This really is off-topic for this discussion but I have to say:

Dude! You aren't 16, are you? Only caring about what happens in the US is like living in a surreal bubble. No interest at all in knowing what's going on in Ukraine, Hong Kong, the middle east, or Mars? And trying for balance by watching cable news? Eh, that's so weird to me. I guess it's just my opinion, but considering the nature of the world we live in these days, anyone who cares at all about the news should be caring about what's happening internationally.

Personally, I'll read the NY Times and maybe watch PBS News hour and 30 minutes of our local news (which they broadcast 1.5 hrs, but pretty much say everything in the first 30 min broadcast. Dumb). If my roommate weren't so attached to watching crappy history channel shows, I might ditch cable and watch those on rabbit ears, in HD! We won't pay our blasted cable company extra for HD.

I once lived 6 miles from the US/Canada border and we only had Canadian tv over the air. Let me tell you, watching the nightly Canadian news broadcasts is an *entirely* different news experience. I really preferred it, frankly, though I wasn't too interested in stories about the price of tea in Whitehorse :)

That's only three syllables. The original arabic is tough to phonetically spell because there are two letters not in our alphabet. For instance, the "Q" is used because the first letter is a hard K, which you use your throat to pronounce. And in the middle is the "ain" letter, which also one uses the throat. The word is prounounced *something* like "al QAA ih duh". There's actually an official government transliteration alphabet that is used when that needs to be done. But I can't remember it and it wouldn't help you :)

It always grated my ears when I heard Bush call them "Al kayda". It offended my arabic language neurons every time!

The terrorist network's name does mean "The Base". It's used a lot, such as in "miltary base", "base of operations". Heck, even a meeting place can be qaeda. Like "Al qaeda is at the store 1pm". Let's meet at the store at 1pm.

I have no idea what Al quida is supposed to mean. I suspect it's a typo, OP says it's network in Arabic, but my check says it's "shibka". I studied arabic in the army but I had to google that, it's been awhile.

We all have our talents. First and foremost that's the thing to remember. Here I go starting this thread talking about being able to do push-ups, when my brother is a ballroom dance instructor and has talent enough to take a piece of clay and turn it into Patrick Stewart. Umm, btw, even in my best years you'd have beat me in sit-ups.

That's interesting. Some things are the same everywhere. In the US Army we got the day off for donating blood, too. It's a great idea and was one of the few really nice perks. (Side note: every three-day weekend we automatically got a fourth day off. See the Army's not *that* bad, hah).

I eventually earned a five gallon donation lapel pin from the Red Cross after I left the service. I told someone this once and she said "You donated 5 gallons of blood today?" *faceslap* Well I'm B+ which is not rare but isn't really too common, either, it seems.

Though I've slacked on my donations lately. This is reminding me I should start thinking more about that.

Cheers AC Greek veteran!

I can think of a couple of reasons, there may be more. A new army recruit is probably going to be payed less than a civilian government employee. Also, in the military, you can work 18+ hrs a day and there is no such thing as overtime. Civilians are also not subject to the uniform code of military justice, which means punishing bad guys--or, heh, good guys doing bad--is always made easier than dealing with messy civilian justice.

When I enlisted in 1990 you only had to be able to complete something like 13 pushups to be assigned to a basic training unit. Those that couldn't were put into a "remedial physical training" unit, where of course they were roundly laughed at by those in real basic. Passing the actual PT test at the end of basic is different, but at 18 were only had to do around 45 pushups and 60 situps in two minutes, and run two miles in less than 17 minutes or thereabouts--don't recall precisely. And as you get older, the requirements lessen. Upon enlistment all we had to do was lift 40 pounds above your head on a weight machine. I was 5'3" and 115 pounds back then (still 5'3", beer has added a bit of weight over time :-)

Dilma Rousseff is female :-) First woman to hold the office.

You could install spamassassin and procmail. If procmail sees X-Spam-Flag: YES in the headers, plop it into your spam folder
or whatever. We use spamassassin on our incoming email servers and I very rarely get spam in my inbox. I receive more than 100
spams a day. We're an ISP and I very rarely have to muck around with with tweaking rules, etc.

After installing spamassassin, a cron job should be set up to run sa-update daily to update the filter rules.

I don't see that it matters. Spammers, in my experience, rarely send with a valid return address, even if it looks legit. Say, like, bounce-12345-user+domain.com@spammerdomain.com. And weeding their lists doesn't seem to be a priority. If I were to look in our mail logs right now, I'd no doubt see
thousands of spam mails per day sent to addresses that haven't existed for YEARS. My own address was unused for more than 3 years, and after
I activated it again (came back to work here, iow), I received new spam within seconds.

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.