For some reason, nobody ever bothers to mention where the logs of the Slashdot IRC forums get posted. After the IRC interview with CmdrTaco and Hemos a few months ago, it took me some digging to figure out where the log wound up.
So why am I now being passed the full search parameters, user browser information, and presumably user IP?
You (or someone) must have changed Apache's CustomLog directive to "combined." This places extra information, like the referer URL and the user-agent string, into the access_log.
Totally normal; in fact, I tend to find logs without this information to be far less useful for statistical purposes. Most stats apps, like awstats, will even pick out the search terms from your logs and rank them based on popularity so you can see how folks are finding you.
If so shouldn't it be possible to open up the cookie file and hand edit it?
You could also use someone else's Google cookie. For example, I wrote a PHP script called NukePost which deletes batches of Usenet posts from groups.google.com at once, automatically. Google's server expects - requires, actually - a cookie in order to complete the process.
I embedded one of my ancient cookies into the script, which is sent to Google every time someone runs it without modifying the cookie data. I've had numerous people write me thanking me for the script. In other words, lots of people have all used "my" Google cookie to delete their own posts from groups.google.com, without problem.
It's kinda like swapping your grocery store discount card with a friend. Sure they're tracking "you," but what they wind up with is a bunch of useless garbage...
This is more or less impossible if the person you're tracking is coming in from AOL, because everyone accesses the Internet proper through an AOL firewall/proxy, so the person you're tracking has the same IP address as all 3,743 other AOL users in Des Moines, Iowa.
To the best of my knowledge, this is true only of outbound web traffic. AOL users do receive a dynamically assigned, "real" IP address when they connect, just like customers of other dialup ISPs. They can indeed participate directly (i.e. no firewall) in P2P networks, run FTP servers, and do a lot of other things most people would probably never bother to do at 38,400 bps.
My guess is that the reason AOL has received so few subpoenas is that dialup ISPs are probably not rife with filesharing. RoadRunner, Time Warner's cablemodem service, has received plenty of subpoenas - even the infamous munkyspanker21 listed in the first round of subpoenas was a RoadRunner user - so there's no "leave AOLTW alone" conspiracy.
Seriously though, is it not possible to read an article about Uranus without seeing all those "uranus *lol* *giggle* *pffft!*" posts ?
Of course it's possible. I'm amazed at the discovery of this new moon system, and duly amazed that the two new moons evaded detection for so many years. I imagine it speaks to the quality of NASA's latest technologURANUS! lol *giggle* *pffft!*
OK, maybe it's not possible, but you have to admit, it's a bit funnier than all those jokes about NO CARRI^ath0
It doesn't matter if you create the best mousetrap, as long as Micro$traps controls the market you will get nowhere. You can't even advertise your new trap, since Micro$traps will threaten the magazines to stop advertising in their paper if yours will get printed.
Wired plugged two independent IM apps, Trillian included, giving both of them positive reviews. Doth not Microsoft advertise in Wired? I don't have the print copy of that issue but I'd be seriously surprised if there was not a Microsoft advert in it.
Where does KaZaA advertise? That's right, nowhere; they created a product that people like (as junky as it may be), so people use it, and tell their friends. When was the last time you were browsing a trade magazine and saw a full-page color ad for Apache? That's what I thought. Yet Apache is everywhere, even on Windows, even with numerous competitors.
Open source/free/alternative software doesn't need to advertise. When it's good, its user base will take care of promotion and evangelizing.
All that said, I don't really see any sort of open source IM initiative taking over. When it comes to IM, the fact is that people want to be on the same network as most or all of their friends. That means a centralized network (or at least a 100% interoperable collection of smaller networks), and that means a lot of bandwidth. Unless IBM, or Sun, or Redhat, or Google decide to pour a few spare millions into operating the infrastructure to power an open IM network, I don't see any "OSS friendly" company ever dominating the IM space.
I think that there should be a tax imposed on people/corporations who file civil lawsuits and lose them. This would not apply to everyone who lost a lawsuit, only to those who initiated the suit and subsequently lost. If someone sued you and won, you would not be taxed, and neither would they.
For example, suppose that SCO sues IBM, and SCO loses. SCO should then have to pay a tax to the government for having wasted taxpayer money by tying up the judicial system with a suit which was found to be without merit. After all, assuming such suit makes it to trial, we (the taxpayers) are the ones footing the bill for the judge, the jury duty pay, the court reporters' salary, the cost of operating the court facilities during the trial, etc.
This would kill two birds with one stone:
a) Cut out a lot of bullshit frivolous lawsuits
b) Make the government a bit of bank on those who went ahead with said bullshit frivolous lawsuits
Who's with me? Vote Motherfucking Shit in 2004...:)
How many of your democrats thought you would be agreeing with a republican today?
Me.
I'm a registered democrat, but only because I lean slightly left of center as opposed to right of center.
I'm pro-gun (typically a conservative trait), but I'm also pro-choice (that disqualifies me from being a true conservative, I suppose). I don't favor taxes (I must be an evil republican), but I don't favor the death penalty either (wait, I must be a bleeding heart). I support the idea of gay marriage (now the neocons surely won't accept me!) but I don't care much for welfare (so maybe I'm conservative after all...).
Goddamnit, it's time that people stop seeing things in black and white!
I'm a democrat but I agree with republicans every day. And republicans agree with me. Not on everything, mind you, but nobody is required to vote a straight ticket. You should vote for the candidate you feel represents your stance on the issues, regardless of which party they're aligned with. If you're a registered republican that doesn't mean that you can't vote for a democrat when he makes sense, and vice versa.
The fact that I'm pro-choice doesn't make me a left-wing nutcase. The fact that I don't like the idea of subsidizing people who are too lazy to find a job and too careless to bother with birth control and wind up with 6 kids whose lives are paid for with my tax dollars doesn't mean I hang out with Rush Limbaugh. The fact is, I can take a liberal stance on one issue and a conservative stance on another. And regardless of how I'm registered, I can and will vote for any damned person I please.
I've voted for republicans and I'll do it again, despite the fact that I'm a registered democrat. There are a fair share of politicians from both parties who "get it." (Arguably there aren't enough from either camp who "get it," especially when it comes to technology, but such is life.) There are also a fair share of politicians from both parties who clearly don't "get it." The ones who don't "get it" - for my own personal value of "getting it" - will not be getting my vote. I don't care what their party affiliation is.
Just because Chris Cannon is a republican doesn't mean that he and I can't see eye to eye on something. Today, we do see eye to eye on the issue of internet commerce. Tomorrow, on some other issue, who knows.
In America, voting is not only a right, it's a duty. Just remember to vote for the candidate, not for the party.
Please explain how the federal deficit has anything to do with state budgets. (Hint: It doesn't, really)
Oh, is that right? You're saying that when the federal government is in the red, and can't give money to state governments because it can't even cover its own operating costs, that situation has no effect on states' budgets?
"Federal funding is nearly equal to the amount raised by general state taxes. In 2003, New Hampshire received $1,058,104,021 in federal funds, 26.83 percent of the $3,944,374,848 in total appropriations. Some agency or division budgets are more than 50 percent dependent on federal sources, but New Hampshire is not alone in its reliance on Washington, D.C. The national average is 26 percent, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities."
"U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Detroit, said the tax cut is the reason Michigan won't get more. "The president's fiscal year 2004 budget request contains misplaced domestic and economic priorities," Levin said. He called Bush's tax cut "a huge deficit creator" that "makes it impossible as a result to assist states like Michigan." Some state budgets are in their worst fiscal crises since World War II."
"For more than 25 years, the federal government has mandated special programs for students with disabilities, but it never has kept its promise to cover nearly half the cost. As a result, Indiana has been forced to pay millions of dollars each year to meet the federal requirements."
"The federal government should pay Indiana $2,622 for each student in special education -- $420.4 million total. This year, Indiana received only about $171 million -- a contribution that falls about $250 million short of the 40 percent promise. To make up for the loss, the state spent $371 million, and districts spent countless classroom dollars."
Before you state the obvious (one of the sources quoted is a Democrat, another article notes that the federal funding problem has been going on for 25 years) I should point out that this is not an anti-Bush post. I'm just trying to clarify that, yes, the federal budget (and deficit) does affect the state budgets.
Similar story here, in the Memphis area (midsouth.rr.com). We used to get 250KB/s down, it was recently upped to 350KB/s, just noticed it this morning when I was downloading from the news-server. My upstream hasn't changed, approximately 35KB/s up.
Rumors abound, though, that RoadRunner is going to be introducing tiered pricing soon enough. I have a gut feeling that the increased downstream is a teaser, and that within a few months they'll say "pay more for the better bandwidth we've introduced, or pay the same but we'll cut you back."
Am I a "poweruser?" After 4 days, with only 6-8 hours of my Freenet node being up,
# w 3:14PM up 4 days, 12:40, 3 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 # ipfw show | grep divert 00050 3165717 1230150721 divert 8668 ip from any to any via dc0
If my Freenet node had been up for the duration of the uptime, I imagine I'd have well exceeded 4 gigs in 4 days.
Several years back, the Lake Superior shard (UO game server) was having serious problems. So a bunch of folks who played on that server hopped over to the Atlantic shard to protest. For whatever reason, it was red dress instead of going naked: Screenshot 1Screenshot 2, they put us in jail
Of course, naked protests aren't unheard of. I don't recall what this one was about, but we were a merry band of nude archers: Naked Posse
...than to say that Heineken is, as far as I'm concerned, the best readily available "mass market" beer here in the US. There are plenty of imports, microbrews, and less popular beers to be had, and certainly several of them (Rolling Rock and Shiner Bock, to be sure) are worthy of mention when it comes to taste. But nothing beats a Heineken in terms of quality versus price.
To all Slashdotters who think that a six-pack of Bud Light is the way to achieve Zen each night, try buying a six-pack of Heinekens tonight, and I promise you won't go back to the lamebrau that is Bud Light. Yeah, the bottles are a bit tougher to open and dispose of than Bud Light's convenient cans, but for very little more money, you get a superior brew, a better buzz, and you also don't have to put up with that "liquid rice" aftertaste.
Given the age (he was only 15!), and given the media, he was still crucified. There was no sympathy angle, there was no "youngster gets hassled by overzealous feds" angle. He was, as could be expected, generally portrayed as an evil h4x0r who DoSed eTrade, eBay, Yahoo, etc.
No, whomever launched MSBlaster.B is not going to become a media darling, and he damned sure isn't going to win the hearts and minds of Joe Sixpack, whose computer kept rebooting itself due to the various incarnations of MSBlaster.
From a personal standpoint, I think it's sort of shitty that this kid is getting busted for what seems to amount to no more than a bit of hex editing. I'd rather see the FBI investing its resources into tracking down the author of the original MSBlaster (as opposed to a barely-modified variant which didn't propagate widely)... And I'd much rather see them go after whatever assclown is responsible for SoBig.F, of which I've now received more than 6,000 copies at 100KB apiece. That's not to say that they aren't investigating these things, and I hope they find the perps eventually; but I think it's a bad deal that they're going to bust a kid who made a knock-off instead of the guy who started it.
I really don't buy the sympathy angle. The guy allegedly launched a worm variant, he probably bragged about it (another similarity to Mafiaboy), according to MSNBC, the FBI subpoenaed IRC server logs to track him down. Launch a worm and gloat about it to your 31337 buddies, and you get what's coming.
This announcement means that I can (presumably) finally get Freenet running on my spare FreeBSD box. I hadn't been able to figure out how to get the quasi-official, not guaranteed to be functional, volunteer java ports (which may or may not actually include NIO, which Freenet uses) installed on FBSD. I'd pretty much given up.
This is great news, even if it's binary-only! My thanks to Sun and to the FreeBSD Java team.
I work for a contractor of FedEx. FedEx owns or rents hundreds of buildings around town, and all of them are protected in some manner or another. Most of the properties are linked up via an electronic access control system which makes use of RFID-enabled cards. The cards are called "proximity cards," or "proxy cards" for short.
The system consists of two components, a proxy card and a card reader. The readers are mounted at the doors of many FedEx buildings, and the proxy card itself is worn or held by employees. Each employee has a unique proxy card. The cards are manufactured by a GE subsidiary, Casi-Rusco.
It's an amazing system. When you walk near the door of a FedEx building, you simply wave your proxy card near (..within the "proximity" of..) the reader. The reader, which emits a signal, activates the RFID chip within your proxy card, and your card sends back its unique ID which in turn is tied to your employee/vendor code. Instantly - within a fraction of a second - the database is checked to determine whether or not you're allowed to open that door. If so, the door unlocks momentarily; if not, it remains locked.
As much as I hate "consumer-grade" RFID, it really is incredibly powerful (and, I imagine, rather convenient) in terms of access control.
Sure... but when was the last time a nurse jabbed you in the ass with a vaccine while you were walking down the street stuffing your mouth with dounuts?
About two hours ago. Unfortunately, the alarm clock went off and I woke up before the part about suction therapy...
Game admins in MMOGs like UO and EQ have the power to create items, or edit accounts, or something similar whereby they can arbitrarily collect real-world saleable items.
Two words: GM Darwin. That's shorthand for "it's been done, and UO does not tolerate employees who try to profit from their godly positions."
I've never played a MMOG why were black dye tubs coveted?
In UO, players can wear various items of clothing and armor. Those made of cloth (and now leather, too) can be dyed using dye tubs. Initially, there was only one kind of dye tub; to use it, you'd buy the tub and some dyes. Using the dyes brought up a list of preset colors you could choose from, and you could color the dye tub one of those colors. Then, you could use the colored dye tub to dye clothing items.
Some years ago, an unauthorized third-party program called UO Extreme (UOX) was released. Among other things, the program allowed you to send unorthodox color combinations when coloring a dye tub. I don't recall the specifics, but essentially, when you colored a dye tub through the normal process, the UO client would send an RGB code to the server indicating which color to make the dye tub. But the sanity check was on the client side. UOX let you put in arbitrary RGB values which were not available from the normal UO client.
And so the black dye tub was born, and people started dying their clothes black. Since black clothing, and black dye tubs themselves, were uncommon (because only those with the UOX program could make them), they fetched a premium price. UOX was deemed an illegal add-on and people who used it were banned from the game, thus locking the supply. For whatever reason, the existing black dye tubs were left alone. The demand continued to rise - this is normal in UO, any sort of "rare" item where there are only a certain number available will attract buyers. "Rares" trading and collecting has become a cottage industry of UO.
All of a sudden there were a limited number of black dye tubs in the world, and since they could no longer be created, they got expensive. That's why they were coveted.
Years later, a black dye tub was added as a legitimate Veteran Reward item.
Dibbell has more to fear from the IRS. What if they get wise to his little scheme and demand income tax?
I'd hope that someone doing this on such a high-profile level would report the income. The Beeb article even quipped that "in April 2004, he will declare to the US Internal Revenue Service that his main source of income is the sale of imaginary goods."
BTW, I recognize you from boards.uo.com (though I haven't really been there since they delegated the boards to Stratics). Nice to see a familiar name from my UO days:)
According to his web site, the current exchange rate is about $16.50 per million gold, or 165$ per 10 million.
It tends to fluxuate. I can remember several years ago when it was around $30 per million, $35 if you needed it right away or bought smaller amounts.
At that time, being a millionaire in UO wasn't rare, but it wasn't common, either. When I first started the game, it took me several months to earn 100,000 gold pieces to buy a house from someone. Fast-forward a few years. A couple of duping bugs, along with a house deed exploit, brought mass inflation and the price of gold bottomed out around $10 per million. In comparison, the house that cost me 100,000 gold pieces some two years prior was selling for 5-6 million! Around the time I quit playing seriously, the gold price had climbed a bit, back to $15 or so per million. I guess it's risen a bit higher since then.
There are also variations from sale to sale even throughout a single day. There's no standard rate, it's sort of like filling up your gas tank. One gas station might be charging $1.659/gallon, then you drive 3 blocks down the road and another station is selling it for $1.599. Similarly, you might go to Tradespot and find someone selling a million gold for $17.50, and no other sales are open, so you buy it. Ten minutes later someone else posts saying they've got gold for sale at $15 per million; you win some, you lose some.
And, just like any other business, there are always a) suckers and b) desperate customers. If gold is averaging $15.00, there'll be some guy posting 10 eBay auctions with a minimum bid and Buy It Now of $17.50, and probably half of them will sell. Someone who needs a few mil in a hurry - say, to buy a house - might stand at the bank in-game and offer to pay $20 per million; it's faster than going over to one of the trading boards.
How long would it take someone playing UO to honestly (or sneakily, in the case of a rogue) earn a million gold?
This varies wildly. When I was last playing, experienced players who had built up or purchased decent characters (and had time to spare) could make 1 or 2 million a day through honest play, using normal game mechanics as opposed to cheating or exploiting. I didn't find this type of person to be the average profiteer, though. Like the parent mentioned, spending 8 hours "working" only to reap $30 or so is no bargain. I used to enjoy powergaming now and then, where I'd spend a day or two doing nothing but trying to earn as much gold as possible, but it was usually for my own spending in-game. After a day or two it always got very boring.
For awhile, there was a "taming boom" which introduced billions of gold pieces into the UO economy. At some point, people started to figure out that a single tamer towing around several dragons or drakes and a nightmare could literally own just about any dungeon room on the entire map. You could sit in one spot for hours on end, letting your tamed pets kill everything for you. When you wound up with more loot than you could carry, you made a quick round-trip recall to and from a bank to drop off the loot and pick up some bandages for the pets. Meanwhile, your pets gained stats and skills - and thus became stronger - from all the fighting.
And thus the taming boom started. Hunting in dungeons turned into a lame experience, because no matter where you went, you'd find tamers camping the good spawn spots. The tamers shouted "go to Felluca" but it was the same situation there, except that some of the tamers were killing each other. Worse, because taming became known as the way to make gold, and because UO became known as a game where you could make real money by playing, it attracted the worst of the worst. A game set in Victorian times tends to lose its atmosphere where you walk into the dungeon and encounter a group of tamers named PiMPiN HaRd, deeznuttz, KindGreenBud, and TupacLivzOn hogging all of the mons
This seems to be something that the online games are going to have to address quickly. As I recall from previous posts, they've made it against the rules to sell items, but is that really enforcable? Why not legalize and regulate the trading industry with items that are "signed" or somehow unique to prevent "duping" or other bugs? An auction system similar to ebay or a simple marketplace exchange would perform this service quite well.
Ultima Online doesn't forbid selling or trading items outside of the game, and in fact at one point someone from OSI was bragging that that the UO gold piece had an exchange rate similar to that of the Lira. The fact that UO items are seen to have real value is (or was) a source of pride to some of the folks running it.
UO now has an official account transfer program whereby the buyer and seller of an account both mail in a signed contract, pay $25, and the account is "cleaned" of any black marks and then given to the buyer. If that's not encouraging the sale of UO accounts (and, as always, finding a way to skim) I don't know what is.
As for ingame trades, they've addressed a lot of the old scams.
Used to be, when you transferred a house, it popped up a little scroll-looking object in the buyer's trade window with coordinates to the house. Plenty of people fell for the scam of dropping a house deed, or even some worthless magic scroll, in the trade window instead of actually transferring the house. Now, when you buy a house, special gumps pop up.
You used to be able to position a black floppy hat on top of a normal (10 gold piece) dye tub in the trade window, making it look like a then-coveted black dye tub. Black dye tubs at the time were labeled "dying tub" just like any other dye tub, so if the buyer checked the tub instead of clicking on the hat, he thought he was getting a black dye tub. They went in and relabeled all black dye tubs to "Black Dye Tub" to address that scam.
There are lots of other examples, but in general, UO does try to crack down on scamming and keep the trading safe.
ex-Frigax Lake Superior (heh, feels strange typing that again:)
Slashdot Mirror
For some reason, nobody ever bothers to mention where the logs of the Slashdot IRC forums get posted. After the IRC interview with CmdrTaco and Hemos a few months ago, it took me some digging to figure out where the log wound up.
For those who can't make the chat, the log will eventually be at http://www.slashnet.org/forums/
Editors: After the chat is over, any chance of having the log URL linked to the story text as an update?
Totally normal; in fact, I tend to find logs without this information to be far less useful for statistical purposes. Most stats apps, like awstats, will even pick out the search terms from your logs and rank them based on popularity so you can see how folks are finding you.
I embedded one of my ancient cookies into the script, which is sent to Google every time someone runs it without modifying the cookie data. I've had numerous people write me thanking me for the script. In other words, lots of people have all used "my" Google cookie to delete their own posts from groups.google.com, without problem.
It's kinda like swapping your grocery store discount card with a friend. Sure they're tracking "you," but what they wind up with is a bunch of useless garbage...
My guess is that the reason AOL has received so few subpoenas is that dialup ISPs are probably not rife with filesharing. RoadRunner, Time Warner's cablemodem service, has received plenty of subpoenas - even the infamous munkyspanker21 listed in the first round of subpoenas was a RoadRunner user - so there's no "leave AOLTW alone" conspiracy.
OK, maybe it's not possible, but you have to admit, it's a bit funnier than all those jokes about NO CARRI^ath0
Wired plugged two independent IM apps, Trillian included, giving both of them positive reviews. Doth not Microsoft advertise in Wired? I don't have the print copy of that issue but I'd be seriously surprised if there was not a Microsoft advert in it.
Where does KaZaA advertise? That's right, nowhere; they created a product that people like (as junky as it may be), so people use it, and tell their friends. When was the last time you were browsing a trade magazine and saw a full-page color ad for Apache? That's what I thought. Yet Apache is everywhere, even on Windows, even with numerous competitors.
Open source/free/alternative software doesn't need to advertise. When it's good, its user base will take care of promotion and evangelizing.
All that said, I don't really see any sort of open source IM initiative taking over. When it comes to IM, the fact is that people want to be on the same network as most or all of their friends. That means a centralized network (or at least a 100% interoperable collection of smaller networks), and that means a lot of bandwidth. Unless IBM, or Sun, or Redhat, or Google decide to pour a few spare millions into operating the infrastructure to power an open IM network, I don't see any "OSS friendly" company ever dominating the IM space.
I think that there should be a tax imposed on people/corporations who file civil lawsuits and lose them. This would not apply to everyone who lost a lawsuit, only to those who initiated the suit and subsequently lost. If someone sued you and won, you would not be taxed, and neither would they.
:)
For example, suppose that SCO sues IBM, and SCO loses. SCO should then have to pay a tax to the government for having wasted taxpayer money by tying up the judicial system with a suit which was found to be without merit. After all, assuming such suit makes it to trial, we (the taxpayers) are the ones footing the bill for the judge, the jury duty pay, the court reporters' salary, the cost of operating the court facilities during the trial, etc.
This would kill two birds with one stone:
a) Cut out a lot of bullshit frivolous lawsuits
b) Make the government a bit of bank on those who went ahead with said bullshit frivolous lawsuits
Who's with me? Vote Motherfucking Shit in 2004...
I'm a registered democrat, but only because I lean slightly left of center as opposed to right of center.
I'm pro-gun (typically a conservative trait), but I'm also pro-choice (that disqualifies me from being a true conservative, I suppose). I don't favor taxes (I must be an evil republican), but I don't favor the death penalty either (wait, I must be a bleeding heart). I support the idea of gay marriage (now the neocons surely won't accept me!) but I don't care much for welfare (so maybe I'm conservative after all...).
Goddamnit, it's time that people stop seeing things in black and white!
I'm a democrat but I agree with republicans every day. And republicans agree with me. Not on everything, mind you, but nobody is required to vote a straight ticket. You should vote for the candidate you feel represents your stance on the issues, regardless of which party they're aligned with. If you're a registered republican that doesn't mean that you can't vote for a democrat when he makes sense, and vice versa.
The fact that I'm pro-choice doesn't make me a left-wing nutcase. The fact that I don't like the idea of subsidizing people who are too lazy to find a job and too careless to bother with birth control and wind up with 6 kids whose lives are paid for with my tax dollars doesn't mean I hang out with Rush Limbaugh. The fact is, I can take a liberal stance on one issue and a conservative stance on another. And regardless of how I'm registered, I can and will vote for any damned person I please.
I've voted for republicans and I'll do it again, despite the fact that I'm a registered democrat. There are a fair share of politicians from both parties who "get it." (Arguably there aren't enough from either camp who "get it," especially when it comes to technology, but such is life.) There are also a fair share of politicians from both parties who clearly don't "get it." The ones who don't "get it" - for my own personal value of "getting it" - will not be getting my vote. I don't care what their party affiliation is.
Just because Chris Cannon is a republican doesn't mean that he and I can't see eye to eye on something. Today, we do see eye to eye on the issue of internet commerce. Tomorrow, on some other issue, who knows.
In America, voting is not only a right, it's a duty. Just remember to vote for the candidate, not for the party.
http://www.eagletribune.com/news/stories/20030211
"Federal funding is nearly equal to the amount raised by general state taxes. In 2003, New Hampshire received $1,058,104,021 in federal funds, 26.83 percent of the $3,944,374,848 in total appropriations. Some agency or division budgets are more than 50 percent dependent on federal sources, but New Hampshire is not alone in its reliance on Washington, D.C. The national average is 26 percent, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities."
http://www.lsj.com/news/local/030210_budget_1a-6a
"U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Detroit, said the tax cut is the reason Michigan won't get more. "The president's fiscal year 2004 budget request contains misplaced domestic and economic priorities," Levin said. He called Bush's tax cut "a huge deficit creator" that "makes it impossible as a result to assist states like Michigan." Some state budgets are in their worst fiscal crises since World War II."
http://www.indystar.com/print/articles/4/008402-6
"For more than 25 years, the federal government has mandated special programs for students with disabilities, but it never has kept its promise to cover nearly half the cost. As a result, Indiana has been forced to pay millions of dollars each year to meet the federal requirements."
"The federal government should pay Indiana $2,622 for each student in special education -- $420.4 million total. This year, Indiana received only about $171 million -- a contribution that falls about $250 million short of the 40 percent promise. To make up for the loss, the state spent $371 million, and districts spent countless classroom dollars."
Before you state the obvious (one of the sources quoted is a Democrat, another article notes that the federal funding problem has been going on for 25 years) I should point out that this is not an anti-Bush post. I'm just trying to clarify that, yes, the federal budget (and deficit) does affect the state budgets.
Rumors abound, though, that RoadRunner is going to be introducing tiered pricing soon enough. I have a gut feeling that the increased downstream is a teaser, and that within a few months they'll say "pay more for the better bandwidth we've introduced, or pay the same but we'll cut you back."
Am I a "poweruser?" After 4 days, with only 6-8 hours of my Freenet node being up,If my Freenet node had been up for the duration of the uptime, I imagine I'd have well exceeded 4 gigs in 4 days.
Time will tell.
Several years back, the Lake Superior shard (UO game server) was having serious problems. So a bunch of folks who played on that server hopped over to the Atlantic shard to protest. For whatever reason, it was red dress instead of going naked: Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2, they put us in jail
Of course, naked protests aren't unheard of. I don't recall what this one was about, but we were a merry band of nude archers: Naked Posse
Frigax
...than to say that Heineken is, as far as I'm concerned, the best readily available "mass market" beer here in the US. There are plenty of imports, microbrews, and less popular beers to be had, and certainly several of them (Rolling Rock and Shiner Bock, to be sure) are worthy of mention when it comes to taste. But nothing beats a Heineken in terms of quality versus price.
To all Slashdotters who think that a six-pack of Bud Light is the way to achieve Zen each night, try buying a six-pack of Heinekens tonight, and I promise you won't go back to the lamebrau that is Bud Light. Yeah, the bottles are a bit tougher to open and dispose of than Bud Light's convenient cans, but for very little more money, you get a superior brew, a better buzz, and you also don't have to put up with that "liquid rice" aftertaste.
Mafiaboy.
Given the age (he was only 15!), and given the media, he was still crucified. There was no sympathy angle, there was no "youngster gets hassled by overzealous feds" angle. He was, as could be expected, generally portrayed as an evil h4x0r who DoSed eTrade, eBay, Yahoo, etc.
No, whomever launched MSBlaster.B is not going to become a media darling, and he damned sure isn't going to win the hearts and minds of Joe Sixpack, whose computer kept rebooting itself due to the various incarnations of MSBlaster.
From a personal standpoint, I think it's sort of shitty that this kid is getting busted for what seems to amount to no more than a bit of hex editing. I'd rather see the FBI investing its resources into tracking down the author of the original MSBlaster (as opposed to a barely-modified variant which didn't propagate widely)... And I'd much rather see them go after whatever assclown is responsible for SoBig.F, of which I've now received more than 6,000 copies at 100KB apiece. That's not to say that they aren't investigating these things, and I hope they find the perps eventually; but I think it's a bad deal that they're going to bust a kid who made a knock-off instead of the guy who started it.
I really don't buy the sympathy angle. The guy allegedly launched a worm variant, he probably bragged about it (another similarity to Mafiaboy), according to MSNBC, the FBI subpoenaed IRC server logs to track him down. Launch a worm and gloat about it to your 31337 buddies, and you get what's coming.
This announcement means that I can (presumably) finally get Freenet running on my spare FreeBSD box. I hadn't been able to figure out how to get the quasi-official, not guaranteed to be functional, volunteer java ports (which may or may not actually include NIO, which Freenet uses) installed on FBSD. I'd pretty much given up.
This is great news, even if it's binary-only! My thanks to Sun and to the FreeBSD Java team.
I work for a contractor of FedEx. FedEx owns or rents hundreds of buildings around town, and all of them are protected in some manner or another. Most of the properties are linked up via an electronic access control system which makes use of RFID-enabled cards. The cards are called "proximity cards," or "proxy cards" for short.
The system consists of two components, a proxy card and a card reader. The readers are mounted at the doors of many FedEx buildings, and the proxy card itself is worn or held by employees. Each employee has a unique proxy card. The cards are manufactured by a GE subsidiary, Casi-Rusco.
It's an amazing system. When you walk near the door of a FedEx building, you simply wave your proxy card near (..within the "proximity" of..) the reader. The reader, which emits a signal, activates the RFID chip within your proxy card, and your card sends back its unique ID which in turn is tied to your employee/vendor code. Instantly - within a fraction of a second - the database is checked to determine whether or not you're allowed to open that door. If so, the door unlocks momentarily; if not, it remains locked.
As much as I hate "consumer-grade" RFID, it really is incredibly powerful (and, I imagine, rather convenient) in terms of access control.
Even better, there's already a HOWTO available. It was written with a UPS in mind, but should work just fine for this guy's mains box...
Some years ago, an unauthorized third-party program called UO Extreme (UOX) was released. Among other things, the program allowed you to send unorthodox color combinations when coloring a dye tub. I don't recall the specifics, but essentially, when you colored a dye tub through the normal process, the UO client would send an RGB code to the server indicating which color to make the dye tub. But the sanity check was on the client side. UOX let you put in arbitrary RGB values which were not available from the normal UO client.
And so the black dye tub was born, and people started dying their clothes black. Since black clothing, and black dye tubs themselves, were uncommon (because only those with the UOX program could make them), they fetched a premium price. UOX was deemed an illegal add-on and people who used it were banned from the game, thus locking the supply. For whatever reason, the existing black dye tubs were left alone. The demand continued to rise - this is normal in UO, any sort of "rare" item where there are only a certain number available will attract buyers. "Rares" trading and collecting has become a cottage industry of UO.
All of a sudden there were a limited number of black dye tubs in the world, and since they could no longer be created, they got expensive. That's why they were coveted.
Years later, a black dye tub was added as a legitimate Veteran Reward item.
BTW, I recognize you from boards.uo.com (though I haven't really been there since they delegated the boards to Stratics). Nice to see a familiar name from my UO days
ex-Frigax
Lake Superior
It tends to fluxuate. I can remember several years ago when it was around $30 per million, $35 if you needed it right away or bought smaller amounts.
At that time, being a millionaire in UO wasn't rare, but it wasn't common, either. When I first started the game, it took me several months to earn 100,000 gold pieces to buy a house from someone. Fast-forward a few years. A couple of duping bugs, along with a house deed exploit, brought mass inflation and the price of gold bottomed out around $10 per million. In comparison, the house that cost me 100,000 gold pieces some two years prior was selling for 5-6 million! Around the time I quit playing seriously, the gold price had climbed a bit, back to $15 or so per million. I guess it's risen a bit higher since then.
There are also variations from sale to sale even throughout a single day. There's no standard rate, it's sort of like filling up your gas tank. One gas station might be charging $1.659/gallon, then you drive 3 blocks down the road and another station is selling it for $1.599. Similarly, you might go to Tradespot and find someone selling a million gold for $17.50, and no other sales are open, so you buy it. Ten minutes later someone else posts saying they've got gold for sale at $15 per million; you win some, you lose some.
And, just like any other business, there are always a) suckers and b) desperate customers. If gold is averaging $15.00, there'll be some guy posting 10 eBay auctions with a minimum bid and Buy It Now of $17.50, and probably half of them will sell. Someone who needs a few mil in a hurry - say, to buy a house - might stand at the bank in-game and offer to pay $20 per million; it's faster than going over to one of the trading boards.
This varies wildly. When I was last playing, experienced players who had built up or purchased decent characters (and had time to spare) could make 1 or 2 million a day through honest play, using normal game mechanics as opposed to cheating or exploiting. I didn't find this type of person to be the average profiteer, though. Like the parent mentioned, spending 8 hours "working" only to reap $30 or so is no bargain. I used to enjoy powergaming now and then, where I'd spend a day or two doing nothing but trying to earn as much gold as possible, but it was usually for my own spending in-game. After a day or two it always got very boring.
For awhile, there was a "taming boom" which introduced billions of gold pieces into the UO economy. At some point, people started to figure out that a single tamer towing around several dragons or drakes and a nightmare could literally own just about any dungeon room on the entire map. You could sit in one spot for hours on end, letting your tamed pets kill everything for you. When you wound up with more loot than you could carry, you made a quick round-trip recall to and from a bank to drop off the loot and pick up some bandages for the pets. Meanwhile, your pets gained stats and skills - and thus became stronger - from all the fighting.
And thus the taming boom started. Hunting in dungeons turned into a lame experience, because no matter where you went, you'd find tamers camping the good spawn spots. The tamers shouted "go to Felluca" but it was the same situation there, except that some of the tamers were killing each other. Worse, because taming became known as the way to make gold, and because UO became known as a game where you could make real money by playing, it attracted the worst of the worst. A game set in Victorian times tends to lose its atmosphere where you walk into the dungeon and encounter a group of tamers named PiMPiN HaRd, deeznuttz, KindGreenBud, and TupacLivzOn hogging all of the mons
UO now has an official account transfer program whereby the buyer and seller of an account both mail in a signed contract, pay $25, and the account is "cleaned" of any black marks and then given to the buyer. If that's not encouraging the sale of UO accounts (and, as always, finding a way to skim) I don't know what is.
As for ingame trades, they've addressed a lot of the old scams.
Used to be, when you transferred a house, it popped up a little scroll-looking object in the buyer's trade window with coordinates to the house. Plenty of people fell for the scam of dropping a house deed, or even some worthless magic scroll, in the trade window instead of actually transferring the house. Now, when you buy a house, special gumps pop up.
You used to be able to position a black floppy hat on top of a normal (10 gold piece) dye tub in the trade window, making it look like a then-coveted black dye tub. Black dye tubs at the time were labeled "dying tub" just like any other dye tub, so if the buyer checked the tub instead of clicking on the hat, he thought he was getting a black dye tub. They went in and relabeled all black dye tubs to "Black Dye Tub" to address that scam.
There are lots of other examples, but in general, UO does try to crack down on scamming and keep the trading safe.
ex-Frigax
Lake Superior
(heh, feels strange typing that again