approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Yes, the KDE network connection stuff's all present and correct; it just doesn't allow you to use WPA2 with a client cert. Believe me I've looked into it... there's another PITA as well - the Thinkpads we use at work are equipped with Intel 2200-something wifi adapters, for which for some reason closed binary firmware is required to make it work. I thought (being a regular purchaser of OpenBSD who only rarely uses it, but wishes to support the project) that Intel were generally pretty good about sharing hardware specs with Free software developers. Course that's Intel's fault, not Mandriva, Linus or the FSF, of course.
Yes, you are of course totally correct - that's what I get for a hasty post after the post-work G&T and not using 'preview'. The moment I saw the thing I cringed to the soles of my feet. Fortunately you seem to have been the only reader on the thread equipped with the ability to correctly parse English. Including me:)
People who advocate the killing of other human beings should be banned off this board, plain and simple. No, people who advocate the killing of other human beings should be lined up - blindfold - last fag - POP! POP! POP!(citizen smiff)
I've been reading about how the next version of Windows will be the one that finally contains so much crap, so many bugs, and so many restrictions on your freedom to actually use your own computer for as long as I've been on Slashdot, which is... dear god, eight or nine years or so now. After Windows 2000 and (especially) XP failed to be complete turkeys that finally opened users' eyes to the possibilities offered by the alternatives. As as result, I am embittered, prematurely aged, and have an irritatingly adolescent habit of peeling off the "Designed for Windows" stickers from any computer I get my hands on and sticking it to toilet flush or kitchen scraps bin. It's taken me almost as long to move from tentative newbie hopelessly failing to install Debian 2.0 to a seasoned professional well used to the process of decontaminating new servers, desktops and laptops, and usually getting all the hardware to work. (WPA2/AES wifi auth, which we use at work, is still a pig involving kernel compilation, and the latest version of Mandriva has broken my access to the corporate PPTP VPN becuase MPPE has been removed from the kernel, and I never managed to acquire any proficiency in the/usr/src/linux shuffle.) But... even having read the much less breathless and reflective piece on the Reg before seeing this, a wild and audacious hope is leaping up in my breast... it's either political advertising subverting ordinary discourse, or it's the end of the beginning of the end for Microsoft. (The beginning, for me, was the anti-trust case. Even though they walked away laughing thanks to Dubya and a foolish judge, anyone in the industry who followed it who DIDN'T already know how evil MS are, were left with no illusions.)
Please, lord, let it be this time... raise thy noodly appendage and smite they foes!
I never completely understand why people argue "God says it". Because they didn't receive a proper education, and failed to learn how to think independently and critically assess propositions put to them?
Personally I'm less bothered by teaching science; I just wish the US would start teaching a bit of history, like the the idea that the country was founded on the principle of religious tolerance. I must say Mutt Rimney's declaration was especially stomach-churning. It's more likely that a black man or a woman will be elected in the next few decades than an atheist. Sickening, really:(
Has anyone tried the high-speed in england? - generally people have 1 Meg connections not 3 to 10 meg in the states and canada. Bollocks. BT won't even sell you slower than 2Mb nowadays. A friend in central London has 10Mb and there are several 10-100 range pilot projects under way. Interestingly we had a typical old-style monopoly telco for years, it was privatised in the early 80s (about the time AT&T was being split up, in fact); there are now probably half-a-dozen major voice providers, including the cable people, and lots of smaller, niche players.
I'm afraid you're mistaken; and I speak as a resident of the UK, where the motorways ("interstates" - fast six-lane roads with average speed of about 80mph) which are actually pretty crap, mostly 30-40 years old, constantly being repaired/extended/widened, with traffic volumes increasing at an unsustainable rate. ("...wait til I get going!")
Unless youre a system administrator, programmer, or uber-geek, this is probably the only reference source you'll need to learn Microsofts Vista." Read below for the rest of John's review. Well that should narrow down the target audience quite nicely. I mean, the set that is the intersection of "not sysadmin and not programmer and not uber-geek and slashdot_poster is...... not on the large side.
possibly we do need a speculation tag, but it wouldn't apply to this story. It sounds like you could do with a bit of background reading. Might I suggest starting with a google for "cytokine storm". (You might also want to check out the special reports in the 'New England Journal of Medicine' and 'Nature' from 2005 - again, google is your friend.) A mutation in the influenza virus causing a worldwide human pandemic is inevitable; it's only the timing which is unknown. It could happen next week, or it might not happen for decades. (I guess the closest analogy OTTOMH would be Californian earthquakes. You may not have had a big one since 1906, but do you want to live in the valley in a non-code house?)
When it does come, it will spread much more quickly than 1918-19 (or even the mini-pandemics of the 50s and 60s) due to the enormous growth in international jet travel. Factor in worldwide mass communications, which also weren't really in place in the 50s/60s (stuff the Internet, if my parents ever wanted to make an international call they had to book it in advance with the operator...) So the thing will be everywhere within a few days, and everyone will know roughly what it is. Even with "low" infection rates of 20% and a "low" mortality rate of, say, 40% (both are conservative) a lot of people are going to witness deaths in their social circle - friends, family, colleagues at work, etc. I have a couple of friends who are involved in UK civil defence and the military, and the official contingency plans are, roughly, to cordon off all large cities and shoot anyone trying to escape. Ditto for looters and other threats to law and order. Believe me, when it kicks off, it is going to get very, very messy. The third world will be a much better place to be, because the economic and social infrastructure doesn't have as far to fall, and because people are used to getting by without much in the way of official help. For us decadent westerners it's going to be horrible.
For true FUD-mongering on this topic, consider what happens to all those nuclear, chemical and biological weapons slowly rusting in bunkers. Not to mention all the wacky millennialist "last days" nutters, and plain ol' large industrial complexes such as oil refineries, chemical factories and the like which have plenty of scope for damage if the people monitoring, controlling and protecting them simply don't turn up for work after a week or two.
One possible ray of hope is that Cory Doctorow's "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" may actually come to pass. Actually, hang on a sec., did I say "hope"? A world populated entirely by fat blokes in curry-stained T shirts with no social skills? ** ph33r!! **
...the network fights back? Huh? D'ye ever think of that? And then it'll launch all the old ICBMs, oh yes, and then androids will stalk the smoking ruins hunting down and shooting the last holdout remnants of the Republican Party.
Sure, it would be nice to not be in Iraq, but the fact remains that we're there and we're not pulling out anytime soon. Define 'soon'. It's pretty clear that the new head general chap is doing plenty of expectation setting. See the questions in the senate hearings about the alternative plan - "Yes, of course we have a standby plan in case this doesn't work, not that we'll ever need it you understand, and yes it's basically ''get the hell out of Dodge'' (retreat to Kuwait, the Kurdish area, Saudi and back into the green zone. Oh, well, since you ask, I guess about 6-9 months would be about to time to make the call." So whether it's announced as such or not, I would not be at all surprised to see the on-the-streets US military presence disappearing well before the end of the year. September/October's my guess.
I'm just wondering whether anyone will be around to video the last chopper out, or whether the society will have disintegrated into a Beirut-style shooting war, making it too damn dangerous to try filming. Really, it all is a horrible horrible mess. Dubya has thrown away enormous US reserves (of all kinds) on an entirely futile and irrational war. The "best" outcome, from the point of purely selfish and short-term US interests, is probably a low intensity regional conflict. Sorry to say that much of what Putin said yesterday about the behaviour of the US under Dubya is utterly uncontroversial pretty much everywhere outside the US.
Jahn points the finger at detractors as well: 'If people don't believe us after all the results we've produced, then they never will.'" That's rather the point. In science it doesn't really matter what results you can produce, if no-one else can reproduce them...
A friend was "sweating out his PhD" in a lab which contained a cool computer-driven laser-etching device. He and a friend hatched a drunken plan to etch parallel lines into a pair of contact lenses, creating a nice one-way mirror effect. No idea if they ever managed it (presumably not), but I wonder if they filed a patent on the idea...
. Nobody calls up the GNOME foundation complaining that 2.16 crawls on their PIII-450 with 256MB of RAM. In comparison, Apple actually has to live up to the specifications they outline on the box.
Random data point: my main home system is a nine-year old Dell Dimension PII/233. Admittedly it's been pimped up with 324Mb RAM and an incredible 40G of disk space, but I use Google Maps and Gmail in Firefox on that system on a daily basis, and often have half a dozen or a dozen other tabs open at the same time. as wellI also ssh in remotely to use it for security testing. The secret is not to run KDE or Gnome. I'm using WindowMaker (aka GNU/Step, a Free WM that traces it's lineage back to Jobs' NeXTStep GUI from the late 80s); others I know of swear by Fluxbox or xfce. TBH I'm seriously thinking of ditching KDE on my main laptop for WindowMaker: not that it's short of cycles, per se, but I just like the clean minimalist look. Of course KDE/Gnome apps run perfectly well under WMaker, just as Konqueror runs under Gnome and so on.
Or, we make browsers so they don't run every damned audio file, flash frigging plugin, executable, movie, or whatever that the idiot who made the site thinks I should hear/see/play with/click/download/execute or whatever. Good heavens, man, if you don't like your browser autoplaying music, why don't you just disable music autoplaying?! It's trivial in Firefox, haven't used Konqueror enough to know if it autoplays or how to configure that (tho the prefs dialog is big and juicy with many many categories fo stuff to fiddle with) -- Firefox gives you about:config, of course, and linx would probably pop up a standalone audio player if you choose to accept the download (it prompts for all that sort of crap before downloading it!) Dunno about MSIE (thank god!) but it must be possible to turn that sort of stuff off there, too. If there's no control knob in "internet settings" or whatever the IS prefs are called these days, perhaps there's some obscure DWORD to set or unset in the recursing bowels of hell that is the Registry.
I don't keep up with this sort of stuff any more, like CPU speeds and the fine shades of difference between two very fast graphic cards, I simply haven't got time to care about it any more (especially now I'm completely MS free... feels as good today as it did three years ago when I said goodbye to my last Windows machine (NT4) and switched to Linux.) I work in networking, and I was having a fag in the bike shed when a friend the Helldesk supervisor stopped by. He mentioned that the corporate edition of Vista... I think he said 'ultimate', I'm not even sure what the other ones are called or what the difference is, but at any rate definitely the corporate one -- is available for download from MS, presumably via MSDN or Select or whatever those "all you can eat" type "deals" are called these days -- and it's activation free, ie you d/l and burn the ISO, boot from it, run the installed, do not pass go and do not have to enter an activation key, and it's good to go (or as good as Pissta will ever be). He thought it was some sort of huge MS blunder -- to me it sounds more like their old "turn a blind eye to piracy in order to maintain vendor lock-in and keep the young, poor, smart hacker kids away from evil Free software, and keep them trapped in the hell of Windows.
Then again the story could be bollocks - can anyone confirm / deny this?
There are several other standing stones in the area, and a couple of big outcrops that are clearly natural formations; the Wye Valley is of course full of named cliffs and other formations, some of which may or may not be man-made. At a rough guess 50% are named for Arthurian or Robin Hood characters. There's a grubby fishpond that's Marion's Pool (as well as Marion's Enclosure, which is an area of woodland); Arthur's Cave, Merlin's Stone, and a couple of variants. One of the most interesting to me (partly because I "discovered" it myself and took my Dad, whereas 25 years ago it was him taking me to what at the time, to me, were dull bits of rock in muddy, bramble-filled woodlands) is just the other side of the river; Caer Guorthegrin, aka Little Doward hillfort. I started reading because the name Vortigern was too good to miss; it's great stuff, sounds rather like these MMORPG things that the kids are all addicted to these days.
'Staunton', the name of the - my - village derives from "stan" (stone) and "ton" (tun, village), presumably because of the standing stones, though there's a hideous enormous roadstone quarry on the other side of the other hill, slowly creeping closer and closer through the woods.
There's a great story about the "Buckstone" -- this was an enormous boulder, judging from the engravings I've seen it was roughly 20 foot high by forty feet long -- that was balanced an outcrop at the top of a cliff / very steep slope perhaps 100' high. Despite it's enormous size it was possible for a strong man to rock it back and forth in it's resting place. It gradually became more and more well-known locally with various events held there. In the Victorian era (1860-something I think), a bunch of local young gentlemen of leisure visited it on Boxing Day. Drink had been taken. They decided to see whether they could rock it so hard that it would move from the shallow depression in the underlying bedrock. Lo, the spirits of the lord caused them to wax mighty, and the boulder was cast over the edge. It crashed through the undergrowth (mature deciduous forest:) leaving matchwood in it's wake, coming to rest 100' lower down... and Staunton lost it's only tourist attraction! (Apart from the village church which has a lot of Saxon and Norman bits, despite hardly having been left alone for more than a century or two since then; and an organ that the man from the organ servicing company got quite excited about and wrote an amazingly researched paper, purely for his own enjoyment and the information of the P.C.C. Oh and the guy who basically invented industrial steel production, and thus kickstarted the industrial revolution and thus all of modern engineering, buildings, aircraft and trains, not to mention wires and computers, is buried somewhere in the churchyard, too. But I digress.)
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because private enterprise never funds pure science...
Never, gonna, happen.
Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Yes, the KDE network connection stuff's all present and correct; it just doesn't allow you to use WPA2 with a client cert. Believe me I've looked into it... there's another PITA as well - the Thinkpads we use at work are equipped with Intel 2200-something wifi adapters, for which for some reason closed binary firmware is required to make it work. I thought (being a regular purchaser of OpenBSD who only rarely uses it, but wishes to support the project) that Intel were generally pretty good about sharing hardware specs with Free software developers. Course that's Intel's fault, not Mandriva, Linus or the FSF, of course.
Yes, you are of course totally correct - that's what I get for a hasty post after the post-work G&T and not using 'preview'. The moment I saw the thing I cringed to the soles of my feet. Fortunately you seem to have been the only reader on the thread equipped with the ability to correctly parse English. Including me :)
And thus Macaddict's Law was conceived.
Please, lord, let it be this time... raise thy noodly appendage and smite they foes!
Personally I'm less bothered by teaching science; I just wish the US would start teaching a bit of history, like the the idea that the country was founded on the principle of religious tolerance. I must say Mutt Rimney's declaration was especially stomach-churning. It's more likely that a black man or a woman will be elected in the next few decades than an atheist. Sickening, really :(
Has anyone tried the high-speed in england? - generally people have 1 Meg connections not 3 to 10 meg in the states and canada. Bollocks. BT won't even sell you slower than 2Mb nowadays. A friend in central London has 10Mb and there are several 10-100 range pilot projects under way. Interestingly we had a typical old-style monopoly telco for years, it was privatised in the early 80s (about the time AT&T was being split up, in fact); there are now probably half-a-dozen major voice providers, including the cable people, and lots of smaller, niche players.
America: some information to help you live in it. Texas is a special case of course; here are some other examples of major problems with the US road system.
If I hadn't heard American Edit, there's not a chance in hell I'd have bought the real American Idiot album on CD. Just my 2e anecdote...
When it does come, it will spread much more quickly than 1918-19 (or even the mini-pandemics of the 50s and 60s) due to the enormous growth in international jet travel. Factor in worldwide mass communications, which also weren't really in place in the 50s/60s (stuff the Internet, if my parents ever wanted to make an international call they had to book it in advance with the operator...) So the thing will be everywhere within a few days, and everyone will know roughly what it is. Even with "low" infection rates of 20% and a "low" mortality rate of, say, 40% (both are conservative) a lot of people are going to witness deaths in their social circle - friends, family, colleagues at work, etc. I have a couple of friends who are involved in UK civil defence and the military, and the official contingency plans are, roughly, to cordon off all large cities and shoot anyone trying to escape. Ditto for looters and other threats to law and order. Believe me, when it kicks off, it is going to get very, very messy. The third world will be a much better place to be, because the economic and social infrastructure doesn't have as far to fall, and because people are used to getting by without much in the way of official help. For us decadent westerners it's going to be horrible.
For true FUD-mongering on this topic, consider what happens to all those nuclear, chemical and biological weapons slowly rusting in bunkers. Not to mention all the wacky millennialist "last days" nutters, and plain ol' large industrial complexes such as oil refineries, chemical factories and the like which have plenty of scope for damage if the people monitoring, controlling and protecting them simply don't turn up for work after a week or two.
One possible ray of hope is that Cory Doctorow's "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" may actually come to pass. Actually, hang on a sec., did I say "hope"? A world populated entirely by fat blokes in curry-stained T shirts with no social skills? ** ph33r!! **
...the network fights back? Huh? D'ye ever think of that? And then it'll launch all the old ICBMs, oh yes, and then androids will stalk the smoking ruins hunting down and shooting the last holdout remnants of the Republican Party.
I'm just wondering whether anyone will be around to video the last chopper out, or whether the society will have disintegrated into a Beirut-style shooting war, making it too damn dangerous to try filming. Really, it all is a horrible horrible mess. Dubya has thrown away enormous US reserves (of all kinds) on an entirely futile and irrational war. The "best" outcome, from the point of purely selfish and short-term US interests, is probably a low intensity regional conflict. Sorry to say that much of what Putin said yesterday about the behaviour of the US under Dubya is utterly uncontroversial pretty much everywhere outside the US.
Jesus 2.0? That would be.. the antichrist, right? Man, I hope none of those wacky "end times" types have access to guns %(
This means nothing to me.
What is this "inventor"? To me it brings to mind images of Professor Branestawm. Where's the Engineering Hall of Fame? (And who designed it? ;)
A friend was "sweating out his PhD" in a lab which contained a cool computer-driven laser-etching device. He and a friend hatched a drunken plan to etch parallel lines into a pair of contact lenses, creating a nice one-way mirror effect. No idea if they ever managed it (presumably not), but I wonder if they filed a patent on the idea...
Random data point: my main home system is a nine-year old Dell Dimension PII/233. Admittedly it's been pimped up with 324Mb RAM and an incredible 40G of disk space, but I use Google Maps and Gmail in Firefox on that system on a daily basis, and often have half a dozen or a dozen other tabs open at the same time. as wellI also ssh in remotely to use it for security testing. The secret is not to run KDE or Gnome. I'm using WindowMaker (aka GNU/Step, a Free WM that traces it's lineage back to Jobs' NeXTStep GUI from the late 80s); others I know of swear by Fluxbox or xfce. TBH I'm seriously thinking of ditching KDE on my main laptop for WindowMaker: not that it's short of cycles, per se, but I just like the clean minimalist look. Of course KDE/Gnome apps run perfectly well under WMaker, just as Konqueror runs under Gnome and so on.
Then again the story could be bollocks - can anyone confirm / deny this?
'Staunton', the name of the - my - village derives from "stan" (stone) and "ton" (tun, village), presumably because of the standing stones, though there's a hideous enormous roadstone quarry on the other side of the other hill, slowly creeping closer and closer through the woods.
There's a great story about the "Buckstone" -- this was an enormous boulder, judging from the engravings I've seen it was roughly 20 foot high by forty feet long -- that was balanced an outcrop at the top of a cliff / very steep slope perhaps 100' high. Despite it's enormous size it was possible for a strong man to rock it back and forth in it's resting place. It gradually became more and more well-known locally with various events held there. In the Victorian era (1860-something I think), a bunch of local young gentlemen of leisure visited it on Boxing Day. Drink had been taken. They decided to see whether they could rock it so hard that it would move from the shallow depression in the underlying bedrock. Lo, the spirits of the lord caused them to wax mighty, and the boulder was cast over the edge. It crashed through the undergrowth (mature deciduous forest :) leaving matchwood in it's wake, coming to rest 100' lower down... and Staunton lost it's only tourist attraction! (Apart from the village church which has a lot of Saxon and Norman bits, despite hardly having been left alone for more than a century or two since then; and an organ that the man from the organ servicing company got quite excited about and wrote an amazingly researched paper, purely for his own enjoyment and the information of the P.C.C. Oh and the guy who basically invented industrial steel production, and thus kickstarted the industrial revolution and thus all of modern engineering, buildings, aircraft and trains, not to mention wires and computers, is buried somewhere in the churchyard, too. But I digress.)
Footnote - I hit google for a ref and found this picture of the stone before it was pushed down the hill. I shall resist the temptation to edit what I just wrote, I wonder how much of it agrees with the Word of Google? And here's another page which actually talks about the stones, and probably contradictions everything I've just said.