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...seems very authentic but isn't.... This has scam written all over it...

So, umm... Does it seem authentic to you, OR does it have scam written all over it?

And, as for "tip offs" the BIG one is that it mentions NIGERIA! These nigerian scams have been going around for long enough that I find it more useful to reference a rich friend in Nigeria than, say, ocean front propery in arizona, or a bridge for sale.


Heh, anyway, no offense Data, but if this is a "new scam" to you, I'd like to know what rock you've been living under. This scam, in one form or another, has been running since the early 80s. It's also known as the 419 scam.

Links, some useful, some funny

http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/ Detailed info

http://j-walk.com/other/conf/ Great parody.

http://www.419eater.com/ Baits and then tricks would-be scammers. Some hilarious "trophy shots," but the hall of shame is better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_fee_fraud The ubiquitus wikipedia article.

Installing apache on your own windows computer isn't exactly the easiest thing in the world, but it is doable. Many nifty howtos can be found on google.

As for learning PHP, it's not too difficult if you already know HTML and some basic programming concepts. If you're just worried about having to have a main page here that's PHP (for the newsbox stuff) than don't. It's trivially simple to add a piece of PHP to a regular web page. Anything that's not PHP just gets treated as regular HTML.

I think I'd like it if Harm and I ruled the world. Stupid people would be put on a Jurassic park like continent...

heh, if we sent all the criminals to some empty continent and just left them there to die
and showed up like 50yrs later like, "sup?"
whatd u think they'd say?
something along the lines of, "G`Day mate"

Not to rain on your parade or anything... I mean, it looks like you've put a lot of effort into this and actually have something decent going, but...

http://smarty.php.net/

"Tribute to the best song in the world" Yes, super bizzaro song.

As for t-shirts... I wasn't in band, but I was in robotics, which was half band nerds anyway, so I know the type. As for t-shirts, we tried to make one that had a roll of duck tape that said "If you can't duck it..." Got rejected by the faculty of course. We did, however, manage to make an entire hat out of duck tape, as well as "paint" the entire robot with it.

I'm not sure what sort of school you went to, but at my high school, I'm pretty sure the subject of "masturbation" came up a least a dozen times a day...

Oh, you meant from the TEACHERS! :-)

We used to ditch and duel with Amtgard weapons (aka "padded sticks") in the school parking lot when we'd take a break during robotics. Security guard thought we were fighting, drives up in her golf cart and then as she gets close realizes it's some sort of sport. She watches for a few minutes, then shakes her head and drives off. I kinda miss those days.

There aren't many "tweaks" you can do to those boards. The chip is soldered in, and I don't think they overclock well. Like Will pointed out, some videos go down to 3fps in complex scenes. The only way around that is to reencode all the video into something easier to decode, and that's rarely worth the time/effort. Besides, that's way too much ram... go with 512 and spend the other cash on a faster CPU.

As for physical size... yeah, our rig is about a square foot in size. It's running in the box the MB came in.

50,000 isn't so much... it's only the same IQ as 10,000 car-park attendants. :-)

For laptop suggestions... I would extremely caution you to stay away from Sony at all costs. We had one in the shop the last week. Important files corrupted. I pull the hard drive out and backup what data I can for the guy, then run a lowlevel scan on the drive. It's just fine upto the second half/platter, then it completely fails to read.

Now, this is only a 3 month old laptop, so the guy figures he'll send it back to sony. But sony won't let him send it back. Seems they don't care what anyone says, you have to do it their way. So they want him to use their "restore" tool, that basically reimages the drive so it's just like it came from the factory. It works, of course, because the image is only 6GB or so, and it easily fits on the first part of the drive. Anyway, long story short, the guy argues and argues with sony for a week. Finally they agree to take it, but on the condition that if it's NOT broken, he has to pay charges and all that. Low and behold sony gets back to him two weeks later (poor fool has been out a computer for 3 weeks now) "Well, it seems you were right, the hard drive was bad." They ship it and he gets it a week later. A month without a computer.

Another story... This time with Dell. I go onsite and look at this computer. It comes on, "sometimes." LEDs flicker... bad power supply I think. Take it back to the shop, plug in a test power supply, and everything works perfectly. I call Dell up, give 'em the service code off the computer and the guy says "So what can we help you with?" "I need a new power supply?" "You know that for sure? Tested it with a known good or some such?" "Yup." "Okay, what's the address I should ship that to?"

They overnight it and first thing in the morning I get a shiny box from dell. Swap it out. Put the old one in the box, and then take the peel off label/waybill inside and stick it over the old label, call the courier service, and they come pick up the old one... All at dell's expense. They were without a computer for 18.5 hours.

Anyway, as for laptops, I don't know what features you need. I hear good things about the toshiba tablets, if you want a pen one. Dell is good for all around stuff, and as I pointed out, their service is good. For really good value, check out Averatec... they're on the low end, but definitely the best bang for your buck. I've had a 3270 for several months now and I love it. I use it all day at work, since I don't have a desktop machine there. I toss it in the backpack anytime I go on a call, and it holds up really well. Paid about 800 bucks for it, and it's nearly as fast my desktop machine (minus, of course, the video card.)

Yes. Of course if you end up in a row later on and one of you comes whining to me that you need the password changed, then the other comes complaining that the password was changed I'm more than likely just to kick you both out. If you share a password with someone, fine, but you're responsible for whatever happens, and I do NOT accept excuse of "but it wasn't me!"

Seriously, this has happened several times before, just as recently as last week even.

It looks fine, but I want to smack you for making a 1.6mb GIF file! You seriously need to optimize that sucker.

Heheh... we've got something like that set up in our living room already. Though no plasma TV, just a regular one. Well, the whole thing is the ghetto version of that. Much older Via board, less ram, smaller hard drive, and just a cheap usb joypad for a remote. Still though, it's networked, and so I can play all my downloaded videos and music in the living room... AND it's got a SNES emulator on it, with nearly every rom ever made, so that's nice as well.

Now if only I could build one into my car...

Okay, I have updated the kernel and rebooted the system. Now that the scary part is over, I feel a bit better. I've just turned on fail2ban, a script that will monitor login attempts and block anyone that fails 5 times. This script is new and in beta, so if you run into problems, let me know.

Yeah, I want one of those new H1 Alphas with the 6.6L engine (46% MORE horsepower) and the new Allison transmission. Or I'd "settle" for a modern (not circa 1985) surplus HumVee. Wonder if I could convince them to leave the TOW launcher on it... *smirk*

And as for swords, I worked out a nifty design for a managable claymore. Most of the core and blade are carbon fiber so it's fairly light (not too light though) but the blade edges are ceramic composites, or in a few years maybe, just make the whole thing from structured carbon. Imagine a 5 foot long actual sword that's light enough to fence with and a razor edge that never needs to be sharpened. Of course I'd "settle" (that word again) for just a good, traditionally designed, hand crafted one made from carbon steel.