go for (-2, Fuel Source) should you actually try to act on them.
> Anyways, my point is that space exploration is a natural technological investment, the same way we spend money on the military and other blue sky research. But that maybe the current structure sucks, the shuttle is horribly expensive to maintain etc etc..
Grok. If I thought I'd get three times the science out of 'em, I'd like to see NASA's budget tripled.
Problem is, you give NASA three times the budget, and you get the Shuttle, the ISS, and the GoreSat (Triana, the thing that was supposed to beam back pretty pictures of Earth so that schoolkids in the third world could see what a pretty blue ball we lived on, and go on to live in ecological harmony, or something like that.)
Since NASA ain't gonna get its budget tripled, the only way to free up the needed funds for science is to deorbit the ISS and scrap the Shuttle. The resulting savings can be used into building robot probes and launching them on existing lift vehiciles (Atlas/Delta/Ariane/Energia), and/or working on ion engines and nuclear propulsion for deep-space missions.
What would you rather see pictures of? The ISS as a vehicle to justify the continued existence of the Shuttle, or scrap 'em both for a Europa orbiter, followed by an RTG-powered Europa lander that'll melt its way through the crust? A flyby of Pluto/Charon, launched 5 years late, but still getting there before the atmosphere freezes due to its spiffy nuclear rocket. A pair of telescopes gliding out of the plane of the ecliptic on ion engines and doing serious-ass-baseline-interferometry. And in the meantime, a dozen Sojourner-scale Mars projects, at least one of which should be able to get past the Martian Space Defence Screen.
Fer chrissakes, it's not like there's any technical reasons why we can't do one science project per Congressional district, just like we do with Shuttle/ISS. (And there are plenty of reasons why splitting up the Shuttle/ISS contracts this way sucks ass. "Sorry, redesign the engines to be small enough that the parts can fit through the train tunnels from Pork District Foo to Pork District Bar" - I don't know if that one's true or not, but it's certainly dumb enough to be true.)
> Commercial interests are not always the best ones to partake in dangerous endevors with unforseen profits. Indeed capatalism is by nature risk averse, capatalists put in the bare minimum to get the maximum return.
Not that I'll ever be a Senator, but imagine for a moment if I were, and I somehow managed to use TIA to get 51 of my buddies into passing the Tackhead Space Development Act:
"Effective January 1, 2008, the Government of the United States shall have no power to collect taxes upon revenues derived from any activity performed by individuals and/or corporations in spacecraft, space stations, or any other installation in orbit around Earth at an altitude of 150 miles or greater, nor on launch activities to support said installations."
> If the ISS were not supported by any more flights from this day on, it would fall from its 250 mile orbit in less than 3 years because it loses altitude at a rate of 2 miles a day.
So, best-case scenario, we have to wait until 2006 to use the budget savings to fund real space science? Shit.
(Is there any way we can get them to deorbit the albatross faster? And while we're at it, could we arrange to have a chunk land on each remaining member of the the Shuttle fleet, thereby forcing us to develop a cheap heavy-lift capability or next-generation propulsion system, rather than spending $400M per launch when and if we decide to return to space?:-)
> NASA hated the idea of 'common folk' leaving the planet. I wouldn't be suprised if NASA hired Lance Bass to 'pretend' to want to go to ISS, go through all the motions of being trained (thusly sucking up MORE of the Russian's resources), then 'back out' at the last minute due to 'lack of funding'...
Or the other way around - Lance pays Russia $20M to go to space camp.
Then, NASA pays Russia $41M to cancel Lance's flight.
Russia pays Lance his $20M back, and keeps $20M for a net breakeven, and the remaining $1M is split as a nice kickback. Russia gets the money, and NASA gets to claim that space still ain't ready for the private sector. Win/Win if you're in NASA.
> Your email address will stay the same. >Your monthly price will stay the same.** >Your billing method will stay the same. > Your high speed DSL Internet connection will stay the same.
"**"? Why did I just instinctively reach for my wallet?
>[...]With SBC Yahoo! DSL, you are in control. You have the power to choose which software to download based on the features you want: ***
"***"?...and my firewall?:-)
Interestingly enough, just a few weeks ago, I got a snail mailing regarding an opportunity to opt out of SBC's sell^H^H^Hharing of my CPNI (Customer Proprietary Network Information) data.
Unless I opted out, SBC promised that it would dutifully use the record of every phone number I dialled to figure out what sorts of crap^H^H^H^Hexciting products and services I might be interested in.
I wondered how the fuck a phone company could use that, and then I realized that if SBC is partnering up with Yahoo in order to provide DSL, that going through every phone user's CPNI records to target ad campaigns to users of competing (dial-up) ISPs would be a perfect application of this.
After all, with CPNI data, SBC could easily send "u wan2 swtch frm AOL" mailings to AOL users, "Tired of seeing Sky Dayton buggering the rotting corpse of Mindspring/Netcom every day?" mailings to Earthlink users of Mindspring or Netcom POPs, and "Why are you still with these small-timers" to users of independent/local ISPs.
Rant: I hate telcos. I hate marketroids. They seem to feed off each other, in an evil, sickening way that makes spammers seem honest by comparison.
At any rate, if you do business with SBC, I'd strongly recommend that you opt-out of having your calling records used for marketing purposes. (You'll need a copy of your phone bill to use that link. A few days later, you'll get a receipt in the snail-mail confirming your opt-out. No word on how long it lasts, but knowing the DMA, you'll probably have to jump through the hoop on at least an annual basis. )
Slashdot Mirror
Postal had a great premise, lousy execution. Imagine something with all the notoriety of GTA, but without the graphics, the plot, or the gameplay. *shudder*
So, like, if I warez a copy of GTA, it's, like, cool? :-)
Yeah, but 2600 Adventure gets a pass because of the easter egg put in by the programmer as a thorn in the side of Atari's senior mangl^H^Hagement.
I'm sorry, I believe that artillery should be targeted by means of tables worked out by rooms full of people with pens and pencils, to PROVE accuracy by solid conventional means of calculation. It's worked for 400 years.
That ENIAC thingy is just a waste of electrons.
"No, no! I meant a Bud Light!"
- Final words of User 765, after having been moderated (-6, Inciteful) instead of (+1, Insightful) by some half-asleep HomeSec d00d who wasn't paying attention. :)
> -Thomas Jefferson
1) Thomas Jefferson was a great man, but he didn't make any claims to infallibility.
2) It's up to each of us to decide whether our government's (IMHO limited and measured) response to the terrorist threat qualifies as placing us under "slavery".
From this, I draw the following conclusion:
3) If you believe you're being enslaved (IMHO a highly questionable belief), and you believe Jefferson was right about slavery (hey, that's your call, but 200 million Britney Spears listeners would probably disagree, and between them all, that's at least one brain's worth of neurons :-), then I'd remind you that (at least in the United States), the First Amendment grants you a right to shoot yourself in protest, and many believe the Second Amendment protects your right to do so with a really gr00vy-looking gun. *G* :-)
Really? Some might disagree with that:
And as long as we're on the subject - while 9/11 could have been stopped by having (with several billion more dollars in extra defence spending, but would those on the Left have supported such flights before 9/11? All that JP4 being turned into noise, all those evil military planes everywhere) 24/7 combat air patrols over all major cities - I'd point out that just as there was a Red Menace in the 50s, there is now an Islamokazi Terrorist Menace (tm).
Perhaps, as with McCarthy, some elements of our response to the ITM(tm) may, 50 years from now, be seen as disproportionate to the threat, but if you dispute that there's an ITM(tm), there are 2800 ghosts in the vicinity of lower Manhattan who will respectfully disagree. (And around the world, several thousand from the preceding 20 years, and a few hundred more since then.)
>
> I feel the same way about Big Brother. I don't consider them to be a threat about what they might intentionally find out about me or my friends/family. I fear what they might "think" they found in a fit of total incompetence.
Amen to that. I heard the swordsman comment phrased a little less elegantly:
"Evil has to sleep at night. Stupidity is 24/7."
At least Big Brother as depicted in Orwell's 1984 was competent - it was staffed by dedicated bellyfeeling Party members who were capable of doing a pretty good job of hunting down and exterminating those who presented a threat to the Party, while leaving the proles alone.
A Big Brother staffed by the cluel^H^H^H^H^H fucknoz^H^H^H^H^H^H^H twit^H^H^H^H individuals presently working at INS, or even your local DMV, scares me far more than the one in 1984.
But compared to either of those alternatives, I'll take a Big Brother staffed by NSA and CIA any day. Heck, I'll even give the FBI a shot at joining in and redeem itself.
Short of spending trillions to achieve the 1984 total security state, the way you achieve the optimum balance between freedom and security is that you have your police force be just a little bit stupid, and just a little bit slow.
We got hit on 9/11 because we went for very slow and very stupid. Bureaucratic stonewalling (no information sharing between FBI, CIA, and NSA) was part of it, as were politically-motivated fuckups like diverting FBI resources away from the Islamokazi whackjob terrorist threat to investigate the domestic militia whackjob terrorist threat. As for stupidity, it doesn't get much dumber than giving visa confirmations to the 9/11 hijackers six months after all hell broke loose - only the INS could pull something like that. And only in the INS could Ashcroft himself not fire those responsible.
IMNSHO, the proposed Big Brother composed of our intelligence agencies (NSA, CIA, post-9/11 FBI design goal) has the potential to achieve the right degree of stupidity and slowness for the job -- and I don't mean that as an insult. Any stupider and slower (pre-9/11 FBI, current INS), and we'd have another 9/11. Any smarter and faster (Stasi, KGB, Gestapo), and it'd be 1984.
Lungs: How 'bout hooking the guy up to a heart-lung machine and letting it oxygenate his blood for him?
Brain: Bah, happens on /. every day.
>
> Spews is worse than the spammers, because at least I can ignore the spammers.
If you want an effective spam advisory system that actually lists spamhausen, use SPEWS.
SPEWS is better than MAPS, because the spammers discovered they could ignore MAPS.
"The Pope? How many divisions does he have?"
- Uncle Joe.
Why do people care about Brin's vision as anything other than a cool premise for a sci-fi novel?
So does Trent Lott, but he doesn't scoff from the position of Senate Majority Leader anymore. *giggle*
"...against unreasonable searches and seizures..."
If the people elect Congress, and Congress introduces a bill enabling widespread Internet surveillance, and the polling numbers are good, and the bill passes, is that not, in effect, the public saying through their elected Representatives that "yes, we believe this search is reasonable and therefore within the limits of the Fourth Amendment"?
Moreover - the Legislative branch can pass any law it wants without regards to the Constitution. Last time I read the Constitution, it was up to the Judiciary to decide whether a law actually met Constitutional standards.
If you wanna invoke the Constitution, you gotta play by its rules. And those rules are pretty clear that the Legislature passing such a law is constitutional, and directing the Executive to enforce such a law is legitimate until such time as the Supreme Court rules otherwise.
Bullshit! Freenet's non-trivial to break, but a sufficiently-motivated government would have no trouble convincing a judge of the following:
"The ISP's logs of the TCP/IP traffic from the suspect's node at 192.168.0.10 made about 500 requests from 5pm to 7pm, every night, for three weeks. 90% of these requests had a TTL of 25, whereas very few requests outside these hours had a TTL of 25. It is highly probable that any given request with a TTL of 25, from 5pm to 7pm, originated from a user at this node. Here are the keys we believe this user requested. [ long list ] "
And since the packet logs will record what keys are requested...
"...here, we see that the defendant's node requested key FOOBARBAZ. Two of our nodes happens to have cached key FOOBARBAZ locally. We know this because our data store is actually a burned DVD-R, and when we request key FOOBARBAZ from the node's console, we see no network traffic, but the CD drive spins up and we get the picture of George Orwell being buggered by a goat."
And thus...
"We have probable cause to believe that the user at 192.168.0.10 is into Orwellian Goat Pr0n. If, when we image his hard drive and put his datastore on a network of two machines, we find that requests for known Orwellian Goat Pr0n keys from a FreeNet client running the second machine can be served from his datastore, then all his base are belong to us. We'll need a warrant to be sure, and that's what we're asking for, Your Honor."
Because if the guy could shoot stuff out of his ass like that, he wouldn't be Spiderman, he'd be Goatseman, and... well, if he was Goatseman, do we really want to know Goatseman gets into anyone's ass? :)
The article was interesting, though: (Emphasis is mine)
What I really wanna know is why the fuck Explorer is "automatically reading" an MP3 or WMA when it's not playing it?
Building thumbnails for JPEGs, OK, I can understand that. But examining the content of a fucking audio file during a copy/move operation? What the fuck?
Ironically, the only possible use I can see for that behavior would be DRM. The OS sees "MP3" or "WMA" and says "I know you asked me to just copy some files full of bits from one directory to another, but I'm going to examine the bits in the files and process whatever metadata I find, because you might not be allowed to copy these special bits."
If that's the rationale, I can see a whole new market opening up: "Norton Copy! Works just like COPY.EXE used to do in DOS 1.0!" competing against "GNU CP! Has a few more command line switches, a 2GB file size limit, but unlike paying $49.99 for Norton you get the source code to /bin/cp!")
In America, you freed Elcomsoft from DMCA.
But in Soviet Russia, Elcomsoft frees you from DMCA!
>
> I sure hope nobody gets me a girlfried.. my wife would be pissed.
How so? Tell your girlfriend you're with your wife. Tell your wife you're with your girlfriend.
Then you can get down the office and have that massive frag-fest on the company LAN!
No, they'd just send 20 times as much spam, in the hopes of getting the same amount of spew past the filters.
Filtering helps, but the long-term solution is going to involve the FTC putting lots of heads on pikes.
Nice sentiment, but I think it's as naive as the guy who thinks it's right to resist law enforcement with force.
Earlier in the thread, was some guy's Tasteless .Sig: "In Nazi Germany, the showers took you."
In the grand scheme of life, I say Mr. Tasteless .Sig gets the (+1, Has Gotten The Point) for his joke, and both of you get (-1, Hopelessly Naive) for your sentiments, with an option to go for (-2, Fuel Source) should you actually try to act on them.
Grok. If I thought I'd get three times the science out of 'em, I'd like to see NASA's budget tripled.
Problem is, you give NASA three times the budget, and you get the Shuttle, the ISS, and the GoreSat (Triana, the thing that was supposed to beam back pretty pictures of Earth so that schoolkids in the third world could see what a pretty blue ball we lived on, and go on to live in ecological harmony, or something like that.)
Since NASA ain't gonna get its budget tripled, the only way to free up the needed funds for science is to deorbit the ISS and scrap the Shuttle. The resulting savings can be used into building robot probes and launching them on existing lift vehiciles (Atlas/Delta/Ariane/Energia), and/or working on ion engines and nuclear propulsion for deep-space missions.
What would you rather see pictures of? The ISS as a vehicle to justify the continued existence of the Shuttle, or scrap 'em both for a Europa orbiter, followed by an RTG-powered Europa lander that'll melt its way through the crust? A flyby of Pluto/Charon, launched 5 years late, but still getting there before the atmosphere freezes due to its spiffy nuclear rocket. A pair of telescopes gliding out of the plane of the ecliptic on ion engines and doing serious-ass-baseline-interferometry. And in the meantime, a dozen Sojourner-scale Mars projects, at least one of which should be able to get past the Martian Space Defence Screen.
Fer chrissakes, it's not like there's any technical reasons why we can't do one science project per Congressional district, just like we do with Shuttle/ISS. (And there are plenty of reasons why splitting up the Shuttle/ISS contracts this way sucks ass. "Sorry, redesign the engines to be small enough that the parts can fit through the train tunnels from Pork District Foo to Pork District Bar" - I don't know if that one's true or not, but it's certainly dumb enough to be true.)
Not that I'll ever be a Senator, but imagine for a moment if I were, and I somehow managed to use TIA to get 51 of my buddies into passing the Tackhead Space Development Act:
"Effective January 1, 2008, the Government of the United States shall have no power to collect taxes upon revenues derived from any activity performed by individuals and/or corporations in spacecraft, space stations, or any other installation in orbit around Earth at an altitude of 150 miles or greater, nor on launch activities to support said installations."
See you on the moon in '09.
So, best-case scenario, we have to wait until 2006 to use the budget savings to fund real space science? Shit.
(Is there any way we can get them to deorbit the albatross faster? And while we're at it, could we arrange to have a chunk land on each remaining member of the the Shuttle fleet, thereby forcing us to develop a cheap heavy-lift capability or next-generation propulsion system, rather than spending $400M per launch when and if we decide to return to space? :-)
Or the other way around - Lance pays Russia $20M to go to space camp.
Then, NASA pays Russia $41M to cancel Lance's flight.
Russia pays Lance his $20M back, and keeps $20M for a net breakeven, and the remaining $1M is split as a nice kickback. Russia gets the money, and NASA gets to claim that space still ain't ready for the private sector. Win/Win if you're in NASA.
> Your email address will stay the same.
>Your monthly price will stay the same.**
>Your billing method will stay the same.
> Your high speed DSL Internet connection will stay the same.
"**"? Why did I just instinctively reach for my wallet?
>[...]With SBC Yahoo! DSL, you are in control. You have the power to choose which software to download based on the features you want: ***
"***"? ...and my firewall? :-)
Interestingly enough, just a few weeks ago, I got a snail mailing regarding an opportunity to opt out of SBC's sell^H^H^Hharing of my CPNI (Customer Proprietary Network Information) data.
Unless I opted out, SBC promised that it would dutifully use the record of every phone number I dialled to figure out what sorts of crap^H^H^H^Hexciting products and services I might be interested in.
I wondered how the fuck a phone company could use that, and then I realized that if SBC is partnering up with Yahoo in order to provide DSL, that going through every phone user's CPNI records to target ad campaigns to users of competing (dial-up) ISPs would be a perfect application of this.
After all, with CPNI data, SBC could easily send "u wan2 swtch frm AOL" mailings to AOL users, "Tired of seeing Sky Dayton buggering the rotting corpse of Mindspring/Netcom every day?" mailings to Earthlink users of Mindspring or Netcom POPs, and "Why are you still with these small-timers" to users of independent/local ISPs.
Rant: I hate telcos. I hate marketroids. They seem to feed off each other, in an evil, sickening way that makes spammers seem honest by comparison.
At any rate, if you do business with SBC, I'd strongly recommend that you opt-out of having your calling records used for marketing purposes. (You'll need a copy of your phone bill to use that link. A few days later, you'll get a receipt in the snail-mail confirming your opt-out. No word on how long it lasts, but knowing the DMA, you'll probably have to jump through the hoop on at least an annual basis. )