"UUNET / WorldCom Helpdesk"? That's a software application?
"FTP Site - Canada"?!
"Six Sigma - ABB data collection for manufacturing quality - Canada". Right, now I know that ad was written by a psychotic butt-monkey. Why the frell does a tier 1 helpdesk tech need to know anything about Six Sigma? You write the frelling numbers down, end of story. Let the green belts or black belts waste time with the statistical analysis.
I lay claim to the primary star of this solar system, typically known as Sol.
Given that this star's properly lines can be drawn out as far as the photosphere, I feel it's not unreasonable to claim trespass on every living thing within this solar system.
Absolutely correct. Spammers don't use their own money and resources they criminally hijack server space, bandwidth and more in order to perform their "business".
Plus the majority of spam is either totally fraudulent (i.e. 491 Nigerian crap, MLM schemes, etc) or 80% fraudulent (herbal viagra, weight-loss pills, etc... People who order that shit usually get something in the mail but it's not going to work as claimed).
Since spammers are now willing to unleash whole new virus schemes just to generate the open relays/zombies needed to do their dirty work, I think we're approaching the point at which only physical action will have a lasting result. Be it confiscation of the spammers business, assets or straight-forward horse-whipping.
And no, I don't think violence is always a solution, but it's a rpetty basic human trait. You piss enough people off long enough, eventually you get your ass kicked...
It's a fallacy to say "Since this isn't the most popular and well-established standard, it can't possibly be better than what everyone uses."
There was a rather good book written on why mediocricity rises to the top. Unfortunately I can't dig-up the title. But essentially, it almost always comes down to issues of money and time. WHat's cheapest and/or quickest becomes king.
Maybe the Dvorak keyboard layout is better. But the sheer momentum of the QWERTY standard is huge. Even if there were significant long-term savings in terms of productivity, most companies will never consider doing something that would require buying hundreds (or thousands) of new keyboards, reconfiguring the workstations and of course training their employees. And of course there's the very strong human resistance to change.
It happened with Beta vs. VHS. The Beta videotape standard is better in terms of both sound and video quality. It's a measurable, scientific fact. But because VHS was smaller, people liked it more (and other factors). So we've been stuck for decades with a de-facto video standard that's shitty quality.
Remember the lesson of the monkeys and the banana.
There's a strong fascination with the concept of speech recoginition because it goes so far towards bringing the concept of interacting with a computer as we interact with other people.
People talk to their computers all the time, just as people often talk to other inanimate objects, or animals. It's anthromorphisizing, and reflects humanity's need to not be alone in our world.
Even though a computer that responds to voice input has nothing to do with AI, it does an effective job of creating that illusion.
And as has been pointed out, speech recoginition for the purposes of dictation is a massive time-saver. It's not something your average IT/geek does but doctor's and lawyers write TONS of papers, forms, etc.
Last, but most important is the advantage speech recoginition gives to the handicapped. For the blind, the 'palegics, severe arthritis sufferers, etc. the benefits are HUGE.
So, how many babies have you breast fed? Were you there for the very first breast feeding your mother had to do?
I've assisted in the breast feeding of my daughter, just after she was born. While the suckle instinct is quite strong, she had to learn how to load the nipple in her mouth correctly, to stay on the nipple and most importantly to keep suckling. It was not trivial and it took many weeks until baby and mother were accomplished at the task.
You're grasp of certain meanings is off. Newborns don't know how to do anything. It's biological, even a severely impared newborn will be able to defecate, cry, etc. And you've mixed up intuition with instinct.
Basically, you're making shit up to sound smart without speaking from actual experience.
AOL isn't anywhere near as annoying as RoadRunner, which indisriminately blocks entire class C's without warning. And then ignores attempts to get the blocks removed for weeks at a time.
AOL appears to just be incompetent about it. RoadRunner is decidedly malicious.
Bringing this back onto topic, that's one of the worst side-effects of the entire spammer brigade. ISP's end up stepping on each other's toes trying to protect their own customers. Sometimes they learn to get along and co-operate. But because of the nature of the business world (i.e, Marketing departments, PBH's, etc), more often you get company A accusing Company B of interfering with their business.
So you not only have all the damage being done by the spamming itself, you have collateral damage to business relationships...
Attempting to destroy a critical part of the infrastrucutre of not just the United States, but most of the world is not "spam". It's a reprehensible act that in many other arenas could legitimately be labeled terrorism.
Just getting a bunch of pornographic ads in your personal mailbox is an annoyance. Relatively easy to combat with client-side filters. But that doesn't change how much bandwidth is used to deliver the e-mail. Not to mention the staggering amounts of disk space and processor time consumed by shuffling a billion or so pieces of spam mail every day across the world.
Someone, be it organized crime, organized spammers, terrorists, or just fucked-up idiots are doing their absolute level best to render e-mail a useless communication medium. Achieving that goal will do massive harm to the US economy, and in fact many other countries economy as well. How many billions of dollars have been spent soley to combat spam? How many hundreds of small businesses have completely out of business after being exploited by spammers?
I'm not advocating vigallante-style justice, that only works out in fiction. But in China, they execute their computer criminals. If you commit a crime that costs billions of dollars and can never in any way fully pay restitution, shouldn't you have to pay the ultimate price?
At the very least, consideration should be made for things like life imprisonment. Hell, Kevin got one of the harshest sentencing ever for a computer criminal and the absolute totality of every crime he commited doesn't add up to even a tiny fraction of how much damage organized spammers have done.
Based on my experience with Cox Cable as cable TV provider for many years, as well as knowing some of the folks who worked on a Cox Cablemodem roll-out in Gainesville, FL...
I really do. At it's heart, geekery is about playing. And playing requires toys.
There's the poster radio with real working controls just printed on the poster. It's over an inch thick though, not a real poster. Oh, and there's a poster phone as well.
Here in Wake county (North Carolina), the system is still pen-and-paper. You complete a broken arrow by the canidate you wish. Very easy to do, ballots printed quite large. The paper ballot is fed into a large, sealed box using an electric feed mechanism. This mechanism displays an LED readout of the number of ballots fed into it. I presume the ballots are transported to some facility where they are counted via scanners, hopefully under the eye of an election official.
Now here's the bad part: I'm not required to show ANY form of identification when I walk in. I'm just asked for my name, then they have me verify my address. Information readily available in any phonebook, on the Internet, etc. So it's really QUITE easy to impersonate another registered voter and effectively take their vote away... If you were willing to travel to multiple precincts you could then vote multiple times.
There may, or may not have been an attempt to compare my signature with that on record. I'm disappointed that they don't require some form of photo ID.
Phil Katz did not alter SEA's binaries, though they claimed he did. He just wrote better programs to manipulate the.ARC format (i.e. faster, which was very critical in the 286/386 days). There was some dispute over whether he'd copied parts of their source code, though SEA distributed the source freely.
SEA found themselves utterly and totally alienated by the BBS community, especially when they started throwing around shit like "We've trademarked the.ARC extension" and saying anyone writing ANY program that manipulated the.ARC format in ANY way owed them money. SEA insisted the file format was copyrighted.
Phil went on to develop a new, better compression file format (Our loyal friend this many years, ZIP). Not simply different compression but the file structure itself was more robust then.ARC, with deliberate room for future additions. And of course Phil went out of his way to make the format of ZIP archives widely and freely available and anyone could make ZIP-compatible programs without owing him anything.
Remember PKZIP 0.91? BBS sysops the world over rapidly switched to that beta from SEA's ARC format/programs and never looked back. ARC died a quick and silent death... SEA did not, unfortunately.
Frequently and routinely shutting machines down allows one to deal with these failures much more smoothly.
I disagree with the "frequently" bit. Nothing wrong with uptimes of 1-3 months. But I'll agree that a routine of system reboots is a good idea, especially if it's part of an established maintenance scheduled...
Hmm...I'm not so sure I agree with you here. I'll concede that the academic costs are far past tuition costs at state schools, but dormitory costs are most cases a profit. Tuition covers just that....tuition. Room and board are always separate expenses and for state schools far outweight the cost of tuition.
You are correct sir, at least regarding tuition and room-and-board being separate. I'm unclear on what you mean by room-and-board outweighing tuition... Do you mean state schools consider it more important? Or that it's a bigger part of the budget?
It doesn't cost the school very much to put a student (or two) up in a 10' by 20' room and give them 3 cafeteria-style meals a day.
Physical maintenance of facilities, security, plumbing, electricity, and of course the Internet access. Space is at a high premium at UF campus (the land was actually donated to UF due to its unsuitable conditions for building... Lake Alice isn't artificial, despite various claims by assinine UF ex-presidents).
Now figure in the profits from students spending money at the campus corner-store and non-mealplan eateries, you're talking even more profit. Even if the cafeterias and stores are operated by a third party, that third party still pays significant cash for the space and utilities.
All the UF eateries are indeed run by a third party company, with the exception of a few kiosks run by various student organizations. But using the term "profit" is misleading.... Again, this is a state-run facility we're talking about here. The money isn't going to a bunch of stockholders. But there is a well-established "Good 'Ol Boy" network in Florida's state school system, as any Florida native can tell you...
My original point wasn't that UF was hurting for money. Just that UF's economic stability is not resting on the back of the department of housing by any stretch of the imagination. THe UF athletics department is FAR more critical to the future of UF.
(I grew up in Gainesville, FL. My mother was an executive secretary at the Dept. of Housing for 17+ years. I'm not just talking out of the side of my mouth here, folks...)
I'm confused, what school are you thinking of that refuses to disperse financial aid if you don't agree to live on campus?
Financial aid packages come in all colors, shapes and sizes. I know there's no universal requirement such as you're talking about with college financial aid, at least in the US.
Seriously, ICANN has always been trying. Sure they've totally sucked at implementing, well, anything... And they're slow as owl shit. But darn it, they mean well!
Which doesn't count for as much as it should in today's world...
It's a dumb idea, in the end. The student are going to quit living on campus or quit coming to that school. Either way, UF loses a ton of money. Guess they shoulda put some consideration into separate internet connections for academic and dorm users.
I'm sure UF would save a TON of money if on-campus housing was eliminated. It's an expensive service to provide and all the residence halls could be retrofitted to become classrooms, or torn down for room to build other facilities... But frankly, lazy college students need to not have to walk/bike/drive 2 miles to campus waaaaaaaaay out-weighs their indignation of not being able to fileshare porn.
And remember, UF is a State school system. Student tuition is only a fragment of its total income. You want to see UF suffer financial losses? Find a way to pull all their lucrative collegiate licensing and athletics program (UF athletics department carries quite a bit of financial clout and power on campus). Or look into getting all the grants and research dollars from private sectors turned off.
Wasn't trying to imply the Sunshine law applied to the software UF developed (though it would be highly amusing if it did). My point was more along showing that UF has responsibilities to the state of Florida. I'm sure the Regents weren't too happy with complaints from the RIAA...
Hell yes. Most universities require freshmen and even sophomores to live in the dorms citing various "campus involvement" aspects of university-run housing.
Yeah, but that's not the case at UF. Sticking to the facts at hand, the University of Florida has no mandatory dorm residency policy.
I doubt they ever will either. It's not like UF has to work to get students to sign up for dorms...
Sure it's a racket. And you know what, demand for on-campus housing is so intense, UF will put three people in a room about 15' x 15' in size (if not smaller). Hell, some dorms didn't even have AC as recently as the early 90's (in an area where summer starts in May and temps hover around 90's for about three months or so... not to mention the 100% humidity).
Yet, demand for on-campus housing is huge. No, UF doesn't need to force students to live on campus, the number of baby freshmen leaving home for the first time is more than sufficient to fill the rather small number of available beds on-campus. UF had 42,000+ enrollment in the early 90's, yet the size of the physical campus hasn't changed in decades.
Actually, while UF owns what it purchases, it is very much considered property of the state. Note that does not mean owned by the taxpayers... there's not much tax money gets spent on that us taxslaves get to legitimately call ours.
In Florida the "Sunshine Law" dictates an open-access policy for Florida government and extensions thereof. Meetings regarding the planning of UF's policies and future are supposed to be open to the public. The complete payroll of every single UF employee (faculty, staff, OPS, A&P, etc) is a matter of public record. Guess what else that means? E-mail relating to UF business (aka State of Florida business) MUST be archived indefinitely for potential public access. NERDC had a tape library of old e-mails going back to at least the early 80's, last I saw.
Slashdot Mirror
"FTP Site - Canada"?!
"Six Sigma - ABB data collection for manufacturing quality - Canada". Right, now I know that ad was written by a psychotic butt-monkey. Why the frell does a tier 1 helpdesk tech need to know anything about Six Sigma? You write the frelling numbers down, end of story. Let the green belts or black belts waste time with the statistical analysis.
Given that this star's properly lines can be drawn out as far as the photosphere, I feel it's not unreasonable to claim trespass on every living thing within this solar system.
Please submit payment in the form of quatloos.
Plus the majority of spam is either totally fraudulent (i.e. 491 Nigerian crap, MLM schemes, etc) or 80% fraudulent (herbal viagra, weight-loss pills, etc... People who order that shit usually get something in the mail but it's not going to work as claimed).
Since spammers are now willing to unleash whole new virus schemes just to generate the open relays/zombies needed to do their dirty work, I think we're approaching the point at which only physical action will have a lasting result. Be it confiscation of the spammers business, assets or straight-forward horse-whipping.
And no, I don't think violence is always a solution, but it's a rpetty basic human trait. You piss enough people off long enough, eventually you get your ass kicked...
There was a rather good book written on why mediocricity rises to the top. Unfortunately I can't dig-up the title. But essentially, it almost always comes down to issues of money and time. WHat's cheapest and/or quickest becomes king.
Maybe the Dvorak keyboard layout is better. But the sheer momentum of the QWERTY standard is huge. Even if there were significant long-term savings in terms of productivity, most companies will never consider doing something that would require buying hundreds (or thousands) of new keyboards, reconfiguring the workstations and of course training their employees. And of course there's the very strong human resistance to change.
It happened with Beta vs. VHS. The Beta videotape standard is better in terms of both sound and video quality. It's a measurable, scientific fact. But because VHS was smaller, people liked it more (and other factors). So we've been stuck for decades with a de-facto video standard that's shitty quality.
Remember the lesson of the monkeys and the banana.
If you'd bothered to watch the video, you'd see it is the Audiopad project at MIT, and a lot more. No idea why your post got moderated as insightful.
People talk to their computers all the time, just as people often talk to other inanimate objects, or animals. It's anthromorphisizing, and reflects humanity's need to not be alone in our world.
Even though a computer that responds to voice input has nothing to do with AI, it does an effective job of creating that illusion.
And as has been pointed out, speech recoginition for the purposes of dictation is a massive time-saver. It's not something your average IT/geek does but doctor's and lawyers write TONS of papers, forms, etc.
Last, but most important is the advantage speech recoginition gives to the handicapped. For the blind, the 'palegics, severe arthritis sufferers, etc. the benefits are HUGE.
So you want something like a gesture interface.
I've assisted in the breast feeding of my daughter, just after she was born. While the suckle instinct is quite strong, she had to learn how to load the nipple in her mouth correctly, to stay on the nipple and most importantly to keep suckling. It was not trivial and it took many weeks until baby and mother were accomplished at the task.
You're grasp of certain meanings is off. Newborns don't know how to do anything. It's biological, even a severely impared newborn will be able to defecate, cry, etc. And you've mixed up intuition with instinct.
Basically, you're making shit up to sound smart without speaking from actual experience.
AOL appears to just be incompetent about it. RoadRunner is decidedly malicious.
Bringing this back onto topic, that's one of the worst side-effects of the entire spammer brigade. ISP's end up stepping on each other's toes trying to protect their own customers. Sometimes they learn to get along and co-operate. But because of the nature of the business world (i.e, Marketing departments, PBH's, etc), more often you get company A accusing Company B of interfering with their business.
So you not only have all the damage being done by the spamming itself, you have collateral damage to business relationships...
Attempting to destroy a critical part of the infrastrucutre of not just the United States, but most of the world is not "spam". It's a reprehensible act that in many other arenas could legitimately be labeled terrorism.
Just getting a bunch of pornographic ads in your personal mailbox is an annoyance. Relatively easy to combat with client-side filters. But that doesn't change how much bandwidth is used to deliver the e-mail. Not to mention the staggering amounts of disk space and processor time consumed by shuffling a billion or so pieces of spam mail every day across the world.
Someone, be it organized crime, organized spammers, terrorists, or just fucked-up idiots are doing their absolute level best to render e-mail a useless communication medium. Achieving that goal will do massive harm to the US economy, and in fact many other countries economy as well. How many billions of dollars have been spent soley to combat spam? How many hundreds of small businesses have completely out of business after being exploited by spammers?
I'm not advocating vigallante-style justice, that only works out in fiction. But in China, they execute their computer criminals. If you commit a crime that costs billions of dollars and can never in any way fully pay restitution, shouldn't you have to pay the ultimate price?
At the very least, consideration should be made for things like life imprisonment. Hell, Kevin got one of the harshest sentencing ever for a computer criminal and the absolute totality of every crime he commited doesn't add up to even a tiny fraction of how much damage organized spammers have done.
You're probably better off using RFC1149.
(And yes, UUNet/MCI/Worldscam reseller contracts require that port 25 on all dial-up IPs be blocked for all IPs except the carriers own SMTP servers)
There's the poster radio with real working controls just printed on the poster. It's over an inch thick though, not a real poster. Oh, and there's a poster phone as well.
Here's an inflatable radio. How is it different from other inflatable radios? Mainly that the controls are printed right on the inflatable surface.
And here's some more boring toys which use the T-Ink technology.
Actually, I'm sort of surprised ThinkGeek hasn't picked up on some of those items...
Now here's the bad part: I'm not required to show ANY form of identification when I walk in. I'm just asked for my name, then they have me verify my address. Information readily available in any phonebook, on the Internet, etc. So it's really QUITE easy to impersonate another registered voter and effectively take their vote away... If you were willing to travel to multiple precincts you could then vote multiple times.
There may, or may not have been an attempt to compare my signature with that on record. I'm disappointed that they don't require some form of photo ID.
SEA found themselves utterly and totally alienated by the BBS community, especially when they started throwing around shit like "We've trademarked the .ARC extension" and saying anyone writing ANY program that manipulated the .ARC format in ANY way owed them money. SEA insisted the file format was copyrighted.
Phil went on to develop a new, better compression file format (Our loyal friend this many years, ZIP). Not simply different compression but the file structure itself was more robust then .ARC, with deliberate room for future additions. And of course Phil went out of his way to make the format of ZIP archives widely and freely available and anyone could make ZIP-compatible programs without owing him anything.
Remember PKZIP 0.91? BBS sysops the world over rapidly switched to that beta from SEA's ARC format/programs and never looked back. ARC died a quick and silent death... SEA did not, unfortunately.
Here's the full story...
The computing community the world over lost a good friend when Phil passed away. :(
No, I am not making that up.
Oh, and it's a firewall system...
FreeBSD [censored] 4.3-RC2 FreeBSD 4.3-RC2 #6: Fri Apr 6 19:17:04 EDT 2001
I disagree with the "frequently" bit. Nothing wrong with uptimes of 1-3 months. But I'll agree that a routine of system reboots is a good idea, especially if it's part of an established maintenance scheduled...You are correct sir, at least regarding tuition and room-and-board being separate. I'm unclear on what you mean by room-and-board outweighing tuition... Do you mean state schools consider it more important? Or that it's a bigger part of the budget?
Physical maintenance of facilities, security, plumbing, electricity, and of course the Internet access. Space is at a high premium at UF campus (the land was actually donated to UF due to its unsuitable conditions for building... Lake Alice isn't artificial, despite various claims by assinine UF ex-presidents). All the UF eateries are indeed run by a third party company, with the exception of a few kiosks run by various student organizations. But using the term "profit" is misleading.... Again, this is a state-run facility we're talking about here. The money isn't going to a bunch of stockholders. But there is a well-established "Good 'Ol Boy" network in Florida's state school system, as any Florida native can tell you...My original point wasn't that UF was hurting for money. Just that UF's economic stability is not resting on the back of the department of housing by any stretch of the imagination. THe UF athletics department is FAR more critical to the future of UF.
(I grew up in Gainesville, FL. My mother was an executive secretary at the Dept. of Housing for 17+ years. I'm not just talking out of the side of my mouth here, folks...)
I'm confused, what school are you thinking of that refuses to disperse financial aid if you don't agree to live on campus?
Financial aid packages come in all colors, shapes and sizes. I know there's no universal requirement such as you're talking about with college financial aid, at least in the US.
Seriously, ICANN has always been trying. Sure they've totally sucked at implementing, well, anything... And they're slow as owl shit. But darn it, they mean well!
Which doesn't count for as much as it should in today's world...
Here's an article showing that ICARUS was actually originally deployed waaaay back in the Summer semester. This isn't brand-new.
Official DHNet webpage with policy on filesharing and such. Use that to get your facts straight.
Some Students react in the DHNet forums.
More student ractions
I'm sure UF would save a TON of money if on-campus housing was eliminated. It's an expensive service to provide and all the residence halls could be retrofitted to become classrooms, or torn down for room to build other facilities... But frankly, lazy college students need to not have to walk/bike/drive 2 miles to campus waaaaaaaaay out-weighs their indignation of not being able to fileshare porn.
And remember, UF is a State school system. Student tuition is only a fragment of its total income. You want to see UF suffer financial losses? Find a way to pull all their lucrative collegiate licensing and athletics program (UF athletics department carries quite a bit of financial clout and power on campus). Or look into getting all the grants and research dollars from private sectors turned off.
Rob,
Wasn't trying to imply the Sunshine law applied to the software UF developed (though it would be highly amusing if it did). My point was more along showing that UF has responsibilities to the state of Florida. I'm sure the Regents weren't too happy with complaints from the RIAA...
Pretty low. It's probably running on AIX.
Yeah, but that's not the case at UF. Sticking to the facts at hand, the University of Florida has no mandatory dorm residency policy.
I doubt they ever will either. It's not like UF has to work to get students to sign up for dorms...
Sure it's a racket. And you know what, demand for on-campus housing is so intense, UF will put three people in a room about 15' x 15' in size (if not smaller). Hell, some dorms didn't even have AC as recently as the early 90's (in an area where summer starts in May and temps hover around 90's for about three months or so... not to mention the 100% humidity).
Yet, demand for on-campus housing is huge. No, UF doesn't need to force students to live on campus, the number of baby freshmen leaving home for the first time is more than sufficient to fill the rather small number of available beds on-campus. UF had 42,000+ enrollment in the early 90's, yet the size of the physical campus hasn't changed in decades.
Actually, while UF owns what it purchases, it is very much considered property of the state. Note that does not mean owned by the taxpayers... there's not much tax money gets spent on that us taxslaves get to legitimately call ours.
In Florida the "Sunshine Law" dictates an open-access policy for Florida government and extensions thereof. Meetings regarding the planning of UF's policies and future are supposed to be open to the public. The complete payroll of every single UF employee (faculty, staff, OPS, A&P, etc) is a matter of public record. Guess what else that means? E-mail relating to UF business (aka State of Florida business) MUST be archived indefinitely for potential public access. NERDC had a tape library of old e-mails going back to at least the early 80's, last I saw.