Posts by Rainy Rat

US lawmakers eye internet 'kill switch'

So...

If there's ever an attack against America's critical comms infrastructure, America will be able to respond by disabling its critical comms infrastructure? Wouldn't that just be doing the attackers job for them?

IE9's Acid, speed and HTML5 trip to land lost surfers

Re: LOL at all the people

@MarkOne: First, I was troubled that the URL you provided wasn't an actual link and I'd have to go through the excruciating second-and-a-half process of copying and pasting it into my address bar. The I remembered about Opera 10.60's "go to web address" option that pops up when you right-click some (any) selected text. That's got to be one of my favourite Opera features.

Dadaist user manuals - a call for submissions

Pointing the finger

"Finger to spiritual emptiness underlying everything"

Allegedly, this was a translation of "Pointer to void" in a Japanese C manual.

US Dems fill inboxes with 419 scams

@g_mannings

Sent myself a quick test mail from the page in question. From the headers:

Received: from web1.dnc.org (web1.dnc.org [192.168.10.71]) by mailservices.democrats.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6EAB912E47B for <me>; Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:17:11 -0400 (EDT)

Received: by web1.dnc.org (Postfix, from userid 30) id 4F7C1482BD; Mon, 31 Aug

2009 11:17:11 -0400 (EDT)

Received: from phpmailer ([192.168.10.24]) by www.democrats.org with HTTP

(PHPMailer); Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:17:11 -0400

Sorry, but it does indeed look like the venerable and frewuently-exploited PHPMailer is at work here. I know that the exploitable nature of the page itself isn't helping, but few (if any) security problems have been improved by the addition of PHP.

Crystal ball torches woman's flat

Unforeseen indeed

This almost happened to me - the (Pagan) wife used to keep hers on the kitchen window sill, until we discovered a series of pretty curved scorch marks had mysteriously appeared next to it. Looked a little like the output from a Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorder.

Zaphod Beeblebrox home sun 'shrinking', may have blown up

But how's it pronounced?

I've heard both "beetle-juice" and "bettle-guise". Any astronomy geeks care to weigh in?