Since I entered my info into the real Colorado no-call list (not the bogus no-call list at Bighorn), the amount of tele-spam I've received has greatly diminished. I used to count on one call every evening. For some reason, I'd get 2 or 3 on Thursdays (anyone know why???). I now get less than 2 a month.
The problem with the Colorado list is that it allows for these swine to call me if:
They have an "established business relationship" with me. This can mean we've done business, or they have sent me information.
They are providing "information", and not attempting to sell me something. They're spamming me with product info and asking "would you like to speak to a sales representative?", at which point we have a "relationship", which opens the flood-gates.
They are a charitable organization. The tele-marketers haven't figured it out yet, but all they need to do is start an NFP (not for profit) strictly for the purposes of telling me about the for-profit company's products.
They are a political organization. "We represent the 'AT&T is cheaper' party and would urge you to vote for our candidate of choice by signing up for AT&T long distance...."
To stop spam will require doing things which are illegal in every country and repugnant to anyone with a conscience. The penalty for sending spam must become so horrifying (for the spammer, personally) that he or she just wouldn't dare. "Civilized" western societies are incapable of this kind of retribution, prefering to play with legislation or technical non-solutions, so we drown in spam, laws against it, and expensive solutions which claim to, but don't, eliminate it.
Re:New ad campaign - the Windows version
on
Baked Apple
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· Score: 1
When, oh when, will we hear a decent "Louis, Lou-eye" sequel? By "decent" I mean "something that inspires fraternity house members to set their furniture on fire and drag it out into the middle of the street" (usually in that sequence).
When hairspray is outlawed, only ....
on
Potato Bazookas
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· Score: 2, Funny
Local stores that sell hairsprays... may also be asked to sell them only to adults
And who's pushing the technology on these weapons of mashed destruction I ask??
German police fear that the youths will turn to more lethal ammunition than potatoes. Tests have shown that such a bazooka firing an empty film canister filled with sand and the cardboard centres of toilet rolls filled with cement could penetrate brickwork.
How do I get a job as Potatoe Launch Vehicle Tester? And not to be outdone, the toddlers are up to their old tricks:
A school in Weinstadt in Baden-Württemberg recently came under a potato barrage from children playing truant...
Ok, what exactly constitutes "a barrage"? More than one? Then how do we classify a handful of Julien frys? An arsenal? That would make McDonald's the biggest arms dealer on the planet.
A 16-year-old in the university city of Göttingen lost part of his ear when the firing chamber ripped open as he pulled the trigger.
I would say natural selection may play a part in thining the ranks.
An apple fired from one of the guns almost took out the eye of a middle-aged man...
Potato guns don't kill people - fruit salad kills people.
You Aussies have previously demonstrated your willingness to relinquish your rights, so what's the big deal? Oh, by the way, once you start down the path of surrender, you can't stop, but you knew that.
The sad part is that this same progressive loss of liberty has already started elsewhere, including the US. Government works best with unobstructed power, and personal freedoms get in the way of that. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.
What if the P2P networks use a similiar technique?
Rip & encode a piece. Watermark it so that it may later be detected even if modified or degraded. This is the "bait".
Release it over the network.
Continuously search for the same piece on other machines. When found, get it. Verify fetched piece has same watermark as original. Ignore items with no or different watermark, which may indicate content is valid but from another source.
Compare quality of original file (from step 1) to quality of file from step 3. If there is measurable degradation, mark supplier as "tainted".
Avoid content from tainted suppliers and others in their subnet.
SCSI is here. Firewire is here. I should give a crap about SATA why?
Intel wants you to use SATA. Intel wants Firewire/1394 to go away. Intel didn't invent 1394.
It's a shame really. 1394 & SBP-2 (the protocol used by 1394 drives) has queuing, hot-plug, auto-configuration, flexible topology (anything but a loop) and free beer. SATA, on the other hand, is cheaper because it's good 'ol ST-506 with a serial-parallel converter (Ok, maybe I'm a little to harsh, but the AT command set is truely horrible). The protocols stay the same (until queuing drivers are available). Manufacturers can get product out the door and see how things work in the real world (you ARE the beta test site, doncha know).
I personally think this is a cool way to teach history. I'd like to see more of this on the high-school level as a means of familiarizing students with the great men and women of antiquity on a personal level.
Perhaps blogs might work as a supplimentary source, but not as a replacement for actually reading the assigned text. What happens next week when blogging becomes passe? Is this promoting form over content ("I'll read Marie Antoinette's web log, but pick up a book?!?! Yucko! That is just so 20th century"). Is it the job of educators to reformat content to display in the currently accepted paradigm, which is likely to be supplanted before the reformatting is complete?
Strictly "feel good" legislation from impotent lawyers who require the trappings of a police state to stay in power. Never trust politicians, and always doubt their motives. They have one thought -- one purpose -- and that is control.
Why not have similiar legislation for every possible item that has a history of being dangerous or causing problems? (knives, hammers, bathtubs, stairs, snow shovels, free speech, the right to assemble).
Why not mandate this technology for law enforcement and military personal? Hey! Saddam's guys aren't using smart weapons! What's the deal?
Is this how MS will forcefeed DRM?
on
DirectX 9 Finally Out
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Is directX9 how Billy G. will attempt to get Digital Rights Management onto my computer? Tie a bunch of really kewl games/graphics features to a "protection" mechanism that makes a colonoscopy look like a walk in the park? I really need to be protected from all that content I've purchased.
they're fun, as long as you dont take them seriously, or believe that they will teach you how to clean and reload a weapon.
Is there danger in those who do take the games seriously? Does practicing basketball or skateboarding make one a better player or rider? Does practicing virtual move-and-shoot hone the instincts for real life move-and-shoot (here, or here, or here)? Does practicing "kill everything in sight" desensitize one, so that the same behavior in real life is easier?
In every case, the answer is "yes". Visualization and mental repetition is a widely utilized training technique -- practice makes perfect. Anyone who wants to be a better killer has to train to kill, practice killing, and visualize killing. FPS games fulfill 2 of these requirements.
(from the MSS Initiative page) ...notify sysadmins about the "brokenage" of their sites
Please help me understand this initiative by not making up words. Yes, I can guess the meaning, but if that's the purpose (i.e. to keep the audience guessing) then why not just post random text? If the goal is to demonstrate you k3wlne55, then post in haCk15h. If the goal is to convey an idea, sway public opinion, convince a group of skeptics, form a consensus, and ultimately, build a coalition, you might want to consider restricting your phraseology to a more mainstream subset of English.
Serial ATA has kept all the truely horrible, obscure, and performance limiting features of parallel ATA (which was originally designed for 40 Mbyte drives), and shoves it down a thin cable. A course in ATA protocols will leave anyone who is computer literate going : You have got to be kidding!! What were they smoking????? The Serial spec has to maintain all kinds of bizarre, obsolete behavior just so that a SATA drive is backwards compatible with old software (i.e. that WfWG 3.11 system you've got tucked away in the closet). Throughout the history of ATA, when drive capacities climb towards the addressable limit of the spec, the protocol is kludged by a team of drunken baboons to extend it for another generation. The SATA committee munched an opportunity to drill a much-needed stake through the heart of ATA and give us a new interface for the next 20 years. Instead we get a change in connectors for a protocol with it's feet firmly encased in the concrete of MS-DOS 2.
Firewire (1394) was killed by Apple's licensing fees and Intel's sudden backstabbing policy change on building it into south-bridge, along with their NIH attitude. There existed working 1394 Device Bay drives over 6 years ago, with OS support from m-soft. 1394 was an attempt to keep the good parts of SCSI protocol, while leaving out as much of the useless stuff as possible (MODE SELECT).
Fibre-channel is still Real Pricey, for the same reason that SCSI is -- "just because". Or, as the hardware vendors say "harrumph, well, it's all about volume".
Every drive I've had has outlasted the computer/OS into which it's installed, which becomes essentially unusable after 3 or 4 years. Since I work for one of those drive companies, I get the crappy pre-production "let's try this recipe" units.
It's tough to make a profit in this biz. Zero to 20% profit margins and a 9 month product life would send most Harvard buusiness school grads screaming to join a monastary. HP gave up. IBM gave up. We have endless meetings about using a $0.41 part vs. a $0.40 part. We sometimes have to sell drives at a loss to keep from writing off a warehouse of ok-last-week/obsolete-this-week products.
How many major drive companies have you seen startup in the last 20 years? And how many have gone belly up??? Disk drives are toasters -- a commodity product sold at Walmart next to the cheese-whiz and britney spears posters.
While those of us who are within a few years of the social security slimepit, and have watched greedy corporate execs and dot-com liars abscond with our meager retirement savings, and have no chance of getting back to break-even in the short time left to us, we got it made! Well, happy days. That'll make the dog food taste so much better. Thanks for the perspective!
Anyone try maneuvering a 22 ft, 3.3 ton, 8 wheeled tuna boat in downtown Tokyo, much less finding a parking place? Sheesh, forget about Tokyo, how 'bout Boulder or Berkeley? The parking places are all designed to fit Volvos (and not the wagons!).
There's a bowl of putrid brown over here... can someone get a mop or something??? Actually, it's pretty funny. I'm guessing someone at/. dumped their girlfriend, and this is the result.
This is a well known phenomenon -- The pesky aliens don't have decent plumbing, so "fluid" (you really don't want to ask) leaks from the on-board toilets, then collects and freezes on the outside of the space ship, forming large clumps. These occasionally break loose and fall to earth where they can damage cars and houses, stun the occasional whale, or run for Congress.
Several have shown up on Florida ballots, but the frozen alien turd electorate hasn't coalesced as well as the candidates. The Democratic party has filed a protest in behalf of the lumps, claiming fraud and abuse.
Anytime someone mentions "lawyer", then someone else will need to do the same. Lawyers have guaranteed employment as long as there is greed, lust, disagreement or conflict.
Yahoo has been running these horrifically obnoxious floating style sheet based ads for firefly that obscure about 30% of the screen. How bad do these things have to get before people just go away???
I steal the card. Now I have the the unduplicatable pattern. There's nothing that ties that pattern to the card holder, so there's no way to prove I'm not the true card holder. Ye-ha. "Ummm, yes. I'll take that Gazelle out on the tarmac please...."
"Borrow" the card and extract the optical pattern (any merchant verifying a sale will do this). Next, I create my own card and extract the optical pattern. Now comes the fun part. Break into the "secure database", find the pattern matching the victim's pattern, the replace it with the pattern off my bogus card. Ta da! I am you and you are we and we are all together!
What? That "secure database" part too scary? Well here's a clue: anything labeled as "secure" probably isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with the Colorado list is that it allows for these swine to call me if:
This can mean we've done business, or they have sent me information.
They're spamming me with product info and asking "would you like to speak to a sales representative?", at which point we have a "relationship", which opens the flood-gates.
The tele-marketers haven't figured it out yet, but all they need to do is start an NFP (not for profit) strictly for the purposes of telling me about the for-profit company's products.
"We represent the 'AT&T is cheaper' party and would urge you to vote for our candidate of choice by signing up for AT&T long distance...."
To stop spam will require doing things which are illegal in every country and repugnant to anyone with a conscience. The penalty for sending spam must become so horrifying (for the spammer, personally) that he or she just wouldn't dare. "Civilized" western societies are incapable of this kind of retribution, prefering to play with legislation or technical non-solutions, so we drown in spam, laws against it, and expensive solutions which claim to, but don't, eliminate it.
Now if it was a Windows machine that would be :
When, oh when, will we hear a decent "Louis, Lou-eye" sequel? By "decent" I mean "something that inspires fraternity house members to set their furniture on fire and drag it out into the middle of the street" (usually in that sequence).
And who's pushing the technology on these weapons of mashed destruction I ask??
German police fear that the youths will turn to more lethal ammunition than potatoes. Tests have shown that such a bazooka firing an empty film canister filled with sand and the cardboard centres of toilet rolls filled with cement could penetrate brickwork.
How do I get a job as Potatoe Launch Vehicle Tester? And not to be outdone, the toddlers are up to their old tricks:
A school in Weinstadt in Baden-Württemberg recently came under a potato barrage from children playing truant...
Ok, what exactly constitutes "a barrage"? More than one? Then how do we classify a handful of Julien frys? An arsenal? That would make McDonald's the biggest arms dealer on the planet.
A 16-year-old in the university city of Göttingen lost part of his ear when the firing chamber ripped open as he pulled the trigger.
I would say natural selection may play a part in thining the ranks.
An apple fired from one of the guns almost took out the eye of a middle-aged man...
Potato guns don't kill people - fruit salad kills people.
The sad part is that this same progressive loss of liberty has already started elsewhere, including the US. Government works best with unobstructed power, and personal freedoms get in the way of that. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.
Intel wants you to use SATA. Intel wants Firewire/1394 to go away. Intel didn't invent 1394.
It's a shame really. 1394 & SBP-2 (the protocol used by 1394 drives) has queuing, hot-plug, auto-configuration, flexible topology (anything but a loop) and free beer. SATA, on the other hand, is cheaper because it's good 'ol ST-506 with a serial-parallel converter (Ok, maybe I'm a little to harsh, but the AT command set is truely horrible). The protocols stay the same (until queuing drivers are available). Manufacturers can get product out the door and see how things work in the real world (you ARE the beta test site, doncha know).
Perhaps blogs might work as a supplimentary source, but not as a replacement for actually reading the assigned text. What happens next week when blogging becomes passe? Is this promoting form over content ("I'll read Marie Antoinette's web log, but pick up a book?!?! Yucko! That is just so 20th century"). Is it the job of educators to reformat content to display in the currently accepted paradigm, which is likely to be supplanted before the reformatting is complete?
Why not have similiar legislation for every possible item that has a history of being dangerous or causing problems? (knives, hammers, bathtubs, stairs, snow shovels, free speech, the right to assemble).
Why not mandate this technology for law enforcement and military personal? Hey! Saddam's guys aren't using smart weapons! What's the deal?
Is directX9 how Billy G. will attempt to get Digital Rights Management onto my computer? Tie a bunch of really kewl games/graphics features to a "protection" mechanism that makes a colonoscopy look like a walk in the park? I really need to be protected from all that content I've purchased.
Is there danger in those who do take the games seriously? Does practicing basketball or skateboarding make one a better player or rider? Does practicing virtual move-and-shoot hone the instincts for real life move-and-shoot (here, or here, or here)? Does practicing "kill everything in sight" desensitize one, so that the same behavior in real life is easier?
In every case, the answer is "yes". Visualization and mental repetition is a widely utilized training technique -- practice makes perfect. Anyone who wants to be a better killer has to train to kill, practice killing, and visualize killing. FPS games fulfill 2 of these requirements.
While not exactly a geek site, I thought the French tank museum (french language only -> Musee des Blindes or another opinion) in Saumur was tres kewl.
General George S. Patton(the movie) studied at the Cavalry Academy in Saumur.
Please help me understand this initiative by not making up words. Yes, I can guess the meaning, but if that's the purpose (i.e. to keep the audience guessing) then why not just post random text? If the goal is to demonstrate you k3wlne55, then post in haCk15h. If the goal is to convey an idea, sway public opinion, convince a group of skeptics, form a consensus, and ultimately, build a coalition, you might want to consider restricting your phraseology to a more mainstream subset of English.
This is only a suggestion.
Firewire (1394) was killed by Apple's licensing fees and Intel's sudden backstabbing policy change on building it into south-bridge, along with their NIH attitude. There existed working 1394 Device Bay drives over 6 years ago, with OS support from m-soft. 1394 was an attempt to keep the good parts of SCSI protocol, while leaving out as much of the useless stuff as possible (MODE SELECT).
Fibre-channel is still Real Pricey, for the same reason that SCSI is -- "just because". Or, as the hardware vendors say "harrumph, well, it's all about volume".
Every drive I've had has outlasted the computer/OS into which it's installed, which becomes essentially unusable after 3 or 4 years. Since I work for one of those drive companies, I get the crappy pre-production "let's try this recipe" units.
It's tough to make a profit in this biz. Zero to 20% profit margins and a 9 month product life would send most Harvard buusiness school grads screaming to join a monastary. HP gave up. IBM gave up. We have endless meetings about using a $0.41 part vs. a $0.40 part. We sometimes have to sell drives at a loss to keep from writing off a warehouse of ok-last-week/obsolete-this-week products.
How many major drive companies have you seen startup in the last 20 years? And how many have gone belly up??? Disk drives are toasters -- a commodity product sold at Walmart next to the cheese-whiz and britney spears posters.
I thought he was an evil brain-sucking alien?? Or maybe I was thinking of scientology ....
While those of us who are within a few years of the social security slimepit, and have watched greedy corporate execs and dot-com liars abscond with our meager retirement savings, and have no chance of getting back to break-even in the short time left to us, we got it made! Well, happy days. That'll make the dog food taste so much better. Thanks for the perspective!
Anyone try maneuvering a 22 ft, 3.3 ton, 8 wheeled tuna boat in downtown Tokyo, much less finding a parking place? Sheesh, forget about Tokyo, how 'bout Boulder or Berkeley? The parking places are all designed to fit Volvos (and not the wagons!).
There's a bowl of putrid brown over here ... can someone get a mop or something??? Actually, it's pretty funny. I'm guessing someone at /. dumped their girlfriend, and this is the result.
Several have shown up on Florida ballots, but the frozen alien turd electorate hasn't coalesced as well as the candidates. The Democratic party has filed a protest in behalf of the lumps, claiming fraud and abuse.
Anytime someone mentions "lawyer", then someone else will need to do the same. Lawyers have guaranteed employment as long as there is greed, lust, disagreement or conflict.
Yahoo has been running these horrifically obnoxious floating style sheet based ads for firefly that obscure about 30% of the screen. How bad do these things have to get before people just go away???
- I steal the card. Now I have the the unduplicatable pattern. There's nothing that ties that pattern to the card holder, so there's no way to prove I'm not the true card holder. Ye-ha. "Ummm, yes. I'll take that Gazelle out on the tarmac please...."
- "Borrow" the card and extract the optical pattern (any merchant verifying a sale will do this). Next, I create my own card and extract the optical pattern. Now comes the fun part. Break into the "secure database", find the pattern matching the victim's pattern, the replace it with the pattern off my bogus card. Ta da! I am you and you are we and we are all together!
What? That "secure database" part too scary? Well here's a clue: anything labeled as "secure" probably isn't.