] We, as a nation, need to ask ourselves some pretty hard
] questions about this incident.
]
]
] The sad fact is that local officials were not acting in a
] manner much different from the way in which many of our
] national leaders have been acting in the two years since
] Sept. 11, 2001. I speak primarily of the rampant,
] institutionalized violations of privacy by our
] government, and the sky-is-falling mentality of fear that
] continues to grip our nation and colors much of what
] passes for national policy these days.

indeed. good article by Bob Barr...

it's getting to the point where being an unhappy kid, or maybe even just a creative one, is indicative of radical mental disease and maladjustment. god forbid that the youth of america should express themselves...

Creative Loafing Atlanta | NEWS & VIEWS | THE TERROR OF A TEENAGER'S DIARY

] What we haven't had, historically, is an emblem that
] represents the entire hacker community of which all these
] groups are parts. This is a proposal that we adopt one
] - the glider pattern from the Game of Life.

Oh no... ESR invents a logo for hackers. I'm going to say my peace about this now, just so I'm on the record about it, but its really no use. This thing is already on Slashdot. The moderators like it. Think Geek will make a t-shirt. People will buy it. It will become popular. People like to self identify as hackers.

Executive summary: Great implementation of a questionable idea incorrectly presented for the wrong reasons.

I like this logo. Its a good logo. In fact, its probably the best logo that anyone has ever come up with for any hacker culture related thing. Linux Penguins, BSD devils, 2600 emblems.... they are all just a little too dorky. Frankly, this is even cooler then the Industrial Memetics logo. Its timeless and artistically adaptable. I want one.

However, logos that represent a subculture aren't trademarks, they are memes. You can't start a meme by posting to Slashdot. ESR has presented this in exactly the wrong way, just as Dawkins has with "brights." Memes are bottom up and not top down. You make stickers and pass them out and don't tell anyone what it means. You make people see it and want to understand it before you let them in on it, so they think that knowing makes them a part of something. Thats how you hook them. When they think they are a part of something, they'll want to let others know that they are in. In fact, ESR has now ruined any opportunity that there will even be to do this right. This is now the official logo of hackerdom whether people like it or not. And its not going to get adopted by the smart people first. Its going to get adopted by the dumb people. The people who need a t-shirt that says something their reputation doesn't. The real hackers will succumb to this, but only after resisting it. I think there is a real danger here that the dumb people will become so interested in this that it will go through a fad stage and people will simply learn to associate it with stupid. Then it will die.

Furthermore, having a logo is usually an attempt to unite. An attempt to create a cohesive identity. But ESR does not seek to unite, he seeks to divide. As ESR is declaring the logo, he is also drawing lines between who does and does not get to use the logo.

In general, his definition of the word hacker is the one baby boomers prefer, and which is rooted in the value system of that generation, and is mostly tied to the kind of culture which hippies writing software for timesharing systems might produce. He likes unix systems, he doesn't like suits. He wants people to break some of the rules, but he hates people that break other rules. He even invented a term for them. He calls them "crackers," in the same way that a bigot uses the word "nigger."

The glider: an Appropriate Hacker Emblem

Whoa....lots of fire in Cali....this pic is cool

NASA - NASA Satellites Watch California Wildfires

] Four research papers presented at the American
] Association for Cancer Research conference in Phoenix
] suggest green tea is useful in fighting certain types of
] cancer, in addition to lowering cholesterol, preventing
] heart disease, boosting oral hygiene and possibly aiding
] in weight loss.
]

Green tea beneficial vs. cancer

] For one thing, Friendster assumes that friends are a good
] screening mechanism for quality dating partners: You like
] your friend, so you will like your friends' friends. This
] isn't a new concept. Most singles have gone on a date set
] up by mutual friends. Trouble is, friends may not be very
] good matchmakers, according to Mark Thompson, a
] psychologist who has studied dating and human interaction
] for decades

This is a fairly good summary of the problems I've had with friendster. Any friendster addicts want to respond?

BW Online | October 28, 2003 | A Dud in Cupid's Online Quiver?

For those who missed it, for those that don't remember what happened, and for those who just like looking at drunk people.... Be sure to check some of the comments in the "why you suck" section.

Phreaknic7 :: Pictures!

"

A digital picture of a spectacular and apparently explosive event in the sky fooled a pair of seasoned NASA scientists, has other researchers around the globe mystified, and made a minor celebrity of a teenage photographer.

Jonathan Burnett, 15, was photographing his friends skateboarding in Pencoed, Wales when one of them noticed a colorful fireball in the sky. Burnett snapped a picture, then sent it to NASA scientists and asked if they knew what it was.

Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell, who run NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD), posted the photograph on Oct. 1 and wrote that "a sofa-sized rock came hurtling into the nearby atmosphere of planet Earth and disintegrated." They called the picture "one of the more spectacular meteor images yet recorded."
Images

The Picture: Jonathan Burnett's photograph, which has scientists baffled.

A photo taken from about 10 miles away, by Julian Heywood, confirmed that Burnett's photo was legitimate and helped scientists decide the event had something to do with a jet contrail

Problem is, it turns out, there was no meteor."

Photo of Fiery Object Mystifies Scientists

Gremlin does not like spam. He does not like it on the train, he does not like it on the plane. Gremlin uses Spam hole. It is a hole for spam. If you ever come across some kind of service on the net that requires your email address and you know it only wants it so it can slam you with a few more terabytes (that's 1024 gigabytes, by the way) of spam, just go to http://www.spamhole.com and create a spamhole temporary email redirect address for just an hour or 2. For the time period you specify email going to your username@spamhole.com address will be redirected to your real email address, so that you can respond to those pesky confirmation emails and receive your confirmation codes from the site to prove to them you have given them a valid email address that they can spam and spam and spam, but just wait til they try... and get nothing but bounces... yeah! spammers hate that.

-Gremlin

Spam Hole

bucy wrote:
] ] The SRV RR allows administrators to use several servers
] ] for a single domain, to move services from host to host
] ] with little fuss, and to designate some hosts as primary
] ] servers for a service and others as backups.
]
] SRV records might, for example, make sitefinder much less bad;
] if the wildcard were
]
] *.com IN SRV host=sitefinder.verisign.com port=80 priority=1
] weight=1
]
] rather than
]
] *.com IN A ...
]
] I expect that the effects would be much less disruptive, i.e.
] browsers would be redirected but everything else would not.

This is a very interesting approach to the sitefinder problem. John, if you make it to Phreaknic I'm willing to give you some of my speaking time to talk about this.

U: I guess one concern is this still creates problems for HTTP based XMLRPC services, which will get a "no XML service on this webserver" error instead of a "host not found" error. (Of course, one could ask that xmlrpc lookup _xmlrpc._tcp.*...

RE: A DNS RR for specifying the location of services (DNS SRV) (RFC2782)

OC_Colin wrote:
] Have you ever wondered why you vote the way you do? Why you
] adhere to a religion? Why you hold to a political philosophy?
] Well, our good friends at the University of Berkley have come
] up with an answer for this perplexing life question.
] Unfortunately, they only have the answer if you’re a
] conservative.

I think its obvious that the mud slinging is wrong on both sides. Honestly, I think its a matter of being urban or rural.

If you grow up in the city you see other people's poverty as a source of most of the bad things about your life, you tend to be very culturally tolerant because your community is diverse and has lots of immigrants, and you see guns as something people use to commit violent crimes. You tend to look to society for answers because everyone is interdependent in the city.

If you grow up the country you don't see as much poverty. You tend to be self reliant, and you expect it of others. You don't tend to be tolerant of people who are "different" because you rarely see them and don't have to live with them. It makes sense to you that kids should pray in school because God created the world and you've never met a hindu. You see guns as something you do on the weekend for fun and it pisses you off that someone might want to take them.

And this is reflected directly in the votes. Urban places like California, New York, etc... tend to vote liberal. Rural places like Texas tend to vote conservative.

These sides never really agree because they aren't coming at this from the same place and they can't put themselves in the other's shoes. It seems to be a frustrating argument most of the time: the country trying to impose its value system on the city, and the city trying to impose its rules of order on the country...

RE: Josef Mengele Moves to Berkley