Of course it gave me a reason. 554 Denied [SHPBL] - Denied by Spamhaus PBL along with a nice url. I'm not willing to give up any more details than that as I am not interested in posting any of the related ips.
Ah, the PBL. That's where your argument falls to pieces.
PBL IP address ranges are added and maintained by each network participating in the PBL project, working in conjunction with the Spamhaus PBL team, to help apply their outbound email policies.
So, your ISP told Spamhaus that mail shouldn't be coming from the range your IP address is in. Not Spamhaus making a trite, petty and vindictive block for the fun of it. Not some blacklist deciding in error to block a whole/24 full of static addresses with REAL rDNS records for most of it because they found a couple of zombied machines with vaguely generic-looking PTRs in it. This is a case of the people you pay for connectivity telling Spamhaus that the rest of the world should not accept mail from your IP address or others near it until further notice - they're being good neighbours, and are to be applauded.
If you have a static address you can poke a hole in the PBL for it pretty easily - *you* can provide that further notice:
A feature of the PBL is the elimination of 'false positives' with a server-identifying and automatic removal mechanism for single IP addresses. This allows end users with static IP addresses within a larger dynamic pool, and legitimate mail server operators, to assert that in their opinion their IP addresses are a trustworthy source of email and to automatically remove (suppress) their IP addresses from the PBL database. Safeguards are built in to prevent abuse of this facility by spammers (and particularly by automated bots).
Do your research. The PBL is pretty damn useful, and you probably qualify for free use. If you have an unfiltered postmaster address on your domain (you do, don't you?) the smart thing would be to start blocking with it but make sure the rejection contains something like "Rejected: $IP_ADDRESS listed in Spamhaus PBL ( http://lookup-urlip_address/ ) - please contact postmaster@whineyblacklisthater.org for assistance if required" - you'll find that the "false-positives" for it are almost invariably from people who don't know what the PBL is and want to do their own thing, regardless of the practicalities the rest of the world has to face. Why should I or anyone else accept mail from somewhere your own ISP or their upstream provider has said I shouldn't?
I tried to do that, but I couldn't get a hold of any.
One man's Unobtainium is another man's landfill. That ribbon for an IBM QuietWriter III that someone wants desperately? I threw a dozen of them out, last time I moved house. I picked up an IBM 5150 from a skip recently, and it'd been fitted with an XT power supply and a hard disk. I recently found a need for four 4 meg 30 pin SIMMs, and remembered having thrown out a dozen of them a couple of years back.
Unobtainium's status is largely subjective and observationally mediated, and things can transmute from junk to unobtainium to hoardium and back in real time before your very eyes, depending on who else is observing it.
Who, tell me, who thought this was a good idea? Why curtains? Why not something that's, you know, outside where the sun can get it.
*raises hand tentatively*
I rarely open some of my curtains (the street-facing ones), for privacy reasons most of the year and for thermal reasons in the hotter months. They face north-ish, which means that since I'm in the southern hemisphere they'd be perfect for a solar collector with low cost and reasonable efficiency.
Glass blocks light, but it will also protect these materials from wind and moisture - and also some of that light, perhaps in the UV range if the right glass is used, and that might help prolong the usable life of some of these materials. I'd rather sacrifice a few percent of efficiency and gain years of extra use.
But there's also the environmental and recycling issues to take into account. What goes into the kind of materials, and can we get it back easily once they reach their end of life? Will they contribute to our depletion of our reserves of rare earth elements? From a resource-management perspective, as a species, we might be better off with huge centralised solar, wind, tide and geothermal power plants supplemented by nuclear (or even coal - if we can manage to burn little enough of it) for peak demand purposes than squandering precious materials so we can all have solar curtains.
(Damn. I've got modpoints, and professional experience at mailfiltering too - but I'll never find this thread again if pyster replies and I've posted AC... )
Which blacklist, and what reasons did they give for listing you? You want to whine and rant? Fine, that's what Slashdot seems to be made for. But if you want your point to be taken seriously and not modded into oblivion, give us the information that will allow us to make informed assessments of your claims about the lameness of the blacklist - and, possibly, the lameness of the admin of the site that chose to use that particular list too, if things are as you say they are. Some lists are dangerous if used inappropriately for some mail streams, but most of the better-known ones are safe and extremely powerful tools if used responsibly (and that includes having a working postmaster@ address and a willingness to communicate with and work with those who find themselves blocked). Spam is a serious problem, and for many places the best first-level defence against their servers being overwhelmed is judicious use of carefully selected blacklists.
For what it's worth, I find blacklists utterly invaluable. The MX servers under my control consult several for straight-up blocking (with a few local whitelistings where appropriate), and a few more for SpamAssassin scoring purposes. We're blocking about half a million messages per day, and get maybe eight queries per months about "accidentally" blocked mail - almost none of which are directly due to an errant blacklisting these days. Most of what we block is due to straight-up rejection due to inclusion in a blacklist, and the last query we got about that kind of block was due to some site that got itself listed in the CBL - boo-fricken-hoo, they deserved it and once I explained the situation they were thankful that we blocked them using the CBL because they were able to fix the problem before they got a Spamcopping or worse.
I don't know your exact situation. For all I know, you could have a legitimate beef about how some particularly crappy blacklist is created and operated. Conversely, you could just be another whiney person who likes to complain because their personal system with a generic-looking and not-clearly-static PTR got listed somewhere because 80% of the/24 it's in is part of various botnets (and if that's the case, I've got a whole lot of helpful information that would help you improve deliverability here and at many other places, now and forever, without changing providers). There could be a real problem with a particular list, or you could just be tilting at windmills and be much better off addressing the underlying issue that caused the listing and moving on. Tell us what the issue was, let us make up our own minds. Hell, you might even learn a thing or two - as, indeed, might I if there's any merit to your claims.
No, I would not be amazed by how dumb users can be.
I'll see your "having trouble with attachments" (had that here from time to time too) and raise.
The.edu.XX I work for recently had problems with lusers responding to the "Your XXX.EDU.XX account will be cancelled unless you send us your username and password and date-of-birth and country-of-birth details within three days" phishing mails that are doing the rounds at the moment. Some of them provided the correct details, causing no end of fun when we detected this (long before the nastygrams from Spamcop and AOL and individuals started rolling in, I might add), but most of them were too dumb to even get that right. On the bright side, it would have wasted some time in Lagos.
What truly amazes me is that some of them can walk and breathe simultaneously.
I'm waiting for the next level of attacks. At the moment, we've mostly just got the bot-herders and 419ers to worry about. What truly concerns me is that some of the phishers will probably take things up a level, and at some insitutions they probably have already.
Say someone gets access to a user email account in a business or educational institution. They could start spamming from it right away, as is traditional, or they can look at the big picture and aim high - risking loss of short-term gains against a far bigger long-term payoff. A good starting point might be a message along the lines of:
Thank you, $LUSER, for providing the requested details. Your $ORGNAME account will not be cancelled. We do, however, ask you to run the attached security update as soon as possible to protect you from certain kinds of malicious emails... That could have keyloggers and remote access clients and all kinds of other goodness. If the user has access to the organisation's finance system it might be possible for the attacker to run off a series of cheques or electronic payments - the proceeds of which could be remitted to Lagos via Western Union by local "payment processing agents" who have been recruited through email. Also, forget running a diploma-mill - you might be able to get duplicate testamurs from prestigious accredited institutions and academic transcript to go with them, just by changing the personal details of past graduates.
I'm sure I've seen other info on that concept that's far more recent - that was just about the first thing that google barfed up when I looked.
There are other options, like kites, that are being investigated too.
As fuel prices increase, and modern wind power methods improve and become cost-effective again (with reduced crews and improved crew safety, compared with sailing ships of a century ago that couldn't compete with the steamers in speed, overall service price, labour costs or labour safety), we're likely to see people start to take advantage of whatever "free" energy they can get because it won't cost them as much to harvest it as the oil they'd need to burn in its place.
Then you might ask "what makes a good developer good". Well's that's not so easy to answer.
Indeed, that one is hard.
An interesting starting point on that conversation might be Weinberg's classic The Psychology of Computer Programming.
I've only read the original edition, haven't had a chance to get my hands on the 25th Anniversary revision yet (yeah, it's been out for a decade... I've had other things to do, and unfortunately buying and reading that has been down low on the list of priorities)
Weinberg's still alive, and blogging, and apparantly writing novels these days too. He's probably a very good source for information on how our humanity can help or hinder our ability to design and write and test good software.
so what if all dvd's were engineered to oxidize at a slower rate. like say 1.3x the length of a format cycle.
The conspiracy theorist in me likes your thinking, but the pragmatist in me doesn't think that's likely.
Sure, we've seen issues with CD Rot and CD Bronzing and a couple of DVD failure modes, but that seems to have been more of a manufacturing issue than a deliberate ploy by the media manufacturers or the record companies. And I don't believe for a second that it would be in the interests of MPAAFIA members to deliberately introduce a severely limited lifespan for these things, because you'd find that environmental or handling considerations would push a substantial number of time-bombed DVDs over the edge well ahead of time. I think all big corporate entities noticed what happened to Big Tobacco, and know full well that secrets have a habit of getting out - and something like deliberately engineering a ten-year average lifespan for DVDs would be a huge secret that even the legislatosaurus would notice eventually.
I could be wrong, but I thought most of the really severe problems with CDs were with ones pressed prior to the early 90's. Similarly, I was under the impression that most of the oxidation and delamination problems with DVDs were with discs made prior to about 2004. To me, that points more to an improved understanding of the manufacturing process and packaging/environmental factors than to a deliberate "Ha ha, buy it again, suckers!" attitude.
without flavor they are like chewing on packing beads
A number of different kinds of biodegradeable packing beads are made from things like starch and bran and stuff like that, and I hear it can be fun to dust a bowl full of them with chicken salt and leave them out where drunken friends can find them.
I have mixed feelings on the revival of the all-in-one-and-use-your-own-TV concept, at least as a pre-built locked-in what-is-in-the-box-is-all-you-can-get concept.
Sure, one thing that killed that formfactor off was the fact that TV resolution just wasn't good enough any more. I've been half-expecting something to crop up any time now, since HDMI is so common on newer TVs and a lot of newer sets have at least 720 lines.
But the thing that *I* think will kill this deader-than-dead in the future is the fact that a decent keyboard would have to be a sizeable part of the cost of anything like this. Ever had a C64 or early Amiga apart? Those keyboards are pretty solid, and they'd need to be. Something like this would probably have to aim at the lower-end of the market, and that would eliminate any chance of using a decent keyboard. If they could come up with a standardized user-replaceable laptop style keyboard with trackpad or clitmouse, then maybe it would get some traction... but other than that, I suspect they'd need to build a better keyboard into the device than the price they could ask would justify.
What I suspect would be more useful would be a device the size of a packet of cigarettes, with a matching switchmode wall-wart. Plug a USB keyboard and mouse in, plug it into the TV, and away you go. That would keep the size and weight down, and would allow flexibility in choice of peripherals - bendy keyboard for your rucksack, a USB Model M derivative for home/desktop use, whatever. If the formfactor could be standardized between a few manufacturers, there could even be a market for keyboard with docking stations built in - slide your C(igarette)P(ack)P(ersonal)C(omputer) into a slot at the back of any one of a range of the things with a range of storage and port options, and maybe sacrifice a little portability for some convenience and something like what you're looking for - a beefy PSU that'll handle a few e-sata or USB2 drives in the internal bays, for example, to make a luggable like the parent seemed to be asking for.
A laptop-style docking unit (with built-in battery and display) would be an intersting option too, and could allow for some interesting configuration options and fewer pre-configured models - you'd buy the keyboard/screen/battery/processor options appropriate for your use and budget. Flat-panels are coming down in price, but there's a huge variation in quality; crappy ones could be supplied for websurfing on the train, decent ones for photographers wanting a good preview-machine for when they go out to shopping centres for kiddy-shoots and the like.
LCD monitor manufacturers could include docking stations for these kinds of devices too - whether you have a PC or Mac could depend on whether you bought the unfiltered or menthol box, but it'd be "all-in-one" in terms of the amount of deskspace used. Extremely short-range, high-bandwidth wireless connections (of the type that I believe Sony are looking at for interconnecting AV components with camcorders and the like) could allow for only a physical power connection between the device and what it docks in, allowing for greater mechanical reliability - and it would probably be needed, as the ability to take your PC with you to work or use it in the car or slot into the back of the airline seat in front of you would be something that people would want to use.
I'll put the crack-pipe down now, before I burn my fingers too badly.
Likewise, Total Recall was a decent action film, but didn't manage much more.
(damn... got modpoints too. Oh well, there are other discussions...)
I just recently read "We can remember it for you wholesale", and... well... yeah, decent action flick that I'll continue to enjoy, but the major twist in the novelette about the memories suppressed by aliens during childhood (and what will happen when they are recovered, and it turns out that he IS the most important person on earth) is what really makes the story. It seems like the standard PKD film-adaptation process is to leave out all the really interesting stuff and just go with whatever lets them do the action or film-noir or whatever kind of genre-flick they've decided to make.
generally find it easier to just put the computers out in the hallways and wait for them to disappear.
Some places you can get away with that, others you can't.
I work at a University in Australia where such things used to happen. Not so much any more...
In between ideas about responsible e-waste disposal, the occupational health and safety (not to mention public liability) issues of leaving items lying on the floor in the hallways and what we're permitted to stick in our waste stream these days, we've been instructed not to do that. It still happens from time to time (got an HP Laserjet 3380 labelled "Free to good home" and some great 17" CRT monitors that way, about a year ago), and occasionally there are skips that get things that they expect nobody will want (recently got an early all-in-one Mac and an IBM 5150 with matching display, both in working order, that way), but I don't see anywhere near as much corridor-dumping any more.
Do you hunt? If not, I'd say you have no real idea of whether you could kill a deer, much less a clone of yourself.
A deer, personally? Probably not. I do eat venison, and crocodile, and yes beef and pork and chicken and lamb and cute little bunny rabbits and they're all delicious and I have been known to go fishing and even enjoy it. But I've also fed the stray rabbit that took up residence in my back yard, and enjoyed having it around. I suppose part of it has to do with whether you have to "meet the meat", and how readily you can anthropomorphise it - which is a little difficult with fish and crustaceans and molluscs. And, of course, the survival-impulse that makes us omnivores happy to eat someone elses handiwork with lower animals is just as likely kick in and make us perfectly happy to run around using organs grown and harvested by someone else - with a nice rump roast of long-pork as an added benefit.
As for the more-squeamish-with-more-consciousness bit... well, yeah, of course. I guess we're getting down to what defines a human being, something that people have struggled with from time to time. And I suspect that the definitions may get a little rubbery around the edges, as we try to accomodate different people and their different needs and beliefs. My hydroencephalopathic adult-sized clone (hell, why not stunt cranial and limb development if we can, if we're primarily after a liver and pancreas and lungs and heart I'm sure that tech to suppress expression of the limb development genes will become available if we get as far as tank-grown organ-donors) is an unthinking lump of flesh and mass of spare parts, grown from my own flesh for the purpose of repairing my body and maybe having a nice rib-roast too. Someone elses hydroencephalopathic newborn is crushed dreams, a life that will never be, sadness for all the "I love you too, Daddy"'s that will never be said. Both have similar amounts of brain function, and are genetically "human" for whatever that's worth, but I'd like to believe that it would be wrong to equate my purpose-grown organ-farm with someone elses stillborn child on those criteria alone.
I would have no problems donating my own organs if I "died", which to me means brain function ceased and my body no longer housed the person I was... by extension, I would like to believe that I would have no problems using organs or flesh that were grown from my own flesh and had never been a person in the sense that they never had the potential to become a human being. Yeah, I know, there are probably rationalisations and a whole lot of circular reasoning underlying that.
Thank you for calling "Bullshit". Thank you for making me think about this some more. I can see from your resume that you probably have a lot of experience with dealing with people, their actual motivations and beliefs, what they believe they are and what they say they are. Thank you for making me examine mine, and how they may differ from what I'd like to believe they are.
I guess you need to ask yourself if you would like to be living in that world.
"Oh brave new world, that has such people in it"
I'm sure the underclasses wouldn't mind. They'd be conditioned not to. In fact, I'm sure that on the whole you'd find that happiness and satisfaction with one's lot would be far more widespread than today. You ought to re-read Huxley some time, he has some good digs at both Henry Ford style capitalism/production/consumption and Socialism, as well as painting a world in which most people are happier than at any other time in history. But I'm not sure it's somewhere I'd like to live.
I'm not sure that breeding a slave-race would really be cost-effective, either. It'd take too long for them to mature sufficiently to be useful, and you'd need to have training and education for them. Additionally, I'm not sure they'd be appropriate for hazardous conditions - I get a little leery of those who deliberately mistreat animals, so I'm not sure I'd be happy with someone deliberately sending semi-humans down the asbestos mines or similar either. It's not the kind of thing that I think would be useful for a modern multi-national - it'd probably only work well if society was re-engineered a'la Huxley's nightmare.
I suspect that our future slave-race will be mechanical, rather than biological - or perhaps a hybrid of the two, the self-healing and self-replicating features of greater and lesser primates perhaps, augmented by implants. A troupe of spider monkeys, augmented by on-board and centralised processing, could be great for general park maintenance - and could alert the computer to get the the orangutan with the pruning saw. Remote-controlled rabbits could keep the grass mowed - general directions on where to go or direct nervous system overrides where appropriate, a jolt to the pleasure centre when they got the grass to the right height, discomfort when they did things wrong, like living in a world-wide Skinner box with a built-in crack dispenser.
where is the harm in using "lab babies"? They would have to be grown in artificial wombs and all that to dehumanize them but logically it shouldn't be stopped.
And once we're there, it's only a stone's throw to cloning complete organisms for organ harvesting for transplants - and vat-grown beef, pork, lamb and even long-pig.
Actually, on the subject of cloning for organ harvesting, I see no reason why that couldn't be done provided brain development was suppressed...and maybe the reproductive system too. I'd probably get a little squeamish about vivisecting a copy of me that had a working brain, but I'd have few problems receiving the heart and lungs and liver from a headless incubator and having a barbecue with the leftovers.
I can think of a situation in which a working reproductive system might be desirable, though - chemotherapy or disease can render people infertile, and it could be handy to have an ovary or testicle available for harvesting (for use in IVF) or even for transplantation. It might even be possible to replace a uterus lost to disease or accident or abuse in this way.
Not sure how you manage to distribute these around the internet though - I expect this is where most of the cost would lie.
Ummmm... ADSL router chipsets? Even if people turn off their computers, they probably leave their routers on 24/7.
Have the devices inspect packets passing through them, like maybe from AV vendors or Windows Update or the device vendor's own pornblocking and anti-malware rulesets, looking for a particular "wake up, phone home" signal. First stage, wake up and report in. Second stage, accept targetting information and await further instructions. Third stage, launch. Do it in the routers themselves and most people would never notice - all their firewalling and packet inspection voodoo (if they're paranoid enough to have any, most won't) will be inside their own networks or on their own box.
Bury that feature deep enough, include extra features like pornblocking and censorware that can be manipulated by the local regime, and market the chipset and/or completed devices through a shell company not covered officially by US embargos - bingo, instant order for a couple of container loads of devices for Iran. Hell, free home-use porn blocking with a list maintained by a commercial provider and licenced either by the device manufacturer or for a nominal fee by end-users would get the things adopted by many families all over the world. Add in some phone-home features (maybe reporting visits to prohibited sites back to a central authority, or certain kinds of data as a distributed traffic-analysis tool) and you've got another reason more totatitarian and less open governments might mandate them - hide the US Botnet feature in a real commercial product from some far-east manufacturer and your enemies might not even notice.
A little more attractive than a big wooden horse, don't you think?
Methinks someones spell-check database stopped learning around 1998...
Methinks my fingers went onto autopilot, and followed the posting conventions of one of the Usenet groups I frequent.
Lbh fubhyq or ganaxsgy V gvga'g ebg13 gur jubyr cbfg gb erqhpqr gur evfx bs hajnagrq nggragvba - that would have been really annoying to casual readers, if it made it past the lameness filter.
I think the biggest thing keeping this troll from being truly informative is the lack of understanding of the licence, and the deliberate mis-statement of its effects. Its fictitious and incorrect pronouncements virtually guarentee that nobody with even rudimentary analytical skills will believe it. After my experience with these beliefs, I won't be recommending them any of my associates. I may reconsider if it switches to something a little more believable, like the HIV-protective benefits of nailing your head to the floor. Until then its attempts to deliberately distort the facts about what you can and cannot do with in-house software that's not for external distribution shall continue to attract such a flurry of indignant responses that it's easy to believe that Mother Henrietta Hickey's day job is posting anti-GPL FUD.
so they're not what visitors will receive to locate their relatives' bodies, but such units are probably what the operators would use to keep track of burial locations.
...and another reason for the five metre minimum distance between burials - that way, they can loan out the bloody-expensive-and accurate-enough-but-not-backpack-sized units to the people visiting Grandma, and still have a reasonable chance of visitors finding the right grave.
When the bush setting itself becomes the memorial, and there's at least the belief that a loved one's atoms are perfusing the living system you're walking through, the exact location and boundaries of the grave might become less important to visitors. Besides, with no burials within five metres it'll probably be fairly easy to pick out the right spot from either the slight mound or slight depression. I'd imagine that a lot of people would want to plant a suitable tree on the grave too; a native, in soil loosened to a depth of six or seven feet, would really take off and become a natural burial marker in a couple of years.
Am I the only one that thinks that something should be done about this?
No, you're not.
However, Zombied machines on Turkish dial-up or broadband connections aren't the biggest problem I have - they seem to get added to various blacklists fairly rapidly. The biggest headache I have right now is those wacky Nigerians and their national sport, abusing Hotmail and Gmail and Yahoo accounts for fun and profit.
Let's tell Dubya that Osama has been seen hanging out in Lagos, and that most of the proceeds from 419 scams go to finance Global Terror.
Re:Sloths
on
Meet Mole Man
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· Score: 3, Interesting
"Sloth Removal" is necessary from time to time. Everybody knows that as part of your council rates there is a "Sloth Abatement Charge", which helps pay for the local council's Animal Control Officers. The very small number of sloths in East London is proof that the charge is having its intended effect. However, from time to time there are problems with localised infestations. Where such infestations are specifically the result of negligence on the part of the homeowner, such as the infestation in Mr Lyttle's tunnels, the council is entitled to recover reasonable costs associated with the removal of the pests.
On the new Evo X, the sensor is part of the special TPS-equipped valve stem. I haven't read up on the details, but there's no way that data is being transmitted 100% over a wired connection.
You should have read your manual more carefully, then. Every 300 metres you need to either switch between forward and reverse OR take off all four wheels and manually re-wind the cable spools.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, the PBL. That's where your argument falls to pieces.
From http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/index.lasso :
PBL IP address ranges are added and maintained by each network participating in the PBL project, working in conjunction with the Spamhaus PBL team, to help apply their outbound email policies.
So, your ISP told Spamhaus that mail shouldn't be coming from the range your IP address is in. Not Spamhaus making a trite, petty and vindictive block for the fun of it. Not some blacklist deciding in error to block a whole /24 full of static addresses with REAL rDNS records for most of it because they found a couple of zombied machines with vaguely generic-looking PTRs in it. This is a case of the people you pay for connectivity telling Spamhaus that the rest of the world should not accept mail from your IP address or others near it until further notice - they're being good neighbours, and are to be applauded.
If you have a static address you can poke a hole in the PBL for it pretty easily - *you* can provide that further notice:
A feature of the PBL is the elimination of 'false positives' with a server-identifying and automatic removal mechanism for single IP addresses. This allows end users with static IP addresses within a larger dynamic pool, and legitimate mail server operators, to assert that in their opinion their IP addresses are a trustworthy source of email and to automatically remove (suppress) their IP addresses from the PBL database. Safeguards are built in to prevent abuse of this facility by spammers (and particularly by automated bots).
Do your research. The PBL is pretty damn useful, and you probably qualify for free use. If you have an unfiltered postmaster address on your domain (you do, don't you?) the smart thing would be to start blocking with it but make sure the rejection contains something like "Rejected: $IP_ADDRESS listed in Spamhaus PBL ( http://lookup-urlip_address/ ) - please contact postmaster@whineyblacklisthater.org for assistance if required" - you'll find that the "false-positives" for it are almost invariably from people who don't know what the PBL is and want to do their own thing, regardless of the practicalities the rest of the world has to face. Why should I or anyone else accept mail from somewhere your own ISP or their upstream provider has said I shouldn't?
One man's Unobtainium is another man's landfill. That ribbon for an IBM QuietWriter III that someone wants desperately? I threw a dozen of them out, last time I moved house. I picked up an IBM 5150 from a skip recently, and it'd been fitted with an XT power supply and a hard disk. I recently found a need for four 4 meg 30 pin SIMMs, and remembered having thrown out a dozen of them a couple of years back.
Unobtainium's status is largely subjective and observationally mediated, and things can transmute from junk to unobtainium to hoardium and back in real time before your very eyes, depending on who else is observing it.
*raises hand tentatively*
I rarely open some of my curtains (the street-facing ones), for privacy reasons most of the year and for thermal reasons in the hotter months. They face north-ish, which means that since I'm in the southern hemisphere they'd be perfect for a solar collector with low cost and reasonable efficiency.
Glass blocks light, but it will also protect these materials from wind and moisture - and also some of that light, perhaps in the UV range if the right glass is used, and that might help prolong the usable life of some of these materials. I'd rather sacrifice a few percent of efficiency and gain years of extra use.
But there's also the environmental and recycling issues to take into account. What goes into the kind of materials, and can we get it back easily once they reach their end of life? Will they contribute to our depletion of our reserves of rare earth elements? From a resource-management perspective, as a species, we might be better off with huge centralised solar, wind, tide and geothermal power plants supplemented by nuclear (or even coal - if we can manage to burn little enough of it) for peak demand purposes than squandering precious materials so we can all have solar curtains.
(Damn. I've got modpoints, and professional experience at mailfiltering too - but I'll never find this thread again if pyster replies and I've posted AC... )
Which blacklist, and what reasons did they give for listing you? You want to whine and rant? Fine, that's what Slashdot seems to be made for. But if you want your point to be taken seriously and not modded into oblivion, give us the information that will allow us to make informed assessments of your claims about the lameness of the blacklist - and, possibly, the lameness of the admin of the site that chose to use that particular list too, if things are as you say they are. Some lists are dangerous if used inappropriately for some mail streams, but most of the better-known ones are safe and extremely powerful tools if used responsibly (and that includes having a working postmaster@ address and a willingness to communicate with and work with those who find themselves blocked). Spam is a serious problem, and for many places the best first-level defence against their servers being overwhelmed is judicious use of carefully selected blacklists.
For what it's worth, I find blacklists utterly invaluable. The MX servers under my control consult several for straight-up blocking (with a few local whitelistings where appropriate), and a few more for SpamAssassin scoring purposes. We're blocking about half a million messages per day, and get maybe eight queries per months about "accidentally" blocked mail - almost none of which are directly due to an errant blacklisting these days. Most of what we block is due to straight-up rejection due to inclusion in a blacklist, and the last query we got about that kind of block was due to some site that got itself listed in the CBL - boo-fricken-hoo, they deserved it and once I explained the situation they were thankful that we blocked them using the CBL because they were able to fix the problem before they got a Spamcopping or worse.
I don't know your exact situation. For all I know, you could have a legitimate beef about how some particularly crappy blacklist is created and operated. Conversely, you could just be another whiney person who likes to complain because their personal system with a generic-looking and not-clearly-static PTR got listed somewhere because 80% of the /24 it's in is part of various botnets (and if that's the case, I've got a whole lot of helpful information that would help you improve deliverability here and at many other places, now and forever, without changing providers). There could be a real problem with a particular list, or you could just be tilting at windmills and be much better off addressing the underlying issue that caused the listing and moving on. Tell us what the issue was, let us make up our own minds. Hell, you might even learn a thing or two - as, indeed, might I if there's any merit to your claims.
No, I would not be amazed by how dumb users can be.
I'll see your "having trouble with attachments" (had that here from time to time too) and raise.
The .edu.XX I work for recently had problems with lusers responding to the "Your XXX.EDU.XX account will be cancelled unless you send us your username and password and date-of-birth and country-of-birth details within three days" phishing mails that are doing the rounds at the moment. Some of them provided the correct details, causing no end of fun when we detected this (long before the nastygrams from Spamcop and AOL and individuals started rolling in, I might add), but most of them were too dumb to even get that right. On the bright side, it would have wasted some time in Lagos.
What truly amazes me is that some of them can walk and breathe simultaneously.
I'm waiting for the next level of attacks. At the moment, we've mostly just got the bot-herders and 419ers to worry about. What truly concerns me is that some of the phishers will probably take things up a level, and at some insitutions they probably have already.
Say someone gets access to a user email account in a business or educational institution. They could start spamming from it right away, as is traditional, or they can look at the big picture and aim high - risking loss of short-term gains against a far bigger long-term payoff. A good starting point might be a message along the lines of:
Thank you, $LUSER, for providing the requested details. Your $ORGNAME account will not be cancelled. We do, however, ask you to run the attached security update as soon as possible to protect you from certain kinds of malicious emails... That could have keyloggers and remote access clients and all kinds of other goodness. If the user has access to the organisation's finance system it might be possible for the attacker to run off a series of cheques or electronic payments - the proceeds of which could be remitted to Lagos via Western Union by local "payment processing agents" who have been recruited through email. Also, forget running a diploma-mill - you might be able to get duplicate testamurs from prestigious accredited institutions and academic transcript to go with them, just by changing the personal details of past graduates.Scary stuff, eh?
http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/science_news/4235579.html?nav=RSS20
I'm sure I've seen other info on that concept that's far more recent - that was just about the first thing that google barfed up when I looked.
There are other options, like kites, that are being investigated too.
As fuel prices increase, and modern wind power methods improve and become cost-effective again (with reduced crews and improved crew safety, compared with sailing ships of a century ago that couldn't compete with the steamers in speed, overall service price, labour costs or labour safety), we're likely to see people start to take advantage of whatever "free" energy they can get because it won't cost them as much to harvest it as the oil they'd need to burn in its place.
Indeed, that one is hard.
An interesting starting point on that conversation might be Weinberg's classic The Psychology of Computer Programming.
I've only read the original edition, haven't had a chance to get my hands on the 25th Anniversary revision yet (yeah, it's been out for a decade... I've had other things to do, and unfortunately buying and reading that has been down low on the list of priorities)
Weinberg's still alive, and blogging, and apparantly writing novels these days too. He's probably a very good source for information on how our humanity can help or hinder our ability to design and write and test good software.
The conspiracy theorist in me likes your thinking, but the pragmatist in me doesn't think that's likely.
Sure, we've seen issues with CD Rot and CD Bronzing and a couple of DVD failure modes, but that seems to have been more of a manufacturing issue than a deliberate ploy by the media manufacturers or the record companies. And I don't believe for a second that it would be in the interests of MPAAFIA members to deliberately introduce a severely limited lifespan for these things, because you'd find that environmental or handling considerations would push a substantial number of time-bombed DVDs over the edge well ahead of time. I think all big corporate entities noticed what happened to Big Tobacco, and know full well that secrets have a habit of getting out - and something like deliberately engineering a ten-year average lifespan for DVDs would be a huge secret that even the legislatosaurus would notice eventually.
I could be wrong, but I thought most of the really severe problems with CDs were with ones pressed prior to the early 90's. Similarly, I was under the impression that most of the oxidation and delamination problems with DVDs were with discs made prior to about 2004. To me, that points more to an improved understanding of the manufacturing process and packaging/environmental factors than to a deliberate "Ha ha, buy it again, suckers!" attitude.
Can't be any worse than other things they've turned loose on the internet, like their Barracuda backscatter^w spam firewalls.
A number of different kinds of biodegradeable packing beads are made from things like starch and bran and stuff like that, and I hear it can be fun to dust a bowl full of them with chicken salt and leave them out where drunken friends can find them.
I have mixed feelings on the revival of the all-in-one-and-use-your-own-TV concept, at least as a pre-built locked-in what-is-in-the-box-is-all-you-can-get concept.
Sure, one thing that killed that formfactor off was the fact that TV resolution just wasn't good enough any more. I've been half-expecting something to crop up any time now, since HDMI is so common on newer TVs and a lot of newer sets have at least 720 lines.
But the thing that *I* think will kill this deader-than-dead in the future is the fact that a decent keyboard would have to be a sizeable part of the cost of anything like this. Ever had a C64 or early Amiga apart? Those keyboards are pretty solid, and they'd need to be. Something like this would probably have to aim at the lower-end of the market, and that would eliminate any chance of using a decent keyboard. If they could come up with a standardized user-replaceable laptop style keyboard with trackpad or clitmouse, then maybe it would get some traction... but other than that, I suspect they'd need to build a better keyboard into the device than the price they could ask would justify.
What I suspect would be more useful would be a device the size of a packet of cigarettes, with a matching switchmode wall-wart. Plug a USB keyboard and mouse in, plug it into the TV, and away you go. That would keep the size and weight down, and would allow flexibility in choice of peripherals - bendy keyboard for your rucksack, a USB Model M derivative for home/desktop use, whatever. If the formfactor could be standardized between a few manufacturers, there could even be a market for keyboard with docking stations built in - slide your C(igarette)P(ack)P(ersonal)C(omputer) into a slot at the back of any one of a range of the things with a range of storage and port options, and maybe sacrifice a little portability for some convenience and something like what you're looking for - a beefy PSU that'll handle a few e-sata or USB2 drives in the internal bays, for example, to make a luggable like the parent seemed to be asking for.
A laptop-style docking unit (with built-in battery and display) would be an intersting option too, and could allow for some interesting configuration options and fewer pre-configured models - you'd buy the keyboard/screen/battery/processor options appropriate for your use and budget. Flat-panels are coming down in price, but there's a huge variation in quality; crappy ones could be supplied for websurfing on the train, decent ones for photographers wanting a good preview-machine for when they go out to shopping centres for kiddy-shoots and the like.
LCD monitor manufacturers could include docking stations for these kinds of devices too - whether you have a PC or Mac could depend on whether you bought the unfiltered or menthol box, but it'd be "all-in-one" in terms of the amount of deskspace used. Extremely short-range, high-bandwidth wireless connections (of the type that I believe Sony are looking at for interconnecting AV components with camcorders and the like) could allow for only a physical power connection between the device and what it docks in, allowing for greater mechanical reliability - and it would probably be needed, as the ability to take your PC with you to work or use it in the car or slot into the back of the airline seat in front of you would be something that people would want to use.
I'll put the crack-pipe down now, before I burn my fingers too badly.
I just recently read "We can remember it for you wholesale", and
I work at a University in Australia where such things used to happen. Not so much any more...
In between ideas about responsible e-waste disposal, the occupational health and safety (not to mention public liability) issues of leaving items lying on the floor in the hallways and what we're permitted to stick in our waste stream these days, we've been instructed not to do that. It still happens from time to time (got an HP Laserjet 3380 labelled "Free to good home" and some great 17" CRT monitors that way, about a year ago), and occasionally there are skips that get things that they expect nobody will want (recently got an early all-in-one Mac and an IBM 5150 with matching display, both in working order, that way), but I don't see anywhere near as much corridor-dumping any more.
As for the more-squeamish-with-more-consciousness bit... well, yeah, of course. I guess we're getting down to what defines a human being, something that people have struggled with from time to time. And I suspect that the definitions may get a little rubbery around the edges, as we try to accomodate different people and their different needs and beliefs. My hydroencephalopathic adult-sized clone (hell, why not stunt cranial and limb development if we can, if we're primarily after a liver and pancreas and lungs and heart I'm sure that tech to suppress expression of the limb development genes will become available if we get as far as tank-grown organ-donors) is an unthinking lump of flesh and mass of spare parts, grown from my own flesh for the purpose of repairing my body and maybe having a nice rib-roast too. Someone elses hydroencephalopathic newborn is crushed dreams, a life that will never be, sadness for all the "I love you too, Daddy"'s that will never be said. Both have similar amounts of brain function, and are genetically "human" for whatever that's worth, but I'd like to believe that it would be wrong to equate my purpose-grown organ-farm with someone elses stillborn child on those criteria alone.
I would have no problems donating my own organs if I "died", which to me means brain function ceased and my body no longer housed the person I was
Thank you for calling "Bullshit". Thank you for making me think about this some more. I can see from your resume that you probably have a lot of experience with dealing with people, their actual motivations and beliefs, what they believe they are and what they say they are. Thank you for making me examine mine, and how they may differ from what I'd like to believe they are.
I'm sure the underclasses wouldn't mind. They'd be conditioned not to. In fact, I'm sure that on the whole you'd find that happiness and satisfaction with one's lot would be far more widespread than today. You ought to re-read Huxley some time, he has some good digs at both Henry Ford style capitalism/production/consumption and Socialism, as well as painting a world in which most people are happier than at any other time in history. But I'm not sure it's somewhere I'd like to live.
I'm not sure that breeding a slave-race would really be cost-effective, either. It'd take too long for them to mature sufficiently to be useful, and you'd need to have training and education for them. Additionally, I'm not sure they'd be appropriate for hazardous conditions - I get a little leery of those who deliberately mistreat animals, so I'm not sure I'd be happy with someone deliberately sending semi-humans down the asbestos mines or similar either. It's not the kind of thing that I think would be useful for a modern multi-national - it'd probably only work well if society was re-engineered a'la Huxley's nightmare.
I suspect that our future slave-race will be mechanical, rather than biological - or perhaps a hybrid of the two, the self-healing and self-replicating features of greater and lesser primates perhaps, augmented by implants. A troupe of spider monkeys, augmented by on-board and centralised processing, could be great for general park maintenance - and could alert the computer to get the the orangutan with the pruning saw. Remote-controlled rabbits could keep the grass mowed - general directions on where to go or direct nervous system overrides where appropriate, a jolt to the pleasure centre when they got the grass to the right height, discomfort when they did things wrong, like living in a world-wide Skinner box with a built-in crack dispenser.
Actually, on the subject of cloning for organ harvesting, I see no reason why that couldn't be done provided brain development was suppressed...and maybe the reproductive system too. I'd probably get a little squeamish about vivisecting a copy of me that had a working brain, but I'd have few problems receiving the heart and lungs and liver from a headless incubator and having a barbecue with the leftovers.
I can think of a situation in which a working reproductive system might be desirable, though - chemotherapy or disease can render people infertile, and it could be handy to have an ovary or testicle available for harvesting (for use in IVF) or even for transplantation. It might even be possible to replace a uterus lost to disease or accident or abuse in this way.
Have the devices inspect packets passing through them, like maybe from AV vendors or Windows Update or the device vendor's own pornblocking and anti-malware rulesets, looking for a particular "wake up, phone home" signal. First stage, wake up and report in. Second stage, accept targetting information and await further instructions. Third stage, launch. Do it in the routers themselves and most people would never notice - all their firewalling and packet inspection voodoo (if they're paranoid enough to have any, most won't) will be inside their own networks or on their own box.
Bury that feature deep enough, include extra features like pornblocking and censorware that can be manipulated by the local regime, and market the chipset and/or completed devices through a shell company not covered officially by US embargos - bingo, instant order for a couple of container loads of devices for Iran. Hell, free home-use porn blocking with a list maintained by a commercial provider and licenced either by the device manufacturer or for a nominal fee by end-users would get the things adopted by many families all over the world. Add in some phone-home features (maybe reporting visits to prohibited sites back to a central authority, or certain kinds of data as a distributed traffic-analysis tool) and you've got another reason more totatitarian and less open governments might mandate them - hide the US Botnet feature in a real commercial product from some far-east manufacturer and your enemies might not even notice.
A little more attractive than a big wooden horse, don't you think?
Lbh fubhyq or ganaxsgy V gvga'g ebg13 gur jubyr cbfg gb erqhpqr gur evfx bs hajnagrq nggragvba - that would have been really annoying to casual readers, if it made it past the lameness filter.
A quick giggle for "or the Gnu Protective License" barfed up the following:
http://www.news.com/5208-1030_3-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=2246&messageID=11919&start=-1
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=389856&cid=21705136
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=67877&no_d2=1&cid=6220788
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=159323&cid=13343214
http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2003/2/13/8422/16656/11#11
I think the biggest thing keeping this troll from being truly informative is the lack of understanding of the licence, and the deliberate mis-statement of its effects. Its fictitious and incorrect pronouncements virtually guarentee that nobody with even rudimentary analytical skills will believe it. After my experience with these beliefs, I won't be recommending them any of my associates. I may reconsider if it switches to something a little more believable, like the HIV-protective benefits of nailing your head to the floor. Until then its attempts to deliberately distort the facts about what you can and cannot do with in-house software that's not for external distribution shall continue to attract such a flurry of indignant responses that it's easy to believe that Mother Henrietta Hickey's day job is posting anti-GPL FUD.
Thank you for your time.
When the bush setting itself becomes the memorial, and there's at least the belief that a loved one's atoms are perfusing the living system you're walking through, the exact location and boundaries of the grave might become less important to visitors. Besides, with no burials within five metres it'll probably be fairly easy to pick out the right spot from either the slight mound or slight depression. I'd imagine that a lot of people would want to plant a suitable tree on the grave too; a native, in soil loosened to a depth of six or seven feet, would really take off and become a natural burial marker in a couple of years.
Cue mandatory mass-liposuction programmes in three, two...
However, Zombied machines on Turkish dial-up or broadband connections aren't the biggest problem I have - they seem to get added to various blacklists fairly rapidly. The biggest headache I have right now is those wacky Nigerians and their national sport, abusing Hotmail and Gmail and Yahoo accounts for fun and profit.
Let's tell Dubya that Osama has been seen hanging out in Lagos, and that most of the proceeds from 419 scams go to finance Global Terror.
"Sloth Removal" is necessary from time to time. Everybody knows that as part of your council rates there is a "Sloth Abatement Charge", which helps pay for the local council's Animal Control Officers. The very small number of sloths in East London is proof that the charge is having its intended effect. However, from time to time there are problems with localised infestations. Where such infestations are specifically the result of negligence on the part of the homeowner, such as the infestation in Mr Lyttle's tunnels, the council is entitled to recover reasonable costs associated with the removal of the pests.