... and mine will have at least five dual-head workstations, at least 10 LCD TV screens tuned to every news channel on the planet, at least 5 different redundant means of getting a mobile Internet connection, and every type of sig-int equipment scanning every frequency possible for everything. All interior seating will be leather. All the machines will be centralized in a space in the back, so there will be no cabin noise.. The exterior will be completely black, even the spinning antennas.. Everything except the factory logo on the sides, which will be painted using some special nanotech hoah so it will only be visable at certain angles.

Amphibious Motorcoach

] Each evening, thousands of Americans drift into Chinese
] restaurants or, if they are too lazy to go out, pick up
] the phone and order one of the most popular dishes on the
] menu: General Tso's Chicken, a sugary-spicy melange of
] dark-meat tidbits, deep-fried then fired up with ginger,
] garlic, sesame oil, scallions and hot chili peppers.
]
] Not one in 10,000 knows who General Tso (most commonly
] pronounced "sow") was, nor what terrible times he lived
] through, nor the dark massacres that distinguished his
] baleful, belligerent career. Setting their chopsticks
] aside, patting their stomachs, the satisfied diners spare
] scarcely a thought for General Tso, except to imagine
] that he must have been a great connoisseur of hot
] stir-fried chicken.
]
] Who was he?

Who Was General Tso And Why Are We Eating His Chicken? (washingtonpost.com)

] Everyone knows they should have a passing knowledge of
] vi, but most people groan at the thought of using it. In
] today's article, I'd like to demonstrate some of the
] tricks that vi has up its sleeve. It really is a powerful
] little editor and I'm constantly amazed at its number of
] built-in shortcuts.

A ton of neat little tricks on using "vi". I'm in and out of vi a dozen times a day, and I learned tricks from this page I never knew about!

Reference: Using the vi Editor

Please keep in mind that these are static jpgs...
Hold onto your seat...

Freak out man!!!

Ahoy maties! Make sure ye observe the fairest day! ARGH!

Talk Like A Pirate Day

crankymessiah wrote:
] ] Late this year the company plans to begin auctioning the
] ] best seats to concerts through ticketmaster.com.
] ]
] ] With no official price ceiling on such tickets,
] ] Ticketmaster will be able to compete with brokers and
] ] scalpers for the highest price a market will bear.
] ]
] ] "The tickets are worth what they're worth," said John
] ] Pleasants, Ticketmaster's president and chief executive.
] ] "If somebody wants to charge $50 for a ticket, but it's
] ] actually worth $1,000 on eBay, the ticket's worth
] ] $1,000."
]

Is this not the definition of ticket scalping? Just because there are people willing to pay $1000 for a ticket, if the cover price of the ticket is $75 and you knowingly charge more that makes you a scalper. Does this mean that scalpers will be able to sit outside shows and "auction" off what tickets they have to the highest bidder as well?

RE: Ticketmaster Auction Will Let Highest Bidder Set Concert Prices

] A pizza delivery man told police he had been forced to
] rob a bank and asked authorities to help him minutes
] before a bomb strapped to his chest exploded and killed
] him.

that's just fucked up.

NEWS STORY

This is the week I said we'd roll our own DSL. On the surface it looks like a daunting task, but it is actually not that hard at all — if you can get past the many regulatory loopholes. But why would you even want to do such a thing? Well maybe DSL isn't available in your area. Maybe you want a significantly cheaper alternative to a T-1 line. Or just maybe you and the kid down the block want to play networked games at warp speed. Well here is how to do it.

-----

Ready for round 2? :)

Roll Your Own DSL

] MONTGOMERY, Alabama (CNN) -- Mississippi Gov. Ronnie
] Musgrove volunteered Thursday to join neighboring Alabama
] in the fight over the Ten Commandments monument by
] offering to display it in his state's capitol building
] for a week starting September 7.

Coming soon, to a town near you! The ten commandments monument!! Official tour starts September 7...

Mississippi covets neighbor's monument

] Now the blocklisters are being overwhelmed by Internet
] saboteurs who harness large numbers of computers to
] bombard their victims with vast amounts of junk data.

For the last couple months, spam-blocker sites such as Osirusoft, monkeys.com, Spamhaus and Spamcop have been under Distributed Denial of Service attacks by up to 10,000 computers at once. Two days ago, Osirusoft imploded, and shut itself down by blacklisting the entire internet, meaning many businesses who relied on Osirusoft's service became unable to receive any email, even if legitimate.

I've been hearing a lot of speculation lately as to whether these DDoS attacks might be related to the Blaster or Sobig worms. Some people say no, they're unrelated. Others say yes, and think that spammers may be behind the coordinated attacks, by hiring blackhat hackers to generate the attacks and create the worms. So this school of thought says that along with the attacks on the spam-blockers, that the worms are intended to create an army of hundreds of thousands of zombie computers, which may eventually be used to send out even more spam.

Another school of thought proposes that yes, the attacks may be coordinated, but for a different reason -- that the attacks on the anti-spam sites have been to restrict their spam-blocking effect so that the Sobig worm (which requires spam email to propagate itself) could spread more effectively.

Regardless of whether the DDoS attacks are connected to Sobig, what *is* the ultimate purpose of the Sobig worm? Is its "raison d'etre" simply to breed and propagate itself as fast and as far and wide as it can? Or is it just a very efficient delivery mechanism, recruiting hundreds of thousands of computers for some other yet-to-be-defined purpose, be it spam or an even more destructive attack in the future?

Or, might the intent even be a benign one -- a worm created to be *so* pervasive and annoying that even the non-tech home users in the world hear about it, and are finally encouraged to secure their systems? In other words, could it have been created as a way of "vaccinating" the internet and building up its immunity to help it withstand a potentially even more malicious virus in the future?

Stay tuned, as the story unfolds . . .

Saboteurs hit spam's blockers -- Could it be related to the Sobig Worm?