My sister told me about one lady she met who bought a broken VCR for a dollar or two at a garage sale and then returned it to MallWart for a full refund of the original price.
I'd just as soon get rid of the Interstates. At least, though Texas.
Let all the tourists go around Texas and leave us alone.
All Interstates mean to me is that they have to steal a bunch of land (what else would you call it when they sieze the land and the owners are forced to accept minimal pay for the land) to do it.
A few months ago, I asked a representative from Southwestern Bell when they would be ready to switch to IPv6. They indicated that they weren't even pursuing the issue.
I look forward to IPv6 just because it will kill the random port scanning by all the Windoze worms.
If we had already moved to IPv6, Code Red might still be looking for the second computer to infect.
They wouldn't have a leg to stand on as long as the ISP followed the law.
The ISP is basically not liable as long as they aren't involved in the file sharing themselves. If the ISP set up their own file sharing node or carried the material on their web site, they would be responsible. They might also be held responsible if a user has the material on a site owned by the ISP and the ISP has not filed the information about their contact addressess set up to receive notifications about copyright violations.
For the exact requirements for an ISP to not be held liable as an infringer or contributing infringer, check out Title 17 US Code: Title 17 -- Copyrights.
Or when someone reprograms your engine computer while you're driving down the road and your car suddenly slows down to 10 mph and belches smoke like crazy.
A few years ago, Texas A&M University fixed up some abandoned bicycles, converted them to one speed, painted them bright yellow, and left them around campus for use by whoever wanted to ride them.
I know one person who uses MailWasher Pro and swears by it.
But because of certain lame functionality, I refuse to recommend it to anyone.
The problem is that it sends fake bounce messages to the return addresses unless you configure it otherwise. That may have changed since I looked at it, but a quick look at their web page shows that they still do the fake bounces.
Fake bounce messages are incredibly lame since the vast majority of spam does not have the return address of the real source. On top of that, spammers don't pay attention to those even if they do come back.
All the fake bounces demonstrate is that the people behind MailWasher Pro don't have a clue what they are doing. Of course, if they are that clueless, you don't even feel like checking out their other products.
What do you bet the backup software will be modified to start popping up messages to try to get people to buy their other products?
I gave up on Norton a couple of years ago. Nearly everyone I know that still uses Norton is very unhappy with all the popups that have nothing to do with the task at hand - dealing with computer viruses and related malware.
We now have Computer Associates eTrust Antivirus on every Windoze computer at the office. It works every bit as well as Norton did at its' best and with none of the annoying popups you see so often from Norton now.
From my point of view, the only people running Norton are doing so only because they don't know any better.
What I've thought about doing is selectively refusing to accept e-mails for those users who wish to particpate in an experiment.
The logic is that a if a spam zombie is the source, they would just react to a problem by going to the next victim. A legitimate server will store the e-mail and try again.
Very few ISPs are so clueless that they don't queue and retry when they get a 4xx response (indicating a tempory failure). There are a few, but not many.
So if you refused all incoming e-mails the first attempt (or the first two attempts) with a mailbox full type message and then accept the e-mail on the next retry. You'd also want some minimum retry period, say 30 minutes. That way a spammer couldn't just try the same address two or three times in a row and reach it.
I'd bet that you could cut the number of spams you receive and the bandwidth eaten by it by 90% or more.
Of course, if everyone did this, the spammers would adapt. But then they'd at least have to store all the information so they could retry.
My suggestion is to match on the ip address of the sending host, the host name in the helo/ehlo, the mail from e-mail address, and the rcpt to e-mail address. If the spam zombie tries again but with a different ehlo or a different mail from, it would count as a first attempt. And entries would need to be deleted when reaching some maximum age.
It could also be coupled with a white-list apprach. Keep a white-list of the various helo/ehlo, mail from, and rcpt to items to determine which e-mail the user has indicated to pass through without refusing the first time or two.
Even if you just randomly refused an e-mail with a temporary problem, you'd cut down on the problem some. For example, 2/3 of the time, you might refuse to accept an e-mail with a mailbox full message. That way, you wouldn't have to keep track of anything. But spammers would be able to get through by just trying several times in a row when they got a 4xx message.
Bouncing is a worthless approach. All you do is become a co-spammer yourself.
That's why I refuse to recommend MailWasher to anyone -- whoever did it thinks that bouncing does something good. I know several people who could really use MailWasher, and if they ever do away with the bouncing capability, I'll recommend they get it. But not until then.
I used to like to have fun with the sales men/women.
One time this one lady called and the conversation went like this:
Woman: Good afternoon. May I speak to Mrs eric76? Me: No. Woman: Why not? Me: She's being punished and isn't allowed to speak to anyone for another week. Woman (in a rather cautious voice): Oh! I see.
and then she hung up.
Another time I told a telemarketer that Mrs eric76 was busy screwing one of the neighbors.
My favorite was a woman from San Antonio that called for some kind of radio survey. I tried to see how long I could talk to her on the telephone and about anything but radio.
Every time she tried to ask me about radio stations in my area, I'd ask her a question about San Antonio.
Not only did I ask her about restraunts, I asked her about several friends of mine who lived in or near San Antonio. It turned out that she had never met any of them!
It can make some difference. That is especially true for your first job out of college.
I once applied to one Wall Street analysis firm and never heard back. Later, I learned that unless your degree is from an Ivy League school, your chances are pretty much nil with that firm.
I know of one instance where that worked the other way, too.
Back in the mid 80s, a friend of mine with two Master's degrees applied for a job with a defense contractor at an AI lab.
There were several other applicants for the open positions waiting for the interview in the room. They were from places like Harvard and Princeton and were talking about their school experiences.
One of them asked my friend where he went to school. He answered Texas A&M University. They all started laughing and joking about how little about AI someone from a backwoods school like Texas A&M would know.
The personnel manager was in the front of the room talking to one of the employees. He heard this and turned around and said "I think there is something you should know. The president of this corporation is a Texas Aggie. The head of this division is a Texas Aggie. And I'm a Texas Aggie, too."
This is how Microsoft has won basically every battle it faced in the 90's anyways.
IE supported NS extensions, Windows supports Novell, UNIX. Word supports Corel, etc..
At the time I knew those two women, I only had 14 graduate hours of computer science and so I could only teach math.
It really ate me up that I knew far more about computer science than they even dreamed of, but they could teach it since they were grandfathered in in spite of no graduate coursework (and precious little undergraduate coursework) in the field and I couldn't teach it because I only had fourteen graduate hours from a much higher ranked university than either of them.
That prompted me to go back for a doctorate in computer science. I have all the coursework I need (and then some), just have to do the research.
I think that most American colleges require a minimum of a Master's and at least 18 graduate hours in the subject area being taught.
I have seen some who didn't come close to meeting those requirements at small colleges. I knew one woman who had an accounting degree teaching their most advanced computer science courses. Since she knew absolutely nothing about what she was teaching, she got ahold of some kind of self paced computer learning modules and just had the students do those. And she refused to answer questions.
I knew another woman who reportedly taught math and statistics and later computer science sitting on the top of a desk. I have never figured out how you can teach math merely by talking about it without ever writing on the blackboard.
If one of their students applied for a job here, I'd give them an independent practical exam before hiring them.
Both of them were grandfathered in when the rules changed.
With idiots like them teaching classes, requiring a Master's and at least 18 graduate hours makes enormous sense.
You know the constitution provides in the preamble for the general welfare.
The U.S. Consitution does not apply since it is not the Federal Government providing the wireless, but a municipal government.
The U.S. Consitution explicitly enumerates what the Federal Government may do (or, to be more precise, what the Legislature may legislate) (See U.S. Consitution, Article 1, Section 8. In theory, anything not enumerated is reserved for the states. That would include providing wireless service.
Tell that to someone who's lost a close relative who died in an accident after running into a buggy because it didn't have headlights and they didn't see it.
Slashdot Mirror
My sister told me about one lady she met who bought a broken VCR for a dollar or two at a garage sale and then returned it to MallWart for a full refund of the original price.
I'm an Aggie, too.
But if I had known he was going to push such a crazy plan, I'd have voted against him.
I'd just as soon get rid of the Interstates. At least, though Texas.
Let all the tourists go around Texas and leave us alone.
All Interstates mean to me is that they have to steal a bunch of land (what else would you call it when they sieze the land and the owners are forced to accept minimal pay for the land) to do it.
Think about the problem for deep space colonies, say ten or more light years away.
Even just for a simple ping, the IP address could easily change between successive pings.
One IPv6 address assignment scheme I've seen mentioned used the MAC address as the lower 48 bits of the address.
If that were used, you wouldn't be able to change your network card while pinging www.slashdot.org.
A few months ago, I asked a representative from Southwestern Bell when they would be ready to switch to IPv6. They indicated that they weren't even pursuing the issue.
I look forward to IPv6 just because it will kill the random port scanning by all the Windoze worms.
If we had already moved to IPv6, Code Red might still be looking for the second computer to infect.
There is good reason for that.
They wouldn't have a leg to stand on as long as the ISP followed the law.
The ISP is basically not liable as long as they aren't involved in the file sharing themselves. If the ISP set up their own file sharing node or carried the material on their web site, they would be responsible. They might also be held responsible if a user has the material on a site owned by the ISP and the ISP has not filed the information about their contact addressess set up to receive notifications about copyright violations.
For the exact requirements for an ISP to not be held liable as an infringer or contributing infringer, check out Title 17 US Code: Title 17 -- Copyrights.
I have my doubts about that.
Potentially, many of those companies who depend on patents for their income don't really do much on their own.
But most of the companies they are holding back actually do produce something useful.
Unfettering those companies from the legal blackmail being visited upon them by the leaches would probably help the economy, not hurt it.
Or when someone reprograms your engine computer while you're driving down the road and your car suddenly slows down to 10 mph and belches smoke like crazy.
A few years ago, Texas A&M University fixed up some abandoned bicycles, converted them to one speed, painted them bright yellow, and left them around campus for use by whoever wanted to ride them.
See Borrow A Bike
I think this was also done at a number of other places.
I know one person who uses MailWasher Pro and swears by it.
But because of certain lame functionality, I refuse to recommend it to anyone.
The problem is that it sends fake bounce messages to the return addresses unless you configure it otherwise. That may have changed since I looked at it, but a quick look at their web page shows that they still do the fake bounces.
Fake bounce messages are incredibly lame since the vast majority of spam does not have the return address of the real source. On top of that, spammers don't pay attention to those even if they do come back.
All the fake bounces demonstrate is that the people behind MailWasher Pro don't have a clue what they are doing. Of course, if they are that clueless, you don't even feel like checking out their other products.
We didn't get telephone service to my home until 1971 or so.
Before that, if we needed to make a telephone call, we had to go to my grandmother's house.
More often, we'd call my grandmother on the radio and she'd place the call for us.
What do you bet the backup software will be modified to start popping up messages to try to get people to buy their other products?
I gave up on Norton a couple of years ago. Nearly everyone I know that still uses Norton is very unhappy with all the popups that have nothing to do with the task at hand - dealing with computer viruses and related malware.
We now have Computer Associates eTrust Antivirus on every Windoze computer at the office. It works every bit as well as Norton did at its' best and with none of the annoying popups you see so often from Norton now.
From my point of view, the only people running Norton are doing so only because they don't know any better.
What I've thought about doing is selectively refusing to accept e-mails for those users who wish to particpate in an experiment.
The logic is that a if a spam zombie is the source, they would just react to a problem by going to the next victim. A legitimate server will store the e-mail and try again.
Very few ISPs are so clueless that they don't queue and retry when they get a 4xx response (indicating a tempory failure). There are a few, but not many.
So if you refused all incoming e-mails the first attempt (or the first two attempts) with a mailbox full type message and then accept the e-mail on the next retry. You'd also want some minimum retry period, say 30 minutes. That way a spammer couldn't just try the same address two or three times in a row and reach it.
I'd bet that you could cut the number of spams you receive and the bandwidth eaten by it by 90% or more.
Of course, if everyone did this, the spammers would adapt. But then they'd at least have to store all the information so they could retry.
My suggestion is to match on the ip address of the sending host, the host name in the helo/ehlo, the mail from e-mail address, and the rcpt to e-mail address. If the spam zombie tries again but with a different ehlo or a different mail from, it would count as a first attempt. And entries would need to be deleted when reaching some maximum age.
It could also be coupled with a white-list apprach. Keep a white-list of the various helo/ehlo, mail from, and rcpt to items to determine which e-mail the user has indicated to pass through without refusing the first time or two.
Even if you just randomly refused an e-mail with a temporary problem, you'd cut down on the problem some. For example, 2/3 of the time, you might refuse to accept an e-mail with a mailbox full message. That way, you wouldn't have to keep track of anything. But spammers would be able to get through by just trying several times in a row when they got a 4xx message.
Bouncing is a worthless approach. All you do is become a co-spammer yourself.
That's why I refuse to recommend MailWasher to anyone -- whoever did it thinks that bouncing does something good. I know several people who could really use MailWasher, and if they ever do away with the bouncing capability, I'll recommend they get it. But not until then.
I've been tempted to fix up my old '64 International pickup to as my next car.
I can probably do a complete rebuild in my spare time for $1,000 and it would be good for at least another 100,000 miles.
I used to like to have fun with the sales men/women.
One time this one lady called and the conversation went like this:
Woman: Good afternoon. May I speak to Mrs eric76?
Me: No.
Woman: Why not?
Me: She's being punished and isn't allowed to speak to anyone for another week.
Woman (in a rather cautious voice): Oh! I see.
and then she hung up.
Another time I told a telemarketer that Mrs eric76 was busy screwing one of the neighbors.
My favorite was a woman from San Antonio that called for some kind of radio survey. I tried to see how long I could talk to her on the telephone and about anything but radio.
Every time she tried to ask me about radio stations in my area, I'd ask her a question about San Antonio.
Not only did I ask her about restraunts, I asked her about several friends of mine who lived in or near San Antonio. It turned out that she had never met any of them!
If the holodeck were invented, think of all the pimps and prostitutes who would go out of business.
It can make some difference. That is especially true for your first job out of college.
I once applied to one Wall Street analysis firm and never heard back. Later, I learned that unless your degree is from an Ivy League school, your chances are pretty much nil with that firm.
I know of one instance where that worked the other way, too.
Back in the mid 80s, a friend of mine with two Master's degrees applied for a job with a defense contractor at an AI lab.
There were several other applicants for the open positions waiting for the interview in the room. They were from places like Harvard and Princeton and were talking about their school experiences.
One of them asked my friend where he went to school. He answered Texas A&M University. They all started laughing and joking about how little about AI someone from a backwoods school like Texas A&M would know.
The personnel manager was in the front of the room talking to one of the employees. He heard this and turned around and said "I think there is something you should know. The president of this corporation is a Texas Aggie. The head of this division is a Texas Aggie. And I'm a Texas Aggie, too."
The friend of mine got the job.
You have that right.
At the time I knew those two women, I only had 14 graduate hours of computer science and so I could only teach math.
It really ate me up that I knew far more about computer science than they even dreamed of, but they could teach it since they were grandfathered in in spite of no graduate coursework (and precious little undergraduate coursework) in the field and I couldn't teach it because I only had fourteen graduate hours from a much higher ranked university than either of them.
That prompted me to go back for a doctorate in computer science. I have all the coursework I need (and then some), just have to do the research.
I think that most American colleges require a minimum of a Master's and at least 18 graduate hours in the subject area being taught.
I have seen some who didn't come close to meeting those requirements at small colleges. I knew one woman who had an accounting degree teaching their most advanced computer science courses. Since she knew absolutely nothing about what she was teaching, she got ahold of some kind of self paced computer learning modules and just had the students do those. And she refused to answer questions.
I knew another woman who reportedly taught math and statistics and later computer science sitting on the top of a desk. I have never figured out how you can teach math merely by talking about it without ever writing on the blackboard.
If one of their students applied for a job here, I'd give them an independent practical exam before hiring them.
Both of them were grandfathered in when the rules changed.
With idiots like them teaching classes, requiring a Master's and at least 18 graduate hours makes enormous sense.
When I heard about it years ago, it was the two hundred club.
I guess the other hundred is due to inflation.
I've taught math and computer science part time at two different universities.
The U.S. Consitution does not apply since it is not the Federal Government providing the wireless, but a municipal government.
The U.S. Consitution explicitly enumerates what the Federal Government may do (or, to be more precise, what the Legislature may legislate) (See U.S. Consitution, Article 1, Section 8. In theory, anything not enumerated is reserved for the states. That would include providing wireless service.
Tell that to someone who's lost a close relative who died in an accident after running into a buggy because it didn't have headlights and they didn't see it.