Christopher Cashell

Why was the Octomom arrested?

Because she was littering.

http://feeds.theonion.com/~r/theonion/weekly/~3/zxnlrEQGXfU/9_drawn_and_quartered_at_0

http://www.theonion.com/content/radio_news/9_drawn_and_quartered_at_0?utm_source=onion_rss_daily

Onion Radio News - with Doyle Redland

Apparently McDonald's is closed today. Thanksgiving McNuggetini: DENIED.

Title
Mailer Daemon / Failed Delivery Test For Inactive Accounts

Short, concise description of the idea
Send a mass e-mail to inactive accounts. For those where a mailer daemon / failed delivery message is received back, flag the journal for deletion.

Full description of the idea
There are currently 22,025,963 accounts that are not active in any way (calculated using http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml). Many, of course, are names that people want but can't under the current method of treating inactive accounts.

So, why not do some sort of test to see if an account is truly inactive, abandoned, and does not have a proper owner?

My suggestion is for LiveJournal to put together a population of inactive journals. (Start with no comments / posts / few log-ins.) For the inactive journals, send a mass e-mail......a friendly one that says how we've missed you, how to delete accounts if they are no longer wanted, it's LiveJournal's birthday, etc.. (And as pointed out in the comments, this should be advertised all over the place so users know this is occurring.)

For any journal for which a "Mailer Daemon" message is recieved (a bounce message / failed delivery message), flag the account for deletion.

If there is no "owner" over the account, then that account should be deleted / purged and then made available to others.

An ordered list of benefits

• Cleaning up abandoned accounts
• Make names available to those who want it
• More revenue for LiveJournal with rename tokens
• Bring back old members/people who forgot they had accounts

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

• Potential that an "abandoned" account is someone who died (depending on the populations the e-mail is sent to)
• Someone may want their account but forgot to update their e-mail address

I think I've almost managed to get the DNA Lounge popup webcast window to resize the video when you resize the window. (Unsurprisingly, the only way that worked portably was to use tables.) Does it work for you? This seems to resize properly in both Firefox and Safari. It mostly works in Opera: it resizes properly, but there's a scrollbar and the bottom text is off the bottom of the screen. I'm not sure how to fix that.

What does it do in IE? Does the video resize, and is there a green box around it?

Previously.

DNA Lounge update, wherein the War on Fun gets some more press.

http://feeds.theonion.com/~r/theonion/weekly/~3/unWju3cywmQ/everyone_in_huddle_afraid

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/everyone_in_huddle_afraid?utm_source=onion_rss_daily

GREEN BAY, WI—Members of the Packers offense opted not to tell quarterback Aaron Rodgers about the large clump of turf wedged between his front teeth...

Peter I Island usually considered as difficult of access. This is mainly due to the difficulties of landing on the island as approaches to it barred by the sludge ice. In addition, the lack of convenient bays and precipitous banks almost throughout the coastline do not allow a large ship to drop anchor directly by the island. That is why it was thought until now that the best opportunity to land on the island was using helicopter from the main deck of the ship.

But we have another variant. For the landing on the island we can use a small hovercraft. Internal combustion engine sets the hovercraft's screw in motion. The screw pushes air under the bottom of the vessel and thus forms the so-called air cushion. Hovercraft can run on the water and on land, on marshes, on sand, on the ice and ice sludge and on the snow. Christy Hovercraft 6132L produced by Christy Hovercraft (Russia) has the following technical characteristics:

Payload - 6 persons, 600 kg
Speed - 60-100 km /h on ice, -50-85 km /h packed snow
Limiting conditions - wind 10-15 m /s, temperature from -30 ° C to +40 ° C,

Hovercraft PIONEER MK3 produced by Airlift Hovercraft (Australia) has even more powerful parameters. But Christy Hovercraft would be quite suitable for our purposes. It costs only $ 62 500 while PIONEER MK3 price is about $ 965 000. Christy Hovercraft occupies one 20-foot container and can be easily transported on a ship.

Thus, we have to transport to Antarctica at least two 20-foot containers (one hovercraft and equipment of the expedition camp). According to preliminary calculations, the number of participants must be at least 10 people.

The expedition’s terms. Given the weather conditions the expedition should be organized in the summer in the Southern Hemisphere (i.e. December-March). Of course, we will do our best but it seems problematic to organize such a complex expedition in two to three months. Therefore, a more realistic launch date of the expedition is December 2010.

The main question is not how to land on the island. It is not even the issue of possible opposition from the Norwegian authorities. The main issue is financial one. According to preliminary calculations, the expedition takes minimal budget which amounts to $ 100 000. Exchequer of the Republic is currently empty. It is difficult to estimate at the moment, how much money the scheduled revenues will bring to the budget of The Republic of Sunland. But we have now at least four variants for funding the expedition. This work has already begun. All who really wants to participate in the preparations to the expedition (even if he/she does not want for some reasons to take a direct part in the expedition itself) may receive relevant information from us. There is a great and responsible cause in front of us and we gladly invite all true men and women to participate in this cause to the extent of their forces and abilities.

The Headquarters of the Sunland Antarctic expedition.
http://new-libertalia.co.cc/

The Obama administration is seeking to reverse a federal appeals court decision that dramatically narrows the government’s search-and-seizure powers in the digital age.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan and Justice Department officials are asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its August ruling that federal prosecutors went too far when seizing 104 professional baseball players’ drug results when they had a warrant for just 10.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ 9-2 decision offered Miranda-style guidelines to prosecutors and judges on how to protect Fourth Amendment privacy rights while conducting computer searches.

( Read more... )

Source

Thoughts? Concerns?

There's a discussion going on at ontd_political. The link to the post is here.

Please participate in the discussion and up-vote the article on reddit while you're at it.

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/dominos_scientists_test_limits_of?utm_source=onion_rss_daily

Despite ethical concerns about testing on humans, researchers say their work was necessary to determine the boundary between garbage and food.

http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/the_money_we_waste_on_nasas?utm_source=onion_rss_daily

So, the United States just sent another multimillion-dollar shuttle out into space to do God knows what. Yet all the while, back here on Earth,...

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/man_who_enjoys_popular_rock?utm_source=onion_rss_daily

ROCHESTER, NY—Sean Ridgeway, a 36-year-old carpenter who is fond of popular rock 'n' roll music from the late 1960s to the present, told...

http://www.theonion.com/content/amvo/thanksgiving_today?utm_source=onion_rss_daily

While the rest of the world goes about its business, the United States ill celebrate its traditional day of thanks today. What do you think?

http://www.theonion.com/content/from_print/kevin_garnett_out_3_4_months?utm_source=onion_rss_daily

News In Photos

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/pittsburgh_school_district_leads?utm_source=onion_rss_daily

PITTSBURGH—Just four years ago, then-eighth-grader Heather Lawler had no idea how to spell Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger's last name. She would often eliminate the "e" after the "o," or place an extra vowel before the "l."

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/leaked_911_text.html

Wikileaks has published pager intercepts from New York on 9/11:

WikiLeaks released half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

[...]

Text pagers are usualy carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center.

Near as I can tell, these messages are from the commercial pager networks of Arch Wireless, Metrocall, Skytel, and Weblink Wireless, and include all customers of that service: government, corporate, and personal.

There are lots of nuggets in the data about the government response to 9/11:

One string of messages hints at how federal agencies scrambled to evacuate to Mount Weather, the government's sort-of secret bunker buried under the Virginia mountains west of Washington, D.C. One message says, "Jim: DEPLOY TO MT. WEATHER NOW!," and another says "CALL OFICE (sic) AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. 4145 URGENT." That's the phone number for the Federal Emergency Management Agency's National Continuity Programs Directorate -- which is charged with "the preservation of our constitutional form of government at all times," even during a nuclear war. (A 2006 article in the U.K. Guardian newspaper mentioned a "a traffic jam of limos carrying Washington and government license plates" heading to Mount Weather that day.)

FEMA's response seemed less than organized. One message at 12:37 p.m., four hours after the attacks, says: "We have no mission statements yet." Bill Prusch, FEMA's project officer for the National Emergency Management Information System at the time, apparently announced at 2 p.m. that the Continuity of Operations plan was activated and that certain employees should report to Mt. Weather; a few minutes later he sent out another note saying the activation was cancelled.

Historians will certainly spend a lot of time poring over the messages, but I'm more interested in where they came from in the first place:

It's not clear how they were obtained in the first place. One possibility is that they were illegally compiled from the records of archived messages maintained by pager companies, and then eventually forwarded to WikiLeaks.

The second possibility is more likely: Over-the-air interception. Each digital pager is assigned a unique Channel Access Protocol code, or capcode, that tells it to pay attention to what immediately follows. In what amounts to a gentlemen's agreement, no encryption is used, and properly-designed pagers politely ignore what's not addressed to them.

But an electronic snoop lacking that same sense of etiquette might hook up a sufficiently sophisticated scanner to a Windows computer with lots of disk space -- and record, without much effort, gobs and gobs of over-the-air conversations.

Existing products do precisely this. Australia's WiPath Communications offers Interceptor 3.0 (there's even a free download). Maryland-based SWS Security Products sells something called a "Beeper Buster" that it says let police "watch up to 2500 targets at the same time." And if you're frugal, there's a video showing you how to take a $10 pager and modify it to capture everything on that network.

It's disturbing to realize that someone, possibly not even a government, was routinely intercepting most (all?) of the pager data in lower Manhattan as far back as 2001. Who was doing it? For that purpose? That, we don't know.

Sometimes gameboyguy13 and teshiron and a few others and I wind up in IRC bouncing stuff off each other, sometimes with copious use of pastebin and email and rapid-fire comments to transfer large chunks of draft-in-progress FAQs at each other (before posting a more polished version here, of course).

Recently, JD and I discovered using Google Wave for the same sort of drafting purpose, and we found that it was a very useful tool for real-time or near-real-time bouncing back and forth, particularly in concert with IRC.

Google Wave just started another round of invitations, and since I'm finding it useful for userdoc, I wanted to give lj_userdoc regulars first crack at my stash of invitations if you're interested.

The Wave is in no way actually going to replace lj_userdoc, and if people come up with stuff in there it should also get shared regularly and properly on here, but I want to make it available to anyone who could use it.

God, I love this movie. And Perry's recounting of the legend from which it gets its title never fails to get me:

It begins with the king as a boy, having to spend the night alone in the forest to prove his courage so he can become king. Now while he is spending the night alone he's visited by a sacred vision. Out of the fire appears the holy grail, symbol of God's divine grace. And a voice said to the boy, "You shall be keeper of the grail so that it may heal the hearts of men." But the boy was blinded by greater visions of a life filled with power and glory and beauty. And in this state of radical amazement he felt for a brief moment not like a boy, but invincible, like God, so he reached into the fire to take the grail, and the grail vanished, leaving him with his hand in the fire to be terribly wounded. Now as this boy grew older, his wound grew deeper. Until one day, life for him lost its reason. He had no faith in any man, not even himself. He couldn't love or feel loved. He was sick with experience. He began to die. One day a fool wandered into the castle and found the king alone. And being a fool, he was simple minded, he didn't see a king. He only saw a man alone and in pain. And he asked the king, "What ails you friend?" The king replied, "I'm thirsty. I need some water to cool my throat". So the fool took a cup from beside his bed, filled it with water and handed it to the king. As the king began to drink, he realized his wound was healed. He looked in his hands and there was the holy grail, that which he sought all of his life. And he turned to the fool and said with amazement, "How can you find that which my brightest and bravest could not?" And the fool replied, "I don't know. I only knew that you were thirsty."

The gay cannibal joined the Navy because he loves the taste of seamen.