Wasn't modem shotgunning really called PPP frame bonding or something?..... After a wikipede it looks like channel bonding or modem bonding is more appropriate.

IIRC Windows 98 supported it, and 95 didn't, though you needed an ISP that supported it too. No idea what the state of support was like in *nix back then - probably complete. NT4 always had more sophisticated dial up than 9x, so that could probably do it, and that means every NT since is able to.

Just had a mess about with a Windows 2000 VM, and that indeed does support the shotgunnage of modems. You simply add a tick next to the modem in a dial up networking networklet properties (yeah, I'm fucked if i can remember what the microsofties call those things). And playing about with the Windows settings, if your dial up server is SLIP rather than PPP, it doesn't seem to allow multilinking (what Windows seems to call modem shottying). If this is a limitation of SLIP or MS's implementation of a SLIP client, I don't know.

<blink> was always criminal, but I seem to remember <marquee> being the choice of the truly tasteless webmaster.

The mainstream computer companies are constantly banging on about how their products are easier to use, more user friendly, etc. than the competition. This is because the majority of the market (or the profitable bit) are essentially new computer users. Or are getting a computer of their own for the first time for recreational use, when they had generally only used computers in work/school for work/school stuff.

If the market was made up of experienced users, things wouldn't be sold as "easy to use", where easy to use is "possibly intuitive for those who don't get computer concepts, and will not RTFM". Cars (yeah, ignore the .sig) aren't sold as easy to use because the market for cars is made up of people who have to demonstrate they can work a car, and hence understand what features a car will and won't have, where they will probably be, and which ones to use and when. Car buyers don't need the steering wheel to be huge and green, they don't need a wizard to wind the windows down.

It wouldn't surprise me to find out that, world wide, every year there are more new users to the internet than the previous year. This means there's lots of new users who don't know how spam works, who don't know how affiliates work, who don't know how banner ads work, who don't know how Google works, who don't know about shit like those text advert links inserted into articles, etc.. These new users possibly will not think that v14gr4 is purposefully written like that, and might even think something like computer messages can suffer interference like a radio signal can.

New users also aren't used to the fonts. Slashdotters can no doubt tell the difference between l 1 I | and o O 0, and can identify the characters correctly when they aren't alongside the ones they could be confused with, but new users? No chance. v14gra might not look that odd to a new user, and so they don't spot it as suspect. You also can't buy viagra off the shelf (or at least, I don't think you can), so when presented with it human interest does kick in for some individuals.

I do sound like I am blaming new users, but I have been using the internet long enough to have seen new users come to the internet and wise up many times. Sometimes they barely wise up, sometimes they wise up very quick, but generally they stand to be manipulated the most when new to the web. There are people though who know they are limited, and so take things extra cautiously, though they are a fucking rare breed.

New users aren't necessarily used to the concepts that computers can produce copies for virtually no effort. Whilst there is a very clear cost to spam put through your front door, there isn't with email or other forms of spam, so even if the person has thought about the economics of advertising IRL, they might not get it right when it comes to computers. And so the spam could seem more legitimate than it is (not that I see any adverts as legitimate - they exist to manipulate your decision making processes, and I do not want that done to me. So I reject all advertising, everywhere).

Anyway, the answer? Education. And proper education, not asking MS what people should be learning. And not mandated computer science for all (though it should be available, if people want it). I dunno exactly what people need, but IME if some people had some basic knowledge of concepts like files and directories, programs and data, they would find using computers much less frustrating. I feel many proprietary products (and free ones that have copied paradigms) purposefully obscure what is going on so that the user becomes dependent on the proprietary product to do a job. The user can't learn what is going on, and if they did, they might change to a different product to do the same job. And that's bad for business.

Really? IR from a nuclear blast doesn't travel at c, whereas the visible light does? Does this make the UV faster than c, and the gamma radiation arrive before the bomb has even been dropped?

Your declaration of "fact" that doesn't correspond to physics seems to substantiate other comments in this discussion that drills like duck and cover were propaganda to make nuclear war more palatable by the general public.

When a government starts to listen to its people about nuclear weapons, and hasn't and isn't trying to convince the people that the weapons are necessary, the weapons tend to go away. cf South Africa, post apartheid.

It must be nice to only be able to see the world in black or white, where complex situations are either one thing, or one other.

Such a flawless logic system wouldn't ever open you up to being manipulated into supporting certain things that might not actually be in your or your peers' interests, either. Oh no.

There's a phrase that one should never stoop to the level of an idiot, because they will go on to beat you with experience. So I am going to try and resist saying something about wishing the foreign civilians that you and your family are to most of the world are killed by not your government or military. You wouldn't be concerned of course, because it is moral and justified.

Or is it that as long as it isn't your tribe being hurt, it is moral and justified?

Attacking civilians is not justifiable. And once you do justify it to yourself, it is easy to just declare a section of your society some kind of non-citizen and wage a war on them. I wonder if you can think of any events in history that might correspond with the kind of thing you are advocating?

The jingle from the CrackDonalds adverts that goes "du du du da da, I'm lovin' it" also fits perfectly with "du du du da da, There's cum in it". And is probably much more descriptive.

Hell, a mate of mine swears a local SmackDonalds was closed down after Trading Standards found semen in food from the place (allegedly 7 different peoples'). I have tried to track the story down, but there doesn't seem to have been anything in the press about it, so I count it as an urban legend.

But I bet there are rumours like that about WhackDonalds all over the world! And lets be honest, WankDonalds is hardly the kind of place where employees are likely to have job satisfaction, and so someone ejaculating into a FuckMuffin is more than plausible.

If that puts civilians at risk, then the obvious solution is to not bomb. But I guess that isn't a possibility for warmonger-apologists like you?

The only reason putting civilians in the way is an effective strategy for some groups is because imperialists still proceed to drop bombs or otherwise open fire when there are civilians in the way!

Apart from the real biggie - everywhere but Parliament Square. And on the pavement on the same side of the road as that weapons manufacturer in Brighton. And anywhere else where organisations have taken out injunctions against people who's opinions stand in the way of their profits or agenda.

Our pigs these days appear to like to practice kettling - the boxing in of protests and then moving them out the way. The principle is pretty much the same as free speech zones[1], and both methods are probably effective, from the bourgeois' point of view.

Protesters need to come up with some methods of defeating kettling. Perhaps sitting down where they are as soon as kettling begins, so the police have to use force if they want people to move? Perhaps protests should be smaller, but lots of them. Ketting works because the pigs box in the whole protest, so will not work if the protesters surround the police, or the police can't surround the protesters.

Many small protests would be hard to manage, but if a small protest starts getting kettled, other protests can move towards the first, hopefully breaking the police lines. Protests would need some excellent coordinating, because the reason the kettling works now is due to the police's organisation and coordination. Perhaps protesters need some police spotters about the place, updating an on line resource so protesters can keep track of the police? Just don't host that resource behind a .uk! (Whew, got the rant back on topic!).

[1] Such a stunningly Orwellian name!

And a side business can be run selling rings, bracelets, and watches! The operation funds itself, perfect policy for politicians who want to be seen doing something.

• Spelling mistakes or habits
• Grammar mistakes or habits
• Talking about certain topics, or when a discussion goes OT, you go OT too with some topics
• The promotion of the same political or economic ideas.
• The use of certain bits of slang, and the exclusion of other bits
• Themes in your usernames. Unless you truly randomly select a word for a username, you are probably saying something about yourself - even if it just what you can see out the window.

Like I have said elsewhere in this thread, I think correlating users on line, anon users on line, users of things off line (eg government services, corporate services), with individuals IRL is or is going to be a major frontier for some groups, like spooks and data-rapists.

But there isn't true competition. Most insurance companies are public corporations, and so shareholders in different companies will overlap. And most of the shareholders will be investment banks and the like (not middle-class share dabblers), and they will want to see maximum returns as soon as possible, and they don't care how it happens. Suddenly very similar pressures are on different companies, so the odds of the different companies making the same decisions shoot up.

Even if shareholders don't overlap, if companies don't tend to do the same kinds of things as the other players in the market, then their share price will fall.

Collusion to maximise profits is not somehow impossible in the insurance business too, and so cannot be dismissed.

Shit, here in the UK some insurance companies like to pretend there is much more competition in the market than there is. There are some car insurance comparison web sites that are heavily advertised on TV, and at least one of them is owned by an insurance company (looks to be comparethemarket.com). Funnily enough, that site tends to offer their own insurance as the cheapest, from the accidental run-in I have had with it. There are also many insurance companies that are all members of large umbrella companies, and often the seemingly independent insurers will be underwritten by one of the big boys - so are tied to the business practices of the big boys.

And the insurance quotes made on comparison sites are not available if you go directly to the insurer! There are obviously affiliate payments made to the comparison sites based on lead referrals, and they must be the right amount such that if you ring an insurer direct, they will not match a price quoted elsewhere, for seemingly the same fucking service! This shows that the customer is not the most powerful person in the transaction, but if there was true competition, the customer would be able to get a better deal when they try for it.

You say you have never linked them, but I think that linking those IDs is a current thing corporations and the spooks are doing, or will be a future Next Big Thing.

If a user signs up to many forums, or sites with comment systems, with different usernames, if they ever use the same email address then the users can be cross referenced (trivially, if the site publicly publishes those addresses). If the user adds IM details to a profile, they can be cross referenced (ever tried Googling an ICQ number? It can be very revealing). Many forums and sites ask for a location, and those could be used as an indicator of the same person, especially if they publish their date of birth too.

With those things though, it is clear when you are giving away your own privacy. I feel there is other stuff that could be used to cross reference different users on line though. I think though that in the future (or now, and we^W I don't know about it), The Man will use some kind of AI to cross reference different users on line, anonymous users on line, and people IRL. People tend to comment on the stuff that interests them, peoples' points of view tend not to change, no matter what they call themselves. People's spelling, grammar, or other language habits will be pretty consistent. The same person will probably phrase the same subject material in very similar ways, and at some point spotting that could be automated.

I do assume that web users are being profiled these days. The likes of security services or corporations could write parsers for web discussion systems, like phpBB, Slash, vBulletin, etc., and other discussion systems like usenet. Businesses like Facebook or Google make their money off data on their users, so with the right contacts or money you can get at their data (In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, invested in Facebook, so I think it is safe to assume they have full access to the FB databases). If captchas are routinely broken by spammers, fully automated forum-parsing is not out of reach of the spooks or data-raping companies. Shit, if companies will pay people to astroturf their products, then they would pay people to sign up to forums and make a few posts so an account can be used by a bot to trawl the site, whilst still looking like a normal user.

So yeah, whilst consciously not linking identities is possible, I think there are things that those who would like to know about the different identities can do to spot various IDs. But we have counter measures, though I doubt they are perfect. We can find a random web user, and copy their identity for use on some sites. We can use the spell checker sometimes, and not other times. Perhaps change the language in the spell checker to be different to your native version, like en-AU instead of en-US, Canadian French (fr-CA?) instead of fr-FR. Hell, write a post, and run it forwards and backwards though translation software. In fact, here is this post Babelfished to Italian and back:

Apart from not making much sense, that does obscure many of my writing habits!

(Score:1, Flamebait)

As predicted.....

To me, you are an immense hypocrite - like all the self-righteous who advocate the death penalty.

What you are saying is that to demonstrate it is wrong to kill someone, we should should kill people. Hmmm. And you go a step further saying that extreme violence should be dealt with with greater violence.

Way to build respect for the justice system! Though perhaps those that like to punish, rather than try to rehabilitate, want a disrespected justice system so that people are more likely to break laws, and so the punisher gets to punish? Fucking bullies.

Of course I will be modded down for this. I have had conversations with people from my country who think we should have the death penalty (usually justified with "think of the children"-type rhetoric, or other appeals to emotion), and when the hypocrisy of capital punishment is pointed out they tend to get irrationally pissed off. On /., this manifests itself as -1, Troll, or similar.

Even if you don't give a shit about other human beings (ie are a psychopath yourself) then the financial costs of building and maintaining an execution facility, the extra legwork necessary to prove undoubtedly that the accused is a killer (I hope you do that), the payouts necessary for when the innocent get killed, etc. are probably very similar to the costs of just locking the seriously fucked-up for life. Actually, I have no idea. I'm not going to look into it either, as an economic argument could never justify human lives to me.

Shit, murderers can contribute to the slave labour that US prisoners are used for too. You can't want to deny struggling international corporations some extra profit by killing killers? What are you, a commie?