Get off my lawn, punk! I mean, if you're trolling, fine, have fun, and Ubuntu livecds have been good enough to use them instead of Knoppix for the last few years, but it was THE standard save-your-ass repair tool to keep around.

I probably won't get around to using it, but a couple of years ago I had a disk get its Host Protected Area set (by a maliciously well-intentioned external drive enclosure), and after I couldn't fix it, I went to my friend the late Hugh Daniel, and he and I spent a long evening trying to get the Linux HPA tools to work, rebuilt Linux kernels a couple of times, consumed lots of pizza, and only succeeded in making the HPA bigger, never smaller. The tools just weren't good enough, and the documentation on HPA was deliberately unavailable. Fixing a 500 GB PATA drive is probably not worth it at this point, but it'd be a fun hack to do in memory of Hugh.

For those of you who've never met HPA before, it's a different set of BIOS interrupts for talking to disk drives which let you allocate space that Windows can't touch, so you can do things like hide a system-restore partition on the drive, or turn a 200 GB drive into a 128 GB drive (so an old computer that can't read LBA can at least use the 128 GB it understands), or turn a 250 GB drive with bad blocks into a 200 GB drive without them (so you can sell the stuff that didn't pass quality control.) In my case, I had an old Maxtor 200GB external USB drive that was failing from too many bad blocks, so I replaced the disk with a new 500GB one. The drive enclosure didn't recognize the disk, so it wrote a 300 GB HPA to knock it down to the same 200 GB size of the original one.

I've generally asked them whose services they're selling, and strung them along for a little while getting information about them - where they do business from, etc. Be sure to get the name of the person you're talking to, so they think you're friendly. And then I either ask them how I know they're not actually burglars trying to find victims, or tell them to put me on their Do Not Call List, or ask if they'd like the FTC's $50,000 reward for violations of the Do Not Call list. (It was actually for recommendations on how to stop violations, but I'm willing to bend the truth a bit to get somebody to rat out Rachel From Cardholder Services.)

Most of these Do Not Call violators aren't just annoying people at dinner - they're scamming the people who do business with them. The DNC violation should be justification for a much more thorough search through their papers looking for that.

Some of these people go away, but some of them don't, or they get replaced by clones who are just as bad. They do seem to be under more pressure lately; they're much more likely to swear at me instead of just hanging up than they used to be. Asking if they're embarrassed to work for criminals (or scammers, or to rip people off for a living) tends to get the most anger. Asking if they'd like to make a $50,000 reward for ratting out their employer usually just gets a hangup, but sometimes it gets a confused "Huh?".

Unfortunately, it's easy to set up shell corporations that can take the risk, and if they're convicted all the FTC gets is a drawer full of paper, and the money's long gone, and a bunch of low-paid call center operators lose their jobs. You have to get at the infrastructure providers, in ways that don't trash legitimate businesses but do penalize the ones that know they're working for scammers, but as technology makes it easier and easier to do distributed call centers, that gets a lot harder.

"Rachel from Cardholder Services" and her clones slowed down for a bit, but haven't stopped calling me. I probably get fewer calls from them these days, and they are obviously under some pressure, because when I tell their robot I want to talk to an operator and waste their time, they curse me out a lot more than they used to for asking whether they're embarrassed about ripping people off for a living.

I agree that it's a dangerous law. Also, it's a way to make the crime Federal, instead of being a typical state-level crime like murder.

Bullets don't count as WMDs, because they're usually only hitting at most one victim per shit (usually.) Doesn't matter that a machine gun can shoot a lot of people in a short time.

That guy who tried to explode a car bomb in NYC in 2010 was also charged with WMDs. Unlike some terrorist attacks in the US, that one didn't even have FBI informants "helping" him and providing fake explosives, or helping mix real explosives like the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

They had lots of electronics on board, but the last message successfully received was from her satellite phone, asking about a way around the weather they'd run into.

I remember James Martin's seminars in the early 80s - hugely influential.

But while he drowned, he wasn't lost at sea; he was near his retirement home in Bermuda. Sad.

Hopefully still is, shipwrecked on some island with her electronics dead, but it's not sounding good. I first met Evi back in the 80s at Usenix conferences, and she was an amazing person, as just about anybody who knew her will tell you.

Sure, you can live in a city or you can live in burbs, and there are parts of the Valley you can't easily reach from the cities without an ugly drive, but it's still the same region and you get the cultural advantages of all of them if you want to pay attention. (On the other hand, I did get married before moving here, so nightlife has been a lot less important than if I were single. I had one friend who moved from San Jose up to the city because of that, but ended up falling in love with another musician who didn't live in the city either :-)

Downtown Mountain View typically has 25 different cuisines in its 4-block restaurant drag, ranging from greasy spoon Chinese to Michelin star (depending on who's chef at TJ's that year.) You can get better Korean or Indian down on El Camino, and there are some other cuisines you have to look around for, and it can be worth driving to Milpitas for some kinds of Chinese. (And sure, Nolan Bushnell had to open his own restaurant just to get one he thought was good enough, but that was the 80s and just because he built Chuck E. Cheese didn't mean he was going to eat there.)

And yeah, if the traffic isn't bad, it's because the economy is, but it's still better than LA or NYC. And unfortunately the trains really only work for going to the city, not coming from the city down here to work.