splante - Slashdot User

Comment: Re:Ethanol is just stupid (Score 1) 894

by splante on Tuesday May 26 2009, @01:17PM (#28098247) Attached to: The Great Ethanol Scam

"Government" funding of roads and highways comes from the state and federal fuel taxes. Essentially they are user fees, just like the fare you pay on Amtrak. The additional money the government pours into Amtrak comes from the general fund--income tax, corporate tax, borrowing, etc. So the people that use the highways pay for them, but we all (well, those of us that actually pay taxes) end up subsidizing Amtrak, whether we want to use it or not.

Comment: NOT Emory (Score 1) 247

by splante on Tuesday February 17 2009, @11:46AM (#26888523) Attached to: Drug Deletes Fearful Memories

The article has a quote attributed to, "a neuroscientist at Emory University, in Atlanta, who was not involved in the research." Further down, it says the research took place at the University of Amsterdam.

Windows Loses Ground With Developers 431

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 03 2007, @01:41PM
from the rising-tide-lifts-all-penguins dept.

An anonymous reader notes that InfoWorld is covering a survey of North American developers that claims that Linux is gaining share as the number of developers targeting Windows fell 11 percent over the last year. Evans Data has been conducting these surveys of client, server, and Web developers since 1998. Evans Data says that the arrival of Windows Vista likely only kept the numbers from being even worse. The big gainer wasn't developing for a Web platform, but rather for Linux and "nontraditional client devices." Windows is still dominant, with 65% of developers writing code for this platform. Linux stands at almost 12%, up from 8% a year earlier. The article says that Evans Data collected information on Mac and Unix development but did not include them in this year's report.

What do you do when a botnet spams you to death? 1

Submitted by

micromuncher

on Tuesday July 03 2007, @01:11PM

micromuncher writes "A month ago I was a happy IT geek. I host my own web site and email server (and have been for over 10 years), and I had been running MDaemon (v7) successfully for four years. A low percentage of spam reached my desktop, though admittedly its gone from a few a day a couple years ago to about twenty now, but then something bad happened. I had measures in place to rudely disconnect spammers; fail on no RDNS, fail on no MX records, and use several spam filters to weed out spam. But the trouble came, from what I can tell, when a non-existant email account got into a botnet — and from what I can tell — its huge. Even though my connections were throttled, I received so many requests, and something odd about the requests, it crashed my mail server. So I flipped on tarpitting and the like, and set my timeouts short, and throttle tight... and I still got crushed. All of the originating servers were passing through the spam filters. Most of them were passing through RBLs. I tried to find information on current spam outbreaks; and I didn't find much useful. I contacted my mail server vendor, and they suggested I fork out the money for an upgrade (that I did), that had the feature of a "bait account". But I'm still getting overloaded by spam (though I am not crashing as far as I can tell.) So my questions to the world; how the heck do you monitor spam outbreaks? What are the most effective measures for dealing with botnets (where all the senders seem legit)? And what the heck can you do to stick it to the foul scum who either advertise through this fraud, or facilitate it?"