While I think a reasonable punishment for a crime is great and all... what happens when an innocent person is convicted of a crime? What happens when you're walking home from the club/friends house/work and you get stopped by a police officer who's having a bad day? When he says you're stoned (even if he can't prove it), you're going to get caned, fined, beaten, imprisoned, and/or possibly executed (not in that particular order).

There's no such thing as an accurate and fair justice system; the least we can do is make sure that punishments aren't so horrible that they have a long term negative effect on your life when you're falsely convicted.

I'm just going to have to pass on the countries with harsh penalties like caning, even if other aspects of them are great.

Actually there are three Uceprotect RBLs - the first one (which is the one I use) only lists single IPs. It's pretty conservative and gets very few false positives.

It's the second and third ones that block entire ranges/ISPs/ASNs/etc. I couldn't really imagine anyone using these two in any kind of production environments.

> It is SORBS that I have an issue with. SORBS was created out of pure spite.

No, you're confusing "spite" with "greed". There's a difference. Spite is blacklisting a spammer's ISP in a fit of anti-spam zealotry. Greed is blacklisting a spammer's ISP hoping to extort a huge amount of money from them so their customers can send email again, and then blacklisting them again right after you un-blacklist them (yes, SORBS does this).

Good riddance to them. They've done nothing but tarnish the reputation of legitimate RBLs.

Spamcop, Spamhaus, and Uceprotect are plenty of RBL for me.

Out of the 68 open positions on Dice for New Orleans, a significant percentage of them aren't even IT at all (engineering). Add in the crime problem, government corruption, terrible streets, and high'ish cost of living, and I'd think it would come in at #1 on the list.

So a few years ago the PSU in my Mac G5 died, and it's under warranty. Unfortunately, the only Apple warranty shop around at the time (right after Katrina) was Circuit City. So I go to drop the box off...

Not an hour later I get a call from them telling me they need the passwords to both the admin account and my normal user account, and any other passwords (email, etc) present on the machine. The reason given? The power supply is actually a special piece of software and not a piece of hardware at all!

Obviously I didn't give them this; I wound up driving two hours away to take it to another shop.

I'm so glad that company is dead and gone.

I live in Louisiana as well, and I can tell you right now that not one damned cent of this new tax income is going to go to protecting children.

Assuming it pulls in one million annually, it's going to be spent something like this:

1) 50%: Given to contractors (aka good ol' boys) for work they'll never do (google for "NOLA crime cameras").
2) 5%: Hookers for David Vitter.
3) 5%: Exorcisms performed by Bobby Jindal (google it).
4) 5%: Vacations for Ray Nagin.
5) Remainder: Kickbacks and bribes.

I tried driving while being the wrong color once.

I wound up on the side of the road with a lump on my head after being hit with a flashlight. The car fared much worse, it was totalled after the cop destroyed the interior of it.

A lot of people say it's only a small minority of cops who make the rest look bad. I disagree - for every one nice cop I meet, I run into five times as many bullying assholes.

How would I have ended it differently... an excellent question, and one I hadn't put too much thought into other than, "Oh god not like this."

Ok, ask and I'll try to deliver. Well, not really, I just took an Ambien and started on a glass of wine. This may be terrible, but hopefully it won't be any worse than King's ending.

Roland and company are resting up near the tower, preparing for tomorrow morning: their long final walk into the unknown. Roland awakes before the others, and decides either one of two things: "If they follow me, they will die - so I will go on alone without them." Not a very Roland-like thought, so "They'll be in my way. This is MY quest, and I'll finish it on my own." The party is unaware of Flagg and Mordreds location and status.

Regardless of reason "why", Roland abandons his party and proceeds on alone. When morning comes, the party discovers he's gone and decides to chase after him. They leave, and soon Mordred and his new pet, a very confused/lobotomized Flagg, catch up.

Now what to do with our characters... We can play some deus ex machina and have an older Jacky Sawyer (and maybe a few wolves) show up and brutally dispose of Flagg and Mordred, and "save" the others, perhaps scattering them across the territories as sorta "knight errants" (keeping Jake and Oy together of course). Or, we can just kill them. No Jacky Sawyer crossover, but at least they get to die with their boots on. Not a little death either, a big long "this fight gets it's own chapter" type of battle. Alternatively, since our villains and heroes are all still more or less intact, spin off a separate book about just them and whatever their disposition turns out to be. If we let them die, they need to die honorable and valiant deaths.

Now we have Roland marching on to his tower, minus his horn.He gains entry and slaughters (not erases) the Crimson King in some fashion, with some great Client Eastwood style one-liners. He looks around, and his horn is there on a pedestal. He proceeds to the balcony, blows it, and cries out the names of all of those he left behind. Now, he marches on up to the top. At every room he learns some new truth, and usually a terrible one that he would rather not know. And when he reaches the pinnacle?

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

It's not so much the "contents" of the tower I disagreed with, it's the whole Mordred/Flagg/Eddie/Oy/etc etc thing. Of course they were going to die in the end, but I think he could have paid much more attention to such well established characters and sent them to the clearing at the end of their path in a more fitting manner.

Goddamnit, Madagascar has already shut it's borders.

The Stand always had the whole mysticism thing going on with Flagg and Mother Abby.

The only thing that was dragged in was King's typical shitty ending. I'm just hoping he doesn't do the same to the Gunslinger seri... oh wait a minute. He did. =(

The above is excellent advice - always record what's going on.

I've had the same extortion racket happen to me before as well: "If you don't stay on, we'll give you a bad recommendation to future employers. Oh, and by the way, we're out of money so you need to work for less, and those hot checks we wrote you? Yeah we're not going to pay you for those.".

Go to your local electronics shop and pick up a cheap digital audio recorder, and when they say something incriminating just record it. Get a copy of your reviews from HR as well. If a company is serious about hiring you and they tell you that the previous employer gave you a bad review, give them the evidence.

You really should ask a lawyer though.