I give take-home exams frequently, and a thankfully small number of my students could probably profit from reading Alex Halavais's wicked valedictory essay, posted as he leaves teaching1 at least temporarily for pastures new: How to cheat good.
Fortunately, the type of student who needs this advice probably isn't reading here.
1 Update: Er, seems I was wrong about that, as explained in the comments…
Dan Hunter posts on (confused) threats he’s received from the proprietor of an online game whose press releases Dan had the temerity to suggest might be slightly inflated.
As one of the commentators to his post noted, sending this sort of threat to a tenured law professor and/or his Dean, is “like playing chicken with a freight train.”
(Incidentally, guys, oral defamation is slander, written defamation is libel. Get your threats right.)
Quickies. Because I’m distracted.
This is funny. Dreamhost, the cheap but imperfect hosts of this blog, have a blog of their own. And in a recent entry, DreamHost Blog | Web Hosting’s Dirty Laundry, they describe their correspondence with a supposedly neutral and objective service that offers consumers reviews of hosting companies.
This is how hosting-reviews.com describes itself:
Hosting-Review is an independent provider of web hosting reviews. We base our reviews on knowledge, personal experience with webhosts and user feedback.
What emerges from their correspondence with Dreamhost, is a little different: if you want to be listed in their top 10, you pay them.
As an encore, Dreamhost offers a defense of their sales policies. It’s written with a certain panache, and convincing as far as bandwidth and disk space go. But I can testify that there’s nothing in the sales literature that I read which put me on notice as to their quite restrictive CPU throttling policies.
Basically, if this blog gets hit with a wave of spam, they threaten to pull the plug. And I’ve had to disable a number of PHP-intensive things to keep CPU usage down. DH’s business model is great for static pages. Lots of them.
But while it may be a great service for a porn server, it is only OK for serving stuff that gets built on the fly, or gets rebuilt often.
Why do I stick? It’s cheap, fairly reliable, friendly, cheap, and I can’t face the switching costs (especially the time & energy). Also, I have a separate managed dedicated server for work (not as cheap!) which performs very well, and I like having the same interface for everything I do.
Further evidence of domestic subversion by our enemies: Moles in the White House killed a (probably) legal NSA data mining project with built-in privacy protections.
The National Security Agency developed a pilot program in the late 1990s that would have enabled it to gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, it shelved the project — not because it failed to work — but because of bureaucratic infighting and a sudden White House expansion of the agency’s surveillance powers, according to several intelligence officials.
The agency opted instead to adopt only one component of the program, which produced a far less capable and rigorous program. It remains the backbone of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance efforts, tracking domestic and overseas communications from a vast databank of information, and monitoring selected calls.
Someone wrote to me once hinting he might offer the high four figures or even five if I would sell him discourse.net. I had no idea if it was real, or some sort of scam, or an attempt to entrap me into something that might be used against me in some weird UDRP proceeding. And since I had no real desire to sell, it seemed safer not to reply and too much trouble to write back with the sort of NDA you have to have in hand before entering into domain name related negotiations.
If you believe this wacky site spotted by Alex Halavais, then it was a waay lowball offer anyway,
discourse.net
It has been determined based on search results that this name may be extensively valuable beyond the scope of the LeapFish.com domain analysis tool. It is recommended that you seek the services of a complete domain appraisal company rather than rely on this estimate.
Thank You.
Combined Value Score: 309
Top
Level Domain Score: 8Unwanted
Characters Score: 10
Dictionary
Word Score: 100
Length
Score: 10
Archive.org
Score: 81
Search Results: 719,000
Yahoo
Search Results: 0
MSN
Search Results: 56,218
Search
Engine Score: 100
Estimated
Base Value: $927.00
Estimated
Actual Value: $143,222.00I don’t myself have much faith in automated domain valuation, but if you do, and think something in the healthy six-figure range sounds reasonable, we should definitely talk.
Posted in Discourse.net 3 Comments
Jotwell Blenderlaw