> Speaking of Carnivore: for 3 months, just after September 11th. I noticed that all of my traffic was being routed through Arlington VA. This stopped about two months ago. Now my packets travel normally, (no Arlington node in every traceorute).
A lot of fiber went dark on 9/11 when the towers fell. There's a lot of bandwidth in VA.
The internet doesn't just interpret censorship as damage and route around it -- it also interprets damage as damage and routes around it:-)
Was that Carnivore? If it was, doesn't that violate Free Speech?
Nope. It's easy enough to sniff for packets without betraying your presence. Anyone with the hardware and capability of sniffing on a such a large scale is going to be smart enough not to have the sniffing detectable.
(And whether sniffed or not, your packets made it to their ultimate destination, regardless of whose routers they went through. I fail to see how your right to speak was infringed.)
> To see that Earthlink is concerned about their subscribers privacy. Complete and total privacy, right? Well, at least privacy from any outside organisation, even a law-enforcement office. What they do internally concerning privacy of their subscribers must be their own private business.
Given the choice between entrusting my data to the FBI, or to employees who may be $cientologists, I'll take the FBI any day.
(The only distressing part about this article is that it implies the FBI trusts the clams. If I were the FBI, I sure as hell wouldn't.)
From the judge's ruling as described in Pennsylvania Law Weekly:
The evidence presented at the hearing showed that it no longer takes several minutes to process a single page fax. The evidence
indicated that it could take as much time as 30 seconds, but more often, it takes 3 to 6 seconds to process. The 'sophisticated and
expensive' facsimile machines are more common now as compared to 1991, and even a lower-end fax machine can hold in its
memory 60 to 80 pages,"
Theft is OK, as long as you only steal a little bit at a time.
Both the Washington and Florida Attorney General's offices testified that after TCPA was enacted, there was an increase in complaints
regarding unsolicited faxes.
That fact, Limbaugh said, calls the law's effectiveness into question because "the court would assume that the complaints would
decrease rather than increase."
Lemme get this straight. There's no law against something, so nobody files complaints with the Attorney General, because they know they're gonna be told "Fuck off, it's legal, if you don't like it, write your Congressman."
So they do what they're told. They write (and fax:) their Congressmen, and Congress passes a law against the something. And then they complain to their Attorney General again, saying "Hey, now it's illegal, do something!"
And that's this fuckweasel's argument for him thinking the law is ineffective? *bitchslap*, HEY, ASSHOLE, is the law against burglary somehow "ineffective" because the police started to get more complaints about break-ins after a law against theft was passed?
As a final insult, after hiking up the skirts of Justice, he then proceeds to ram it home: Upon realizing that federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction over actions bought by state Attorneys-General, and that State courts judge cases brought by private parties, he rules unconstitutional the right of private action.
Congress, in a rare display of clue, anticipating that your State prosecutors (having first told you "fuck off, it's legal") will continue to tell you to fuck off by doing nothing to enforce the new law, includes a private right of action. Congress, in effect, is saying "If your idiot Attorney General can't be bothered to bring charges, you can file suit for $500".
11 years after that, a judge tells you to fuck off, confirming what you already knew - writing your Congressman is a fucking waste of time, even when he does pass the law you require, your Attorney General will still ignore it, and when you try to use it yourself, a judge in the thrall of the Direct Marketing Association will simply throw out the part of the law you need.
This has to be appealed, and it has to be overturned. A man's home is his castle, and theft by conversion cannot be free speech.
This judge is an insult to the bench, and his ruling brings the law into disrepute.
>> The key to April Fools jokes is sublety [...] Let's review what, IMHO,/. should or could have done. Below is a list of stories that would have been good:
>>...ATI buys Matrox >> Dell buys Gateway...
>>
>No. An april fools joke must be so insane that no one could possibly believe it, and it can't be an unnerving lead-in like so many
of today's stories. If anything, the stories of today and your examples are too conservative.
> > BitBoys Buys ATI
You mean like:
HP buys Compaq
If we use your criteria of being so insane nobody could believe it, April Fools' Day came and went months ago!
> I also find myself having sex more often when coding Java for a living. That's primarily because Java leaves me rather... unsatisfied. OTOH, C++ is better than sex, once you get everything working just right. > >
Perl is great for quickies. Python is great for quickies where you don't want to experiment too much. OCaml is great for
fetishists. FORTH is perfect for masochists. And of course, then there's playing with LaTeX. Pity the poor Visual Basic
programmer.. that's got to be like masturbating in the shower.
> >Maybe we geeks should be happy just to make it at all.
Only one thing to add - you forgot one language: APL is for those 16-orificed critters from Proxima Centauri;-)
> [as part of a truly spectacular troll (/me applauds), Anthy wrote that]... there is a time and place for everything and all this shows is a total lack of taste and crassness
And Slashdot, especially on April 1st, and even more so on a thread about programming languages and sex, is that place!
Hell, Slashdot, on any day, on any thread, is that place, and that's what we love about it.
Anyone for a menage-a-trois with Anthy and Natalie Portman, naked and petrified, in a whole vat of hot grits? I'd volunteer, but there's this ASCII-art bird clamped onto my wang.
(No, I don't mean the dedicated word-processing computer of the early '80s. Wish I did. My g/f gives me no end of hassle about that damn bird... loves the feathers, but the beak's in the wrong place.)
> See the thing is that Sun, being the wise company it is has taken java to a new level by adding the JSAPI (Java Sex API). Some
of the new packages include: > >javax.sex.bondage >javax.sex.[...]
Java? Pshaw! We had that during the golden age of USENET, and didn't need no steenking packages!
The obvious:
alt.sex.bondage.sco.unix
alt.sex.bondage.female-admins.nntp
alt.sex.bondage.particle.physics
alt.sex.bestiality.barney
alt.sex.bestiality.hamster.duct-tape
alt.sex.sheep.baaa.baa.baa.moo
Because some old servers evidently couldn't just mdir "foo/bar/baz", they had to "mkdir foo", "cd foo; foo/bar", and "cd bar; mkdir baz" when creating a directory from a news spool, countless freshmen started their USENET careers being asked if they wanted to subscribe to...
alt.sex
alt.sex.aluminum
alt.sex.aluminum.baseball
alt.sex.aluminum.baseball.bat
My faves were from earlier censorship efforts. (IIRC, some of these were originally used when university administrators cut off alt.sex - the affected people posted to alt.sex.[subgroup] and crossposted to alt.sex to get propagation.)
alt.sex.fetish.cost.benefit.analysis
alt.sex.fetish.head-librarian
alt.sex.prevost-derbecker
alt.sex.senator-exon
alt.sex.unnatural-acts.jesse-helms
There's a lot of history in a list of old newsgroups. (Ah, the series of newsgroups containing strings of dashes and asterisks to spell a message in ASCII-art in your.newsrc - now that was genius. Sick, twisted genius, but genius nonetheless...)
> > Ever wonder what would happen if the incredibly creative talents of Squaresoft and Disney got together?
There'd be lawsuits, but they'd look really cool, with, like, rendered hair on the judge's funny wig.
> IGN won't let you view more than 5 screenshots/movies per day unless you pay for their "IGN Insider" subscription service. So choose wisely!
Actually, mixing Disney with software development would probably result in something like that, plus prison terms for people who exchange screenshots amongst themselves after viewing them. (And even longer prison terms for people who write web browsers with "Save Image As..." buttons.)
Too bad, this RPG sounds like fun. But I'd sooner gnaw off my own testicles than give Eisner my money.
> The phones in question were distributed to media-types only to demonstrate the supposed proprietary technology. They were not purchased by end users.
And when someone opened the phone to see what made it tick, they saw no evidence that a disposable phone tech existed, only what appeared to be a cleverly-rigged demo by a company with (as the article describes) a questionable history of legal/regulatory/disciplinary actions against it.
I smell a letter to Fritz Hollings in the making:
"Sir, I'm an ethikul bidnizzman now facing the possibility of fraud charges, SEC charges, and a class-action lawsuit from angry investors because someone had a jeweller's screwdriver and opened the demo unit to discover that my new proprietary tech was just a rigged demo with someone else's product in a cheap paper shell that relied on nobody in the press opening the demo units!
We need a law requiring that all electronics be shipped with inbuilt rods of thermite hooked up to photocells, so that the products automatically self-immolate whenever opened by criminal hackers! (The current market-based solution of merely voiding the warranty is clearly an insufficient deterrent.)
Similarly, a jeweller's screwdriver ought to be used by jewellers only. I propose a licencing requirement for screwdrivers under a certain diameter, to minimize the risk of screwdriver technology falling into the hands of those who would use them to open electronic devices. Screwdrivers are clearly a reverse-engineering enabling tool, and their use must be restricted.
My business model requires new legislation mandating the tamperproofing with auto-destruct devices in all electronic components in the next session, along with compulsory licensing for reverse-engineering tools. As I'm sure you're well aware, the livelihood of the entire rigged demo industry depends on the suckers not realizing it's all smoke and mirrors until after we get financing.
I propose this new law be called the Cellphone Bidnizzman Demonstration Technology Protection Act (CBDTPA), and claim it will encourage entreprenooers to produce longer and more breathless press releases, leading to higher stock prices for entreprenooers without the risk of having the schemes exposed by illegal criminal terrorist hackers armed with jewellers' screwdrivers.
> Peugot has often *claimed* to won those numbers, but they certainly don't. In the case of Porsche they decided they couldn't afford to fight Peugot in court and "voluntarily" acquiesed.
This must be some strange definition of the word "voluntary" of which I was previously unaware.
Do you perchance work for the IRS, which claims (with a straight face, no less) that the U.S. tax system "is based on individual self-assessment and voluntary compliance"?
Would you defend a rapist in court with "Your Honor, in the case of the young woman in question, she decided she didn't have the physical capability to fight my client in the back alley, and voluntarily decided to have sex before going to the nearest hospital emergency room?"
> Clear Notice: The company's privacy policy will include easy-to-read explanations of its online ad serving services.
New explanation: Any personal data not nailed down, is ours. Any personal data we can pry loose, is not nailed down.
> Enhanced Choice: If the company collects personally identifiable information, previously collected clickstream obtained by the company from across web sites can only be combined with the personally identifiable information after the provision of clear and conspicuous notice to the Internet user and receipt of the Internet user's opt-in choice.
<font size = microscopic> By clicking either "I accept" or "I refuse", you agree that you have opted in to receiving our marketing materials, and that you wish us to resell your data to anyone who wants it.
> Consistency: The company will ensure that an Internet user's online data will not be used in a manner materially inconsistent with the privacy policy under which it was collected, [... ]
...which becomes much easier, now that all "privacy policies" these days are variations on "All your data are belong to us!"
> Purging of Data and Cookie Life: The company will institute internal policies to ensure the protection and routine purging of data collected online. [...]
Potential new internal policy: "To prevent our database from overflowing, every once in a while, we use the old cookies as primary keys of the new database, and reconstruct the data as users create new ones. Hey, it's an internal policy, it's not like anyone can prove otherwise!"
> Settlement Compliance: A nationally recognized independent accounting firm will conduct annual reviews for the next two years of DoubleClick's compliance with specified terms of the settlement,
...and we thank our Andersen Consulting guy for getting such a great deal for us with Arthur Andersen!
> However, if you are smart enough to call on the night shift, where you'll get minimum wage quake addicted 'in the trenches' technophiles on their first job tech support, and you show some signs of competence, they will help you out anyway.
True story: I'm vacationing at a broadband-enabled friend's place and showing them the wonders of USENET.
His ISP's newsserver won't let me in no matter what user/pass I give it. First, I blame my configuration of the newsreader, and try telnetting to port 119 and doing it manually. No dice.
I phone up tech support in the middle of the night. Dude says "Oh, yeah, our NNTP server authenticates our broadband customers via IP address and doesn't require authentication."
I yell "Doh!", we both laugh, and call closed. Woohoo!
> what software and services should ISPs distrubute and support?"
The larger the ISP, the larger the marketing department, and consequently, the less I trust bundled ISPware.
I've been to the homes of n00bs, and seen some truly sickening stuff - one poor person was paying $19.99 per month (the same as any other user), for a custom browser that (a) crashed reproducibly on certain specific emails, (b) beamed banner ads every 30 seconds, and (c) looked like nothing I'd ever seen before - like the worst of Netscape, IE, and AOL rolled into one.) I think it was called Encompass. (Acquired, not coincidentally, by Yahoo in 1999).
Since I saw that, I no longer patronize ISPs that require the use of branded products.
So my answer to your question would be "I don't give a damn what you may distribute and support, so long as there's an easily-located web page or phone support script that allows me to find the IP addresses of your primary/secondary DNS servers, and the FQDNs of your POP, SMTP, NNTP, FTP and news servers, what number I can use to connect, and what to enter as a name/password combination when I do."
What you do with the n00bz is your own business.
Yes, you may not be using adware/spyware/malware - but because I don't trust you, I'm not gonna install your bundle to find out. If I can't set up the box without your branded bundle, I'll just take my business elsewhere.
> A recent survey revealed that 68 percent of all home computer users say they're satisfied
with their normal 56K computer modem. It can download pretty much all that's on the Net,
as not much (legal) material is out there that's chock full of graphics and in a
consumer-friendly format to create the need for a cable modem or a digital subscriber line
(DSL).
Well, of course!
The 56k users know Congress is gonna make consumer broadband useless by banning its only killer app. Why buy a fat pipe when you know that in a year, it'll be illegal to download anything useful off it?;-)
> What about going to like cdnow.com to buy the cd's for those bands? Normaly they have cd's that you can't find in many stores.
Well, yeah, but I was talking about how to prevent money from going to RIAA, too, so to be consistent, I couldn't use "buy from cdnow.com" in that post. I think they had a Dorsetshire CD was available as a German import for $28ish, and I suppose as an import, RIAA wouldn't be seeing much of that $28.;-)
But ideally, I'd just go to the band's website, find an address, and buy the CD direct from them.
One interesting example of this was the late-80s sample/synth/electro-rock band Sigue Sigue Sputnik. After being dropped from EMI, they vanished for about 5 years, and as far as I can tell from their "history" pages, it looks like they saw they still had interested fans, so they re-recorded their old stuff and released it themselves.
(Side note: Thanx to the AC who pointed me to gemm.com as a link to other music resellers. Far out!)
> Imagine what a world of difference this would make to the mute or to people who had lost the use of their voice due to
throat cancer. It seems weird they didn't mention the applications this would have for people who have lost or have never
had the use of their voice.
Oh, great.
Now we're gonna have to put up with a decade of crap from self-appointed guardians of the "mute culture", claiming that this tech is cultural genocide, just like self-styled "advocates" for the deaf oppose the existence of cochlear implants because they constitute a "threat" to the "deaf community".
(In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned as a freak and a heretic. *sigh*)
> according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in Washington, people averaged 90 minutes per online session. A year later, when the same people were polled, that number had dropped to 83 minutes.
I agree with your "wanton abuse of statistics" description of this bunk.
My theory - Maybe they just learned to read.
My experience:
1) Started BBSing. 300 baud. Could read it on the fly. Was wowed by 1200 baud. Could read it on the fly after about a week.
2) Went to 2400 baud. Seemed to be the top of my reading speed. Learned to skim.
3) Found USENET. Learned to read non-quoted stuff, and lightly skim the quoted portions of posts.
3.1) I don't top-post when I reply. (#include <op_posters_suck.h>). Sometimes I get questions from lusers^W asking me why my mails are so long.
I asked one of them what the beef was, and discovered that this person was reading all my quoted material, word for word, no matter how deeply-quoted it was. (After all, because I take the time to excerpt only the relevant portions of the article or email when I quote, it must all be worth reading. That's how you read memos in the office of the 1970s, right? Read every word, or if you're referring to an old memo, attach a full copy of the old memo to yours. Word processors didn't exist, so a "memo" or "mail" was an atomic object; the notion of quoting a sentence or paragraph in context was completely alien to them. This person's mental model - without their consciously realizing it - was that one could no more subdivide an email and quote a portion of it than you could physically cut and paste a sentence out of a photocopied departmental memo!)
4) Learning to read efficiently. I don't need to download five news articles from five news sites to realize that "yes, a bunch of people killed a bunch of other people in the Middle East yesterday". (And for that matter, since I've seen that headline every day for all my life, the whole friggin' region's in my mental killfile. Wake me when something important happens.)
4.1) Corollary -- no report on "current events" is likely to offer me more than any other report, so even if I was interested in Middle East politics, I'd still only read one or two reports to get an idea of who killed whom, where, when, and the final body count. Like I said, wake me when there's a significant military or economic development. (And no, aother "peace plan" or offer of cease-fire doesn't count. Those are a dime a dozen, just as the mass murders are. I said a significant development, like a high-level assassination on either side, a hundredfold increase in body count on either side, or deployment of WMD by either side.)
5) Learning to filter out "news" from "ad copy pretending to be news" and handed to news departments by PR agents.
After a few weeks of reading online news, I noticed that some articles were even more full of breathless prose and light on detail than others. I soon learned to detect PR within the first paragraph, sometimes within just the article title, and no longer even read it.
5.1) Example - currently on cnn.com Stay tuned for new TV sport: 'SlamBall'. Even if I'm interested in new sports, I don't have to read that article to know a priori that it's an advertisement for whatever TV network is launching a new show. Is it paid advertising? Probably not. But it's clearly a case of the SlamBall PR guy sending a prepackaged story (with print copy and videotape) to CNN's editorial desk with a note saying "Hey, one of your journalists should run this on a slow news day, because it costs you nothing to produce this piece."
(I'm not picking on CNN here - all the mainstream news outlets do this. They're just the nearest target.)
7) Kill Your Television. As much as I've just ripped web-based mainstream news sites a new asshole up there, I still prefer them to watching TV news.
7.1) I timed myself - made up a "typical half-hour" news broadcast by reading every article on cnn.com. Read through it in 10 minutes.
7.2) Of course, the real time savings is that I don't need the whole website. I never watch the sports, weather, or "human interest" and "local criminal in media sensational trial" segments on the local news, and that's 2/3 of the broadcast. By the time I get home, I already know the "top story", and that's the other 1/3 of the broadcast. And I know the article about the Hubble restoration won't be on TV.
Why should I waste spend 22 minutes watching TV, and 10 minutes of ads, to get less information than I can now get within 30 seconds on the web?
Bottom line: I've spent my entire life reading textual media, starting with BBSes, USENET, email, and news sites. With each new medium I use, I start out slowly, then my brain adjusts to the rate of dataflow, and makes adaptations to deal with it. By skimming over text, skipping over quoted and redundant material, reflexively glancing down two inches to the next Slashdot post when I see "goatse.cx" or "penis bird", filtering out mentally-killfiled "news subjects that aren't really news" and "thinly-disguised PR puff pieces" on mainstream news sites, as every year passes, I find myself glean more information per day, keep the amount of raw data relatively constant, and to do so in less time than I was a year ago.
And that's why I spend less time reading news sites today than I did a year ago. I predict that newbie "business-only" web surfers will find similar reductions in the time it takes to "go through the day's news" during their first few years on the web, too.
> Or did slashdot intentionally pick this article to change the ad server from m.doubleclick.net to m2.doubleclick.net? > >
Does anyone know if *.doubleclick.net works for mozilla image blocking?
Wrong website to ask that.
Around here, you start with "Does anybody not already have *.doubleclick.net firewalled, blocked by Junkbuster, and BIND set up to declare doubleclick's nameservers as bogus?" (Hey, can't be too careful, might as well take the belt-and-suspenders approach. I call it defense-in-depth;-)
If by some miracle, you find someone who answers "no", then you can ask about m2.doubleclick.net.
> In spite of the "I'd like it faster on Solaris" comment, that doesn't mean I don't like it. I still use mozilla exclusively on Solaris too; the tabbed browsing, integrated searching, and killing of popups would make it worthwhile at half the speed.)
Interesting - what hardware platform are you running on your Solaris boxen? I know some folks on old-azz Ultra 5s (360 MHz, 256K cache) who'd be interested, but I've never bothered trying to compile Mozilla on because I feared the result would be too slow to be usable. I'd love to pop in a 333 (or 440) MHz/2M cache CPU but can't justify the outrageous price for that upgrade. *sigh* Back to browsing surplus stores for trashed boxen:-)
We need a Europa orbiter to take gravity measurements to look for tides and other evidence that'll tell us how thick the crust is. With that, we can design the submersible and crust-penetrator, and select an appropriate landing site for the probe.
> The ethical question (with the assumption)... should we crack open the ice sheet to get to the sea? This is a sea that hasn't been exposed to anything above the ice for a looong time.
Actually, the sea won't be exposed with the probe either - like the probes at Lake Vostok (a subsurface lake in Antarctica), the Europa submersible will probably melt its way through the crust, and the "hole" through which it descends will freeze over it.
Also, there are cracks in the surface that appear to indicate upwelling of material from below. Could be water from the seas, could be slush from below the ice, but above the water. Hard to tell.
It's also possible that the peaked craters described in the first press release I cited were from impacts in thicker portions of the crust.
An orbiter should be able to show us areas where the crust is thinnest.
Meantime, the folks at planetary protection will be making damn sure that any Europa probe is sterile before landing.
IMNSHO, despite not getting a full sterilization treatment (that is, what we'll be doing to any Europa orbiter or probe) on Earth, Galileo is completely sterile after having been fried in Jovian radiation for the past several years and poses no threat to whatever it smashes into.
That opinion aside, the fact that the planetary protection folks at NASA still said "chuck Galileo into Jupiter when you're done with it, just to be on the safe side" should give you some idea of just how damn sure we'll be of a future probe's sterility before we attempt landing on Europa. (Insert obligatory Arthur C. Clarke joke here:-)
> I agree, but I don't think the RIAA and MPAA are ever going to see that people trading MP3's will make them money (people who trade more MP3s, buy more cds becuase they hear more music), and that keeping people from trading them will equal less money.
As I wrote earlier today, I discovered three new bands this week alone through the magic of downloading MP3s from bands I'd never heard of.
What's good for musicians and bad for RIAA - one of those bands will be seeing some money the next time I'm in their area. They appear to perform frequently, and I'll check 'em out live.
What RIAA fears most - two of those bands are now defunct. The only way I could buy their stuff is to buy at a used record store - in which case neither the artist nor RIAA see any money.
RIAA are the puritans of our age: A cartel of people desperately afraid that someone, somewhere, might be enjoying music without regard for whether it's a "hit".
> If they were really serious, there would be an e-mail address you could forward the Nigerian scam mail to and then would personally track it and give the person the beat-down of their life.
Actually, it's often the other way around.
While it's all well and good to laugh at the 419 scams we get in our mailbox, people have been kidnapped and murdered as part of these scams.
Maybe the spam you got today was from some joker in a trailer park trying his luck. But I've seen some with headers that do indicate points of origin in Nigeria or other third-world countries.
I follow the advice of the 419 Coalition's website, and forward them to the U.S. Secret Service, clearly indicating that I have suffered "NO FINANCIAL LOSS", and that my report is merely for the benefit of their archives.
If the headers indicate (say, a city name on the reverse DNS of the dialup or cablemodem used to inject the spam) a point of origin, I usually add a note to the effect that the spammer may be based in whatever region the headers indicate. A little digging around WHOIS servers can usually get a probable country of origin.
The one thing I never do is tip off the scammer that I know what he's up to. Remember, no SMTP header can tell you whether you're dealing with a chickenboner in a trailer park, or the outer edge of a real organized crime syndicate.
Suppose that only 1% of your 419 scammers are "serious". Your mileage may vary, but thumbing your nose at 100 people, one of whom is running an organized crime syndicate, still qualifies as a cheap ticket out of the gene pool in my books. Are the cheap laughs from trolling the 99 trailer-park denizens really worth the risk?
Let the Treasury guys take care of it. That's what they're paid for.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of fiber went dark on 9/11 when the towers fell. There's a lot of bandwidth in VA.
The internet doesn't just interpret censorship as damage and route around it -- it also interprets damage as damage and routes around it :-)
Was that Carnivore? If it was, doesn't that violate Free Speech?
Nope. It's easy enough to sniff for packets without betraying your presence. Anyone with the hardware and capability of sniffing on a such a large scale is going to be smart enough not to have the sniffing detectable.
(And whether sniffed or not, your packets made it to their ultimate destination, regardless of whose routers they went through. I fail to see how your right to speak was infringed.)
Given the choice between entrusting my data to the FBI, or to employees who may be $cientologists, I'll take the FBI any day.
(The only distressing part about this article is that it implies the FBI trusts the clams. If I were the FBI, I sure as hell wouldn't.)
Theft is OK, as long as you only steal a little bit at a time.
Lemme get this straight. There's no law against something, so nobody files complaints with the Attorney General, because they know they're gonna be told "Fuck off, it's legal, if you don't like it, write your Congressman."
So they do what they're told. They write (and fax :) their Congressmen, and Congress passes a law against the something. And then they complain to their Attorney General again, saying "Hey, now it's illegal, do something!"
And that's this fuckweasel's argument for him thinking the law is ineffective? *bitchslap*, HEY, ASSHOLE, is the law against burglary somehow "ineffective" because the police started to get more complaints about break-ins after a law against theft was passed?
As a final insult, after hiking up the skirts of Justice, he then proceeds to ram it home: Upon realizing that federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction over actions bought by state Attorneys-General, and that State courts judge cases brought by private parties, he rules unconstitutional the right of private action.
Congress, in a rare display of clue, anticipating that your State prosecutors (having first told you "fuck off, it's legal") will continue to tell you to fuck off by doing nothing to enforce the new law, includes a private right of action. Congress, in effect, is saying "If your idiot Attorney General can't be bothered to bring charges, you can file suit for $500".
11 years after that, a judge tells you to fuck off, confirming what you already knew - writing your Congressman is a fucking waste of time, even when he does pass the law you require, your Attorney General will still ignore it, and when you try to use it yourself, a judge in the thrall of the Direct Marketing Association will simply throw out the part of the law you need.
This has to be appealed, and it has to be overturned. A man's home is his castle, and theft by conversion cannot be free speech.
This judge is an insult to the bench, and his ruling brings the law into disrepute.
>> The key to April Fools jokes is sublety [...] Let's review what, IMHO,
>>
>> Dell buys Gateway...
>>
>No. An april fools joke must be so insane that no one could possibly believe it, and it can't be an unnerving lead-in like so many of today's stories. If anything, the stories of today and your examples are too conservative.
>
> BitBoys Buys ATI
You mean like:
If we use your criteria of being so insane nobody could believe it, April Fools' Day came and went months ago!
Oh yeah? I got an even BIGGER April Fools' for ya!
"Daikatana 2 won't suck!" ;)
>
> Perl is great for quickies. Python is great for quickies where you don't want to experiment too much. OCaml is great for fetishists. FORTH is perfect for masochists. And of course, then there's playing with LaTeX. Pity the poor Visual Basic programmer
>
>Maybe we geeks should be happy just to make it at all.
Only one thing to add - you forgot one language: APL is for those 16-orificed critters from Proxima Centauri ;-)
And Slashdot, especially on April 1st, and even more so on a thread about programming languages and sex, is that place!
Hell, Slashdot, on any day, on any thread, is that place, and that's what we love about it.
Anyone for a menage-a-trois with Anthy and Natalie Portman, naked and petrified, in a whole vat of hot grits? I'd volunteer, but there's this ASCII-art bird clamped onto my wang.
(No, I don't mean the dedicated word-processing computer of the early '80s. Wish I did. My g/f gives me no end of hassle about that damn bird... loves the feathers, but the beak's in the wrong place.)
Hey, whatever floats your boat is OK for you, but I'll skip the "cd" step. I'm only targeting one platform and not into the cross-compiler scene ;-)
>
>javax.sex.bondage
>javax.sex.[...]
Java? Pshaw! We had that during the golden age of USENET, and didn't need no steenking packages!
The obvious:
- alt.sex.bondage.sco.unix
- alt.sex.bondage.female-admins.nntp
- alt.sex.bondage.particle.physics
- alt.sex.bestiality.barney
- alt.sex.bestiality.hamster.duct-tape
- alt.sex.sheep.baaa.baa.baa.moo
Because some old servers evidently couldn't just mdir "foo/bar/baz", they had to "mkdir foo", "cd foo; foo/bar", and "cd bar; mkdir baz" when creating a directory from a news spool, countless freshmen started their USENET careers being asked if they wanted to subscribe to...- alt.sex
- alt.sex.aluminum
- alt.sex.aluminum.baseball
- alt.sex.aluminum.baseball.bat
My faves were from earlier censorship efforts. (IIRC, some of these were originally used when university administrators cut off alt.sex - the affected people posted to alt.sex.[subgroup] and crossposted to alt.sex to get propagation.)- alt.sex.fetish.cost.benefit.analysis
- alt.sex.fetish.head-librarian
- alt.sex.prevost-derbecker
- alt.sex.senator-exon
- alt.sex.unnatural-acts.jesse-helms
There's a lot of history in a list of old newsgroups. (Ah, the series of newsgroups containing strings of dashes and asterisks to spell a message in ASCII-art in yourThere'd be lawsuits, but they'd look really cool, with, like, rendered hair on the judge's funny wig.
> IGN won't let you view more than 5 screenshots/movies per day unless you pay for their "IGN Insider" subscription service. So choose wisely!
Actually, mixing Disney with software development would probably result in something like that, plus prison terms for people who exchange screenshots amongst themselves after viewing them. (And even longer prison terms for people who write web browsers with "Save Image As..." buttons.)
Too bad, this RPG sounds like fun. But I'd sooner gnaw off my own testicles than give Eisner my money.
And when someone opened the phone to see what made it tick, they saw no evidence that a disposable phone tech existed, only what appeared to be a cleverly-rigged demo by a company with (as the article describes) a questionable history of legal/regulatory/disciplinary actions against it.
I smell a letter to Fritz Hollings in the making:
This must be some strange definition of the word "voluntary" of which I was previously unaware.
Do you perchance work for the IRS, which claims (with a straight face, no less) that the U.S. tax system "is based on individual self-assessment and voluntary compliance"?
Would you defend a rapist in court with "Your Honor, in the case of the young woman in question, she decided she didn't have the physical capability to fight my client in the back alley, and voluntarily decided to have sex before going to the nearest hospital emergency room?"
New explanation: Any personal data not nailed down, is ours. Any personal data we can pry loose, is not nailed down.
> Enhanced Choice: If the company collects personally identifiable information, previously collected clickstream obtained by the company from across web sites can only be combined with the personally identifiable information after the provision of clear and conspicuous notice to the Internet user and receipt of the Internet user's opt-in choice.
<font size = microscopic> By clicking either "I accept" or "I refuse", you agree that you have opted in to receiving our marketing materials, and that you wish us to resell your data to anyone who wants it.
> Consistency: The company will ensure that an Internet user's online data will not be used in a manner materially inconsistent with the privacy policy under which it was collected, [ ... ]
> Purging of Data and Cookie Life: The company will institute internal policies to ensure the protection and routine purging of data collected online. [...]
Potential new internal policy: "To prevent our database from overflowing, every once in a while, we use the old cookies as primary keys of the new database, and reconstruct the data as users create new ones. Hey, it's an internal policy, it's not like anyone can prove otherwise!"
> Settlement Compliance: A nationally recognized independent accounting firm will conduct annual reviews for the next two years of DoubleClick's compliance with specified terms of the settlement,
True story: I'm vacationing at a broadband-enabled friend's place and showing them the wonders of USENET.
His ISP's newsserver won't let me in no matter what user/pass I give it. First, I blame my configuration of the newsreader, and try telnetting to port 119 and doing it manually. No dice.
I phone up tech support in the middle of the night. Dude says "Oh, yeah, our NNTP server authenticates our broadband customers via IP address and doesn't require authentication."
I yell "Doh!", we both laugh, and call closed. Woohoo!
The larger the ISP, the larger the marketing department, and consequently, the less I trust bundled ISPware.
I've been to the homes of n00bs, and seen some truly sickening stuff - one poor person was paying $19.99 per month (the same as any other user), for a custom browser that (a) crashed reproducibly on certain specific emails, (b) beamed banner ads every 30 seconds, and (c) looked like nothing I'd ever seen before - like the worst of Netscape, IE, and AOL rolled into one.) I think it was called Encompass. (Acquired, not coincidentally, by Yahoo in 1999).
Since I saw that, I no longer patronize ISPs that require the use of branded products.
So my answer to your question would be "I don't give a damn what you may distribute and support, so long as there's an easily-located web page or phone support script that allows me to find the IP addresses of your primary/secondary DNS servers, and the FQDNs of your POP, SMTP, NNTP, FTP and news servers, what number I can use to connect, and what to enter as a name/password combination when I do."
What you do with the n00bz is your own business.
Yes, you may not be using adware/spyware/malware - but because I don't trust you, I'm not gonna install your bundle to find out. If I can't set up the box without your branded bundle, I'll just take my business elsewhere.
Incomplete! I'm surprised nobody mentioned the other three (four) from one of George Carlin's later routines, namely:
"sneg gheq gjng, and SPP!"
> A recent survey revealed that 68 percent of all home computer users say they're satisfied with their normal 56K computer modem. It can download pretty much all that's on the Net, as not much (legal) material is out there that's chock full of graphics and in a consumer-friendly format to create the need for a cable modem or a digital subscriber line (DSL).
Well, of course!
The 56k users know Congress is gonna make consumer broadband useless by banning its only killer app. Why buy a fat pipe when you know that in a year, it'll be illegal to download anything useful off it? ;-)
Well, yeah, but I was talking about how to prevent money from going to RIAA, too, so to be consistent, I couldn't use "buy from cdnow.com" in that post. I think they had a Dorsetshire CD was available as a German import for $28ish, and I suppose as an import, RIAA wouldn't be seeing much of that $28. ;-)
But ideally, I'd just go to the band's website, find an address, and buy the CD direct from them. One interesting example of this was the late-80s sample/synth/electro-rock band Sigue Sigue Sputnik. After being dropped from EMI, they vanished for about 5 years, and as far as I can tell from their "history" pages, it looks like they saw they still had interested fans, so they re-recorded their old stuff and released it themselves.
(Side note: Thanx to the AC who pointed me to gemm.com as a link to other music resellers. Far out!)
Oh, great.
Now we're gonna have to put up with a decade of crap from self-appointed guardians of the "mute culture", claiming that this tech is cultural genocide, just like self-styled "advocates" for the deaf oppose the existence of cochlear implants because they constitute a "threat" to the "deaf community".
(In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned as a freak and a heretic. *sigh*)
I agree with your "wanton abuse of statistics" description of this bunk.
My theory - Maybe they just learned to read.
My experience:
1) Started BBSing. 300 baud. Could read it on the fly. Was wowed by 1200 baud. Could read it on the fly after about a week.
2) Went to 2400 baud. Seemed to be the top of my reading speed. Learned to skim.
3) Found USENET. Learned to read non-quoted stuff, and lightly skim the quoted portions of posts.
3.1) I don't top-post when I reply. (#include <op_posters_suck.h>). Sometimes I get questions from lusers^W asking me why my mails are so long.
I asked one of them what the beef was, and discovered that this person was reading all my quoted material, word for word, no matter how deeply-quoted it was. (After all, because I take the time to excerpt only the relevant portions of the article or email when I quote, it must all be worth reading. That's how you read memos in the office of the 1970s, right? Read every word, or if you're referring to an old memo, attach a full copy of the old memo to yours. Word processors didn't exist, so a "memo" or "mail" was an atomic object; the notion of quoting a sentence or paragraph in context was completely alien to them. This person's mental model - without their consciously realizing it - was that one could no more subdivide an email and quote a portion of it than you could physically cut and paste a sentence out of a photocopied departmental memo!)
4) Learning to read efficiently. I don't need to download five news articles from five news sites to realize that "yes, a bunch of people killed a bunch of other people in the Middle East yesterday". (And for that matter, since I've seen that headline every day for all my life, the whole friggin' region's in my mental killfile. Wake me when something important happens.)
4.1) Corollary -- no report on "current events" is likely to offer me more than any other report, so even if I was interested in Middle East politics, I'd still only read one or two reports to get an idea of who killed whom, where, when, and the final body count. Like I said, wake me when there's a significant military or economic development. (And no, aother "peace plan" or offer of cease-fire doesn't count. Those are a dime a dozen, just as the mass murders are. I said a significant development, like a high-level assassination on either side, a hundredfold increase in body count on either side, or deployment of WMD by either side.)
5) Learning to filter out "news" from "ad copy pretending to be news" and handed to news departments by PR agents. After a few weeks of reading online news, I noticed that some articles were even more full of breathless prose and light on detail than others. I soon learned to detect PR within the first paragraph, sometimes within just the article title, and no longer even read it.
5.1) Example - currently on cnn.com Stay tuned for new TV sport: 'SlamBall'. Even if I'm interested in new sports, I don't have to read that article to know a priori that it's an advertisement for whatever TV network is launching a new show. Is it paid advertising? Probably not. But it's clearly a case of the SlamBall PR guy sending a prepackaged story (with print copy and videotape) to CNN's editorial desk with a note saying "Hey, one of your journalists should run this on a slow news day, because it costs you nothing to produce this piece."
(I'm not picking on CNN here - all the mainstream news outlets do this. They're just the nearest target.)
7) Kill Your Television. As much as I've just ripped web-based mainstream news sites a new asshole up there, I still prefer them to watching TV news.
7.1) I timed myself - made up a "typical half-hour" news broadcast by reading every article on cnn.com. Read through it in 10 minutes.
7.2) Of course, the real time savings is that I don't need the whole website. I never watch the sports, weather, or "human interest" and "local criminal in media sensational trial" segments on the local news, and that's 2/3 of the broadcast. By the time I get home, I already know the "top story", and that's the other 1/3 of the broadcast. And I know the article about the Hubble restoration won't be on TV.
Why should I waste spend 22 minutes watching TV, and 10 minutes of ads, to get less information than I can now get within 30 seconds on the web?
Bottom line: I've spent my entire life reading textual media, starting with BBSes, USENET, email, and news sites. With each new medium I use, I start out slowly, then my brain adjusts to the rate of dataflow, and makes adaptations to deal with it. By skimming over text, skipping over quoted and redundant material, reflexively glancing down two inches to the next Slashdot post when I see "goatse.cx" or "penis bird", filtering out mentally-killfiled "news subjects that aren't really news" and "thinly-disguised PR puff pieces" on mainstream news sites, as every year passes, I find myself glean more information per day, keep the amount of raw data relatively constant, and to do so in less time than I was a year ago.
And that's why I spend less time reading news sites today than I did a year ago. I predict that newbie "business-only" web surfers will find similar reductions in the time it takes to "go through the day's news" during their first few years on the web, too.
>
> Does anyone know if *.doubleclick.net works for mozilla image blocking?
Wrong website to ask that.
Around here, you start with "Does anybody not already have *.doubleclick.net firewalled, blocked by Junkbuster, and BIND set up to declare doubleclick's nameservers as bogus?" (Hey, can't be too careful, might as well take the belt-and-suspenders approach. I call it defense-in-depth ;-)
If by some miracle, you find someone who answers "no", then you can ask about m2.doubleclick.net.
Interesting - what hardware platform are you running on your Solaris boxen? I know some folks on old-azz Ultra 5s (360 MHz, 256K cache) who'd be interested, but I've never bothered trying to compile Mozilla on because I feared the result would be too slow to be usable. I'd love to pop in a 333 (or 440) MHz/2M cache CPU but can't justify the outrageous price for that upgrade. *sigh* Back to browsing surplus stores for trashed boxen :-)
Depends on what you mean by proof, but the magnetometer evidence is pretty strong.
We need a Europa orbiter to take gravity measurements to look for tides and other evidence that'll tell us how thick the crust is. With that, we can design the submersible and crust-penetrator, and select an appropriate landing site for the probe.
> The ethical question (with the assumption)... should we crack open the ice sheet to get to the sea? This is a sea that hasn't been exposed to anything above the ice for a looong time.
Actually, the sea won't be exposed with the probe either - like the probes at Lake Vostok (a subsurface lake in Antarctica), the Europa submersible will probably melt its way through the crust, and the "hole" through which it descends will freeze over it.
Also, there are cracks in the surface that appear to indicate upwelling of material from below. Could be water from the seas, could be slush from below the ice, but above the water. Hard to tell.
It's also possible that the peaked craters described in the first press release I cited were from impacts in thicker portions of the crust.
An orbiter should be able to show us areas where the crust is thinnest.
Meantime, the folks at planetary protection will be making damn sure that any Europa probe is sterile before landing.
IMNSHO, despite not getting a full sterilization treatment (that is, what we'll be doing to any Europa orbiter or probe) on Earth, Galileo is completely sterile after having been fried in Jovian radiation for the past several years and poses no threat to whatever it smashes into.
That opinion aside, the fact that the planetary protection folks at NASA still said "chuck Galileo into Jupiter when you're done with it, just to be on the safe side" should give you some idea of just how damn sure we'll be of a future probe's sterility before we attempt landing on Europa. (Insert obligatory Arthur C. Clarke joke here :-)
As I wrote earlier today, I discovered three new bands this week alone through the magic of downloading MP3s from bands I'd never heard of.
What's good for musicians and bad for RIAA - one of those bands will be seeing some money the next time I'm in their area. They appear to perform frequently, and I'll check 'em out live.
What RIAA fears most - two of those bands are now defunct. The only way I could buy their stuff is to buy at a used record store - in which case neither the artist nor RIAA see any money.
RIAA are the puritans of our age: A cartel of people desperately afraid that someone, somewhere, might be enjoying music without regard for whether it's a "hit".
Actually, it's often the other way around.
While it's all well and good to laugh at the 419 scams we get in our mailbox, people have been kidnapped and murdered as part of these scams.
Maybe the spam you got today was from some joker in a trailer park trying his luck. But I've seen some with headers that do indicate points of origin in Nigeria or other third-world countries.
I follow the advice of the 419 Coalition's website, and forward them to the U.S. Secret Service, clearly indicating that I have suffered "NO FINANCIAL LOSS", and that my report is merely for the benefit of their archives.
If the headers indicate (say, a city name on the reverse DNS of the dialup or cablemodem used to inject the spam) a point of origin, I usually add a note to the effect that the spammer may be based in whatever region the headers indicate. A little digging around WHOIS servers can usually get a probable country of origin.
The one thing I never do is tip off the scammer that I know what he's up to. Remember, no SMTP header can tell you whether you're dealing with a chickenboner in a trailer park, or the outer edge of a real organized crime syndicate.
Suppose that only 1% of your 419 scammers are "serious". Your mileage may vary, but thumbing your nose at 100 people, one of whom is running an organized crime syndicate, still qualifies as a cheap ticket out of the gene pool in my books. Are the cheap laughs from trolling the 99 trailer-park denizens really worth the risk?
Let the Treasury guys take care of it. That's what they're paid for.