When they described the nuclear batteries they specifically mentioned beta radiation. They vaguely state that beta radiation is "energetic electrons" and can be harnessed.
I suspect what they may be refering to is a device that has a beta emitter and some compound that scintillates (emitts little flashes of light when hit by a beta particle) layered on it, and then a relatively ordinary photo-voltaic cell on top of that. Such a device is described on page 522 of James Bamford's "Body of Secretes", and he says that the device is now in use (for powering bugs that have to be small, require low power, and need to operate for as long as possible, and you can't go back to change the batteries).
The more common nuclear battery has enough material to actually heat up, and runs a thermocouple.
If the NSA is actually using beta radiation batteries, I wish they would commercialize that and have someone sell them. On one hand, we don't want nuclear materials to proliforate too much in everyday objects, because then the landfills start getting slightly hot and put low level contaminants into groundwater, etc. On the other hand, a certain number of people die every year from being in a house where the battery on the smoke detector has run out; perhaps these nuclear batteries could be approved only for smoke detectors.
I want to use them to power my army of tiny robots that will go out at night and collect droped change around the parking meters downtown, hidding in the bushes and storm drains by day. My plan to lay around posting to slashdot all day while my robot army brings me a steady income will soon be complete !
Don't you think that VISA rejected the terms of the original agreement by adding their own new requirements ?
Of course I didn't expect VISA to accept my terms. I did, however, expose the fact that while they wanted to limit my activity with the money they gave me, they were not willing to let me similarly limit their activity with the money I gave them. In addition to exposing this hypocracy, I got the added enjoyment of watching them lie !
I think it was worth it. You should try it next time they send you an update to your serfdom contract. Certified letter: $3.90. Stamp: $0.34 Warm glow of watching a self-righteous and pompous entity sqirm under the exposure of their hypocracy and in confusion also throw in a free falsehood: priceless. Back to MasterCard !
As a VISA cheerleader, you may find this letter I wrote to a VISA card issuer interesting:
\documentclass{letter}
\begin{document}
\address{Robert G. Ristroph \\
4533 Avenue A \#208 \\ ( no longer my real address, don't write me here)
Austin, TX 78751 }
\signature{Robert G. Ristroph}
\begin{letter}{ U.S. Bank National Association N.D. \\
P.O. Box 6300 \\
Fargo, ND 58125-6300 }
\opening{Dear Sir or Madam,}
I read with some interest an unsigned note appearing in a bill for my VISA card (Account No. 4190 0043 1516 9544) (don't worry, it's not a valid account anymore!)
on February 7th, 2001. The note is titled in
large letters ``IMPORTANT CHANGES TO THE CARDHOLDER AGREEMENT GOVERNING YOUR
ACCOUNT ISSUED BY U.S. BANK NATIONAL ASSOCIATION ND''. The note states that the
late payment fee is \$27.00 the first two times inside any twelve months, and
\$35.00 for additional late payments. It also states the following, which I
quote in full:
\begin{quote}
Illegal Purchases:
Your card must not be used for any unlawful purpose (for example,
funding any account that is set up to facilitate online gambling). You agree
that you will not use your card or account for any transaction that is illegal
under applicable law.
\end{quote}
I don't want to disagree with this and thus cancel my account. Rather, I would
like to agree with it and ask for the following clarifications:
\begin{enumerate}
\item Does the sentence ``Your card must not be used for any unlawful purpose
(for example, funding any account that is set up to facilitate online
gambling)'' mean that you are giving me legal advice that ``facilitating online
gambling'' is against the law in my jurisdiction (or any other) ?
\item Is U.S. Bank National Association ND a law enforcement organization, a
representative of a law enforcement organization, or empowered with any law
enforcement powers ?
\item May I use this card and account to purchase insurance online ?
\end{enumerate}
I also read with intense interest the additional printing on the reverse side:
\begin{quote}
IMPORTANT CHANGES TO YOUR AGREEMENT
If you do not agree to the changes in terms, \emph{you must notify us in writing
within 25 days of the effective date.} If you notify us that you do not agree to
the new terms, your account will be closed but \emph{your balance may be paid
off in full or under the terms of your existing Cardholder Agreement.}
If you do not notify us, you will have agreed to the these changes in this
notice. By using your account after the effective date, you will have accepted
the new terms, even if the notification period has not expired.
\end{quote}
I find it interesting that we can amend our agreement and that failure to object
or use of the card constitutes agreement to the amendment. I am hereby
notifying you of the following changes to our agreement, effective April 25:
\begin{enumerate}
\item[Illegal Activity] Reciprocal to the new terms you instituted that restrict
me from using the Card Account for illegal activity such as online
gambling, I restrict you by these new terms from using any moneys I pay
to you for any illegal activity, including but not limited to bribery,
undisclosed compensation of corporate officers, illegal tax avoidance
schemes, illegal campaign contributions, payments to illegally hired
workers, or any expenditure unproperly reported in your SEC filings.
\item[Account Limit] The account limit on this card is now set to \$200,000.
This includes merchant purchases as well as cash advances.
\item[Yearly Interest] The yearly compounded interest on the account is now two
percent.
\item[Minimum Payment] The minimum payment will never exceed \$1,500 regardless
of the balance.
\item[Disclosure of Account Information] U.S. Bank Association ND will not
disclose any information on this account, including but not limited to
my name, social security number, address, purchasing history, or other
account activity, to anyone, unless forced to disclose the information
by a court order or search warrant; and should U.S. Bank National
Association ND have to disclose such information, they will promptly
notify me of the information revealed and the party receiving the
information.
\end{enumerate}
If you do not agree to these terms, you must notify me within 25 days of the
effective date (that is, 25 days after April 25, 2001). If you notify me that
you do not agree to the new terms, the account will be closed, under the terms
of the old agreement. If you do not notify me, you will have agreed to the
these changes in this notice. By using the account (accepting a charge I make)
after the effective date, you will have accepted these terms, even if the
notification period has not expired.
\closing{Sincerely,}
\end{letter}
\end{document}
After I sent those guys this polite letter, you know what happened ? I got a note from them saying they were canceling my account "at your request" ! I think it is quite plain I didn't want my account to be canceled at all, and it was THEIR wish not to be bound by my new terms that lead to them canceling our aggreement.
As a VISA patron, what are your thoughts on these revelations ? I want to hear your opinion.
I have not seen a cable modem telephone from these people, but I believe that Grande Communications offers that in some parts of Austin (bundled with broadband and cable channels). I can't see on the web page where it explicitly says that you don't need the old twisted pair wire, just your cable co-ax, but my understanding from talking to someone who was about to get it was that there was an rj-11 connector on the cable modem, or maybe on a separate box connected to the cable modem, with an rj-11 connector.
But the service doesn't seem all that cheap. I fail to see what AT&T, SBC, or any of these other people can't give me minimal local service for $8 to $16 a month. It seems to me that's what it should cost by now.
His web site looks great to me ! High signal-to-noise, no flash, looks great in lynx . . . I wish more people made websites like http://j2000.org/ and http://www.david-j.com !
Do you know who these people are, and how they are funding their project, and if they are likely to vanish abruptly from lack of funds ?
I looked around the web site, and at the whois entry, and while the service looked great and they seemed to have the right philosophy, I didn't see a list of volunteers or non-profit org or something like that refered to anywhere.
The problem with Yahoo is that it is trying to make money doing something (providing communications) that has such a razor thin margin, and people willing to provide it for free, out of love for the particular community.
I think yahoo is going to slowly go downhill. They started charging to ftp files to geocities pages. They will start charging to access your email through pop on April 24th. Slowly it will get more and more ad-ridden, and filled with fees and annoyances, until it is dead. It was great while it lasted though, and I obviously still use it (look at my email address) and I'm a member of several groups.
sdf.lonestar.org may add mailing list capabilities to one of it's service levels. For group owners willing to pay, it may end up being the way to go. I'm in the midst of migrating my email and web page over there now.
The mailing list delivery mechanism is can be run from a home cable modem machine (pending harassment over the TOS and AUP, of course) but you are likely to get a lot of bellyaching if you go offline for a while. On the other hand a web-accessible archive can go offline for a while and not generate hate mail, death threats, and accusations that you are hijacking the internet or something.
I like the format of the archives produced by mailman, which is at http://www.list.org/
Technically, it can happen. A state can revoke a company's charter. They can't do it arbitrarily, but they can do it. You could even take care of the obligations of the company that you cared about, such as employee's pensions and 401ks.
When all those pension funds see the MS stock in them become toilet paper, then you can bet that other big companies will be pressured to show how they aren't going to the same fate.
But those same pension funds and hurt stock holders would also weild their influence to insulate companies from that.
On the whole, I think erasing companies would be a good way to respond to some breaches of conduct. I wouldn't want it to tossed about arbitrarily, or over used.
Not really. Then all you need is a local root exploit, which is much easier to come by than a remote one. It's also a cheap on-off finger in the dike type thing -- now some manager can tell you to provide a place for people to hook up laptops, and you are back to scrambling again.
Plus, you have allowed your response to a security threat to reduce the services you offer your users. Always a sign of a lazy BOFH.
If you feel satisfied with trying to prevent a machine on the net from spoofing any old UID, why not at least throw a password on the BIOS and set it not to boot from the floppy, and then remove all the local root exploits that you think your users might be cool enough to know about ? Then at least the lusers can save their pointless work on the floppy, and you can wear your leatherman and grow your beard bushy without feeling like you're faking the Sys Admin uniform.
If you really want to do it right, you want to use AFS or coda (with kerberos maybe?) to make it so that regardless of the local user on the machine, you must have the user's password to see or modify their files. I would design the lab with the idea in mind that users could bring in their own computers and hook them up, and that root password would be public. One of the problems to solve then is how you keep one student from compromising the system to capture passwords from the next guy to log in.
Of course, I wouldn't even dream of using thin clients, I think they are a dumb idea designed to be sold to slow corporate types who subconsciously feel nervous about any system that is too flat and not hierarchical enough. A clever ploy.
I'm one of the people that used paypal to donate to dyndns.org.
I will never use paypal again, because they suddenly sent me an email giving me 1 day to provide a bank account link or have my account put into a pseudo-frozen state that would accept payments but not let me send money out. I had about $200 in the account, because a roommate who was moving paid off his last month's rent that way, not by my choice. I'd been slowly frittering it away on ebay purchases and donations to places like you and the freenetproject.
I escaped with my cash because I had a friend with lower standards than I would had succumbed to them and linked the account, and I immediately sent the money to him and he paid me back. Since then all my ebay transactions as well as donations to sdf.lonestar.org have been money orders.
That's not the point.
The point is, as a volunteer run service operating of off user donations, you cannot afford to associate yourself with paypal type shit. I'm not talking about just using the service; it is possible that without the easy method of payment that paypal offers, you might not exist, because it would be too troublesome to donate money. The point is, you are (fairly or unfairly) held to a higher standard because of your donation/volunteer status. Look at what happens to places like the Red Cross, UNICEF, etc whenever one of the once-a-decade scandals about how much their executives are paid comes out. People expect a business to be in it for the money; when you advertise what seems to be a more pure, more benevolent status, people react strongly to discovering that they are deceived.
I expect to donate more money to dyndns.org later this year, by check. But if you shill for people of paypal's caliber, I'll go back to having my machine mail the IP address to a yahoo account, or use a different service. If you want to depend on people's donations, you have to have a high level of respectability and trust. I think you should avoid associating with paypal more than is necessary for the survival of the system, associating with them doesn't help the mission to which you have obviously dovoted a good deal of time and pain.
You run the risk of sounding like you are saying "Hey look how paypal avoids me because I represent so much business ! They only steal from small pissants ! Now all you small guys just sign up with paypal so you can give me money."
Please don't go around talking about paypal more than you need to, especially not in high-traffic, high profile places like slashdot. Potential users of dyndns are going to see that, and back off donating, leaving more of a burden on users who are left.
Why did you use NFS to mount the home directories ?
Have you tried going into the lab, booting a floppy based system (linux or BSD or whatever, who cares) creating a user with the same uid/gid as the target, mounting/home over NFS, and seeing if you can read/write their files ?
No passwords needed !
I bet the geeks are always reading the email of the cute girls to see if they have boyfriends. Do the TA's keep quizes or tests in those home directories ?
People post comments because they believe other people will read them. If the audience is potentially limited, then fewer people will post, and the character of what is posted will change.
If Rob wants to increase the value of slashdot and get people coming back to use up their ad-free pages or veiw ad, here are the two single most effective things he can do to increase the value of the site:
1) A google-class search engine. By this I don't mean using site:slashdot.org in your search string; there should be an "advanced search" feature that allows you to search for threads of a certain length, parent comments only, etc.
2) Once you have 1) you will realize that the archiving of comments has to improve - threading must be preserved, among other things.
I believe that at one point in the past slashdot's search was the subject of some sort of abuse, in which people passed search queries designed to make a high load on the server. Possibly searching should be passed off to it's own box, using a copy of the database for all the archieved stuff, and only use the live database for dynamic searches. You do need to be able to search live discussions.
Right now people come to slashdot because it has a reputation for being the "weblog of record" or coffeeroom of a technical community. Slashdot is that, because people come. However, if slashdot keeps drifting towards group-thing censorship, banning posting from disagreeable IPs, as well as not presenting a good tool to plumb the opinions of the tech community on a subject (i.e., the archieving and searching), then slashdot will loose it's status, and we will all find ourselves sitting around like a bunch of old users of the The Well whining about the good old days when slashdot was so famous it attracted goatse.cx fans to every article.
There is still a lot of good stuff at the bottom of the barrel in every discussion. AC posts in stories about particular corporations, for example, often provide interesting information (if uncollaborated). When the next Enron hits the fan, if people can point to anonymous comments deep within slashdot from 'way back and say "it was first called here", that will cement slashdot's position. But many of those comments are currently thrown away.
The answer to why GNU propaganda is in the technical documentation is simple: the GNU people are so narrow mindedly obsessed with their campaign, that they infiltrate the message into everything they write.
I'm just saying that seeing the out-of-place GNU propaganda in the gcc info manual makes me feel good, it doesn't bother me at all. I'm also suggesting that given the various attempts on our freedom which are being made, others might re-consider their discomfort with it, and decide to be GNU fanatics too.
There are some things which you SHOULD be single minded and obsessive about.
Maybe in that case what you did was smartest, grabbing the deal.
Just keep in mind that you said "I bid what I could afford." That's not necessarily a real auction. In a real auction you often pay a lot less than you could afford, that's the point of the auction -- you pay no more than you need to. Your point of "I paid no more than I could afford" is very different.
You say "the bidder was kicked by ebay and the seller couldn't contact him." Do you really know that the seller and bidder are the not the same person, or two friends, who were just making sure that you "paid what you could afford" and not a penny less ? The possibility exists that you could have gotten that auction for your initial bid, not your final bid.
That's the scam I am trying to make you aware of. And one way to stop it is to not accept the kind of deals you found yourself offered. Of course that means that a lot of good, honest deals won't come off; and perhaps it's the hit from the economic transactions that don't happen due to suspicion that are the biggest cost of scammers like these.
I realize that you are talking about a stylistic issue. You don't want to consider the license wars as part of figuring out what flags to use on the command line, you don't want to delve into Linux vs. GNU/Linux name wars when you are just trying to figure out what flags to add to the makefile for the new gcc.
I'm saying this annoying insertion of philosophy into everything is annoying for me too, but it is also why I trust the FSF, and why I am willing to give them money.
And the BSD license and feudalism thing . . . I almost removed that line from my post when preveiwing because I was sure someone would mod me "flamebait" just for having those to words in a post. But I'll explain. The BSD license or software community doesn't promote feudalism or any other particular political system.
What they do do is trade with an enemy who does. BSD code can potentially be used by people who wish to create a caste-style society, where your access to the immense resources of the computer revolution is regulated and metered.
If Microsoft and the other proprietary software people were not so powerful, I wouldn't care. But when they represent a clear threat to my way of life, I tend to veiw with suspicion anyone who helps them in any way, no matter how small and inconsequential. Continuing my string of (very imperfect and possibly confusing;) ) analogies, if you trade with England today you are a businessman. If you traded with England in 1778 you might get your house burned by angry neighbors who felt their way of life threatened, and justly. While Microsoft and similarly powerful interests maintain a credible threat to my ability to use computers, I'm going to take a pretty jaundiced veiw of some BSD user complaining about GNU propaganda.
Hopefully, five or ten years from now, the level of the average consumer's computer education will have risen to the point where large numbers of people can switch to linux if necessary, consumer awareness will have increased to the point where Microsoft's business tactics (and the many who would emumlate them) result in big consumer backlashes, and Microsoft is once again competeing on the merits of their products and focusing on re-earning trust. Then the GNU movement will become less important. Chapters on philosophy in compiler documentation will seem as odd as the Cold War anti-communist propaganda seems today, and they will disappear.
The license doesn't prevent you from removing those sections and releasing your own "non-political" version of the gcc documentation.
Your comment about "the freedom of people writing the software" versus the users is completely off base. It's like a slavery appologist saying the Emancipation Proclamation focused too much on the freedom of laborers and not enough on property rights. The only "freedom" being denied writers under that system is the "freedom" to control other writers. By choosing to write software under a FreeBSD style license, you are leaving a greater range of actions open to yourself -- and that includes actions which completely prevent other people from becoming writers.
I think someone who writes code under the BSD license and justified by your arguments would be using sophistry to hide the fact that the tools they create may be used be Microsoft to control and restrict information to the point that other people cannot even do what they did.
Think back to the first time you used BSD, and all the delightful learning experiences you no doubt had along the way. The sense of freedom that can come from finding out how to do something that seemed mysterious and hard, and learning that it is actually simple and you can do it ! Don't you want future generations of programmers to be able to have the same experiences ? Then you should not support the creation of code and tools under anything but the GNU license.
The GPL has a fair symmetry to it, a kind of resonance with the rule Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The BSD license creates a system which has the potential to incredibly and unfairly asymetric, making a system where only a small class of people get to write code, and the rest of us just get to pay. This is not a humourous plot from the Illuminati trilogy; real people, powerful people, are working to create that system today.
The propaganda that suffuses the GNU documentation is necessary to make sure we can do what we want with our computers. Otherwise the computer revolution will be hijacked by people who want to create a kind of modern feudalism. I wouldn't want the GNU rants to disappear any more than I would want policemen to stop using the Miranda warnings, or schools to stop teaching the Declaration of Independence. There are societies in the world which have neglected discussion and focus on freedom for the practical content and how to make money; and China is not the kind of society I want to live in.
Free Software is better than whatever "Open Source" is. And not enough people know that. And I already run "virtual rms" (vrms - a debian program that scans your machine for non-free packages at tells you RMS would be proud/disappointed accordingly), and I have no problem integrating it into ls. Although emacs dired mode seems more appropriate.
I trust the FSF to maintain their total and complete, very literal minded dedication to Freedom. Their admittedly sometimes annoying prostelytizing is part of why I trust them. FreeBSD might be 10 times as fast and technically better than a GNU system on Linux or HURD, but if I'm going to invest the time and effort to learn to use something, I'm going to committ to the system that seems willing to committ to not fucking me.
If you want a propaganda free system, use Solaris or FreeBSD.
You should refuse to buy anything if you are contacted but aren't the winning bidder.
It makes you vulnerable to shill bidding. The seller or a friend of the seller can bid against the auction, so they feel out your maximum price. That's why the winning bidder had zero feedback dumbass, it was a fake account created for this purpose.
So now rather than paying $1 more than the maximum someone else would have paid, you paid the maximum you were willing to.
If someone tries to contact you as the second-runner in an auction, just don't buy. Otherwise you are destroying the "auction" nature of ebay.
That remark reminds me of the "reputation" based sub-cultures -- I think they were called "Moderators" and "Regulators" -- that populated Bruce Sterling's book "Distraction." Maybe we should look into starting something like this up, bringing the sci-fi into reality.
If no one sees pop-up ads, then they will be useless, and will eventually go away.
You have to go after your less computer savy friends and help them turn them off. Think of it in terms of who browses the web the most, and focus on the heavy users first, so that you eliminate the most potential page views possible.
This is the best place to go to configure mozilla not to do pop-ups. I would just cut and paste all the examples into prefs.js, and then remove them if you discover that one particular site you like abosultely has to have some javascript feature or another.
The war on pop-ups is best fought not by writing letters to corporations and webmasters and begging them for mercy; rather, cut off their food supply and let them find their own way. Think of all your less computer savy friends and family as the slow, dumb buffalo the Indians feed off of; remove the buffalo, the Indians get a lot more manageable. It's not the kindest analogy, but if you want to fight a war, pick your strategies from those that win.
I'm sorry, but the interface to that infopop stuff is just plain foul. I would pay to avoid it. Obviously I go there sometimes because I know about it, but I'd go there a lot more if they has slash or scope, and I'd probably read it religously if there was a usenet feed.
It's all one long column, no threading ! It's hard to trace a "conversation" through it with replies scattered around all quoting the parent in full.
Free will take over: example - sdf.lonestar.org
on
End of the Free Internet
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Most of the people here are ranting about banner ads, and slashdot subscriptions. That's not the main point I believe.
The main point is the supposed disappearence of free services on the internet. There are many free services that are stable and around for the long haul. The trick is, to latch on to one that is NOT run by a for-profit corporation.
The original promise of the internet still exists ! It is possible to publish information to millions of people so cheaply that any noodle can do it ! Of course it doesn't cost exactly nothing, but it is cheap enough that it is conceivable that it will eventually be a commonly available utility like service. (It ain't there yet, but if the cost were to drop 50% every 18 months (seems plausible, especially once the recession finishes flushing out a lot of the dead weight) then in a decade we could be there.)
What this means is that a lot of companies trying to make business and justify fairly huge capital investments are just going to get blown out of the water by hobbiests doing it for fun. That's ok, in fact it's good. It's good because we need to invest a lot of money in various projects that will never be done by hobbiests -- getting into space, curing various diseases, physical infrastructure, etc. We need to chace a lot of these suits and corporate bureaucrats out of the internet feild and back into the kinds of big capital things they they necessary for -- like putting up multi-million dollar wind farms so we are not so dependant on oil.
So from the point of view of you, the little guy, the trick is to find the cheap free service that is being run by a non-profit club or other organization. One example is sdf.lonestar.org, non profit organization offering unix shells, web space, virtual hosting, and other services. It's not free, you have to give donations to get various levels of service. (The basic unix shell and email address is free.) These guys have been around since 1987, and I have a feeling that they will be around for a long time, especially as for-profit companies abandon the area and move to business pursuits that require and justify lots of capital.
Similarly, look at dyndns.org. Those guys are not free, they are running off of your donations. But Dyndns and SDF will be here when Yahoo and Geocities finally kick me off the free email and website, because while it is cheap (not free) to provide those services, there just isn't enough money in it to justify investing people's pensions in the stock to support it. And they are close enough to free that it doesn't matter if you have a job.
In summary, what I see happening here is exactly the opposite of what everyone else here seems to be observing. There is no "end of free." That's just an illusion you get by counting press announcements of bad businesses in their death throes. In reality, I believe more and more people are using non-business services on the net: the numbers of dyndns and SDF users are going up and up, and those organizations are much more permanent than the catalog of nonsense you see on that endoffree site.
The long term trend is that connection fees will come down; bandwidth fees will come down, even if more is not available, but that's ok because as people learn how to use the net they use less bandwidth; and in the end the net will be a collection of various non-profit organizations providing services, with a layer of for-profit high-end services still there, of course, but only for a pretty small percentage.
I think the major strategy on our part is to make sure the net remains a peer-to-peer and not a hierarchical structure. To do this we have two major tools: 1) bind together in organizations like dyndns and sdf to provide what services do need a centralized and large investment, and 2) make sure that cable companies, ISPs, and DSL companies are forced to keep their service symmetrical, i.e., that you can provide services for free from your own machine.
In fact, I can't, so I'll just quote the previous poster (I wouldn't want that beautiful prose being lost to posterity just because Slash doesn't archive AC posts):
" It's quite shocking to me that people are still wading through a 2000+ post story and marking things 'offtopic'. If you've ever had a conversation that didn't vary in topic over the course of an entire week, then you are a depressingly boring person. But that's not surprising if you spend all of your free time on slashdot looking for comments to mod down. In case you haven't noticed, a new topic has emerged. Any comment posted to this story since 3 days ago that *isn't* blatant crapflood filler with the sole purpose of pushing the story up a notch in the Slashdot Hall of Fame is now offtopic. We are on a mission. Whether or not we 'congratulate' rob and kathleen in the course of completing our mission is incidental. Modding us down will not slow our progress, but in doing so you show yourself to be against the mission. As pointed out in an earlier post, to be against the mission is to be in favor of terror and assholes like Osama bin Laden. If you love Osama, then mod me down. Mod me down and burn in hell."
Slashdot Mirror
When they described the nuclear batteries they specifically mentioned beta radiation. They vaguely state that beta radiation is "energetic electrons" and can be harnessed.
I suspect what they may be refering to is a device that has a beta emitter and some compound that scintillates (emitts little flashes of light when hit by a beta particle) layered on it, and then a relatively ordinary photo-voltaic cell on top of that. Such a device is described on page 522 of James Bamford's "Body of Secretes", and he says that the device is now in use (for powering bugs that have to be small, require low power, and need to operate for as long as possible, and you can't go back to change the batteries).
The more common nuclear battery has enough material to actually heat up, and runs a thermocouple.
If the NSA is actually using beta radiation batteries, I wish they would commercialize that and have someone sell them. On one hand, we don't want nuclear materials to proliforate too much in everyday objects, because then the landfills start getting slightly hot and put low level contaminants into groundwater, etc. On the other hand, a certain number of people die every year from being in a house where the battery on the smoke detector has run out; perhaps these nuclear batteries could be approved only for smoke detectors.
I want to use them to power my army of tiny robots that will go out at night and collect droped change around the parking meters downtown, hidding in the bushes and storm drains by day. My plan to lay around posting to slashdot all day while my robot army brings me a steady income will soon be complete !
Don't you think that VISA rejected the terms of the original agreement by adding their own new requirements ?
Of course I didn't expect VISA to accept my terms. I did, however, expose the fact that while they wanted to limit my activity with the money they gave me, they were not willing to let me similarly limit their activity with the money I gave them. In addition to exposing this hypocracy, I got the added enjoyment of watching them lie !
I think it was worth it. You should try it next time they send you an update to your serfdom contract. Certified letter: $3.90. Stamp: $0.34 Warm glow of watching a self-righteous and pompous entity sqirm under the exposure of their hypocracy and in confusion also throw in a free falsehood: priceless. Back to MasterCard !
\documentclass{letter}
\begin{document}
\address{Robert G. Ristroph \\
4533 Avenue A \#208 \\ ( no longer my real address, don't write me here)
Austin, TX 78751 }
\signature{Robert G. Ristroph}
\begin{letter}{ U.S. Bank National Association N.D. \\
P.O. Box 6300 \\
Fargo, ND 58125-6300 }
\opening{Dear Sir or Madam,}
I read with some interest an unsigned note appearing in a bill for my VISA card (Account No. 4190 0043 1516 9544) (don't worry, it's not a valid account anymore!) on February 7th, 2001. The note is titled in large letters ``IMPORTANT CHANGES TO THE CARDHOLDER AGREEMENT GOVERNING YOUR ACCOUNT ISSUED BY U.S. BANK NATIONAL ASSOCIATION ND''. The note states that the late payment fee is \$27.00 the first two times inside any twelve months, and \$35.00 for additional late payments. It also states the following, which I quote in full:
\begin{quote}
Illegal Purchases:
Your card must not be used for any unlawful purpose (for example, funding any account that is set up to facilitate online gambling). You agree that you will not use your card or account for any transaction that is illegal under applicable law.
\end{quote}
I don't want to disagree with this and thus cancel my account. Rather, I would like to agree with it and ask for the following clarifications:
\begin{enumerate}
\item Does the sentence ``Your card must not be used for any unlawful purpose (for example, funding any account that is set up to facilitate online gambling)'' mean that you are giving me legal advice that ``facilitating online gambling'' is against the law in my jurisdiction (or any other) ?
\item Is U.S. Bank National Association ND a law enforcement organization, a representative of a law enforcement organization, or empowered with any law enforcement powers ?
\item May I use this card and account to purchase insurance online ?
\end{enumerate}
I also read with intense interest the additional printing on the reverse side:
\begin{quote}
IMPORTANT CHANGES TO YOUR AGREEMENT
If you do not agree to the changes in terms, \emph{you must notify us in writing within 25 days of the effective date.} If you notify us that you do not agree to the new terms, your account will be closed but \emph{your balance may be paid off in full or under the terms of your existing Cardholder Agreement.}
If you do not notify us, you will have agreed to the these changes in this notice. By using your account after the effective date, you will have accepted the new terms, even if the notification period has not expired.
\end{quote}
I find it interesting that we can amend our agreement and that failure to object or use of the card constitutes agreement to the amendment. I am hereby notifying you of the following changes to our agreement, effective April 25:
\begin{enumerate}
\item[Illegal Activity] Reciprocal to the new terms you instituted that restrict me from using the Card Account for illegal activity such as online gambling, I restrict you by these new terms from using any moneys I pay to you for any illegal activity, including but not limited to bribery, undisclosed compensation of corporate officers, illegal tax avoidance schemes, illegal campaign contributions, payments to illegally hired workers, or any expenditure unproperly reported in your SEC filings.
\item[Account Limit] The account limit on this card is now set to \$200,000. This includes merchant purchases as well as cash advances.
\item[Yearly Interest] The yearly compounded interest on the account is now two percent.
\item[Minimum Payment] The minimum payment will never exceed \$1,500 regardless of the balance.
\item[Disclosure of Account Information] U.S. Bank Association ND will not disclose any information on this account, including but not limited to my name, social security number, address, purchasing history, or other account activity, to anyone, unless forced to disclose the information by a court order or search warrant; and should U.S. Bank National Association ND have to disclose such information, they will promptly notify me of the information revealed and the party receiving the information.
\end{enumerate}
If you do not agree to these terms, you must notify me within 25 days of the effective date (that is, 25 days after April 25, 2001). If you notify me that you do not agree to the new terms, the account will be closed, under the terms of the old agreement. If you do not notify me, you will have agreed to the these changes in this notice. By using the account (accepting a charge I make) after the effective date, you will have accepted these terms, even if the notification period has not expired.
\closing{Sincerely,}
\end{letter}
\end{document}
After I sent those guys this polite letter, you know what happened ? I got a note from them saying they were canceling my account "at your request" ! I think it is quite plain I didn't want my account to be canceled at all, and it was THEIR wish not to be bound by my new terms that lead to them canceling our aggreement.
As a VISA patron, what are your thoughts on these revelations ? I want to hear your opinion.
But the service doesn't seem all that cheap. I fail to see what AT&T, SBC, or any of these other people can't give me minimal local service for $8 to $16 a month. It seems to me that's what it should cost by now.
His web site looks great to me ! High signal-to-noise, no flash, looks great in lynx . . . I wish more people made websites like http://j2000.org/ and http://www.david-j.com !
Do you know who these people are, and how they are funding their project, and if they are likely to vanish abruptly from lack of funds ?
I looked around the web site, and at the whois entry, and while the service looked great and they seemed to have the right philosophy, I didn't see a list of volunteers or non-profit org or something like that refered to anywhere.
I think yahoo is going to slowly go downhill. They started charging to ftp files to geocities pages. They will start charging to access your email through pop on April 24th. Slowly it will get more and more ad-ridden, and filled with fees and annoyances, until it is dead. It was great while it lasted though, and I obviously still use it (look at my email address) and I'm a member of several groups.
sdf.lonestar.org may add mailing list capabilities to one of it's service levels. For group owners willing to pay, it may end up being the way to go. I'm in the midst of migrating my email and web page over there now.
The mailing list delivery mechanism is can be run from a home cable modem machine (pending harassment over the TOS and AUP, of course) but you are likely to get a lot of bellyaching if you go offline for a while. On the other hand a web-accessible archive can go offline for a while and not generate hate mail, death threats, and accusations that you are hijacking the internet or something.
I like the format of the archives produced by mailman, which is at http://www.list.org/
Technically, it can happen. A state can revoke a company's charter. They can't do it arbitrarily, but they can do it. You could even take care of the obligations of the company that you cared about, such as employee's pensions and 401ks.
When all those pension funds see the MS stock in them become toilet paper, then you can bet that other big companies will be pressured to show how they aren't going to the same fate.
But those same pension funds and hurt stock holders would also weild their influence to insulate companies from that.
On the whole, I think erasing companies would be a good way to respond to some breaches of conduct. I wouldn't want it to tossed about arbitrarily, or over used.
Not really. Then all you need is a local root exploit, which is much easier to come by than a remote one. It's also a cheap on-off finger in the dike type thing -- now some manager can tell you to provide a place for people to hook up laptops, and you are back to scrambling again.
Plus, you have allowed your response to a security threat to reduce the services you offer your users. Always a sign of a lazy BOFH.
If you feel satisfied with trying to prevent a machine on the net from spoofing any old UID, why not at least throw a password on the BIOS and set it not to boot from the floppy, and then remove all the local root exploits that you think your users might be cool enough to know about ? Then at least the lusers can save their pointless work on the floppy, and you can wear your leatherman and grow your beard bushy without feeling like you're faking the Sys Admin uniform.
If you really want to do it right, you want to use AFS or coda (with kerberos maybe?) to make it so that regardless of the local user on the machine, you must have the user's password to see or modify their files. I would design the lab with the idea in mind that users could bring in their own computers and hook them up, and that root password would be public. One of the problems to solve then is how you keep one student from compromising the system to capture passwords from the next guy to log in.
Of course, I wouldn't even dream of using thin clients, I think they are a dumb idea designed to be sold to slow corporate types who subconsciously feel nervous about any system that is too flat and not hierarchical enough. A clever ploy.
Hi Tim.
I'm one of the people that used paypal to donate to dyndns.org.
I will never use paypal again, because they suddenly sent me an email giving me 1 day to provide a bank account link or have my account put into a pseudo-frozen state that would accept payments but not let me send money out. I had about $200 in the account, because a roommate who was moving paid off his last month's rent that way, not by my choice. I'd been slowly frittering it away on ebay purchases and donations to places like you and the freenetproject.
I escaped with my cash because I had a friend with lower standards than I would had succumbed to them and linked the account, and I immediately sent the money to him and he paid me back. Since then all my ebay transactions as well as donations to sdf.lonestar.org have been money orders.
That's not the point.
The point is, as a volunteer run service operating of off user donations, you cannot afford to associate yourself with paypal type shit. I'm not talking about just using the service; it is possible that without the easy method of payment that paypal offers, you might not exist, because it would be too troublesome to donate money. The point is, you are (fairly or unfairly) held to a higher standard because of your donation/volunteer status. Look at what happens to places like the Red Cross, UNICEF, etc whenever one of the once-a-decade scandals about how much their executives are paid comes out. People expect a business to be in it for the money; when you advertise what seems to be a more pure, more benevolent status, people react strongly to discovering that they are deceived.
I expect to donate more money to dyndns.org later this year, by check. But if you shill for people of paypal's caliber, I'll go back to having my machine mail the IP address to a yahoo account, or use a different service. If you want to depend on people's donations, you have to have a high level of respectability and trust. I think you should avoid associating with paypal more than is necessary for the survival of the system, associating with them doesn't help the mission to which you have obviously dovoted a good deal of time and pain.
You run the risk of sounding like you are saying "Hey look how paypal avoids me because I represent so much business ! They only steal from small pissants ! Now all you small guys just sign up with paypal so you can give me money."
Please don't go around talking about paypal more than you need to, especially not in high-traffic, high profile places like slashdot. Potential users of dyndns are going to see that, and back off donating, leaving more of a burden on users who are left.
You used OpenBSD because it was more secure.
/home over NFS, and seeing if you can read/write their files ?
Why did you use NFS to mount the home directories ?
Have you tried going into the lab, booting a floppy based system (linux or BSD or whatever, who cares) creating a user with the same uid/gid as the target, mounting
No passwords needed !
I bet the geeks are always reading the email of the cute girls to see if they have boyfriends. Do the TA's keep quizes or tests in those home directories ?
People post comments because they believe other people will read them. If the audience is potentially limited, then fewer people will post, and the character of what is posted will change.
If Rob wants to increase the value of slashdot and get people coming back to use up their ad-free pages or veiw ad, here are the two single most effective things he can do to increase the value of the site:
1) A google-class search engine. By this I don't mean using site:slashdot.org in your search string; there should be an "advanced search" feature that allows you to search for threads of a certain length, parent comments only, etc.
2) Once you have 1) you will realize that the archiving of comments has to improve - threading must be preserved, among other things.
I believe that at one point in the past slashdot's search was the subject of some sort of abuse, in which people passed search queries designed to make a high load on the server. Possibly searching should be passed off to it's own box, using a copy of the database for all the archieved stuff, and only use the live database for dynamic searches. You do need to be able to search live discussions.
Right now people come to slashdot because it has a reputation for being the "weblog of record" or coffeeroom of a technical community. Slashdot is that, because people come. However, if slashdot keeps drifting towards group-thing censorship, banning posting from disagreeable IPs, as well as not presenting a good tool to plumb the opinions of the tech community on a subject (i.e., the archieving and searching), then slashdot will loose it's status, and we will all find ourselves sitting around like a bunch of old users of the The Well whining about the good old days when slashdot was so famous it attracted goatse.cx fans to every article.
There is still a lot of good stuff at the bottom of the barrel in every discussion. AC posts in stories about particular corporations, for example, often provide interesting information (if uncollaborated). When the next Enron hits the fan, if people can point to anonymous comments deep within slashdot from 'way back and say "it was first called here", that will cement slashdot's position. But many of those comments are currently thrown away.
The answer to why GNU propaganda is in the technical documentation is simple: the GNU people are so narrow mindedly obsessed with their campaign, that they infiltrate the message into everything they write.
I'm just saying that seeing the out-of-place GNU propaganda in the gcc info manual makes me feel good, it doesn't bother me at all. I'm also suggesting that given the various attempts on our freedom which are being made, others might re-consider their discomfort with it, and decide to be GNU fanatics too.
There are some things which you SHOULD be single minded and obsessive about.
Maybe in that case what you did was smartest, grabbing the deal.
Just keep in mind that you said "I bid what I could afford." That's not necessarily a real auction. In a real auction you often pay a lot less than you could afford, that's the point of the auction -- you pay no more than you need to. Your point of "I paid no more than I could afford" is very different.
You say "the bidder was kicked by ebay and the seller couldn't contact him." Do you really know that the seller and bidder are the not the same person, or two friends, who were just making sure that you "paid what you could afford" and not a penny less ? The possibility exists that you could have gotten that auction for your initial bid, not your final bid.
That's the scam I am trying to make you aware of. And one way to stop it is to not accept the kind of deals you found yourself offered. Of course that means that a lot of good, honest deals won't come off; and perhaps it's the hit from the economic transactions that don't happen due to suspicion that are the biggest cost of scammers like these.
I realize that you are talking about a stylistic issue. You don't want to consider the license wars as part of figuring out what flags to use on the command line, you don't want to delve into Linux vs. GNU/Linux name wars when you are just trying to figure out what flags to add to the makefile for the new gcc.
;) ) analogies, if you trade with England today you are a businessman. If you traded with England in 1778 you might get your house burned by angry neighbors who felt their way of life threatened, and justly. While Microsoft and similarly powerful interests maintain a credible threat to my ability to use computers, I'm going to take a pretty jaundiced veiw of some BSD user complaining about GNU propaganda.
I'm saying this annoying insertion of philosophy into everything is annoying for me too, but it is also why I trust the FSF, and why I am willing to give them money.
And the BSD license and feudalism thing . . . I almost removed that line from my post when preveiwing because I was sure someone would mod me "flamebait" just for having those to words in a post. But I'll explain. The BSD license or software community doesn't promote feudalism or any other particular political system.
What they do do is trade with an enemy who does. BSD code can potentially be used by people who wish to create a caste-style society, where your access to the immense resources of the computer revolution is regulated and metered.
If Microsoft and the other proprietary software people were not so powerful, I wouldn't care. But when they represent a clear threat to my way of life, I tend to veiw with suspicion anyone who helps them in any way, no matter how small and inconsequential. Continuing my string of (very imperfect and possibly confusing
Hopefully, five or ten years from now, the level of the average consumer's computer education will have risen to the point where large numbers of people can switch to linux if necessary, consumer awareness will have increased to the point where Microsoft's business tactics (and the many who would emumlate them) result in big consumer backlashes, and Microsoft is once again competeing on the merits of their products and focusing on re-earning trust. Then the GNU movement will become less important. Chapters on philosophy in compiler documentation will seem as odd as the Cold War anti-communist propaganda seems today, and they will disappear.
Your comment about "the freedom of people writing the software" versus the users is completely off base. It's like a slavery appologist saying the Emancipation Proclamation focused too much on the freedom of laborers and not enough on property rights. The only "freedom" being denied writers under that system is the "freedom" to control other writers. By choosing to write software under a FreeBSD style license, you are leaving a greater range of actions open to yourself -- and that includes actions which completely prevent other people from becoming writers.
I think someone who writes code under the BSD license and justified by your arguments would be using sophistry to hide the fact that the tools they create may be used be Microsoft to control and restrict information to the point that other people cannot even do what they did.
Think back to the first time you used BSD, and all the delightful learning experiences you no doubt had along the way. The sense of freedom that can come from finding out how to do something that seemed mysterious and hard, and learning that it is actually simple and you can do it ! Don't you want future generations of programmers to be able to have the same experiences ? Then you should not support the creation of code and tools under anything but the GNU license.
The GPL has a fair symmetry to it, a kind of resonance with the rule Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The BSD license creates a system which has the potential to incredibly and unfairly asymetric, making a system where only a small class of people get to write code, and the rest of us just get to pay. This is not a humourous plot from the Illuminati trilogy; real people, powerful people, are working to create that system today.
The propaganda that suffuses the GNU documentation is necessary to make sure we can do what we want with our computers. Otherwise the computer revolution will be hijacked by people who want to create a kind of modern feudalism. I wouldn't want the GNU rants to disappear any more than I would want policemen to stop using the Miranda warnings, or schools to stop teaching the Declaration of Independence. There are societies in the world which have neglected discussion and focus on freedom for the practical content and how to make money; and China is not the kind of society I want to live in.
I trust the FSF to maintain their total and complete, very literal minded dedication to Freedom. Their admittedly sometimes annoying prostelytizing is part of why I trust them. FreeBSD might be 10 times as fast and technically better than a GNU system on Linux or HURD, but if I'm going to invest the time and effort to learn to use something, I'm going to committ to the system that seems willing to committ to not fucking me.
If you want a propaganda free system, use Solaris or FreeBSD.
If it really was worth $1500, then how did you get out bid if your max bid was $100 ? Why wouldn't you set your max bid at, say, $1490 ?
In the senario you describe, it does make sense for you to buy it, but neither the seller nor you are really using ebay as an auction.
You should refuse to buy anything if you are contacted but aren't the winning bidder.
It makes you vulnerable to shill bidding. The seller or a friend of the seller can bid against the auction, so they feel out your maximum price. That's why the winning bidder had zero feedback dumbass, it was a fake account created for this purpose.
So now rather than paying $1 more than the maximum someone else would have paid, you paid the maximum you were willing to.
If someone tries to contact you as the second-runner in an auction, just don't buy. Otherwise you are destroying the "auction" nature of ebay.
You, SIR, are WORSE THAN HITLER, and if I can get you to win this auction, I will KICK YOUR ASS.
That remark reminds me of the "reputation" based sub-cultures -- I think they were called "Moderators" and "Regulators" -- that populated Bruce Sterling's book "Distraction." Maybe we should look into starting something like this up, bringing the sci-fi into reality.
You have to go after your less computer savy friends and help them turn them off. Think of it in terms of who browses the web the most, and focus on the heavy users first, so that you eliminate the most potential page views possible.
This is the best place to go to configure mozilla not to do pop-ups. I would just cut and paste all the examples into prefs.js, and then remove them if you discover that one particular site you like abosultely has to have some javascript feature or another.
The war on pop-ups is best fought not by writing letters to corporations and webmasters and begging them for mercy; rather, cut off their food supply and let them find their own way. Think of all your less computer savy friends and family as the slow, dumb buffalo the Indians feed off of; remove the buffalo, the Indians get a lot more manageable. It's not the kindest analogy, but if you want to fight a war, pick your strategies from those that win.
I'm sorry, but the interface to that infopop stuff is just plain foul. I would pay to avoid it. Obviously I go there sometimes because I know about it, but I'd go there a lot more if they has slash or scope, and I'd probably read it religously if there was a usenet feed.
It's all one long column, no threading ! It's hard to trace a "conversation" through it with replies scattered around all quoting the parent in full.
The main point is the supposed disappearence of free services on the internet. There are many free services that are stable and around for the long haul. The trick is, to latch on to one that is NOT run by a for-profit corporation.
The original promise of the internet still exists ! It is possible to publish information to millions of people so cheaply that any noodle can do it ! Of course it doesn't cost exactly nothing, but it is cheap enough that it is conceivable that it will eventually be a commonly available utility like service. (It ain't there yet, but if the cost were to drop 50% every 18 months (seems plausible, especially once the recession finishes flushing out a lot of the dead weight) then in a decade we could be there.)
What this means is that a lot of companies trying to make business and justify fairly huge capital investments are just going to get blown out of the water by hobbiests doing it for fun. That's ok, in fact it's good. It's good because we need to invest a lot of money in various projects that will never be done by hobbiests -- getting into space, curing various diseases, physical infrastructure, etc. We need to chace a lot of these suits and corporate bureaucrats out of the internet feild and back into the kinds of big capital things they they necessary for -- like putting up multi-million dollar wind farms so we are not so dependant on oil.
So from the point of view of you, the little guy, the trick is to find the cheap free service that is being run by a non-profit club or other organization. One example is sdf.lonestar.org, non profit organization offering unix shells, web space, virtual hosting, and other services. It's not free, you have to give donations to get various levels of service. (The basic unix shell and email address is free.) These guys have been around since 1987, and I have a feeling that they will be around for a long time, especially as for-profit companies abandon the area and move to business pursuits that require and justify lots of capital.
Similarly, look at dyndns.org. Those guys are not free, they are running off of your donations. But Dyndns and SDF will be here when Yahoo and Geocities finally kick me off the free email and website, because while it is cheap (not free) to provide those services, there just isn't enough money in it to justify investing people's pensions in the stock to support it. And they are close enough to free that it doesn't matter if you have a job.
In summary, what I see happening here is exactly the opposite of what everyone else here seems to be observing. There is no "end of free." That's just an illusion you get by counting press announcements of bad businesses in their death throes. In reality, I believe more and more people are using non-business services on the net: the numbers of dyndns and SDF users are going up and up, and those organizations are much more permanent than the catalog of nonsense you see on that endoffree site.
The long term trend is that connection fees will come down; bandwidth fees will come down, even if more is not available, but that's ok because as people learn how to use the net they use less bandwidth; and in the end the net will be a collection of various non-profit organizations providing services, with a layer of for-profit high-end services still there, of course, but only for a pretty small percentage.
I think the major strategy on our part is to make sure the net remains a peer-to-peer and not a hierarchical structure. To do this we have two major tools: 1) bind together in organizations like dyndns and sdf to provide what services do need a centralized and large investment, and 2) make sure that cable companies, ISPs, and DSL companies are forced to keep their service symmetrical, i.e., that you can provide services for free from your own machine.
Hear hear !
I could not have said it better.
In fact, I can't, so I'll just quote the previous poster (I wouldn't want that beautiful prose being lost to posterity just because Slash doesn't archive AC posts):
" It's quite shocking to me that people are still wading through a 2000+ post story and marking things 'offtopic'. If you've ever had a conversation that didn't vary in topic over the course of an entire week, then you are a depressingly boring person. But that's not surprising if you spend all of your free time on slashdot looking for comments to mod down. In case you haven't noticed, a new topic has emerged. Any comment posted to this story since 3 days ago that *isn't* blatant crapflood filler with the sole purpose of pushing the story up a notch in the Slashdot Hall of Fame is now offtopic. We are on a mission. Whether or not we 'congratulate' rob and kathleen in the course of completing our mission is incidental. Modding us down will not slow our progress, but in doing so you show yourself to be against the mission. As pointed out in an earlier post, to be against the mission is to be in favor of terror and assholes like Osama bin Laden. If you love Osama, then mod me down. Mod me down and burn in hell."