SageRaven

Sometimes a David makes a bigger impression than a Goliath.

It's been years since I've worked with Ladar. However, he's a man of great intelligence and principle. It's not unheard of for "the little guy" to take on the machine and win. I believe that Ladar will prevail in the end, and I hope he'll resume operations or come up with something even better.

I'll be donating something as soon as I finish my post.

What does the code actually deliver in the HTTP request, and what path does the request travel?

Is the exploit that the request is made outside of the TOR proxy (thus revealing the true origin IP) or that it gathers information about the host and sends that via TOR to some machine?

I believe the state law is that in any county where the population is under 400,000 residents, prostitution is legal, which rules out the main large cities in Nevada. I live in neighboring Utah, so I learn some interesting factoids about our neighbor once in a while.

> We have systemic trillion dollar annual deficits, so tax collection efforts are being ramped up.

Funny. In renewable energy circles, the first, and most efficient, optimization is "conservation". Converting the 50 incandescent bulbs in your home to their LED or CFL counterparts yield more long-term value than spending the money on the ability to produce the power those original bulbs consumed.

Likewise, our government needs to quit pretending it actually needs money and cut spending. The TSA and middle-east war machines are the first places I'd start with.

Point taken. But it still seems he had a direct relationship (the license).

My point still stands. If I, having no relation whatsoever with Monsanto, buy random soybeans as feed, then plant them, then spray them with Roundup to weed out the non-Monsanto seeds, then save the seeds selected for resistance, I believe that the Court would not have made such an "easy" 9-0 decision, assuming they tried to sue me at all (rather than the granary or someone else).

The intuitive purpose of the patent protection for RR seeds seems to be preventing a different genetic research firm from creating a similar seed and also selling "Roundup-Ready Seeds" -- not preventing some random Joe who selects some unidentified seed stock for resistance to Roundup to better his yields. The fact that we should all know there may be Monsanto seeds in the mix is (or should be) irrelevant.

So it seems to me that we're still waiting for a "real" case that deals 100% with the genetics and patents.

Many folks are stating this was a clear-cut case of violation of contract law: the guy at one time signed something with Monsanto stating his exclusive source of RR soybeans would be Monsanto.

However, if I buy 160 acres of land, and plant that land in soybeans from a non-Monsanto granary with some RR seed in it, then how could I be culpable if I had no dealings at all with Monsanto? I am guessing a case wouldn't be a straight 9-0 SCOTUS ruling.

People begging for money online (see those "please donate cash so I can get breast implants" sorts of things from a few years ago and on various sub-reddits) are probably a more honest way to earn money than the start-up cashing out method.

If I donate money for some stranger to get larger breasts, I at least know with certainty I'm being used. Not so with many start-ups.

At least that's how I interpret the guy's rant in the article. And in some respects, I share his view. But in many ways, it's no different than someone ranting about their favorite indie band signing up under the litigious umbrella of the RIAA labels.

Sure, the individual(s) producing the goods need to feed themselves (and feed themselves exceedingly well, according to a poster below), but if you as an individual engage with a group of fans/customers, then you are in fact betraying them to some extent when you change your game out from under them.

> We were building roads and services before taxes.

That's all I need: Paying to use Verizon Interstate Highway in order to traverse my state.

Infrastructure is one of the few things that taxes are pretty good for, as most everyone benefits from roads, utility grids, etc.. War, scanning air travelers, and installing the Great Eye of Sauron at every intersection are not good uses of public money.

Well, whatever works for them. I've been using gmail since my '04 invite, but a few weeks ago I migrated to mail.com for web mail and bing for search. Google lured me in with the sparse simplicity of their search and webmail. If everything Google is getting bloated and broken (literal string "searches" in google search, fo example), I may as well disburse my online data to multiple places so no single entity has a full picture of my online behavior. I now can vote/comment on youtube without having those things tied to my identity (WTF, Google. If I didn't explicitly sign onto Youtube, don't fucking associate my gmail identity with Youtube!!!).

Anyway, I'm not trying to be hip or edgy. I just finally got tired of Google's feature creep and identity wrangling. So I switched to inferior competitors. Hasn't been too painful, though.

The one thing I'll keep a "real" identity presence on Google's services is "talk" just so I can converse with the few contacts who desire that venue, pretty much making that account similar to my token Yahoo and MSN accounts. I've managed to create a fake identity solely for my Android phone so I can get apps from Play.

While I am curious about Google's future, I've decided that I no longer want to be a part of it.

One of the first couple of episodes of Cosmos (maybe the first?) has a similar thing to convey the scale of time in our existence in the universe. Pretty cool.

Good, entertaining read. I get the impression it was sanitized a great deal, because I was sorely disappointed with the lack of technical meat-n-potatoes.

For instance, the author totally glossed over how they recovered the data from his encrypted storage at the end. Was the PC left on and the screen not locked? Cold boot attack? Brute force? Hell, they didn't even specify exactly which crypto software was used.

Have a Coke and a smile?

One summer in college, I sub-rented an apartment from a friend who was away for the summer. It was the first time in my life I had lived alone. I was working grounds crew at a dorm (relatively strenuous/active job). I'd get home around 4pm, have a snack, maybe watch some TV or listen to some tunes, then I'd just crash. I'd usually wake up after dark (being summer, between 8 and 10pm), eat dinner, then be up until 1 or 2am. Then I'd go to bed, then get up at 6am to be at work at 7am.

It was a great routine. Ever since career and family became part of my life, I've rarely ever had such peaceful moments in my life.

Intentional contamination or no, patenting genes and extorting royalties from people propagating self-replicating organisms is very much evil.

If farmers want to pay for seed stock of known features and quality, that's great. What they do after that should be totally under their control and domain. A legal precedent for interfering with the ancient practice of saving seed and selection of seeds from desirable plants is so entirely "evil" I can't explain it to someone who doesn't "get" it already. The evilness or any corporate control of genetics in the wild (outside of their production labs) should be self-evident.

I laugh at the audacity of garden catalogs that warn that you cannot take cuttings of certain patented items, like thornless blackberries. Blackberries are stupid-easy to propagate with cuttings, and it is completely absurd to think that people will (or should) obey such a warning.

How many rural villages in China were polluted from a nearby factory producing components of the computer you used to make this post?

Every single person posting in this thread is guilty of consuming far more resources than a majority of global inhabitants. The time and energy to even have this specific debate is mark of privilege. What's the solution? A global return to agrarian subsistence living?

I get where you are coming from, but I think the battle is already lost. The "haves" have always, intentionally or not, screwed over the "have-nots", and while it varies by degrees based on how little or much you "have", it ultimately comes down to the innate selfish nature of creatures living in a world of scarcity.

That's kinda like saying the MPAA ratings systems is ok because my beef is really with large theater chains that refuse to carry non-rated films. Large, entrenched authorities who provide ratings about [insert noun here] have historically been a problem.

I thought it was statistical filtering and crowd-sourced spam tagging (like Google's spam filter). I maintain a mail server for a client and Spam Assassin (edit: and greylisting) works well enough without blacklists enabled. Throw in a couple of extra Bayesian filters via procmail, and you're doing about as well as Google does.

How disappointing. I thought it was going to be the story of a fed-up email admin breaking down and DoS'ing one of the scourges of the internet.

Blacklists are pure evil, and nothing will ever change my opinion of that. They cause far more problems than they solve. Granted, it's usually by idiot, over-zealous mail admins who block on merely being listed anywhere, rather than by weighted score.

Time for everyone to order teddy bears, propane bottles, and a copy of the Quran from Amazon whenever they book a plane ticket. Bring back the "spook fodder" concept from the heydays of USENET.

My make-a-wish request would be some standard protocol to translate threaded discussions such as from here and Reddit into an NNTP feed. Back in my early 90s college days, I could rip through an amazing amount of content in a short amount of time. The half-dozen or so keys in trn or tnn, combined with thread filters, made this kind of content consumption so incredibly efficient that I sorely miss an interface today.

Ever since these small devices have been in production, I've always wondered about their potential use in clandestine installations. Obviously things like the Shiva Plug are almost capable of hiding in plain site, so long as there's a plug near by.

I've also wondered if there are clamp-on induction taps that can be clamped to power lines (say, above the tiles in a corporate bathroom powering the lights) and drive low-power devices like a small Arduino.

This 9V hack is really cool for sensors and the like, but it wouldn't power a full OS with wireless AP ability for very long.

I know of at least one sub-division where non-potable water is connected to yard irrigation systems, so the concept is not totally unheard of. Nothing as sensible as the system you outline in Paris, though.

This is my thought on the modern flush toilette:

http://makeameme.org/media/created/skeptical-third-world-kid...

I lived in what was essentially a rural cabin for 5 years. We had no indoor plumbing and stored water for cooking and bathing in barrels. We used a composting toilette (see "The Humanuer Handbook"). After moving back to a "real" modern house in the city, I am daily reminded of the tragic waste of potable water that modern plumbing endorses.

For shits and giggles, I snagged a vinyl rip of Simon and Garfunkle's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" in 24-bit 96KHz FLAC format online, just to see what all the fuss was about. Some guys who do serious vinyl rips spare no expense, using pristine vinyl on high-end rigs, washing the disk before the first play, etc.. I don't pretend to understand all the jargon.

Now I obviously couldn't perform scientifically sound listening tests on my own. But I did do repeated back-to-back plays (of snippets and whole song) comparing the 16-bit 44.1 KHz FLAC rip I performed on my S&G's "Greatest Hits" CD to the 24-bit vinyl rip. And as skeptical as I was, the sound is a little warmer and seems to have more spacial volume (I'm no audiophile, so my terms are probably making people wince) on vinyl than on the CD. I am using a low-end $60 Sony head-set and all audio from my PC competes with background clicks and chirps from my built-in audio jack due to bad poor grounding in the motherboard (I assume).

I can think of 3 reasons the vinyl rip sounded better to me: 1) It is, in fact, a better sound; 2) The master used to produce the vinyl source was better than the one used for the CD I have; or 3) It's all in my head.

I mostly ruled out #3 because I snagged a few more 24-bit vinyl rips to see if they were any better then my CD sources, but I deleted them due to poor sound.

That all said, regardless of the technical details, I am quite fond of my new 24-bit 96KHz copy of "The Boxer". This song is amazing in its musical layering and depth, and the ever-so-slight improvements I personally hear from the new rip was well worth the bother.

I totally agree with you.

I use dirt-cheap VPS servers to tunnel web traffic over SSH socks proxies. Why? For fun. Because I can. To thwart ISP packet inspection and Google profiling my IP. To screw up IP-based ad targeting. Whatever.

I often sign up for a new VPS service while relaying from another one. I will often make it through the entire sign-up process, going through the PayPal info and everything, only to be told something like, "Your new account has been suspended due to suspicion of fraud." This only happens when I'm using a proxy. So they must be doing geo-IP lookups and flagging IP space that is a certain variance from your billing address.

I don't know how many VPS providers have lost my business due to this practice.

If it is any indicator, current versions of FreeBSD and some Linux distros have "xz" as part of the base system, along with their gzip and bzip2 counterparts, including xzcat/xzless/etc., newsyslog/logrotate compression options for xz, xz-compressed tarballs for source distributions (tar.xz / txz), as well as binary packages for FreeBSD compressed with the format.

LZMA compression has gained a lot of traction over the past few years.

The most useful take-away from the article:

"In other words, it appeared that pushing people’s emotional buttons, through derogatory comments, made them double down on their preexisting beliefs."

Sounds like politics, doesn't it?

There's a difference between doing something harmful to yourself repeatedly for shits and giggles, and at your own discretion, and voluntarily following something through to its conclusion when somebody else plans the exercise for you. Perhaps the subtle distinction is only in my own head, but I do believe there is one.

The dude doesn't deserve a pat on the back for the meditation itself. If he had been fasting, following a running/swimming program, studying go/baduk life-and-death problems, or playing guitar exercises for 10 days, and he stuck with it to the end and documented it similarly, I feel he would still deserve kudos. Giving one's undivided attention to a new and uncomfortable activity, 10 hours a day for 10 days, is a challenge for most people.

Hell, I'm lucky if I can give up coffee or power drinks for 10 straight days. The 2 or three times I completed a 24-hour fast, I felt some sense of accomplishment. And keeping up with some kind of exercise routine? Forget about it.

And that's why I found his story so layered and interesting. It's not just about the meditation (which was interesting in its own right), but about his dedication, and his privilege, and his turning his mind's eye inward.

Berate him (or me) if you will. You said it best: to each their own.

Why so dismissive? Religious or feel-good benefits aside from the 100-hour regimen, the guys deserves kudos merely for sticking with the exercise to its conclusion. Even without the discomfort, sitting/standing/whatever for 10 hours a day doing nothing physically takes some dedication.

I find his experience amazing on so many levels, and I am gracious for such a intimate account of that experience (I read the full-on article he references).

Anybody know how big robots.txt can be and if anyone has ever given a spider grief by screwing with the size or download rate of robots.txt?