Ask TOMBOT

im sorry, tom :(

why do the images in polls disappear after the poll closes

-- am0n, Saturday, March 1, 2008 6:33 PM (Yesterday)

why do the images in polls disappear after the poll closes

-- am0n, Saturday, March 1, 2008 6:33 PM (Yesterday)

-- am0n, Tuesday, March 4, 2008 3:13 PM (1 minute ago)

I would complain about the quality of your revive but it's much better than what just happened on ASK TEHRESA

tombot what was the single most important event/factor that made you the bot you are today

i may have asked this before but i can't remember

probably my parents fucking.

(has anybody done studies of monozygotic twins to determine if attitudes on "nature vs. nurture" are genetically determined?)

true, yet unenlightening. during yr lifetime then

(xp i haven't)

during my lifetime? probably my parents' not fucking anymore after having me.

Is this book any good?

http://www.amazon.com/Chatter-Dispatches-Secret-Global-Eavesdropping/dp/1400060346

No. None of those kinds of books are any good, because nobody who has anything interesting to say is allowed to write a book, and everybody else manages to fuck it up with huge dollops of hyperbole trying to distract you from the fact that they don't actually have anything remotely interesting to say. Ask yourself what you could possibly hope to find out by reading something like that that you would find surprising or genuinely thought-provoking in any way. Right.

In short, read fas.org

reading something like the James Bamford books after you already know this shit is going on in the world is kind of like taking two-semester sequence of ADVANCED SANTA CLAUS IS NOT REAL after finding out, you know, santa's not real

and yeah what jon said, shit's out there for free. cryptome.org too but don't forget the salt

i heard you can track santa on norad

tombot,

did you know that the race in texas is very close?

thats what ive heard

TB, why is it so hard to find george allen (the coach) vids on youtube, esp the one where he says "every time you lose, you die a little, inside. Not all your organs; maybe just your liver."

i met george allen's widow in a cafe in paris in 1997. she gave me a pocket schedule from his last year at long beach state.

bb, no, I hadn't heard.

cankles, that is because NFL Films hires the greatest internet hardmen alive to track their material down and torch the abode of anybody who tries to post it. I am planning to attend their combine in a few years to see how I measure up.

Tom, do you know of any web sites that would have video of the hilarious less-than-lethal weapon known as "sticky foam"? Youtube is a bust.

dan, I think part of the problem might be that sticky foam lost favor shortly before the internet got big. Defensetech says it's now deployed in security doors. They don't like to use it on people much because the "non-lethality" bit turns out to not be very true should you happen to get any of it around your breathing apparatus.

Tom,

Is yr Sony hate driven by their attitude towards consumers or by disappointment in their products?

Dan,

I am still massively pissed off about the rootkit DRM scandal. The fact that the company is still run with an eye towards continuing to implement similar snake oil wherever possible is why I continue my unrelenting grudge. I pretty much boycott anybody who distributes DRM content. I would prefer everybody switch to eMusic and Amazon from iTunes, too.

tombot,

can you suggest a book for me to read? i'm thinking about stopping at powell's on the way to the train.

kevin, for lighter fare, I have recently enjoyed Atul Gawande's "Better," the works of Walker Percy, and John McPhee's "Uncommon Carriers."

In fact yeah definitely check out the last one, it's in paperback now.

(btw "for lighter fare" I am just disclaiming that you probably would not want to read the shit I have been educating myself with lately)

In fact yeah definitely check out the last one, it's in paperback now.

my sister's boyfriend gave it to me as thanks for letting him crash at my place when he was driving from boston to portland, oregon. i really dug that book, the canoe trip on the merrimack would have taken him right through my hometown.

Tom, what topics are of interest to you lately ("educating")

mostly hard sociological and psychological stuff on the cognitive issues contributing to systems accidents

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mad_scientist&diff=98023606&oldid=96706991

right now, what is your favourite anecdote/example of cognitive issues contributing to systems accidents?

insufficient documentation on the format of crontab entries at one organization caused a critical server to almost tip over one morning because a developer had plugged a task in there that was generating 60 instances of itself every night. nobody noticed that anything was malfunctioning for months because 1. nobody ever ps greps the cron user 2. "that server is always slow" 3. expected outputs were being generated each morning with no problems until the tipping point was reached. had a certain astute individual not immediately identified and run down the source of the fire who knows what would have happened. the offending programmer was told to clean it up and spent the next hour committing process genocide. this was no boat accident.

i take it you can't say which organization?

I can't wait until the cron scripts I have to generate static versions of query heavy pages fail.

Perhaps when I leave my job, locking my account will disable them!

http://grigbertz.com/gallery/v/nethack/

What do you think about THIS?

semi-nsfw

also, i am afraid i am going to get that chatter book unless you can suggest a better book about 20C or later US intelligence, why becaue it look interesting, even if it is horseshit. suggestions welcome!

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/bamford/images/cover3.gif

What do you think about THIS?

I don't think about that.

ty

semi

waht

gbx, please be more specific.

dear tombot,

how come you don't step up and pwn these clowns?

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/03/07/china.hackers/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

What exactly are you asking me to do? Phone Interpol and tell them to read CNN?

I mean I read variations on that "news" every day, I'm not a cop though, and I definitely don't have jurisdiction in the countries where all these douchebags live. Also, script kiddies are braggarts, film at fucking 11.

so you're just going to sit there with your thumb up your ass?!?!?!?!