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What about SysVR4 binary emulation under FreeBSD?

check this out. (it's not goatse, promise)

The article Slashdot your representative has been reposted from floating atoll ; please see the site for updates, responses, etc.

The p2p networks are considering a possible move agianst the RIAA in response to this by using recently enacted anti-spam laws."
(more)

One advantage of not being totally decentralized is that you have influence, legally. Now the Internet community can actively use the laws it's helped pass. There needs to be more of this kind of thing; it just takes a few more votes. Participate!

I propose a modification to Slashdot, such that users who have logged in and provided a name, address, and 9-digit zip code (in the united states) or a 6-digit post code (in the united kingdom) are shown a new link with articles: Contact your representative.

Now the Slashdot effect serves to enable millions of hits a day with the chance to vote. The last figure I remember was hearing was 30,000 unique visitors a day; imagine if ten percent of them each send one fax to their representative. Suddenly they're hearing the voices of three thousand Slashdot users, clearly, once a day.

Now do it more often. For every article. And support the United Kingom efforts, too. Other countries, too; perhaps a distributed network of Slashdot users with modems.

The slashdot effect has been analyzed:

Traffic increase from slashdot effect
Increase in hits and bandwith requirements of a Linux related story being featured on Slashdot
Analysis of several stories making it to the frontpage of Slashdot and other newslogs.

Especially the second link shows that the Slashdot effect can look very much like a DDoS attack. The severance depends on the story, probably on the time of day and of course on the link and hardware powering the /.ed site.

If you pay by the gigabyte for your webtraffic (who doesn't), the /. effect can be a financial DoS attack much more than a technical DoS.

... is of course the S l a s h d o t E f f e c t.

Sooo... congresscritters are thinking of passing a nasty ole law? Rob could just threaten to post a story like "An anonymous coward writes: Streaming video of Natalie Portmans hot grit's posted to the US Congress Web site. "([sic] - TacoLexicon in force. my real grammar is better.)

Congress would naturally cave in and meet all our demands. Well, maybe not RMS's...

From FreeBSD "man loader":

The program called loader is the final stage of FreeBSD's kernel boot-
strapping process. On IA32 (i386) architectures, it is a BTX client. It
is linked statically to libstand(3) and usually located in the directory
/boot.

It provides a scripting language that can be used to automate tasks, do
pre-configuration or assist in recovery procedures. This scripting lan-
guage is roughly divided in two main components. The smaller one is a
set of commands designed for direct use by the casual user, called
"builtin commands" for historical reasons. The main drive behind these
commands is user-friendlyness. The bigger component is an ANS Forth com-
patible Forth interpreter based on ficl, by John Sadler.

Here's another one.

I have found a picture on the supplied link for the linux install fest. This piuctuer shows a very clearly DIVINE entity, namely, bill gates... (or at least, it looks like him:)

As has been previously pointed out, it's not the majority of us Aussies agreeing, it's the Government pushing a political agenda. The current Govt was only just in the majority at the time of this legislation, and as such needed to pander to an independant moral crusader called Harradine. This was entirely useless, but they pushed the bill through anyway.

Our PM, John Howard, said about those opposing the bill that "they do not understand the mood of middle Australia on this issue," or something like that. What he failed to realize was that middle Australia is, for the most part, totally uninformed and gets all their information through the standard media channels (the 'net is the source of all depravity type things). Unfortunately, most of our PMs are part of that demographic.

Essentially, the attitude of "the majority wants it, so it must be alright" is far too simplistic, and possibly dangerous. There's a fantastic article by Mark Newton, When Democracy Fails (check out the domain name!). This addresses all of these issues, and is fairly relevant to the discussion at hand.
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