Jesus, timothy.

I just took a shit. It was kind of average as far as shits go. Maybe it's front-page material now though?

According to William Seabrook, who had more range of diet than many human meat eaters, it is pretty good and tastes like high quality veal.

                      http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

Copypasta from FARK. Slightly cleaned up for formatting.

Rik01 4 hours ago
Folks have heard me biatch about changes in my own city in the State of Florida -- and changes in the State itself. Basically the response has been (1) progress old man, (2) change the onion on your belt, (3) yelling at clouds, (4) who cares -- it's Floraduh!

However, these changes have been going on in other states.

I've watched politicians promise Eco-improvements with one hand and sell the voters down the river with the other. [For example] We had a massive oyster bed in the Indian River placed off limits to the public for preservation and ecological reasons for close to 20 years. That thing had huge oysters in it and the water in its cove was nearly crystal clear. The local police arrested scores of people sneaking down there to poach oysters and the shores were dotted with piles of empty shells. The cove was absolutely packed with the things, no river bottom exposed. Then, during the Housing Boom, an upscale development went it around it. Since the cove was too shallow for wealthy owners to park their boats at the planned docks behind the cove-side homes, it was dredged. No warning to anyone who wanted to get these delicious oysters. Dredges came in, ripped thousands of them out and disposed of them. The cove is now full of dark water and few oysters, making a lot of folks like myself wonder why we preserved them.

Water use in the state has quadrupled. Florida used to be very swampy, but the water table was shallow. Now, after sucking so much out and changing the lay of the land, plus paving over every square inch they could, we're the capitol of the US when it comes to sink holes. Water shortages began to pop up years ago, where before, we never had any.

Millions of acres of wild woods have been developed, endangering a host of native species of animals we used to have and the amount of fish in the rivers has diminished to the point that you need a license and a fishing season for Mullet -- once so plentiful that it was considered 'garbage fish' and caught mainly for bait. Within the last 40 years, the Indian River has to be closed to shellfish harvesting and fishing periodically during the summer because of massive human fecal bacteria contamination.

The previously crystal clear air of my seaside town now shows signs of grey pollution. They stopped dump burning ages ago, along with burning huge piles of used tires. Land clearing agencies have to use these massive air blowers that surround burn pits to burn stumps and brush with, creating a hotter, less smoke making fires. However, the local traffic, even with more eco-friendly cars, has quadrupled and quadrupled again. Their lesser pollution has, by the sheer weight of volume, has surpassed that which was present in times of less pollution control, when you used to have 'smokers' rolling down the roads.

Major advertising campaigns have convinced the public that instead of one or two cars per family, everyone except the dog needs one, plus a couple of ATVs, a boat and a couple of those fast, small watercraft good for nothing except going fast on the water and making a lot of noise. Prior to that, dirt bikes were the thing, tearing up thousands of acres of wild woods and chasing out local animals for fun. To round things out for the macho man, we have air boats, running on aircraft engines, no mufflers, tearing up the diminishing acres of wild swamps and annoying the crap out of neighbors when the owners 'test' them in their yards.

We have fewer forest fires than when I was a kid, thanks to sophisticated fire equipment -- but then again, the acres of undeveloped woods has fallen by 3/4, so there's less to burn. Where lightening would hit decades old pine trees and forest floors thick with dry pine needles, it hits houses, paved streets, power poles and grassy lawns.

My yard has an 'old growth' pine in it. Around 60 feet tall and nearly three feet around. It was 6 feet tall when we moved in around 1958. Across the street used to be a forest of even older trees, around two miles square. Some reached 100 feet tall. That area is now made up of a couple of housing developments. 98% of the trees are gone.

The main drainage ditch in front of my home, which was shaded by Oaks along the banks, was more like a shallow creek, brimming with clear water, frogs, colorful minnows, several types of turtles -- including the irritable snapper -- gar fish and other freshwater versions. Us kids played in it, sheltered from the hot summer sun. Now it's a deep, sluggish stream of dark water, covered by algae, few minnows and most of the Oaks were removed when the housing developments went in. Their 'salvage ponds' drain into it. Even if I was a kid, I wouldn't want to play in that mess.

Yet according to statistics, we need more homes because rents are too high because people can't buy homes whose prices nearly doubled due to the Housing Boom.

We had a landmark here made by a great old man called Ralph Waldo Sexton, who did much for the community with his wealth and eccentric ideas. The land was deeded to the city with the restriction that it never be town down. The city agreed -- until explosive development hit and a business needed the tiny patch of land to add to it's parking lot. The city had let the landmark deteriorate anyhow (known as Sexton's Mountain) and as the value of the Oceanside land soared, that plot became worth much more than the hand built land mark.

They sold it and it was plowed under and paved over. Adding to the destruction of the beach itself from over development. Even the Great Red Land-crab Migration, that used to cover blocks in hundreds of thousands of the small crustations, covering the land for blocks in nearly a solid wave has stopped.

Their nests on a swampy salt marsh have been plowed under as houses went up and covered every square foot, which means a lot of cranes and other animals who fed on them are gone also. Plus their holes helped the ground absorb rain water, which filtered into the aquifer -- those hundreds of thousands of gallons of which now roll off the paved streets and manicured lawns and harder fill into the salt marsh waters and out into the sea.

Each time a politician enacts an eco-friendly program, he quietly passes two which undermine the efforts of the first and benefits development companies or other businessmen. When we had a good city manager who was not thrilled with explosive development, he didn't last long. Appointed by the Mayor, he was removed and his replacement arrived, all hyper about explosive development.
So, now you all can see the nationwide results -- and it ain't gonna stop anytime soon. We protected the birds -- and they tore down the forests. Gopher turtle nests could stop a development -- until no one noticed them until after the bulldozers had plowed them under. We built a huge, new eco-friendly dump, closing all of the others -- and then they had to sink huge pipes into it to vent the not-so-eco-friendly methane gas, making no attempt to even capture, compress it and use it. (You can smell our dump long before you see it.) Around the 4th of july, dump managers are secretly terrified some kids with fireworks might manage to ignite some of those vapor spilling pipes.

Crime, illness, irritability and cost have soared within my city. We went from a small Mayberry-type jail to a fortress-like prison, plus built a sprawling juvenile facility. Where you could walk the streets at late night with no fear, you need to go in groups now. Home burglaries have just soared. (I even got hit, for the first time in over 50 years.) We had 4 good schools. Now we have about 10 mediocre ones and they have chain link fences around them. Kids are no longer allowed to play on the exercise fields during summer vacation. Shootings are on the rise.

The cost of living keeps climbing. More and more funds are needed to keep the infrastructure going to maintain the city and county, while they keep reducing benefits for the workers who do the actual work. We now spend millions a year on keeping our beaches nice -- something they did for just a few thousand 30 years ago when thousands of folks didn't tear them up and build right up against them.

BTW, rents here are just obnoxious, unless you want to live in a place made up of termites and roaches holding hands. We were also a major citrus provider -- but the majority of the old, labor intensive groves which produced magnificent fruit have been sold and housing developments put in their place. (It takes 4 years of work to prepare the ground for citrus saplings then another 4 years to harvest good fruit. Working in a grove for the summer was almost every high school kids rite of passage. Old, established groves were gold mines.)

I once reported a new Sea Turtle Nest I found on a beach, not wanting the heavy, tractor-like sand groomers (yeah, we have to have those now) to roll over it and crush the eggs. The response I got from the Federal and State agency I contacted was 'what do you want us to do about it?' Yet had I dug up the eggs to move them, cops would have popped out of the weeds to arrest and fine me.

I think the beach groomers crushed the nest.

It's also often a corporate standard, especially for companies and their clients with older, Windows specific software tools. And many proxies are configured to lie about the web client they are proxying for, in order to provide access to upstream websites which demand IE. There are many examples, such as:

        http://unix.stackexchange.com/...

My concern was more that AT&T is unusually cooperative with federal monitoring of communications. There are reasons to want the data, and even good uses for it such as letting this senior AOL user has accidentally built up an extraordinary phone bill. But there are so many _bad_ reasons to want the data, such as personal or meta analysis of anyone with political or media use of personal telephones, that I'm forced to remember that AT&T has cooperated in aggressive secret domestic surveillance programs with no apparent objections.

I've no personal ability to prevent the analysis or meta-analysis of customer data: I'm concerned with possible, even likely, abuse of the information.

Maybe because Net Applications is the only counter that tries to correct for known skewed sampling.

They have to correct for skewed sampling because their sample size is so small, especially for non-U.S. sites. Of the big metrics sites:

StatCounter monitors over 3 million sites (reports page hits)
W3Counter monitors over 70,000 sites (reports unique visitors per month)
Net Applications monitors over 40,000 sites (reports unique visitors per month)

Net Applications is the only one which reports IE still in the lead. Which given the sample sizes I think more calls into question their correcting algorithms than it does StatCounter's sample.

Unlike all the others? The most infamous such case was that of Microsoft and Internet Explorer.

                      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U....
                     

You have valid logical and legal points. But the acts would be considered felonies if committed by an adult. The subtle difference between a delinquency and a felony in the early stages are subtle enough not to confuse the typical reader with.

Why would the EFF be involved? They're not "the protectors of all technology", there has to be someone whose rights they'd be defending. That would be the owner of the open source, or possibly free software, copyrights. And given that the first case the EFF ever helped litigate was against the US Secret Service, and that the lawyer involved is still there, I think they'd be willing to take on Goldman Sachs if needed.

Unfortunately, none of the copyrights or of open source or 'copylefts' of "free as in speech" software require returning your modifications to the world at large. You _only_ have to provide them, if asked, to the client you wrote them for or provide binaries for, and that requirement applies only to "free software", not to most "open source". The open source licenses generally _deliberately_ allow you to proprietize your personal version of the software, and do not require you to publish changes, precisely so that the "business model" of providing your own secret enhancements can continue. This is the core of a great many open source projects funding, including Citrix Xen, Zmanda, and Sun Microsystems before Oracle bought them.

This one way relationship with free software is extremely common, especially in the financial software community. I and my colleagues are considered fairly odd because we publish our patches, and send them upstream to the code authors. We sometimes have real difficulty negotiating IP clauses in contracts with others because they do not understand, or profoundly fear, the practice. And the difficulty is not with the engineers doing the work. It's with their own lawyers, frightened of providing any information which could be used as any kind of leverage at all in any other case, and their managers, who argue that if they are not _compelled_ to, why should they provide this assistance to competitors?

My team tries to sell it on the basis of supportability. If they patches and improvements get published upstream, other eyes can enhance it, they don't have to maintain and keep spending resources to maintain their own in-house fork, and upsream changes are much less likely to become incompatible with their in-house changes. Then, if necessary, we point out examples, ideally with software they're already using. But it wastes a lot of early setup time getting this negotiated.

I can think of half a dozen companies I worked with in the last decade, all of whom thought they'd re-invented network protocols. All of them found that by the time they'd implemented necessary error correction, buffering, and re-transmit protocols for missed data that they'd actually _lost_ performance. It never showed up in the early testing because the inexperienced, "key developer" didn't know the history or the available technologies, so they'd never tested it under realistic circumstances.

This isn't an errant bill or anything. The person called long distance that much in two months.

Wow does that bring back memories. For those who weren't around in the dialup days, certain malware would change the default dialup number for your modem to a 900 number (where you're charged per minute, like phone sex services use), which would then redial to AOL or whatever number you were trying to connect to. So you wouldn't notice anything was amiss because you'd still connect to AOL like usual, but you'd be racking up phone charges at $3/min.

After the government cracked down on phone companies which provided the 900 numbers used this way, the problem mostly disappeared for U.S. numbers. The malware switched to making the modem dial the equivalent of a 900 number in a foreign country.

It sounds like he got hit by this type of malware.

This also brings up something I've always wondered about. The power companies I've worked with seem to bend over backwards to get you onto the plan which most benefits you. When the electricity consumption at my business changed dramatically, Edison sent a guy over to talk with us to figure out what caused the change, and how to adjust our equipment and power plan to minimize our cost. Why does the power company do this, while the phone company seems content to leave you on a plan where you're paying more for worse service? I type Woodland Hills, CA DSL into Google, and it says that 6 Mbps AT&T U-verse/DSL is available there for just $34.95/mo.

Having their billing system trigger a flag when it hits 10x the usual cost and halt access and red flag for support to call them when it hits 100x is NOT hard or invasive.

"Halting access" would mean cutting off their landline service. That is _not_ something to do lightly to someone in the midst of their personal or business crisis.

Many people in the USA live in remote areas with no good cell coverage and no cable or fiber optic. And that $50/month undoubtedly includes unrestricted local calls, which is why his previous always-on AOL usage was not increasing his bill.

There used to be good commercial reasons for AT&T to monitor for this sort of thing. It was tying up long distance trunk lines nearly 24x7 for a month, and those used to be radically more expensive and less available than local connections. It required an actual physical copper connection from one part of the country to the other, maintained 24x7 with significant electrical and maintenance costs. But today, with all the different ISP's and phone services handling Voice Over IP instead and making much larger data connections, a single landline phone connection is a few packets lost in the flood of data.

Also, monitoring for this kind of accident is paying a lot more attention to individual customer bills and usage than I necessarily want AT&T monitoring. AT&T has already established that they cooperate extensively with monitoring US communications at NSA request, especially with the notorious "Room 641A". DO we want them collecting and acting on this kind of data?

One of my and my group's major sources of income is cleaning up after those "one developer" projects. The "rone developer" often has no idea how, or no willingness, to set up a testing plan before releases, to integrate robust security, to make software high availability, or to scale it behind a certain very modest size.

The result is that the first project or demo works well and is very lean and agile in the performance sense. But as the number of customers grow, or as people find and report bugs, scaling up and keeping it working well is much easier for the larger, more cautious team. Ideally, they code reviewed each other's work and pointed out where a fix here broke a feature elsewhere, or pointed out the edge cases that also need to be handled. As an example, what works on a laptop sitting next to the server running the multi-player game may not work so well behind three firewalls, NAT, and an overburdened local cable network setup. Lone developers often are not expected to spend time on those issues.

It's a radio transmitter in a can. It would take an even larger departure from known physics to make it go boom. We have a good deal of experience with radio transmitters in space.