For those who still have landline phones, Mike Sandman, purveyor of genuinely indispensable old-school telephony gear, has some telco line powered goodies.

Don't even try to order any of them, though.

Car manufacturers: "To protect the environment, our cars are now greener than ever. Why, even the wiring is biodegradable!"

By all means use fail2ban. But setting alwaysauthreject=yes in sip.conf will generally stop the attacks faster, and also in cases where they try s-l-o-w-l-y, hoping to slip under fail2ban's radar.

Setting alwaysauthreject causes asterisk to respond the same way to an invalid peer registration as to a valid one using a bad secret. In other words, the attacker can't get a list of valid extensions for later password cracking attempts. Note that this violates RFC3261, but I'm unaware of anything that it will actually break, and in fact it's the default in asterisk 1.8.

I wonder whether, thanks to MTV, that's why Buzz Aldrin is so much better known than McCandless.

In general, you're correct. But here we're talking about civil servants, who never get fired for anything short of criminal malfeasance.

Indeed. Legitimate dealers will sell bullion coins (e.g., Eagles) for about 4% over spot, and buy them for 1% over. That 3% difference is where their profit comes from.

A "preservationist" is someone like Martin Scorsese who has worked tirelessly to make sure old celluloid films aren't lost. He's doing it to make sure others can get the kind of exposure to the history of our culture as shown in cinema.

Thanks for mentioning Scorsese. Besides working to preserve old films through his Film Foundation and as the DGA representative to the National Film Preservation Board), he has spoken eloquently and often on such evils as "pan-and-scan" and time compression, and how profoundly they can alter a director's work. I have great respect for that man.

Indeed he is.

The most desirable identity for the intruder to assume is that of the super-user. System administrators acquire super-user privileges by executing a program called su.

-- F. T. Grampp* and R. H. Morris*, UNIX Operating System Security, AT&T Bell Lab. Tech. J., 63, No. 8 Pt. 2 (October 1984), p. 1660.

*AT&T Bell Laboratories.

My house was built in 1957. All interior wiring is in EMT or IMC (plus a little Greenfield to the fixed appliances) or within steel conduit bodies and device boxes. Not an inch of NM.

Let's get this clear. Literacy tests were applied discriminitorily in the South to disenfranchise black voters. That was a wrong that needed righting. I would have been much happier if the tests had been required of every voter rather than being banned, but it could be argued that in the '60s blacks did not have the opportunity to attend the same K-12 schools as whites. "Separate but equal schools" was bad, as was, "If your grandfather could vote, so can you", (the original grandfather clause, which was intended to allow even illiterate whites to vote). This is no longer the case. Even the original authors of the act intended that it sunset in 5 years.

When I got the motorcycle endorsement on my driver's license, the test included a "quick stop on a curve." Too many people were dropping their bikes on this part of the test, so it was eliminated. I would have preferred that they'd kept it, culling some of the least competent motorcyclists. Ditto for voters.

If your choose to infer from this that I'm some sort of skinhead racist, go right ahead. I can't stop you. But if you're trying to pigeonhole me, here's a better fact: I have many friends, but not a single one of them cannot read. Does that make me an elitist, too?

Like so many laws, it is well-intentioned. But the result is that people can vote on issues without understanding them at all. And vote they do.

Sorry. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 pretty much did away with literacy tests for voters. Sigh.