Idleness is the holiday of the wise.
So... my laziness is a sign of wisdom?
My old roommate once got a real fortune that said 'You would make a good lawyer.' He nearly refused to order from that restaurant ever again.
In 1995 or 1996, I happened upon a USPS bulletin board system. I never found any advertisements for it, just happened upon the number during a war dialing session. It seems like there was no password on the BBS at all, or else it was something extremely easy to guess, because I'm pretty sure there was no hacking of any sort involved in gaining access. There wasn't anything as personal as those Kazaa-found files but there was a large database of postal related scams and what the USPS was doing to prevent them. A lot of them were ideas I'd never thought of before and probably would have worked easily in the low-tech area I lived in at the time. As easy as it was to access, I have to presume that far more malicious people than myself were probably reading all of the files as well.
I for one think $6500 is a fair price for silence. Not that I can afford to put that theory to the test. I might, however, be able to come up with enough spare change to get myself a Real Hamster.
If you have trouble keeping track of multiple passwords, consider using a program like Password Safe. It allows you to store username/password combinations and you don't even to have the passwords displayed within it in plain text. You can right click on an entry and copy your password to the clipboard and then paste it into the password field. Of course, this requires you to remember the password that you use to lock the vault and to be able to keep people from getting ahold of that password.
As for webmail verses POP mail, while there are plenty of arguments against webmail, I'd say it's still more secure than POP mail. The odds of someone gaining access to the system where your webmail is stored is considerably lower than gaining access to your ISP or POP3 provider. And it's a lot easier to bruteforce a POP3 password since most of them don't have the 3 to 5 strikes and you're temporarily out attribute that pretty much all webmail providers now feature. With a semi-decent password (ie, at least one letter of each case and at least one number or punctuation mark) it would probably take years to bruteforce a webmail account that put your account on hold for 15 minutes after 5 unsuccessful login attempts. Once again, though, if you don't know how to protect yourself from attempts to steal your password, your mail provider could be the Internet equivalent of Fort Knox and you'd still be wide open.
MTV2 still shows more videos than MTV but it's still more non-video shows than video shows most of the day. A few weeks ago, though, I noticed that at a certain time of day, MTV, MTV2, VH1 and Fuse (formerly Much Music USA) were all 4 playing videos at the same time. So, naturally, 2 of them (Fuse and MTV, I believe) were playing the exact same video.
If it's videos you want, though, Fuse is the best option. The channel is probably 85% videos with the other 15% being music related shows and the infomercials that play for a few hours in the early morning. Fuse also has the show "Oven Fresh" which plays new videos, often from unknown artists, and allows people to vote on whether those videos should stay on the play list.
I don't think someone reading your e-mail would be considered identity theft.
And if you haven't already changed your password, then I highly recommend that you stop using the Internet.
I haven't had any problems with Yahoo Chat but one of my e-mail accounts says that "An Unexpected Error Has Occured" and that "Yahoo has been notified of the problem." It's been saying that for over 3 years now, on multiple computers/ISPs and I've e-mailed Yahoo support a couple of times and it's never been fixed.
Perhaps it's because a lot of people don't even realize that shooting is an Olympic sport. My sister is a pretty good skeet shooter and she didn't even know it was an Olympic event. Her brother-in-law just placed 7th in the nation in a skeet shooting event and he didn't realize it was in the Olympics either. I knew about it (thanks to video games) but I probably still wouldn't know that BB Guns were an Olympic event if it hadn't been the first medal awarded.
For those that want to get around registration for newspaper sites, BugMeNot is an excellent little tool. You give it the URL and it gives you a login/password. If you use FireFox, there's even an extension that lets you right click on a site and click BugMeNot and it will pop up a window with a login/password for that site. It comes in handy when you're only interested in a single article from a site you might not read again for quite some time (and would probably forget your login information by then.)
Greg Palast has several articles in the Latin America section of his site, the most recent of which (currently linked from the front page of his site) was written today after the results were released) and another that was written yesterday, explaining the situation.
I also recommend this article that Palast wrote regarding the direct link between the Venezuelan recall election and the debacle in Florida four years ago.
In short, though, the Bush regime doesn't like Chavez because when he took power, he began making the US pay a fair price for oil and then used that money to keep his campaign promises to help the country's poor. Also, he's friends with Castro and worked out a deal where he sends oil to Cuba and Cuba sends teachers and doctors to Venezuela. In general, Chavez is doing what a leader should do, which threatens everything that the Bush family has spent decades working towards.
So, kwonsar, if you believe that marriage is an union blessed by God, does that mean that you believe that non-Christian heterosexuals shouldn't be allowed to marry in a non-Christian ceremony?
The founding fathers weren't nearly as Christian as the Christians would have you believe.
I'm particularly fond of this quote from Benjamin Frankling "...I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to [Christ's] Divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble."
They're probably along the same lines of the spam I've gotten on occasion that say "Put your advertising message here." ie. the idiot spammer forgot to fill out the form before pushing send.
Or it's possible that there's a bug attached and they're just scanning for valid addresses.
I haven't seen the new commercial, being on dialup, but the original was an example of what would happen if a deadly product such as cigarettes was advertised honestly. So that's the relevancy.
They do. And all of the books about divorce have "Add this to your wedding registry." buttons as well. (There are over 63,000 books about divorce.)
Also, when you click on write a review of this item, they have a link that says "Under 13? Use Our Kid's Review Form!" I wonder if there are a lot of 12 year olds purchasing penis pumps and vibrators...
Amazon's "Health & Personal Care" section has all sorts of idiosyncrasies. For instance, when someone was complaining about being unable to find an original copy of Myst, I looked on Amazon to see what they charged (less than $2) but when I did a search for Myst, this item (sort of NSFW) came up before the game I was looking for. That's actually how I discovered that Amazon now sells sex toys.
Regarding invitations, the most popular theory seems to be that they'll open GMail to the public on or immediately before the IPO. I don't think storage is the issue, they're still working on the system. They changed the login method a few days ago and a week or two before they, they added several new features. Also of note is that while you have 1GB of storage, the individual files seem to get cut off a lot smaller. (I forget the exact size now, someone was experimenting with it and found out it starts rejecting files at some point that was well below 100MB.)
Idleness is the holiday of the wise. So... my laziness is a sign of wisdom? My old roommate once got a real fortune that said 'You would make a good lawyer.' He nearly refused to order from that restaurant ever again.
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In "Letter of Warning: Don't share your office computer's C drive on Kazaa."
In 1995 or 1996, I happened upon a USPS bulletin board system. I never found any advertisements for it, just happened upon the number during a war dialing session. It seems like there was no password on the BBS at all, or else it was something extremely easy to guess, because I'm pretty sure there was no hacking of any sort involved in gaining access. There wasn't anything as personal as those Kazaa-found files but there was a large database of postal related scams and what the USPS was doing to prevent them. A lot of them were ideas I'd never thought of before and probably would have worked easily in the low-tech area I lived in at the time. As easy as it was to access, I have to presume that far more malicious people than myself were probably reading all of the files as well.
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In "Apparently, Buddhists enjoy drinking pee (urine)."
So if you don't lead a generally healthy lifestyle, can you drink the urine of someone who does?
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In "RealDoll"
I for one think $6500 is a fair price for silence. Not that I can afford to put that theory to the test. I might, however, be able to come up with enough spare change to get myself a Real Hamster.
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In "Curious George: My privates have been infiltrated."
If you have trouble keeping track of multiple passwords, consider using a program like Password Safe. It allows you to store username/password combinations and you don't even to have the passwords displayed within it in plain text. You can right click on an entry and copy your password to the clipboard and then paste it into the password field. Of course, this requires you to remember the password that you use to lock the vault and to be able to keep people from getting ahold of that password. As for webmail verses POP mail, while there are plenty of arguments against webmail, I'd say it's still more secure than POP mail. The odds of someone gaining access to the system where your webmail is stored is considerably lower than gaining access to your ISP or POP3 provider. And it's a lot easier to bruteforce a POP3 password since most of them don't have the 3 to 5 strikes and you're temporarily out attribute that pretty much all webmail providers now feature. With a semi-decent password (ie, at least one letter of each case and at least one number or punctuation mark) it would probably take years to bruteforce a webmail account that put your account on hold for 15 minutes after 5 unsuccessful login attempts. Once again, though, if you don't know how to protect yourself from attempts to steal your password, your mail provider could be the Internet equivalent of Fort Knox and you'd still be wide open.
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In "Curious George: Digital Cable Question - "
MTV2 still shows more videos than MTV but it's still more non-video shows than video shows most of the day. A few weeks ago, though, I noticed that at a certain time of day, MTV, MTV2, VH1 and Fuse (formerly Much Music USA) were all 4 playing videos at the same time. So, naturally, 2 of them (Fuse and MTV, I believe) were playing the exact same video. If it's videos you want, though, Fuse is the best option. The channel is probably 85% videos with the other 15% being music related shows and the infomercials that play for a few hours in the early morning. Fuse also has the show "Oven Fresh" which plays new videos, often from unknown artists, and allows people to vote on whether those videos should stay on the play list.
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In "Curious George: My privates have been infiltrated."
I don't think someone reading your e-mail would be considered identity theft. And if you haven't already changed your password, then I highly recommend that you stop using the Internet.
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In "Curious, George: Yahoo! Chat"
I haven't had any problems with Yahoo Chat but one of my e-mail accounts says that "An Unexpected Error Has Occured" and that "Yahoo has been notified of the problem." It's been saying that for over 3 years now, on multiple computers/ISPs and I've e-mailed Yahoo support a couple of times and it's never been fixed.
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In "US Olympic Shooting Medal Results."
Perhaps it's because a lot of people don't even realize that shooting is an Olympic sport. My sister is a pretty good skeet shooter and she didn't even know it was an Olympic event. Her brother-in-law just placed 7th in the nation in a skeet shooting event and he didn't realize it was in the Olympics either. I knew about it (thanks to video games) but I probably still wouldn't know that BB Guns were an Olympic event if it hadn't been the first medal awarded.
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In "The fix may be in, yet again..."
For those that want to get around registration for newspaper sites, BugMeNot is an excellent little tool. You give it the URL and it gives you a login/password. If you use FireFox, there's even an extension that lets you right click on a site and click BugMeNot and it will pop up a window with a login/password for that site. It comes in handy when you're only interested in a single article from a site you might not read again for quite some time (and would probably forget your login information by then.)
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In ""
Greg Palast has several articles in the Latin America section of his site, the most recent of which (currently linked from the front page of his site) was written today after the results were released) and another that was written yesterday, explaining the situation. I also recommend this article that Palast wrote regarding the direct link between the Venezuelan recall election and the debacle in Florida four years ago. In short, though, the Bush regime doesn't like Chavez because when he took power, he began making the US pay a fair price for oil and then used that money to keep his campaign promises to help the country's poor. Also, he's friends with Castro and worked out a deal where he sends oil to Cuba and Cuba sends teachers and doctors to Venezuela. In general, Chavez is doing what a leader should do, which threatens everything that the Bush family has spent decades working towards.
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In "Your marriage? Null and void."
So, kwonsar, if you believe that marriage is an union blessed by God, does that mean that you believe that non-Christian heterosexuals shouldn't be allowed to marry in a non-Christian ceremony?
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
The founding fathers weren't nearly as Christian as the Christians would have you believe. I'm particularly fond of this quote from Benjamin Frankling "...I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to [Christ's] Divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble."
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In "Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines."
They're probably along the same lines of the spam I've gotten on occasion that say "Put your advertising message here." ie. the idiot spammer forgot to fill out the form before pushing send. Or it's possible that there's a bug attached and they're just scanning for valid addresses.
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In "Your marriage? Null and void."
Someone should sue the state of California and demand that they reimburse everyone who spent money on wedding gifts that are no longer valid.
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In "The Deadly Sins and Heavenly Virtues Page"
When I clicked Get Score, my browser crashed. Apparently, I'm so "perverse and disgusting" that the even the Internet is appalled.
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In "New ShardsO'Glass Lights!"
I haven't seen the new commercial, being on dialup, but the original was an example of what would happen if a deadly product such as cigarettes was advertised honestly. So that's the relevancy.
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In "Amazon offering used condoms."
They do. And all of the books about divorce have "Add this to your wedding registry." buttons as well. (There are over 63,000 books about divorce.) Also, when you click on write a review of this item, they have a link that says "Under 13? Use Our Kid's Review Form!" I wonder if there are a lot of 12 year olds purchasing penis pumps and vibrators...
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
Amazon's "Health & Personal Care" section has all sorts of idiosyncrasies. For instance, when someone was complaining about being unable to find an original copy of Myst, I looked on Amazon to see what they charged (less than $2) but when I did a search for Myst, this item (sort of NSFW) came up before the game I was looking for. That's actually how I discovered that Amazon now sells sex toys.
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
In "Links to new Gmail applications"
Regarding invitations, the most popular theory seems to be that they'll open GMail to the public on or immediately before the IPO. I don't think storage is the issue, they're still working on the system. They changed the login method a few days ago and a week or two before they, they added several new features. Also of note is that while you have 1GB of storage, the individual files seem to get cut off a lot smaller. (I forget the exact size now, someone was experimenting with it and found out it starts rejecting files at some point that was well below 100MB.)
posted by Vestal Lies 19 years ago
(limited to the most recent 20 comments)