Homeopathy is a bogus quack theory with two hundred years of trial and error experience. The lack of scientific basis means that their experience has been used less effectively than it could have been, and it means that much of what they write about what they're doing is too silly for words, but they _have_ learned a lot over the years about what works. They didn't catch on to the Germ Theory of Disease, which means it's not something I'd trust for curing real diseases when modern Western medicine can do something for you, but that doesn't mean it's useless.
Allergies are one area where homeopathy is useful, because you're not concerned with curing the causes, you're concerned with getting rid of the symptoms. ("Yes, I know there are trees blooming outside, I just want to stop sneezing.") Modern medicine has antihistamines that can help block the symptoms, and cause some side effects, and homeopathy has bogus quack formulations that can also help block the symptoms, and have different side effects, and depending on which one does a better job for _you_ with the allergens that are blowing around right now, and which one has more annoying side effects (e.g. drowsiness vs. stomach upset), sometimes homeopathy is the right choice. Or you can get allergy shots, which aren't really much different from well-controlled homeopathy. It's only been the last couple of years that I've found that modern medicine has products that are significantly better.
Flu is a special case. It's a virus, so if the vaccine didn't protect you this year, modern medicine mostly tells you to stay home in bed, drink hot fluids, and cover your mouth when you sneeze, and otherwise can't do much. Homeopathy is good for this - there are a couple of homeopathic preparations that can take you from feeling really lousy to merely feeling not very good, and that's a big win.
The nice thing about homeopathy is that its particularl bogus theory is that the more you dilute a medicine, the more subtle the hints it gives your body's immune system about how to attack the real problem, and therefore the stronger it is. (It's similar to the theory of making martinis that says that you should take the vermouth bottle and gesture meaningfully in the direction of the glass without actually pouring any in...) So unlike herbalist medicines, which you take in non-trivial quantities and can sometimes cause liver or kidney damage if you're not careful, most homeopathic medicines aren't going to hurt you, and the "really strong" stuff is no threat at all if it doesn't work.
Chiropractic is another quack theory that is obviously not useful for curing disease, but sometimes it can help with back and neck pain, and if you think of it as yet another form of massage, it's often somewhat helpful for many people. My first chiropractor was also an MD, which rather surprised both communities. The last one I went to wasn't able to recognize that my shoulder pains were early bursitis, so it was a while before I found a doctor who could do much about it, but at least he knew his limitations and could tell me that shoulder joints weren't something he knew about.
8086 is _not_ an 8-bit processor. It's basically a 16-bit processor, with segmented memory that let you access 20 bits of address space. While Linux didn't run on them, because it used the 80386's memory structures, there were Unix versions that did, including Xenix and Minix. After all, the machine's roughly as capable as a slow PDP-11. It multitasks just fine, if you're using an operating system that can do that, though it doesn't have the hardware assistance that later machines did.
Wow! That sounds like it's nearly either psychedelic or instant heart attack. Fortunately there's no non-diet cola in the house or I'd have to go make one of these...
A more recent NANOG post says it was a backend software problem that's now fixed.
An isolated issue occurred Monday May 24, 2004 (roughly during the period of 8:00 a.m. - 9:30 a.m. ET), where multiple Akamai customers experienced intermittent performance and availability degradation.
This degradation was the result of a bug within one of Akamais backend content control management tools, which allows the expiration of content on the Akamai network. The degradation was not a result of any outside interference with Akamai's network (such as Denial of Service or hacking).
Upon identification of the bug, Akamai quickly took corrective action which returned customers to normal service levels. Akamai is currently putting measures in place to return the content management tool to its normal working order and is adding safeguards such that the issue will not occur in the future. In the meantime, Akamai customers are able to serve their content through the Akamai Network normally.
No, Akamai as a whole really does have humongous amount of bandwidth, it's just distributed among 14000+ small machines. Their web site says they crank out "40 GPS", which is probably gigabits per second rather than gigabytes per second, so that's about 3 Mbps per machine, and that's probably aggregate peak delivered bandwidth, but most of their machines probably have a lot more capacity than that (10 Mbps would seem to be obvious for the smaller Ethernet-connected ones), because different machines will be busy at different times. It's not the kind of job that needs lots of CPU, but it does need lots of memory (at least by the standards of when the initial machines were deployed), because you don't want to wait 10ms for a disk drive to fetch your data when the reason the content provided chose you was to speed up their delivery and cut out latency (though you could get some performance wins by locking the first 10-20ms of each file in RAM and paging the rest.)
Akamai's competitors have different scaling tradeoffs. The last time I knew numbers was a couple of years ago, and it may have changed, but Akamai had a very large number of mostly small servers located on many carriers networks, AT&T had a couple hundred very large servers (mostly at peering points, which takes advantage of being a carrier, though they also bought some transit for content distribution), and Speedera was somewhere in between. AT&T's directions included lots of streaming media, and Akamai was doing fancy database things.
I've got two Lexmark printers. We bought one partly as a spare, but partly because it was on sale for the price of an ink cartridge, and even when they're not on sale, the lower-end models only cost about $20-40 more than the ink cartridges included with them.
Now that laser printers are getting cheap, it's time to go buy another one and stop bleeding money on ink cartridges.
I'm not real impressed with Lexmark's software. It tries to be friendly, so you have to install an application that negotiates with the printer about things like ink levels and paper outage. That's fine when it works, but it tends to lie about the ink level, and doesn't run on all my computers.
Not only did they not see my test message when I read it from/bin/mail, they didn't see it when I downloaded it to Eudora and read it on line, which is probably because I don't download images while reading mail. I sent a copy to my fastmail.fm account, and it was able to detect that, but the thing hung around in infinitely-slow-download mode so it could detect when I closed the reading window, which doesn't seem to be a reliable process (I X'd out of that so it'd stop hanging, and I haven't gotten the update message that says I've closed the window, so I assume I never will.)
This is the kind of application where GIF files are really just fine. Unless your prof is showing photographs, which really do need good color depth and can be handled separately, most class material is either text or line drawings, so a limited color palette (16-256 colors) is enough, and GIF-type lossless compression is more appropriate than JPEG-type lossy fuzziness (which is better for photographs.)
The big annoyance of image files of any type is that they make it hard to cut&paste text, but if you're working from raw bitmaps anyway, you don't lose out by using GIF instead of PDF to package the pictures. (PDFs that are created from text make it possible to retrieve the text, at least with newer PDF versions, but you don't have text to retrieve.) So also try running the thing through an OCR to extract anything you can, but don't expect much.
In some fields, typing really is difficult, because you need to draw pictures, so scanning is probably appropriate. But in many fields, most of the material is text, and they ought to be typing it anyway:-) So if they're the type that can be motivated this way, give them a choice of ugly scans (8-bit color, 300dpi) or else submitting their typed notes, and give them a friendly interface for uploading their typed notes (if you can support web, email, and also drag&drop, that increases the chances that they'll use it.)
There are lots of cheap sheet-feeder scanners out there if you only need to handle ~30-50 pages in a batch. Fax machines can do it, so it's obviously not inherently expensive, though most of the current cheap scanner market is oriented towards single-page flatbed scanners that do photographs well. That $299 HP scanner may be overkill, but it'll be solidly built and well-supported. You can also check out multi-function printers from brands like Brother that'll scan, fax, copy, and print, but be sure the resolution is good enough.
A couple years ago I bought a sheet-feeder scanner at Fry's for $29. In addition to regular paper, it could also handle business cards. Unfortunately it got stolen out of my office, and I couldn't find a cheap replacement; I'm now using a flatbed scanner.
He missed the normal energy drinks like Coffee, Tea, Chocolate, etc. The one crossover-marketed beverage I've seen is Starbucks Double Shot, which is a little $2 can containing espresso and cream. Unlike most of the genre, it actually tastes good!
Usually a byte was used to represent a character, but that hasn't always been true, and Unicode means we're getting used to multi-byte characters again.
Scotty's complaint alleged that by removing the spam complainer's name from complaints to his upstream providers, that prevented him from doing his CAN-SPAM duty and removing them from his lists. This is Rule 1, of course - if a spam complainer _wanted_ to give Scotty their address so he could resell it to other spammers, the complainer could do that directly. And if the complainer wanted to give that to Scotty's pet ISP Optigate, which stated in the lawsuit that they'd give it to Scotty, the complainer could have done that too. Spamcop's providing a service that people specifically want by removing the names.
The only anti-spam law that I've seen that was really useful was the never-enacted "S.1618" Senate bill. Spammers would but lies in the bottom of their messages about how S.1618 said they mail wasn't really spam, and S.1618 was a sufficiently unique string that your spam filters could safely trash any message that contained it (unless you were in a discussion about spam, of course, but those discussions always risk false positives.)
Scotty pretends to be operating legitimately, and puts OptIn's name and contact information on the "legitimate bulk email" he sends. He also appears to be using the name WholesaleBandwidth, though that could be a buddy of his if it's not him directly. I don't know if he's also sending spam through other channels, but OptInRealBig's still going.
I used to discard all my OptInRealBig spam (based on From moosq.com), but when they filed their lawsuit against spamcop I started saving it all. I usually get a few a day, down from a dozen or so. Most of what I get goes to a catchall alias that my ISP provides, which is something I'd *never* use to sign up for everything, so it's strict from harvesting or dictionary-spam.
OptIn no longer uses the OptiGate connections through AboveNet that they referenced in their lawsuit. They're now using somebody who's a customer of WVFiber.net. They've got nice operational folks, who said they were having their management talk to the customer to get them to dump OptIn, but it apparently hasn't happened yet. If you want to check out who they're using when you read this, traceroute 23/moosq.com (or other two-digit number between about 01 and 50.) You'll currently see some path to wvfiber.net, then to ibis7 (an old business name wvfiber used) then 69.6.63.2, then the moosq. If you've got spam from them and want to forward them to abuse@wvfiber.net, that could help get Scotty kicked off yet another ISP.
If you're an ISP and want to do your customers a favor, you could set your DNS to resolve any moosq.com domains to 127.0.0.2, and blackhole route 69.6.0.0/18 and 69.6.64.0/20 and as11938. (At one point, AboveNet, who were OptiGate's upstream, stopped accepting route advertisements for 69.6.0.0/18, as documented in the lawsuit.) If you're a Tier 1 ISP and want to violate the normal practices that keep the Internet running smoothly, you could even start advertising routes to that space and null-route it, but that would be a Bad Thing.
This is the FSF they're asking about. There are no secrets here - the Information wants to be Free, and that's not exactly the same as Open Source, and you want all their lawyers to have to sit in a room and have Richard Stallman explain to them EXACTLY, IN EXTREMELY PRECISE DETAIL what the differences are, AND the history of all the GNU licenses, and exactly why EACH WORD was chosen to say exactly what it says, and why, if they're asking for EVERYTHING that they're going to get a response that's ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING, and they're going to sit still until they've seen ALL of it. Remember that in the GNU Economy, code is something that people hack on, and they either hack on it for fun or to create beauty or to solve problems that people may need solved, especially if you can solve it as a general solution and not just a narrowly targeted subset problem (unless you can do cool efficiency stuff that way), and you don't make money by HOARDING CODE, you make money by solving problems for people and providing services - and these bozos aren't just asking about the code as black marks on paper, they're asking about the intellectual processes that lead to it (because that's how Derivative Works happen, among other things), and so they deserve to get what they asked for, and get it good and hard. As Chef said "You been served. So it's ON!"
Besides, the documentation is all documented in TeXiNfO [IMG of the head of a GNU](no GIFs due to patent problems) so they can read it themselves, and the history's in CVS or its predecessors, or in RMS's and Len's memory, and if they're not willing to RTFM, well, they've asked for the ENTIRE history, so that means that they'll need to have RMS show them EXACTLY what was done and when and how, because they asked for EVERYTHING, which means he first needs to teach them TECO, because that's pretty close to first chronologically and they really need it as a background for learning EMACS, and looking at the evolution of features in TECO and their later implementation in EMACS is a good way to get a deep understanding of the Hacker Ethic which is critical to the philosophy behind GNU. Eventually they'll work their way up to 1980 or so.
I'm not saying any of this to criicize RMS. He does rant sometimes, but they're essentially asking for an explanation of every software-related rant that he's ever been a part of, and every piece of intellectual content (note that I very specifically didn't say "intellectual property") that he or his followers have worked on.
And if you want to bring up National Security, well, a decade or so into this discussion ESR becomes part of the scene, and now you're dealing with philosophical differences of opinion about software licensing, which they need to listen to also, and also about the national security effects of having an armed citizenry as opposed to the armed tax collectors that socialists tend to forget they're depending on... You need to keep the lawyers in the room to hear that part too:-)
Jon Postel worked on "Internet Protocol". ICANN works on "Intellectual Property". It's not the same IP at all, even though names and addresses are both part of both sides. They're much much more interested in wrangling about trademark ownership than in making anything technical work well, and the market they're trying to serve is trademark owners, not people who want interesting memorable company names.
Managing registries of names and numbers isn't something that requires "international registration" or "governance" or any of that sort of thing, though at some point the problem would have probably scaled beyond Jon's ability to do it by hand and he'd have needed to get some extra funding for a couple of PCs to run a shell script and a web interface.
Creating and resolving disputes about trademarks and imagined business names, on the other hand, requires enough more people that it's a big enough operation to want to build a funding model that can support a bunch of policy wonks and trademark lawyers in the style to which they're accustomed, and once you're doing that you need to create artificial scarcities so you can charge money for things that don't really cost much so you can fund yourself. It also takes a lot of work to prevent internet folks from going out and building and deploying cool things that'll mess with your operation, which was a problem Jon didn't have.
The stuff that says "Fake Herbal V1@Gr4 R337 CH33P" or just lists it along with the synthetic opiates isn't pr0n - but a lot of spam spends its time talking about how you'll be able to have hot! horny! sex! all! weekend! because it'll give you 8 inches of hard throbbing hot spam! (Ouch!)
They're using more coffee per cup of water, and they're using bigger cups as well - part of the boost is that you're buying a 20-oz cup, not a 12-oz or 6-oz.
Starbucks uses espresso to make their espresso, and other levels of roasting for the beans for their drip coffees, and the article says that their drip coffee is ho-caf also. To some extent, it's because the coffee's stronger, but it's also because it's a 20-ounce cup (~570ml).
"Espresso" coffee beans are just beans that have been roasted a certain amount - more than French Roast. It tends to have less caffeine than regular coffee, but I'm not sure if that's from the roasting or the brewing technique. If you're making a quadruple-shot latte, it doesn't really matter that each of the four shots has less caf than a cuppa McJoe:-)
The reason I go to places like Peets or Starbucks for coffee isn't the caffeine content, it's the flavor. The beans are better tasting, and they use more ground beans per cup than that watery cuppa joe at McDonalds. And if there's more ground beans, there's more flavor and also more caffeine. I make my coffee that strong at home too - if the spoon falls over, the coffee's not strong enough.
That's especially critical for Decaf, which is what I usually drink - watery decaf is like "why bother?"....
It's nice to have a document that says you're allowed to speak freely - the Soviets had one too. The US Constitution isn't perfect, but it's certainly better than what the government is doing today. What really matters is whether you can enforce it when you've got something to say. To a large extent, the enforceability depends on a long history of court cases establishing that the First Amendment and other parts of the Bill of Rights either do or don't mean what they plainly say. There have been serious violations of this - the Supreme Court approving the conviction of Schenck for anti-draft leafleting in 1919 (the leafleting occurred in 1916 before the US entered the Great War) is one of the most blatant examples, and it took a bunch of cases about Jehovah's Witnesses who didn't want to worship the Flag and Commies who wanted to be Commies before the rights were really solidified. And Americans are prudes, so free speech doesn't appear to really apply to Sex (though it's better now than before the 1960s.) And while Roosevelt didn't directly nationalize radio broadcasting the way most of Europe did, the FCC's quasi-nationalization of the spectrum did strongly restrict the amount of free speech that was permitted on radio and television (which not only applies to sex, tobacco, and alcohol, but also enforced the "Fairness Doctrine" which kept most political commentary "Fair and Balanced" in the Fox News sense until the late 1980s. But at least our newspapers were relatively free before corporate consolidation turned them all into mush (though again, since Americans are prudes, the tabloids' Page 3 had to be slightly more polite than British tabloids while still treating women as objects.)
But even though the US hasn't been consistent about respecting the rights that it claims to guarantee to everybody (including citizens and noncitizens), the right is there, and if a bunch of hateful thugs like the Nazis or KKK or Revolutionary Communist Party want to have a parade down Main Street, they can do it, and the ACLU has properly helped make sure they government lets them do it even if it doesn't want to, because free speech is more important than political correctness. In most of Europe they can only do it if they're Communist hateful thugs, not Nazi hateful thugs. These days the police in small towns really hate it when thugs like that have parades, not only because it makes their town look bad, but because it can be really hard to protect the thugs from crowds from throwing rocks and bottles at them, and the thugs often encourage such problems because they not only get to feel macho, but they get to sue the town if they're injured and also get to sue the town if they aren't allowed to have their parade. (A friend of mine was on a small town government that had to put up with this annoyance from an outsider group. It's much less common in big cities, because the police forces are larger and tougher, and while nobody expects New York City's or Chicago's police to respect the rights of free speech, both sides are less likely to risk messing with them.)
Also, Revealing Official Secrets isn't a crime in the US unless you're an official who's been entrusted with them by the government, or unless you're a spy for an enemy power. So The New York Times was able to publish The Pentagon Papers (including a lot of secrets about the war in Vietnam having become a major war based on lies about the Gulf of Tonkin events), and The Progressive could publish their article on H-bomb secrets, but those were both edgy enough cases that they had to fight their way up to the Supreme Court to stay out of trouble. On the other hand, if the evidence against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been legitimate instead of largely fictitious, it would probably have been legal to convict them for revealing the H-bomb secrets to the Soviets. But if you've got a security clearance, you're not allowed to reveal any classified information you received, and if you violate that you're definitely convictable.
Europe has traditionally been much more flexible about what drugs you can medicate yourself with than the US has (as long as you're not expecting your National Health System to pay for them, at least.) The US FDA has been in the control of the big drug industries and modern-medicine doctors for decades, and it takes the paternalistic position that They know what's good for You, and You shouldn't be making decisions about your own body except for eating right and exercising. The War on Politically Incorrect Drugs exacerbates the problem. And sure, I appreciate the FDA's advice about what drugs appear to be safe and what drugs appear to be effective, but fundamentally this is MY body, and if I want to try something that's still experimental because I don't like the standard formularies (or they haven't approved anything for whatever disease I might have) it's my decision, even if the stuff is on the Generally Recognized As Total Quackery list.
Pharmacy laws and formularies vary by country, but when I was in France the other year and ran out of blood pressure medicine, I could walk into the drugstore and buy it over the counter, and I could also buy codeine over the counter. (Codeine wasn't OTC in Denmark or Lithuania, but it is in Canada and Australia.) I think they also had penicillins OTC as well - my cousin from Costa Rica was shocked that she couldn't get it OTC in the US when she moved here.
Friends from Germany and Hungary tell me that herbal medicine is much more common and accepted in Europe, and that doctors are as likely to recommend that as to push chemicals at them.
It's bad enough to get spam-blocked and flamed because of a joe job, but it's much worse if you lose your domain name from it. Registrars generally don't like to get involved in dispute resolution, and aren't usually very good at it, or if they're good they're not cheap, so that's overall a Bad Idea.
Which is too bad, of course - it'd be nice if part of the process of busting a spammer was to seize his domain name in the process (then *you* become the owner of GetFakeHerbalViagraFast.com, which is rather a dubious honor...). But there's still a way to do it, which is to ask for the spammer's domain name in court if you've got some other legal justification for hauling them in (e.g. in states that have anti-spam laws that let individuals bring anti-spam suits in small claims court.)
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Allergies are one area where homeopathy is useful, because you're not concerned with curing the causes, you're concerned with getting rid of the symptoms. ("Yes, I know there are trees blooming outside, I just want to stop sneezing.") Modern medicine has antihistamines that can help block the symptoms, and cause some side effects, and homeopathy has bogus quack formulations that can also help block the symptoms, and have different side effects, and depending on which one does a better job for _you_ with the allergens that are blowing around right now, and which one has more annoying side effects (e.g. drowsiness vs. stomach upset), sometimes homeopathy is the right choice. Or you can get allergy shots, which aren't really much different from well-controlled homeopathy. It's only been the last couple of years that I've found that modern medicine has products that are significantly better.
Flu is a special case. It's a virus, so if the vaccine didn't protect you this year, modern medicine mostly tells you to stay home in bed, drink hot fluids, and cover your mouth when you sneeze, and otherwise can't do much. Homeopathy is good for this - there are a couple of homeopathic preparations that can take you from feeling really lousy to merely feeling not very good, and that's a big win.
The nice thing about homeopathy is that its particularl bogus theory is that the more you dilute a medicine, the more subtle the hints it gives your body's immune system about how to attack the real problem, and therefore the stronger it is. (It's similar to the theory of making martinis that says that you should take the vermouth bottle and gesture meaningfully in the direction of the glass without actually pouring any in...) So unlike herbalist medicines, which you take in non-trivial quantities and can sometimes cause liver or kidney damage if you're not careful, most homeopathic medicines aren't going to hurt you, and the "really strong" stuff is no threat at all if it doesn't work.
Chiropractic is another quack theory that is obviously not useful for curing disease, but sometimes it can help with back and neck pain, and if you think of it as yet another form of massage, it's often somewhat helpful for many people. My first chiropractor was also an MD, which rather surprised both communities. The last one I went to wasn't able to recognize that my shoulder pains were early bursitis, so it was a while before I found a doctor who could do much about it, but at least he knew his limitations and could tell me that shoulder joints weren't something he knew about.
8086 is _not_ an 8-bit processor. It's basically a 16-bit processor, with segmented memory that let you access 20 bits of address space. While Linux didn't run on them, because it used the 80386's memory structures, there were Unix versions that did, including Xenix and Minix. After all, the machine's roughly as capable as a slow PDP-11. It multitasks just fine, if you're using an operating system that can do that, though it doesn't have the hardware assistance that later machines did.
Wow! That sounds like it's nearly either psychedelic or instant heart attack. Fortunately there's no non-diet cola in the house or I'd have to go make one of these...
An isolated issue occurred Monday May 24, 2004 (roughly during the period of 8:00 a.m. - 9:30 a.m. ET), where multiple Akamai customers experienced intermittent performance and availability degradation.
This degradation was the result of a bug within one of Akamais backend content control management tools, which allows the expiration of content on the Akamai network. The degradation was not a result of any outside interference with Akamai's network (such as Denial of Service or hacking).
Upon identification of the bug, Akamai quickly took corrective action which returned customers to normal service levels. Akamai is currently putting measures in place to return the content management tool to its normal working order and is adding safeguards such that the issue will not occur in the future. In the meantime, Akamai customers are able to serve their content through the Akamai Network normally.
Akamai's competitors have different scaling tradeoffs. The last time I knew numbers was a couple of years ago, and it may have changed, but Akamai had a very large number of mostly small servers located on many carriers networks, AT&T had a couple hundred very large servers (mostly at peering points, which takes advantage of being a carrier, though they also bought some transit for content distribution), and Speedera was somewhere in between. AT&T's directions included lots of streaming media, and Akamai was doing fancy database things.
Now that laser printers are getting cheap, it's time to go buy another one and stop bleeding money on ink cartridges.
I'm not real impressed with Lexmark's software. It tries to be friendly, so you have to install an application that negotiates with the printer about things like ink levels and paper outage. That's fine when it works, but it tends to lie about the ink level, and doesn't run on all my computers.
Not only did they not see my test message when I read it from /bin/mail, they didn't see it when I downloaded it to Eudora and read it on line, which is probably because I don't download images while reading mail. I sent a copy to my fastmail.fm account, and it was able to detect that, but the thing hung around in infinitely-slow-download mode so it could detect when I closed the reading window, which doesn't seem to be a reliable process (I X'd out of that so it'd stop hanging, and I haven't gotten the update message that says I've closed the window, so I assume I never will.)
The big annoyance of image files of any type is that they make it hard to cut&paste text, but if you're working from raw bitmaps anyway, you don't lose out by using GIF instead of PDF to package the pictures. (PDFs that are created from text make it possible to retrieve the text, at least with newer PDF versions, but you don't have text to retrieve.) So also try running the thing through an OCR to extract anything you can, but don't expect much.
In some fields, typing really is difficult, because you need to draw pictures, so scanning is probably appropriate. But in many fields, most of the material is text, and they ought to be typing it anyway :-) So if they're the type that can be motivated this way, give them a choice of ugly scans (8-bit color, 300dpi) or else submitting their typed notes, and give them a friendly interface for uploading their typed notes (if you can support web, email, and also drag&drop, that increases the chances that they'll use it.)
A couple years ago I bought a sheet-feeder scanner at Fry's for $29. In addition to regular paper, it could also handle business cards. Unfortunately it got stolen out of my office, and I couldn't find a cheap replacement; I'm now using a flatbed scanner.
He missed the normal energy drinks like Coffee, Tea, Chocolate, etc. The one crossover-marketed beverage I've seen is Starbucks Double Shot, which is a little $2 can containing espresso and cream. Unlike most of the genre, it actually tastes good!
Usually a byte was used to represent a character, but that hasn't always been true, and Unicode means we're getting used to multi-byte characters again.
The only anti-spam law that I've seen that was really useful was the never-enacted "S.1618" Senate bill. Spammers would but lies in the bottom of their messages about how S.1618 said they mail wasn't really spam, and S.1618 was a sufficiently unique string that your spam filters could safely trash any message that contained it (unless you were in a discussion about spam, of course, but those discussions always risk false positives.)
I used to discard all my OptInRealBig spam (based on From moosq.com), but when they filed their lawsuit against spamcop I started saving it all. I usually get a few a day, down from a dozen or so. Most of what I get goes to a catchall alias that my ISP provides, which is something I'd *never* use to sign up for everything, so it's strict from harvesting or dictionary-spam.
OptIn no longer uses the OptiGate connections through AboveNet that they referenced in their lawsuit. They're now using somebody who's a customer of WVFiber.net. They've got nice operational folks, who said they were having their management talk to the customer to get them to dump OptIn, but it apparently hasn't happened yet. If you want to check out who they're using when you read this, traceroute 23/moosq.com (or other two-digit number between about 01 and 50.) You'll currently see some path to wvfiber.net, then to ibis7 (an old business name wvfiber used) then 69.6.63.2, then the moosq. If you've got spam from them and want to forward them to abuse@wvfiber.net, that could help get Scotty kicked off yet another ISP.
If you're an ISP and want to do your customers a favor, you could set your DNS to resolve any moosq.com domains to 127.0.0.2, and blackhole route 69.6.0.0/18 and 69.6.64.0/20 and as11938. (At one point, AboveNet, who were OptiGate's upstream, stopped accepting route advertisements for 69.6.0.0/18, as documented in the lawsuit.) If you're a Tier 1 ISP and want to violate the normal practices that keep the Internet running smoothly, you could even start advertising routes to that space and null-route it, but that would be a Bad Thing.
Besides, the documentation is all documented in TeXiNfO [IMG of the head of a GNU](no GIFs due to patent problems) so they can read it themselves, and the history's in CVS or its predecessors, or in RMS's and Len's memory, and if they're not willing to RTFM, well, they've asked for the ENTIRE history, so that means that they'll need to have RMS show them EXACTLY what was done and when and how, because they asked for EVERYTHING, which means he first needs to teach them TECO, because that's pretty close to first chronologically and they really need it as a background for learning EMACS, and looking at the evolution of features in TECO and their later implementation in EMACS is a good way to get a deep understanding of the Hacker Ethic which is critical to the philosophy behind GNU. Eventually they'll work their way up to 1980 or so.
I'm not saying any of this to criicize RMS. He does rant sometimes, but they're essentially asking for an explanation of every software-related rant that he's ever been a part of, and every piece of intellectual content (note that I very specifically didn't say "intellectual property") that he or his followers have worked on.
And if you want to bring up National Security, well, a decade or so into this discussion ESR becomes part of the scene, and now you're dealing with philosophical differences of opinion about software licensing, which they need to listen to also, and also about the national security effects of having an armed citizenry as opposed to the armed tax collectors that socialists tend to forget they're depending on... You need to keep the lawyers in the room to hear that part too :-)
Managing registries of names and numbers isn't something that requires "international registration" or "governance" or any of that sort of thing, though at some point the problem would have probably scaled beyond Jon's ability to do it by hand and he'd have needed to get some extra funding for a couple of PCs to run a shell script and a web interface.
Creating and resolving disputes about trademarks and imagined business names, on the other hand, requires enough more people that it's a big enough operation to want to build a funding model that can support a bunch of policy wonks and trademark lawyers in the style to which they're accustomed, and once you're doing that you need to create artificial scarcities so you can charge money for things that don't really cost much so you can fund yourself. It also takes a lot of work to prevent internet folks from going out and building and deploying cool things that'll mess with your operation, which was a problem Jon didn't have.
The stuff that says "Fake Herbal V1@Gr4 R337 CH33P" or just lists it along with the synthetic opiates isn't pr0n - but a lot of spam spends its time talking about how you'll be able to have hot! horny! sex! all! weekend! because it'll give you 8 inches of hard throbbing hot spam! (Ouch!)
I get lots more mail about this than actual porn spam these days. Some of it's more explicit than others....
They're using more coffee per cup of water, and they're using bigger cups as well - part of the boost is that you're buying a 20-oz cup, not a 12-oz or 6-oz.
"Espresso" coffee beans are just beans that have been roasted a certain amount - more than French Roast. It tends to have less caffeine than regular coffee, but I'm not sure if that's from the roasting or the brewing technique. If you're making a quadruple-shot latte, it doesn't really matter that each of the four shots has less caf than a cuppa McJoe
That's especially critical for Decaf, which is what I usually drink - watery decaf is like "why bother?"....
Meanwhile, Google shows ~30000 hits for "googol" and ~49,200,000 for "google".
But even though the US hasn't been consistent about respecting the rights that it claims to guarantee to everybody (including citizens and noncitizens), the right is there, and if a bunch of hateful thugs like the Nazis or KKK or Revolutionary Communist Party want to have a parade down Main Street, they can do it, and the ACLU has properly helped make sure they government lets them do it even if it doesn't want to, because free speech is more important than political correctness. In most of Europe they can only do it if they're Communist hateful thugs, not Nazi hateful thugs. These days the police in small towns really hate it when thugs like that have parades, not only because it makes their town look bad, but because it can be really hard to protect the thugs from crowds from throwing rocks and bottles at them, and the thugs often encourage such problems because they not only get to feel macho, but they get to sue the town if they're injured and also get to sue the town if they aren't allowed to have their parade. (A friend of mine was on a small town government that had to put up with this annoyance from an outsider group. It's much less common in big cities, because the police forces are larger and tougher, and while nobody expects New York City's or Chicago's police to respect the rights of free speech, both sides are less likely to risk messing with them.)
Also, Revealing Official Secrets isn't a crime in the US unless you're an official who's been entrusted with them by the government, or unless you're a spy for an enemy power. So The New York Times was able to publish The Pentagon Papers (including a lot of secrets about the war in Vietnam having become a major war based on lies about the Gulf of Tonkin events), and The Progressive could publish their article on H-bomb secrets, but those were both edgy enough cases that they had to fight their way up to the Supreme Court to stay out of trouble. On the other hand, if the evidence against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been legitimate instead of largely fictitious, it would probably have been legal to convict them for revealing the H-bomb secrets to the Soviets. But if you've got a security clearance, you're not allowed to reveal any classified information you received, and if you violate that you're definitely convictable.
Pharmacy laws and formularies vary by country, but when I was in France the other year and ran out of blood pressure medicine, I could walk into the drugstore and buy it over the counter, and I could also buy codeine over the counter. (Codeine wasn't OTC in Denmark or Lithuania, but it is in Canada and Australia.) I think they also had penicillins OTC as well - my cousin from Costa Rica was shocked that she couldn't get it OTC in the US when she moved here.
Friends from Germany and Hungary tell me that herbal medicine is much more common and accepted in Europe, and that doctors are as likely to recommend that as to push chemicals at them.
Which is too bad, of course - it'd be nice if part of the process of busting a spammer was to seize his domain name in the process (then *you* become the owner of GetFakeHerbalViagraFast.com, which is rather a dubious honor...). But there's still a way to do it, which is to ask for the spammer's domain name in court if you've got some other legal justification for hauling them in (e.g. in states that have anti-spam laws that let individuals bring anti-spam suits in small claims court.)