Is anyone else in Tennessee (or any place else) having problem with very high latency and slow DNS servers? I looks like something is up with AT&T in GA & TX ... (att in general?)
btw the techs (phone monkeys) I called said that there is nothing wrong as far as they know but I don't think that is true as DSL Reports: COMCAST forum looks like it might be a east cost partial outage....

Telnet on over to 'route-server.ip.att.net' and take a look...

Comcast Problems....

I can't remember why I decided to taste everything in it. It made sense at the time. It also made sense to record my findings for posterity (or possibly for the coroner). The only paper to hand was our "phone book" - a school exercise book pressed into service as a repository for phone numbers, lists, doodles, and now lab notes....

Good. Funny for me. Drunk man trying to review alcohol... And the had written notes get better as he drinks more.... :)

an unfortunate experiment...

This 1883 book is without question the worst phrasebook ever written. The writer, Pedro Carolino, who was Portuguese, did not particularly speak English, nor did he have a Portuguese-English dictionary available. Instead, he worked with a French-English phrasebook and a Portuguese-French dictionary. The results, I'm sure you'll agree, are staggering.

English as she is spoke

message intercepted

some reasons why its not so bad that the white house is spying on our phone calls and emails:

- finally mothers everywhere have a way to defend themselves when they look through their children's things and read their diaries.

- when I tell my personal problems to that sexy automated voice at virgin-atlantic customer service, I can feel that someone is really listening.

- before every phone call you make, verizon can boost profits by adding a pre-recorded message saying "to ensure the safety of the free world the following conversation may be recorded"

- we can feel safe that even if there is a mix up, we still have the right to fair trial and can't be held indefinitely without formal charges...uh...strike that...bummer.

- finally, girls will stop referring to me as their "little terrorist" and stop saying that they are going to "bomb my secret target of love".

- just as we are all born sinners, we are all born terrorists until we can prove our thoughts and text messages are pure.

- we can be sure that there are safeguards against listening to opposition parties' strategy conference calls...come on...its foolproof.

- just as we should avoid talking about condoms in school.. and instead just teach abstinence...we should stop talking about the root causes of terrorism and just focus on killing terrorists.

- if kidnapping and spying are considered terrorist activities the NSA may have to indict themselves.

- preventing terrorist attacks has finally been given the highest place in government function...above things that are more deadly...but just not as mean sounding...like basic health care.

- "civil liberty" can finally be replaced with "intelligent privacy"

Zefrank: message intercepted

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that there are "half a dozen futures that seem to me equally probable, and among them is the possibility of civilization cutting its own throat." The catalyst for such an outcome might very well be the bureaucratic impulse to hide incompetence, embarrassment, and abuse. Today, when a U.S. national security employee, intelligence official, or member of a law enforcement agency reports wrongdoing, he or she has virtually no protection against retaliation. They are confronted with a choice between career and conscience--for there is little in history to make them confident about their continued employment should they speak out against illegal dealings or activities that put us all at risk.

In the 1980s, CIA employee Richard Barlow discovered that Pakistan, with the blessing of the Reagan and Bush I administrations, was able to buy restricted nuclear technology-related items in the United States. Barlow also unmasked a coordinated attempt by the U.S. intelligence community to lie to Congress about Pakistan's activities. The result? His security clearance was suspended, and he lost his job. The Reagan and Bush I administrations covered up Barlow's discoveries because, at the time, they needed Pakistan's help to fund and supply the Afghans in their bloody fight with the Soviets.

This was not merely a problem restricted to the presidencies of that era. The then-Democratically controlled Congress steadfastly refused to address the dangerous issues that Barlow raised and was only too happy to try to move them out of the public eye. We are now paying the price for this shortsightedness--what Barlow had discovered was an early incarnation of physicist Abdul Qadeer Khan's illegal, international nuclear proliferation network. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, has been under house arrest since February 2004. In October 2005, President George W. Bush declared that "The United States . . . has exposed and disrupted a major blackmarket operation in nuclear technology led by A. Q. Khan." But that disruption should have come nearly 20 years ago, when Barlow first raised the alarm. Khan's underground network could have been halted before he leaked nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

In light of what happened to Barlow, is it likely that anyone would come forward in similar circumstances now? His case is hardly unique, a fact attested to by the very existence of our organization, the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. Our members include Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who reported that Operation Able Danger had information on 9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta's cell well before the attacks. (Shaffer was subsequently labeled untrustworthy, in part because he admitted to taking government dime pens out of an embassy when he was a high school intern, and his security clearance was revoked.) And then there's Sandalio Gonzalez, a 32-year law enforcement agen... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

To tell the truth...

The Pew Internet and American Life Project also finds that U.S. Internet users are more apt to get help on health care, financial and other decisions because they have a larger set of people to which to turn.

Further rebuking early studies suggesting that the Internet promotes isolation, Pew found that it "was actually helping people maintain their communities," said Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociology professor and co-author of the Pew report.

The study found that e-mail is supplementing, not replacing, other means of contact. For example, people who e-mail most of their closest friends and relatives at least once a week are about 25 percent more likely to have weekly landline phone contact as well. The increase is even greater for cell phones.

"There's a certain seamlessness of how people maintain their social networks," said John Horrigan, Pew's associate director. "They shift between face-to-face, phone and Internet quite easily."

Meanwhile, Internet users tend to have a larger network of close and significant contacts -- a median of 37 compared with 30 for nonusers -- and they are more likely to receive help from someone within that social network.

The latest Pew report, issued Wednesday, was based on random telephone surveys conducted in February and March of 2004 and 2005.

Each year's survey involved about 2,200 adults and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points

Alone on the Internet? Hardly...

Apple has sold more than 42 million of the devices since they went on sale in 2001, including 14 million in the fourth quarter last year. The devices can produce sounds of more than 115 decibels, a volume that can damage the hearing of a person exposed to the sound for more than 28 seconds per day, according to the complaint.

The iPod players are "inherently defective in design and are not sufficiently adorned with adequate warnings regarding the likelihood of hearing loss," according to the complaint, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, on behalf of John Kiel Patterson, of Louisiana.

The suit, which Patterson wants certified as a class-action, seeks compensation for unspecified damages and upgrades that will make iPods safer. Patterson's suit said he bought an iPod last year, but does not specify whether he suffered hearing loss from the device.

Patterson does not know if the device has damaged his hearing, said his attorney, Steve W. Berman, of Seattle. But that's beside the point of the lawsuit, which takes issue with the potential the iPod has to cause irreparable hearing loss, Berman said.

Dumb!

Lawsuit: iPods may cause ... eh?

That's right. The HP ScanJet 4c's SCL (Scanner Control Language) command set includes an unofficial PLAY TUNE command. I stumbled across this after reading an article on the ScanJet 4c in the feb. 1997 issue of HP Journal (see the sidebar Sing to Me).

The PLAY TUNE command basically varies the stepping rate of the scanner motor to produce audible frequencies. All it needs is a series of note frequencies and durations previously written to its SCSI buffer. The ScanJetPlay utility resulted from my efforts in trying out this easter egg. Check dis shit out, babee! :^)

ScanJetPlay requires libsane and libsanei (for SCSI access) from the SANE backends package. Note that libsanei and its header files is not installed per default, and must be done manually.

Video here...

http://www.ghana-projects.de/scanjet-elise2.mpg

This just sounds so cool ... :)

ScanJet Music

SNL - The Chronic of Narnia Rap

'So bad yet so.. HaHa...'

SNL - The Chronic of Narnia Rap

India's and China's educational systems — known for producing vast numbers of engineers — are commonly thought to be slowly and steadily overtaking the U.S. in technological leadership. But that may not be the case.

A controversial Duke University study contradicts that perception, pointing out that engineers are defined differently in different places. Those differences give the impression that foreign colleges are graduating more engineers, as measured by U.S. standards, than they really are. In addition to blurring the definition of the term, schools in India and China may not be graduating engineers of the same caliber as those in the United States. And their graduates may not be competitive in a global sense for a variety of reasons, including language issues and job locations.

While the study may augur well for the United States and do much to deflate the "sky is falling" hyperbole about the alarmingly low numbers of qualified engineers here (see Opinion, Dec. 12, page 4), it's not a black-and-white analysis. Some in the field predict a continued drop in the number of U.S. engineering graduates and increased salary pressure from other countries. They point out that current failings of the K-12 educational system in the United States create future risks to U.S. technological dominance.

The 2004 engineering school graduate figures often cited are 352,000 for India and 600,000 for China, according to the Dec. 12 study.

U.S. engineer education not in dire straits: study