The admin somehow or another ran a finger query on the shell machine I was logged onto and sent me email demanding to know who I was and why I was connected to his machine.
This is a sign they copied the "how to log suspicious connections" man page info associated with TCP wrappers (I forget which man page exactly - inetd? hosts.allow? hosts.deny?). The example given tries to safe_finger any detected rogue connection except other fingers (which could cause and endless loop of mutual fingering to start).
I don't know if it is a good or a bad thing (in terms of what this/. article is about) that the example usually fails to work on Linux distributions I've used, notably Red Hat, because TCP wrappers was compiled with options that need a different format.
But: To anyone else out there that uses the example in hosts.deny - guess what? Because TCP wrappers errors out on that line you let the connection in as a result - it never gets to the usual "ALL: ALL: DENY" at the end!
Like the poster says, "There are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots."
Working as a consultant for an ISP for a while, I had to handle complaints about perfectly legitimate ICMP Unreachable Fragmentation Required messages being returned, by nimrod sysadmins who apparently programmed their routers and firewalls by the "ride madly in all directions" method. ("Don't Fragment" bit set? Duh. Expect them then...)
Starbucks be damned, keep Starbuck named "Starbuck".
"Holloa! Starbuck's astir," said the rigger. "He's a lively chief mate that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn to." And so saying he went on deck, and we followed.-- GOING ABOARD, Chapter 21, Moby Dick
The one thing that drove me crazy about that show was that they just made up units of measure for time, and they never made any sense. Starbuck would say something like, "I'll be back in four Centons." What the hell is a centon? Is it an hour? A day? I was only 11 when the show came out, and that bothered the hell out of me.
Makes perfect sense to me. More sense than the ST* series' still using light-years for measuring distance in a Federation made up of a multitude of species, planets, et cetra, all of which would have their own different "year". Even "kiloseconds" or "megaseconds" would have made more sense, though it would have deprived Spock and Data of the fun of dividing by 60, 3600, 86400, and whateverthehell a solar year is in seconds when answering questions irritatingly precisely.
Don't get me started on Star Wars' Hans Solo using "parsecs" as a measure of time.
...start with yourself & ride your bike to work a couple times a week.. Take the train or bus once in a while.
Yeah, be a good little worker bee. Otherwise Uncle Sam will have to give you a spanking.
Heh. I was watching THX1138 yesterday... I think I'd rather be one of the guys who gets to drive the dual turbine cars than one of the drones who walks along in lockstep and is too brainwashed to consider using anything but their habitual elevator even when it is announcing it is out of service...
Re:Vigilantes aren't all bad.
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 1
Nope, generally it is whites killing whites, and blacks killing blacks. What's ironic is that blacks who kill other blacks tend to use supposed oppression by a white-dominated society as an excuse.
Re:The only thing that helps is taxes
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
A truck is great for transportation in a rural area if you only have a few people, but if you have to move more than a few people, an SUV may be your only option on rough roads.
Not to mention that it's hard to carpool in a "ecologically aware" vehicle the size of a tin of Altoids.
Re:Vigilantes aren't all bad.
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 3
The classic image of vigilantes involves ravening hordes of ignorant southerners intent on lynching some poor innocent for the crime of offending local sensibilities. However, history tells us that this is not the case. Furthermore, we have interesting statistics which tells us that in situations where guns are fired, armed citizens are significantly less likely to shoot the wrong person than police officers.
BTW, some of the first gun control legislation in the USA was designed specifically to prevent blacks freed from slavery from owning guns with which they could defend themselves against such attacks.
Re:Physical Attacks Are Not Good
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
[...]of note is this sentence in one article: "Under Texas law, an accident due to the commission of another crime still amounts to murder, but not capital murder."
I'm not certain, but I think specific case of arson, proving an "intent to kill" is not always required for it to be a capitol crime, if there are in fact people killed in the offence. And if the building is inhabited, those inside don't necessarily have to die to qualify the arsonist for the death penalty either. I'm not sure what the technicalities are in Texas in particular.
Even where there is no death penalty allowed by state law, a citizen stopping an act of arson using deadly force is usually perfectly legal though, if you have reason to believe there could be someone endangered.
Re:Physical Attacks Are Not Good
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
If a fireman dies trying to fight the blaze, it's called capital murder (in many US jurisdictions, as far as I know in all that have the death penalty at all).
And "gosh, I didn't mean that to happen" isn't a defense, BTW.
Just don't bitch and moan if you get sentenced to ten years in prison for those actions - no doubt you would be proud to serve the time you'd earned, and serve as an example to your fellows, right?
Or in the case of attempted arson, like the examples given, to be shot and killed by someone defending society against you. Few people have the privilege to be true martyrs...
Only reasonable response...
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
If you are going to get an SUV or another product similar to one produced by a terrorist-targeted industry, buy it from the victims of such tactics.
Mr Jalin: Oh fireflies, I thought you said bacon. (she hits him again) All right, all right. What's he charge then?
Mrs Jalin: It's free.
Mr Jalin: Ooh! Where does he want us to sit?
Mrs Jalin: (calling through the door) He says yes.
(Mr Zorba enters carrying plywood flat with portion cut out to represent TV. He stands behind flat and starts.)
Zorba: Good evening. Tonight fireflies. Fireflies are a type of beetle (order Coleoptera), consisting of about 1,900 species that inhabit tropical and temperate regions. The common glowworm is a member of this family...
Mrs Jalin: Not very interesting is it?
Zorba: What?
Mrs Jalin: I was talking to him.
Zorba: Oh. Anyway, Researchers have long understood how the light is generated but the control mechanism used by the insect has been a mystery. Now, a US team has been able to show that the simple molecule nitric oxide (NO) acts as the on-off "button". It is just one more example of the prominent role played by NO in biochemistry...
Mrs Jalin: Dreadful isn't it?
Zorba: What?
Mrs Jalin: I was talking to him.
Zorba: Oh. Well anyway... to understand the role NO plays in fireflies, Barry Trimmer, from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and colleagues studied the insects in tiny custom-designed chambers.
Mr Jalin: Switch him off.
(Mrs Jalin gets up and looks for the switch unsuccessfully)
Zorba: Whenever the fireflies were exposed to nitric oxide they glowed or flashed almost continuously, and they stopped once the nitric oxide was turned off... (looking out) What are you doing?
Mrs Jalin: Switching you off.
Zorba: Why, don't you like it?
Mrs Jalin: Oh it's dreadful.
Mr Jalin: Embarrassing.
Zorba: Is it?
Mrs Jalin: Yes, it's perfectly awful.
Mr Jalin: Disgraceful! I don't know how they've got the nerve to put it on.
Mrs Jalin: It's so boring.
Zorba: Well... it's not much of a subject is it... be fair.
Mrs Jalin: What do you think, George?
Mr Jalin: Give him another twenty seconds.
Zorba: Anyway the majority of the Fireflies are members of the Family Lampyridae...
Mrs Jalin: We knew that (she gets up and goes to the set)
Zorba: (quickly) However, what is more interesting, er... is the Firefly's er... sexual chemistry.
Mrs Jalin: (stopping dead) Oh!
Zorba: Yes, the Nitric oxide's part in assisting men achieve erection has been exploited by the modern impotence drugs like Viagra...
I don't know how precise salmon are when finding a place to spawn, nor when that location is imprinted, I would imagine they are not always 100% accurate. How else would salmon tend to spread?
From the evidence provided by the genetic diversity of salmon from different spawning streams, and west coast salmon spawning streams where they've been wiped out and in which they haven't been known to return except by the release of salmon hatched and raised in the same waters, the anwser would seem to be "extremely slowly".
If a super-salmon escapes into the wild and if that salmon is fertile and if that salmon manages to spawn and if the model predicts correctly, then Atlantic salmon become extinct.
Unfortunately, that (Purdue University) model's hypothesis, as far as I can find using web resources, seems to be have been backed up only by an experiment using livebearing Japanese fish confined to aquaria,. The purported reason the fish would die out is based on a general unfitness that seems totally unrelated to seasonal starvation - that starvation, which would tend to eliminate the GM salmon, doesn't seem to have been included in the Purdue study, merely a hypothesized overall increase in adult size that hasn't been actually observed in the GM salmon - if they merely grow faster to return to fresh water to spawn somewhat earlier, but at the same size, they aren't going to receive the greatly preferential attention of the females needed to support the hypothesis. And I can't find any mention of the genetic barrier caused by Salmon homing instincts, porous or otherwise, in the accounts of the Purdue study at all!
So, what we are talking about is the possibility that over the century or so that many salmon generations would take, plus the extended peoriod that it would take for them to migrate into different breeding populations, that no one would bother to continue raising the hatchery born salmon that already make up a good portion of the population (much of the rest being already extinct), or that they would blindly use fish with the GM modification for the breeding stock. Given that premise there might be a real, though very long-term, risk, but not including it is like ignoring inconvenient-to-include realities to build a model that says that anyone on a railroad train might suffocate if it went over forty miles an hour. But that doesn't mean it it is necessarily going to happen, or even that there is a real "risk" of it.
Judge: Let's break up the biggest consumer technology producing company in the economy. Don't broadcast this until after I issue my order and pretend appeals don't matter. Economy: Okay, let's watch the stock market that high-tech stuff has been driving crash and burn immediately, starting today. Appeals Court: Sorry, can't ignore the law and make your own rules judge. We'll have to send it back to someone less self-promoting at the law's expense. Economy: Well, we'll start off with a big rally... [to be continued...]
what else would explain it? an act of god?:) the press needs something to put on the front page:P the more bizzare, the more "cooler" it seems to the readers.. and, the more "distracted" from reality the more likely it'll have some believers.:P
My money is on an escaped pet Brazilian Giant Otter.
"Might promote cancer" isn't even a valid test, really. Doses of beta-carotine, a vitamin-A source, have been shown to cause cancer to grow faster. Well, so might many nutrients, right? So should we all stop growing/eating yellow veggies? Go back to the white carrots that were all that existed up until the last few hundred years, until the mutation/natural gene transfer from other plant took place, ban other carotene producing food plants, and accept the blindness from vitamin deficencies that would result? Simple fact is that most plants contain cancer-causing chemicals with much greater activity than the miniscule probabilities some people have conniptions over, probably in combination with other substances that balance the effect out.
Gasp! You terribly selfish, unthinking person! What if its pollen somehow got into the food supply? We could end up with - shudder - hypo-allergenic peanuts!
1) Bt-Corn affects in particular all species in the order Lepidoptera (moths,butterflys), not just ones that attack corn, hense the effect on the Monarch butterfly whose chief food source, milkweed, is found mostly in and around corn fields. And as alluded to earlier, when pollenating, the poison is released 24x7 making it both very effective but at the same time more likely to give rise to super-tolerant strains.
As shown in actual testing, however, the monarch butterflies do better alongside those fields, because other pesticides aren't used, and not enough pollen ends up on the milkweed to be a toxic dose. The BT toxins that actually have effects are the ones in the leaves and stalks that the targeted destructive insects eat. FUD, pure and simple.
4) It appears that people are not concerned enough about the consequences if they mess up. In particular, there is this one company this wants to make a super-salmon. Their projections indicate that in the coming years, aquaculture will need to be 7 times more productive. They have modified salmon to not stop growing in the winter as normal salmon do. The result is salmon that are ready 4 times faster. But normal salmon don't grow in the winter because if they did, they would die from lack of food in the wild. Now take into account observation shows that salmon 25% larger are 400% more likely to mate. One mathematical model predicts that if enough of these super-salmon escape into the wild (many 1000's do every year), the potential is that all salmon could be wiped out. Sobering
Think, if you can. How are the modified salmon going to pass on their modified genes when they instinctually return to the same penning area they were spawned and grown in, after having died in the wild from winter starvation, and being unable to spawn at all, because they're sterilized?
For example, there is a GE form of sea grass that was made more robust for use in fish tanks. People change their tanks and flush the water. The sea grass flows out to sea.
This grass is now taking over huge areas of underwater shorescapes and pushing out all natural life in certian areas. They are trying to contain it, but don't have much of a chance.
Sorry. That wasn't a genetically modified grass at all. Just one that wasn't native to the area, actually, it could have been one of several types of aquarium plants this has happened with, but no one has bothered to genetically modify aquarium plants. Your example doesn't wash, no matter how many times you swear it is "true".
Umm, that wasn't exactly what I meant. Note I specified relative shittiness compared to the next higher quality grade of "everything", which represents a spectrum. Soon you're going to reach a point where everything in the remaining 10% is at least decent shit.
More like the 90/10 law that explains why cluttered desks represent productive employees, which is that 10% of the documents are the ones you need 90% of the time, 10% of that 10% (1 percent) represents docs you need 90% of that 90% of the time and so on. For a few levels at least.
Actually as I understand it, the effect of BT bacteria (besides the vegitative growth; GM plants including BT toxin genes don't actually make the bacteria) is caused by the crystals of delta-endotoxin they produce, which when dissolved act by paralyzing the the digestive system and making the digestive membranes more porous. One of Bt toxins' most desirable characteristic is its selectivity; only certain insects are susceptible to the delta-endotoxin. Scientists have identified at least 29 different crystals and delta-endotoxins. Each is effective against specific insects. The bacteria, spores, and their products have been used for approximately 50 years. Little or no resistance has been reported to date.
Presumably by a process that would prevent the development of the female parts of the plant, or block pollenation but not the production of pollen itself. Or through shoots resulting in new plants, like creosote bushes or aspen.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a sign they copied the "how to log suspicious connections" man page info associated with TCP wrappers (I forget which man page exactly - inetd? hosts.allow? hosts.deny?). The example given tries to safe_finger any detected rogue connection except other fingers (which could cause and endless loop of mutual fingering to start).
I don't know if it is a good or a bad thing (in terms of what this /. article is about) that the example usually fails to work on Linux distributions I've used, notably Red Hat, because TCP wrappers was compiled with options that need a different format.
But: To anyone else out there that uses the example in hosts.deny - guess what? Because TCP wrappers errors out on that line you let the connection in as a result - it never gets to the usual "ALL: ALL: DENY" at the end!
Working as a consultant for an ISP for a while, I had to handle complaints about perfectly legitimate ICMP Unreachable Fragmentation Required messages being returned, by nimrod sysadmins who apparently programmed their routers and firewalls by the "ride madly in all directions" method. ("Don't Fragment" bit set? Duh. Expect them then...)
"Holloa! Starbuck's astir," said the rigger. "He's a lively chief mate that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn to." And so saying he went on deck, and we followed.-- GOING ABOARD, Chapter 21, Moby Dick
Makes perfect sense to me. More sense than the ST* series' still using light-years for measuring distance in a Federation made up of a multitude of species, planets, et cetra, all of which would have their own different "year". Even "kiloseconds" or "megaseconds" would have made more sense, though it would have deprived Spock and Data of the fun of dividing by 60, 3600, 86400, and whateverthehell a solar year is in seconds when answering questions irritatingly precisely.
Don't get me started on Star Wars' Hans Solo using "parsecs" as a measure of time.
Let's do it anyway.
Lets's make Harlan Ellison cry.
Yeah, be a good little worker bee. Otherwise Uncle Sam will have to give you a spanking.
Heh. I was watching THX1138 yesterday... I think I'd rather be one of the guys who gets to drive the dual turbine cars than one of the drones who walks along in lockstep and is too brainwashed to consider using anything but their habitual elevator even when it is announcing it is out of service...
Nope, generally it is whites killing whites, and blacks killing blacks. What's ironic is that blacks who kill other blacks tend to use supposed oppression by a white-dominated society as an excuse.
Not to mention that it's hard to carpool in a "ecologically aware" vehicle the size of a tin of Altoids.
BTW, some of the first gun control legislation in the USA was designed specifically to prevent blacks freed from slavery from owning guns with which they could defend themselves against such attacks.
I'm not certain, but I think specific case of arson, proving an "intent to kill" is not always required for it to be a capitol crime, if there are in fact people killed in the offence. And if the building is inhabited, those inside don't necessarily have to die to qualify the arsonist for the death penalty either. I'm not sure what the technicalities are in Texas in particular.
Even where there is no death penalty allowed by state law, a citizen stopping an act of arson using deadly force is usually perfectly legal though, if you have reason to believe there could be someone endangered.
And "gosh, I didn't mean that to happen" isn't a defense, BTW.
Or in the case of attempted arson, like the examples given, to be shot and killed by someone defending society against you. Few people have the privilege to be true martyrs...
If you are going to get an SUV or another product similar to one produced by a terrorist-targeted industry, buy it from the victims of such tactics.
Mr Jalin: Tell him I've already got one. (Mrs Jalin hits him hard with a newspaper) All right, all right. What's he want then?
Mrs Jalin: He says do we want a documentary on Fireflies.
Mr Jalin: Fireflies!
Mrs Jalin: Yes.
Mr Jalin: What's he mean, Fireflies?
Mrs Jalin: FIREFLIES!! LIGHTNING BUGS! LUCIFERIN OXIDIZING BEETLES! LAMPYRIDAE!
Mr Jalin: Oh fireflies, I thought you said bacon. (she hits him again) All right, all right. What's he charge then?
Mrs Jalin: It's free.
Mr Jalin: Ooh! Where does he want us to sit?
Mrs Jalin: (calling through the door) He says yes.
(Mr Zorba enters carrying plywood flat with portion cut out to represent TV. He stands behind flat and starts.)
Zorba: Good evening. Tonight fireflies. Fireflies are a type of beetle (order Coleoptera), consisting of about 1,900 species that inhabit tropical and temperate regions. The common glowworm is a member of this family...
Mrs Jalin: Not very interesting is it?
Zorba: What?
Mrs Jalin: I was talking to him.
Zorba: Oh. Anyway, Researchers have long understood how the light is generated but the control mechanism used by the insect has been a mystery. Now, a US team has been able to show that the simple molecule nitric oxide (NO) acts as the on-off "button". It is just one more example of the prominent role played by NO in biochemistry...
Mrs Jalin: Dreadful isn't it?
Zorba: What?
Mrs Jalin: I was talking to him.
Zorba: Oh. Well anyway... to understand the role NO plays in fireflies, Barry Trimmer, from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and colleagues studied the insects in tiny custom-designed chambers.
Mr Jalin: Switch him off.
(Mrs Jalin gets up and looks for the switch unsuccessfully)
Zorba: Whenever the fireflies were exposed to nitric oxide they glowed or flashed almost continuously, and they stopped once the nitric oxide was turned off... (looking out) What are you doing?
Mrs Jalin: Switching you off.
Zorba: Why, don't you like it?
Mrs Jalin: Oh it's dreadful.
Mr Jalin: Embarrassing.
Zorba: Is it?
Mrs Jalin: Yes, it's perfectly awful.
Mr Jalin: Disgraceful! I don't know how they've got the nerve to put it on.
Mrs Jalin: It's so boring.
Zorba: Well ... it's not much of a subject is it ... be fair.
Mrs Jalin: What do you think, George?
Mr Jalin: Give him another twenty seconds.
Zorba: Anyway the majority of the Fireflies are members of the Family Lampyridae...
Mrs Jalin: We knew that (she gets up and goes to the set)
Zorba: (quickly) However, what is more interesting, er ... is the Firefly's er ... sexual chemistry.
Mrs Jalin: (stopping dead) Oh!
Zorba: Yes, the Nitric oxide's part in assisting men achieve erection has been exploited by the modern impotence drugs like Viagra...
Mrs Jalin: (going back to sofa) Disgusting!
Mr Jalin: Ought not to be allowed.
Mrs Jalin: (again) Disgusting!
Mr Jalin: But more interesting.
[...]
[Apologies to Monty Perl, or whoever that was...]
From the evidence provided by the genetic diversity of salmon from different spawning streams, and west coast salmon spawning streams where they've been wiped out and in which they haven't been known to return except by the release of salmon hatched and raised in the same waters, the anwser would seem to be "extremely slowly".
If a super-salmon escapes into the wild and if that salmon is fertile and if that salmon manages to spawn and if the model predicts correctly, then Atlantic salmon become extinct.
Unfortunately, that (Purdue University) model's hypothesis, as far as I can find using web resources, seems to be have been backed up only by an experiment using livebearing Japanese fish confined to aquaria,. The purported reason the fish would die out is based on a general unfitness that seems totally unrelated to seasonal starvation - that starvation, which would tend to eliminate the GM salmon, doesn't seem to have been included in the Purdue study, merely a hypothesized overall increase in adult size that hasn't been actually observed in the GM salmon - if they merely grow faster to return to fresh water to spawn somewhat earlier, but at the same size, they aren't going to receive the greatly preferential attention of the females needed to support the hypothesis. And I can't find any mention of the genetic barrier caused by Salmon homing instincts, porous or otherwise, in the accounts of the Purdue study at all!
So, what we are talking about is the possibility that over the century or so that many salmon generations would take, plus the extended peoriod that it would take for them to migrate into different breeding populations, that no one would bother to continue raising the hatchery born salmon that already make up a good portion of the population (much of the rest being already extinct), or that they would blindly use fish with the GM modification for the breeding stock. Given that premise there might be a real, though very long-term, risk, but not including it is like ignoring inconvenient-to-include realities to build a model that says that anyone on a railroad train might suffocate if it went over forty miles an hour. But that doesn't mean it it is necessarily going to happen, or even that there is a real "risk" of it.
Judge: Let's break up the biggest consumer technology producing company in the economy. Don't broadcast this until after I issue my order and pretend appeals don't matter.
Economy: Okay, let's watch the stock market that high-tech stuff has been driving crash and burn immediately, starting today.
Appeals Court: Sorry, can't ignore the law and make your own rules judge. We'll have to send it back to someone less self-promoting at the law's expense.
Economy: Well, we'll start off with a big rally... [to be continued...]
My money is on an escaped pet Brazilian Giant Otter.
"Might promote cancer" isn't even a valid test, really. Doses of beta-carotine, a vitamin-A source, have been shown to cause cancer to grow faster. Well, so might many nutrients, right? So should we all stop growing/eating yellow veggies? Go back to the white carrots that were all that existed up until the last few hundred years, until the mutation/natural gene transfer from other plant took place, ban other carotene producing food plants, and accept the blindness from vitamin deficencies that would result? Simple fact is that most plants contain cancer-causing chemicals with much greater activity than the miniscule probabilities some people have conniptions over, probably in combination with other substances that balance the effect out.
Gasp! You terribly selfish, unthinking person! What if its pollen somehow got into the food supply? We could end up with - shudder - hypo-allergenic peanuts!
As shown in actual testing, however, the monarch butterflies do better alongside those fields, because other pesticides aren't used, and not enough pollen ends up on the milkweed to be a toxic dose. The BT toxins that actually have effects are the ones in the leaves and stalks that the targeted destructive insects eat. FUD, pure and simple.
Think, if you can. How are the modified salmon going to pass on their modified genes when they instinctually return to the same penning area they were spawned and grown in, after having died in the wild from winter starvation, and being unable to spawn at all, because they're sterilized?BT has been used for about 50 years with little or no apparent resistance developing.
Sorry. That wasn't a genetically modified grass at all. Just one that wasn't native to the area, actually, it could have been one of several types of aquarium plants this has happened with, but no one has bothered to genetically modify aquarium plants. Your example doesn't wash, no matter how many times you swear it is "true".
More like the 90/10 law that explains why cluttered desks represent productive employees, which is that 10% of the documents are the ones you need 90% of the time, 10% of that 10% (1 percent) represents docs you need 90% of that 90% of the time and so on. For a few levels at least.
Actually as I understand it, the effect of BT bacteria (besides the vegitative growth; GM plants including BT toxin genes don't actually make the bacteria) is caused by the crystals of delta-endotoxin they produce, which when dissolved act by paralyzing the the digestive system and making the digestive membranes more porous. One of Bt toxins' most desirable characteristic is its selectivity; only certain insects are susceptible to the delta-endotoxin. Scientists have identified at least 29 different crystals and delta-endotoxins. Each is effective against specific insects. The bacteria, spores, and their products have been used for approximately 50 years. Little or no resistance has been reported to date.
Presumably by a process that would prevent the development of the female parts of the plant, or block pollenation but not the production of pollen itself. Or through shoots resulting in new plants, like creosote bushes or aspen.