| Sunday,
June 18, 2000 Well, Jenny got her MFA in Archeology. She's
been using stuff she learned as an officer in Army Intelligence to infer
trade patterns in the ancient world, and apparently has caught some of the
profession by surprise.
And the good news is that my back is better though not good.
Internet Explorer has been giving me a search engine called go.com or
some silly thing. Apparently idiot companies bid to see who will be at the
top of the search hits. So I was looking for the site for iomega.com so
see if I could find drivers that will work with Windows 2000. My W 2000
Zip 100 Plus works with the W 2000 system, but the icon is wrong, and most
of the tools don't work. So I did a search on Iomaga.
I got about 100 URL's listed, not one of which was Iomega. So I went to
Altavista, did a search on Iomega, and the first one was http://www.iomega.com
which is what I should have tried in the first place, but I had wanted to
be sure that was where I ought to go. MSN and go.com can go to blazes.
What use is it to have a search engine that returns things in the order in
which they PAID for it? Silly. Useless. I'll have to look into how to
change my default search engine, because MSN gave me that one, and that
one sucks dead bunnies.
[Turns out I had it wrong. See
mail.]
Alas, this machine doesn't have GETRIGHT on it (an oversight; I didn't
transfer it when setting it up; I'll fix that when I get back to LA) so I
have to download the new Zip software in chunks. Iomega wants to know
everything about me before they will send me the software. I told them my
company name was "I Hate Zip" and my address is a swamp
somewhere, and if they try that phone number they will like the results a
lot. Oh and my title is Zip Hater. They don't ask for all this
information, they demand it before their product will work with my new
machine. Interesting. It's as if I owe them something for buying their
products.
The software is enormous and is going to take a while to get. I sure
wish I had brought GetRight.
We have been getting a lot of complaints about Click of Death and dead
Zip drives, but I have to say I never have had any problems, and I do find
Zip a very convenient way to transfer files from one place to another, and
for TEMPORARY backup storage. No magnetic media is really safe storage,
and if you want to be sure, burn a CDROM or a DVD RAM; but all in all, I
can't say I am all that unhappy with ZIP except for their silly policy on
downloads.
I have put up a LOT of mail, and one
recommended book on Heinlein.
It seems the inmates have been running the
asylum all along.
from http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-2000619225010.htm
----- Mr. Richardson said on NBC's "Meet
the Press" "it's very clear" in the contract the University
of California has with the Department of Energy that "they're in
charge of security" at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New
Mexico.
-Roland Dobbins <mordant@gothik.org>
Well, I don't really know much about security within the National Labs.
When I was in the business, I wrote one document that was classified above
my own level, so I could never have the entire document in my possession
at once. Since I had written every single page, I could have every page,
but only page at a time, and I had to sign out for each one. It was a
royal pain, but since the damn thing was supposed to contain everything we
knew, and everything we knew about the Soviets, on the subject of ICBM's
and basing, it made a fair amount of sense to treat it carefully.
I guarantee you no one had access to any of that document without
signing in. So the situation at the labs seems a bit odd to me.
Tip on installing a USR external modem under Windows 2000: do it
yourself, select the generic 56K modem, and forget the USR 3Com stuff; The
USR drivers suck or don't work at all with W 2000. Fascinating how
lazy they have got.
It isn't easy to install modems without using the hardware wizard,
either. The stupid wizard keeps finding bad drivers, attempting to
install, then giving up. Go to Control Panel, Phone and Modems, Modems,
then ADD a modem. Don't try the hardware install wizard at all. This
is dumb, but it's the only way.
What are we to do about Spam? Some Spammers cost me minutes a day.
Multiply by the tens of thousands they do it to, and they owe society life
imprisonment, only that's expensive. Which is to say, they have cost more
of other people's lives than theirs will ever be worth. Perhaps if they
were used as involuntary blood donors it would make up for some of it. But
how to find them to apply the remedy?
We have computers. There must be some way to use them to attack this
problem. We also have prisons, organ donation collection centers,
work camps... This was all brought home to me by being off line a
couple of days. When I got back on, the stuff poured in. On every mail
address I have. And since I was for a while connected only at 9600, the
interminable flow was costly in time, and would have been in connect time.
Surely there is a way to deal with this stuff that makes the people who
send it unhappy. Miserable would be better. They make a lot of people
unhappy; visit all that unhappiness back on the spammer. I know that is
uncharitable, but what else is to be done?
Is it legal to set a demon dialer to dialing their 800 number? Do 800
calls cost the spammer? Can we mail dead fish to their mail boxes? Find
out their addresses and advertise in their local papers that they are in
need of urine and feces samples? If we can find out who they are, listing
their home numbers in a porno spam might be interesting.
But surely something can be done?
Perhaps I am merely bilious tonight.
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