Posts by jwenting

9 years may be excessive, but if it sets an example others might be less anxious to start their own little spam enterprises.
Giving him a few weeks of community service wouldn't have caused more than a byline in a local newspaper (if that), giving him 9 years makes sure the case gets worldwide attention which may well have been why the verdict was as it came out.

So he's a sacrificial black goat. So what? He's out of the running for a good while.

While he wasn't responsible for all or maybe even most spam, he was responsible for enough to get law enforcement interested...
Take down the large ones and the small ones will fall by the wayside. The small ones are the ones easiest to block anyway as they're not the smart ones (if they were they'd be large ones).

The session (and that's universal) exists for a web application context. That means a specific webapp installed on a specific domain.
Crossing domains and applications isn't possible as it would cause major security problems.

It's a good book though maybe a bit too advanced if you are just starting out.

Think and be consistent.

Think so you don't make more bloody stupid mistakes than cannot be avoided (and there's enough of those because of poor specs and incomplete understanding of the problem domain) and be consistent so it doesn't look like garbage.

Documentation is important too but I'd rather have undocumented code that works and is a pleasure to read than heavily documented code that's a load of rubbish (because in my experience the documentation quality usually mirrors the code quality and bad documentation is worse than no documentation).

paradox nailed it

It's so easy to say one should just get a new email address but that's often not an option.

I've had my domain and email address since 1998. Reaching everyone who needs to be reached to send them a new address is impractical at best, impossible at worst.

If you have a business it gets worse still, you're going to loose (potential) customers and will have to spend a LOT of money on new stationary, businesscards, brochures, etc. etc.

I've done some testing here. I run my own server so can create new addresses at will.
After I added a new address it took just minutes before it received spam, despite never having been used! That's how massive the load has become.

My main address currently receives about 30 pieces of spam and virus emails an hour, that's one every other minute 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
At the peak during 2002 the server received over a thousand virus emails an hour for a 2 week period. It got so bad I had to shut down the mailserver and run a periodic deletion program on the upstream server in order to delete all the suspect messages so they wouldn't bog down my connection.

There are companies that have had to install multiple layers of spam filtering proxies in front of their mailservers just to keep them from overloading.

THAT's how bad spam has become.

While at current my …

for (int i=0; i<60000; i++) // i think this loop takes aboout a minute

It won't :) On my machine at work (which is extremely slow because of lack of memory, it often spends 5 minutes swapping data when I switch applications) it took 2 minutes almost to the second.

Anyway, it won't print out strings with an average interval of one minute.
For that you need to use a Thread which sleeps for a random interval.
Of course you can't possibly create an unknown number of random intervals yet have those have an average time of a minute.
At best you can create a random number between 2 limits and use that as the interval where the average between those numbers is one minute (in milliseconds which is the measure of time used by Thread.sleep()).

Sure it does- This is a forum for fixing problems with IE, and Firefox certainly does that. :mrgreen:

no it doesn't. Firefox hides "problems" with IE by exposing people to the problems in itself.

In my experience most "problems" people have with IE exist only between their ears. I've in 8 years online never had a trojan, spyware, or virus infection for example, despite using IE almost exclusively.
Enough indication that the problem is not with IE itself but with the way it's (ab)used, just as the problem with guns is not inherent to the gun but to in the way they're used (if you point it at someone and pull the trigger someone could get hurt).

Microsoft is doing a lot right. They've been instrumental in driving one of the most prolific spammers on the net into bankruptcy already, as well as seriously harming several others.

They're also deeply involved in the fight against virus authors.

Microsoft in 2003 (I think it was) designed and built for free a large scale system to aid in the fight against child porn and child abuse for the Canadian federal police. This system does automatic facial recognition between child porn pictures and videos and the missing person database to identify missing children being forced into the porn industry. This greatly eases the very bad task of police officers who until then had to watch every second of every one of those disgusting tapes and pictures and do manual matches (which led to a lot of emotional and mental problems as you can imagine)...

Microsoft has donated thousands of PCs to schools in poor districts in the US and around the world, schools that otherwise could never have taught their pupils to use computers...

"Thirdly, it is NOT the case that an OEM Windows is only available with a new PC! An OEM Windows can be purchased with components as well, and in the event that it is, then the license is tied to that COMPONENT, not to the system. I've personally got a home built household system which uses an OEM Windows XP which was purchased with the hard drive installed. When I later decided to replace motherboard, processor and display card in it, to improve its games capability, I rang Microsoft first, knowing that a reinstall was in order so that I could be sure of the system booring to Windows afterwards. Here's the response:"

Maybe in the US. Here you can't purchase an OEM license separately from a complete machine (though stores interpret that to mean you can purchase a complete set of parts to assemble yourself and they'll call that a complete machine).

Microsoft also clearly prints on the packaging (and often the CDs too) of OEM and educational versions the restrictions on use and resale of those products, as do others.
In fact, they only supply educational versions through educational institutions through a specialised organisation which handles educational distribution all over the country.
These are specially printed CDs which can only be purchased by students and teachers on showing student ID or proof of their status as a teacher.
These licenses become invalid when that status changes, a fact clearly stated to you before …

http://bdn.borland.com/museum/ Borland has made some of their old compilers available free of charge, not just Pascal but C and C++ as well.

Well, blatant advertising for Firefox shouldn't be in the IE forum either as it has nothing to do with IE :cheesy:

While cheap keyboards are available I never recommend them.
Cheap keyboards have short MTBF (thus increasing the cost over time of using them) and are uncomfortable (often to the point of being bad for your health) to use (causing RSI).

I used to replace my keyboard several times a year, they wore out that quickly.
Since buying a €100 Logitech almost 3 years ago I've not had to buy a single €20 keyboard, saving me so far well over the purchase price of that more expensive unit.

HeadFirst books are fun! Excellent for learning, not too sure about their value as reference works.

Looks good, but in some places a bit cramped. Don't know why as it seems to be all about the same size.

Educational licenses can only be sold to qualified people.

AFAIK there is no company called "Microshaft" and even if there is any agreement they make with anyone won't have any impact on this case which involved a company called Microsoft.

If a store refuses to take back software sold there, that's no responsibility of the software manufacturer... The purchaser should have been made aware of that at time of purchase (usually via signs saying "no returns on software" or some such). If he wasn't he has a case against the store, but that doesn't give him the right to sell the product to parties who are not entitled to buy it.

The agreement states clearly that you can take the software back to the store for a refund if you don't agree with it.

He chose to not do so but instead sell it himself, which is NOT allowed with OEM software.
OEM software says clearly and on the packaging "for sale with a new PC only".

Microsoft should have dug deeper and they'd probably have found evidence of this guy selling more than he'd ever purchased...

Everything you need has been explained to you several times already. I don't see how regurgitating the same knowledge again will make any difference.

Any of the current crop of laptops should do then.
For programming in my experience RAM is usually more important than CPU so you may decide on a machine with more RAM and a slightly slower processor.

Toshiba, Dell, and HP have some decent machines in that range, personally I'd go for a Centrino based machine with 512MB RAM and a decent size harddisk.
As you're not interested in videos and games (at least primarilly) get that down first and look at the graphics card only as a secondary concern if you can get several machines with the same CPU and other options inside your budget.

Also look at battery life. You will want something that can last several hours on batteries at least. Handy in a traffic jam or when you're stuck waiting for a train or in an airport.

Correct zeroth. I've nothing against any religion (like I said) nor against religios conotations in society as long as that religion doesn't force its ideas and ideals on me.
For example, I've nothing against an easter bunny, but don't expect me to go to church on easter.
I've nothing against Muslims praying in the subway, but don't ask me to do the same or to condone them blocking the tunnels.

And no, I'm no atheist. Atheism is a religion too, as atheists have a religious disbelief in the existence of gods.

I keep my options open... Being pragmatic I have concluded that every religion out there preaches harsher punishment after death for believers in false gods than it does for people that believe in no gods at all.
That means you're better off not joining any religion than you are joining the wrong one and as there's so many religions gambling on choosing the correct one is too risky.

It's a pyramid scheme.
Those indeed can work, but the odds are huge against you.

You sign up for a ton of spam and have to buy expensive stuff. Then you have to get a ton of people to do the same to get the free iPod. Those people then have to sign up even more people... Pretty soon the whole thing collapses.
It's a scam. For the money you could save by not buying the overpriced products you have to buy to even be allowed to participate you could have bought several iPods and you'd not have made enemies of your friends and opened your mailbox to a ton of spam.

no, there's nobody there.

All equipment that has an electrical current flowing through it will transmit radio frequency emissions. Apparently your crappy cheap digicrap and/or your cable are extremely poorly shielded and happen to transmit at the exact frequency at which your crappy cheap radio receives.
Freak coincidence.

And yes, they're out to get you.
Black helicopters will descend on your home and men in white space suits will take you to have experiments performed on you by aliens.

As to what laptop to get, that's impossible to say without you giving some indication about your budget and requirements.

If you have 500 pounds to spend on a laptop on which you want to do some websurfing and word processing you'd get different advise than when you have 2000 pounds to spend on a machine for high end photo processing and programming.

From the US you'd pay import duties, plus UK VAT.
You'd also get a US-only warranty, and of course a US 110V powersupply.

Many US companies won't ship overseas, certainly they won't be allowed to ship a laptop with software overseas as many software companies don't allow their US products to be sold overseas (US law involved there).

Total cost of getting it into the UK, getting UK software for it, and a UK powersupply, would be more than the savings.
Remember that VAT and import duties are leveraged over the FULL cost of the order INCLUDING shipping charges.
The item will also be charged for VAT and duties at the price it would cost you in the UK, not necessarilly the price you paid for it in the US.

Selling OEM software is a violation of the license to that software. Any court that decides otherwise is clearly biassed against the "big bad corporation" and therefore partial (and thus not capable of handing out judgment).

Try NumberFormat and its derivatives.

Check the API docs for specifics.

At current Microsoft anti-spyware is a repackaged application they purchased elsewhere.
It's provided as-is while Microsoft is working to update and enhance it.

If it doesn't remove some things, blame the original developers rather than Microsoft...

Of course many anti spyware tools (especially free versions) tend to have a lot of false positives in order to scare people into spending money on the full product.
As Microsoft AFAIK has no intention of making money out of their product, they don't have a need for such shady tactics.

by knowing developers :)
That's the nice thing of online communities, people who know their stuff can get noticed by the developers of a product.
That's how I got in contact with several, leading to places on beta teams and vollunteer work as a customer support person for one company (with free access to their entire product line as a reward).

religion not suppressing science?
Tell that to Galileo...
Other scientists have been killed as heretics for daring to proclaim things that didn't fit in the framework of the ruling religion.
Religious groups in the US and elsewhere want to ban evolution theory from being taught in schools as heretical.

There is no J2EE 4.2, that may be your problem :)

Go get yourself Apache Tomcat (latest version, 5.5.something) and install that.
Tomcat needs JAVA_HOME set correctly AFAIK.
Install tools.jar from your JDK installation in your Tomcat installation (overwrite the one that's there) to make Tomcat work properly with JDK 1.5.

That should be enough to use JSPs. Personally I'd ditch that old book and get a current one. JSP has evolved a lot over the years and most old paradigms for it have been abandoned and are now considered bad practice.
Get O'Reilly's JSP book, it's excellent.

You will need j2ee.jar from your J2EE API installation (and the documentation as well) if you want to go further.

If you go further you'll need a full J2EE application server as well. I recommend Orion (http://www.orionserver.com) which is standards compliant, easy to use, and free for anything almost except running commercial websites.

This is not JSP... Post it in the JavaScript forum instead...

To go further: even if they were you should not use the services.
NEVER reply to spam and NEVER EVER buy anything from a spammer.

There's an optional attribute you can set for an HTML formfield which makes it forget what was previously entered (so the history is gone).
Not sure if that works with the backbutton too, you'd have to try.

Of course anyone stupid enough to not close a browser window after a session in which sensitive information was entered deserves to get her account compromised.

sure looks a lot like microsofts antispyware program !

Edit: I just found out why ,it powered by Giant ,same as microsofts !!

2nd Edit ,my microsft antispyware ,stoppen working when i uninstall counterspy !!!

That's logical. If it's indeed the same engine they share DLLs.
Many programs have very messy uninstallers that don't check whether DLLs are used by others and just delete anything they may have installed themselves...

subclass it to provide the behaviour you want.

If you need something like that your architecture is wrong :)

Commandline programs are executed from a shell, so the output remains visible if the user wants it. If not he'll likely have it redirected to a file and why should you force him to look at something he doesn't want to see?

Old news, DARPA has been experimenting with such systems for some years now.

What's the signature of toString?
All you need to do is provide a method with that exact signature in your own class.

By reading the API docs for java.lang.Object you can find out the signature of toString.

Guess :)

Java programs (unless you do something stupid like calling operating system specific commands or filenames) will run anywhere there's a JVM of an appropriate version for the classfiles available.

Nothing will stop decompilation but the usefulness to human readers of the generated code can be made pretty poor :)

And indeed NEVER pass off decompiled code as your own, and NEVER decompile code you didn't get explicit permission for to decompile it.
Such code is copyrighted to someone else and may contain patented information you have no right to.
And if you do get permission to decompile something often you'll get the source as well :)

Well, since Java doesn't run on DOS but only on 32 bit operating systems you won't be able to execute DOS commands.

You can however (if you insist on loosing platform independence) execute Windows (or Unix) shell commands using the appropriate methods from the Runtime class.
As I in principle don't agree with doing this you'll have to figure out the rest on your own, there's tons of documentation about the pitfalls.

Sorry, not going to hand over my email address to a company I've never even heard of. Enough harvesting for spam purposes going on as it is.

Religion is a means of explaining away things you don't understand in terms you do understand.
Once it gets organised it degenerates (or evolves, depends on who you are in the hierarchy) into a means for a few (whom are called priests to stay in generic terms) of controlling the masses through indoctrination and by keeping them unaware of reality.
Thus religion will create supernatural all knowing beings whom are claimed to be in contact with the priest cast, telling on all disgressions from the rules laid down by that priest cast on the general population. This (together with the statement that those rules are dictated by those supernatural beings) provides an easy way for the priesthood to control the population and gives them the power to do pretty much whatever they wish.
In such a system there's no place for scientific development as that would inevitably explain away the "miracles" the priests perform or claim the gods perform by means of logic and scientific evidence.
The denial by religions of evolution is one example of that denial and suppression of science by religion.

And yes, I was raised (semi)religiously but never forced to accept any religion and I didn't.
I will tolerate and respect any religion that tolerates and respects the fact that I don't …

The passport would contain the biometrics data on a chipcard or something similar.
We've here already a stiff plastic card embedded in the passport which contains a digitised photograph and signature, adding a chip to that would be easy.

To verify identity (if in doubt from the photograph and other data) a fingerprint and/or retinal scanner can be used and the generated data compared to that stored on the passport.
A central database can be used as a backup to verify the passport was indeed issued (eliminating the possibility of false passports, now a problem as some countries are rumoured to be experts at falsifying the passports of western nations for distribution to terrorists and spies).

The technology exists and has been used for years in access cards for companies, computer networks, etc.
It's the integration and largescale use that's new.

Some people hint at privacy implications but those are mainly the people screaming their rights are being violated whenever anyone does anything that limits their "right" to do whatever they want no matter the consequence for others...

Your entire idea makes little sense.
You say you want to convert a String to uppercase and eliminate whitespace, then give an example where there's only a single uppercase letter.

String has a function to convert a String to uppercase built in, so no need for your messy ideas.
Whitespace elimination is only slightly more involved, involving another single function from class String.

Read the API docs to find out all you need to know, the entire procedure can be written as one line of code, 2 at most.

I'd expect a regular expression that extracts all uppercase letters into a new String, followed by simply taking the length of that String, to be the shortest code.
The regular expression could get messy though, and not being an expert at them I'm not going to try writing one :)

JBuilder allows it, Netbeans allows it, Eclipse has plugins for it, and so do many others.

Of course this is mainly limited to GUI components for most of them, though JBuilder also allows it for some other things like database connections and things like that.

Personally I consider most such options to be pretty useless except for prototyping. The generated source is usually not very pretty, hard to maintain, and far from optimal.

Well, you don't have a constructor matching the parameter list you're using when you try to create an Item.
That's why you get that error, the compiler cannot find a symbol (meaning a reference to something) with the required signature in the Item class.

I get reams of spam, that's the problem with having an old account (the address is in so many usenet archives it's impossible to get rid of the crap).

You won't get spam unless you let someone or something know your email address who then sells it (or otherwise passes it on) to spammers.
The surest way is still to post your address to usenet or websites for all to see, but with the advent of email virusses address books are now also at risk from harvesting.

I'm in several beta programs (including the software I write for a job of course).
Beta testing is not just having access to cool new software, it's serious (and often incredibly boring and frustrating) work.

Microsoft wants only people they know they can trust to keep their mouths shut and to really work at it in their beta programs, an attitude I think is perfectly correct.

I've been running IE exclusively since 1996 (before that I used Netscape 3) and have NEVER had a virus, spyware, or other malware infestation (and never had any attempt at infecting me that I would not have had running any other browser, meaning a piece of software trying to install itself that happened to have been infected, this kind of infection doesn't depend on a particular browser).

My secret? I know what I do and don't visit warez sitez, I don't use Kazaa and other P2P programs to get pirated music and software, and I don't click on links to sites I don't know in banner ads.
I also never open email attachments I didn't expect to get and kill all email I don't trust on the server (or have it killed by my spamkiller and email virus scanner).

It's not IE that is inherently insecure, it's the people using it. Were those people to use another browser they'd still click "yes" when asked to install Kazaa or RealPlayer or some download accellerator...