Unfortunately, the Malaysian parts of network mostly don't support reverse DNS lookups, so I can't tell where they are, though some of them are Telekom Malaysia [AS4788], and the actual machines are part of AS17464, address space owned by Telekom Malaysia's hosting division, but might be operated by Webvisions, a company in nearby Singapore. It'd be nice if the Tsunamii folks could provide a bit more information. Telekom Malaysia [AS4788] has BGP connections with UUNET [AS701], Sprintlink[AS1239], and Teleglobe[AS6453], and Eastgate[AS17971] (which looks like it's probably also owned by or related to Telekom Malaysia.) Some other connections include Reach [AS4637] (well-connected), Solsis [AS17736] (a couple hops from Verio), and some people who look like customers.
Standard Internet BGP routing is asymmetric and location-dependent unless somebody tweaks it to do otherwise - the path followed by packets in one direction may be entirely different than the path followed by packets in the opposite direction. I took the traceroute provided by Tsunamii, and tracerouted to the different nodes on it to see what I could find. Depending on which node in Malaysia I traced to, the hop across the Pacific either went from UUNET in Sacramento, California, UUNET in Los Angeles, California, or Sprint in San Jose, California (if you're not from around here, Los Angeles is in the South and San Jose and Sacramento are in the north, and probably take a different set of cables across the Pacific.) It's somewhat frustrating that the Tsunamii mapping application draws those links going across the Atlantic, Europe, and Asia instead of the Pacific, just because it's fewer miles from the center of the US to Malaysia that way.
While there are ways to get to Telekom Malaysia that don't go through Sprint or UUNET, none of the US ISPs I tried used them - too many extra hops, even for the one that peered with Verio in the US (aka NTT), though I didn't try from anywhere that had Genuity that didn't also have UUNET.
There were a couple of Russian spammers in New Jersey who were found murdered in their home a few years ago. The general speculation is that they were running a pump&dump stock scam and somebody who lost money took out a hit on them.
That's ROKSO, the Spamhaus Project's Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) Database. More people watch TV than Spamhaus, but at least the ROKSO people do some research and try harder to be "Fair and Balanced"...
The Spamhaus and ROKSO people assert that the vast maajority of spam comes from around 200 big spammers. If the bounty business makes it possible to shut them down, either by busting them or by filtering them out, that could help.
I agree than filtering at the ESMTP level would be much more scalable than filtering in the message body, and that'd help. There are other things that can also change scalability radically, such as moving from long-term-use email addresses under real domains to limited-use addresses under subdomains, combined with teergrubing mail to bad addresses. A number of mail systems support addresses like username+tag@domain.com, which lets you identify where some of your messages came from, but only at the MUA level; tag@username.domain.com is visible to the MTA at the envelope level, so it can be set to block email addressed to known spambait addresses distributed on a per-user level rather than a per-ISP level. It does mean that some anti-spam tools get built at the DNS server level rather than the sendmail server level, which can be fast and lightweight if you're not using bind, but has other issues. It also has the effect of making dictionary attacks impractical, if implemented carefully, because the spammer now has to search for usernames and subdomains, though under simpler implementations, this just means that a spammer who does get your subdomain sends you a million emails (oops...).
Usually it's hard to trace the sending of the spam. But most spam is selling something, or advertising web sites, and it's much easier to trace that part - you follow the money, because spamming is almost always about trying to get money. That doesn't mean that there aren't "Joe Jobs" framing people with forgeries (usually sent by real spammers annoyed at anti-spammers), and some kinds of spam (like "Buy stock XYZW") don't lend themselves well to it. But usually, you can track down where the money goes.
You avoid the "children born with 4 feet" problem by aiming the beams and staying away from them. The main hazards are for people who want to eat the free microwaved chicken that collects under the beams, unless they retrieve it with a long stick or something.
To type fast on one of these things, plug in a full-sized or semi-compact USB or Bluetooth keyboard, as well as plugging in a monitor if you want. For most applications, if you're not sitting at a desk, you don't need to type all that fast, though there are occasional exceptions like taking notes in a meeting or working on an airplane.
If you want some kind of fancy chordboard or touchpad thing, fine; one that I like is the Half Keyboard which uses the QWERT half of a keyboard and a shift key, and has one model with USB for Macs and also a wrist-mount version, but it's not usually necessary to do silly things.
What I didn't see mentioned was an Ethernet interface (though USB frobs can work) or any discussion of power (batteries? 3-pound AC power bricks? battery lifetime?) or price, but I assume that everything except price will be reasonable.
Unlike many of the characters in the movie, where they have to do something about the age differences, because they're doing a prequel when the original actors are 25 years older or else dead, Chewbacca was basically a guy in a Wookiee suit with a good script. Sure, the actor did a fine job, but just about anybody of similar size could handle it well enough. So as long as he hasn't gotten too fat or arthritic, then it's nice to give him a job that will probably pay more than most of the actors in the original got.
But it's the suit and the script that really have the part, and if the script is bad enough, the suit's no more helpful than Jackie Chan's Tuxedo...
There are different semantics available for None-of-the-Above votes, including "Bounce them all and hold an election with better candidates" and "office stays unfilled". In N-seat elections, e.g. at-large city council elections, people have tried running "None of the above", but it turns out that you can get weird and ambiguous results which can make it impossible to tell how to vote to get what you want unless it's implemented carefully.
The big effects of the Internet aren't convenience in voting, they're convenience in finding out what the government is up to, in a more decentralized fashion than broadcast television. If couch potatoes aren't getting up and voting, let them stay on the couch; we've got absentee ballots that elderly shut-ins can use if they're unable to get to the polls or travellers can use if they won't be home on voting day.
A Republic is three wolves voting on _which_ sheep to have for lunch. It's also dangerous, though usually disasters happen slower, so they can occasionally be stopped once the political fad that led to them has passed, and the US has a Second Amendment that says that if politicians really get out of hand we can overthrow them.
The US Constitution wasn't a fully-formed treatise passed down from the Deist God on tablets of parchment, it was a political compromise between a bunch of people who had a bunch of different objectives. As such, it's not bad, and we've done well to keep it together for over 200 years, except for minor problems like the Welfare State, half the country leaving because they wanted slavery and the other half reconquering them because they liked Nationalism better, nationalists arresting socialists for preaching against a war we had no business being in (remember the War to End All Wars?), Manifest Destiny proponents taking over half the middle part of the Continent, an unadmitted empire in the western hemisphere even before the politicians decided to be the policemen of the world, etc.
If it's possible for politicians to tell who you voted for, they can threaten you if you don't vote their way and take reprisals afterwards if you didn't cooperate. The fact that multiple parties can threaten you to vote different ways does not reduce the risk. This way lies madness.
Published votes also make bribery and vote-buying possible (and practical!) Sure, giving a guy a bottle of whiskey each time he votes for Tammany Hall or Mayor Daley cheapens the voting process, but so does promising "Read My Lips, No New Taxes" and "Pot for every Chicken" and "Contract on\\With America" and "A New Deal".
There's lots of cryptographic research into voting protocols; pick a set of 5-10 objectives and you'll find a research paper on how to make it work or why they're contradictory. Schneier's Applied Cryptography book describes some of them, and there is really good work on how to implement voting for other kinds of applications (e.g. corporate stock proxies, private organization internal elections, etc.) where there's less risk of violence or where there are different forms of cheating or gaming the system. RISKS-Digest periodically has notes from people like Rebecca Mercuri and Ed Gerck about the topic. For instance, it's important to be able to verify that your votes were actually counted, but to have it be impossible for anybody to tell how you voted, at least unless you're contesting the counting. In general, most of the choices are Bad, Worse, or Inadequate, because it's a really hard problem.
There was various other detail, but you got the critical parts correct. It didn't look like they were suing them for libel, which might have had some chance of validity (e.g. arguing that some of their blocked IP addresses hadn't been used for spamming, or that some of the allegedly spam email wasn't really spam, it was Legitimate Marketing, or complaining about Emotional Damage from being lumped together with Penis Lengthener Vendors and how inadequate that made them feel....)
The closest I could see to anything that might let their complaint get anywhere is that they asserted that the anti-spammers were selling their products commercially. I've lost track by now of who's commercial and who's non-commercial, but they've got more of a case if they're claiming that the anti-spammers are in it for the money rather than people providing a public service for the good of humanity.
The plaintiff is demanding a jury trial here, alleging that the value of the complaint is over $75K, which is presumably some legal threshold in the jurisdiction he's suiing in, though I didn't see where he provided any backup for that number. Sounds like a Bad Move to me - he's probably hoping he can whine to a jury about how those mean, nasty anti-spammers are trying to put him out of business, but he'll either have to make sure that nobody on the jury actually gets email, or else he'll find that instead of arguing points of law with a judge, where maybe he'd get somewhere, when its' the defendants turn to speak, they'll start putting up quantities and categories of email that spam-blockers are trying to block, leaving the jury ROTFLTAO.
I'm glad I wasn't named on this one, and it should probably be safe for the non-US named parties to get out of it (not necessarily, though), but if somebody who's party to it wants to have lots of fun bashing the plaintiffs because of their strategic and tactical mistakes, there should be plenty of opportunity here. For instance:
"Discovery" is the process of getting the various parties to produce relevant information. The plaintiff asserts that the anti-spammers blocked the domain names and/or IP addresses of the Plaintiff's association's members. That looks like an obvious case to do discovery on the personal/organizational names and contact information of all of those members, and all of the domain names and IP addresses that they claim to own which the spammers allegedly blocked, and maybe all of the other domain names and IP addresses that they own, and which spam messages have been sent from which IP addresses.
Oh, yeah, and once that information is obtained through the discovery process, it certainly ought to be posted to the list in nice machine-readable form, like DNS records:-)
The complaint refers to contracts that the plaintiff or its fellow-spammers have with several ISPs. Sure would be nice to get the technical details of those contracts made public, specifically IP addresses and contact information.
The plaintiff claims the anti-spammers did things to its members. I didn't see an explanation of which of those actions affected the plaintiff itself, as opposed to its "membership base", which might give it standing to sue, or any explanation of what "members" are for a non-profit corporation and how it can speak for them. The tricky part is how to get the cased tossed out but still use the discovery process to force the Plaintiff to fork over all the cool information, so everything has to be done in the right order.
Some of the defendants are "more equal than others". It'd be nice if the people who are obviously being abused by this process can get all their legal costs paid (and therefore maximize them) without leading to large legal costs for any defendants who won't be able to get them paid for.
Libel law in the UK is *much* more flexible than libel law in the US. Normally this is a really bad thing; US law has protections like truth being an absolute defense to libel and such, and the fact that UK libel law lets UK people in the UK sue people anywhere in the world is also atrocious. But if the UK defendants want to participate with the process far enough to get dropped from it or get it tossed out (which risks having them forced to give out information during discovery), they might have fun with a libel suit afterwards, and of course that would be tried in the UK.
The DNS registrar got named because they hadn't provided "proper" contact information for the real targets, but there's no legal references stated that suggests they had a legal obligation to do so. Does this give them grounds for arguing that it's a frivolous lawsuit, and getting legal costs covered, beyond simply getting taken off the suit? Doing so weakens the whole thing.
Most of the other parts are pretty bogus too.
Note: I'm not a lawyer, and if you want to get specific legal advice about which 20% of this message is totally bogus as opposed to merely imprecise or incorrect, you could go hire a real lawyer:-) However a lot of this stuff really is pretty readable in plain English.
There have been a variety one-handed keyboards over the years, doing various chord things. Some of them are ergonomically hand-molded for various configurations, whether desktop or carry-around.
The one I really liked was the Half Keyboard for Palm, Mac, and PC, which has the QWERT half of a keyboard, and you shift with your thumb on the spacebar to get the YUIOP side, or numlock to get numbers. It's a total no-brainer to understand how to use it, unlike most of the other systems, assuming you already know the standard keyboard well. The small half-keyboard version is only for left-handed typing. For Palm users drawing with a stylus, that's probably correct for most people, but my preferences for PC use are the opposite. I'm right-handed, and type much better with my right hand than my left, while I've gotten very good at left-handed mousing while trying to avoid various RSI problems. They now make a full-sized left-and-right-halves keyboard, which they want $400 for; I don't understand why....
There's also a software version of the Half-keyboard, but at least when it came out, it was more expensive than the hardware version, being marketed toward handicapped business users who could get their companies to pay for them. (Perhaps that also explains the $400 left-and-right-halves.) Sigh. It's not currently on their web site price list. I don't know if the concept's patented, which could interfere with an open-source implementation.
Heat.... plus water.... gives steam. Steam! The world can be saved by STEAM!!
Sorry. It seems to be one of those anime-otaku in-jokes, like CowboyNeal or NataliePortman poll options.... But it was the right thing to say here....
protecting cords from rabbits
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At least they took the bunny to the pet store and not the pound, so there's more chance of it being adopted. I've had a couple of pet rabbits over the years, and they're much nicer and happier as free-running housepets than stuck in cages. They house-train pretty well, and at least if you've got wood floors instead of carpet it's easy to clean up when they don't get to the box.
But yes, they chew on things. They especially like phone cords - data and power cords are ok, but phone cords have just the right chewy texture and usually don't taste like they've got electricity in them. Cordless phones help take care of this problem, and you'll have cordless phones pretty soon whether you plan for them or not:-)
Plastic piping of various sorts forces you to keep your cables neat, or at least to keep them out of reach, and to keep the spare cables stashed in a drawer. They also make other shapes of cord protectors - spiral sorts of stuff. If you're not normally neat (which I'm not) you'll end up having to learn a bit about keeping the back of your desk and the floor under it neat instead of cluttered with cables, but you'll get some positive reinforcement because the bunny periodically gets in and eats all the cables you didn't secure.
Now that it's been a few years since our last bunny, and I've acquired more computer equipment with more cords, I've lost most of those neatness habits except putting away the unused cables:-( The DSL modem is on the floor, mostly for convenience, and it makes a nice warm thing for the cat to lie on when he's hanging around while I work.
I've got one of those USB-controlled FM radio receivers for my PC. The software it came with was totally lame (the scheduler only knew about 24 hours, not a week, with one event on one station, and needed enough disk space to store the uncompressed.WAV files TWICE before using a separate MP3 coder to compress it), so I haven't actually used it in a couple of years (ran out of disk space, and haven't reinstalled it since I got the new 120GB drive). And my old sound card is really too lame, and the new one has a bunch of broken drivers that just don't work well on WinME.
But assuming it's done well, and that your system isn't broken, it's nice to be able to record FM radio. This is especially an issue for me, because my weekly going-out-to-dinner group is the same night as the Grateful Dead Hour on KPFA, but there are other interesting radio shows that don't happen to be on at the times I want to listen. Usually when I'm driving, if I'm not on the cell phone, I'll be listening to Traffic/News Radio, or sometimes KPFA leftist radio, or NPR well-produced establishment radio.
The Space Management Issue - Workaround.
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Sure, TiVo could do a better job with disk drives, and their early hacker-friendliness was nice for their early adopters, and it'd be nice to have a recording capability built in, but now that disk drive capacities have gotten big enough to store 60+ hours instead of 10 hours, the easy workaround is to back things up to VCR (Remember the VCR you used to use before you got TiVo? It's still on your shelf somewhere, probably even still near the TV:-)
Pop in a 10-hour tape, and tell it to play all those Farscape episodes while you're at work, and you can free up the space on your disk while keeping the program content manageable. It'd be nice to have it record stuff at 8x speeds onto a DVD burner instead of 1x, but remember, this is mostly the TV you haven't watched yet, or the episodes you've seen already plus the one from the last week or two. And if the software's at all bright enough, if you do want to watch the tape later, you should be able to spool it back into the TiVo for random-access play rather than just using your VCR's fast-forward and reverse and such.
(I don't own TiVo myself; we kept dithering about whether we'd rather improve our TV watching experience or stick the TV in the garage so we don't watch it at all, and buying a TiVo would have committed us to one of those strategies:-)
Back when TiVo was new, some friends of mine got it. They tended to say things like "TiVo has lots of minor usability bugs and YOU HAVE TO BUY ONE RIGHT NOW ANYWAY!!!". As hackers, of course, they wanted to be able to change things, but the improvement in their TV viewing experience was the big appeal.
Sure, the voltages are probably wrong, but that just means you may need several of them. They're pretty small, and you'll already need to have some way to take a power feed from the PC as well as from the wall-wort, so you'll already be doing some power management hardware.
There's no need for the OS to be in non-volatile memory - almost all of it's read-only except for a few log files, things like print spools,/tmp, and swap space when that's needed. So if the operating system does a half-decent job of cache management, it'll keep the stuff it needs in RAM, and it'll be much more efficient if it can decide flexibly what that is rather than having chunks of the memory inflexibly dedicated only to specific applications.
The special cases are things like/tmp, which look like disk drives but mostly contain files that are created, used, and destroyed, and never really need to be saved on disk if there's enough cache space to keep them. The tmpfs file system type was designed to optimise these - it stores files in RAM and uses the virtual memory mechanisms to handle its data rather than a separate disk partition, and can really speed up applications like compiles because there's no need to wait for disk latencies or to even bother the disk bus with writes in most cases.
Those removable disk drive trays are really convenient, and they're an obvious win if you're using them for backups. They're also really useful for development shops - your developers and testers don't always need 10 computers on their desks, but they always need another clean copy of the standard environment to build their application on, and they may have multiple tracks of things they're working on (if nothing else, testing client 1.6.1 against server 1.5 and server 1.4 and server 1.5.9.)
Also, you always need backups in any professional environment - RAID protects you against disk failures, but it doesn't protect you against accidentally deleting an important file, or editing the wrong file, or crackers or viruses infecting your machines, or the RAID controller freaking and scrambling your data. Sometimes you can get by with journaling file systems on your RAID.
You can use 1+1 disk mirroring instead of RAID 5 - it has the advantage that to do backups, you disable one disk (if your controller's bright enough) or shut down, pop out the drawer with one drive, replace it with a blank drive, and rebuild the mirror. If you underestimated your storage requirements, add another pair of disks (which will usually be bigger than the previous pair, at least if your underestimation was about growth speed rather than initial needs.)
Disks and tapes can both demagnetize or otherwise have Bad Things happen to them. They also get Format Rot, and Operating System Rot, and Application Rot, and other problems that are much harder to fix than magnetic bit rot. If you've got data that's critical for long-term storage, you need to preserve at least some of it by copying it onto newer devices. For example, copy the data from last year's monthly backup disks to new disks this year - if you're lucky, you'll need half or a quarter as many disks. And if the trends in disk drive price-performance improvement slow down from the radical increases of recent years, then it'll be cost-effective to reuse the old backup disks for new backups.
In a home environment, this is usually all less critical - over the last couple of years, I've found that disk drive prices keep coming down rapidly, so when I added the 20GB drive, I copied all my user files from the 6GB drive to it, and when I added the 120GB drive and took out the 6GB drive, I copied the whole 20GB drive into a partition on the 120.
Slashdot Mirror
Standard Internet BGP routing is asymmetric and location-dependent unless somebody tweaks it to do otherwise - the path followed by packets in one direction may be entirely different than the path followed by packets in the opposite direction. I took the traceroute provided by Tsunamii, and tracerouted to the different nodes on it to see what I could find. Depending on which node in Malaysia I traced to, the hop across the Pacific either went from UUNET in Sacramento, California, UUNET in Los Angeles, California, or Sprint in San Jose, California (if you're not from around here, Los Angeles is in the South and San Jose and Sacramento are in the north, and probably take a different set of cables across the Pacific.) It's somewhat frustrating that the Tsunamii mapping application draws those links going across the Atlantic, Europe, and Asia instead of the Pacific, just because it's fewer miles from the center of the US to Malaysia that way.
While there are ways to get to Telekom Malaysia that don't go through Sprint or UUNET, none of the US ISPs I tried used them - too many extra hops, even for the one that peered with Verio in the US (aka NTT), though I didn't try from anywhere that had Genuity that didn't also have UUNET.
It's an email you can't refuse...
That's ROKSO, the Spamhaus Project's Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) Database. More people watch TV than Spamhaus, but at least the ROKSO people do some research and try harder to be "Fair and Balanced" ...
I agree than filtering at the ESMTP level would be much more scalable than filtering in the message body, and that'd help. There are other things that can also change scalability radically, such as moving from long-term-use email addresses under real domains to limited-use addresses under subdomains, combined with teergrubing mail to bad addresses. A number of mail systems support addresses like username+tag@domain.com, which lets you identify where some of your messages came from, but only at the MUA level; tag@username.domain.com is visible to the MTA at the envelope level, so it can be set to block email addressed to known spambait addresses distributed on a per-user level rather than a per-ISP level. It does mean that some anti-spam tools get built at the DNS server level rather than the sendmail server level, which can be fast and lightweight if you're not using bind, but has other issues. It also has the effect of making dictionary attacks impractical, if implemented carefully, because the spammer now has to search for usernames and subdomains, though under simpler implementations, this just means that a spammer who does get your subdomain sends you a million emails (oops...).
Usually it's hard to trace the sending of the spam. But most spam is selling something, or advertising web sites, and it's much easier to trace that part - you follow the money, because spamming is almost always about trying to get money. That doesn't mean that there aren't "Joe Jobs" framing people with forgeries (usually sent by real spammers annoyed at anti-spammers), and some kinds of spam (like "Buy stock XYZW") don't lend themselves well to it. But usually, you can track down where the money goes.
You've seen the story by Terry Bisson, no sense repeating it here....
You avoid the "children born with 4 feet" problem by aiming the beams and staying away from them. The main hazards are for people who want to eat the free microwaved chicken that collects under the beams, unless they retrieve it with a long stick or something.
Sorry....
If you want some kind of fancy chordboard or touchpad thing, fine; one that I like is the Half Keyboard which uses the QWERT half of a keyboard and a shift key, and has one model with USB for Macs and also a wrist-mount version, but it's not usually necessary to do silly things.
What I didn't see mentioned was an Ethernet interface (though USB frobs can work) or any discussion of power (batteries? 3-pound AC power bricks? battery lifetime?) or price, but I assume that everything except price will be reasonable.
because they're doing a prequel when the original actors are 25 years older or else dead, Chewbacca was basically a guy in a Wookiee suit with a good script. Sure, the actor did a fine job, but just about anybody of similar size could handle it well enough. So as long as he hasn't gotten too fat or arthritic, then it's nice to give him a job that will probably pay more than most of the actors in the original got.
But it's the suit and the script that really have the part, and if the script is bad enough, the suit's no more helpful than Jackie Chan's Tuxedo...
KDE says: How are you, Gentlegnomes - You are on your way to destruction. Make your time....
I always liked Wavy Gravy's "Nobody for President!" campaign.
The big effects of the Internet aren't convenience in voting, they're convenience in finding out what the government is up to, in a more decentralized fashion than broadcast television. If couch potatoes aren't getting up and voting, let them stay on the couch; we've got absentee ballots that elderly shut-ins can use if they're unable to get to the polls or travellers can use if they won't be home on voting day.
A Republic is three wolves voting on _which_ sheep to have for lunch. It's also dangerous, though usually disasters happen slower, so they can occasionally be stopped once the political fad that led to them has passed, and the US has a Second Amendment that says that if politicians really get out of hand we can overthrow them.
The US Constitution wasn't a fully-formed treatise passed down from the Deist God on tablets of parchment, it was a political compromise between a bunch of people who had a bunch of different objectives. As such, it's not bad, and we've done well to keep it together for over 200 years, except for minor problems like the Welfare State, half the country leaving because they wanted slavery and the other half reconquering them because they liked Nationalism better, nationalists arresting socialists for preaching against a war we had no business being in (remember the War to End All Wars?), Manifest Destiny proponents taking over half the middle part of the Continent, an unadmitted empire in the western hemisphere even before the politicians decided to be the policemen of the world, etc.
Published votes also make bribery and vote-buying possible (and practical!) Sure, giving a guy a bottle of whiskey each time he votes for Tammany Hall or Mayor Daley cheapens the voting process, but so does promising "Read My Lips, No New Taxes" and "Pot for every Chicken" and "Contract on\\With America" and "A New Deal".
There's lots of cryptographic research into voting protocols; pick a set of 5-10 objectives and you'll find a research paper on how to make it work or why they're contradictory. Schneier's Applied Cryptography book describes some of them, and there is really good work on how to implement voting for other kinds of applications (e.g. corporate stock proxies, private organization internal elections, etc.) where there's less risk of violence or where there are different forms of cheating or gaming the system. RISKS-Digest periodically has notes from people like Rebecca Mercuri and Ed Gerck about the topic. For instance, it's important to be able to verify that your votes were actually counted, but to have it be impossible for anybody to tell how you voted, at least unless you're contesting the counting.
In general, most of the choices are Bad, Worse, or Inadequate, because it's a really hard problem.
The closest I could see to anything that might let their complaint get anywhere is that they asserted that the anti-spammers were selling their products commercially. I've lost track by now of who's commercial and who's non-commercial, but they've got more of a case if they're claiming that the anti-spammers are in it for the money rather than people providing a public service for the good of humanity.
The plaintiff is demanding a jury trial here, alleging that the value of the complaint is over $75K, which is presumably some legal threshold in the jurisdiction he's suiing in, though I didn't see where he provided any backup for that number. Sounds like a Bad Move to me - he's probably hoping he can whine to a jury about how those mean, nasty anti-spammers are trying to put him out of business, but he'll either have to make sure that nobody on the jury actually gets email, or else he'll find that instead of arguing points of law with a judge, where maybe he'd get somewhere, when its' the defendants turn to speak, they'll start putting up quantities and categories of email that spam-blockers are trying to block, leaving the jury ROTFLTAO.
Note: I'm not a lawyer, and if you want to get specific legal advice about which 20% of this message is totally bogus as opposed to merely imprecise or incorrect, you could go hire a real lawyer
The one I really liked was the Half Keyboard for Palm, Mac, and PC, which has the QWERT half of a keyboard, and you shift with your thumb on the spacebar to get the YUIOP side, or numlock to get numbers. It's a total no-brainer to understand how to use it, unlike most of the other systems, assuming you already know the standard keyboard well. The small half-keyboard version is only for left-handed typing. For Palm users drawing with a stylus, that's probably correct for most people, but my preferences for PC use are the opposite. I'm right-handed, and type much better with my right hand than my left, while I've gotten very good at left-handed mousing while trying to avoid various RSI problems. They now make a full-sized left-and-right-halves keyboard, which they want $400 for; I don't understand why....
There's also a software version of the Half-keyboard, but at least when it came out, it was more expensive than the hardware version, being marketed toward handicapped business users who could get their companies to pay for them. (Perhaps that also explains the $400 left-and-right-halves.) Sigh. It's not currently on their web site price list. I don't know if the concept's patented, which could interfere with an open-source implementation.
Sorry. It seems to be one of those anime-otaku in-jokes, like CowboyNeal or NataliePortman poll options.... But it was the right thing to say here....
But yes, they chew on things. They especially like phone cords - data and power cords are ok, but phone cords have just the right chewy texture and usually don't taste like they've got electricity in them. Cordless phones help take care of this problem, and you'll have cordless phones pretty soon whether you plan for them or not :-)
Plastic piping of various sorts forces you to keep your cables neat, or at least to keep them out of reach, and to keep the spare cables stashed in a drawer. They also make other shapes of cord protectors - spiral sorts of stuff. If you're not normally neat (which I'm not) you'll end up having to learn a bit about keeping the back of your desk and the floor under it neat instead of cluttered with cables, but you'll get some positive reinforcement because the bunny periodically gets in and eats all the cables you didn't secure.
Now that it's been a few years since our last bunny, and I've acquired more computer equipment with more cords, I've lost most of those neatness habits except putting away the unused cables :-( The DSL modem is on the floor, mostly for convenience, and it makes a nice warm thing for the cat to lie on when he's hanging around while I work.
But assuming it's done well, and that your system isn't broken, it's nice to be able to record FM radio. This is especially an issue for me, because my weekly going-out-to-dinner group is the same night as the Grateful Dead Hour on KPFA, but there are other interesting radio shows that don't happen to be on at the times I want to listen. Usually when I'm driving, if I'm not on the cell phone, I'll be listening to Traffic/News Radio, or sometimes KPFA leftist radio, or NPR well-produced establishment radio.
Pop in a 10-hour tape, and tell it to play all those Farscape episodes while you're at work, and you can free up the space on your disk while keeping the program content manageable. It'd be nice to have it record stuff at 8x speeds onto a DVD burner instead of 1x, but remember, this is mostly the TV you haven't watched yet, or the episodes you've seen already plus the one from the last week or two. And if the software's at all bright enough, if you do want to watch the tape later, you should be able to spool it back into the TiVo for random-access play rather than just using your VCR's fast-forward and reverse and such.
(I don't own TiVo myself; we kept dithering about whether we'd rather improve our TV watching experience or stick the TV in the garage so we don't watch it at all, and buying a TiVo would have committed us to one of those strategies :-)
Back when TiVo was new, some friends of mine got it. They tended to say things like "TiVo has lots of minor usability bugs and YOU HAVE TO BUY ONE RIGHT NOW ANYWAY!!!". As hackers, of course, they wanted to be able to change things, but the improvement in their TV viewing experience was the big appeal.
Also, you'll need to manage cooling and airflow.
The special cases are things like /tmp, which look like disk drives but mostly contain files that are created, used, and destroyed, and never really need to be saved on disk if there's enough cache space to keep them. The tmpfs file system type was designed to optimise these - it stores files in RAM and uses the virtual memory mechanisms to handle its data rather than a separate disk partition, and can really speed up applications like compiles because there's no need to wait for disk latencies or to even bother the disk bus with writes in most cases.
Also, you always need backups in any professional environment - RAID protects you against disk failures, but it doesn't protect you against accidentally deleting an important file, or editing the wrong file, or crackers or viruses infecting your machines, or the RAID controller freaking and scrambling your data. Sometimes you can get by with journaling file systems on your RAID.
You can use 1+1 disk mirroring instead of RAID 5 - it has the advantage that to do backups, you disable one disk (if your controller's bright enough) or shut down, pop out the drawer with one drive, replace it with a blank drive, and rebuild the mirror. If you underestimated your storage requirements, add another pair of disks (which will usually be bigger than the previous pair, at least if your underestimation was about growth speed rather than initial needs.)
Disks and tapes can both demagnetize or otherwise have Bad Things happen to them. They also get Format Rot, and Operating System Rot, and Application Rot, and other problems that are much harder to fix than magnetic bit rot. If you've got data that's critical for long-term storage, you need to preserve at least some of it by copying it onto newer devices. For example, copy the data from last year's monthly backup disks to new disks this year - if you're lucky, you'll need half or a quarter as many disks. And if the trends in disk drive price-performance improvement slow down from the radical increases of recent years, then it'll be cost-effective to reuse the old backup disks for new backups.
In a home environment, this is usually all less critical - over the last couple of years, I've found that disk drive prices keep coming down rapidly, so when I added the 20GB drive, I copied all my user files from the 6GB drive to it, and when I added the 120GB drive and took out the 6GB drive, I copied the whole 20GB drive into a partition on the 120.