While I agree that citizens' privacy needs to be protected, obviously there is a much greater focus on terrorism since the September 11 attacks, and the US has engaged in conflicts in two countries. It seems only natural that more activities of a secret nature would be taking place, now that we have clearly been made aware that there are people out there that actually would launch an attack on the United States, instead of substance-free posturing.
However, since we cannot really know what the secret requests were for, we cannot simply acquiesce to the potential eroding of our civil liberties. I just think that secrecy (at least not necessarily) == (evil|bigbrother|invasionofprivacy), which is the inevitable conclusion some here will reach.
Or do the old-fashioned way, and toss them in your hosts file, and map to 0.0.0.0 - a "valid" ip that errors out instantly. I have several thousand lines in my hosts file that blocks various ad sites and whatnot. Just google for "hosts file" or something like that, and there are many prefab hosts files to download or copy and paste into your own.
Windows ME and AOL 9.0 Super-Dee-Duper Turbocharged Dialup-on-Steroids!!1!eleven
Guaranteed to scare the most seasoned geek:
You: "How are you, Grandmother?" Your Grandma: "Why do all these nekked women keep popping up? Could I have a phish? 'Cause I read that Bill Gates tries to get everyone sick by adaware-ing that clickety-click-thing." You: <begin shaking in terror> Your Grandma: "Oh, and how come my computer doesn't fax? You said it could send faxes, so I jammed what I wanted to fax into the cup holder thingy. Then that little box - ya' know, the one on the ground, connected to the computer? - started making some funny sounds. So I just unplugged it from the wall. Then, the strangest thing happened. My computer went blank! So anyways, I want you to come over here tomorrow and fix that little box thing. Seems I need it for my computer to work." You: <sobbing>
Although the name may sound like it is a wimpy CMS, ezPublish is one of the most impressive CMS's around. I am currently in the process of adopting it as the base for my employer's website redesign.
Yes, it is wrote by Norwegians, but their English is superior to that of many native speakers. Also, they have an amazing model for translations and versioning (keeps the 10 most recent versions of a document by default). It also has a nifty nodular system of organizing pages.
At first, it seems a little confusing, especially when the manual starts talking about nodes and objects and IDs and whatnot, but it eventually makes sense. Once that happens, you have a great deal of creative abilities, with templates and the such. I shied away from many other CMSs because they assumed (or at least appeared to assume that) you wanted to do one certain thing, and God help you if you wanted to do something else. ezPublish really seems flexible.
Oh, and to the "CMSs only take an hour or so" group: I wrote a CMS working with one other person, and we easily put 500 man-hours into developing it, adding custom functionalities, and making it look acceptable to non-technical folks (we still don't have a graphical interface, just HTML menus and tables with a sprinkling of Javascript).
Now Google indexes blogspam twice as much. Hopefully, the blog index won't affect Pagerank. If it did, then we would just see more and more blog spam. As an administrator of a small blog site, I have enough trouble as it is keeping up with the blog spam.
I personally love to go geocaching. I am not into a lot of outdoors-type activities, such as camping, etc., but I have a blast geocaching! Equipment-wise, I use a Garmin eTrex Vista, Palm Tungsten T3, and (on longer caching days) my Acer Aspire 1362LCi laptop.
In terms of software, I use GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife, http://gsak.net/) for the majority of data manipulation and transferal, and Garmin MapSource (with Topographical Maps) to do mapping and routing stuff. On my Palm I use CacheMate (http://www.smittyware.com/palm/cachemate/), which provides a cache-oriented interface, not just an html viewer, although some are satisfied with offline version of the cache description pages.
I do subscribe to the premium service at geocaching.com. The main benefit of this is that you can create specific search queries, and have them emailed to you (on a schedule) in GPX format (too lazy to look up acronym, but it is an XML file) that you can then import into GSAK/MapSource. I have also bought licences for GSAK and Cachemate; as much as the Slashdot community is against spending any money at all, I feel that it is the Right Thing to do. The authors provide wonderful programs, with free demos (fully functional indefinitely, IIRC in the case of GSAK). Also, these people are independent software authors trying to make a living, not $EvilCorporation. I think that nowadays, each of the software products runs $20-30, along with the $3/mo or $30/yr premium membership to GC.com.
I would like to note that you do not *have* to pay/buy anything (other than a GPS device) to have fun Geocaching (contrary to some implications by previous posters). As with most hobbies, you can spend as little ($400 for top of the line GPS, subscriptions, and more) as you want/are able to.
Geocaching is a fun activity for people of all age ranges: I know cachers of ages from 3 to their 70s. I know many families enjoy caching as a family activity; in a medium-sized city, there are bound to be caches that even kids can find.
Final words of advice: Get a good Silva-style compass and learn how to use it. In dense woods, your GPS may become useless within 100 feet of the cache (i.e. your accuracy is so low) that it is sometimes best to stop when the GPS says 100-150 feet, take a bearing on the compass, and use that to try to find the cache.
Oh, and, please please please DON'T leave McDonald's toys as trade items at a cache. Everyone hates them, and they are (mostly) worthless.
Please note that the domain is registered to a company _not_ in Mountain View, CA, who, among thousands of other, own domains such as:
www.0---0.org
www.0--porno.info
www.0-0-0casino.com
Somehow, I don't think that those are Google domain names....
At my local CVS/pharmacy, I believe that they have a inkjet, albeit a high-quality, but still an inkjet, printer in the self-serve kiosk. Once the front cover was removed for some reason, and it looked similar to an HP Deskjet in size/shape/appearance. While I am fairly confident that a Deskjet could not produce that quality, it operated in a similar manner.
Then again, I almost always just use my hp psc 2510 photosmart to print my photos (on glossy paper if the importance warrants it), and I have been very pleased with the results, especially considering that it is not a photo printer per se, and rather a multi-function device.
BTW, there is a big difference between "forensics" and "forensic science". One is the fancy name for advanced speech class, and the other is glamorized by shows such as CSI.
Here is a test image that I believe was designed for printer/monitor color calibration (I dredged it up from the data recovered from a hard drive failure a while back). It is 2297x3600x24 at a resolution of 360 pixels per inch for a final image size of 6.381x10 inches. Included on the image are several Kodak color charts, along with a variety of household objects and several faces of varying skin colors.
Here is another test photo of the same style as the first one. According to the CNET Labs printer page, this is "the industry-accepted PhotoDisc Target document." Not sure about that (especially with the website logo in the corner of the image), but whatever. It works nonetheless.
Following with the previous recommendation of finding a vibrant nature photo, I located a rather beautiful photograph (free registration required for download) of the Grand Canyon with a large variety of colors at 1200x1600x24.
I have been thinking about this on and off for a while now (still stuck in lowly inkjet-land). Thanks for finally motivating me to do some research. Hope this aids you in your obsessive-compulsive quest to achieve satisfaction from knowing every little defect in your printer.
a lot of true randomness comes from I/O--the way users interact with the computer and whatnot
PGP for Windows does this when generating a new public/private keypair - if the process of text entry of the passphrase does not produce enough random data, then it brings up a screen that instucts the user to move the mouse/pound on the keyboard/whatever until enough data has been collected.
It seems to me that a somewhat effective solution would be to "map" the 9-1-1 button sequence to the local emergency number (as programmed by user). This may be how some of the current VOIP/911 technology works...I do not know. This however alleviates the issue of non-residents (babysitters, houseguests, etc.) to still be able to dial the familiar 9-1-1 instead of having to post a disclaimer on your front door advising visitors that 911 service is not available and that they must use the local emergency number. This still would not solve the issue of people who are unable to give their address...but it would at least be a start.
To those who agree with the Chicago-Florida example from above, anyone who knows enough to set up and transport and re-setup a VOIP system should be responsible enough to find the local emergency number and program it appropriately. Maybe VOIP manufacturers could add "profiles" to the firmware, so that you could have as many predefined locations as its memory could hold and could switch between locations if you were to move or travel (as in previous example, the poster could program his local emergency number in Chicago and the one for the place he was staying in Florida).
Not that any of this is a permanent solution...geographic IP lookup in some way, shape, or form still needs to be implemented. I just don't think that a good, secure system can be implemented in 120 days.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree that citizens' privacy needs to be protected, obviously there is a much greater focus on terrorism since the September 11 attacks, and the US has engaged in conflicts in two countries. It seems only natural that more activities of a secret nature would be taking place, now that we have clearly been made aware that there are people out there that actually would launch an attack on the United States, instead of substance-free posturing.
However, since we cannot really know what the secret requests were for, we cannot simply acquiesce to the potential eroding of our civil liberties. I just think that secrecy (at least not necessarily) == (evil|bigbrother|invasionofprivacy), which is the inevitable conclusion some here will reach.
No.
However, shutdown -s -t 02 will work.
Or do the old-fashioned way, and toss them in your hosts file, and map to 0.0.0.0 - a "valid" ip that errors out instantly. I have several thousand lines in my hosts file that blocks various ad sites and whatnot. Just google for "hosts file" or something like that, and there are many prefab hosts files to download or copy and paste into your own.
Windows ME and AOL 9.0 Super-Dee-Duper Turbocharged Dialup-on-Steroids!!1!eleven
Guaranteed to scare the most seasoned geek:
You: "How are you, Grandmother?"
Your Grandma: "Why do all these nekked women keep popping up? Could I have a phish? 'Cause I read that Bill Gates tries to get everyone sick by adaware-ing that clickety-click-thing."
You: <begin shaking in terror>
Your Grandma: "Oh, and how come my computer doesn't fax? You said it could send faxes, so I jammed what I wanted to fax into the cup holder thingy. Then that little box - ya' know, the one on the ground, connected to the computer? - started making some funny sounds. So I just unplugged it from the wall. Then, the strangest thing happened. My computer went blank! So anyways, I want you to come over here tomorrow and fix that little box thing. Seems I need it for my computer to work."
You: <sobbing>
http://ez.no/
Although the name may sound like it is a wimpy CMS, ezPublish is one of the most impressive CMS's around. I am currently in the process of adopting it as the base for my employer's website redesign.
Yes, it is wrote by Norwegians, but their English is superior to that of many native speakers. Also, they have an amazing model for translations and versioning (keeps the 10 most recent versions of a document by default). It also has a nifty nodular system of organizing pages.
At first, it seems a little confusing, especially when the manual starts talking about nodes and objects and IDs and whatnot, but it eventually makes sense. Once that happens, you have a great deal of creative abilities, with templates and the such. I shied away from many other CMSs because they assumed (or at least appeared to assume that) you wanted to do one certain thing, and God help you if you wanted to do something else. ezPublish really seems flexible.
Oh, and to the "CMSs only take an hour or so" group: I wrote a CMS working with one other person, and we easily put 500 man-hours into developing it, adding custom functionalities, and making it look acceptable to non-technical folks (we still don't have a graphical interface, just HTML menus and tables with a sprinkling of Javascript).
Kyle
Great.
Now Google indexes blogspam twice as much. Hopefully, the blog index won't affect Pagerank. If it did, then we would just see more and more blog spam. As an administrator of a small blog site, I have enough trouble as it is keeping up with the blog spam.
I personally love to go geocaching. I am not into a lot of outdoors-type activities, such as camping, etc., but I have a blast geocaching! Equipment-wise, I use a Garmin eTrex Vista, Palm Tungsten T3, and (on longer caching days) my Acer Aspire 1362LCi laptop.
In terms of software, I use GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife, http://gsak.net/) for the majority of data manipulation and transferal, and Garmin MapSource (with Topographical Maps) to do mapping and routing stuff. On my Palm I use CacheMate (http://www.smittyware.com/palm/cachemate/), which provides a cache-oriented interface, not just an html viewer, although some are satisfied with offline version of the cache description pages.
I do subscribe to the premium service at geocaching.com. The main benefit of this is that you can create specific search queries, and have them emailed to you (on a schedule) in GPX format (too lazy to look up acronym, but it is an XML file) that you can then import into GSAK/MapSource. I have also bought licences for GSAK and Cachemate; as much as the Slashdot community is against spending any money at all, I feel that it is the Right Thing to do. The authors provide wonderful programs, with free demos (fully functional indefinitely, IIRC in the case of GSAK). Also, these people are independent software authors trying to make a living, not $EvilCorporation. I think that nowadays, each of the software products runs $20-30, along with the $3/mo or $30/yr premium membership to GC.com.
I would like to note that you do not *have* to pay/buy anything (other than a GPS device) to have fun Geocaching (contrary to some implications by previous posters). As with most hobbies, you can spend as little ($400 for top of the line GPS, subscriptions, and more) as you want/are able to.
Geocaching is a fun activity for people of all age ranges: I know cachers of ages from 3 to their 70s. I know many families enjoy caching as a family activity; in a medium-sized city, there are bound to be caches that even kids can find.
Final words of advice: Get a good Silva-style compass and learn how to use it. In dense woods, your GPS may become useless within 100 feet of the cache (i.e. your accuracy is so low) that it is sometimes best to stop when the GPS says 100-150 feet, take a bearing on the compass, and use that to try to find the cache.
Oh, and, please please please DON'T leave McDonald's toys as trade items at a cache. Everyone hates them, and they are (mostly) worthless.
Please note that the domain is registered to a company _not_ in Mountain View, CA, who, among thousands of other, own domains such as: www.0---0.org www.0--porno.info www.0-0-0casino.com Somehow, I don't think that those are Google domain names....
At my local CVS/pharmacy, I believe that they have a inkjet, albeit a high-quality, but still an inkjet, printer in the self-serve kiosk. Once the front cover was removed for some reason, and it looked similar to an HP Deskjet in size/shape/appearance. While I am fairly confident that a Deskjet could not produce that quality, it operated in a similar manner.
Then again, I almost always just use my hp psc 2510 photosmart to print my photos (on glossy paper if the importance warrants it), and I have been very pleased with the results, especially considering that it is not a photo printer per se, and rather a multi-function device.
BTW, there is a big difference between "forensics" and "forensic science". One is the fancy name for advanced speech class, and the other is glamorized by shows such as CSI.
Here is a test image that I believe was designed for printer/monitor color calibration (I dredged it up from the data recovered from a hard drive failure a while back). It is 2297x3600x24 at a resolution of 360 pixels per inch for a final image size of 6.381x10 inches. Included on the image are several Kodak color charts, along with a variety of household objects and several faces of varying skin colors.
Here is another test photo of the same style as the first one. According to the CNET Labs printer page, this is "the industry-accepted PhotoDisc Target document." Not sure about that (especially with the website logo in the corner of the image), but whatever. It works nonetheless.
Following with the previous recommendation of finding a vibrant nature photo, I located a rather beautiful photograph (free registration required for download) of the Grand Canyon with a large variety of colors at 1200x1600x24.
I have been thinking about this on and off for a while now (still stuck in lowly inkjet-land). Thanks for finally motivating me to do some research. Hope this aids you in your obsessive-compulsive quest to achieve satisfaction from knowing every little defect in your printer.
PGP for Windows does this when generating a new public/private keypair - if the process of text entry of the passphrase does not produce enough random data, then it brings up a screen that instucts the user to move the mouse/pound on the keyboard/whatever until enough data has been collected.
Wow. Something screwed up in that comment...that first sentence should have read:
/. would this be considered "Insightful" instead of the "Funny" it deserves."
"Only on
Odd...
Only on /. would this be consideit deserves.
Wait, it could quite possibly happen on Kuro5hin as well...
It seems to me that a somewhat effective solution would be to "map" the 9-1-1 button sequence to the local emergency number (as programmed by user). This may be how some of the current VOIP/911 technology works...I do not know. This however alleviates the issue of non-residents (babysitters, houseguests, etc.) to still be able to dial the familiar 9-1-1 instead of having to post a disclaimer on your front door advising visitors that 911 service is not available and that they must use the local emergency number. This still would not solve the issue of people who are unable to give their address...but it would at least be a start.
To those who agree with the Chicago-Florida example from above, anyone who knows enough to set up and transport and re-setup a VOIP system should be responsible enough to find the local emergency number and program it appropriately. Maybe VOIP manufacturers could add "profiles" to the firmware, so that you could have as many predefined locations as its memory could hold and could switch between locations if you were to move or travel (as in previous example, the poster could program his local emergency number in Chicago and the one for the place he was staying in Florida).
Not that any of this is a permanent solution...geographic IP lookup in some way, shape, or form still needs to be implemented. I just don't think that a good, secure system can be implemented in 120 days.
D-Link has similar "thin" transformers...love 'em.