I think the guy's hearing with his eyes, or using a totally different set of music than what I listen to.
If you wanna hear how dog-fuckingly-shit Blade is, encode the first 10 seconds of New Order's "Blue Monday" (a basic drum machine emitting a sound common to much new-wave, dance, and industrial from around 1980 to the present day) at 128/160/192 using Blade, Fraun, and LAME.
Blade will be unlistenable at 128, shit at 160, and you may hear artifacts at 192 if you know what to listen for. LAME and Fraun sound sweet, even at 128.
Similar results can be achieved with a heavy guitar track, e.g. Def Leppard or other 80's "hair metal" bands.
I don't have data on string quartets - but for non-classical music, Blade blows steaming piles of donkey dick.
1: of, relating to, or dealing with aesthetics or the beautiful 2 : appreciative of, responsive to, or zealous about the beautiful; also : responsive to or appreciative of what is pleasurable to the senses
> How in the heck is this an aesthetic move for AOL?
Broader question: Given that definition, how in the heck is the word "aesthetic" in any way, shape, or form related to anything AOL throws at its users?
My conspiracy theory: Bill wants to put the final nail in Netscape/Mozilla coffin, and associating Netscape with AOL 6.0's b0rken browser is that nail. His mole at AOL must be highly-paid.
1) As an AC has already pointed out (albeit in an inflammatory way), the suggestion that NSA break your crypto was made by the author of the posting, not by the FBI official at the NANOG meeting.
2) If you were NSA, and you had the ability to break strong crypto, you would never risk exposing that fact by doing so on behalf of FBI, where evidence indicating that you had done so would become part of a public record in the resulting court case.
Shotgun's got it right with his aircraft-carrier analogy. The ability (and information regarding the existence or non-existence of the ability) to break strong crypto is a big gun, and will remain a big gun for the forseeable future. It will not be used for the kinds of routine surveillance of citizens that FBI is attempting to implement with Carnivore.
> they are bringing us closer to living in the world written about by George Orwell,
> [... ]
> when things get bad enough, the people will rise up and overthrow the ruler/government that is oppressing them
"If there is hope, it is in the proles."
- Winston Smith
Didn't exactly work out that way in 1984, did it?
If you believe "popular uprisings" against the government will even happen in a properly-managed police state, (let alone actually succeed in stopping oppression!), you haven't read much Orwell;-)
> Well, their goal is to get your problem solved as quickly as possible so they can minimize the number of
customer support people they have to pay for,
Problem is, management often sees these goals as being in conflict.
If your goal is to "close more calls", then you blame the user whether it's the user's fault or not. "Sorry, you're running Linux. That must be why our modems are returning a busy signal. Buh-bye."
If your goal is to "solve more user problems", then you have to cough up the bucks and hire enough clued-in second-tier support to... well... solve the user problems.
There's overlap - "blame the user the first time" is a good strategy because often it's the user's fault, and by asking them to "wiggle the power cord", you can solve user problems and and process more calls per hour.
But more often than not, the goals of "close calls quick" and "solve user problems" are in conflict. Worse - management often assumes they're in conflict even when they're not. This is what leads to serious customer frustration: "Is it plugged in? Is the modem turned on?" "Look, drone, I'm typing to you in an IRC channel. It'd be pretty fscking hard to do that without having the computer plugged in and the modem turned on now, wouldn't it?"
> This project is one example of an effective, efficient, non-disasterous project that demonstrates that
space can be done for cheap cost [... ]
Agreed. NEAR is an awesome bit of work. Though the mission came extremely close to disaster. The reason we're reading about this in 2000 is because they damn near lost the spacecraft on first approach, and executed a miraculous recovery. It delayed the mission a year (waiting for the next orbit), but it didn't cost us much in terms of scientific return at all.
It's also a great demonstration of the fact that if you're in orbit around something - thinking of NEAR, Eros, and the Sun - whether you throw an object "up" or "down" makes no difference, it'll intersect your position next orbit.
That is, if you want to go "up" or "down" and you're in orbit, you thrust "forward" or "back". The EROS recovery was basically "screw it, don't waste fuel chasing the rock this year, because if we just relax, Newton will put us back on target for another encounter next year")
> Holy cow! It's a rock! And it's in space! And it's got holes in it! And now we've got pictures!
Believe me, if Eros had holes in it, as opposed to craters, I'd be phoning my broker with SELL orders, and then practicing up on my Wing Commander and other 3D space-combat game skills.
Cripes, didn't anybody here read Ender's Game? The buggers are out there, I tell you! They're out there!
> The NSA is not chartered for domestic surveillance. End of story.
Thanks. Like I've said before. I trust NSA and CIA way the hell more than I do FBI.
NSA and CIA are intelligence organizations. They are tasked to generate intelligence -- to process data and generate information useful to decisionmakers. The higher the signal-to-noise ratio, the better the quality of the intelligence. Sure, they may capture everything you do, but they're not interested in it. The data comes in, but its only value is that it can be transmuted to more useful data for processing by decisionmakers.
FBI is an enforcement organization. Their mandate is to generate arrests, not information. Data-gathering enables them to generate more arrests by placing a larger segment of the population under surveillance and then enforcing the laws as they choose.
To illustrate the difference, I'll fabricate an analogy out of another bit of automated surveillance technology: photo radar.
An intelligence organization would use a photo radar station to measure the number, type, and speed distribution of cars travelling down a stretch of road. The resulting report could be used by other organizations to decide whether to widen the road, to maintain the road more or less frequently based on truck traffic, or to see how many people respect carpool lanes or speed limits.
We all know why cops would use such a device. Extraction of revenue, control of driver behavior, and 10 miles down the road, the search-and-seizure of "couriers" who fit "profiles" like driving at 54 MPH in a 55 zone at 3:00am with out-of-state licence plates.
Both organizations would go through their photo radar records if a Ryder truck blew up a federal building near the highway, in order to make life hell for the bastard.
But the intelligence-operated radar trap wouldn't be trying to justify its existence by annoying everyone else during non-crisis situations.
> The vast majority of calls to tech support are from people too stupid to comprehend the fucking manual even if they bothered to read it.
Hell yes. Asking the user the equivalent of "is it plugged in" is an appropriate first-stab at almost all customer-level problems.
I'd like to see these @home documents/policies in context.
If the context is "assume it's the customer's problem when you pick up the phone, but be willing to escalate upon presentation of evidence", I have no problem with the policy.
If the context is "even when the customer demonstrates more clue than you, and cites evidence that the problem is not on his end, adamantly refuse to escalate and continue to blame the user", I've got a big problem.
With the documents, it's impossible to determine what @home really meant by "suspect the customer first".
Case in point - numerous customers on my dialup POP had experience mysterious dropped connections and latency (unable to even ping or traceroute the ISP's DNS server, followed by a disconnect in 2-3 minutes). I assumed I was one of them and responded to a general invitation from one of their senior tech support folks to report such problems directly to him.
The senior Bob mailed back and said that after looking at the logs, whatever I'd been seeing wasn't appearing on his end, and looked like normal disconnections, instead of the problem he was trying to debug. I was skeptical (as my symptoms matched that of the other complainants), but when he suggested that I try removing all other phones from the line to eliminate the possibility of retrains screwing up my results, I gave it a shot, and my problem went away. Solid 49333.
Sometimes even for a clued-in user, the problem is still on the user's end. And I learned that V.90 is still young. And I can now tell with 90% accuracy whether my roomie has a phone plugged in based on my initial connect speed.
Of course, this ISP also had sufficient clue that a few weeks later, when a traceroute revealed that all packets to the news server were either vanishing or going into a loop, the entry-level Bob I spoke with was able to say that "yeah, I'll escalate, that looks like a router problem". He may not have understood what the router problem was, or even what a router was, but at least he had the clue not to ask me to reinstall Windoze.
> They probably agreed to pay the $100 Mil, because it's cheaper than hiring the legal staff to >
fight off DC's future legislation. It's easier just to pay 'em off than to fight it out in court.
Based on the legal cluelessness demonstrated by DC's "if we scream loud enough, maybe the hackers won't notice we don't have a leg to stand on" letters, can you blame 'em?
I mean, when your defence against hackers is the legal equivalent of a wet noodle, what defence could you possibly have against a patent infringement lawsuit?
"Hackers? Yeah, we'll threaten 'em with bogus letters, they'll all... huh? What's this in the mail?"
"Oh shit, Fred! These guys actually know what they're talking about when they mention intellectual property! We might as well save ourselves the embarassment and cough up another $100M of the shareholders' money."
Have we established that the "burn-in" does anything to the CPU, and not the thermal grease?
Suppose you've got a few small bubbles in your layer of goop, or the heatsink isn't *quite* perfectly attached. What does burn-in do? Heats stuff, lets it slosh around, and subjects it to several hours of fan vibration.
End result is a somewhat better-mated heatsink/chip interface and greater stability at marginal (read: overclocked) conditions.
If my theory is correct, this effect will vary more as a function of die/cap size (e.g. old-sk00l Pentiums, K6-2 and K6-3 chips will show different results than new-sk00l "wow, look at that flip-chip!" designs).
If not, hey, I'm just blowin' smoke. Problem with that "theory" is, of course, it's essentially untestable, since so many other things have changed besides the "big honkin' mating area" and "little dinky mating area" variables.
FWIW, I do my thermal testing at high voltages to give myself an idea of the worst-case heat generation during normal fan operation. After a day or two of CPU-"burnin" later, I then overclock, and back off voltage until it's unstable. I then bump the voltage up by 0.05 or thereabouts and reconfirm stability.
I don't view the burnin as a way to improve the performance of an overclocked CPU, but I do view it as a great way to test stability.
>> [SS is] the stealthiest tax around (I dare you to find the numbers on your 1040!)
>
> Eh? That's like saying income taxes are stealthy because they're not on your hunting license. SS Taxes aren't handled by the IRS, so it's unlikely they would be on an IRS form.
Yeah - but just try not withholding 'em. IRS will find out real quick and tell you exactly how much you owe:-)
I've seen the Canadian tax forms - the Canada Ponz^H^H^H^Hension Plan is their equivalent of the SS pyramid. And their tax forms show exactly what you're paying.
The point being, how come the 1.45% Medicare tax shows up on your 1040 but your SS tax doesn't? I'm not saying that SSA == IRS, (or even that it should== IRS) but it seems pretty obvious to me that neither political party has any interest in having light shone on this tax grab.
Now I'm getting curious... Let's take a single filer, and assume he/she is in the 31% federal tax bracket for funds between ~$60-$120K. Suppose we (being The Gummint) decide we wanna gouge this guy for $744 over four years in income taxes, while keeping the SS taxes the same. How much of a hike would we have to put in his/her income taxes?
That means we take an extra $744 out of the money made between $61400 (where the 31% bracket begins) and $80400 (where the SS tax now ends) using income tax only. If we create a new "tax bracket" for $61400-80400, what rate would it have to be?
- Presently, Joe Taxpayer pays 31% on (80400-61400) = 31% of $19000 = 5890.
- We want to gouge him for $5890+744 = 6634.
- He must therefore pay 6634/19000 = 34.9%.
Damn, that's within epsilon of the 36% the "rich" pay on income between $128K and $278K. Probably in excess if we assume another year or two of SS tax hikes or Bush actually following through on his income tax cuts.
To paint this in the worst possible light (hey, it is an election year, politically-loaded comparisons are the "in thing"!), if you made ~$80K for the past four years, the SS tax hike they've imposed on you is comparable to being in the same tax bracket as those earning $250,000.
People on the right should argue for SS reform because SS is a pyramid scheme. People on the left should argue for SS reform because it's the most regressive tax in the system. (The nature of the desired reforms will be a function of which side you choose, but both sides probably agree that the system as it stands is terminally fuX0red.)
> [Most tech workers - won't see Gore's cuts, will see Bush's cuts]
Couldn't have said it better myself. Gore is using the rhetoric of class warfare to mask the fact that his "cut" is merely a complication of the tax code - a series of if/then statements crammed into a chunk of code that's already unmaintainable.
Bush, whatever else folks may about him, at least provides a tax cut plan that's intelligible and gives broad-based tax relief. He changes a few constants (the brackets and ther tax rates), and leaves the rest of the code alone.
> [Bush vs. Gore on giving younger workers the option to invest part of their SS taxes in the markets, as opposed to the governmen IOU "fund"]
1998: 6.2% on your first $68400 ($4240).
1999: 6.2% on your first $72600 ($4501), up 6.14% from '98
2000: 6.2% on your first $76200 ($4724), up 4.95% from '99
2001: 6.2% on your first $80400 ($4984), up 5.50% from 2000
In the past four years alone, the SS tax has gone up by $744.
If you run your own business, double the 6.2% to 12.4%. That's goddamn near $1500 taken straight outa your wallet.
The Social Security pyramid scheme is imploding NOW. Is it any wonder that the limits on earnings subject to SS tax have been increasing at more than double the rate of inflation?
It's the stealthiest tax around (I dare you to find the numbers on your 1040!), and it's going up faster than any tax out there.
Given the rates at which the SS tax is increasing, and given the time required for the phase-in of Bush's income tax cuts, most techies will be very hard-pressed to keep their overall tax payments at a constant level.
Under Gore, I shudder to think how far it'll go. No income tax cut, continuing explosive increase in SS tax. And the government funnels all my SS taxes into the pyramid scheme.
Under Bush, I get an income tax cut that might keep pace with the SS tax increases, and I get to keep at least some of those SS dollars out of the black hole.
If you're a techie and you're voting on taxes, the choice is clear.
Naturally, if you're not voting on the issue of taxes, well, disregard this whole post.
But whatever you're basing it on, get out there and vote. Unlike the past two or three elections around here, the outcome has not yet been determined, and there are substantial economic policy differences even between the two mainstream candidates.
And if you live in a swing state, one look at the electoral college map makes it damn obvious that your vote counts a hell of a lot more than it has in the past 10-15 years.
> For some unknown reason, most of my spam is written in Chinese, sent from China and Taiwan. [... ] I'm tempted to put them all on my
"Falun Gong Society for the Promotion of Counter-Revolutionary Activities" mailing list.
As seen on news.admin.net-abuse.email:
If you own the domain, configure sendmail to bounce connections from.cn domains with "550 Free Tibet JUNAQ DJQVD". The last two bits are randomness translated into bits of ASCII, and you can set up a cron job to change the random blocks every few hours or so. The result is "crypto" that the.cn government will never be able to crack, which is therefore bound to attract a lot of attention.
If you're more courageous, reply to the spammer. "Message received. Funds received and transferred to Falun Gong account as per your instructions. Sorry can't send back mail with PGP, I'm on friend's computer. Bye."
The Chinese government wields a mighty LART. If just 1% of American hosts receiving relay attacks from.cn machines did the "550 Free Tibet [crypto block]" trick, the Chinese government would wake up and solve the problem for us.
> Fatbrain. In blatant violation of my preference settings. When challenging them on it, they played ignorant.
s/played ignorant/lied/g
0) Spam is theft.
1) Spammers lie.
2) If you think a spammer's telling the truth, see Rule #1.
3) Spammers are st00pid.
My story? A major online travel agency did the same goddamn thing to me. I fired off LARTs to investor relations and corporate, and got what appeared to be a Real Reply from one of their senior marketroids, apologizing profusely and telling me he'd remove me from their database.
One month later, spammed again. More LARTS, quoting the earlier email exchange in full, and pointing out that further spams would result in phone calls and a *VERY* well-documented RBL nomination. The mails were ignored, but at least I haven't been spammed again. Knock on silicon.
Remember Farmer Tackhead's advice:
If it comes out of a cow's ass, it's cowshit.
If it comes out of a horse's ass, it's horseshit.
If it comes out of a marketer's mouth, it's bullshit.
I've never done business with that travel agency again. And I never started to do business with Spamazon. All my book orders go through Powell's.
(All my travel bookings go through someone who has (yet) to spam me. Sadly, this online travel agency deals with me through a disposable mailbox at yahoo.com. They suffer due to the lies spewed by their competitors.)
This, and not credit fraud, is what's gonna kill e-commerce.
> [the bill describes my.mp3.com's business model]
> Just a quick side curiousity, who has the patent on this?
Hey, who cares! I mean, either...
(a) Nobody does, in which case the House of Representatives applies for the patent itself, allowing the government to fund itself through royalties, or...
(b) Someone else owns the patent, sues the pants off the government, and takes over the country. In this case...
- If you're a fan of Bush or Browne, you've gotta admit that a private corporation would be more efficient than our elected representuhtives.
- If you're a fan of Gore or Nader, you'd be pissed, but you wouldn't see any difference other than that it'd be a little more honest than the current situation, in which we still pretend the corporate sector doesn't own the gummint!
> A curious point, for me, is the number of spam pieces sent to usernames that not only don't
exist, but never existed [... ] plausible-looking
usernames.
Consult (deja.com:-) in news.admin.net-abuse.email for "dictionary attack".
Both chickenboner ("guy in a trailer park) and mainsleaze (i.e. "legitimate" - at least, companies that *pretend* to be legit) marketroids are spamming any plausible username at any SMTP server they can get their hands on.
The goal is, as your logs show, to cram spam down the throats of users who've never even used email. After all, the spammer just ignores the bounce, and your box has to consume bandwidth dealing with it. It's no skin off the spammer's nose if your box dies from the load.
If you're seeing this, report it as a DOS attack. Because frankly, that's what it is.
> Occam's Razor assumes that a significant amount of data from which to draw a >conclusion is present. Otherwise, the "simplest explanation" of why volcanoes erupt would still > be "because God is mad at us."
The reason that's not a "simple" explanation is that it presupposes the existence of an omnipotent (or at least volcanopotent:) being.
The reason I believe the doomsayers of cellphone radiation do not posess the "simpler" explanation (in Occam's sense) is because they also seem to presuppose the existence of mechanisms solely to support a theory - whereas the data do not yet support said theory.
> I think the poster was more supporting caution until more results are in than Chicken-Littling.
Where one draws the line between caution and Chicken-Littling is a matter of personal preference. I use data to determine where I draw the line. Others, apparently, do not.
All that said, risk assessment is one of those things where the rules of probability tend to be thrown out the window.
(Canonical examples - some people feel safer behind the wheel of a car than on an airplane. Still others will refuse to board an airplane altogether, but laugh off the asteroid threat as pie-in-the-sky doomsaying. People won't play a 50/50 game where you put down $1.00 to win $2.00, but will spend buckets on lottery tickets. Go fig.)
Things I Never Knew About Lara Croft
on
Trigger Happy
·
· Score: 3
> the impact of the legendary Lara Croft, the pistol-toting,
> ponytailed, hotpants-and-shades digital star of the l996 game,
Lara was wearing hotpants and shades? And she had a ponytail?
[/me runs the game]
...well, I'll be damned. Up until now, I never noticed!
Re:Article states that Usenet unit IS profitable
on
Deja For Sale
·
· Score: 2
>The company believes the profitable Usenet business unit [...]
Then we were right all along, and deja.com is truly fuckedcompany.com material.
The reason their USENET archive was profitable (fuck, just think how many banner impressions get generated for a typical query - and I'm talking Deja Classic, not the "new" mode) was because it was useful, and people used it.
I'm actually very relieved to see that they'll be selling the USENET archive to someone who gives a damn about USENET. Deja sure as hell didn't.
And that the money-losing "product review" site will go to someone dumb enough to think that when I'm searching for "Frobozznitz 1996 specs", I want some FrobCo marketer's spiel about the latest and greatest, when the reality is merely that I found the circuit board for a Frobozznitz in a surplus store, the dates on the chips indicate it was made in 1996, and I wanna find out what it was!
I just hope that the buyer of the USENET archive gets the full source tree for their code, so they can go back and dump the ass-sucking "frames" look, the nonproportional text fonts, the goofy colors (ugly shit-beige on white!?!) the tracking URLs (www.deja.com/wewatch/whatlinksyouclick/thenweredi rectyouto/http://www.eatatjoes.com/oldfr obs), the spammish URLs (http://www.frobcoscompetitor.com) inserted into USENET posters' posts, and all the marketing shite they added to Deja's code over the past 3 years.
> [ snip story of white pol in Deep South using the bigotry of his constituents to advance the cause of civil rights]
Problem is, in the Age of the Internet, you can't get away with that anymore. If you try to pander to opposing groups, one of the two sides is gonna figure out they're bein' snowed.
(Oh, wait a minute, Gore can get away with "talkin' da ebonics 2 da homiez" and "speaking white to the white folks" - changing his figures speech to suit the audience - so maybe I stand corrected.:) (In fairness, Bush likely does the same thing.)
> don't believe the hype, believe the physics, but you must also ALWAYS believe >
what empirical evidence has shown to be true, especially if it flies in the face of known principles >
of biology, physics, etc
Abso-friggin-lutely.
I agree that the studies on cellphone radiation are useful - and if the weight of the evidence changes in favor of the hypothesis that it's harmful, then I'll change my opinion.
Your comment on "especially" if the evidence flies in the face of established knowledge also rings true. It's been said that "the only way to see a revolutionary advance in physics has been to wait for all the old physicists to die".
Einstein spent the latter part of his life refusing to accept quantum physics. Scientists are people too.
Slashdot Mirror
*ROFLMAO*
As if it weren't already obvious this were a troll ;)
I think the guy's hearing with his eyes, or using a totally different set of music than what I listen to.
If you wanna hear how dog-fuckingly-shit Blade is, encode the first 10 seconds of New Order's "Blue Monday" (a basic drum machine emitting a sound common to much new-wave, dance, and industrial from around 1980 to the present day) at 128/160/192 using Blade, Fraun, and LAME.
Blade will be unlistenable at 128, shit at 160, and you may hear artifacts at 192 if you know what to listen for. LAME and Fraun sound sweet, even at 128.
Similar results can be achieved with a heavy guitar track, e.g. Def Leppard or other 80's "hair metal" bands.
I don't have data on string quartets - but for non-classical music, Blade blows steaming piles of donkey dick.
> How in the heck is this an aesthetic move for AOL?
Broader question: Given that definition, how in the heck is the word "aesthetic" in any way, shape, or form related to anything AOL throws at its users?
My conspiracy theory: Bill wants to put the final nail in Netscape/Mozilla coffin, and associating Netscape with AOL 6.0's b0rken browser is that nail. His mole at AOL must be highly-paid.
So all you Bay Area types who want to get in a weekend of retro gaming will have your chance to see it too, without the trip to PA!
Sadly, there are. The FAA would get medieval on your ass if you tried it. Lasers and pilots' eyeballs don't mix.
But if I had the $10K to buy the laser projection system, it just might be worth the fines.
A possible solution to the FAA problem would be to do it on a boat in international waters, far away from major air traffic routes.
As cool as the PS2 is, I'd spend $5K as a down payment on LaserMAME before I bought a PS/2!
1) As an AC has already pointed out (albeit in an inflammatory way), the suggestion that NSA break your crypto was made by the author of the posting, not by the FBI official at the NANOG meeting.
2) If you were NSA, and you had the ability to break strong crypto, you would never risk exposing that fact by doing so on behalf of FBI, where evidence indicating that you had done so would become part of a public record in the resulting court case.
Shotgun's got it right with his aircraft-carrier analogy. The ability (and information regarding the existence or non-existence of the ability) to break strong crypto is a big gun, and will remain a big gun for the forseeable future. It will not be used for the kinds of routine surveillance of citizens that FBI is attempting to implement with Carnivore.
> [
> when things get bad enough, the people will rise up and overthrow the ruler/government that is oppressing them
"If there is hope, it is in the proles."
- Winston Smith
Didn't exactly work out that way in 1984, did it?
If you believe "popular uprisings" against the government will even happen in a properly-managed police state, (let alone actually succeed in stopping oppression!), you haven't read much Orwell ;-)
Problem is, management often sees these goals as being in conflict.
If your goal is to "close more calls", then you blame the user whether it's the user's fault or not. "Sorry, you're running Linux. That must be why our modems are returning a busy signal. Buh-bye."
If your goal is to "solve more user problems", then you have to cough up the bucks and hire enough clued-in second-tier support to... well... solve the user problems.
There's overlap - "blame the user the first time" is a good strategy because often it's the user's fault, and by asking them to "wiggle the power cord", you can solve user problems and and process more calls per hour.
But more often than not, the goals of "close calls quick" and "solve user problems" are in conflict. Worse - management often assumes they're in conflict even when they're not. This is what leads to serious customer frustration: "Is it plugged in? Is the modem turned on?" "Look, drone, I'm typing to you in an IRC channel. It'd be pretty fscking hard to do that without having the computer plugged in and the modem turned on now, wouldn't it?"
Agreed. NEAR is an awesome bit of work. Though the mission came extremely close to disaster. The reason we're reading about this in 2000 is because they damn near lost the spacecraft on first approach, and executed a miraculous recovery. It delayed the mission a year (waiting for the next orbit), but it didn't cost us much in terms of scientific return at all.
It's also a great demonstration of the fact that if you're in orbit around something - thinking of NEAR, Eros, and the Sun - whether you throw an object "up" or "down" makes no difference, it'll intersect your position next orbit.
That is, if you want to go "up" or "down" and you're in orbit, you thrust "forward" or "back". The EROS recovery was basically "screw it, don't waste fuel chasing the rock this year, because if we just relax, Newton will put us back on target for another encounter next year")
Believe me, if Eros had holes in it, as opposed to craters, I'd be phoning my broker with SELL orders, and then practicing up on my Wing Commander and other 3D space-combat game skills.
Cripes, didn't anybody here read Ender's Game? The buggers are out there, I tell you! They're out there!
Thanks. Like I've said before. I trust NSA and CIA way the hell more than I do FBI.
NSA and CIA are intelligence organizations. They are tasked to generate intelligence -- to process data and generate information useful to decisionmakers. The higher the signal-to-noise ratio, the better the quality of the intelligence. Sure, they may capture everything you do, but they're not interested in it. The data comes in, but its only value is that it can be transmuted to more useful data for processing by decisionmakers.
FBI is an enforcement organization. Their mandate is to generate arrests, not information. Data-gathering enables them to generate more arrests by placing a larger segment of the population under surveillance and then enforcing the laws as they choose.
To illustrate the difference, I'll fabricate an analogy out of another bit of automated surveillance technology: photo radar.
Both organizations would go through their photo radar records if a Ryder truck blew up a federal building near the highway, in order to make life hell for the bastard.
But the intelligence-operated radar trap wouldn't be trying to justify its existence by annoying everyone else during non-crisis situations.
Hell yes. Asking the user the equivalent of "is it plugged in" is an appropriate first-stab at almost all customer-level problems.
I'd like to see these @home documents/policies in context.
If the context is "assume it's the customer's problem when you pick up the phone, but be willing to escalate upon presentation of evidence", I have no problem with the policy.
If the context is "even when the customer demonstrates more clue than you, and cites evidence that the problem is not on his end, adamantly refuse to escalate and continue to blame the user", I've got a big problem.
With the documents, it's impossible to determine what @home really meant by "suspect the customer first".
Case in point - numerous customers on my dialup POP had experience mysterious dropped connections and latency (unable to even ping or traceroute the ISP's DNS server, followed by a disconnect in 2-3 minutes). I assumed I was one of them and responded to a general invitation from one of their senior tech support folks to report such problems directly to him.
The senior Bob mailed back and said that after looking at the logs, whatever I'd been seeing wasn't appearing on his end, and looked like normal disconnections, instead of the problem he was trying to debug. I was skeptical (as my symptoms matched that of the other complainants), but when he suggested that I try removing all other phones from the line to eliminate the possibility of retrains screwing up my results, I gave it a shot, and my problem went away. Solid 49333.
Sometimes even for a clued-in user, the problem is still on the user's end. And I learned that V.90 is still young. And I can now tell with 90% accuracy whether my roomie has a phone plugged in based on my initial connect speed.
Of course, this ISP also had sufficient clue that a few weeks later, when a traceroute revealed that all packets to the news server were either vanishing or going into a loop, the entry-level Bob I spoke with was able to say that "yeah, I'll escalate, that looks like a router problem". He may not have understood what the router problem was, or even what a router was, but at least he had the clue not to ask me to reinstall Windoze.
> fight off DC's future legislation. It's easier just to pay 'em off than to fight it out in court.
Based on the legal cluelessness demonstrated by DC's "if we scream loud enough, maybe the hackers won't notice we don't have a leg to stand on" letters, can you blame 'em?
I mean, when your defence against hackers is the legal equivalent of a wet noodle, what defence could you possibly have against a patent infringement lawsuit?
"Hackers? Yeah, we'll threaten 'em with bogus letters, they'll all... huh? What's this in the mail?"
"Oh shit, Fred! These guys actually know what they're talking about when they mention intellectual property! We might as well save ourselves the embarassment and cough up another $100M of the shareholders' money."
Have we established that the "burn-in" does anything to the CPU, and not the thermal grease?
Suppose you've got a few small bubbles in your layer of goop, or the heatsink isn't *quite* perfectly attached. What does burn-in do? Heats stuff, lets it slosh around, and subjects it to several hours of fan vibration.
End result is a somewhat better-mated heatsink/chip interface and greater stability at marginal (read: overclocked) conditions.
If my theory is correct, this effect will vary more as a function of die/cap size (e.g. old-sk00l Pentiums, K6-2 and K6-3 chips will show different results than new-sk00l "wow, look at that flip-chip!" designs).
If not, hey, I'm just blowin' smoke. Problem with that "theory" is, of course, it's essentially untestable, since so many other things have changed besides the "big honkin' mating area" and "little dinky mating area" variables.
FWIW, I do my thermal testing at high voltages to give myself an idea of the worst-case heat generation during normal fan operation. After a day or two of CPU-"burnin" later, I then overclock, and back off voltage until it's unstable. I then bump the voltage up by 0.05 or thereabouts and reconfirm stability.
I don't view the burnin as a way to improve the performance of an overclocked CPU, but I do view it as a great way to test stability.
>
> Eh? That's like saying income taxes are stealthy because they're not on your hunting license. SS Taxes aren't handled by the IRS, so it's unlikely they would be on an IRS form.
Yeah - but just try not withholding 'em. IRS will find out real quick and tell you exactly how much you owe :-)
I've seen the Canadian tax forms - the Canada Ponz^H^H^H^Hension Plan is their equivalent of the SS pyramid. And their tax forms show exactly what you're paying. The point being, how come the 1.45% Medicare tax shows up on your 1040 but your SS tax doesn't? I'm not saying that SSA == IRS, (or even that it should== IRS) but it seems pretty obvious to me that neither political party has any interest in having light shone on this tax grab.
Now I'm getting curious... Let's take a single filer, and assume he/she is in the 31% federal tax bracket for funds between ~$60-$120K. Suppose we (being The Gummint) decide we wanna gouge this guy for $744 over four years in income taxes, while keeping the SS taxes the same. How much of a hike would we have to put in his/her income taxes?
That means we take an extra $744 out of the money made between $61400 (where the 31% bracket begins) and $80400 (where the SS tax now ends) using income tax only. If we create a new "tax bracket" for $61400-80400, what rate would it have to be?
- Presently, Joe Taxpayer pays 31% on (80400-61400) = 31% of $19000 = 5890.
- We want to gouge him for $5890+744 = 6634.
- He must therefore pay 6634/19000 = 34.9%.
Damn, that's within epsilon of the 36% the "rich" pay on income between $128K and $278K. Probably in excess if we assume another year or two of SS tax hikes or Bush actually following through on his income tax cuts.
To paint this in the worst possible light (hey, it is an election year, politically-loaded comparisons are the "in thing"!), if you made ~$80K for the past four years, the SS tax hike they've imposed on you is comparable to being in the same tax bracket as those earning $250,000.
People on the right should argue for SS reform because SS is a pyramid scheme. People on the left should argue for SS reform because it's the most regressive tax in the system. (The nature of the desired reforms will be a function of which side you choose, but both sides probably agree that the system as it stands is terminally fuX0red.)
Couldn't have said it better myself. Gore is using the rhetoric of class warfare to mask the fact that his "cut" is merely a complication of the tax code - a series of if/then statements crammed into a chunk of code that's already unmaintainable.
Bush, whatever else folks may about him, at least provides a tax cut plan that's intelligible and gives broad-based tax relief. He changes a few constants (the brackets and ther tax rates), and leaves the rest of the code alone.
> [Bush vs. Gore on giving younger workers the option to invest part of their SS taxes in the markets, as opposed to the governmen IOU "fund"]
1998: 6.2% on your first $68400 ($4240).
1999: 6.2% on your first $72600 ($4501), up 6.14% from '98
2000: 6.2% on your first $76200 ($4724), up 4.95% from '99
2001: 6.2% on your first $80400 ($4984), up 5.50% from 2000
In the past four years alone, the SS tax has gone up by $744.
If you run your own business, double the 6.2% to 12.4%. That's goddamn near $1500 taken straight outa your wallet.
The Social Security pyramid scheme is imploding NOW. Is it any wonder that the limits on earnings subject to SS tax have been increasing at more than double the rate of inflation?
It's the stealthiest tax around (I dare you to find the numbers on your 1040!), and it's going up faster than any tax out there.
Given the rates at which the SS tax is increasing, and given the time required for the phase-in of Bush's income tax cuts, most techies will be very hard-pressed to keep their overall tax payments at a constant level.
Under Gore, I shudder to think how far it'll go. No income tax cut, continuing explosive increase in SS tax. And the government funnels all my SS taxes into the pyramid scheme.
Under Bush, I get an income tax cut that might keep pace with the SS tax increases, and I get to keep at least some of those SS dollars out of the black hole.
If you're a techie and you're voting on taxes, the choice is clear.
Naturally, if you're not voting on the issue of taxes, well, disregard this whole post.
But whatever you're basing it on, get out there and vote. Unlike the past two or three elections around here, the outcome has not yet been determined, and there are substantial economic policy differences even between the two mainstream candidates.
And if you live in a swing state, one look at the electoral college map makes it damn obvious that your vote counts a hell of a lot more than it has in the past 10-15 years.
As seen on news.admin.net-abuse.email:
If you own the domain, configure sendmail to bounce connections from .cn domains with "550 Free Tibet JUNAQ DJQVD". The last two bits are randomness translated into bits of ASCII, and you can set up a cron job to change the random blocks every few hours or so. The result is "crypto" that the .cn government will never be able to crack, which is therefore bound to attract a lot of attention.
If you're more courageous, reply to the spammer. "Message received. Funds received and transferred to Falun Gong account as per your instructions. Sorry can't send back mail with PGP, I'm on friend's computer. Bye."
The Chinese government wields a mighty LART. If just 1% of American hosts receiving relay attacks from .cn machines did the "550 Free Tibet [crypto block]" trick, the Chinese government would wake up and solve the problem for us.
s/played ignorant/lied/g
0) Spam is theft.
1) Spammers lie.
2) If you think a spammer's telling the truth, see Rule #1.
3) Spammers are st00pid.
My story? A major online travel agency did the same goddamn thing to me. I fired off LARTs to investor relations and corporate, and got what appeared to be a Real Reply from one of their senior marketroids, apologizing profusely and telling me he'd remove me from their database.
One month later, spammed again. More LARTS, quoting the earlier email exchange in full, and pointing out that further spams would result in phone calls and a *VERY* well-documented RBL nomination. The mails were ignored, but at least I haven't been spammed again. Knock on silicon.
Remember Farmer Tackhead's advice:
If it comes out of a cow's ass, it's cowshit.
If it comes out of a horse's ass, it's horseshit.
If it comes out of a marketer's mouth, it's bullshit.
I've never done business with that travel agency again. And I never started to do business with Spamazon. All my book orders go through Powell's.
(All my travel bookings go through someone who has (yet) to spam me. Sadly, this online travel agency deals with me through a disposable mailbox at yahoo.com. They suffer due to the lies spewed by their competitors.)
This, and not credit fraud, is what's gonna kill e-commerce.
> Just a quick side curiousity, who has the patent on this?
Hey, who cares! I mean, either...
(a) Nobody does, in which case the House of Representatives applies for the patent itself, allowing the government to fund itself through royalties, or...
(b) Someone else owns the patent, sues the pants off the government, and takes over the country. In this case...
Win/win/win situation as I see it ;-)
Consult (deja.com :-) in news.admin.net-abuse.email for "dictionary attack".
Both chickenboner ("guy in a trailer park) and mainsleaze (i.e. "legitimate" - at least, companies that *pretend* to be legit) marketroids are spamming any plausible username at any SMTP server they can get their hands on.
The goal is, as your logs show, to cram spam down the throats of users who've never even used email. After all, the spammer just ignores the bounce, and your box has to consume bandwidth dealing with it. It's no skin off the spammer's nose if your box dies from the load.
If you're seeing this, report it as a DOS attack. Because frankly, that's what it is.
>conclusion is present. Otherwise, the "simplest explanation" of why volcanoes erupt would still
> be "because God is mad at us."
The reason that's not a "simple" explanation is that it presupposes the existence of an omnipotent (or at least volcanopotent :) being.
The reason I believe the doomsayers of cellphone radiation do not posess the "simpler" explanation (in Occam's sense) is because they also seem to presuppose the existence of mechanisms solely to support a theory - whereas the data do not yet support said theory.
> I think the poster was more supporting caution until more results are in than Chicken-Littling.
Where one draws the line between caution and Chicken-Littling is a matter of personal preference. I use data to determine where I draw the line. Others, apparently, do not.
All that said, risk assessment is one of those things where the rules of probability tend to be thrown out the window.
(Canonical examples - some people feel safer behind the wheel of a car than on an airplane. Still others will refuse to board an airplane altogether, but laugh off the asteroid threat as pie-in-the-sky doomsaying. People won't play a 50/50 game where you put down $1.00 to win $2.00, but will spend buckets on lottery tickets. Go fig.)
> ponytailed, hotpants-and-shades digital star of the l996 game,
Lara was wearing hotpants and shades? And she had a ponytail?
[/me runs the game]
Then we were right all along, and deja.com is truly fuckedcompany.com material.
The reason their USENET archive was profitable (fuck, just think how many banner impressions get generated for a typical query - and I'm talking Deja Classic, not the "new" mode) was because it was useful, and people used it.
I'm actually very relieved to see that they'll be selling the USENET archive to someone who gives a damn about USENET. Deja sure as hell didn't.
And that the money-losing "product review" site will go to someone dumb enough to think that when I'm searching for "Frobozznitz 1996 specs", I want some FrobCo marketer's spiel about the latest and greatest, when the reality is merely that I found the circuit board for a Frobozznitz in a surplus store, the dates on the chips indicate it was made in 1996, and I wanna find out what it was!
I just hope that the buyer of the USENET archive gets the full source tree for their code, so they can go back and dump the ass-sucking "frames" look, the nonproportional text fonts, the goofy colors (ugly shit-beige on white!?!) the tracking URLs (www.deja.com/wewatch/whatlinksyouclick/thenweredi rectyouto/http://www.eatatjoes.com/oldfr obs), the spammish URLs (http://www.frobcoscompetitor.com) inserted into USENET posters' posts, and all the marketing shite they added to Deja's code over the past 3 years.
A USENET archive. Profitable. Kick ass.
Problem is, in the Age of the Internet, you can't get away with that anymore. If you try to pander to opposing groups, one of the two sides is gonna figure out they're bein' snowed.
(Oh, wait a minute, Gore can get away with "talkin' da ebonics 2 da homiez" and "speaking white to the white folks" - changing his figures speech to suit the audience - so maybe I stand corrected. :) (In fairness, Bush likely does the same thing.)
> what empirical evidence has shown to be true, especially if it flies in the face of known principles
> of biology, physics, etc
Abso-friggin-lutely.
I agree that the studies on cellphone radiation are useful - and if the weight of the evidence changes in favor of the hypothesis that it's harmful, then I'll change my opinion.
Your comment on "especially" if the evidence flies in the face of established knowledge also rings true. It's been said that "the only way to see a revolutionary advance in physics has been to wait for all the old physicists to die".
Einstein spent the latter part of his life refusing to accept quantum physics. Scientists are people too.