> And by the time you're done with all that, you could have simply deleted all the spam, read and replied
to your legitimate emails, and had about 1/2 hour to spare.
Until tomorrow, when you got another 10-20 spams.
And the day after that, when you got another 10-20.
By learning how to read headers and report spammers to their upstream providers, I cut my spamload from 10-15 per day in 1997 to 1-2 per day in 1999. It's remained relatively constant since then.
Incidentally, from the names of the "companies" mentioned in the spam, a little searching on Google will reveal that there's much more behind IMG Marketing, Berrytrim, and IGP than meets the eye in this article.
The meatspace identities of the perpetrators behind these three particular frauds are leaking out, and the perps are going down. (Hi, IMG, whazzup Brendan,
and a big hello to Ralsky, now reduced to operating his web servers on dialup lines. Too bad for IGP, who, as mentioned in the article, finally got themselves torn a new asshole by the IRS. Guess it was a bad idea to have one of your spammers joe-job all those Lumber Cartel operatives. Whatever happened to Ron anyways? Wonder what's up with the IGP joe-jobber in Sacramento now?) *splorf*
My only regret is with the EIN fraud with the dropbox in Beverly Hills. Last time I checked, Beverly Hills was in CA, and I'd love to ask the deputy attorney-general why, if they know about it, American Financial Services is still operating? (Or perhaps the AG's office is just giving 'em enough rope to hang themselves... muahahahah!)
As regards Pre-Paid Legal Services, thestreet.com did some good reporting on them a few months ago.
> There's no need to sand your color coat as long as you don't get dirt in the paint. Use a good gun, not the one from
Sears. You'll want a high quality HVLP gun (I used to use a Geo, nice gun). You'll need a decent air compressor
with good water traps. Forget learning with a spray can... not worth the effort. Use a high solids clear for a nice
deepness to the finish. Wet sand the clear coat, 1500 grit is fine. Realize now that buffing sucks ass and requires
a real buffer. One of those cheapy polishers from Wal-Mart won't do the job. On the plastic parts you'll need to
be very sure they are clean due to the chemicals used when producing them. They do make a cleaner just for
plastics. They also make an additive to make the paint more flexible. It's mainly used on bumpers, but will keep
your paint from cracking when your screwing around with the plastic parts. Good luck.
(Amazing amount of useful information quoted and reposted at Mod-level 2, just to preserve it for those re-reading this thread in the future.
Mad props to the AC who posted it. Wish I could justify the cost of the gun and air compressor setup for this project, but the tip on cleaning plastics probably saves me a lot of time and trouble, as does the tip on avoiding a drill and a buffing wheel.)
> not only 'brainy' people get addicted to things online. I've met hundreds of people that are addicted to
instant messaging and don't have a clue as to what they're really doing.
I think what it comes down to is that we're talking about addictive behavior, and that's part and parcel of the web.
If casinos are legal in your area, go to one. Watch the slot machine players.
1) Insert coin
2) Pull handle
3) Wait a few seonds while the wheels spin
4) Get results - either a reward or punishment stimulus.
5) Repeat.
Observe the glassy stare as the wheels spin. If you're feeling sociable, ask them what they "feel" as they watch the wheels spin. Or try it yourself for a few bucks.
If you don't get off on slots, try a few hands of meatspace (i.e. non-video) blackjack - the procedure's the same, only that there's a little more interaction between you (player) and the machine (dealer), and you have to make a decision at every turn (whether to hit/stand) before you get the stimulus (new card, which either improves your position or "busts" you out of the game), and then the added stimulus of the dealer playing his hand.
Now compare it to:
a) Instant messaging - type something, click on it to send it, wait a while, and get the stimulus of your friend saying "kewl" or "sux0rz!"
b) Cybersex - same as above, but with sex.
c) Web-pr0n - click on the URL, wait for the web browser to grab and render the HTML, then watch the IMG space fill up with pr0n, some of which is appealing to you (Natalie!) or not (g0atz!). Click on the next URL for the next page of pr0n pics.
d) Web-trading - click "Reload", wait a few minutes to get new prices (a stimulus of green or red numbers), and make a decision whether to buy, sell, or hold. Then click "Reload" for another hit.
e) Slashdot. How many times have you reloaded to see if there were new stories or if your comments got up-moderated today? Again - "do something simple", "wait, not knowing the outcome", "get feedback in form of pleasure or pain", "repeat".
This isn't to say that all IM users, pr0n-downloaders, daytraders and Slashdotters are addicts, anymore to say that everyone in a casino is a problem gambler.
But the parallels are disturbing, and people need to be aware of them -- remember that the slot machine (unlike your browser) was designed to reinforce this behavior, and it's terribly effective at what it does.
The fact that your web browser works the same way, even if by virtue of a technological accident (the delay is inherent in the protocol, after all!), means that nobody should be surprised when web browsers cause some users to behave in ways similar to problem gamblers.
I'd rather be addicted to/. than the slots. I even get a chance to learn things. It might even be good to be addicted to it. But it doesn't change the likelihood that it's a form of addiction.
Re:By-Pass Free Registration (Privacy Invasion)
on
The Not-So-Free Web
·
· Score: 5
Newswire: May 2, 2001: Yahoo! (YHOO) stock quintupled today on news that the New York Times had just signed a $2.3 trillion dollar contract with Yahoo! to publish its stories on Yahoo's site.
One anonymous NYTimes source was quoted as saying: "We just put this story up on how the 'free' model wasn't working, and our web servers crashed under the load of all the people coming from Yahoo's site. Boy, were we wrong!
Our sysadmin keeps screaming something about slashing dots affecting us, and how we're a bunch of clueless idiots, but our marketing department tells us they're positive the users are clicking on our article because they saw it on Yahoo, and besides, they throw much better parties."
> > Imagine a computer with three buttons: Send Mail. Read Mail. Browse Web. > >
Making a very-limited-choice interface is not a solution for dealing with intrinsically complex problems.
Yup. Netpliance tried to do exactly that. They're titsup.com now.
The problem wasn't that we hax0red their I-Openers, the problem was that even the target audience probably would have outgrown the IO's capabilities before NPLI had a chance to make any money off 'em.
Finally, dumbing down the interface is a great way to get people started, but a horrible way to get them to move forward.
I call it "the WinHelp problem". Most users won't press F1 for "help" unless something went wrong (If everything worked right, they'd have accomplished their task, and wouldn't need the online help!). But the online help in most 'doze apps is only a listing of features and how they're supposed to work when everything goes right.
A more concrete example: "Send mail" -> I get back a 55x SMTP message. Even if I don't understand it, I can call tech support, ask them, and they can look it up. Or I can use google.com to search for the error message and find out what it means for myself.
But if I look at the online help in a typical "dumbed-down" email client, all I get is "Click on the picture of the envelope to send mail".
And getting back to your original point - that a limited-choice interface is a poor solution for complex problems - the biggest problem for a tech support rep isn't users too dumb to ask the right question, but applications that deny the user what he or she needs to report the problem in the first place.
"I can't send mail". ("Did you read the online help?") "Yes, and it told me to click on the envelope to send mail. So I did." ("Were there any error messages?") "Yes. It said it couldn't send the mail." (*gunshot*, *thud*) "Hello? Can you put me through to a supervisor? Are you still there?"
> If it is copyright infringement to download a ring tone, is it also copyright infringement
to display a list of numbers to press and save that will "sound just like" a popular song?
In a nutshell, yeah, it is, and the landsharks at Harry Fox Agency (the same bunch of sheepfuckers that nuked lyrics.ch a few years ago) is suing people over it.
> Until the people decide (the only body allowed to decide, according to the constitution) en masse that they want to change from
a free society to a police-state, run by corps with lots of money, then there really isn't anything to debate here, is there?
...and now that, judging from the legislation of the past 8 years and the current crop of Congresscritters sittin' on the hill, the people have decided they want the police-state ("for the chiiiildrun!"), we discover that you were right: there really isn't anything to debate.
At least, nothing that can be debated without the debaters being threatened by lawyers.
> The only thing that is needed to produce real art is the artist and the consumer, in this case the listener. Most everything else [e.g. RIAA]
is excess baggage.
Four words for you: "I want my MTV".
Dire Straits was poking fun at themselves and the rest of Top-40. Unfortunately, they were also right.
Amen. The way I had it explained to me was to imagine the world's most efficient WW2 bomber pilot given a mission: to make one flight with 16 bombs and blow up a all the ball bearing factories along the Rhine.
He got himself over the first target, aimed, and let fly with one bomb ('cuz he was so good that he doesn't need to carpet-bomb the whole city). The bomb hit the target he aimed at - a civilian's house ten blocks away from the ball bearing factory. He flew onward, aiming at a house 5 blocks away from the power plant, and drops another one, blowing the house to smithereens. He continued until he ran out of bombs, having hit every target he aimed at. 15 houses, and one cow standing in a field, just for a lark.
> If the government was keeping detailed records on me, they'd probably
have some idea that I'm more of an anarchist than a complacent, lazy citizen.
Funny, I am a complacent, lazy citizen.
I'm more worried about some of my posts where I take jabs at the "Feebs" and the "SS" making me look like an anarchist than I really am!
Of course, your average Feeb reading this is likely to categorize this post as "just part of my cover".
I was gonna end that line with a smiley, but then I realized I'd hit the nail on the head -- any degree of surveillance above "none at all" but below "total surveillance" is bound to introduce inaccuracies in the data -- my wisecrack up there is the Catch-22 of living in a surveillance state.
Anything you say can and will be used against you.
> Besides that, what did the FBI seriously hope to gain from this? Is it just scare tactics, or are they
honestly going to track down users by IPs?
Criminals tend to be stupid. It's entirely possible that someone posting classified information would have done so from their own ISP - certainly worth investigating. If true, nailing the SOB to the wall is a slam-dunk.
If I were IMC, I'd ask for a compromise - archive everything (and encrypt it) so it's preserved. Then grep the server logs for the IP address from which the data was posted. Then return all traffic from that IP, and any IPs associated with any user-ID "logged-in" from that IP. You might get one or two duplicates from other folks on the same dialup port, but they could be eliminated as suspects in the future.
I mean, wasn't Carnivore supposed to save the Feds from the need to go through all this trouble?
Someone mentioned the NYTimes having "won" in court regarding the publication of classified information. Yes, they won. But the person who leaked that information to the Times was guilty of a crime. And there's no problem with the FBI trying to find out who did that.
If the Feds (FBI/SS) can get that information from IMC without acquiring gobs of data on random joes who just happened to be reading IMC, then more power to 'em.
Again - that's what Carnivore was supposed to ensure, wasn't it?
> I will once again reiterate that the best thing to do is read everything
(books from the sociology and political science section of your bookstore are great background
material), and come to your own conclusions. Just don't assume that any one source is giving you
the whole story, because they never are.
Amen, bro. I may have flamed your arse off on the inconsistency of your "Well, the left doesn't pretend to be neutral", versus the left's [and right's] pollution of words like "Independent" in an effort to claim the middle ground, but we're in complete agreement here.
The thing that most disturbs me about the Feebs' log-fishing is that for every 1000 hits, they may well "catch" 900 "3vil l3fti$t r4d1k@lz" for future surveillance, but they may also catch 100 average joes who just want to read both the left and right-wing versions of the story and sort out the facts for themselves.
Of course, the 100 average joes who don't have a political axe to grind, but are just interested in What Really Happened (i.e. people who want to get their news from reporters as opposed to journalists), are probably "just as bad" in the eyes of the Feebs. They're thinking for themselves. Gotta be dangerous. Hell, nail them first.
> Sites like indymedia recognize that most of the mainstream media acts as a mouthpiece for the interests
of the companies that own them, and yet pretend to be objective. The lefties at least admit their biases
and say outright that their news is aimed towards progressive social change.
Then why - if what you say is really true - doesn't "Indy"media call itself "Leftymedia" and start living up to its own standards?
Do I think they were right to aid and abet someone's posting of classified information? Fuck, no.
Do I think the Feebs were right to use that posting as an excuse to dredge the logs for "everyone who might have visited the site" (and in all probability, to enable them, or their successors, to cross-reference those logs with third-party data sources in order to create a list of unreliable elements for future monitoring and extermination?) Fuck, no again.
But until the wacko left gets off its high horse and stops polluting neutral terms like "Independent" with its own particular brand of bias, please allow me to call you a hypocrite. Angry Toad is right - IMC isn't "independent" media any more than CNN isn't an arm of the Democratic Party, nor FOX an arm of the Republicans.
> All true, but are they really making money? I rarely see an ad there (not banner ad, mind you, but they're own form of
search-related targetted ads). So are they still going off of vc, or do the few ads I see cover the bills?
Actually, I think they're being smart about it.
If the typical query returns one USENET post - maybe 2-3 kilobytes of text - why would you want to (as Deja did) spend money sending 20-30 kilobytes of HTML for the associated frames and banners and other ad support?
The user's gonna see one ad. Google's bandwidth and I/O costs are gonna explode if the HTML wrapped around each ad takes up 10 times as much space as each query's results.
By going with text-based ads and a non-frames approach, they not only make the site more user-friendly (thereby adding value), they cut their own costs by a sizable fraction.
With lower bandwidth costs and I/O requirements, Google can make money with less ads, not more. That's where (IMHO) Deja went wrong - the more they needed the ad-revenue, the more they escalated the cost of serving the ads, in a vicious circle that consumed them.
> Get one of ThinkGeek's black light and one of these cases. get some glass working tools. Cut the holes like crystal.
Then put crystals (tranculent and angled) all over the thing. The black light would go everywhere in cool angles. For
added fun also put in a disco ball.
Disco ball, blue LED. Yum.
Or break off a pin or two from your Alpha-style heatsink, and wedge (after insulating the leads) in a red LED. "Look, ma, my heatsink's red hot!"
The RF wouldn't be a problem if the holes in the sides of the case were small enough. Your "crystal" idea would work great for this, and solve any problems ("dustbunnies") associated with a totally-translucent case.
> This rig would look pretty sweet with a light kit, or a strobe to "stop" the
fans.
That'd rock. The biggest concern I'd have would be that there might be interference coming from the discharge through the strobe light.
OTOH, you could "strobe" a high-intensity LED just as easily as you could a real strobe light, and it might be bright enough to be seen.
Now you've got me thinking about breaking off a pin in the middle of my Alpha heatsink. The space thus created would be just big enough to hold an LED, and the light would emerge from *within* the heatsink and "leak" through the fan blades. You could probably ensure it "stopped" the fan blades regardless of fan speed by simply triggering the LED based on the third wire (fan speed sense) from the fan itself!
> Somehow, this kinda stuff reminds me of the rice boy attitude. You know those Hong-Kong kids who soup up their
Civic CXs with Mugen stickers, and racing stripes?:)
Absolutely...
...but it's still loads of fun, and you can pick up some basic metalworking skillz while you're at it. I'm currently doing a case mod of a generic ATX case in glossy black and hammered-metal finish, based on a case I saw on [H]ardOCP a few months ago.
What I learn from that, I can use to polish out dents and chips in the paint on my car, rather than paying an auto body shop to do it for me. The techniques are identical - sand at 220 grit to bare metal, lay down primer to fill in the rough spots, sand at 600, lay down color, sand at 600, lay down color, sand at 1200, seal with clearcoat, sand at 2000 and buff/polish to taste.
But it's a helluvalot cheaper to learn the technique (and make your newbie mistakes) on a $75 ATX case than it is on your car.
If the paint adheres nicely to plastic, I'll probably do the same thing with my I-openers. The one that now serves as a digital picture frame will actually look more like a picture frame than a piece of computing equipment.
Quoth the author of the drive-modding site: > All the hard drives I have done this mod to are stuff running fine. I stress test them for about a week of intense disk activity and they pass
gracefully.
Fuck me!
I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. Fuck, I still don't believe it!
I thought it was gonna be a mod that said "Do this, then hook up the drive, and run a piece of software to make the heads thrash every now and then, 'cuz there ain't no way you're reading any data off this drive".
But it seems he's serious in that he didn't lose data.
I'd still never do this with a drive that had data I cared about. All the posters pointing out the need for a clean room (and the grit/dust from the grinding operations, and the lack of an air filter on the modded drive) are absolutely right - this shouldn't work.
But for an old (obsolete, and out-of-warranty) drive that you're only using for/swap on a non-mission-critical system, maybe it really is doable.
> You know, it seems like there was a time when gods did more impressive feats than telling old women that their
CD-ROM cable is in backwards. What happened to parting oceans, annihilating entire populations in opposing
nations, plagues of locusts, and so forth?
I dunno, but I waved a turkey leg (closest thing I had to a chicken) around a SCSI chain and it worked.
As far as I'm concerned, that's on a par with parting oceans. Not as much fun to watch as annihilating entire populations in adversary nations, but a hell of a lot more useful to me at the time:)
It's pretty much cut-and-dried only to the few people who have made a choice between the two points of view ("soul exists and mind/body are inseparable") and ("meat machines").
The only reason it's not cut-and-dried in Congress is because most of the voters and campaign sponsors have never thought about which world view they hold true.
> I gotta think that cloning is one of the weirdest ethical dilemmas we've ever met, and the
US Government is doing its damndest to convince itself that it's pretty cut-and-dried.
Problem is, it is cut-and-dried. But it's cut-and-dried only to those who've thought about it, and who have made a decision between two mutually-exclusive points of view:
One: A human being is a thing that was created by God or some other process, and the notion of "soul" is meaningful, and that maybe even a brainless body has a soul, because, after all, if it were conceived naturally and happened to be a mutant, God oughta have mercy on it. There are many ethical concerns about cloning if you're part of this group. (Sorry if I've misstated the underlying philosophy - it isn't my view, and its adherents can probably describe it better than I can.)
Two: We are machines made of meat. "Self" or "soul" or "consciousness" is an epiphenomenon of neural activity. There can be no neural activity without a brain. A brainless (anencephalic) clone grown in a vat would not be a person. A brained (i.e. "normal") clone grown in a vat or womb would be a person, just as an identical twin is a person. There is no ethical dilemma.
Problem is - 99% of the population has never thought about these issues. We - as geeks - are accustomed to thinking about these things because we've grown up in a world where science-fiction robots and real-world AI debates are part of our daily existence.
We're not the norm here, though, and our education system is pretty much geared to making sure nobody ever thinks about "deep stuff" like that (after all, it's not conducive to producing worker bees), and as a result, we will continue to see decisions based on ignorance.
I don't care what side of this debate you're on. Just think about it and pick a side. Enclue your friends as to your point of view. Because the educational system sure as hell won't.
Slashdot Mirror
Until tomorrow, when you got another 10-20 spams.
And the day after that, when you got another 10-20.
By learning how to read headers and report spammers to their upstream providers, I cut my spamload from 10-15 per day in 1997 to 1-2 per day in 1999. It's remained relatively constant since then.
Incidentally, from the names of the "companies" mentioned in the spam, a little searching on Google will reveal that there's much more behind IMG Marketing, Berrytrim, and IGP than meets the eye in this article.
The meatspace identities of the perpetrators behind these three particular frauds are leaking out, and the perps are going down. (Hi, IMG, whazzup Brendan, and a big hello to Ralsky, now reduced to operating his web servers on dialup lines. Too bad for IGP, who, as mentioned in the article, finally got themselves torn a new asshole by the IRS. Guess it was a bad idea to have one of your spammers joe-job all those Lumber Cartel operatives. Whatever happened to Ron anyways? Wonder what's up with the IGP joe-jobber in Sacramento now?) *splorf*
My only regret is with the EIN fraud with the dropbox in Beverly Hills. Last time I checked, Beverly Hills was in CA, and I'd love to ask the deputy attorney-general why, if they know about it, American Financial Services is still operating? (Or perhaps the AG's office is just giving 'em enough rope to hang themselves... muahahahah!)
As regards Pre-Paid Legal Services, thestreet.com did some good reporting on them a few months ago.
As Tom Lehrer put it - "Who's Next?"
(Amazing amount of useful information quoted and reposted at Mod-level 2, just to preserve it for those re-reading this thread in the future.
Mad props to the AC who posted it. Wish I could justify the cost of the gun and air compressor setup for this project, but the tip on cleaning plastics probably saves me a lot of time and trouble, as does the tip on avoiding a drill and a buffing wheel.)
I think what it comes down to is that we're talking about addictive behavior, and that's part and parcel of the web.
If casinos are legal in your area, go to one. Watch the slot machine players.
1) Insert coin
2) Pull handle
3) Wait a few seonds while the wheels spin
4) Get results - either a reward or punishment stimulus.
5) Repeat.
Observe the glassy stare as the wheels spin. If you're feeling sociable, ask them what they "feel" as they watch the wheels spin. Or try it yourself for a few bucks.
If you don't get off on slots, try a few hands of meatspace (i.e. non-video) blackjack - the procedure's the same, only that there's a little more interaction between you (player) and the machine (dealer), and you have to make a decision at every turn (whether to hit/stand) before you get the stimulus (new card, which either improves your position or "busts" you out of the game), and then the added stimulus of the dealer playing his hand.
Now compare it to:
a) Instant messaging - type something, click on it to send it, wait a while, and get the stimulus of your friend saying "kewl" or "sux0rz!"
b) Cybersex - same as above, but with sex.
c) Web-pr0n - click on the URL, wait for the web browser to grab and render the HTML, then watch the IMG space fill up with pr0n, some of which is appealing to you (Natalie!) or not (g0atz!). Click on the next URL for the next page of pr0n pics.
d) Web-trading - click "Reload", wait a few minutes to get new prices (a stimulus of green or red numbers), and make a decision whether to buy, sell, or hold. Then click "Reload" for another hit.
e) Slashdot. How many times have you reloaded to see if there were new stories or if your comments got up-moderated today? Again - "do something simple", "wait, not knowing the outcome", "get feedback in form of pleasure or pain", "repeat".
This isn't to say that all IM users, pr0n-downloaders, daytraders and Slashdotters are addicts, anymore to say that everyone in a casino is a problem gambler.
But the parallels are disturbing, and people need to be aware of them -- remember that the slot machine (unlike your browser) was designed to reinforce this behavior, and it's terribly effective at what it does.
The fact that your web browser works the same way, even if by virtue of a technological accident (the delay is inherent in the protocol, after all!), means that nobody should be surprised when web browsers cause some users to behave in ways similar to problem gamblers.
I'd rather be addicted to /. than the slots. I even get a chance to learn things. It might even be good to be addicted to it. But it doesn't change the likelihood that it's a form of addiction.
Newswire: May 2, 2001: Yahoo! (YHOO) stock quintupled today on news that the New York Times had just signed a $2.3 trillion dollar contract with Yahoo! to publish its stories on Yahoo's site.
One anonymous NYTimes source was quoted as saying: "We just put this story up on how the 'free' model wasn't working, and our web servers crashed under the load of all the people coming from Yahoo's site. Boy, were we wrong!
Our sysadmin keeps screaming something about slashing dots affecting us, and how we're a bunch of clueless idiots, but our marketing department tells us they're positive the users are clicking on our article because they saw it on Yahoo, and besides, they throw much better parties."
>
> Making a very-limited-choice interface is not a solution for dealing with intrinsically complex problems.
Yup. Netpliance tried to do exactly that. They're titsup.com now.
The problem wasn't that we hax0red their I-Openers, the problem was that even the target audience probably would have outgrown the IO's capabilities before NPLI had a chance to make any money off 'em.
Finally, dumbing down the interface is a great way to get people started, but a horrible way to get them to move forward.
I call it "the WinHelp problem". Most users won't press F1 for "help" unless something went wrong (If everything worked right, they'd have accomplished their task, and wouldn't need the online help!). But the online help in most 'doze apps is only a listing of features and how they're supposed to work when everything goes right.
A more concrete example: "Send mail" -> I get back a 55x SMTP message. Even if I don't understand it, I can call tech support, ask them, and they can look it up. Or I can use google.com to search for the error message and find out what it means for myself.
But if I look at the online help in a typical "dumbed-down" email client, all I get is "Click on the picture of the envelope to send mail".
And getting back to your original point - that a limited-choice interface is a poor solution for complex problems - the biggest problem for a tech support rep isn't users too dumb to ask the right question, but applications that deny the user what he or she needs to report the problem in the first place.
"I can't send mail".
("Did you read the online help?")
"Yes, and it told me to click on the envelope to send mail. So I did."
("Were there any error messages?")
"Yes. It said it couldn't send the mail."
(*gunshot*, *thud*)
"Hello? Can you put me through to a supervisor? Are you still there?"
>
> Yes.
Modded as (+1, Funny)?
Moderators on crack again. That wasn't (+1, Funny), it was (+1, Informative)!
The thread on Threatening Online Tablature is over that-a-way.
In a nutshell, yeah, it is, and the landsharks at Harry Fox Agency (the same bunch of sheepfuckers that nuked lyrics.ch a few years ago) is suing people over it.
At least, nothing that can be debated without the debaters being threatened by lawyers.
> The only thing that is needed to produce real art is the artist and the consumer, in this case the listener. Most everything else [e.g. RIAA] is excess baggage.
Four words for you: "I want my MTV".
Dire Straits was poking fun at themselves and the rest of Top-40. Unfortunately, they were also right.
Money for nothin', indeed.
Several terabytes of pseudo-random numbers? ;-)
Amen. The way I had it explained to me was to imagine the world's most efficient WW2 bomber pilot given a mission: to make one flight with 16 bombs and blow up a all the ball bearing factories along the Rhine.
He got himself over the first target, aimed, and let fly with one bomb ('cuz he was so good that he doesn't need to carpet-bomb the whole city). The bomb hit the target he aimed at - a civilian's house ten blocks away from the ball bearing factory. He flew onward, aiming at a house 5 blocks away from the power plant, and drops another one, blowing the house to smithereens. He continued until he ran out of bombs, having hit every target he aimed at. 15 houses, and one cow standing in a field, just for a lark.
One bomb, one kill.
100% efficiency -- and totally ineffective.
Funny, I am a complacent, lazy citizen.
I'm more worried about some of my posts where I take jabs at the "Feebs" and the "SS" making me look like an anarchist than I really am!
Of course, your average Feeb reading this is likely to categorize this post as "just part of my cover".
I was gonna end that line with a smiley, but then I realized I'd hit the nail on the head -- any degree of surveillance above "none at all" but below "total surveillance" is bound to introduce inaccuracies in the data -- my wisecrack up there is the Catch-22 of living in a surveillance state.
Anything you say can and will be used against you.
Criminals tend to be stupid. It's entirely possible that someone posting classified information would have done so from their own ISP - certainly worth investigating. If true, nailing the SOB to the wall is a slam-dunk.
If I were IMC, I'd ask for a compromise - archive everything (and encrypt it) so it's preserved. Then grep the server logs for the IP address from which the data was posted. Then return all traffic from that IP, and any IPs associated with any user-ID "logged-in" from that IP. You might get one or two duplicates from other folks on the same dialup port, but they could be eliminated as suspects in the future.
I mean, wasn't Carnivore supposed to save the Feds from the need to go through all this trouble?
Someone mentioned the NYTimes having "won" in court regarding the publication of classified information. Yes, they won. But the person who leaked that information to the Times was guilty of a crime. And there's no problem with the FBI trying to find out who did that.
If the Feds (FBI/SS) can get that information from IMC without acquiring gobs of data on random joes who just happened to be reading IMC, then more power to 'em.
Again - that's what Carnivore was supposed to ensure, wasn't it?
Amen, bro. I may have flamed your arse off on the inconsistency of your "Well, the left doesn't pretend to be neutral", versus the left's [and right's] pollution of words like "Independent" in an effort to claim the middle ground, but we're in complete agreement here.
The thing that most disturbs me about the Feebs' log-fishing is that for every 1000 hits, they may well "catch" 900 "3vil l3fti$t r4d1k@lz" for future surveillance, but they may also catch 100 average joes who just want to read both the left and right-wing versions of the story and sort out the facts for themselves.
Of course, the 100 average joes who don't have a political axe to grind, but are just interested in What Really Happened (i.e. people who want to get their news from reporters as opposed to journalists), are probably "just as bad" in the eyes of the Feebs. They're thinking for themselves. Gotta be dangerous. Hell, nail them first.
Then why - if what you say is really true - doesn't "Indy"media call itself "Leftymedia" and start living up to its own standards?
Do I think they were right to aid and abet someone's posting of classified information? Fuck, no.
Do I think the Feebs were right to use that posting as an excuse to dredge the logs for "everyone who might have visited the site" (and in all probability, to enable them, or their successors, to cross-reference those logs with third-party data sources in order to create a list of unreliable elements for future monitoring and extermination?) Fuck, no again.
But until the wacko left gets off its high horse and stops polluting neutral terms like "Independent" with its own particular brand of bias, please allow me to call you a hypocrite. Angry Toad is right - IMC isn't "independent" media any more than CNN isn't an arm of the Democratic Party, nor FOX an arm of the Republicans.
And what discussion of clear cases would be complete without the clear Ms. PacMan machine?
> can you just imaging how much _______ (insert your choice: mp3s, pr0n, divX;), etc) you could store! damn. *drool*
A full USENET feed (including binaries) is about 250GB per day (yes, about an OC-3 saturated), and growing at 50-60% per year.
One petabyte works out to only four more years of future USENET, give or take 50%.
Scary, ain't it?
Actually, I think they're being smart about it.
If the typical query returns one USENET post - maybe 2-3 kilobytes of text - why would you want to (as Deja did) spend money sending 20-30 kilobytes of HTML for the associated frames and banners and other ad support?
The user's gonna see one ad. Google's bandwidth and I/O costs are gonna explode if the HTML wrapped around each ad takes up 10 times as much space as each query's results.
By going with text-based ads and a non-frames approach, they not only make the site more user-friendly (thereby adding value), they cut their own costs by a sizable fraction.
With lower bandwidth costs and I/O requirements, Google can make money with less ads, not more. That's where (IMHO) Deja went wrong - the more they needed the ad-revenue, the more they escalated the cost of serving the ads, in a vicious circle that consumed them.
It's also where (IMHO) Google is doing it right.
Disco ball, blue LED. Yum.
Or break off a pin or two from your Alpha-style heatsink, and wedge (after insulating the leads) in a red LED. "Look, ma, my heatsink's red hot!"
The RF wouldn't be a problem if the holes in the sides of the case were small enough. Your "crystal" idea would work great for this, and solve any problems ("dustbunnies") associated with a totally-translucent case.
That'd rock. The biggest concern I'd have would be that there might be interference coming from the discharge through the strobe light.
OTOH, you could "strobe" a high-intensity LED just as easily as you could a real strobe light, and it might be bright enough to be seen.
Now you've got me thinking about breaking off a pin in the middle of my Alpha heatsink. The space thus created would be just big enough to hold an LED, and the light would emerge from *within* the heatsink and "leak" through the fan blades. You could probably ensure it "stopped" the fan blades regardless of fan speed by simply triggering the LED based on the third wire (fan speed sense) from the fan itself!
Absolutely...
What I learn from that, I can use to polish out dents and chips in the paint on my car, rather than paying an auto body shop to do it for me. The techniques are identical - sand at 220 grit to bare metal, lay down primer to fill in the rough spots, sand at 600, lay down color, sand at 600, lay down color, sand at 1200, seal with clearcoat, sand at 2000 and buff/polish to taste.
But it's a helluvalot cheaper to learn the technique (and make your newbie mistakes) on a $75 ATX case than it is on your car.
If the paint adheres nicely to plastic, I'll probably do the same thing with my I-openers. The one that now serves as a digital picture frame will actually look more like a picture frame than a piece of computing equipment.
Quoth the author of the drive-modding site:
> All the hard drives I have done this mod to are stuff running fine. I stress test them for about a week of intense disk activity and they pass gracefully.
Fuck me!
I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. Fuck, I still don't believe it!
I thought it was gonna be a mod that said "Do this, then hook up the drive, and run a piece of software to make the heads thrash every now and then, 'cuz there ain't no way you're reading any data off this drive".
But it seems he's serious in that he didn't lose data.
I'd still never do this with a drive that had data I cared about. All the posters pointing out the need for a clean room (and the grit/dust from the grinding operations, and the lack of an air filter on the modded drive) are absolutely right - this shouldn't work.
But for an old (obsolete, and out-of-warranty) drive that you're only using for /swap on a non-mission-critical system, maybe it really is doable.
Fsckin' cool hack, though, to say the least.
I dunno, but I waved a turkey leg (closest thing I had to a chicken) around a SCSI chain and it worked.
As far as I'm concerned, that's on a par with parting oceans. Not as much fun to watch as annihilating entire populations in adversary nations, but a hell of a lot more useful to me at the time :)
Maybe. The PSN guy who said "Is it doing the same thing on another computer" exhibited more debugging clue than any of the Micros~1 flunkies.
It's pretty much cut-and-dried only to the few people who have made a choice between the two points of view ("soul exists and mind/body are inseparable") and ("meat machines").
The only reason it's not cut-and-dried in Congress is because most of the voters and campaign sponsors have never thought about which world view they hold true.
Problem is, it is cut-and-dried. But it's cut-and-dried only to those who've thought about it, and who have made a decision between two mutually-exclusive points of view:
One: A human being is a thing that was created by God or some other process, and the notion of "soul" is meaningful, and that maybe even a brainless body has a soul, because, after all, if it were conceived naturally and happened to be a mutant, God oughta have mercy on it. There are many ethical concerns about cloning if you're part of this group. (Sorry if I've misstated the underlying philosophy - it isn't my view, and its adherents can probably describe it better than I can.)
Two: We are machines made of meat. "Self" or "soul" or "consciousness" is an epiphenomenon of neural activity. There can be no neural activity without a brain. A brainless (anencephalic) clone grown in a vat would not be a person. A brained (i.e. "normal") clone grown in a vat or womb would be a person, just as an identical twin is a person. There is no ethical dilemma.
Problem is - 99% of the population has never thought about these issues. We - as geeks - are accustomed to thinking about these things because we've grown up in a world where science-fiction robots and real-world AI debates are part of our daily existence.
We're not the norm here, though, and our education system is pretty much geared to making sure nobody ever thinks about "deep stuff" like that (after all, it's not conducive to producing worker bees), and as a result, we will continue to see decisions based on ignorance.
I don't care what side of this debate you're on. Just think about it and pick a side. Enclue your friends as to your point of view. Because the educational system sure as hell won't.