Who cares about journalists anyway?

As it is said in Texas, what a load of bull sh*t. Reporters Without Boarders™ juices up the story by stating that the reporters were "body searched". Well duh, anytime you are officially taken into custody by the authorities you are as they say again in Texas "patted down" in order to make sure the detainee has no weapons or other items that may be used to harm the custodial officers, detainees, other inmates, whatever. This is not to be confused with a "cavity body search" which is what the story implies.

God it is no wonder that with the exception of the esteemed journalists at the Inquirer everyone hates journalists.

Sincerely yours

Henry L Dicus, email supplied

Microsoft and Sharp make Longhorn compliant LCD

Hi!

I worked a long time as colorist (measuring colors and color coordinates). What I know (and I am really sure about that) is that a normal human eye is only able to see about 2.000.000 colors (200 grades color, 500 brightness and 200 saturation. Sure there are more colors because the colorspace is 3d and there are infinite points but the eye can only see a difference about a delta of 0.3 in grey and 1.0 in green and orange/red.

So the press release is abolute nonsense.

See here.

Sorry for my english

Thomas

Free Software Foundation claims OpenTV GPL violation

"The general public licence is free, but if companies or individuals use the software code, they're expected to put that code back into the public domain."

"use" should be "who distributes"

Pleas fix this becous now it looks like my oneline kernel hack must be sent to linus/somesone.

Thanks

Bjorn Blomqvist

I'm so sick of hearing "IP", "IP", "IP" a self promotional term. Especially for the latest acoustically impaired teeny bopping out of her clueless, drug addled top.

Reporters with public presence need to start using acronyms that stick with a sting. My draft nomination:

Copywrong Cabal Conspiracy Project - CCCP, empires of evil It still needs some work, especially on the P, but your readers would get the idea, replacement/improvements/additions welcome. I don't believe what RIAA, MPAA etc are doing is merely unconstitutional, it is anti - constitutional ! I think that the American copyright system of the 19th century with concepts of first sale, fair use and shorter periods came closest to getting it right. The evolving imperial American "IP" system threatens us all in so many ways it needs an acronym of infamy...

My apologies to Cyrillic speakers that phonically recognize this as SSSR (USSR). Hopefully no trademark remains for that expired organization which didn't believe in private property anyway (just state property).

My employer got a "real" US patent 11 years ago for defensive purposes for my chemical's manufacture/use.

Bruce Iiams
Email address supplied

INQ, Register "ruined my life"

ROFLMFFAO

HAHAHAHAHAHA

oh damn that was good...

Pete martin, email address supplied

Chancellor Gordon Brown has said that ruling out membership of the Euro on grounds of dogma not economics would be damaging for investment, jobs and business.

Yours faithfully

Tony Blair, your prime minister

Mike,

I keep reading about the whole Spam / antispam conflict, and came to the conclusion that as long as there are greedy people out there and idiots willing to part with their money, we'll have a problem.

Some of the statistics on Spam are (roughly, and I may miss a decimal somewhere) 0.0075% of Spam emails are opened, and 0.0025% are acted on (ie 1 in 3 people stupid enough to open the Spam are dumb enough to get suckered in by it). if you send out 20,000,000 emails, you'll get 1,500 responses, and 500 sales. (or something like that)

Spam works

And if something works, then you'll always have a hard time getting rid of it, whatever measures you take, they will always find a way around, because "its worth their while"

So I then further thought about the problem, and realised that instead of hitting the spammers, you could hit their clients (preferably with a large bat - but I digress), the people that are asking them to send out the spam, they're the *cause* of the problem, the spammers are just providing a service...

Then I had an idea (I don't know if this has been tried before, if it has, then I'm unoriginal, but if it hasn't then I'd like to be known hence forth as "Tim, the guy that killed spam" - *grin* let me explain my idea: (You'd want to automate the process below, preferably in a form that you can pass to your friends, for reasons I'll elaborate on later.)

If you set up a dummy email address (you wouldn't want to do this with your real one), and post it a few places to attract some Spam, pretty quickly you'll be receiving ads for penis enlargement, herbal viagra, work from home, and business opportunities in Nigeria.

You then repeatedly click on *every* ad, and every link within the ad (pref with a browser kill command a few second later, or something like that), and send an email full of garbage to every email address contained therein. Most of the ads these days contain HTML encoded links to pictures (which require downloading info from the clients webserver somewhere), and the links will bring up the website of the "product", also requiring a download from the webserver. Sending the emails is like reverse Spam, Spam 20,000,000 people once and if 20,000,000 people Spam you back 10 times...

One person doing this won't add significantly to the load on the web & email servers, but if you could get some effort going like cloudmark, then we'd have a rolling DDOS against the clients of spammers. Maybe they might learn the lesson, "advertise by Spam, watch your web server go up in smoke"

I'm guessing that the clients of the spammers don't generally have huge (expensive) webservers and unlimited hosting, and even if they do, its fairly easy to overwhelm a webserver with relatively large number of frequent requests, and just watch their hosting bills go through the roof !

To put it in non technical terms, we're drowning out the idiots replies, no idiots means no money (for the clients), no money means waste of time (for the clients), waste of time for the clients, means the spammers don't get contacted, spamming becomes unprofitable, then the spammers sod off and die (or go back to kiting bad checks & petty larceny, like the rats that they are)

The beauty of this is that they are contributing to their own downfall, if the spam clients don't have any way to be contacted, then you can't buy their product, and without that, there is no reason to Spam.

As I said, you wouldn't want to do this manually, but surely there are people out there that can code this type of program.

Just my $0.02

Cheers

Tim