You should have burned it
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Hacking Vodka
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· Score: 1
Sounds awful - but burning it would have at least been an honorable disposal method:-)
California's Wimpy Everclear
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Hacking Vodka
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There are some US states with silly prohibition laws which appear to ban 192-proof ethanol, so you can't get real Everclear here. The company sells a 151-proof clear grain alcohol, which is not really the same thing.
Cost and price aren't that closely related
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Hacking Vodka
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· Score: 1
When I was down in Mexico a few years ago, the proprietor of our local fish restaurant kept pouring tequila like it was water. I later went to a liquor store, and found that you could get the local sugar-based hooch for about $5/gallon (that's ~4 liters for you non-USians), and the lowest-end tequila wasn't much more expensive. If all you're looking for is cheap clear liquor, whether it's rum or vodka, it doesn't really matter if they distill it from fermented sugars and starches or use some more industrial method - most of the cost comes from taxes, marketing, and distribution, and the price comes from whatever willingness to buy that the marketing folks can drum up (so supermarket vodka's pretty cheap.)
Obviously things like scotch and good brandies that develop from soaking ethanol in different kinds of wood take a lot longer to develop, and there's enough evaporation loss that the cost of a long-aged product reflects a lot more raw material than end product.
Vodka snobbery vs. other snobberies
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Hacking Vodka
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· Score: 1
I've never understood vodka snobbery, because vodka _is_ very precisely tasteless colorless ethanol/water mixture, distilled from femented mash of whatever starch material was available (potatoes, wheat, rye, barley, etc.). The water it's diluted with obviously varies a bit, but you should be paying mineral-water-snob prices for that, not vodka-snob prices:-) The hooch does need to be distilled enough to get rid of the fractions of other alcohols or organics, but it's still just hooch, and the expensive stuff is just hooch in a pretty bottle with more expensive television commercials. Flavored vodkas are obviously a different case, and gin is basically a complex flavored vodka - different gins really are much different.
But most of those other rich-boy snobbery fads you're disparaging really _do_ have a basis for telling the fancy stuff from the cheaper stuff. Wines have a huge range of differences between them, and Scotch is more subtle but still extremely varied, and both of them take a long time to mature, unlike vodka and other moonshine which are quick industrial products. Cigars are annoying enough that I won't comment much, though second-hand smoke from cheap cigars is usually even nastier than from good cigars.
Boy Scout Handbook described that still
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Hacking Vodka
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· Score: 1
You can use whatever moisture sources you've got handy - green plants that might not be edible, cactus you can't get enough water out of, sea water, urine, etc.
For shipwreck situations, the Maria Telkes still is a floating equivalent, and of course you've got water water everywhere if you need to use it.
There's a lot you can see with 3-inch (0.33 dpi:-) resolution that simply doesn't show up at more typical 1-meter or 5-meter resolutions. Obviously this isn't continuous moving pictures - it's a static image from whenever the satellite was staring at a given location for long enough. But it should be more than enough to see whatever cars were parked in your driveway when the bird was there, and to see your house pretty well. It can show whatever people were visible - the resolution's too low to recognize them, and I don't know how long the exposure takes so moving people or moving cars might just be a faint blur. But people staying in one place should have recognizable colors, or if you're looking at pictures of grassland it should be easy to count the larger animals, etc.
Back when one of the free mapping programs had aerial photos (for a much smaller set of locations), I was able to see my car parked on my street (I think the resolution was between 0.25-1 meter per pixel), and I was able to see that a street had a divider down the middle (so I could tell that the driving directions didn't support a left turn there...)
Lasers from Mars pointed at the US Southwest, with Roswell smack-dab in the middle of it, and you even have to _ask_ if there's Space Alien involvement?
It's really tough to answer the original question, because the anonymous reader doesn't say what kind of artwork he/she needs to do.
Basic network or equipment drawings (flowcharts, boxes and arrows with labels on them, etc.) are something that's not hard to draw in Powerpoint (though it was easier to do in MacDraw 15 years ago, and pick your favorite Open Source Free Beer drawing package if you'd prefer.)
Visio is a much more powerful object-ish drawing system that I should get around to learning, and it comes with a wide range of standard object pictures (some in the basic packages, more in various confusingly-priced add-on packages.) Kivio is a similar though probably less powerful KDE imitation of Visio.
Basic kitschy clip art is available from a wide range of sources if you really like that sort of thing. A Real Artist would probably spend a lot of time telling you not to do it, or at least helping it not clutter up your presentations.
Photoshop is really good for manipulating photographs. If *that's* related to the kind of art you do, fine, but there's no indication that the kind of art you need is better matched to Photoshop than to Powerpoint or Visio.
In addition to Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, you're also supposed to go read "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward Tufte.
Go look at the first couple of years' issues of Wired. Then don't do that.
If Alice@alice.com wants to protect her email address from spammers, and Bob@bob.com wants to send mail to her, Alice's robot sends Bob mail saying "to get past Alice's robot, run this calculation and send me the results". Bob runs the calculation at bob.com, burning bob.com's CPU, and sends the result to alice's robot, which adds him to the whitelist on alice.com and passes the original message on to Alice. If Bob is real person, this doesn't create a lot of load on bob.com, but if Bob is a spammer trying to send 10 million messages per day, then it costs him a lot.
Hashes are mathematical functions that make it easy to turn a specific input value into an output value, but make it very hard to find an input value that will produce a specific output value. So hashcash and similar functions specify an output and make the sender apply lots of brute force to find an input value that produces that output - but it takes almost no time to run the calculation once to see if the input works.
As a user of a hashcash system that's protecting your email, you don't need to do any work - the hashcash system harasses the email senders and manages the whitelist of any who respond, and you can probably also use the results to feed your Bayesian system if you don't want to give it total control. People who wanted to send you mail and didn't like dealing with your robot may hassle you, but that's a social problem.
Besides, you presumably need to maintain a whitelist anyway, so friends and other frequent correspondents don't get caught by your spam filters. (That's even more true if you're on a mailing list that discusses spam or spam tools, because such discussions commonly include spammy words and phrases even if they don't originate at bad IP addresses.)
if you're an email user trying to SEND mail to a Hashcash user, that's of course much more annoying, because some stupid robot is telling you you've got to do something hassly to get your mail delivered. Depending on how well the user interactions are designed, it may be more or less annoying (if some robot tells me that I have to install and run some piece of software on my computer to be able to send you mail, forget that! But if all I have to do is download some web page and wait until the Java applet gives me a number to type, that's only mildly annoying.)
Non-hashcash systems like TMDA typically make you either type in a captcha text or sometimes just reply to the email, which demonstrates that the real email you sent wasn't from a forged address, and they usually do auto-whitelisting. And people complain about them too, but unlike hahscash, they usually understand it.
He didn't say that the bandwidth wasn't being used - he said that as a user, he didn't *care* that the bandwidth was being used, because bandwidth is basically free. He cares about the spam not reaching him, not about whether it reaches some machine that disposes of it, and that it's only network administrators who complain about the bandwidth usage - but for most people, web browsing uses far more bandwidth than email even including spam, so it's only niche email providers who have heavy bandwidth costs.
Somebody who replied below said that network administrators spend lots of time responding to abuse complaints - but that's not true for users like him - he doesn't complain about spam that he never sees, and the people who should be responding to the abuse complaints are the senders of spam, not the recipients.
The more relaxed approaches to hashcash make the user calculate a hash once and then whitelist them. The usual worry about whitelists is that spammers can forge From: addresses to get through whitelists (I'm surprised they're not already regularly forging senders like Dave Farber and Declan McCullough they way they're forging eBay and banks...) But this is a good combination with things like SPF or SenderID - if you've made foo@foo.com calculate a hashcash, then you can trust additional messages from that user name if you've got SPF validating the origin.
You could do your own version of that without the SPF - if foo@foo.com gives you a hashcash from IP address 1.2.3.4, you could whitelist any mail from foo@foo.com at that IP address (or probably even that/24) even without an SPF header, but SPF gives you additional support.
Were you downloading allegedly potentially infringing material under conditions that might or might not be fair use (e.g. something with a movie file type that had a name that might be interpreted as an MPAA-controlled movie? Or were you downloading definitely legal material like Linux distributions or non-MPAA movies or legal jam band downloads and they were trolling for people using BitTorrent?
I'm not asking you to incriminate yourself here - just trying to figure out if the MPAA is out phishing....
I'm shocked, shocked to hear allegations of pork-barrel spending by our fine Legislature!
But no, the problems aren't caused by the legislature's spending money on pork-barrel. They're caused by the legislature and executive branch being unwilling to make honest and realistic predictions of income, expenses, and risk, and being unwilling to come up with the political guts to either raise taxes enough to cover their current expenses plus past debts or else to cut spending, and reality's making it harder to just lie about the numbers, which was the traditional way to resolve those conflicts.
Before the state adopted Term Limits, legislators might expect that if they did a good job they'd be in office long enough to get hit with the consequences of their mistakes, and that if they did a politically unpopular job, they'd get thrown out of office, so they had some incentive to do the right thing. Now that they're only going to have their seats for two terms maximum, they've got an incentive to make bogus forecasts of future income (like predicting that the dot-com boom would go on forever), borrow heavily against it, enact popular spending programs, and leave their successors in office stuck with cleaning up the mess.
The Lad Vampire is a project of Artists Against 419 which has taken down ~150 scammer websites. The scammers tend to have lots of websites out there for their fake banks, and they're usually cheap and disposable and typically have monthly bandwidth limits. The lad vampire page shows images from 20 or so of the sites, and keeps refreshing them rapidly until they've burned the monthly quota (after all, a few hundred people with DSL lines or cable modems can use a lot of download bits.) When one scammer fake bank site dies, they replace it with a new target.
There are more efficient ways to implement this - a script that keeps doing "wget options >/dev/null" could suck down as much bandwidth without wasting CPU and memory on having your browser render it, but this one's really a no-brainer to use. One of my computers gets a bit clunky running this (the 2.4GHz running XP has more trouble than the 1.1GHz running Win2K.)
VOIP is clearly interstate commerce, even if you're using a phone company that has local presence in your state. Therefore, the US Constitution's Commerce Clause makes it Federal jurisdiction, just as shipping between states by boat is interstate commerce even if you're using a dock in some state that would like to tax you. It's not like the access line to your house, which the state's already taxing (even that could be argued to be interstate commerce, but there's a lot of historical precedent.)
VOIP technology is taking the cost of long-distance calling to zero; the main reason companies like Vonage can get away with charging as much as they do is that they're providing convenience to early adopters, and big long distance spenders use a lot of minutes of last-mile delivery (currently billed about 2 cents per minute in much of the US.)
Towns like getting money, and once they get a source of it they make sure to spend it irresponsibly, and California's current state budget problems mean that the state is keeping more money that was previously going to the cities, so they're looking around harder for any sources of catch and grouchier about anything they lose. But this source of money is toast.
Some banks get fancy and use SecureID or similar access tokens, but most US banks seem to only use login and password, and it's not uncommon for the password to be your ATM PIN.
Getting Banks to Advertise SPF on their email
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Fishing for Phishers
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· Score: 1
One critical thing to do about Phishing is to get Banks, E-Bay, e-gold, etc. to publish SPF codes for their email servers. That would permit any ISP or end user whose spam filters support SPF to discard most of the Phishing mail unseen, rather than depend on the user to notice that it's fake. Digitally signing email is also important, but at the moment SPF is more useful for most people, since Joe Gullible isn't going to validate signatures anyway.
There are a lot of hidden costs, plus your arithmetic's way off - the average American pays a lot more taxes than that. There are about 150 million US taxpayers, so that's about $100 per taxpayer. If you're interested in that kind of thing, that's still not a bad deal, but if only 20% of taxpayers are interested, then that's $500 per interested taxpayer, and if only 10% of taxpayers are interested, that's $1000 per interested taxpayer. Total Federal spending is about $20-25,000 per taxpayer (not sure if your numbers include Social Security or not, and that includes spending that's paid for by taxes and deficit spending that'll be paid for by taxes later on) - your wild-ass guess ignores the "tax the rich" effect and the "don't bother taxing the poor" effects (progressive tax rates and standard deductions.)
The other things that you could have done with the money are an obvious opportunity cost, but the much more serious cost is the rocket scientists themselves. Sure, they're doing lots of cool rocket science, and occasionally the things they build are useful in the civilian parts of the real world, but they could be using their skills to build things that the real world really needs, like more efficient cars, better passenger airplanes, solar power plants, better water treatment systems, better hydrogen refiners, the foobaralyzer system that would have revolutionized the economy except that the guy who would have invented it was building Space Shuttles instead.
And meanwhile, Paul Allen's probably spent less than $150 million between SETI and the recent space flights, and he's been cooler than NASA for about 1% of the budget.
Of course, Wotan stole the ring from Alberich the Niebelung, who'd made it with the Rheingold he'd stolen, and after Wotan used the ring to pay off the giants, various other people kept stealing it from each other.
It's pretty common in frivolous lawsuits that the judge will require the loser to pay the winner's legal costs. (It's more common outside the US, and in the US it's more common that a winning plaintiff will be awarded costs than a successful defendant, but the more frivolous the suit, the more likely the award.)
BitTorrent is as legal as HTTP or FTP or UUCP. It's not designed to support infringement by providing anonymity. Bram has worked on anonymous/pseudonymous/other privacy-protecting software systems in the past, and this was designed not to do that, and not to have a Napster-like central server that's used for all material, legitimate or otherwise. That means it's safe to use BitTorrent for applications like distributing Linux distributions, which otherwise cause a really annoying Slashdotting on anybody who wants to do it, and that it's possible to use it for non-commercial publication, because you can run your own tracker for your own material, rather than needing to fund a central server for everybody's material or use a badly-scaling distributed indexing service.
Somebody who distributes pirated material using BitTorrent may very well be an infringer, and somebody who knowing runs a torrent and tracker for pirated material may very well be a useful lawsuit target, but Bram's work is neither infringing nor inducing infringement any more than Apache is.
So not only do TV programs on PBS get supported by a grant from the Archer Daniels Midland Corporation, Supermarket to the World (tm), but if you want to watch a DVD it'll still be made out of Corn from Kansas? Sounds pretty Dole....
If you're running a UDP protocol, you've still got UDP headers and IP headers and optionally Ethernet headers, wrapped around whatever you're carrying, which already had a UDP header and an IP header, all to carry a payload that's only 10 bytes long, or 20-30 with some codecs. Yes, doing UDP instead of TCP takes care of some problems, but it's still a huge overhead for a protocol that absolutely needs to ship a large number of very small packets every second. By contrast, if you're using it to carry bulky applications like FTP or Email, the overhead's a drop in the bucket, because the data payloads are typically ~1400-1500 bytes. If you're carrying telnet traffic, which often has even smaller data packets than VOIP, you'd think it would be worse, but it's usually not - a 100wpm typist is typing about 15 characters/second (which might each be carried in a their own packet), compared to VOIP with about 50-100 packets/second and much tighter timing concerns.
The article said that they did't get their security from Asterisk itself - they added it on by using OpenVPN to build encrypted UDP tunnels and push the Asterisk IAX protocol through them. (No apparent detail on how to configure it.) Some of the Asterisk mailing lists talk about adding encryption to the transport protocols, but as near as I can tell from a few Google hits, that's really all a Wishlist for Somebody Else to implement rather than part of the core protocols.
That's really too bad - encrypting VOIP causes extemely annoying overhead problems, because the voice data packets are really small (they're not very big before compressing them, and then they're even smaller), so the minimum overhead for just doing the RTP+UDP+IP headers is several times the size of the voice traffic they carry, and IPSEC adds another two layers of headers, or SSL adds about three, and pretty soon that cute little elegant 8kbps compressed voice stream is looking like 40-80kbps and won't fit on your modem. SIP can use the SRTP protocol as a modification of RTP, so to the extent that anybody implements it, it's basically doing then encryption along with a layer you needed anyway, so it doesn't add much overhead. IAX doesn't appear to have this (which is especially frustrating because the IAX2 trunking protocol makes multiple simultaneous connections much more efficient, though I suppose if you've already done that, the extra overhead of IPSEC or OpenVPN may not bother you as much.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds awful - but burning it would have at least been an honorable disposal method :-)
There are some US states with silly prohibition laws which appear to ban 192-proof ethanol, so you can't get real Everclear here. The company sells a 151-proof clear grain alcohol, which is not really the same thing.
Obviously things like scotch and good brandies that develop from soaking ethanol in different kinds of wood take a lot longer to develop, and there's enough evaporation loss that the cost of a long-aged product reflects a lot more raw material than end product.
But most of those other rich-boy snobbery fads you're disparaging really _do_ have a basis for telling the fancy stuff from the cheaper stuff. Wines have a huge range of differences between them, and Scotch is more subtle but still extremely varied, and both of them take a long time to mature, unlike vodka and other moonshine which are quick industrial products. Cigars are annoying enough that I won't comment much, though second-hand smoke from cheap cigars is usually even nastier than from good cigars.
For shipwreck situations, the Maria Telkes still is a floating equivalent, and of course you've got water water everywhere if you need to use it.
Back when one of the free mapping programs had aerial photos (for a much smaller set of locations), I was able to see my car parked on my street (I think the resolution was between 0.25-1 meter per pixel), and I was able to see that a street had a divider down the middle (so I could tell that the driving directions didn't support a left turn there...)
Lasers from Mars pointed at the US Southwest, with Roswell smack-dab in the middle of it, and you even have to _ask_ if there's Space Alien involvement?
Hashes are mathematical functions that make it easy to turn a specific input value into an output value, but make it very hard to find an input value that will produce a specific output value. So hashcash and similar functions specify an output and make the sender apply lots of brute force to find an input value that produces that output - but it takes almost no time to run the calculation once to see if the input works.
Besides, you presumably need to maintain a whitelist anyway, so friends and other frequent correspondents don't get caught by your spam filters. (That's even more true if you're on a mailing list that discusses spam or spam tools, because such discussions commonly include spammy words and phrases even if they don't originate at bad IP addresses.)
if you're an email user trying to SEND mail to a Hashcash user, that's of course much more annoying, because some stupid robot is telling you you've got to do something hassly to get your mail delivered. Depending on how well the user interactions are designed, it may be more or less annoying (if some robot tells me that I have to install and run some piece of software on my computer to be able to send you mail, forget that! But if all I have to do is download some web page and wait until the Java applet gives me a number to type, that's only mildly annoying.)
Non-hashcash systems like TMDA typically make you either type in a captcha text or sometimes just reply to the email, which demonstrates that the real email you sent wasn't from a forged address, and they usually do auto-whitelisting. And people complain about them too, but unlike hahscash, they usually understand it.
Somebody who replied below said that network administrators spend lots of time responding to abuse complaints - but that's not true for users like him - he doesn't complain about spam that he never sees, and the people who should be responding to the abuse complaints are the senders of spam, not the recipients.
You could do your own version of that without the SPF - if foo@foo.com gives you a hashcash from IP address 1.2.3.4, you could whitelist any mail from foo@foo.com at that IP address (or probably even that /24) even without an SPF header, but SPF gives you additional support.
I'm not asking you to incriminate yourself here - just trying to figure out if the MPAA is out phishing....
But no, the problems aren't caused by the legislature's spending money on pork-barrel. They're caused by the legislature and executive branch being unwilling to make honest and realistic predictions of income, expenses, and risk, and being unwilling to come up with the political guts to either raise taxes enough to cover their current expenses plus past debts or else to cut spending, and reality's making it harder to just lie about the numbers, which was the traditional way to resolve those conflicts.
Before the state adopted Term Limits, legislators might expect that if they did a good job they'd be in office long enough to get hit with the consequences of their mistakes, and that if they did a politically unpopular job, they'd get thrown out of office, so they had some incentive to do the right thing. Now that they're only going to have their seats for two terms maximum, they've got an incentive to make bogus forecasts of future income (like predicting that the dot-com boom would go on forever), borrow heavily against it, enact popular spending programs, and leave their successors in office stuck with cleaning up the mess.
Turns out the 419ers have a fair amount of practice gang-banging on their own.
There are more efficient ways to implement this - a script that keeps doing "wget options > /dev/null" could suck down as much bandwidth without wasting CPU and memory on having your browser render it, but this one's really a no-brainer to use. One of my computers gets a bit clunky running this (the 2.4GHz running XP has more trouble than the 1.1GHz running Win2K.)
VOIP technology is taking the cost of long-distance calling to zero; the main reason companies like Vonage can get away with charging as much as they do is that they're providing convenience to early adopters, and big long distance spenders use a lot of minutes of last-mile delivery (currently billed about 2 cents per minute in much of the US.)
Towns like getting money, and once they get a source of it they make sure to spend it irresponsibly, and California's current state budget problems mean that the state is keeping more money that was previously going to the cities, so they're looking around harder for any sources of catch and grouchier about anything they lose. But this source of money is toast.
Some banks get fancy and use SecureID or similar access tokens, but most US banks seem to only use login and password, and it's not uncommon for the password to be your ATM PIN.
One critical thing to do about Phishing is to get Banks, E-Bay, e-gold, etc. to publish SPF codes for their email servers. That would permit any ISP or end user whose spam filters support SPF to discard most of the Phishing mail unseen, rather than depend on the user to notice that it's fake. Digitally signing email is also important, but at the moment SPF is more useful for most people, since Joe Gullible isn't going to validate signatures anyway.
The other things that you could have done with the money are an obvious opportunity cost, but the much more serious cost is the rocket scientists themselves. Sure, they're doing lots of cool rocket science, and occasionally the things they build are useful in the civilian parts of the real world, but they could be using their skills to build things that the real world really needs, like more efficient cars, better passenger airplanes, solar power plants, better water treatment systems, better hydrogen refiners, the foobaralyzer system that would have revolutionized the economy except that the guy who would have invented it was building Space Shuttles instead.
And meanwhile, Paul Allen's probably spent less than $150 million between SETI and the recent space flights, and he's been cooler than NASA for about 1% of the budget.
Of course, Wotan stole the ring from Alberich the Niebelung, who'd made it with the Rheingold he'd stolen, and after Wotan used the ring to pay off the giants, various other people kept stealing it from each other.
BitTorrent is as legal as HTTP or FTP or UUCP. It's not designed to support infringement by providing anonymity. Bram has worked on anonymous/pseudonymous/other privacy-protecting software systems in the past, and this was designed not to do that, and not to have a Napster-like central server that's used for all material, legitimate or otherwise. That means it's safe to use BitTorrent for applications like distributing Linux distributions, which otherwise cause a really annoying Slashdotting on anybody who wants to do it, and that it's possible to use it for non-commercial publication, because you can run your own tracker for your own material, rather than needing to fund a central server for everybody's material or use a badly-scaling distributed indexing service.
Somebody who distributes pirated material using BitTorrent may very well be an infringer, and somebody who knowing runs a torrent and tracker for pirated material may very well be a useful lawsuit target, but Bram's work is neither infringing nor inducing infringement any more than Apache is.
So not only do TV programs on PBS get supported by a grant from the Archer Daniels Midland Corporation, Supermarket to the World (tm), but if you want to watch a DVD it'll still be made out of Corn from Kansas? Sounds pretty Dole....
If you're running a UDP protocol, you've still got UDP headers and IP headers and optionally Ethernet headers, wrapped around whatever you're carrying, which already had a UDP header and an IP header, all to carry a payload that's only 10 bytes long, or 20-30 with some codecs. Yes, doing UDP instead of TCP takes care of some problems, but it's still a huge overhead for a protocol that absolutely needs to ship a large number of very small packets every second. By contrast, if you're using it to carry bulky applications like FTP or Email, the overhead's a drop in the bucket, because the data payloads are typically ~1400-1500 bytes. If you're carrying telnet traffic, which often has even smaller data packets than VOIP, you'd think it would be worse, but it's usually not - a 100wpm typist is typing about 15 characters/second (which might each be carried in a their own packet), compared to VOIP with about 50-100 packets/second and much tighter timing concerns.
That's really too bad - encrypting VOIP causes extemely annoying overhead problems, because the voice data packets are really small (they're not very big before compressing them, and then they're even smaller), so the minimum overhead for just doing the RTP+UDP+IP headers is several times the size of the voice traffic they carry, and IPSEC adds another two layers of headers, or SSL adds about three, and pretty soon that cute little elegant 8kbps compressed voice stream is looking like 40-80kbps and won't fit on your modem. SIP can use the SRTP protocol as a modification of RTP, so to the extent that anybody implements it, it's basically doing then encryption along with a layer you needed anyway, so it doesn't add much overhead. IAX doesn't appear to have this (which is especially frustrating because the IAX2 trunking protocol makes multiple simultaneous connections much more efficient, though I suppose if you've already done that, the extra overhead of IPSEC or OpenVPN may not bother you as much.)