His ears were burning, he has updated his whois and is now anonymous. Not that it is going to help him now.

Administrative Contact:
        Contact Privacy Inc. Customer 0121602432, cyanogenmod.com@contactprivacy.com
        96 Mowat Ave
        Toronto, ON M6K 3M1
        CA
        +1.4165385457
[SNIP]
Record last updated on 14-Nov-2012.

End-users should not notice a thing. The caching resolver they use at their ISP will try one of the listed
nameservers for a domain first (typically at random) if that address is not already in its cache, and if
the connection fails will automagically try the next in its list, if that fails the next, and so on. A delay of
some milliseconds in name resolution will be the only result, and probably not even noticed. If both
(or all if more than one) of the listed nameservers are offline and their is no cache entry for the looked up
name, the resolver will return an error to the client. Then they get a network connection error or whatever
their particular web browser decides to call the problem.

From the article:

"In my opinion, taking down the top three spam botnets—Lethic, Cutwail, and Grum—is enough for a rapid and permanent decline in worldwide spam level," he said. "We still have to deal with small players, but I am sure that, after seeing the big players being knocked down, they will retreat as well."

Very optimistic! There's too many colo/virtual host sites out there that simply don't give a rat's ass that large swaths of their
bandwidth and IP space are being used by spammers. They're everywhere! And I've given up telling them. Even "legit" ISPs
like Integra have routinely ignored my notices in the past, so I've simply given up, I haven't the time or inclination to help any
more. They're using spammers to help pad their bottom line.

Reduced, sure, but go away? And another big botnet will appear again in the future, I have no doubt at all.

I was recently setting up a web power switch and its manual said the scripting language it used was BASIC, and I instantly flashed back to writing
a Star Trek II (Kaaahhhnn) simulator in BASIC during the 80's that had photon torpedoes about 1cm x 1cm. Strange how the brain works sometimes. Well, it
wasn't as sophisticated as your call progress detection hack, by any means, but I wish I had managed to saved that 5 1/4" floppy, just for grins.

Also, I believe this might be the first time in my years of having a slashdot login that I recall seeing someone admit to spending time in the slammer without posting as an AC. Cheers #1563, and happy for you that you left the club in time to garner a four-digit slashdot userid! I'm not jealous or anything. Ah, I'm off-topic. Been here 12 years and have a six-digit userid, I'll be off-topic for once. Heh.

But to get back on topic, though most likely nobody will read it. Working for an ISP off-and-on these last 15 years has nearly forced me to want to line up these scammers... well and do something not nice to them. Perhaps force them to watch under bright lights whilst someone social engineers one of their family and gets them to give up their life savings, at least their email password so we can login to their webmail and send nasty emails to all of their contacts. This is a symptom of having lots of customers do just that and *poof* we have thousands of emails going all over the place and Yahoo and what not deferring everything, so customers call up wondering why their email (forwarded joke, with attachments) to Grandma hasn't arrived yet. Maybe these scammers are desperate, maybe not. But it's kind of like shitting on someone else's lawn and not cleaning it up. *Someone* has to, and it's usually us.

I did login to the latest Nigerian scammer's web site, at some colo center in Germany btw, and enter a username of "GO BITE YOURSELF HOSER" and a password of "GET A LIFE". Wish I could say I tied them up on the phone for 30 minutes, but that is my contribution so far.

Screw that. I just told my boss about this story and he imploded. We've been deploying MikroTiks to many
remote sites and they never bat an eye (although we sometimes prefer to run OpenWRT on them instead of
dealing with RouterOS). At around $80 a piece, they could have saved nearly $24 million dollars. Add
some additional cost for something cheap that interfaces with their T-1's. Ah, they should have got all the
fiber ready and then bought something much cheaper that would interface with it. $24 million of OUR MONEY.
Thank you WV.

For any of us that happen to live in the northwest US or the billion or so others who are near the Pacific ring of fire, we don't really have much choice. Here in Bend, we're only 30 miles from a bunch of old volcanoes--one of them, South Sister, is developing a bulge that grows about 1 inch a year--but if we moved the city farther away, we'd be out in the desert without our wonderful view of the Cascade Mountains and quick access to the ski resort and the dozens of lakes up there. Who would want that? I think it's a lot easier for someone from Scotland (I assume *that* Edinburgh) to avoid volcanoes in his native land, eh?

In any case, lack of proximity does not equal safety. When Mt St Helens erupted in 1980, I was in Spokane, at least a couple of hundred miles away from it, and we got blanketed in ash that made life more difficult for weeks. We didn't suffer from pyroclastic flows or anything, of course, but it's not recommended to breath volcanic ash for any length of time (had to wear masks forever).

'
Good info. I don't believe this would stop the crew up there from investigating, trying to
find and investigating again some way to save the other half. I'm guessing, but if I were up
there, saving these friends of mine would be a priority. Up there, I suppose, my wishes
might be like dust.

Give me a Soyuz capsule, or give me an eternity in this gravity well.

There's a large T-Mobile support center here in central Oregon. They even have a gym and other nice amenities for call reps. And I've talked to T-Mobile reps who are at other call centers in the US. It would be a shame if AT&T cut those jobs. It was a big deal when T-Mobile came here--it's not like there are tons of other jobs opening up.

Your message is ambiguous--when you say "doing it on the cheap" are you talking about BSG, or Caprica, or both?

I never did get to watch Caprica. I've dissed cable and sat tv for awhile now. BSG, on the other hand, I watched. I would say that, regardless of how much they paid their actors, the audience saw performance above and beyond that of the typical science fiction show of late. It's interesting that some of them often lived as day actors in Vancouver, grabbing parts here and there as they could. But the performances they gave! How about the job Tricia Helfer did (hmm, I might be biased). She rocked. No, the casting for BSG was terrific.

So on to the topic of girls: never in my life have I known of a sci-fi show that lots of girls ended up liking. You're stereotyping big-time, too. Why should my maleness preclude me from wanting "character development"? Bah, rubbish man, rubbish. I even got my sister-in-law to like BSG, which she watched until the end, as did other women I know, including a romantic interest. Star Trek never had the same effect in my world :-)

I just happened to peruse nbc.com the other day and noticed that they have a lot of Quantum Leap episodes available for viewing. I was amazed, really--I hadn't visited a mainstream network's web site in some time. In the end, I watched some episodes of the original BSG! Hah! Born in 1972, I'm old enough to recall seeing them back when they aired. Luckily, my mom has always been a sci-fi fan. Just hearing the music tickles long-lasting pathways in my brain.

Ah, Halo, I love emacs, but never bothered to master its web browsing functions. No, for me it was lynx, and emacs was relegated to text and code editing functions. And you didn't have to be too late back in the day to end up with a uid greater than 3 digits. I signed up in 2000/2001 (can't recall precicely) and ended up with a six-digit uid :-) btw, once in awhile I still load up lynx for simple stuff, but less and less often as the weeks go by. Hmm, I'm posting this more than 12 hours after you did, so you may be the only one to see it if you manage to look!

Later,

There are certainly other reflectors out there on the moon, that could and have been used for measuring the moon's distance--and for some time now. I can't imagine what could be special about this one, except for the quality, perhaps? Nah. What if it's not kosher for others to shoot lasers at the reflectors that other scientists use? The article ends there and is skimpy on details.

Probably my first off-topic post after years reading slashdot, but I must say that FTFY stuff is getting a bit tiring. It doesn't sit well with me to quote somebody's words and alter them. Better to quote honestly and explain how you think your opinion differs, which it would seem you don't disagree anyway. FTFY seems very arrogant to me--there was really nothing to fix in his post because what he said was actually true in his experience, and most reasonable people would agree with him. There's probably not one post ever submitted that couldn't be "fixed" by someone in some fashion, and then what kind of forum would it be? Just a bunch of FTFY's, over and over and over... blah! Am I being picky? hmmm

And it would still be spelled "Sci Fi". Marketing drones... the hosers.