Sure, it was silly, but it was a fun thing to do. And besides, we'd recently spent an evening sitting on our roof looking at Comet Kohoutek being totally lame, so it was nice to have *some* big event happen:-)
Yes, there are applications where you want a real, heavy-duty, full-scale Distributed File System. The last time I looked at AFS it had too much Transarc commerciality in the way of using it, but that was a Decade Ago. If the OpenAFS works, it's probably a great choice.
But for a lot of applications, you simply don't need that much, and you've got some way to contain the security risks, and NFS can be enough. It's easy enough to set up, and if all you're *really* trying to do is make sure that everybody sees their home directory as/home/~user, and sees the operating system in the usual places and the couple of important project directories as/projecta and/projectb, NFS with an automounter and a bunch of symlinks for your home directories is really just fine. They hide the fact that users ~aaron through ~azimuth are on boxa and ~beowulf through ~czucky are on boxbc etc. And yes, there are times you really want more than that, and letting your users go log onto the boxes where their disk drives really are to run their big Makes can be critical help. But for a lot of day-to-day applications, it really doesn't matter so much.
No, the reason to record them is so you can time-shift, which lets you listen to the ones that are only on while you're at work or other inconvenient times. If anything, that lets you listen to the commercials for the shows you actually want to listen to.
If you choose to skip over commercials, that's your business (not that it affects them directly very often because there's no measurement methodology), but on Listener-sponsored Pacifica stations there aren't any commercials except the ~quarterly pledge-break begathon week, and on NPR there's pledge week and "Enhanced Underwriting" pretend-non-commercials brought to you by a grant from Archer Daniels Midland, Supermarket To the World and of course Your Tax Dollars At Work.
Isn't it fun when they go out of their way to toss a nice slow pitch right over the plate? (Hmmm. American Baseball may not be totally familiar to Steve at Spamhaus, since he lives in the UK, but actually that plays into the real point...)
Spamhaus isn't a US entity, and Steve Linford isn't a US resident, and it's highly likely that the court has no jurisdiction over his actions, so it may be much cleaner for him to say "no thanks" and not be part of the suit. That means he may not get to play the Discovery game (or at least he'd need a real lawyer rather than me advising him.) But any of the US-based defendants certainly can go file discovery motions as part of their response, even if the result of them is to demonstrate that they're not part of the suit or that they didn't do the actions they're accused of or that those actions aren't a tort.
You can have *so* much fun with discovery in this - not only should they be able to get the names and real addresses and phone numbers of all the spammers that the plaintiff alleges are part of his organization, but also
all the IP addresses and domain names the spammers own or use and
copies of all the ISP contracts the plaintiff alleges to have, or that the plaintiff's spammer buddies allege to have, and
any other ISP contracts that they have which the plaintiff is *not* alleging were blocked, because that obviously indicates something relevant, and
exactly what hardware and software and which ISP connections were used to deliver the spam that was allegedly blocked, and what recordkeeping capabilities it has, and
any records they have about the dates and times and recipients that they attempted to deliver messages to which were blocked, and
how they determined that the recipients use SBL as instead of or in addition to other blocking lists, and
why they assert that SBL was actually used to block their spam as opposed to some other list, and
the contents of those messages, and
who if anyone had hired them to deliver the messages, and all their names and addresses,
or if the spammers were trying to sell the products themselves, exactly what those products were (Ajax Model 28 Penis Expander), or if they were medical products, whether they met all legal requirements for selling them, e.g. Viagra,
or if the spammers were promoting web pages with their spam, exactly which web pages and who paid them to promote them, and
where they obtained the addresses of the recipients they were spamming, and
whether the information was delivered directly by the spammers, or by using open relays and/or open proxies, and their IP addresses, and whom they obtained permission from to use each of those, and how they located them, and
precise cost accounting data used to calculate the alleged damages, especially because the spammer alleges, probably correctly, that they're high enough to trigger some jurisdictional or procedural effects under Florida law,
and any other information you can think of that the spammers would probably rather NOT have exposed to public view. And be sure to get all of them in electronic form, and delivered to all the defendants, because even if Steve Linford and Spamhaus aren't under US or Florida jurisdiction, they're certainly parties to the case, and it'd be a real shame if there were no particular way to impose confidentiality rules on the non-US defendants for use of that data.
Yeah, it seems like a lot of data. But the plaintiff's suit doesn't just claim something fuzzy like libel (where he might have had a chance suing in the UK, though probably less likely here) or restraint of trade, it claims that the defendants engaged in activities that caused damages to the plaintiff by interfering with the plaintiff's legitimate activities, and that means that the actual activities that the plaintiff claims to have engaged in and the defendant's actions which allegedly i
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not sure whether Steve's "response" is just a public statement or is a document that's been submitted to the court, and I'm not going to speculate on whether he should or should not use any particular form of response since he's asserting that he's not under their jurisdiction. Having said that, howerver:
Steve's response is very clear on the point that the SBL doesn't block the transmission of any messages, but he's fuzzy on whether it blocks the reception - in some places he says it does, while in other places he talks about the recipient blocking them. I thought that the SBL is implemented in a way that the user's email software does the blocking, after checking the site's status with the SBL. It's a potentially important difference - not so much for Steve or Spamhaus (because of the jurisdictional issues) but for the US plaintiffs. It shouldn't be - the recipient has every right to hire a blocking service to block spam for them, even if the one they've chosen to use charges no money - but it could make a difference to a jury or to a really clueless judge.
The real question is what it will do for your education, and whether they can take advantage of all students having laptops vs. some but not all students having individual or shared computers. Do they know how to use them for teaching? Do the teachers know more than the kids? (or at least, enough teachers for it to be useful?) Cliff Stoll has lots of things to say about this.
And even aside from the teaching, do the classrooms have enough *electricity* for them? You can't depend on a laptop having more than an hour's battery life, in spite of what the ads said when they were brand new (which was usually overoptimistic then, and battery life decreases rapidly as machines get to be a couple of years old, so the _seniors_ are definitely going to need to plug in their machines if they haven't replaced the ones they bought freshman year.) On the other hand, if schools can use them to replace paper copies of textbooks, so the kids who are getting new laptop weight to carry around in their backpacks can leave their books back in their rooms, that may be a win. Works fine for classical literature (anything out of copyright, i.e. pre-Disney), but not so hot for most of the textbook market.
They're not going to save any natural resources by having you use computers instead of paper. Nor will they save money. Sure, the paper you use in a year will probably outweigh the computer, but you'll spend more than $100/year on computers, while you won't conceivably use that much paper writing by hand:-) And computers encourage you to print stuff a lot more than you'd expect, unless they make *that* inconvenient.
The real environmental costs have to include the disposal costs of the equipment. Laptop LCD screens are much smaller and lighter than CRTs, and other people have talked about the leaded glass and phosphor problems with CRTs. LCDs are semiconductor-based, which means there's a certain amount of toxic waste involved in the production; I don't know if it's more or less than monitors. Fortunately, Nickel Cadmium batteries are a thing of the past, but how toxic are the current battery technologies?
And how long do these things last, and how upgradable are they? Laptops are usually slower than desktops made at the same time, with smaller disks and RAM for the money. How many years will they last before being obsolete? My experience carrying a laptop around as a business traveller and train commuter was that they're not super-durable, especially the ones that are light enough that you're willing to carry them around all that time. How will they survive students?
Scheduled Music Programs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Sure, most top 40 stations play the same music over and over, so recorded is no better than live, but there *are* still other music formats in spite of Clear Channel's attempt at World Domination.
The Greatful Dead Hour - David Gans's weekly program. Here in the San Francisco area, we actually get his 2-hour KPFA live version. It's on Wednesday nights, at the same time as our weekly going-out-to-dinner group.
Many Classical Stations play different types of music at different times.
Many Jazz Stations also play different types of music - and sometimes they're the same stations that also do classical.
Ethnic Programming on Mixed-content stations - Here in California there's a lot of Spanish-only radio, but there are also stations here and in New Jersey that play different ethnic music or news programs at different times of day, so you may want to record the Mandarin version that plays while you're at work, or the Russian folk music, or whatever.
Listener-Sponsored Radio - No, not NPR, Brought to you by a Grant from ExxonMobil and Archer Daniels Midland - But real Pacifica Lefty Radio, which plays lots of different types of music, such as Latin and America's Back 40 (old-timey/folk/country/Bluegrass) and different types of hip-hop and random weird stuff, as well as doing talk programs.
Prairie Home Companion on NPR. Brought to you from Lake Wobegone by Powdermilk Biscuits and the FearMonger's Shoppe, and also whichever commercial sponsor they've got these days.
Cheap FM Receivers for PCs
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TiVo For Radio?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
A few years ago I bought a USB-controlled radio for my PC for $29. (It was a D-link product, now apparently discontinued.) There have also been several FM Radio cards for PCs, and most of the current TV Tuner cards for PCs also do FM radio. Seems pretty silly to buy a $150 frob for radio when you can get TV as well for $75-100, or radio for $29.
Now, the software that came with the D-Link was egregiously lame, and the $5 audio card in my PC made pretty lame audio recordings, so I gaveup on it:-) But that was DLink's lameness back then; presumably other products are smarter by now. I've heard that there's decent Linux software for the things, so maybe I'll try it again. The two biggest problems with the radio software were that
It could only schedule one recording event, and only only could handle one day's clock, not a week's, so I could set it up in the morning before heading out to catch the train for work if I wanted to, but I couldn't set it up the night before or the weekend before.
It only recorded sounds in.WAV format, after accumulating them in RAM (in.WAV format), so instead of saving the program directly as an MP3, it needed twice the capacity of a.WAV, which came to something like 600MB/hour. (They did include some free MP3 software, and to cut them some slack, this was back when there were patent questions about the MP3 formats that they could dodge by doing this.) Back then I didn't have that much spare disk space, having split my 6GB drive between Linux and Windows. Now it's different, so even if the software's lame, I've got spare disk space.
It was really designed to use the computer as a friendly user interface to control the radio and use the PC's speakers, which it could do all on the analog side of a sound card, rather than having to digitize it.
"Its this wild colour scheme that freaks me, you know. When you press one of these black buttons that are labeled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you've done it!" - Zaphod.
As various people have pointed out, the light bulb is a fluorescent, not a UV bulb, and the network stuff isn't there to control the light - the network stuff is there to provide 802.11 to the big room, and the light fixture was the convenient place to mount it.
Motel of the Mysteries ISBN: 0395284252 Author: Macaulay, David Publisher: Walter Lorraine Books
It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from an accident with a computer and a junk-mail system back in 1985. Amateur archeologist Howard Carson, crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site, felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber.
And he goes on to describe the items in the Toot'n'C'mon Motel and speculate about what they must have been used for by the ancient inhabitants...
Several states have anti-spam laws designed to make this easy. They're tort laws (person-sues-spammer-for-damages) rather than state-vs-spammer laws, and the damages are small (mostly $200-500) so you can sue in small claims court with minimal legal costs if you can catch the spammer (and if the spammer's in your state.)
That doesn't let you catch every spammer that spams you, but it's enough that it can theoretically be very annoying to small spammers, who have to show up personally, and are more likely to be receptive to the message that "everybody hates you, and we'll make you lose money and spend lots of time being told that everybody hates you." (And if not, then hey, it's an $200 check for an evening's trip to Small Claims - busting spammers can be profitable if you 're in a state with that kind of law.) Big spammers are likely to annoy more people, and usually incorporate to protect their owners, so they probably have to send a lawyer to the courts rather than the owner, but that's fine too. On the other hand, they're much more likely to locate to states that don't have such laws, so they're only subject to Federal laws.
I found the assertion that Scientologists and Rebirthers were part of the same cult to be rather confusing; either he's just a troll making stuff up or he's referring to things that *I* certainly didn't see on any of your web sites, nor did Google...
ic.org lists about 500 intentional communities, ranging from hippie communes to apartment buildings trying not to be boring to Quaker villages I know old people from to some things that probably are run by wackos (or would be if they could get organized).
I live in a condo, which is more of an unintentional community:-) We've got 32 units of medium and large apartments in Silicon Valley, mostly occupied by owners and some by tenants, with a shared central yard and pool, and monthly dues that keep going to things like paint and termite repair and fixing the hot water and such. Works OK.
Intentional Communities are a broad movement, ranging from student-oriented housing coops to hippie communes to old Quaker villages to apartment buildings that don't want to be boring. (OK, some of them probably _are_ cult-like - the ic.org web page lists about 500 of the things.) I know people who've lived in a number of these things - some have stuck together for 50 years, while others have fallen apart in a year. Some people like being closely involved with their neighbors, while others don't; suit yourself.
For a no-skill job, $52K is ok, and an entry-level job in today's market, it's ok, but entry-level programming jobs were typically $40K a decade ago here in Silicon Valley, before the boom. For an experienced programmer or sysadmin, it's still lame, though there's been enough automation that things like basic web design without database support are almost as easy as typing, as opposed to being experienced-programmer work. $52K certainly isn't enough to rent a house without two incomes here, though rents here are still totally silly, and by now you can rent your own 2-BR apartment on that kind of income. For a part-time job, it's a much more interesting amount.
But the ex-spammer said he was having to put significant work into the job - not so much the technical side, once he had that mostly stable, but the business side of finding vendors that want to use spammers to sell their products and keeping up to date on defense methods against spam-prevention technology. Perhaps it's the kind of thing that now that he's spent six months getting good at it, it either can start taking much less time or else start bringing in much more money.
Also, this is a job that basically sucks. Jobs that suck had better pay a lot more than jobs that don't suck.
And the petawatt will help in one of the lab's primary jobs -- "stockpile stewardship" of the nation's nuclear weapon arsenal, Loucks said. The vast majority of the lab's $49 million annual operating budget comes from the Energy Department, which pays for study of the energy phenomena that occur in nuclear explosions now that the nation no longer does nuclear testing. (That's LLNL, not UR labs talking.)
It's fun to think about fusion reactors being practical sources of electric power, and it's fun to spend millions of dollars on Really Cool Toys and do fundamental physics research that nobody could do before and build really big computers for mathematical simulations of the physics. But it's really about testing new nuclear weapons designs, and modelling the aging of existing nuclear weapons to know when they need replacing. More detailed discussion on Stockpile Stewardship. After all, that's one of the things that you can do with very precise knowldge of hydrogen fusion behavior.
Furthermore, the Bush Administration recently got the Senate Armed Services Committee to approve $25M for resuming nuclear weapons testing and about $20M for designing new small nuclear bombs (less than 5KT) and big bunker-buster bombs (up to 1MT.) The small ones are presumably fission-based, while the bigger ones are probably fusion. SJMerc article.TheAge Article. (So just in case you thought the recent unpleasantness in the Middle East was designed to stop Weapons of Mass Destruction, well, no...)
"He said he made as much as $1,000 a week" which implies he's making less than $52K/year on it, and some weeks he wasn't making that much. Pretty lame for a full-time job. Presumably that's net after paying for his software? Otherwise he didn't make anything at all, because he talks about having spent $20K on spamware and buying multiple computers and various other costs.
But that means he only sold Viagra to 20 suckers a week, or mortgage-refinancing contacts to 200 suckers a week (not mortgages, just people who actually contacted a broker.) That's not a lot of suckers, though I've got no idea what fraction of the Viagra-spamming business he contributed.
It doesn't take criminal intent - a civil lawsuit is usually good enough for that sort of thing, and unlike criminal cases, you're relatively in control of them. The real issue becomes how much of that you can do in small claims court, which in most states is cheap and minimizes paperwork compared to a regular court.
It shouldn't be too hard to get his address - doing a lawsuit in small claims is probably enough to get SWBell to cough up the address of that DSL line. And you should be able to come up with an excuse to sue him. You might be able to get the SWBell security folks after him, but more likely they'd just cancel the account and it'd be protected by their privacy policies.
Kids these days, thinking 20 years is a long time... I've been online longer than that. Try "over 30 years old".:-)
My 1983 computer was a VAX 11/780. UC Berkeley got their first one in the spring of 1979, IIRC, and went to work porting the Unix to it using 32V (it was a 32-bit machine with virtual memory after all) and V7 and some PDP-11 BSD stuff. I didn't have a Unix account when I was there, just IBM mainframes and the (?5150?) micro that ran APL. My undergrad work had been mostly on IBM mainframes like 360's.
I used a PDP-11/20 in 1972, and an 11/45 in 73-74. It was at the University of Delaware, and my high school time-shared on it using a Model 33 Teletype, the ASR kind with the paper-tape punch, and the modem that could do 110 baud if you set the switch to "fast". (Otherwise, it was 75 baud, which is roughly 75 Words Per Minute, but only a couple of the kids could type that fast.) They were running RSTS-11 operating system on it, which let us program in BASIC. I also used some kind of HP machine running BASIC, I think a Model 1000 or 2000. The university lab had their previous timesharing machine sitting in the corner, a PDP-8 that had a "DECSYSTEM 10" label covering the PDP-8 label.)
As far as reading old media from that era goes, forget reading DECTAPE (think of using a cassette tape as a floppy...) The best way to read paper-tape is probably an optical scanner - I tried to buy an paper-tape reader/punch in ~1985 or so and DEC referred me to their "Traditional Products Group", who didn't have one lying in the back anywhere. My VAX had 9-track tape, which could run at 6250 DPI or 1600 DPI. My department also owned an older 800/1600 DPI drive, which a few years later was the last on e in our building. DIsks were RM05 removable packs - 14" multiplatter things the size of a tupperware cake container. They held 250MB, and cost about $1000 for the media, and about $35K for the drive. And all of this stuff ran on 3-phase power:-) The console / bootstrap controller for the VAX was an LSI-11 microprocessor implementation of the PDP-11, which had an 8-inch floppy. A few years later somebody sent us some data in RT-11 (RSX-11?) format on one of those, and we were able to read it. People would also send us data in various weird formats (VMS backup format, or raw binary on tapes), and sometimes it would be a struggle to read it; depends a lot on the quality of documentation, which was often poor. Somewhere in my attic I've got a Sun shoebox tape drive which may be able to read some Sun cartridge tapes, but I wouldn't bet on it.
The only medium that's got any chance of surviving a long time is "copy your old data onto new media every couple of years and keep any format documentation you can find" and take advantage of Moore's Law and folks who write emulators. That $1000 that bought a 250GB removable cartridge in 1983 will get you a terabyte of IDE today, and it doesn't need the $35K drive. Or you can spend ~$35 for a CD-R drive and get 700-MB CD-R media for about 25 cents. (That's a factor of 12000, or about 2**13.5, so that's about 18 months per doubling for the media, and a bit slower for the drives...) Seek time hasn't changed as much - I think the RM-05s were 85ms, which is probably similar to CDs, while the IDE are about 8ms. I don't remember if a single RM05 could fill a 2MB/s MASSBUS or not - if so, that's about a 10x CD:-)
Assembly language? Not! Well, the V6 Unix Manual had PDP-11 assembler hook documentation for the system calls, and maybe V7 did as well, but nothing after that. Assembler was used for a small fraction of the kernel that needed to talk to hardware in ways that C couldn't do, such as some of the interrupt handlers and memory munging, but even the V6 kernel was almost all C. The nice thing about C was that it was a high-level language that still gave you really good control over anything that looked at least vaguely like a PDP-11, and tried very hard not to surprise you with whatever it did.
There are two main applications over the years where I've seen Unix progammers resort to assembler other than for direct hardware control. One of them is numerical programming (and some graphics and crypto bignums) that benefits from machine operations not available from C, like 16x16->32 multiplies (where C would either limit the result to 16 bits, risking overflows, or expand the operands to 32 bits before multiplying, which is slow.) The other is for detailed bit-bashing operations, like crypto and some graphics, where some operations like bit-rotating aren't directly supported in C. There's almost nothing else.
I've only done one project since I started using Unix in ~1978 where assembler was useful, and it wasn't actually on Unix, and I didn't actually write code in it, just used it to diagnose code... The Bell Labs BLIT graphics terminals had a light-weight operating system that ran on 68000s and later WE32010s, and if you've got a nice 1Kx1K screen and a CPU that's got 3/4 MIPS and almost nothing to do, you might as well have it calculate Mandelbrot sets in the background. Of course, there's no floating-point coprocessor on those terminals, and doing it in floating-point emulation was dog-slow, but a little bit of numerical analysis makes it possible to do in fixed-point fractions. If you talk to it nicely, you can make it all happen in the registers, rather than using memory, and get the 16x16->32 multiplies for free without any type conversion happening, but the only way to be sure of getting it right is to have the compiler output assembler to make sure your code did what you wanted it to. (Remember registers? They were the things that 8086s didn't have enough of, and therefore Pentiums didn't have enough of, which made everything work really fast on real machines. Even PDP-11s had twice as many registers as 8086s.)
I clicked a bunch of links. They were pretty much *all* useless:-) The things he's trying to imitate are a bit less vague about what they do, but not by much. Normally when I'm posting a flame about this, I include a brief description of what the thing actually *does*, but it's pretty hard to tell even from poking around their site for a few minutes looking at links that fail to load screenshots very well.
Necrotica's comment is the first thing I've seen that says what Karamba actually DOES, and even it's only kind of suggesting.
"It's like FOO and BAR" doesn't help - they're also apparently new projects, and neither of them clearly say what they do on the first page of their websites.
"Summarize information" is a vague hint - what kind of information about what? Necrotoca's article provides some example, which helps.
is the canonical useless Slashdot description of something - I want to know what the something DOES. If it's supposed to be an eyecandy-manager for something else, fine.
The 1GB Microdrive is simply too small; an iPod drive is much closer to adequate. The reason I'd want to use one of these things instead of hauling around my clunky laptop is so I can carry my entire Microsoft Outlook work email system (needs about 2GB) plus my personal email (needs about 100MB:-) plus the files I've been working on in the last year (another ~1GB, much smaller if I'm constantly sorting down to the files I've used in the last week or month, which is way too time-consuming for a labor-saving device.) That way I could get by with a thin client at work (~$200 plus monitor) and my own PC at home.
A 400MHz XScale is just fine for this kind of thing. But while Bluetooth is good for some applications, it isn't fast enough for many others; it's like an 0.5X CD-ROM speed, though it's certainly good enough to drive the headphone audio. 802.11 could be fine (though it tends to be a power hog, suggesting the need for an on-off switch...), though it's tempting to recommend a simple ethernet jack on the side instead, which has the advantage of working in places where people are correctly paranoid about which side of the firewall the wireless network belongs on. I tend to favor having an "ok to connect new object" button anyway, for security reasons...
UPnP is one of them evil Microsoft things:-) Is it the right one? What about security - how do you implement that correctly for this kind of device?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, it was silly, but it was a fun thing to do. And besides, we'd recently spent an evening sitting on our roof looking at Comet Kohoutek being totally lame, so it was nice to have *some* big event happen :-)
But for a lot of applications, you simply don't need that much, and you've got some way to contain the security risks, and NFS can be enough. It's easy enough to set up, and if all you're *really* trying to do is make sure that everybody sees their home directory as /home/~user, and sees the operating system in the usual places and the couple of important project directories as /projecta and /projectb, NFS with an automounter and a bunch of symlinks for your home directories is really just fine. They hide the fact that users ~aaron through ~azimuth are on boxa and ~beowulf through ~czucky are on boxbc etc. And yes, there are times you really want more than that, and letting your users go log onto the boxes where their disk drives really are to run their big Makes can be critical help. But for a lot of day-to-day applications, it really doesn't matter so much.
If you choose to skip over commercials, that's your business (not that it affects them directly very often because there's no measurement methodology), but on Listener-sponsored Pacifica stations there aren't any commercials except the ~quarterly pledge-break begathon week, and on NPR there's pledge week and "Enhanced Underwriting" pretend-non-commercials brought to you by a grant from Archer Daniels Midland, Supermarket To the World and of course Your Tax Dollars At Work.
Cool - I'll have to try it out. Thanks!
Spamhaus isn't a US entity, and Steve Linford isn't a US resident, and it's highly likely that the court has no jurisdiction over his actions, so it may be much cleaner for him to say "no thanks" and not be part of the suit. That means he may not get to play the Discovery game (or at least he'd need a real lawyer rather than me advising him.) But any of the US-based defendants certainly can go file discovery motions as part of their response, even if the result of them is to demonstrate that they're not part of the suit or that they didn't do the actions they're accused of or that those actions aren't a tort.
You can have *so* much fun with discovery in this - not only should they be able to get the names and real addresses and phone numbers of all the spammers that the plaintiff alleges are part of his organization, but also
and any other information you can think of that the spammers would probably rather NOT have exposed to public view. And be sure to get all of them in electronic form, and delivered to all the defendants, because even if Steve Linford and Spamhaus aren't under US or Florida jurisdiction, they're certainly parties to the case, and it'd be a real shame if there were no particular way to impose confidentiality rules on the non-US defendants for use of that data.
Yeah, it seems like a lot of data. But the plaintiff's suit doesn't just claim something fuzzy like libel (where he might have had a chance suing in the UK, though probably less likely here) or restraint of trade, it claims that the defendants engaged in activities that caused damages to the plaintiff by interfering with the plaintiff's legitimate activities, and that means that the actual activities that the plaintiff claims to have engaged in and the defendant's actions which allegedly i
Steve's response is very clear on the point that the SBL doesn't block the transmission of any messages, but he's fuzzy on whether it blocks the reception - in some places he says it does, while in other places he talks about the recipient blocking them. I thought that the SBL is implemented in a way that the user's email software does the blocking, after checking the site's status with the SBL. It's a potentially important difference - not so much for Steve or Spamhaus (because of the jurisdictional issues) but for the US plaintiffs. It shouldn't be - the recipient has every right to hire a blocking service to block spam for them, even if the one they've chosen to use charges no money - but it could make a difference to a jury or to a really clueless judge.
And even aside from the teaching, do the classrooms have enough *electricity* for them? You can't depend on a laptop having more than an hour's battery life, in spite of what the ads said when they were brand new (which was usually overoptimistic then, and battery life decreases rapidly as machines get to be a couple of years old, so the _seniors_ are definitely going to need to plug in their machines if they haven't replaced the ones they bought freshman year.) On the other hand, if schools can use them to replace paper copies of textbooks, so the kids who are getting new laptop weight to carry around in their backpacks can leave their books back in their rooms, that may be a win. Works fine for classical literature (anything out of copyright, i.e. pre-Disney), but not so hot for most of the textbook market.
They're not going to save any natural resources by having you use computers instead of paper. Nor will they save money. Sure, the paper you use in a year will probably outweigh the computer, but you'll spend more than $100/year on computers, while you won't conceivably use that much paper writing by hand
The real environmental costs have to include the disposal costs of the equipment. Laptop LCD screens are much smaller and lighter than CRTs, and other people have talked about the leaded glass and phosphor problems with CRTs. LCDs are semiconductor-based, which means there's a certain amount of toxic waste involved in the production; I don't know if it's more or less than monitors. Fortunately, Nickel Cadmium batteries are a thing of the past, but how toxic are the current battery technologies?
And how long do these things last, and how upgradable are they? Laptops are usually slower than desktops made at the same time, with smaller disks and RAM for the money. How many years will they last before being obsolete? My experience carrying a laptop around as a business traveller and train commuter was that they're not super-durable, especially the ones that are light enough that you're willing to carry them around all that time. How will they survive students?
Now, the software that came with the D-Link was egregiously lame, and the $5 audio card in my PC made pretty lame audio recordings, so I gaveup on it :-) But that was DLink's lameness back then; presumably other products are smarter by now. I've heard that there's decent Linux software for the things, so maybe I'll try it again. The two biggest problems with the radio software were that
- It could only schedule one recording event, and only only could handle one day's clock, not a week's, so I could set it up in the morning before heading out to catch the train for work if I wanted to, but I couldn't set it up the night before or the weekend before.
- It only recorded sounds in
.WAV format, after accumulating them in RAM (in .WAV format), so instead of saving the program directly as an MP3, it needed twice the capacity of a .WAV, which came to something like 600MB/hour. (They did include some free MP3 software, and to cut them some slack, this was back when there were patent questions about the MP3 formats that they could dodge by doing this.) Back then I didn't have that much spare disk space, having split my 6GB drive between Linux and Windows. Now it's different, so even if the software's lame, I've got spare disk space.
It was really designed to use the computer as a friendly user interface to control the radio and use the PC's speakers, which it could do all on the analog side of a sound card, rather than having to digitize it.As various people have pointed out, the light bulb is a fluorescent, not a UV bulb, and the network stuff isn't there to control the light - the network stuff is there to provide 802.11 to the big room, and the light fixture was the convenient place to mount it.
It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from an accident with a computer and a junk-mail system back in 1985. Amateur archeologist Howard Carson, crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site, felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber.
And he goes on to describe the items in the Toot'n'C'mon Motel and speculate about what they must have been used for by the ancient inhabitants...
That doesn't let you catch every spammer that spams you, but it's enough that it can theoretically be very annoying to small spammers, who have to show up personally, and are more likely to be receptive to the message that "everybody hates you, and we'll make you lose money and spend lots of time being told that everybody hates you." (And if not, then hey, it's an $200 check for an evening's trip to Small Claims - busting spammers can be profitable if you 're in a state with that kind of law.) Big spammers are likely to annoy more people, and usually incorporate to protect their owners, so they probably have to send a lawyer to the courts rather than the owner, but that's fine too. On the other hand, they're much more likely to locate to states that don't have such laws, so they're only subject to Federal laws.
ic.org lists about 500 intentional communities, ranging from hippie communes to apartment buildings trying not to be boring to Quaker villages I know old people from to some things that probably are run by wackos (or would be if they could get organized).
I live in a condo, which is more of an unintentional community :-) We've got 32 units of medium and large apartments in Silicon Valley, mostly occupied by owners and some by tenants, with a shared central yard and pool, and monthly dues that keep going to things like paint and termite repair and fixing the hot water and such. Works OK.
Intentional Communities are a broad movement, ranging from student-oriented housing coops to hippie communes to old Quaker villages to apartment buildings that don't want to be boring. (OK, some of them probably _are_ cult-like - the ic.org web page lists about 500 of the things.) I know people who've lived in a number of these things - some have stuck together for 50 years, while others have fallen apart in a year. Some people like being closely involved with their neighbors, while others don't; suit yourself.
I first heard the term from people who were talking about unwiring places in the Caribbean.
$52K certainly isn't enough to rent a house without two incomes here, though rents here are still totally silly, and by now you can rent your own 2-BR apartment on that kind of income. For a part-time job, it's a much more interesting amount.
But the ex-spammer said he was having to put significant work into the job - not so much the technical side, once he had that mostly stable, but the business side of finding vendors that want to use spammers to sell their products and keeping up to date on defense methods against spam-prevention technology. Perhaps it's the kind of thing that now that he's spent six months getting good at it, it either can start taking much less time or else start bringing in much more money.
Also, this is a job that basically sucks. Jobs that suck had better pay a lot more than jobs that don't suck.
It's fun to think about fusion reactors being practical sources of electric power, and it's fun to spend millions of dollars on Really Cool Toys and do fundamental physics research that nobody could do before and build really big computers for mathematical simulations of the physics. But it's really about testing new nuclear weapons designs, and modelling the aging of existing nuclear weapons to know when they need replacing. More detailed discussion on Stockpile Stewardship. After all, that's one of the things that you can do with very precise knowldge of hydrogen fusion behavior.
Furthermore, the Bush Administration recently got the Senate Armed Services Committee to approve $25M for resuming nuclear weapons testing and about $20M for designing new small nuclear bombs (less than 5KT) and big bunker-buster bombs (up to 1MT.) The small ones are presumably fission-based, while the bigger ones are probably fusion. SJMerc article. TheAge Article. (So just in case you thought the recent unpleasantness in the Middle East was designed to stop Weapons of Mass Destruction, well, no...)
But that means he only sold Viagra to 20 suckers a week, or mortgage-refinancing contacts to 200 suckers a week (not mortgages, just people who actually contacted a broker.) That's not a lot of suckers, though I've got no idea what fraction of the Viagra-spamming business he contributed.
It doesn't take criminal intent - a civil lawsuit is usually good enough for that sort of thing, and unlike criminal cases, you're relatively in control of them. The real issue becomes how much of that you can do in small claims court, which in most states is cheap and minimizes paperwork compared to a regular court.
It shouldn't be too hard to get his address - doing a lawsuit in small claims is probably enough to get SWBell to cough up the address of that DSL line. And you should be able to come up with an excuse to sue him. You might be able to get the SWBell security folks after him, but more likely they'd just cancel the account and it'd be protected by their privacy policies.
My 1983 computer was a VAX 11/780. UC Berkeley got their first one in the spring of 1979, IIRC, and went to work porting the Unix to it using 32V (it was a 32-bit machine with virtual memory after all) and V7 and some PDP-11 BSD stuff. I didn't have a Unix account when I was there, just IBM mainframes and the (?5150?) micro that ran APL. My undergrad work had been mostly on IBM mainframes like 360's.
I used a PDP-11/20 in 1972, and an 11/45 in 73-74. It was at the University of Delaware, and my high school time-shared on it using a Model 33 Teletype, the ASR kind with the paper-tape punch, and the modem that could do 110 baud if you set the switch to "fast". (Otherwise, it was 75 baud, which is roughly 75 Words Per Minute, but only a couple of the kids could type that fast.) They were running RSTS-11 operating system on it, which let us program in BASIC. I also used some kind of HP machine running BASIC, I think a Model 1000 or 2000. The university lab had their previous timesharing machine sitting in the corner, a PDP-8 that had a "DECSYSTEM 10" label covering the PDP-8 label.)
As far as reading old media from that era goes, forget reading DECTAPE (think of using a cassette tape as a floppy...) The best way to read paper-tape is probably an optical scanner - I tried to buy an paper-tape reader/punch in ~1985 or so and DEC referred me to their "Traditional Products Group", who didn't have one lying in the back anywhere. My VAX had 9-track tape, which could run at 6250 DPI or 1600 DPI. My department also owned an older 800/1600 DPI drive, which a few years later was the last on e in our building. DIsks were RM05 removable packs - 14" multiplatter things the size of a tupperware cake container. They held 250MB, and cost about $1000 for the media, and about $35K for the drive. And all of this stuff ran on 3-phase power:-) The console / bootstrap controller for the VAX was an LSI-11 microprocessor implementation of the PDP-11, which had an 8-inch floppy. A few years later somebody sent us some data in RT-11 (RSX-11?) format on one of those, and we were able to read it. People would also send us data in various weird formats (VMS backup format, or raw binary on tapes), and sometimes it would be a struggle to read it; depends a lot on the quality of documentation, which was often poor. Somewhere in my attic I've got a Sun shoebox tape drive which may be able to read some Sun cartridge tapes, but I wouldn't bet on it.
The only medium that's got any chance of surviving a long time is "copy your old data onto new media every couple of years and keep any format documentation you can find" and take advantage of Moore's Law and folks who write emulators. That $1000 that bought a 250GB removable cartridge in 1983 will get you a terabyte of IDE today, and it doesn't need the $35K drive. Or you can spend ~$35 for a CD-R drive and get 700-MB CD-R media for about 25 cents. (That's a factor of 12000, or about 2**13.5, so that's about 18 months per doubling for the media, and a bit slower for the drives ...) Seek time hasn't changed as much - I think the RM-05s were 85ms, which is probably similar to CDs, while the IDE are about 8ms. I don't remember if a single RM05 could fill a 2MB/s MASSBUS or not - if so, that's about a 10x CD :-)
There are two main applications over the years where I've seen Unix progammers resort to assembler other than for direct hardware control. One of them is numerical programming (and some graphics and crypto bignums) that benefits from machine operations not available from C, like 16x16->32 multiplies (where C would either limit the result to 16 bits, risking overflows, or expand the operands to 32 bits before multiplying, which is slow.) The other is for detailed bit-bashing operations, like crypto and some graphics, where some operations like bit-rotating aren't directly supported in C. There's almost nothing else.
I've only done one project since I started using Unix in ~1978 where assembler was useful, and it wasn't actually on Unix, and I didn't actually write code in it, just used it to diagnose code... The Bell Labs BLIT graphics terminals had a light-weight operating system that ran on 68000s and later WE32010s, and if you've got a nice 1Kx1K screen and a CPU that's got 3/4 MIPS and almost nothing to do, you might as well have it calculate Mandelbrot sets in the background. Of course, there's no floating-point coprocessor on those terminals, and doing it in floating-point emulation was dog-slow, but a little bit of numerical analysis makes it possible to do in fixed-point fractions. If you talk to it nicely, you can make it all happen in the registers, rather than using memory, and get the 16x16->32 multiplies for free without any type conversion happening, but the only way to be sure of getting it right is to have the compiler output assembler to make sure your code did what you wanted it to. (Remember registers? They were the things that 8086s didn't have enough of, and therefore Pentiums didn't have enough of, which made everything work really fast on real machines. Even PDP-11s had twice as many registers as 8086s.)
I clicked a bunch of links. They were pretty much *all* useless :-) The things he's trying to imitate are a bit less vague about what they do, but not by much. Normally when I'm posting a flame about this, I include a brief description of what the thing actually *does*, but it's pretty hard to tell even from poking around their site for a few minutes looking at links that fail to load screenshots very well.
A 400MHz XScale is just fine for this kind of thing. But while Bluetooth is good for some applications, it isn't fast enough for many others; it's like an 0.5X CD-ROM speed, though it's certainly good enough to drive the headphone audio. 802.11 could be fine (though it tends to be a power hog, suggesting the need for an on-off switch...), though it's tempting to recommend a simple ethernet jack on the side instead, which has the advantage of working in places where people are correctly paranoid about which side of the firewall the wireless network belongs on. I tend to favor having an "ok to connect new object" button anyway, for security reasons...
UPnP is one of them evil Microsoft things :-) Is it the right one? What about security - how do you implement that correctly for this kind of device?