If printed copies of these books average $30 each, the break-even point on this subscription service is 15 months. Even in this industry, not very many things worth writing a whole book about are revised that often, not to the point that 16 month-old books are worthless. So as fascinating as this concept is, and as handy as search features and revised-as-needed reference material can be, this smells like a losing proposition for users. Books are meant to be owned, not rented.
I'm taking a tech writing course this term, and the "book" is an on-line thingy that I pay $40 for the privilege of using for a year. Shame I wouldn't mind being a tech writer when I grow up, because instead of having something on my shelf I can use every day for ten years, I have to spend $400 for access to the same information for the same decade.
Here's an oversimlification: To turn the lock, the tumblers must be pushed just far enough to slide around a groove. Tumblers actually have a top and a bottom half, and turning the lock generates new pairs, each of which must be repicked. Thus these locks have the advantage of being very tedious to pick using conventional methods.
They also have the advantage of being invulnerable to another popular method of defeating conventional locks: hammering in a flat-blade screwdriver and twisting like hell.
I find the Bic solution very elegant because I admire simple hacks that solve intricate problems (like holding down the shift key to defeat CD copy protection). Bummer that this affects me, though.
Congratulations on the birth of your daughter. May she bring you many years of joy.
In the meantime, don't bother trying to be the protagonist of a story in a book somewhere. From her point of view, you're Daddy. Do the daddy things well, and love her well, because what you do for a living is incredibly peripheral to her life---it's just something that you go to in the morning and come home from ("Yaaay! Daddy's home!") at night.
Read her stuff you enjoy reading and that she enjoys having you read to her. Read her Where the Wild Things Are and James and the Giant Peach. Read her lots and lots of Seuss. Read her stuff you enjoyed as a kid. Read her Pooh. Read her The Monster at the End of This Book, starring Grover. Do the voices when you read---she'll be giggling at your Grover impersonation even when she's in college.
When she asks her what you do for a living, don't point to some character in a book: Tell her. Show her. Invite her to the office along for an hour or two and show her off to everybody you work with.
I swear to you it doesn't matter what you read to her, as long as it amuses and stimulates her, and as long as you do it out of love.
With due respect, if a person is 25 yards from you, he's probably not in your living room with you. And unless he is also armed with a projectile weapon, he probably does not presently count as your attacker. For home defense the best weapon is still a slide-action twelve gauge with a very short straight-bore barrel, loaded with #10 or finer shot. At close quarters (read: "in home-defense situations"), there's no aiming, every target gets knocked down, and wild shots don't pass through walls and injure the nice couple across the street. Also, that shick-shack sound of the slide being worked is a dandy deterrent all on its own, to say nothing of having to look into that cavern of a muzzle...
We aren't discussing trespassing here, are we? We are discussing someone committing a felony, on your property.
Probably the absolute best value a firearm has is as a deterrent. A slide-action shotgun has this wonderful, ominous shick-shack sound that everybody recognizes and no home invader can hear without immediately recognizing that he is in very bad trouble. The responsible thing for a homeowner to do, having thus served notice that he is armed, is to scream "Get out!" at the top of his lungs, and give the invader the opportunity to comply.
Pulling the trigger is indeed the last solution. The invader's, anyway.
I copied-and-pasted it down from your posting. The rest is just a matter of finding a solution within a set of constraints. It's just another form of hacking, I suppose.
the only things you can really reveal about a former employee are their hire dates, salary and whether they're elligable for rehire.
"Mr. Smith? Hi, this is Mr. Anderson over at Fubarco? You hired one of our former employees, a Mr. Jones? I just needed to tell you that his reference status has changed---he is no longer eligible for rehire. Federal law prohibits me from specifying the particulars behind why there's not a chance in hell we would allow Mr. Jones to work here ever again. Just thought I'd let you know. Which reminds me---and this is a completely different and unrelated topic that has nothing to do with the reason we won't allow Mr. Jones to work here ever again---do you have any knowledge of how to remove dead fish from a ventilation system? No? Just thought I'd ask. Well, best of luck!"
My e-mail address keebler@mindspring.com, has been around since 1994, and very often used unobscured during those early years. It is quite well known to spammers and is often used as a forged header. My father recently recieved an ActiveX virus sent using my address in the "From:" field. He was suspicious, as I know how to spell and form sentences like a native English speaker, and don't send him attachments other than amusing.jpegs
But I'm scared of my more technically naive mother getting zapped this way, so I will probably have to retire that address. I resent that very much.
Windows (and other reasonably complex OSs) often get very busy for reasons difficult to discern. My old, crap laptop gets all but frozen when it starts swapping in earnest, or during dramatic GC sweeps. I've learned when to expect these, though.
Also, my DSL modem has a "WAN" light, but nothing to say what's coming in vs going out. Turning logging on demonstrated that nearly all unaccountable activity was incoming probes, and I breathed easier. I also helped more than one sysadmin/netadmin identify zombies on their own networks, but it took some learnin' to see what probes were harmless vs those that were malicious.
You're absolutely right about bounce messages---a brief "View Sources" against the headers, particularly the Received-From header, usually shows their origin being very far away from me.
He is. But Groundskeeper Willie is Scotland. Got my Scots confused there, and I can't think of anything to say about Iowans. "Ya corn-raisin' ________ monkey", maybe, but I don't know what ________ is.
He also inspired the Scotty Rule:
When your commanding officer tells you to get something done,
Estimate the time to finish the job,
Double that,
Change up to the next highest units.
For example, if you think the job takes two weeks, say it's impossible to get it done in under four months. So when you spend three weeks drinking beer then knock it out in an afternoon, your boss will think you're some kind of miracle worker.
"Scotty! I need warp power in three minutes or we're all dead!"
"I can give you three minutes next Thursday. How's that sound, ya cheese eatin' surrender monkey?"
I grew up admiring "Scotty" as an engineer. [...] Sure enough, I'm not an actor today, but a professional engineer, although in software, not warp drive.
You're not the only one. A university in Wisconsin's school of engineering awarded Doohan an honorary degree when they found out half their student body had been inspired into engineering by Scotty.
I gotta respect the man. Did you know he stormed the beaches at Normandy?
You have to be careful of the relocation/repopulation program, though. One morning some Department of Wildlife rangers jumped out at me and shot me with a tranq gun. I woke up a day later at a data center in New Delhi, with a bastard of a headache and a yellow tracking tag stapled to my earlobe...
"SCO's present assertion...that SCO has not had sufficient time to perform the requisite analyses of Linux and the UNIX code it claims to have copyrighted, and that such analyses could take 25,000 man-years, obviously rings hollow. It appears that SCO's litigation strategy now is simply to seek delay for delay's sake. SCO, by its own admission, has already performed the analyses it needed, but has not come forward with any evidence that would a create genuine issue of material fact as to copyright infringement in this case. In this situation, summary judgment is appropriate; SCO should not be given additional time to perform analyses it admits it has already performed and have apparently (despite SCO's public claims) turned up nothing" (emphasis added).
OTOH maybe the judge should grant a stay until SCO has completed the 25,000 man-years of analyses it says it needs. A staff of 100 could finish the job in 250 years; surely BayStar can keep pouring money in for that long?
Actually, Alabama's law against interracial marriage was not repealed until two years ago. It had not been enforced in several decades and was generally seen as having gone the way of laws requiring horseless carriages be preceded by a man waving a red lantern. Most people had forgotten it was even on the books.
But in 2002, the state legislature, rather than pretend the law did not exist, did the right and courageous thing by acknowledging the law, and repealing it.
You wouldnt expect a kid to read a book about the perils of not eating their vegetables, so why this?
Because vegetables aren't nearly as tasty as data. The kid may not read it now, but the first time she loses some critical data, or gets suckered into downloading a trojan, then she might RTFM and her world become a better place.
Especially as stubborn as kids are nowadays
How old are you, that you've made the transition from "people older than me are ruining the world" to "people younger than me are destroying civilization"? Kids have never been unstubborn. A few days ago I found a great quote:
The Earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer mind their parents. Every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.
This was taken from Assyrian stone tablet dated around 2800 BCE.
The only thing that changes from century to century is the terminology.
I've taken about a dozen flights in the past two years, all pretty uneventful except for the time I'd forgotten about my penknife being in my bookbag. This last week, I flew from Boston to Atlanta, and it got all PITA on me. The first big clue was that the automated no-baggage check-in kiosk wouldn't work for me. I had to go get back in line to get a boarding pass. When I got to the security checkpoint, the guy took my bording pass, checked my ID, and applied yellow highlighter to my boarding pass, where it had SSSS printed under my seat assignment. They put me in the special line. They inspected my shoes. They passed the wand over me. They patted me down. They searched my backpack and carry-on. They did the chemical test on my laptop.
They were all very polite and efficient about the whole thing---I learned a long time ago that the surlier you are with the people handling you, the surlier they're going to be. The older fellow doing the bag inspection joked about the title of one of my books---"Absolute BSD". He said "I know what BS is, what's the D stand for?"
When I left the security area, I realized two things. First, that I was flying on a one way ticket, all the way down the Atlantic coast, on a ticket bought by a third party at nearly the last minute. Add that to the fact I'm male and below 40 and you've got a very close match to the warning-bells profile.
The second thing I realized was that they forgot to check under my hat! All this song and dance and I could have had anything under there!
On the whole, an ugly fact of modern existance. So why search septugenarian invalids? Because if you only search guys like me, then you're profiling, I guess, and that's racist and naughty.
Atlanta, I vote the worst and most obnoxious airport out there, security-wise. I've seen lines stretch all the way through baggage claim, past ticketing and out onto the sidewalk on Monday mornings.
And because I'm a vindictive son of a bitch who never forgives and never forgets...
A properly vindictive son-of-a-bitch would name the manager and identify the store by name and location. That way we could all share in the fun.
Congratulations, though, on getting them to shoot themselves in the foot. That is always so much more gratifying than going through all the effort oneself.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm taking a tech writing course this term, and the "book" is an on-line thingy that I pay $40 for the privilege of using for a year. Shame I wouldn't mind being a tech writer when I grow up, because instead of having something on my shelf I can use every day for ten years, I have to spend $400 for access to the same information for the same decade.
They also have the advantage of being invulnerable to another popular method of defeating conventional locks: hammering in a flat-blade screwdriver and twisting like hell.
I find the Bic solution very elegant because I admire simple hacks that solve intricate problems (like holding down the shift key to defeat CD copy protection). Bummer that this affects me, though.
Old, slow servers. Nearly any laptop HDD turns at 4200 RPM. I suppose that's okay for low bandwidth home use, though.
In the meantime, don't bother trying to be the protagonist of a story in a book somewhere. From her point of view, you're Daddy. Do the daddy things well, and love her well, because what you do for a living is incredibly peripheral to her life---it's just something that you go to in the morning and come home from ("Yaaay! Daddy's home!") at night.
Read her stuff you enjoy reading and that she enjoys having you read to her. Read her Where the Wild Things Are and James and the Giant Peach. Read her lots and lots of Seuss. Read her stuff you enjoyed as a kid. Read her Pooh. Read her The Monster at the End of This Book, starring Grover. Do the voices when you read---she'll be giggling at your Grover impersonation even when she's in college.
When she asks her what you do for a living, don't point to some character in a book: Tell her. Show her. Invite her to the office along for an hour or two and show her off to everybody you work with.
I swear to you it doesn't matter what you read to her, as long as it amuses and stimulates her, and as long as you do it out of love.
Now, is that just for the pelt, or do I have to bring in the whole spammer?
With due respect, if a person is 25 yards from you, he's probably not in your living room with you. And unless he is also armed with a projectile weapon, he probably does not presently count as your attacker. For home defense the best weapon is still a slide-action twelve gauge with a very short straight-bore barrel, loaded with #10 or finer shot. At close quarters (read: "in home-defense situations"), there's no aiming, every target gets knocked down, and wild shots don't pass through walls and injure the nice couple across the street. Also, that shick-shack sound of the slide being worked is a dandy deterrent all on its own, to say nothing of having to look into that cavern of a muzzle...
Probably the absolute best value a firearm has is as a deterrent. A slide-action shotgun has this wonderful, ominous shick-shack sound that everybody recognizes and no home invader can hear without immediately recognizing that he is in very bad trouble. The responsible thing for a homeowner to do, having thus served notice that he is armed, is to scream "Get out!" at the top of his lungs, and give the invader the opportunity to comply.
Pulling the trigger is indeed the last solution. The invader's, anyway.
I copied-and-pasted it down from your posting. The rest is just a matter of finding a solution within a set of constraints. It's just another form of hacking, I suppose.
Ah, nothing like a stream of highly conductive liquid between your genitals and something containing thousands of volts...
"Mr. Smith? Hi, this is Mr. Anderson over at Fubarco? You hired one of our former employees, a Mr. Jones? I just needed to tell you that his reference status has changed---he is no longer eligible for rehire. Federal law prohibits me from specifying the particulars behind why there's not a chance in hell we would allow Mr. Jones to work here ever again. Just thought I'd let you know. Which reminds me---and this is a completely different and unrelated topic that has nothing to do with the reason we won't allow Mr. Jones to work here ever again---do you have any knowledge of how to remove dead fish from a ventilation system? No? Just thought I'd ask. Well, best of luck!"
Dude, Given my current valid/invalid ratio is below .01 already, any mail bombs will just be bouncing the rubble.
But I'm scared of my more technically naive mother getting zapped this way, so I will probably have to retire that address. I resent that very much.
Also, my DSL modem has a "WAN" light, but nothing to say what's coming in vs going out. Turning logging on demonstrated that nearly all unaccountable activity was incoming probes, and I breathed easier. I also helped more than one sysadmin/netadmin identify zombies on their own networks, but it took some learnin' to see what probes were harmless vs those that were malicious. You're absolutely right about bounce messages---a brief "View Sources" against the headers, particularly the Received-From header, usually shows their origin being very far away from me.
He is. But Groundskeeper Willie is Scotland. Got my Scots confused there, and I can't think of anything to say about Iowans. "Ya corn-raisin' ________ monkey", maybe, but I don't know what ________ is.
- Estimate the time to finish the job,
- Double that,
- Change up to the next highest units.
For example, if you think the job takes two weeks, say it's impossible to get it done in under four months. So when you spend three weeks drinking beer then knock it out in an afternoon, your boss will think you're some kind of miracle worker."Scotty! I need warp power in three minutes or we're all dead!"
"I can give you three minutes next Thursday. How's that sound, ya cheese eatin' surrender monkey?"
You're not the only one. A university in Wisconsin's school of engineering awarded Doohan an honorary degree when they found out half their student body had been inspired into engineering by Scotty.
I gotta respect the man. Did you know he stormed the beaches at Normandy?
You have to be careful of the relocation/repopulation program, though. One morning some Department of Wildlife rangers jumped out at me and shot me with a tranq gun. I woke up a day later at a data center in New Delhi, with a bastard of a headache and a yellow tracking tag stapled to my earlobe...
"SCO's present assertion...that SCO has not had sufficient time to perform the requisite analyses of Linux and the UNIX code it claims to have copyrighted, and that such analyses could take 25,000 man-years, obviously rings hollow. It appears that SCO's litigation strategy now is simply to seek delay for delay's sake. SCO, by its own admission, has already performed the analyses it needed, but has not come forward with any evidence that would a create genuine issue of material fact as to copyright infringement in this case. In this situation, summary judgment is appropriate; SCO should not be given additional time to perform analyses it admits it has already performed and have apparently (despite SCO's public claims) turned up nothing" (emphasis added).
OTOH maybe the judge should grant a stay until SCO has completed the 25,000 man-years of analyses it says it needs. A staff of 100 could finish the job in 250 years; surely BayStar can keep pouring money in for that long?
But in 2002, the state legislature, rather than pretend the law did not exist, did the right and courageous thing by acknowledging the law, and repealing it.
Maybe we need a new acronym, GAS, for GNU Ain't SCO.
Because vegetables aren't nearly as tasty as data. The kid may not read it now, but the first time she loses some critical data, or gets suckered into downloading a trojan, then she might RTFM and her world become a better place.
Especially as stubborn as kids are nowadays
How old are you, that you've made the transition from "people older than me are ruining the world" to "people younger than me are destroying civilization"? Kids have never been unstubborn. A few days ago I found a great quote:
This was taken from Assyrian stone tablet dated around 2800 BCE.
The only thing that changes from century to century is the terminology.
They get banned from the script meetings?
They were all very polite and efficient about the whole thing---I learned a long time ago that the surlier you are with the people handling you, the surlier they're going to be. The older fellow doing the bag inspection joked about the title of one of my books---"Absolute BSD". He said "I know what BS is, what's the D stand for?"
When I left the security area, I realized two things. First, that I was flying on a one way ticket, all the way down the Atlantic coast, on a ticket bought by a third party at nearly the last minute. Add that to the fact I'm male and below 40 and you've got a very close match to the warning-bells profile.
The second thing I realized was that they forgot to check under my hat! All this song and dance and I could have had anything under there!
On the whole, an ugly fact of modern existance. So why search septugenarian invalids? Because if you only search guys like me, then you're profiling, I guess, and that's racist and naughty.
Atlanta, I vote the worst and most obnoxious airport out there, security-wise. I've seen lines stretch all the way through baggage claim, past ticketing and out onto the sidewalk on Monday mornings.
A properly vindictive son-of-a-bitch would name the manager and identify the store by name and location. That way we could all share in the fun.
Congratulations, though, on getting them to shoot themselves in the foot. That is always so much more gratifying than going through all the effort oneself.
You mean like that one scene where they tilt the camera? Gave me chills.