I relied on the WhoIs contact database when my work got slammed with SoBig virii/viruses. It was so bad that our mail queue was delayed as much as 2 days at points. Tracking infected computers that were hammering us by IP, then contacting them via the phone number listed in WhoIs was *VERY* successful. In a 3 day span, I had notified over 100 infected users that were unaware of their virus problems. All cleaned their machines and work returned to it's usual humdrum routine.
True, idiot users still have to run the attachment, but they can run it on any mailer that works with any(?) windows OS. That includes Mozilla, Groupwise, Eudora, Pegasus or any brand of web based mail clients. The attachment is the virus and it doesn't work through any mail client. It has it's own MTA built in.
SoBig.F is not an Outlook worm. It is a Windows worm. It does not require Outlook to run. It has it's own built in MTA and grabs email addresses from cached webpages and local text files as well as the Outlook/Express address book.
List generation software is not always evil. I have written software to web-scrape VERY specific sites. Some examples:
For a fraternity that had limited membership rules according to major. Get them a list of all students in that subset of majors to compare people who signed up with interest against. It's counter productive when you are trying to get someone to join your organization to be over-intrusive when first meeting.
For my boss, a list of all houses for sale in a 30 mile radius from all 22 local realtors. The houses had to fit certain specs and be in a certain price range. This included contact info of the realtor.
For the company I work for. I wrote a robot that scans specific job postings for projects available to bid on. It compiles them from many sites and updates them daily to an inter database, which then generates webpages for our Sales Staff to llok at and figure which ones are best for us to bid on. Once again, contact info is grabbed
Again, for my company. A bot to scour resume sites based on inputable criteria so that HR can find potential new hires more easily.
For my company yet again. contact info for the owners, engineers, contacts, managers, etc... of every (available) mall, shop, radio/TV/Emergancy radio tower, telephone company, utility, etc. We are contracted out to provide PEMA (Pennsylvania Emergency Management Association) a database for use in case of emergancy. The list generation software helped populate the data, and helps scrub the database and keep it up to date.
For my company again. Phase I/II 911 geodatabases. I write software that scours local tax records for changes when people move, as well as phone carrier's records so that when you dial 911, they already have directions to where you are and emergancy crews automatically dispatched. These databases can shave anywhere from 45 seconds to 3 minutes off of response time... which can mean life or death.
For a man in Palm Springs, CA. He wanted to track down people he graduated with for their 25th class reunion. His school had since closed and I wrote software to scrape classmates.com (after he paid for a membership) for the contacts he wanted so they could be put in a spreadsheet that was more easily readable and printable than the website.
These are just some of the very legitamate uses for list generating software.
I don't have much of a problem with targetted lists, either, but I don't generate them myself. The man from Palm Springs offered me $2000 to get him the contact info from every Real Estate Agent in Cali. He was teh top seller for 6 years straight ('91-'96) for a real estate firm in CA and retired young a very rich man. He wanted to offer his consulting services to agents there now. I find this a gray area for spamming, but refused the job on principle. He *WAS* targetting his email towards people that could actually use his services (unlike me getting mortgage offers when I don't own a house or my girlfriend getting penis enlargement spam, regardless of how much I may or may not need it;). I told him 'no' because I didn't feel right about contributing to spam anyways.
I work for a medium sized Engineering & Telecommunications firm (>500 employees all over the east coast). I have a mail filter set up on an intermediate MTA to catch all executable files. This includes.PIF,.BAT,.SCR,.EXE,.COM, etc. When a file of this type comes in, it is parked in a holding folder for 7 days. A notification message is sent to the recipient and back to the sender (I, know this sucks, but bear with me a second) with instructions on how to send another email back with a release code in the subject. When the message with the release code is received by the MTA, it continues delivering the original email to our actual mail server. If no message is received in 7 days, the original mail is deleted.
Now, once the SoBig hit, I made a seperate rule to catch just those files. No notifications were sent. It parked them for 4 days then deleted them. In that time, I've written a small script** that parses the header of all parked files every morning at 7:45am. It grabs the IP# of the originating computer and tosses it into a spreadsheet. Once it has done all parked messages, it tally's them up and sorts them by the most common appearing numbers. Then, when I get in at 8am, I do a WhoIs lookup on the IP as well as an nslookup. I try and contact the owner of the netblock and notify them that they have a computer infected with SoBig on their network and it is attacking us. I have yet to have anyone that hasn't co-operated fully (though, Comcast took a bit of prodding). My worst case was a 3 day period where a single cable modem user in Philadelphia on Comcast.net sent us ~13,000 Sobigs a day. Just this morning I had to contact an ISP/Network Security company in NYC to have a machine there cleaned.
I know it's not my responsibility to see that other people clean their machines, but it is affecting our productivity at work. At the height of the infestation, we were receiving over 28,000 SoBig viruses a day. At ~100Kb each, it was causing massive delays in the mail queue. Keep in mind that most people don't even realize they are infected with it, so they need to be notified so that they can clean it.
-Ab
ps. The script is fairly simple because the built in mail transfer agent in the SoBig is basic (Though I was impressed at the spoofed header-field, X-MailScanner: Found to be clean, that says it's been checked by SpamAssasin(?) and is not Spam. If anyone is interested in the script (it is a VB executable, but I can send the source code or psuedo-code so it can be recreated in perl/python) let me know.
Um, everything2.com is a bit off in the explination of why da 'Burgh has the 'h' at the end. I'm from the area and we were taught in our local history class in high school that the 'h' is the way the early british colonial soldiers could tell if there was a major fort in the town for bedding and restocking. This was a briefly used system that was eventually abandoned, but the name stuck. There are dozens of cities/towns in Pennsylvania, especially western PA, that end in 'burg'. Most of them are along the old portage system (or what would become that system. A brief listing:
Mercersburg
Chambersburg
Harrisburg
Mechanicsburg
Ebensburg
Holidaysburg
Loysburg
Lewisburg
Landisburg
Milesburg
Phillipsburg
Rebersburg
Johnsonburg
Martinsburg
Markleysburg
Saxonburg
Riemersburg
Cannonsburg
Many of these towns/cities DID have an 'h' at the end until the renaming convention stated in the article at everything2.com mentioned. Pittsburgh just happened to be large enough (and stubborn enough) to tell them all to go fsck themselves.:)
There are several reasons the Everything2.com story doesn't seem to hold water. First, there are as many towns in PA along the same path that end in "boro" that were founded by the British, such as Barnsboro, Springboro, and Waynsboro. None of them switched over to 'burgh'. 2nd, Pitt didn't found the city of Pittsburgh. In fact, no one British did. The city was founded by the French in the late 1600s and was called Duquesne. They built Ft. Duquesne at the point where the 3 rivers (Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio) meet; currently were Point State Park is. There is a historical marker commemorating the old fort. The British were took control after defeating the French (shocker there;) ) in the French & Indian war. General Forbes (whom many things are named after in the city, including one of the main roads and one of the OLD baseball parks) named the city and the fort after Sir william Pitt. You don't read about this French influence because only the winners get to write the history books.
In fact, MANY of the french (and german, more on this later) named border towns were renamed to British names after the war. You will find hundreds of towns ending in 'boro', 'burg', 'town', 'ton', 'ville', and 'hill'. You'll also find that even though it was originally found by the French, and claimed by the British, most of the towns in Central/Western PA contain mostly people of German, Polish, and Slovakian descent. This also led to a lot lot of misspellings and mis-pronounciations.
-Ab
ps. Considering the original article is in the Kansas City Star, are you sure they didn't mean Pittsburg, Kansas? I can't check www.toynbee.com cause it's currently slashdotted.
By your logic, if your television got stolen, or if your television was "so scratched up as to be" unviewable, then you would steal another television because you don't want to pay a "tax" on something you already own.
No, this is not his logic at all. To apply what you said to his original analogy would be to say, My CD player broke, so I'm going to steal another one. To liken your analogy to be in line with his original one (as close as you can when dealing with actual property versus intellectual property), you would say, My cable line is out and I paid for it but the cable company won't honor my transaction and replace it so I will watch my neighbor's TV.
Now... do I expect the the RIAA companies to replace scratched CDs?** Not really. Their (flawed) business model depends on people replacing media. Records -> 8-tracks -> Cassetts -> CDs -> ??? -> Profit!. But, courts have already ruled that people can make back-ups for their own private use. Ask yourself, would it have been just as wrong for the parent to your post to have made CD-R copies before the scratches or theft had occured? He had paid his money, he bought rights to listen to the songs on those media indefinitely. There was no license or EULA that said there were conditions on his enjoyment of those tracks.
These tracks are good for 3 years or 3000 listenings, whichever comes first. RIAA is not held responsible for mistreatment of our shoddily made products that may result in the physical medium becoming unreadable rendering this EULA null and void. By breathing and/or blinking while reading this license you have agreed to it and all statments that are implied, unstated, and overlooked by this document (unless they come back to bite us in the ass, at which point we reserve the right to change this legally binding license at any time without notice and sue you, your ISP, your computer manufacturer, your bank, your spouse, kids, parents, roommates, grandparents, cousins, nieces, nephews, friends, acquaintences, study partners, pets, pharmacist, doctor, dentist, gardner, cable company, local representative, landlord, insurance carrier, mechanic, plumber (and his ass-crack), your favorite restaurant, local PTA, your 3rd grade spelling teacher, local minister/priest/mullah/rabbi, your bank, electricity providor, skippy the wonder hampster, and anyone else we think we might scare into paying us for the non-existant damages you unknowingly agreed to just by being born.
-Ab
** Other content related businesses do this. There are several game companies that do. I have had replacement EA games sent to me before at no cost to me. All I had to do was send the scratched disk back. They even paid shipping. This was 3 years ago, though. I don't know iff they still have that policy.
Easy... cause the house was controlled by right-wing conservative fucks. Now, I didn't go to *CUNT-FEST* or *SEX-FAIRE*, so my information is all from news sources and talking with friends on campus. There were tents in the HUB lawn (Student Union Building) that were running events such as "Orgasm Bingo" and "Pin the Clitorus on the Vulva". Here are 2 links: The first is a listing of the campus newspaper's articles favorable towards them (As most are). The second is an editorial by a student that has links to more articles at the end.
Personally, they have the right to put on an event like this. I would've liked to see it a little less "IN YOUR FACE" because, believe it or not, people do bring their kids and families to walk around campus. Seeing huge banners stating *CUNT-FEST* isn't exactly a family atmosphere at 3 in the afternoon on a Saturday. My only real beef with them is the inequity of funds distribution that those groups get. I was in 3 different UPAC supported clubs that year. Every club is supposed to get a minimum of $350-$450 if they have at least 15 (maybe 20) members. All of the clubs I was in had at least 50 (one, the Deck-hockey club had over 200). All of my clubs got nothing because "funds had run out," yet these people, several weeks later, get nearly Ten-Grand to put on a show that less than 200 people showed up to and was basically put on to tell the culture around them, "FUCK YOU!".
Now, don't get me wrong. The representative (Lawless R-Montgomery County) that spearheaded this crusade to cut funding is a cocksucker in his own right. If it were up to him, the entire campus would be dry and anyone caught buying condoms would be expelled. He's a self-rightous, pompous douchebag. I *believe* (unsure) that he was voted out of office last year in the elections. I'm too lazy at the moment to look it up.
As I said in my original post, it is one thing excercise your free speech, it is another to expect to continue to be rewarded for it if a significant amount of people find it offensive or dumb. Just like it is a poster's right to put up "GNA FPs" and "Natalie Portman covered in Peanut Butter!" and "BSD is DEAD!" posts, but don't expect to be modded up for it.
Will it be meant for actual LAN usage? I think it's being designed more for back-bone-like reasons. I can't even get my drives to transfer large amounts of data back and forth in a reasonable time, so I can't see the need unless we go to entirely solid state drives.
but... imagine a beowulf cluster interconnected by lines of these...;)
Nah, it would be the greatest dupe ever if Timothy had also been the editor that posted the FIRST article, as well. Now that wouldn't bode well for an editor's competence level.
You may very well be right. I've always heard it attributed to Linus, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's CORRECTLY attributed to him. If I'm wrong then I'm wrong.
As a Liberatarian, I have to say... you are 100% right. The act of censoring is NOT limited to the government. ANYONE can censor. Censorship (in layman's terms) is preventing another individual or group from receiving all or part of a communication. What the ORIGINAL poster SHOULD'VE said is that it's only ILLEGAL for the Government to censor private citizens, except in the cases where the lack of censorship would lead to injury (yelling "FIRE!" in a movie theater), intimidation (blackmail, threats), or immediate damage to public or private property (unauthorized protests). There are a few other minor cases such as outlawing porn to minors and where the act disrupts public proceedings or safety, like a mime performing on a major interstate.
Now, that being said, the Government is in no way OBLIDGED to reward "free speech" either. If the government gives an art museum $1,000,000 in grants a year to showcase art through the National Arts Endowment and then the bigwigs there see a statue of the virgin mary covered in blood and feces displayed as art, they are well within their rights as a governing body to NOT renew the grants. This is not censorship. The government is NOT required to reward behavior that it doesn't find acceptable, regardless of whether that behavior is legal or not.
The same way the Lesbian, Gay, BiSexual, Transgender Association on here on campus had a "SexFaire" and "CuntFest" a few years back that "promoted safe sex and raised awareness of students inherant sexuality". About 200 of the university's 45,000 students went to it, but it became a big deal cause they handed out condoms, gave kissing lessons, and other stuff that escapes me at the moment. The state government heard about it and decided to cut the universities funding because the groups that put on these events used campus funds. Were the censored? No. They were no longer rewarded for their behaviors. The money was given to them for free before and they lost that priviledge.
"Don't bite the hand that feeds you" comes to mind.
-Ab
what about the email lists?
on
P2P Spam?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Sobig scans the address book, cached webpages, text files on the harddrive, etc., for email addresses. Has it occurred to anyone that the rapid reproduction and spreading may just be a side effect of a spammer trying to gather the largest email list on earth? Imagine what they could do with a list that size? Even people who are careful with their personal email addresses could lose them to the spammer by their parents getting infected.
Now, add this on top of how the sobig already spoofs emails and you get other people doing your spam for you... and it's NEARLY untraceable back to you.**
-Ab
** I know they can be traced, at least to the last computer, but getting back to the source is tough cause people tend to delete the original virrused email. I know I traced several attacks and helped notify the host companies/universities and got them cleaned up, but after my 7th track, I got fed up and gave up, adjusted my MTA to block all mails with the.scr and.pif extensions and curled in a fetal position under my deskand took a nap.
Re:The RIAA, DeBeers, Gemology and Maxell
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Near constantly we see stories of little children being tortured over diamonds in Africa yet the/. population seems more concerned with the RIAA placing fake copies of Christina Aguilera songs on KaZaa.
Simple answer... Slashdot is a News for Nerds site. We're all (mostly) techno-weenies and come here for that fact. There isn't a whole lot of science or technology involved in the torture of little african kids for diamonds. If you want to read about that, goto a humanitarian news forum rather than a technology forum.
Personally, I think Sam Kineson said it best when he said (about africans) "You live in a desert. NO FOOD GROWS THERE! MOVE!"
I feel for you, but is this really AOL's problem? Is it even really your problem with AOL? I see as your problem with the spammers and your ISP.
Let's use an analogy:
If I get a bunch of crap marketing calls from an MBNA call center from Sleazy Marketing Company (SMC). I call up the phone company and complain. THey get dozens more complaints and as collective users, we have dictated a policy to them to remain their customers, "Either block the calls from this center or we will goto someone who can." The phone company CAN do this and you see it occasionally in very close night bible thumping communities.
Now, the charity "Save Everything 'cept SCO" decides to rent the call center for it's fund-drive and can't reach anyone in our phone exchange......who is at fault? The charity is pissed at the end-user? Why? The end-user has a right to not answer the phone. They could just as easily ordered caller-ID and not answered anything from that call-block (or unavailable,not listed, etc...). This way the end user's phone isn't tied up when real calls come in.
The charity is pissed at the phone company. Why? The company has a policy in place to keep it's customers. The company's interests lie in itself and it's customers, not some 3rd party.
Who the charity SHOULD have a problem with is MBNA and the original spammers. It is the actions of these 2 that have prompted the blocking. The charity should've requested and read the policy based on what the call-center could and could not be used for. Now, they may have rented the center before SMC caused the problems. This would be unfortunate, but still not the phone company's or the end-user's fault. The charity needs to go back at MBNA and get refunds because their call-center couldn't reach all clients like advertised. They have the choice of using other call-centers with much better cold-calling and call-type policies.
In case there are people that had problems with the analogies portion of the SATs... here's a key:
- MBNA Call Center is your average ISP that allows it's clients to spam.
- SMC is a spamhaus.
- The phone company is any other ISP that doesn't and impliments blacklisting
- The charity is a good company that got caught in the spam fire. Casualty of war, if you will.
Now, the end users (such as your dad) definitely have the option to switch providers (As he did) in protest. The Good company's (such as yourself) can switch providers as well. There are others out there. They may not be as cheap, but is the extra money worth the improved reliablity? You also have the power of your almighty dollar. Call and make threats to leave their service. Demand refunds. It works wonders. I got an additional 150 minutes of anytime minutes and a new $100 phone from AT&T today for free cause of a $2 billing discrepancy today. My journal will have the story tomorrow if anyone is interested.
Ok, I posted another post on this subject before (more of a rant) but I'll re-do it here.
I am colorblind. Been that way since birth. I am a Protanope (more on that later). I have had classes in college on human perception (especially on the eye and ear). Quick background on the eye.
The eye has 2 types of cells on it's retina: rods and cones. Rods see shapes and movement, are better in low light and are 100x more sensative to light than cones. Cones see color. That's it. There are 3 types of cones (Red-Green, Blue, Yellow, and Purple-Orange) and they work very much like a binary gate. They are either on or off. When you see something blue, the blue cone is on (releasing a certain nuero-transmitting chemical that it will re-absorb later), and the other's are half on and half off.
This can be demonstrated by staring at a figure made entirely of 1 color (say a 3 inch square that is bright solid orange). Stare at it for a full 60 seconds, blinking as little as possible. As soon as the minute is up, look at a blank white wall. You'll see a purple square. This is because your orange/Purple cones were so busy firing orange that they ran out of the chemical and can't fire half/half to nuetralize the purple. There for the purples are on and the ones that should be firing orange are in a nuetral non-state until your eyes recover.
Now that we have that out off the way, this red/green cone is where we get the common misconception of "Red-Greed colorblindness". There is no such thing. There are 3 types of color deficiency (which we commonly call colorblindness): Short wave, Middle wave, and Long Wave.
Long wave is red deficiency. People with this are called Protanopes. If you just have a deficiency, you suffer from Protanomaly. If you cannot perceive long waves at all, you have Protanopia. This is the rarer of the "red-green" colorblindnesses.
Middle wave is green deficiency. people with this are called Deutanopes. Mild deficiency is Deutanomaly. No middle wave perception is called Deutanopia. This is also often referred to as "red-green colorblindness"
Short wave is blue deficiency. blah blah blah, Tritanope, tritanamoly, tritanopia. Called "blue-yellow" colorblindness.
Now, to understand what a colorblind person sees, you also need to have a slight understanding of additive color theory and how it works. Light is additive color, paint/ink/anything physical that needs to reflect light is subtractive color. Additive color has 3 primary colors (Red, Green, Blue) and their associated complimentary colors (Yellow, Green, Purple). If you have a base color (let's take red, for example), you add it's compliment to make it appear darker (turn the blue-yellow cones from a 50/50 to a 60/40 or 70/30 ratio). To make it lighter, add white or remove the complimentary colors (turn on more rods, reset the blue-yellow to 50/50).
Now, with this background out of the way, to understand colorblindness you need to consider this, noone is quite sure what is wrong with their cones. The leading theories are:
Their cones do not produce as much of the 'blind' nuero-chemical.
Their cones are missing part of the receptor for that wave length and therefore doesn't fire
The cones of that wavelength are much slower at reclaiming the nuerotransmitter chemical after firing.
Regardless of which (if any are correct), they all have the same effect... reduced sensativity to that wavelength of light. To do a simple simulation of what a Deutanope sees, adjust the gamma correction on your computer's video adapter's properties. Set it so that JUST the green is about half of what it notmally is (offf completely for a Deutanopia suffer). You can do the same for blue and red to see the other types. Some monitors have RGB color adjusting as well. You can do it there.
Now, if you want to know what color your damn shirt/pants/place mats/hair scrunchy/purse/flo
I tend to a gree with you. I have had lots of interaction with vegans here at Penn State University. I get a much larger 'lecture' from them when I wear my t-shirt that says "I (heart) eating cows." I have only met 2 people that I can stand who are vegans.
One is a punk-rock friend of mine that has recently become vegan (memorial day to be exact). He's adamant about not eating meat or meat products (including eggs or milk), not cause he cares about the animals (he has leather pants for Christ's sake), but because he wanted to try it. He's lost 25 pounds and says he feels great, but when that 6 month point comes around, the first thing he's gonna do is tear into a steak. That's the first type of Vegan I can get along with.
The other vegan I know is a cute little woman. She's a near-vegan. She eats eggs once a week because she realizes the need for complete proteins and b-vitamins. When I told her about the Plant that converts turkeys into oil, she got a little conflicted because of the implicattions that they'll have the technology to use that oil to make plastics in the near future. She is the best (IMHO) type of vegan around. When we go out for dinner, I can order a burger, steak, chicken, pork, etc... while she gets her tofu salad and there's no lecturing, preaching, or the like. She has her beliefs (non-religous) for not eating meat and doesn't feel the need to press those on others.
I've never felt the need to impart any of my vegan combacks on either of my friends cause they never impart their beliefs on me. For those of you that need a few to fend off the more vile type of vegans, try the following:
State firmly and clearly, "My ancestors didn't scratch, claw, and battle their way to the top of the food chain so that I had to force myself to exist on salad."
Say, "See these?" point at your canine teeth and finish with, "2 million years of evolution developed these. They're for RIPPING AND TEARING FLESH. Who am I to tell the Earth Mother, Gaia, that she fucked up in her evolutionary plans?"
The liver is the largest organ in your body. It's primary digestive function is to secrete bile (whis is stored in the gall bladder until needed) to digest animal fat. Hell, the next largest is the stomach, and stomach acid digests whole proteins mainly. So the 2 largest organs in the digestive system are designed to digest animals. The partial proteins of plant matter are digested later in the small and large intestines by enzymes released by the pancreas. So, we're designed mainly to digest animals and the parts that take care of the plants are the same parts that hold our sh*t until we can find a toilet.
(my personal favorite...) "Ok, you win, I'll make you a deal. I'll eat vegan and nothing but vegan... but you gotta indulge me. We are reaching a compromise here. I'm trying you're way, you try mine. As long as I eat vegan, you MUST eat at least 1/8 pound of pig (either ham, bacon, or sausage) and some form of egg derived substance with your breakfast. Lunch involves something made from cow... at least 1/8th pound... sometimes 1/4 pound. Dinner is a rotating option of cow, chicken, turkey, pig, (rarely seafood), deer or other wild game, or lamb (rarely). Veal, steak, or hamburger is especially common and encouraged. No tofu is allowed. No 'exotic' veggies, either, like kale, alfalfa, sprouts. Just peas, carrots, celery, corn, and green beans. Salad is the SIDE dish and shall be proportioned as such. Every sandwich/sub/potato/salad you eat mush have cheese and bacon on it. Do we have a deal?" Rattle that off fast (like an announcer stating the 'fine print' on a comercial for a contest) and look real serious. I've had o
ok01? Tell Mark Branson the PSU guys say "hi." Did he bring Caps (the game) back like he said he would? A few of your other guys were up for spring break this past spring as well. We had a small gathering for them, but it wasn't break for us and they were here mid-week. Partying and drinking is all fun and that, but reserved for Fri-Sat (and occasionally Thur, and not to forget Wings and beer on Wed, nor the monkey-boy specials on Sun & Tues... oh and Monday night football... ok, so every night is a drinking night.)
Hey! I resemble that remark! As a proud alumni of Penn State University (a.k.a. "The world's largest community college" and "A drinking town with a football problem") we were ranked 1st and 4th best party schools last year by CNN.com and Playboy/Bacardi (not necessisarily in that order). We are in the mid 40s this year in overall academic rank. Not a bad balance of work and play, especially when you consider that our business college is basically a joke. As the EE t-shirt puts it: Lim(GPA->0) = Business
We also have one of the highest graduation rates for athletes. 1 in 8 PE (professional engineers) has a degree from Penn State (1 in 6 female engineers). Our Nuc-E program is rated #1 (granted, there aren't that many, especially with an active reactor to experiment on). Our AE (Arch-Eng) is top 5, especially in the Lighting and Construction inspection fields. Our IE program (my major) was #3 ranked when I graduated. Our CS and CompE programs suck ass... royal ass... I mean, a field of donkey's in an F-5 tornado amount of ass-sucking. Our EE is there (though, there's something to be said for a course that 70% of the students retake EE350 at LEAST twice... some as many as 5 times). That's not even half of our engineering majors offered. We still have ME, Chem-E, Civ-E, Ag-E, Bio-E, E-Sci, Poly-E, Enviro-E, E-Mech, and Mat-E.
But anyways, we're not just a party school... some of us know how to drink AND get work done. I was a member of the engineering social fraternity, and we'd hear all the "geeks", "nerds", etc.. comments until people came to drink with us. It's quite a statment to hear someone say, "Damn, you guys can DRINK!" to which we reply, "You think it's possible to understand physics or diff. eq's fully while sober? I think not. Besides, you business people screw up, and you have a failed project and move on to the next one. Worst case, you lose your job and have to work as a manager at Bennigan's. Us engineers screw up and buildings collapse, reactors melt down, bridges shake to pieces... people die. We gotta drink just to stay sane."
"Using RFIDs will save billions of dollars a year. Those savings will translate to lower prices for you. What can possibly be wrong about that?"
You don't know american capitalism very well, do you? Your statement should've read:
"Using RFIDs will save billions of dollars a year. Those savings will translate to higher paychecks for the CEO and board members while cutting low-level jobs because people to do inventory are no longer needed. What can possibly be wrong about that?"
You're describing the classic open pool reactor. Although they are nuclear reactors, they're a far cry from a pressurized water reactor where the water temperature is 800F and the pressure is 1000psi. It's nearly impossible to have a catastrophic failure with a open pool reactor (provided there's water in the pool).
Yes, this reactor is NOT a powerplant, but is subject to all the same rules and regulations that a powerplant is subject to. It is an open pool and is used primarily for instruction purposes and reasearch (did you know a copper pipe that has been exposed to nuetron bombardment treatment will corrode at 1/10th the rate of normal copper pipe?:) ).
The most disturbing thing I found while at the reactor was the Nitrogen-8 diffusion system.** It is highly radioactive, but has a half-life of about 10 seconds, so they create alternating horizontal currents from the bottom of the pool to the top that slow the bubbles down by making them zig-zag. By the time they reach the top, they should be harmless.
-Ab
** It's been 3 years since I took the class, so some of the finer details are (such as the nitrogen-8, it maybe another number, 19 is also ringing in my head for some reason) may be off slightly.
They aren't running windows on the actual fail-safe machines. We have a reactor here on campus cause we're one of the few universities to teach Nuclear Engineering. I was an Industrial Engineer and we had to tour the plant and comment on the safety systems and re-design parts of it to make it more human friendly, especially in an emergancy situation.
One of the things we learned is that the computer that actually controls the rods is run on DOS. They are required by the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Committee) to run a very specific program to manipulate and monitor the rods that is only to be run on Dos. The program is internet capable and supports dumb terminals. This is how they instructed us before we went into the control room (in a classroom elsewhere in the building).
On some other notes, if the machines fail, the control rods fall automatically. They are held up buy the computer (well, by motors and/or electromagnets controlled by the computer). If they stop receiving signal form the computer, gravity naturally pulls the rods back down. They also have 2 additional COMPLETE systems ready to be plugged in at any moment if the primary system crashes. At this reactor, you can actually watch the reaction in the pool from above (contrary to the movies, the glow is an eerie blue, not yellow or green).
Slashdot Mirror
I relied on the WhoIs contact database when my work got slammed with SoBig virii/viruses. It was so bad that our mail queue was delayed as much as 2 days at points. Tracking infected computers that were hammering us by IP, then contacting them via the phone number listed in WhoIs was *VERY* successful. In a 3 day span, I had notified over 100 infected users that were unaware of their virus problems. All cleaned their machines and work returned to it's usual humdrum routine.
-Ab
True, idiot users still have to run the attachment, but they can run it on any mailer that works with any(?) windows OS. That includes Mozilla, Groupwise, Eudora, Pegasus or any brand of web based mail clients. The attachment is the virus and it doesn't work through any mail client. It has it's own MTA built in.
-Ab
Lousy E-mail Filters Complicating Outlook Worms
SoBig.F is not an Outlook worm. It is a Windows worm. It does not require Outlook to run. It has it's own built in MTA and grabs email addresses from cached webpages and local text files as well as the Outlook/Express address book.
-Ab
For a fraternity that had limited membership rules according to major. Get them a list of all students in that subset of majors to compare people who signed up with interest against. It's counter productive when you are trying to get someone to join your organization to be over-intrusive when first meeting.
For my boss, a list of all houses for sale in a 30 mile radius from all 22 local realtors. The houses had to fit certain specs and be in a certain price range. This included contact info of the realtor.
For the company I work for. I wrote a robot that scans specific job postings for projects available to bid on. It compiles them from many sites and updates them daily to an inter database, which then generates webpages for our Sales Staff to llok at and figure which ones are best for us to bid on. Once again, contact info is grabbed
Again, for my company. A bot to scour resume sites based on inputable criteria so that HR can find potential new hires more easily.
For my company yet again. contact info for the owners, engineers, contacts, managers, etc ... of every (available) mall, shop, radio/TV/Emergancy radio tower, telephone company, utility, etc. We are contracted out to provide PEMA (Pennsylvania Emergency Management Association) a database for use in case of emergancy. The list generation software helped populate the data, and helps scrub the database and keep it up to date.
For my company again. Phase I/II 911 geodatabases. I write software that scours local tax records for changes when people move, as well as phone carrier's records so that when you dial 911, they already have directions to where you are and emergancy crews automatically dispatched. These databases can shave anywhere from 45 seconds to 3 minutes off of response time ... which can mean life or death.
For a man in Palm Springs, CA. He wanted to track down people he graduated with for their 25th class reunion. His school had since closed and I wrote software to scrape classmates.com (after he paid for a membership) for the contacts he wanted so they could be put in a spreadsheet that was more easily readable and printable than the website.
;). I told him 'no' because I didn't feel right about contributing to spam anyways.
These are just some of the very legitamate uses for list generating software.
I don't have much of a problem with targetted lists, either, but I don't generate them myself. The man from Palm Springs offered me $2000 to get him the contact info from every Real Estate Agent in Cali. He was teh top seller for 6 years straight ('91-'96) for a real estate firm in CA and retired young a very rich man. He wanted to offer his consulting services to agents there now. I find this a gray area for spamming, but refused the job on principle. He *WAS* targetting his email towards people that could actually use his services (unlike me getting mortgage offers when I don't own a house or my girlfriend getting penis enlargement spam, regardless of how much I may or may not need it
-Ab
I work for a medium sized Engineering & Telecommunications firm (>500 employees all over the east coast). I have a mail filter set up on an intermediate MTA to catch all executable files. This includes .PIF, .BAT, .SCR, .EXE, .COM, etc. When a file of this type comes in, it is parked in a holding folder for 7 days. A notification message is sent to the recipient and back to the sender (I, know this sucks, but bear with me a second) with instructions on how to send another email back with a release code in the subject. When the message with the release code is received by the MTA, it continues delivering the original email to our actual mail server. If no message is received in 7 days, the original mail is deleted.
Now, once the SoBig hit, I made a seperate rule to catch just those files. No notifications were sent. It parked them for 4 days then deleted them. In that time, I've written a small script** that parses the header of all parked files every morning at 7:45am. It grabs the IP# of the originating computer and tosses it into a spreadsheet. Once it has done all parked messages, it tally's them up and sorts them by the most common appearing numbers. Then, when I get in at 8am, I do a WhoIs lookup on the IP as well as an nslookup. I try and contact the owner of the netblock and notify them that they have a computer infected with SoBig on their network and it is attacking us. I have yet to have anyone that hasn't co-operated fully (though, Comcast took a bit of prodding). My worst case was a 3 day period where a single cable modem user in Philadelphia on Comcast.net sent us ~13,000 Sobigs a day. Just this morning I had to contact an ISP/Network Security company in NYC to have a machine there cleaned.
I know it's not my responsibility to see that other people clean their machines, but it is affecting our productivity at work. At the height of the infestation, we were receiving over 28,000 SoBig viruses a day. At ~100Kb each, it was causing massive delays in the mail queue. Keep in mind that most people don't even realize they are infected with it, so they need to be notified so that they can clean it.
-Ab
ps. The script is fairly simple because the built in mail transfer agent in the SoBig is basic (Though I was impressed at the spoofed header-field, X-MailScanner: Found to be clean, that says it's been checked by SpamAssasin(?) and is not Spam. If anyone is interested in the script (it is a VB executable, but I can send the source code or psuedo-code so it can be recreated in perl/python) let me know.
Many of these towns/cities DID have an 'h' at the end until the renaming convention stated in the article at everything2.com mentioned. Pittsburgh just happened to be large enough (and stubborn enough) to tell them all to go fsck themselves.
There are several reasons the Everything2.com story doesn't seem to hold water. First, there are as many towns in PA along the same path that end in "boro" that were founded by the British, such as Barnsboro, Springboro, and Waynsboro. None of them switched over to 'burgh'. 2nd, Pitt didn't found the city of Pittsburgh. In fact, no one British did. The city was founded by the French in the late 1600s and was called Duquesne. They built Ft. Duquesne at the point where the 3 rivers (Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio) meet; currently were Point State Park is. There is a historical marker commemorating the old fort. The British were took control after defeating the French (shocker there
In fact, MANY of the french (and german, more on this later) named border towns were renamed to British names after the war. You will find hundreds of towns ending in 'boro', 'burg', 'town', 'ton', 'ville', and 'hill'. You'll also find that even though it was originally found by the French, and claimed by the British, most of the towns in Central/Western PA contain mostly people of German, Polish, and Slovakian descent. This also led to a lot lot of misspellings and mis-pronounciations.
-Ab
ps. Considering the original article is in the Kansas City Star, are you sure they didn't mean Pittsburg, Kansas? I can't check www.toynbee.com cause it's currently slashdotted.
No, this is not his logic at all. To apply what you said to his original analogy would be to say, My CD player broke, so I'm going to steal another one. To liken your analogy to be in line with his original one (as close as you can when dealing with actual property versus intellectual property), you would say, My cable line is out and I paid for it but the cable company won't honor my transaction and replace it so I will watch my neighbor's TV.
Now
-Ab
** Other content related businesses do this. There are several game companies that do. I have had replacement EA games sent to me before at no cost to me. All I had to do was send the scratched disk back. They even paid shipping. This was 3 years ago, though. I don't know iff they still have that policy.
off-topic ...
:)
jag164? Is that a Penn State ID by any chance? If so, how's it going, Goody?
-Ab
Easy ... cause the house was controlled by right-wing conservative fucks. Now, I didn't go to *CUNT-FEST* or *SEX-FAIRE*, so my information is all from news sources and talking with friends on campus. There were tents in the HUB lawn (Student Union Building) that were running events such as "Orgasm Bingo" and "Pin the Clitorus on the Vulva". Here are 2 links: The first is a listing of the campus newspaper's articles favorable towards them (As most are). The second is an editorial by a student that has links to more articles at the end.
Personally, they have the right to put on an event like this. I would've liked to see it a little less "IN YOUR FACE" because, believe it or not, people do bring their kids and families to walk around campus. Seeing huge banners stating *CUNT-FEST* isn't exactly a family atmosphere at 3 in the afternoon on a Saturday. My only real beef with them is the inequity of funds distribution that those groups get. I was in 3 different UPAC supported clubs that year. Every club is supposed to get a minimum of $350-$450 if they have at least 15 (maybe 20) members. All of the clubs I was in had at least 50 (one, the Deck-hockey club had over 200). All of my clubs got nothing because "funds had run out," yet these people, several weeks later, get nearly Ten-Grand to put on a show that less than 200 people showed up to and was basically put on to tell the culture around them, "FUCK YOU!".
Now, don't get me wrong. The representative (Lawless R-Montgomery County) that spearheaded this crusade to cut funding is a cocksucker in his own right. If it were up to him, the entire campus would be dry and anyone caught buying condoms would be expelled. He's a self-rightous, pompous douchebag. I *believe* (unsure) that he was voted out of office last year in the elections. I'm too lazy at the moment to look it up.
As I said in my original post, it is one thing excercise your free speech, it is another to expect to continue to be rewarded for it if a significant amount of people find it offensive or dumb. Just like it is a poster's right to put up "GNA FPs" and "Natalie Portman covered in Peanut Butter!" and "BSD is DEAD!" posts, but don't expect to be modded up for it.
-Ab
Will it be meant for actual LAN usage? I think it's being designed more for back-bone-like reasons. I can't even get my drives to transfer large amounts of data back and forth in a reasonable time, so I can't see the need unless we go to entirely solid state drives.
... imagine a beowulf cluster interconnected by lines of these ... ;)
but
-Ab
Nah, it would be the greatest dupe ever if Timothy had also been the editor that posted the FIRST article, as well. Now that wouldn't bode well for an editor's competence level.
-Ab
You may very well be right. I've always heard it attributed to Linus, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's CORRECTLY attributed to him. If I'm wrong then I'm wrong.
-Ab
If you're on a slow pipe, don't underestimate the throughput of the postal system.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with back-up tapes." -Linus
-Ab
As a Liberatarian, I have to say ... you are 100% right. The act of censoring is NOT limited to the government. ANYONE can censor. Censorship (in layman's terms) is preventing another individual or group from receiving all or part of a communication. What the ORIGINAL poster SHOULD'VE said is that it's only ILLEGAL for the Government to censor private citizens, except in the cases where the lack of censorship would lead to injury (yelling "FIRE!" in a movie theater), intimidation (blackmail, threats), or immediate damage to public or private property (unauthorized protests). There are a few other minor cases such as outlawing porn to minors and where the act disrupts public proceedings or safety, like a mime performing on a major interstate.
Now, that being said, the Government is in no way OBLIDGED to reward "free speech" either. If the government gives an art museum $1,000,000 in grants a year to showcase art through the National Arts Endowment and then the bigwigs there see a statue of the virgin mary covered in blood and feces displayed as art, they are well within their rights as a governing body to NOT renew the grants. This is not censorship. The government is NOT required to reward behavior that it doesn't find acceptable, regardless of whether that behavior is legal or not.
The same way the Lesbian, Gay, BiSexual, Transgender Association on here on campus had a "SexFaire" and "CuntFest" a few years back that "promoted safe sex and raised awareness of students inherant sexuality". About 200 of the university's 45,000 students went to it, but it became a big deal cause they handed out condoms, gave kissing lessons, and other stuff that escapes me at the moment. The state government heard about it and decided to cut the universities funding because the groups that put on these events used campus funds. Were the censored? No. They were no longer rewarded for their behaviors. The money was given to them for free before and they lost that priviledge.
"Don't bite the hand that feeds you" comes to mind.
-Ab
Sobig scans the address book, cached webpages, text files on the harddrive, etc., for email addresses. Has it occurred to anyone that the rapid reproduction and spreading may just be a side effect of a spammer trying to gather the largest email list on earth? Imagine what they could do with a list that size? Even people who are careful with their personal email addresses could lose them to the spammer by their parents getting infected.
... and it's NEARLY untraceable back to you.**
.scr and .pif extensions and curled in a fetal position under my deskand took a nap.
Now, add this on top of how the sobig already spoofs emails and you get other people doing your spam for you
-Ab
** I know they can be traced, at least to the last computer, but getting back to the source is tough cause people tend to delete the original virrused email. I know I traced several attacks and helped notify the host companies/universities and got them cleaned up, but after my 7th track, I got fed up and gave up, adjusted my MTA to block all mails with the
Near constantly we see stories of little children being tortured over diamonds in Africa yet the /. population seems more concerned with the RIAA placing fake copies of Christina Aguilera songs on KaZaa.
... Slashdot is a News for Nerds site. We're all (mostly) techno-weenies and come here for that fact. There isn't a whole lot of science or technology involved in the torture of little african kids for diamonds. If you want to read about that, goto a humanitarian news forum rather than a technology forum.
Simple answer
Personally, I think Sam Kineson said it best when he said (about africans) "You live in a desert. NO FOOD GROWS THERE! MOVE!"
-Ab.
I feel for you, but is this really AOL's problem? Is it even really your problem with AOL? I see as your problem with the spammers and your ISP.
... ...who is at fault? The charity is pissed at the end-user? Why? The end-user has a right to not answer the phone. They could just as easily ordered caller-ID and not answered anything from that call-block (or unavailable,not listed, etc ...). This way the end user's phone isn't tied up when real calls come in.
... here's a key:
Let's use an analogy:
If I get a bunch of crap marketing calls from an MBNA call center from Sleazy Marketing Company (SMC). I call up the phone company and complain. THey get dozens more complaints and as collective users, we have dictated a policy to them to remain their customers, "Either block the calls from this center or we will goto someone who can." The phone company CAN do this and you see it occasionally in very close night bible thumping communities.
Now, the charity "Save Everything 'cept SCO" decides to rent the call center for it's fund-drive and can't reach anyone in our phone exchange
The charity is pissed at the phone company. Why? The company has a policy in place to keep it's customers. The company's interests lie in itself and it's customers, not some 3rd party.
Who the charity SHOULD have a problem with is MBNA and the original spammers. It is the actions of these 2 that have prompted the blocking. The charity should've requested and read the policy based on what the call-center could and could not be used for. Now, they may have rented the center before SMC caused the problems. This would be unfortunate, but still not the phone company's or the end-user's fault. The charity needs to go back at MBNA and get refunds because their call-center couldn't reach all clients like advertised. They have the choice of using other call-centers with much better cold-calling and call-type policies.
In case there are people that had problems with the analogies portion of the SATs
- MBNA Call Center is your average ISP that allows it's clients to spam.
- SMC is a spamhaus.
- The phone company is any other ISP that doesn't and impliments blacklisting
- The charity is a good company that got caught in the spam fire. Casualty of war, if you will.
Now, the end users (such as your dad) definitely have the option to switch providers (As he did) in protest. The Good company's (such as yourself) can switch providers as well. There are others out there. They may not be as cheap, but is the extra money worth the improved reliablity? You also have the power of your almighty dollar. Call and make threats to leave their service. Demand refunds. It works wonders. I got an additional 150 minutes of anytime minutes and a new $100 phone from AT&T today for free cause of a $2 billing discrepancy today. My journal will have the story tomorrow if anyone is interested.
-Ab
I am colorblind. Been that way since birth. I am a Protanope (more on that later). I have had classes in college on human perception (especially on the eye and ear). Quick background on the eye.
The eye has 2 types of cells on it's retina: rods and cones. Rods see shapes and movement, are better in low light and are 100x more sensative to light than cones. Cones see color. That's it. There are 3 types of cones (Red-Green, Blue, Yellow, and Purple-Orange) and they work very much like a binary gate. They are either on or off. When you see something blue, the blue cone is on (releasing a certain nuero-transmitting chemical that it will re-absorb later), and the other's are half on and half off.
This can be demonstrated by staring at a figure made entirely of 1 color (say a 3 inch square that is bright solid orange). Stare at it for a full 60 seconds, blinking as little as possible. As soon as the minute is up, look at a blank white wall. You'll see a purple square. This is because your orange/Purple cones were so busy firing orange that they ran out of the chemical and can't fire half/half to nuetralize the purple. There for the purples are on and the ones that should be firing orange are in a nuetral non-state until your eyes recover.
Now that we have that out off the way, this red/green cone is where we get the common misconception of "Red-Greed colorblindness". There is no such thing. There are 3 types of color deficiency (which we commonly call colorblindness): Short wave, Middle wave, and Long Wave.
Long wave is red deficiency. People with this are called Protanopes. If you just have a deficiency, you suffer from Protanomaly. If you cannot perceive long waves at all, you have Protanopia. This is the rarer of the "red-green" colorblindnesses.
Middle wave is green deficiency. people with this are called Deutanopes. Mild deficiency is Deutanomaly. No middle wave perception is called Deutanopia. This is also often referred to as "red-green colorblindness"
Short wave is blue deficiency. blah blah blah, Tritanope, tritanamoly, tritanopia. Called "blue-yellow" colorblindness.
Now, to understand what a colorblind person sees, you also need to have a slight understanding of additive color theory and how it works. Light is additive color, paint/ink/anything physical that needs to reflect light is subtractive color. Additive color has 3 primary colors (Red, Green, Blue) and their associated complimentary colors (Yellow, Green, Purple). If you have a base color (let's take red, for example), you add it's compliment to make it appear darker (turn the blue-yellow cones from a 50/50 to a 60/40 or 70/30 ratio). To make it lighter, add white or remove the complimentary colors (turn on more rods, reset the blue-yellow to 50/50).
Now, with this background out of the way, to understand colorblindness you need to consider this, noone is quite sure what is wrong with their cones. The leading theories are:
Their cones do not produce as much of the 'blind' nuero-chemical.
Their cones are missing part of the receptor for that wave length and therefore doesn't fire
The cones of that wavelength are much slower at reclaiming the nuerotransmitter chemical after firing.
... reduced sensativity to that wavelength of light. To do a simple simulation of what a Deutanope sees, adjust the gamma correction on your computer's video adapter's properties. Set it so that JUST the green is about half of what it notmally is (offf completely for a Deutanopia suffer). You can do the same for blue and red to see the other types. Some monitors have RGB color adjusting as well. You can do it there.
Regardless of which (if any are correct), they all have the same effect
Now, if you want to know what color your damn shirt/pants/place mats/hair scrunchy/purse/flo
I am a protoanope, too. It's not that bad.
:)
-Ab
ps. this wouldn't be the Zarquon from Peterboro that used to work for pipcom, would it? If so, come talk to me in my journal. Long time, no see.
One is a punk-rock friend of mine that has recently become vegan (memorial day to be exact). He's adamant about not eating meat or meat products (including eggs or milk), not cause he cares about the animals (he has leather pants for Christ's sake), but because he wanted to try it. He's lost 25 pounds and says he feels great, but when that 6 month point comes around, the first thing he's gonna do is tear into a steak. That's the first type of Vegan I can get along with.
The other vegan I know is a cute little woman. She's a near-vegan. She eats eggs once a week because she realizes the need for complete proteins and b-vitamins. When I told her about the Plant that converts turkeys into oil, she got a little conflicted because of the implicattions that they'll have the technology to use that oil to make plastics in the near future. She is the best (IMHO) type of vegan around. When we go out for dinner, I can order a burger, steak, chicken, pork, etc... while she gets her tofu salad and there's no lecturing, preaching, or the like. She has her beliefs (non-religous) for not eating meat and doesn't feel the need to press those on others.
I've never felt the need to impart any of my vegan combacks on either of my friends cause they never impart their beliefs on me. For those of you that need a few to fend off the more vile type of vegans, try the following:
State firmly and clearly, "My ancestors didn't scratch, claw, and battle their way to the top of the food chain so that I had to force myself to exist on salad."
Say, "See these?" point at your canine teeth and finish with, "2 million years of evolution developed these. They're for RIPPING AND TEARING FLESH. Who am I to tell the Earth Mother, Gaia, that she fucked up in her evolutionary plans?"
Point them to Maddox's Guiltless Grill. This one is chock full of goodies.
The liver is the largest organ in your body. It's primary digestive function is to secrete bile (whis is stored in the gall bladder until needed) to digest animal fat. Hell, the next largest is the stomach, and stomach acid digests whole proteins mainly. So the 2 largest organs in the digestive system are designed to digest animals. The partial proteins of plant matter are digested later in the small and large intestines by enzymes released by the pancreas. So, we're designed mainly to digest animals and the parts that take care of the plants are the same parts that hold our sh*t until we can find a toilet.
(my personal favorite...) "Ok, you win, I'll make you a deal. I'll eat vegan and nothing but vegan ... but you gotta indulge me. We are reaching a compromise here. I'm trying you're way, you try mine. As long as I eat vegan, you MUST eat at least 1/8 pound of pig (either ham, bacon, or sausage) and some form of egg derived substance with your breakfast. Lunch involves something made from cow ... at least 1/8th pound ... sometimes 1/4 pound. Dinner is a rotating option of cow, chicken, turkey, pig, (rarely seafood), deer or other wild game, or lamb (rarely). Veal, steak, or hamburger is especially common and encouraged. No tofu is allowed. No 'exotic' veggies, either, like kale, alfalfa, sprouts. Just peas, carrots, celery, corn, and green beans. Salad is the SIDE dish and shall be proportioned as such. Every sandwich/sub/potato/salad you eat mush have cheese and bacon on it. Do we have a deal?" Rattle that off fast (like an announcer stating the 'fine print' on a comercial for a contest) and look real serious. I've had o
ok01? Tell Mark Branson the PSU guys say "hi." Did he bring Caps (the game) back like he said he would? A few of your other guys were up for spring break this past spring as well. We had a small gathering for them, but it wasn't break for us and they were here mid-week. Partying and drinking is all fun and that, but reserved for Fri-Sat (and occasionally Thur, and not to forget Wings and beer on Wed, nor the monkey-boy specials on Sun & Tues ... oh and Monday night football ... ok, so every night is a drinking night.)
-Ab.
Hey! I resemble that remark! As a proud alumni of Penn State University (a.k.a. "The world's largest community college" and "A drinking town with a football problem") we were ranked 1st and 4th best party schools last year by CNN.com and Playboy/Bacardi (not necessisarily in that order). We are in the mid 40s this year in overall academic rank. Not a bad balance of work and play, especially when you consider that our business college is basically a joke. As the EE t-shirt puts it: Lim(GPA->0) = Business
... royal ass ... I mean, a field of donkey's in an F-5 tornado amount of ass-sucking. Our EE is there (though, there's something to be said for a course that 70% of the students retake EE350 at LEAST twice ... some as many as 5 times). That's not even half of our engineering majors offered. We still have ME, Chem-E, Civ-E, Ag-E, Bio-E, E-Sci, Poly-E, Enviro-E, E-Mech, and Mat-E.
... some of us know how to drink AND get work done. I was a member of the engineering social fraternity, and we'd hear all the "geeks", "nerds", etc.. comments until people came to drink with us. It's quite a statment to hear someone say, "Damn, you guys can DRINK!" to which we reply, "You think it's possible to understand physics or diff. eq's fully while sober? I think not. Besides, you business people screw up, and you have a failed project and move on to the next one. Worst case, you lose your job and have to work as a manager at Bennigan's. Us engineers screw up and buildings collapse, reactors melt down, bridges shake to pieces ... people die. We gotta drink just to stay sane."
We also have one of the highest graduation rates for athletes. 1 in 8 PE (professional engineers) has a degree from Penn State (1 in 6 female engineers). Our Nuc-E program is rated #1 (granted, there aren't that many, especially with an active reactor to experiment on). Our AE (Arch-Eng) is top 5, especially in the Lighting and Construction inspection fields. Our IE program (my major) was #3 ranked when I graduated. Our CS and CompE programs suck ass
But anyways, we're not just a party school
-Ab
"Using RFIDs will save billions of dollars a year. Those savings will translate to lower prices for you. What can possibly be wrong about that?"
You don't know american capitalism very well, do you? Your statement should've read:
"Using RFIDs will save billions of dollars a year. Those savings will translate to higher paychecks for the CEO and board members while cutting low-level jobs because people to do inventory are no longer needed. What can possibly be wrong about that?"
-Ab
You're describing the classic open pool reactor. Although they are nuclear reactors, they're a far cry from a pressurized water reactor where the water temperature is 800F and the pressure is 1000psi. It's nearly impossible to have a catastrophic failure with a open pool reactor (provided there's water in the pool).
:) ).
Yes, this reactor is NOT a powerplant, but is subject to all the same rules and regulations that a powerplant is subject to. It is an open pool and is used primarily for instruction purposes and reasearch (did you know a copper pipe that has been exposed to nuetron bombardment treatment will corrode at 1/10th the rate of normal copper pipe?
The most disturbing thing I found while at the reactor was the Nitrogen-8 diffusion system.** It is highly radioactive, but has a half-life of about 10 seconds, so they create alternating horizontal currents from the bottom of the pool to the top that slow the bubbles down by making them zig-zag. By the time they reach the top, they should be harmless.
-Ab
** It's been 3 years since I took the class, so some of the finer details are (such as the nitrogen-8, it maybe another number, 19 is also ringing in my head for some reason) may be off slightly.
They aren't running windows on the actual fail-safe machines. We have a reactor here on campus cause we're one of the few universities to teach Nuclear Engineering. I was an Industrial Engineer and we had to tour the plant and comment on the safety systems and re-design parts of it to make it more human friendly, especially in an emergancy situation.
One of the things we learned is that the computer that actually controls the rods is run on DOS. They are required by the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Committee) to run a very specific program to manipulate and monitor the rods that is only to be run on Dos. The program is internet capable and supports dumb terminals. This is how they instructed us before we went into the control room (in a classroom elsewhere in the building).
On some other notes, if the machines fail, the control rods fall automatically. They are held up buy the computer (well, by motors and/or electromagnets controlled by the computer). If they stop receiving signal form the computer, gravity naturally pulls the rods back down. They also have 2 additional COMPLETE systems ready to be plugged in at any moment if the primary system crashes. At this reactor, you can actually watch the reaction in the pool from above (contrary to the movies, the glow is an eerie blue, not yellow or green).
-Ab