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.

My friend, the management of Frost Bank sounds like a cold-hearted bunch. Luckily for them, they'll be able to take your hard-earned fees and distribute them to their various boat payments. The warmth of the Caribbean will no doubt make up for months of freezing in Manhattan--or wherever you and Frost Bank live in the world :-)

Close! Strange how memory works. Put those two together and you get "Trumpet Winsock". You just tickled a few memories: I remember I was really happy to buy Win95 so I wouldn't have to deal with Trumpet Winsock anymore. Well, and let's face it, it was an improvement to 3.11, but really I think my packard hell computer ran the older much faster than the new, but networking was easier. Thanks to the internet I found slackware linux some few months later. No more winsock.dll... :)

As for the story topic, later I found out how much a racket network solutions was with their outrageous domain registration fees, and heard about this guy Aveek Datta and ml.org, which we would provide free domain names under ml.org for anybody. Thousands and thousands signed up--clearly average people didn't want to pay $100+ for a .com name. I helped run that for awhile, and it was a worthy cause in my book. It was hard to like network solutions. I couldn't have helped if I hadn't spent hours fixing my screwups in slackware, on a side note :)

I'll not write as causticly as the AC who also replied, but I'll agree in principal.

One thing that is obvious and well-known is that it doesn't matter that you don't visit "shady" web sites to end up being subject to potential malware infection. Ad companies are letting nasty ads get through whatever controls they have in place. Serious vetting and the talent to implement it costs money, no doubt. I just found this, http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20000353-245.html

My 7 year old nephew's computer was chronically infested and he played games loaded via IE online. These free games sites have lots of ads. No windows virus scanner I tried could get rid of them. Had to use the Trinity Rescue Kit and ALL of its virus scanners to eliminate the infections on one occasion. I don't trust virus scans in windows much anymore. Oh, btw, they were letting him use an account with admin privs. I'm a years-long linux guy, and it's seriously tiring dealing with this, but I'll hazard a guess that you and others of us here are first responders for family and friends' computer issues, so won't get any sympathy :-)

Anyway, I think common sense applies. You're an experienced computer user, but why not be better safe than sorry? Your computer, your rules, certainly, but why take the chance? You have to make it as hard for the bad guys as possible, zero-day exploits and general windows vulnerabilities as common as they seem to be. I wonder if patch Tuesday will some day start a religion?

It may be nearly useless. That doesn't mean that botnets aren't sending email direct-to-MX. These hosts have connected to our incoming MX's in just the last couple of minutes, and I'd say it's a small sample :) But, nearly all of these connections get pretty high scores from spamassassin, and users generally don't see the resulting spam.

129-219-159-242.nat.asu.edu
s0106001d60d07529.lb.shawcable.net
79.103.93.54.dsl.dyn.forthnet.gr
adsl-074-251-208-007.sip.tys.bellsouth.net
87-205-77-134.adsl.inetia.pl
77-56-149-16.dclient.hispeed.ch
cpe-065-190-194-031.nc.res.rr.com
cablelink-173-211-215.cpe.intercable.net
host-89-231-69-81.plock.mm.pl

... and the list goes on. Hmm, we're getting a LOT of smtp connections from botnetted windoze computers nowadays...

I'm sure he's not the only Sci-Fi author to have put these ideas into fiction. I had a great time reading his Neutronium Alchemist novels and others and seeing his description of how mind/computer interfaces could function.

I think it's a lot more realistic than Star Trek (gasp :) to imagine that future spacers will be sitting on an acceleration couch with their eyes closed--and seeing space around them as if they were outside, than to be sitting at a console with hundreds of controls, relying on the speed of electrons traveling through meat. And I loved their ability to superimpose heads-up displays onto their vision. I suppose I'm getting beyond the scope of this story...

-Aaron

I can't say specifically how you go about firewall rules and that particular equipment, but we have an inbound ACL on our gateway cisco router that blocks incoming TCP connections on port 445, which this worm uses to try and talk to vulnerable windows boxes, AFAIK.

On our 7505 that handles our customer's DSL connections, we have an outbound rule that blocks 445. It only has 53 matches after months without a counter reset.

The ACL on our border router shows tremendous amounts of matched packets. I can't recall exactly how long ago these counters were reset, I believe around a month to a month and a half:

deny tcp any any eq 445 syn (11118380 matches)
permit ip any any (358140948 matches)

That's about 3% of incoming packets. Non-scientfic, sure, but it's certainly more than a little blip on the radar. Bastards.

In the time it took to preview and edit my post, the count went up to 11118552. That took about a minute.

After tiring of the increasing load on our incoming mail servers running spamassassin, I undertook to spend a couple of days finding as many netblocks that ONLY have spam coming from them.

It's shocking really, that I ended up spending more than two days since there were so many spread out all over the place at various colo companies. And I'm sorry to say that what I found is that nearly all of the snowshoe spammers I found were riddled around in colos here in the US. There are a bunch of ISPs out there that seem to be making a bunch of money from snowshoe spammers, so much so that they don't mind allocating half of a damned /19 for the spammers to use and populate with randomly generated domain names. And, of course, just to make it easier for us poor and broke sysadmins, these colos don't just put them all into nice contiguous blocks of IP addresses. I've about given up complaining to the likes of GalaxyVisions, Pacific Internet Exchange, AboveNet (yes, Abovenet is these days hosting lots of snowshoe spammers--sad). The list goes on and on.

I'm up to ~375 netblocks we no longer accept SMTP connections from. The load average on our three MXs is usually about half what it used to be now.

I think we used a 486-class processor.. a Cyrix processor if I remember correctly, in our mail server here until 2002. So I agree with you.

Back in 1993, I think, I replaced my 486SX 33Mhz with a 486DX 66Mhz, and I remember paying $600 for the thing!