OK, I've read the many pros-and-cons and they are all griping about the same thing: that the "paper" will be retained by the scanning company for use without compensation for the submitter [and also bears the potential for the paper to be "extracted" from their database by a hacker/disgruntled employee and further sold down the river...]
One poster had the right idea: present the paper as a scanned PDF image -- sure, a little more work for both parties, but not overly burdonsome to either [not even to the prof -- acrobat reader may take a long time to load, but not much longer than word...] The downside is that this can still be "OCR'd" from the images
I'd suggest taking it a step further: submit the paper using the professor's "public key" -- that way, ONLY the professor can decipher it. If further copies "magically appear" in turnitin's database, well, you have a pretty good idea who the culprit may be...
Actually, just as a side note, maybe this is a GOOD use for some of the new "features" in a palladium-ensconced version of office: you, as the "author" of the paper, can explicitly forbid copying and perhaps even the ability for turnitin to "read" it...
(of course, turnitin will just look for an open source version of a DRM cracker...:) )
I suppose I'm a little late to this slashdot party going on in this thread [meaning most people will ignore it anyway] but I really don't see this happening "for technical reasons" -- after all, Google is using [perhaps] the world's largest cluster [beowulf or otherwise] of LINUX-based servers.
It would obviously be a bitter pill to swallow for them to keep the existing technology "in place" (this would have far more exposure than hotmail using unix systems) so you know they will want to switch to MS based OS's for their server farm.
Personally, I doubt their systems can handle such a load. Sure, "I may be wrong..." and 10 times as many NT boxes will actually keep up without crashing [and you know MS could afford to expand the google data center by an order of magnatude;) ] but what is going to happen at the next outbreak of a MS-sql-based "worm" [whups -- as I wrote this my webserver deflected another default.ida request -- imagine code red or nimda happily bouncing around a few thousand CPU's in a single datacenter over a gigabit-ethernet backplane...]
And what happens the next time MS decides it is time to get the masses to "upgrade" by making the next release incompatable with the current release? Sure, updates can be automated, but on the scale it would take to upgrade Google's data center? [even at the current size]
Reading your list of "alternate reality" series [i.e. everyone is a superhero, so what are the cops?] reminds me of a series of books called the
"wild cards". These are actually a series of co-authored short stories compiled somewhat in anthology form, where you'll see oblique references to characters by "other authors" in the series.
Fun to read, and delves into the "alternate history" arena a bit as well [for instance, Marilyn Monroe is still alive in the mid 80's...]
Along the lines of "if everyone is a super hero, what are the cops?" I've often wondered about a potential problem that was never addressed in these books: sports figures. Without giving too much away, the premise behind the people in these series is similar to the "rising stars" bit you mentioned -- instead of a meteor, it is a blimp that gets shot down, somewhat accidentally, that releases a gas cloud. The gas affects "some" of the people, mostly negatively, and fewer still "positively". [this is all revealed in the first story, so this isn't a spoiler] What may be a bit of a spoiler is that later in the series, it was pointed out that the gas cloud was intended to increase the telekinetic capabilities of humans [among other things], and most of the people affected DO have some teke abilities. I've always thought that this would kill sports as we know it -- fans in the stadium would be able to influence the flight of a football, for instance. The only thing is, if the "fans" with abilities are divided, what would happen is that the QB would throw the ball, it would get to some point in the pass, and then explode because everone was "willing" the ball to go in a different direction...
well, actually of a VCR -- it's probably a bit of a setup/planned video, but set to look like tape from a surveilance camera. This is a german site with some, well, odd stuff on it [perfect for the slashdot crowd] but go to
nu-rock and scroll down to the video/
burning-recorder.mpeg to see what I'm talking about
hmmm... being the original submitter, I suppose I *should* take some offense to being called a "moron", but let me fill you in on a little secret [which you would have figured out if you read the article] it is the same headline the newspaper itself used (well, close -- the Toronoto Star simply said "the house of the future has no bathroom" rather than "Microsoft's house of the..." -- minor difference to specifically mention Microsoft in the title, but pointless anyway as this was filed under "articles, microsoft")
Starman9x
p.s. actually, the title I gave it when I submitted it was based more on the current "palladium/where do you THINK you're going" type.sig that many people already use; obviously Chrisd thought the paid/professionall editors at the Star are a bit better at figuring out what is "catchy" than I was with my feeble attempt at humor, for which I thank him:)
hmmm... yes, it is easy to dis it "just cuz microsoft did it", and to be honest, I'm not as thrilled today about that prospect as I would have been in, say, 1985 or so -- that was when I was just out of high school and thinking of all sorts of similar/neat things I would eventually want in my house. At that time I would not have cared whether it was "apple" or microsoft" or even "radio shack" that "implemented" them [things like a recipe lookup/display set up in the kitchen for instance] The "star trek" aspect of voice recognition [and subsequent on-the-fly voice output that "makes sense" would be insanely cool as well]
But, the sad fact of the matter is that the "world has changed" since I was a young idealistic college freshman, and mircosoft, rightly or wrongly, has taken a position that differs from my "ideals" -- I'm the type that likes to tinker under the hood of the program, and I don't see Microsoft making all that easy to "tinker" when "the house of the future" does come around.
Starman9x
p.s. (of a sort) there are several mentions of "Disney" in the article, as in the dark-ride/automated event type rides, but she missed the most obvious "Disney" parallel -- The Smart House"
I have had the unfortunate pleasure (?) of living across the street from a descendant of N.B. any time anything remotely "radio" oriented came up I'd get bombarded by "the story". (Actually, she wasn't so bad about it, but her father "just won't let it rest") -- if the slashdot crowd feels up to a not-very-interesting diversion from their usual web hangouts, check out www.smart90.comWARNING: the guy who builds these "smart90" sites has a lousy sense of what makes a "good" web page. The pages he's pumping out now are a little better than in the past, but you should still dig out an airsickness bag before visiting this site just in case...
and realizing it was all of 1/2 hour, at lunch, [at a burger king in fact -- right off of the community college campus.]
Generally I don't go for the "one upmanship" stuff of how fast I learned this or that, but in this case I make an exception because when I finished lunch I specifically remember thinking to myself, "OK, I've just skimmed through the book and I'm fairly certain I already know the concepts that will be presented during this semester." This was in the early 80's, I think my second semester in "college", and I had a pretty solid understanding of BASIC, a non-trivial amount of (z80) assembler, and a dabbling of "other languages" [APL, fortran, etc.]
I had picked up the required book from the school's bookstore, went to lunch at the aforementioned BK, and started looking through the chapters. It didn't take long to realize that some things were simply renamed terms (table == array) and other things were "syntactic sugar" ("accept" vs. "input") At first, the amount of "preamble" seemed a bit daunting, but in practice that's when I found out how to effectively use a "mainframe" style line editor...:)
One of the BEST things I think I've learned from COBOL is the underlying format of data in a "structure" -- don't underestimate the power of "redefines" or a level 88 variable! Investigate these to learn their "counterparts" in other languages...
No, windows just happened to be first to do CUA...
on
KDE 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
[and before you get the flamethrowers out about the semantics of the word "first", let me downgrade that slightly to "before KDE";) ]
Back when Microsoft and IBM were buddy-buddy pals, they were working on something called "CUA", a TLA that stands for "Common User Access" (do a net search on it for details -- there ARE plenty of books out there on it) This is where things like ctl-c for copy, ctl-v for paste, and the like came into being
Basically, Microsoft has proven the concept -- make the same keystrokes map to the same (conceptual) action all the time, and users will like/learn/adapt/adopt your software that much faster. Unfortunately, by the time you implement the majority of these "common" features, you're "desktop" environment tends to look pretty homogenous when set next to any other desktop. (of course, that is probably how it should be anyway -- the "desktop" environment is merely a way to get to the data on a system, not the system itself...)
Microsoft has pretty much always muddied the waters when it comes to the distinction between a "user interface" and the "system interface" [better known as the "operating system"...] By tightly integrating the user interface with the actual OS code, you create the impression that the user interface itself is indeed "the OS" -- IBM kept a tacit distinction between "OS/2" and the "Presentation Manager" [you could, for instance, build a text-based version of the PM and substitute it instead -- you end up with something that looks amazingly similar to Unix on a mainframe box...] Linux just proves that this "distinction" is certainly feasible -- the implementation of the user interface can be completely seperate from the OS (and as interchangeble as a set of tires on the family car...)
OK, I'm rambling now -- time to let the mod-trolls do their worst to these comments...
You've probably seen this.sig before -- it finally caught my attention as I was reading another story -- so does anyone know offhand if this "prognostication" has come to pass?:)
Go ahead, kill off all the DNS servers. That just means more bandwidth for Gnutella.
Ahh yes --
here it is -- "Buy your own exoskeleton flying vehicle"
yup, modus operandi seems to be the same: sell a vehicle that has only made "tethered flights" on e-bay with a starting bid of $1 million and a proviso that you can't fly it [in order to figure out the fact it probably cannot fly in the first place...]
(ok, looks like a bit more than a week -- that one was dated jan 11th...)
It doesn't take very much of a search to find "new" items on e-bay -- in fact, e-bay even promotes the idea of setting up a "storefront" whereby your prices are determined by (dutch) auction
but, be that what it may, this could certainly backfire on the lawyer -- if such an article is indeed "part of the claim", then the patently bogus nature of this provision should help throw out the entire case...
OK, you're really gonna make me think about this, eh?:)
Currently, however, I do agree with your final point: "you can't put together a system with all the Xbox features for less than the cost of an Xbox." I'm just putting this forth as a "very close competitor", and within say maybe 6 months, the hardware prices will have dropped to the point where this case + "extras" would indeed be $200. OTOH, because this is a P4 based system with very fast FSB's, you can't get a system that is as "slow" as an Xbox in the first place [apples & oranges comparison]
But, be that what it may, here are the other "comparison points" to consider:
the mobo has on-board TV-out -- maybe not a Geforce or ATI, but it does have it
"plus processor & memory" -- true enough, but stop and realize that this is for a full-on P4, not a P-III, and with 400-533mhz "fsb's", we're talking 1.lots to 2.some-odd ghz processors, not 733/celerons
hard drive: what size drive comes in an Xbox to begin with, and is it upgradable? [I don't know -- I haven't shopped for an Xbox...] For the $200 MS is charging, I'm willing to bet the "standard" HD is barely a gig, maybe 2 [you almost cannot buy one that small anymore, however...]
controller: for $9.95 I've seen an interface unit that lets you connect standard nintendo-style controllers to a USB port -- I don't think that's going to break very many budgets...
Well, start with
this box to get the "cool looking" (and small) device, add your DVD drive, and I think you're pretty much set [the box, as is, has most of the other stuff you're looking for]
Realize of course that the $300 price tag on that site is merely "the first site I found with this" and that current prices differ [in other words, you should be able to find a better deal somewhere...]
If you stop and think about it, "not being able to buy the blanks" stops approximately 0% of any determined intruder [since you didn't say you were successful in getting a duplicate made, I presume you aren't all that determined...]
But, consider all the "variables" there are to a typical key:
number of pins (tumblers)
heights of the pins
shape of the "end" of the key (keyway)
items 1 & 2 are really the same (just padding the list to make it look impressive) which leaves the third item: the "shape" of the key as viewed head-on. You CAN use your current key impressed in wax/soap/silly putty to get that shape, then use that for making a mold to make your own blanks -- as they say, it ain't rocket science!
I recently started a very similar discussion(*) on my linux user group's chat/list, and got much the same reaction as is posted here.:)
One thing, however, that is common with all the detractors is the presumption that the "counter attack" would be all encompassing, i.e., "his system had a worm trying to infect mine, so I wiped his BIOS in return so the machine can't boot" [that would be seriously wrong...]
BUT that isn't how I (and I suspect the original author) interperet the situation -- someone mentioned the concept of a "surgical strike", and I think that is far more appropriate: "his system had a worm trying to infect mine, so I killed just the worm..."
Mind you, there should be a few other things that "should be done" in the process, mainly, notification (as best as is possible) that the offending system has "something amiss with it", actual pointers to process names or what have you [i.e., proof that it was indeed a "malicious process" and not merely thousands of slashdotters hitting the system w/browsers], notification that the one particular process was stopped (and a request not to start it until it can be verified as "clean" or whatever), and so on.
Yes, this will annoy those folks that are too lazy to take responsibility for their system's actions. They'll piss and moan and complain. If you have a "body of evidence" that you were acting in defense of your system and/or resources, and if this "goes public", then the sysadmin of the offending system will be exposed for the idiot that he is [IOW, a competent admin will clean up the problem, **possibly** thank you and/or acknowledge that there was a foul up, and life will go on without name calling or anyone's panties getting in a bunch.]
One of the threads drew an analogy of a neighbor's monkey throwing rocks and breaking windows, with the "solution" of "shooting the monkey, problem solved..."; my suggestion is that instead of shooting the monkey, clear the neigbors yard of any rocks big enough to break your windows:)
(*) the "discussion" was centered around some things I found in my web server's logs, namely "404 errors" for attempts to retrieve files with names like "../../c/windowsnt/system/cmd32.exe?...." [code red stuff] My premise is simple: "hey, he asked for the file, it just so happens that on my linux system the file 'cmd32.exe' is a script that copies a gigabyte of data FROM/dev/null"
Sounds fair enough -- it's about as braindamaged as any other reason would be;)
[I do hope your reason is not an implication that I might actually use that stuff -- what would the members of my linux user group think if that were so?]
Ok, I'm new at this [well, slashdot in particular I'm new at -- spouting my opinions I've been doing for years:) ]
So here's the deal: I try to be humorous in pointing out there must be a zillion cookies associated with the sundance site and (for the first time in my so-far-rather-short-slashdot-career) I get a comment modded [yay] down [boo] as offtopic [hmm, perhaps should have mentioned that I was getting a cookie request for every mouse movement on the sundance site -- now I see "out of context" my post might seem a bit "off topic"]
Now, here's the screwy part: because of a DOWNWARD mod, my karma went DOWN as well
[of course, commenting on karma CERTAINLY is offtopic, so things will only go from bad to worse...]
Now, I may be a bit off base, but I thought that karma goes up [for you] when you do good things for other people, and down when you do bad things to them [so I suppose the moderator's karma has dropped as well, right?] Along the same lines, when bad things happen to you your karma should INCREASE for having had to endure a "bad" moment (which makes sense, because it would meant that your karma decreases as you enjoy a happy moment, in effect, "using up" your good karma...)
or is it like everthing else associated with/. lately, i.e., "it's backards, just because" [which, again, actually makes sense -- people could bump up their karma by posting intentionally bad items in hopes of getting modded down and thus increase their stature, but people wouldn't really do that, now would they?:) ]
ok, maybe I'm being dense [and the coffee I've had isn't helping] but how do I "deal with" the sundance site that says I need windows media player version -9- [what happened to 8? when I left windows for linux, 7 was "the hot ticket", but had too many security flaws even for microsoft's taste...]
got an odd error today "certificate signing authority is unknown or invalid" when I tried to go to the "home page" manager for pacbell -- details showed the cert manager to be verisign...
Since I don't give a rodent's nether region about whether or not it is "netiquettely correct" to continue one's own/. post without an intervening comment, I'd like to throw this link at you:
The Funny Thing About Fear is a short story that I found while trying to "remember" (via google) whether it was equalateral or equetorial [and, subsequently, that most of the links I *did* find were links to amazon.com, noting the book can be had for about $0.15 nowadays...]
it may still be early, but the story got a laugh from me
Slashdot Mirror
One poster had the right idea: present the paper as a scanned PDF image -- sure, a little more work for both parties, but not overly burdonsome to either [not even to the prof -- acrobat reader may take a long time to load, but not much longer than word...] The downside is that this can still be "OCR'd" from the images
I'd suggest taking it a step further: submit the paper using the professor's "public key" -- that way, ONLY the professor can decipher it. If further copies "magically appear" in turnitin's database, well, you have a pretty good idea who the culprit may be...
Actually, just as a side note, maybe this is a GOOD use for some of the new "features" in a palladium-ensconced version of office: you, as the "author" of the paper, can explicitly forbid copying and perhaps even the ability for turnitin to "read" it... (of course, turnitin will just look for an open source version of a DRM cracker... :) )
It would obviously be a bitter pill to swallow for them to keep the existing technology "in place" (this would have far more exposure than hotmail using unix systems) so you know they will want to switch to MS based OS's for their server farm.
Personally, I doubt their systems can handle such a load. Sure, "I may be wrong..." and 10 times as many NT boxes will actually keep up without crashing [and you know MS could afford to expand the google data center by an order of magnatude ;) ] but what is going to happen at the next outbreak of a MS-sql-based "worm" [whups -- as I wrote this my webserver deflected another default.ida request -- imagine code red or nimda happily bouncing around a few thousand CPU's in a single datacenter over a gigabit-ethernet backplane...]
And what happens the next time MS decides it is time to get the masses to "upgrade" by making the next release incompatable with the current release? Sure, updates can be automated, but on the scale it would take to upgrade Google's data center? [even at the current size]
Fun to read, and delves into the "alternate history" arena a bit as well [for instance, Marilyn Monroe is still alive in the mid 80's...]
Along the lines of "if everyone is a super hero, what are the cops?" I've often wondered about a potential problem that was never addressed in these books: sports figures. Without giving too much away, the premise behind the people in these series is similar to the "rising stars" bit you mentioned -- instead of a meteor, it is a blimp that gets shot down, somewhat accidentally, that releases a gas cloud. The gas affects "some" of the people, mostly negatively, and fewer still "positively". [this is all revealed in the first story, so this isn't a spoiler] What may be a bit of a spoiler is that later in the series, it was pointed out that the gas cloud was intended to increase the telekinetic capabilities of humans [among other things], and most of the people affected DO have some teke abilities. I've always thought that this would kill sports as we know it -- fans in the stadium would be able to influence the flight of a football, for instance. The only thing is, if the "fans" with abilities are divided, what would happen is that the QB would throw the ball, it would get to some point in the pass, and then explode because everone was "willing" the ball to go in a different direction...
well, actually of a VCR -- it's probably a bit of a setup/planned video, but set to look like tape from a surveilance camera. This is a german site with some, well, odd stuff on it [perfect for the slashdot crowd] but go to nu-rock and scroll down to the video/ burning-recorder.mpeg to see what I'm talking about
Starman9x
p.s. actually, the title I gave it when I submitted it was based more on the current "palladium/where do you THINK you're going" type .sig that many people already use; obviously Chrisd thought the paid/professionall editors at the Star are a bit better at figuring out what is "catchy" than I was with my feeble attempt at humor, for which I thank him :)
But, the sad fact of the matter is that the "world has changed" since I was a young idealistic college freshman, and mircosoft, rightly or wrongly, has taken a position that differs from my "ideals" -- I'm the type that likes to tinker under the hood of the program, and I don't see Microsoft making all that easy to "tinker" when "the house of the future" does come around.
Starman9x
p.s. (of a sort) there are several mentions of "Disney" in the article, as in the dark-ride/automated event type rides, but she missed the most obvious "Disney" parallel -- The Smart House"
I have had the unfortunate pleasure (?) of living across the street from a descendant of N.B. any time anything remotely "radio" oriented came up I'd get bombarded by "the story". (Actually, she wasn't so bad about it, but her father "just won't let it rest") -- if the slashdot crowd feels up to a not-very-interesting diversion from their usual web hangouts, check out www.smart90.com WARNING: the guy who builds these "smart90" sites has a lousy sense of what makes a "good" web page. The pages he's pumping out now are a little better than in the past, but you should still dig out an airsickness bag before visiting this site just in case...
Generally I don't go for the "one upmanship" stuff of how fast I learned this or that, but in this case I make an exception because when I finished lunch I specifically remember thinking to myself, "OK, I've just skimmed through the book and I'm fairly certain I already know the concepts that will be presented during this semester." This was in the early 80's, I think my second semester in "college", and I had a pretty solid understanding of BASIC, a non-trivial amount of (z80) assembler, and a dabbling of "other languages" [APL, fortran, etc.]
I had picked up the required book from the school's bookstore, went to lunch at the aforementioned BK, and started looking through the chapters. It didn't take long to realize that some things were simply renamed terms (table == array) and other things were "syntactic sugar" ("accept" vs. "input") At first, the amount of "preamble" seemed a bit daunting, but in practice that's when I found out how to effectively use a "mainframe" style line editor... :)
One of the BEST things I think I've learned from COBOL is the underlying format of data in a "structure" -- don't underestimate the power of "redefines" or a level 88 variable! Investigate these to learn their "counterparts" in other languages...
Back when Microsoft and IBM were buddy-buddy pals, they were working on something called "CUA", a TLA that stands for "Common User Access" (do a net search on it for details -- there ARE plenty of books out there on it) This is where things like ctl-c for copy, ctl-v for paste, and the like came into being
Basically, Microsoft has proven the concept -- make the same keystrokes map to the same (conceptual) action all the time, and users will like/learn/adapt/adopt your software that much faster. Unfortunately, by the time you implement the majority of these "common" features, you're "desktop" environment tends to look pretty homogenous when set next to any other desktop. (of course, that is probably how it should be anyway -- the "desktop" environment is merely a way to get to the data on a system, not the system itself...)
Microsoft has pretty much always muddied the waters when it comes to the distinction between a "user interface" and the "system interface" [better known as the "operating system"...] By tightly integrating the user interface with the actual OS code, you create the impression that the user interface itself is indeed "the OS" -- IBM kept a tacit distinction between "OS/2" and the "Presentation Manager" [you could, for instance, build a text-based version of the PM and substitute it instead -- you end up with something that looks amazingly similar to Unix on a mainframe box...] Linux just proves that this "distinction" is certainly feasible -- the implementation of the user interface can be completely seperate from the OS (and as interchangeble as a set of tires on the family car...)
OK, I'm rambling now -- time to let the mod-trolls do their worst to these comments...
Go ahead, kill off all the DNS servers. That just means more bandwidth for Gnutella.
Hmmm... [checking...]
Ahh yes -- here it is -- "Buy your own exoskeleton flying vehicle"
yup, modus operandi seems to be the same: sell a vehicle that has only made "tethered flights" on e-bay with a starting bid of $1 million and a proviso that you can't fly it [in order to figure out the fact it probably cannot fly in the first place...]
(ok, looks like a bit more than a week -- that one was dated jan 11th...)
but, be that what it may, this could certainly backfire on the lawyer -- if such an article is indeed "part of the claim", then the patently bogus nature of this provision should help throw out the entire case...
Currently, however, I do agree with your final point: "you can't put together a system with all the Xbox features for less than the cost of an Xbox." I'm just putting this forth as a "very close competitor", and within say maybe 6 months, the hardware prices will have dropped to the point where this case + "extras" would indeed be $200. OTOH, because this is a P4 based system with very fast FSB's, you can't get a system that is as "slow" as an Xbox in the first place [apples & oranges comparison]
But, be that what it may, here are the other "comparison points" to consider:
Hopefully the spammer will succumb to a mental melt-down trying to figure out how to make "50% off" sound good...
Realize of course that the $300 price tag on that site is merely "the first site I found with this" and that current prices differ [in other words, you should be able to find a better deal somewhere...]
But, consider all the "variables" there are to a typical key:
- number of pins (tumblers)
- heights of the pins
- shape of the "end" of the key (keyway)
items 1 & 2 are really the same (just padding the list to make it look impressive) which leaves the third item: the "shape" of the key as viewed head-on. You CAN use your current key impressed in wax/soap/silly putty to get that shape, then use that for making a mold to make your own blanks -- as they say, it ain't rocket science!One thing, however, that is common with all the detractors is the presumption that the "counter attack" would be all encompassing, i.e., "his system had a worm trying to infect mine, so I wiped his BIOS in return so the machine can't boot" [that would be seriously wrong...]
BUT that isn't how I (and I suspect the original author) interperet the situation -- someone mentioned the concept of a "surgical strike", and I think that is far more appropriate: "his system had a worm trying to infect mine, so I killed just the worm..."
Mind you, there should be a few other things that "should be done" in the process, mainly, notification (as best as is possible) that the offending system has "something amiss with it", actual pointers to process names or what have you [i.e., proof that it was indeed a "malicious process" and not merely thousands of slashdotters hitting the system w/browsers], notification that the one particular process was stopped (and a request not to start it until it can be verified as "clean" or whatever), and so on.
Yes, this will annoy those folks that are too lazy to take responsibility for their system's actions. They'll piss and moan and complain. If you have a "body of evidence" that you were acting in defense of your system and/or resources, and if this "goes public", then the sysadmin of the offending system will be exposed for the idiot that he is [IOW, a competent admin will clean up the problem, **possibly** thank you and/or acknowledge that there was a foul up, and life will go on without name calling or anyone's panties getting in a bunch.]
One of the threads drew an analogy of a neighbor's monkey throwing rocks and breaking windows, with the "solution" of "shooting the monkey, problem solved..."; my suggestion is that instead of shooting the monkey, clear the neigbors yard of any rocks big enough to break your windows :)
(*) the "discussion" was centered around some things I found in my web server's logs, namely "404 errors" for attempts to retrieve files with names like "../../c/windowsnt/system/cmd32.exe?...." [code red stuff] My premise is simple: "hey, he asked for the file, it just so happens that on my linux system the file 'cmd32.exe' is a script that copies a gigabyte of data FROM /dev/null"
[I do hope your reason is not an implication that I might actually use that stuff -- what would the members of my linux user group think if that were so?]
So here's the deal: I try to be humorous in pointing out there must be a zillion cookies associated with the sundance site and (for the first time in my so-far-rather-short-slashdot-career) I get a comment modded [yay] down [boo] as offtopic [hmm, perhaps should have mentioned that I was getting a cookie request for every mouse movement on the sundance site -- now I see "out of context" my post might seem a bit "off topic"]
Now, here's the screwy part: because of a DOWNWARD mod, my karma went DOWN as well [of course, commenting on karma CERTAINLY is offtopic, so things will only go from bad to worse...]
Now, I may be a bit off base, but I thought that karma goes up [for you] when you do good things for other people, and down when you do bad things to them [so I suppose the moderator's karma has dropped as well, right?] Along the same lines, when bad things happen to you your karma should INCREASE for having had to endure a "bad" moment (which makes sense, because it would meant that your karma decreases as you enjoy a happy moment, in effect, "using up" your good karma...)
or is it like everthing else associated with /. lately, i.e., "it's backards, just because" [which, again, actually makes sense -- people could bump up their karma by posting intentionally bad items in hopes of getting modded down and thus increase their stature, but people wouldn't really do that, now would they? :) ]
(ok, where did I leave those <sarcasm> tags?)
is it just me, or does it seem like every mouse movement causes a "new cookie" event for the "siteserver" cookie?
ok, maybe I'm being dense [and the coffee I've had isn't helping] but how do I "deal with" the sundance site that says I need windows media player version -9- [what happened to 8? when I left windows for linux, 7 was "the hot ticket", but had too many security flaws even for microsoft's taste...]
got an odd error today "certificate signing authority is unknown or invalid" when I tried to go to the "home page" manager for pacbell -- details showed the cert manager to be verisign...
The Funny Thing About Fear is a short story that I found while trying to "remember" (via google) whether it was equalateral or equetorial [and, subsequently, that most of the links I *did* find were links to amazon.com, noting the book can be had for about $0.15 nowadays...]
it may still be early, but the story got a laugh from me
something suspiciously self-referential is going on here...