Who would think of perverting a new bit of technical ingenuity for the use
of pr0n? Surely there's no precedent for that??
Just think of cheap wireless combined with wearable computing. Nobody would
ever get anything done and downloading of pr0n would climb to unheard of levels.:)
So could this guy have altered graphs and quotes, triggering massive sell-offs or buying sprees?
/me shudders while thinking of script kiddies sending Wall Street into a tailspin.
But I have to say that I wouldn't mind getting ahold of such an exploit--I could pay off my credit card
and set up a nice retirement nest egg in a few minutes in all likelihood.:)
Luckily for Taco, bad spelling is impossible to detect in public speaking. So for once, his incredibly reliable mangling of the word 'weird' will go unnoticed.:)
Good luck with the trolls, Taco. Maybe a certain Natalie P. will make a surprise appearance??
Umm...you might want to read the documentation that comes with mutt. There is a macro in/usr/local/doc/mutt/PGP-Notes.txt that allows old-style clear-text PGP signatures.
For gpg, try this in your.muttrc or wherever (could require some fiddling, I don't use these clear-text signatures myself):
set pgp_clearsign_command="gpg --no-verbose --batch -o - --passphrase-fd 0 --arm
or --textmode --clearsign %?a?-u %a? %f"
Check out mutt.org for more details. There is a section linking to users'.muttrc files, which is where these came from. Good luck.
I understood that between NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC, all of the Olympics was going to be covered...some 400+ hours of action. The odd thing, according to Sports Illustrated some weeks ago, is that precisely 0 hours of it will be broadcasted live. I know Oz is a long way away, but you would think that they could be bothered to show at least a couple of things live...
I've got one sitting in the basement of my parents' house. It's a cube, 16MB RAM, 300MB or so hard drive, monitor, keyboard, mouse.
It doesn't boot anymore, and I don't have the software for it (got it free from my alma mater), but it's quite possible that someone out there knows what to fix to make it boot. May only need a new battery, I dunno.
Over a year ago it was working fine, but it needed the OS reinstalled. I moved it from a friend's room over to my apartment in his pickup--when we left it worked, when we arrived, it stopped working. No idea why. Tried new SIMMs, different cables, different HD, different keyboard, everything. Maybe something jarred loose on the way over?
Anyway, the upshot is, if anyone's interested, I'm more than willing to part with it, and my folks want it out of their basement. I know this isn't eBay, but if you're interested in owning some NeXT hardware (a cube even!!), let me know...you may just be able to make the thing work again, too.
A year or so ago, a friend and I were using Office98 on a G3. Had Word open alongside a terminal emulator. Opened a telnet session to the campus host, then saved a nearly blank Word document on the drive.
FTPed the Word doc, ran strings foo.doc, and were not entirely shocked to see that legible bits of text from the screen of the terminal emulator had been used to pad the file to whatever the nice round number Word likes files to be. Didn't see any cleartext passwords, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was possible.
You hit the nail squarely on the head. Besides, even if you wanted to find a pay phone, it's getting tougher. There was a story in City Pages (Twin Cities arts/entertainment weekly) a few weeks ago about dwindling numbers of pay phones.
In some of the more unsightly neighborhoods in the city, US West (now Qwest, apparently) has been pulling out phones like crazy because they are hot spots for drug activity and/or prostitution. They attract unsavory elements of society, and plenty of businesses that used to have them decided to have their pay phones removed.
So I guess it all boils down to a choice: radiation to fry yer brain or a healthy economy in the world's oldest profession?;)
The built-up area of cities produces 'islands' of higher temperatures, for a number of reasons, among which are:
Manmade materials like concrete, asphalt, bricks, etc. absorb solar energy much more readily than vegetation.
Water almost completely runs off because there's so much concrete everywhere, instead of standing around and slowly evaporating. Evaporation can make a significant contribution to cooling.
Waste heat from vehicles, residences, etc. doesn't help the situation.
Urban heat islands are pretty well understood. You can get nice images of them--temperature contrasts, that is--from AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer) remotely-sensed imagery.
cf. W.B. Myer, "Urban heat island and urban health: Early American perspective", Professional Geographer 43, 1991, p. 38 if yer curious for a little more.
Throw more heat up into moist summertime air and that's a good prescription for thunderstorms.
Oh yeah. We got more than half an inch that night. And 2.5" last night...I watched from my porch at 3 AM...saw lightning hit something for the first time in my life! I bet the Witch's Hat up on Tower Hill got hit too.
Eagan got between 10" and 12", depending on where exactly you were. Insane.
Bringing everyone the Internet is one thing, but do they really want/need it? Mamy don't know what it is, and I can envision lots of people in developing countries get sucked into online culture at the expense of more pressing local situations that they should be helping to remedy.
Rolling out the necessary telecom infrastructure in remote places is quite a task. Besides, local (and even national) politics in lots of developing nations are rife with graft and corruption (hmm...so in that sense they're First World), something that will hinder the possibilities of providing good access to everyone.
Getting them out of this cycle has proved to be an arduous process. Especially in sub-Saharan Africa, large families are a cultural tradition, and it is often expected that women will have many children. Boys are preferred, so they sometimes keep having kids until they have enough boys to help out w/ the daily tasks--gathering wood, water, raising crops, livestock, etc.
I don't think it's entirely accurate in the sub-Saharan Africa context to say 'they don't have an education, hence they have lots of kids'. Birth control is a very new phenomenon that has to become accepted in the culture to succeed. That doesn't happen overnight. Family size is a function of necessity, not education.
You are probably right about some places in the world, but that's what I know about sub-Saharan Africa in particular.
X works well for me. I think it does for a lot of people. I don't exactly have the latest and greatest video hardware, but it seems that the X people have done a decent job at keeping up with trends. Not perfect, but what fun is perfection anyway...no complaining to do then.
When he mentioned KDE and GNOME, it made me think that maybe his underlying motive for improving X rendering was to make those funky waves that Enligtenment will put on the bottom of the screen work better.:) After all, isn't eye candy the only reason most people use X?:) (just kidding)
I don't have any URLs handy to back this up, but when I worked for Hennepin County (Minnesota) last summer, I understood from some people that companies figured out ways to compensate for the built-in signal degradation a while ago.
This is probably just an acknowledgment of the fact that you can get good quality signals (if you're prepared to pay for them) already on the commercial market.
Despite the fact that I really can't be bothered to feel sorry for CmdrTaco for any reason, it has to be said that he doesn't deserve to be badgered with emails about this subject.
There are DOZENS of other online forums for discussing the market, and the petulant whiners who finally got their way should be ashamed of themselves for their tactics. Make better use of you time and bandwidth, people!
Now if they were calls for an article about something computer-related about the market, like an interview with the NASDAQ sysadmin, that would be different--and perhaps interesting. But let's all remember who's rightly got editorial control.
Hmm, more computers in schools. Computers as a part of the curriculum.
Careful what you teach 'em, or in 5-10 years we'll have lowered the median age of DoS attackers from 18 to 10!
I can see the headline now: VIRGINIA 3RD GRADER COORDINATES INTERNET-WIDE ATTACK FROM SCHOOL-PROVIDED LAPTOP, PLASTERS PR0N ON CHRISTIAN COALITION WEBSITE
Everyone has added some really excellent thoughts on this subject, kudos to you all.
I think there is a place for computers in schools and curricula, but the application of technology must be carefully planned and targeted for very specific skills. Clearly, with a large roll-out of computers, the best solution is to have an IT professional helping the process along--don't make teachers figure out how to alter their styles to incorporate computer use on their own.
Another issue is that some students will progress much more rapidly with computers than others. What do you do when you've got 5 whiz kids hacking together kernel patches when the rest of the class is still learning to point and click?:) Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but there's a logical extension of an increasingly common phenomenon in the regular classroom--public education in many places is a waste of time for the best and brightest. My brothers are spinning their wheels in high school--both are going to be Nat'l. Merit Scholars and in the top 3 of their classes. They shouldn't have to put up with English teachers making students WATCH Billy Budd instead of READING it.
When I have kids someday, and I put them through school, I'd rather they learn important skills that they will need later in measured doses AT HOME, rather than in the schools. If they have to write papers for class, they can learn how to use a word processor at home. Ditto for spreadsheets, etc.
Nick Hornby. No 's' in there. Also the author of Fever Pitch, an excellent (and quick) read about the life of an English football supporter. In his case, he supports Arsenal, but it's enjoyable even if you're a supporter of a different club.
Think what you like about Dyson and the religion v. science issue, but from what I know of him he deserves the recognition.
He spent the spring semester of 1999 as a visitor at my alma mater, Gustavus Adolphus College. I attended a couple sessions of the weekly seminar he participated in. In that arena, and when I saw him (almost every day) in the cafeteria, he always struck me as being contemplative and humble.
I didn't agree with everything I read in his book Imagined Worlds, but you have to tip your cap to him for having the pluck to talk about religion and science openly, something that very few of his peers are wont to do.
I think a lot of this community's struggles in the online frontier would be easier with more clueful people in government. Maybe we'll have to wait a few years before the youngest legislators (at state and federal levels) are likely to be in tune with the Internet world, but it will happen.
As it stands now, I can't think of many places outside the Valley and other high-tech corridors where you might actually have a critical mass of (motivated) voters who sympathize with online ideals.
Maybe if the whole 'Net could "elect" members of a Congressional advisory committee we could acquire a voice. If there was such a thing, it might be really cool because it would have less to do with partisan politics and be able to make important policy contributions.
We should take this bull by the horns instead of waiting for a Congressman to become versed in all the areas that we care about--privacy, patent law, copyright law, corporate bullying, antitrust, etc.
And while you're at it, proofread what you contribute. Grammar is tough if you haven't had English for years and don't have an MLA style guide handy, but give it your best shot.
But do take the time to run things through ispell. Spelling words correctly doesn't take much time, but has a big effect on presentation and credibility. Lots of people who post on/. are horrendous spellers--most of the time that's OK, but this is probably one of the few times that it's a good idea to be meticulous.
I think the whole idea of caring where a Net user or server is located is lousy. The Net is not a logical extension of real space where political boundaries apply.
You could squawk about how it's desirable to (theoretically, at least) be able to track down software pirates, criminals, script-kiddies, and pr0n mavens, but I like to believe that an increasing majority of Net users really don't have intentions like that. They want to communicate, learn stuff, and legitimately download things like Linux and Linux applications.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Who would think of perverting a new bit of technical ingenuity for the use
:)
of pr0n? Surely there's no precedent for that??
Just think of cheap wireless combined with wearable computing. Nobody would
ever get anything done and downloading of pr0n would climb to unheard of levels.
So could this guy have altered graphs and quotes, triggering massive sell-offs or buying sprees?
:)
/me shudders while thinking of script kiddies sending Wall Street into a tailspin.
But I have to say that I wouldn't mind getting ahold of such an exploit--I could pay off my credit card
and set up a nice retirement nest egg in a few minutes in all likelihood.
Luckily for Taco, bad spelling is impossible to detect in public speaking. So for once, his incredibly reliable mangling of the word 'weird' will go unnoticed. :)
Good luck with the trolls, Taco. Maybe a certain Natalie P. will make a surprise appearance??
Umm...you might want to read the documentation that comes with mutt. There is a macro in /usr/local/doc/mutt/PGP-Notes.txt that allows old-style clear-text PGP signatures.
.muttrc or wherever (could require some fiddling, I don't use these clear-text signatures myself):
.muttrc files, which is where these came from. Good luck.
For gpg, try this in your
set pgp_clearsign_command="gpg --no-verbose --batch -o - --passphrase-fd 0 --arm
or --textmode --clearsign %?a?-u %a? %f"
Check out mutt.org for more details. There is a section linking to users'
I understood that between NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC, all of the Olympics was going to be covered...some 400+ hours of action. The odd thing, according to Sports Illustrated some weeks ago, is that precisely 0 hours of it will be broadcasted live. I know Oz is a long way away, but you would think that they could be bothered to show at least a couple of things live...
I've got one sitting in the basement of my parents' house. It's a cube, 16MB RAM, 300MB or so hard drive, monitor, keyboard, mouse.
It doesn't boot anymore, and I don't have the software for it (got it free from my alma mater), but it's quite possible that someone out there knows what to fix to make it boot. May only need a new battery, I dunno.
Over a year ago it was working fine, but it needed the OS reinstalled. I moved it from a friend's room over to my apartment in his pickup--when we left it worked, when we arrived, it stopped working. No idea why. Tried new SIMMs, different cables, different HD, different keyboard, everything. Maybe something jarred loose on the way over?
Anyway, the upshot is, if anyone's interested, I'm more than willing to part with it, and my folks want it out of their basement. I know this isn't eBay, but if you're interested in owning some NeXT hardware (a cube even!!), let me know...you may just be able to make the thing work again, too.
A year or so ago, a friend and I were using Office98 on a G3. Had Word open alongside a terminal emulator. Opened a telnet session to the campus host, then saved a nearly blank Word document on the drive.
FTPed the Word doc, ran strings foo.doc, and were not entirely shocked to see that legible bits of text from the screen of the terminal emulator had been used to pad the file to whatever the nice round number Word likes files to be. Didn't see any cleartext passwords, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was possible.
So yeah, their file formats are horrid.
You hit the nail squarely on the head. Besides, even if you wanted to find a pay phone, it's getting tougher. There was a story in City Pages (Twin Cities arts/entertainment weekly) a few weeks ago about dwindling numbers of pay phones.
;)
In some of the more unsightly neighborhoods in the city, US West (now Qwest, apparently) has been pulling out phones like crazy because they are hot spots for drug activity and/or prostitution. They attract unsavory elements of society, and plenty of businesses that used to have them decided to have their pay phones removed.
So I guess it all boils down to a choice: radiation to fry yer brain or a healthy economy in the world's oldest profession?
The built-up area of cities produces 'islands' of higher temperatures, for a number of reasons, among which are:
Manmade materials like concrete, asphalt, bricks, etc. absorb solar energy much more readily than vegetation.
Water almost completely runs off because there's so much concrete everywhere, instead of standing around and slowly evaporating. Evaporation can make a significant contribution to cooling.
Waste heat from vehicles, residences, etc. doesn't help the situation.
Urban heat islands are pretty well understood. You can get nice images of them--temperature contrasts, that is--from AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer) remotely-sensed imagery.
cf. W.B. Myer, "Urban heat island and urban health: Early American perspective", Professional Geographer 43, 1991, p. 38 if yer curious for a little more.
Throw more heat up into moist summertime air and that's a good prescription for thunderstorms.
Oh yeah. We got more than half an inch that night. And 2.5" last night...I watched from my porch at 3 AM...saw lightning hit something for the first time in my life! I bet the Witch's Hat up on Tower Hill got hit too.
Eagan got between 10" and 12", depending on where exactly you were. Insane.
Your cons are spot on.
Bringing everyone the Internet is one thing, but do they really want/need it? Mamy don't know what it is, and I can envision lots of people in developing countries get sucked into online culture at the expense of more pressing local situations that they should be helping to remedy.
Rolling out the necessary telecom infrastructure in remote places is quite a task. Besides, local (and even national) politics in lots of developing nations are rife with graft and corruption (hmm...so in that sense they're First World), something that will hinder the possibilities of providing good access to everyone.
Getting them out of this cycle has proved to be an arduous process. Especially in sub-Saharan Africa, large families are a cultural tradition, and it is often expected that women will have many children. Boys are preferred, so they sometimes keep having kids until they have enough boys to help out w/ the daily tasks--gathering wood, water, raising crops, livestock, etc.
I don't think it's entirely accurate in the sub-Saharan Africa context to say 'they don't have an education, hence they have lots of kids'. Birth control is a very new phenomenon that has to become accepted in the culture to succeed. That doesn't happen overnight. Family size is a function of necessity, not education.
You are probably right about some places in the world, but that's what I know about sub-Saharan Africa in particular.
Hmm...I'd offer my opinion if it weren't for the fact that all of us scrambling to click over to their site /.ed them. :)
Anyone familiar with this want to give a brief outline?
X works well for me. I think it does for a lot of people. I don't exactly have the latest and greatest video hardware, but it seems that the X people have done a decent job at keeping up with trends. Not perfect, but what fun is perfection anyway...no complaining to do then.
:) After all, isn't eye candy the only reason most people use X? :) (just kidding)
When he mentioned KDE and GNOME, it made me think that maybe his underlying motive for improving X rendering was to make those funky waves that Enligtenment will put on the bottom of the screen work better.
I don't have any URLs handy to back this up, but when I worked for Hennepin County (Minnesota) last summer, I understood from some people that companies figured out ways to compensate for the built-in signal degradation a while ago.
This is probably just an acknowledgment of the fact that you can get good quality signals (if you're prepared to pay for them) already on the commercial market.
Despite the fact that I really can't be bothered to feel sorry for CmdrTaco for any reason, it has to be said that he doesn't deserve to be badgered with emails about this subject.
There are DOZENS of other online forums for discussing the market, and the petulant whiners who finally got their way should be ashamed of themselves for their tactics. Make better use of you time and bandwidth, people!
Now if they were calls for an article about something computer-related about the market, like an interview with the NASDAQ sysadmin, that would be different--and perhaps interesting. But let's all remember who's rightly got editorial control.
Hmm, more computers in schools. Computers as a part of the curriculum.
Careful what you teach 'em, or in 5-10 years we'll have lowered the median age of DoS attackers from 18 to 10!
I can see the headline now:
VIRGINIA 3RD GRADER COORDINATES INTERNET-WIDE ATTACK FROM SCHOOL-PROVIDED LAPTOP, PLASTERS PR0N ON CHRISTIAN COALITION WEBSITE
Everyone has added some really excellent thoughts on this subject, kudos to you all.
:) Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but there's a logical extension of an increasingly common phenomenon in the regular classroom--public education in many places is a waste of time for the best and brightest. My brothers are spinning their wheels in high school--both are going to be Nat'l. Merit Scholars and in the top 3 of their classes. They shouldn't have to put up with English teachers making students WATCH Billy Budd instead of READING it.
I think there is a place for computers in schools and curricula, but the application of technology must be carefully planned and targeted for very specific skills. Clearly, with a large roll-out of computers, the best solution is to have an IT professional helping the process along--don't make teachers figure out how to alter their styles to incorporate computer use on their own.
Another issue is that some students will progress much more rapidly with computers than others. What do you do when you've got 5 whiz kids hacking together kernel patches when the rest of the class is still learning to point and click?
When I have kids someday, and I put them through school, I'd rather they learn important skills that they will need later in measured doses AT HOME, rather than in the schools. If they have to write papers for class, they can learn how to use a word processor at home. Ditto for spreadsheets, etc.
Nick Hornby. No 's' in there. Also the author of Fever Pitch, an excellent (and quick) read about the life of an English football supporter. In his case, he supports Arsenal, but it's enjoyable even if you're a supporter of a different club.
Every time CmdrTaco uses the word 'wierd', you could have a routine that automagically corrects it to be 'weird'. :)
Think what you like about Dyson and the religion v. science issue, but from what I know of him he deserves the recognition.
He spent the spring semester of 1999 as a visitor at my alma mater, Gustavus Adolphus College. I attended a couple sessions of the weekly seminar he participated in. In that arena, and when I saw him (almost every day) in the cafeteria, he always struck me as being contemplative and humble.
I didn't agree with everything I read in his book Imagined Worlds, but you have to tip your cap to him for having the pluck to talk about religion and science openly, something that very few of his peers are wont to do.
I think a lot of this community's struggles in the online frontier would be easier with more clueful people in government. Maybe we'll have to wait a few years before the youngest legislators (at state and federal levels) are likely to be in tune with the Internet world, but it will happen.
As it stands now, I can't think of many places outside the Valley and other high-tech corridors where you might actually have a critical mass of (motivated) voters who sympathize with online ideals.
Maybe if the whole 'Net could "elect" members of a Congressional advisory committee we could acquire a voice. If there was such a thing, it might be really cool because it would have less to do with partisan politics and be able to make important policy contributions.
We should take this bull by the horns instead of waiting for a Congressman to become versed in all the areas that we care about--privacy, patent law, copyright law, corporate bullying, antitrust, etc.
And while you're at it, proofread what you contribute. Grammar is tough if you haven't had English for years and don't have an MLA style guide handy, but give it your best shot.
/. are horrendous spellers--most of the time that's OK, but this is probably one of the few times that it's a good idea to be meticulous.
But do take the time to run things through ispell. Spelling words correctly doesn't take much time, but has a big effect on presentation and credibility. Lots of people who post on
Well, no one else called it.
Hmmm, what's my AC (armor class, not Anonymous Coward) with the Mandalorian Armor?
Special abilities: Disintegration, Tracking
Special items: Jet pack
I think the whole idea of caring where a Net user or server is located is lousy. The Net is not a logical extension of real space where political boundaries apply.
:)
You could squawk about how it's desirable to (theoretically, at least) be able to track down software pirates, criminals, script-kiddies, and pr0n mavens, but I like to believe that an increasing majority of Net users really don't have intentions like that. They want to communicate, learn stuff, and legitimately download things like Linux and Linux applications.