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Ahh! I used up my mod points yesterday... Please someone mod the parent up -- this is really funny! And for those who don't get the reference...

Long version: http://www.acme.com/jef/netgems/scratch_monkey.htm l
Short version: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/scrat ch-monkey.html

Haven't heard of why they did this, but I guess they had a reason. Hopefully a good one.

It's probably just an instance of the connector conspiracy.

Myth: Open Source is written by heterosexuals.

Fact: All Open Source development is done by raging homosexuals. The more flaming examples include Anal Cox, Linus Turdballs, Eric Ass-Reaming Raymond, and the entire Slashdot crew. The ringleader of the slashdotters, a man named CmdrTaco, engages in a practice known as Taco-snotting, along with his faggot-buddies Jeff Homos Bates and CowBoiKneel.

Myth: Open Source is written for heterosexuals.

Fact: Using Open Source software can cause suppressed homosexual fantasies to surface, leading to all out flaming faggotry within 6-8 weeks. Anecdotes of otherwise hetero men turning queer are far too numerous to count, but a few examples stand out. In one case, a man was arrested loitering outside an elementary school and making sexual overtures to several children: he quickly confessed that shortly after installing the Mozilla browser on his computer, he began to have uncontrollable urges to, to put it simply, have his cock sucked off by little boys. He soon met several other like-minded men through discussions on the Bugger Zilla mailing list (all already homosexuals), who together kidnapped a total of seven children whom they brought back to their apartment and sodomized. The other two men are still at large and believed to still be using Mozilla.

Myth: Open Source is multicultural.

Fact: Open Source is openly racist.

Myth: Open Source is democratic.

Fact: Open Source is controlled by a few narrow-minded zealots (mentioned throughout this post), most of whom are either Communists, Stalinists, Nazis, or Fascists. Additionally, Open Source supports terrorism.

Myth: Open Source is tolerant of religious preferences.

Fact: Open Source developers regularly engage in holy wars over the superiority of various Open Source projects, such as the Emacs program (preferred by Christians) versus vi (used mostly by neo-pagans and Satanists); or the KDE desktop (a favorite among Muslims) versus the GNOME project (particularly favored by Jews). Posts initiating crusades or jihads against other developers can be found regularly throughout the newsgroups and mailing lists.

Myth: Open Source is tolerant of sexual preference.

Fact: See above. Either you are a homo, you become a homo, or you never visit Richard Stallman alone in his office and hope to God you never meet him on the street at night.

Myth: Open Source is tolerant of political differences.

Fact: Open Source is an anarcho-communist philosophy bent on the destruction of capitalism. The very same Richard Stallman, a man whose name is disturbingly reminiscent of Stalin, has stated several times in public that his vision includes the subjugation of all who own intellectual properties under the jackboot of the GPL. The GPL is a pernicious piece of literature lifted straight from Karl Marxs Communist Manifesto, and is fortunately banned in many democratic nations.

* * * * * UPDATE * * * * *

Myth: Open Source programming is a harlmess, healthy activity.

Fact: Open Source programming has been known to lead to massive obesity, violent tendencies with an obsession with handguns, paranoid-delusional ranting, and in severe cases, complete insanity. If anyone you know is thinking about going Open Source, stop them before its too late!

Then you haven't written enough tests. Or you're trying to integrate too much at once.

According to a jargon definition site, ICBM Address... Lat/Long plus target Elevation would be a real missle address.

Pascal n.

An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline language ). The hackish point of view on Pascal was probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&R fame) entitled "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", which was turned down by the technical journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was eventually published in "Comparing and Assessing Programming Languages", edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is worth repeating here, because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself after many years of improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. (The entire essay is available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html.) At the end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote:

9. There is no escape

This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler that defines the "standard procedures". The language is closed.

People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others.

I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language, suitable for teaching but not for real programming.

Pascal has since been entirely displaced (mainly by C ) from the niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems programming, and from its role as a teaching language by Java.

(reference) Now, since you were honest enough to admit you like Pascal, I'll be fair and admit that this position I've listed above is very, very old. It may be outdated now. Or maybe it isn't. I don't know.

Pascal n.

An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline language ). The hackish point of view on Pascal was probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&R fame) entitled "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", which was turned down by the technical journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was eventually published in "Comparing and Assessing Programming Languages", edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is worth repeating here, because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself after many years of improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. (The entire essay is available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html.) At the end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote:

9. There is no escape

This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler that defines the "standard procedures". The language is closed.

People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others.

I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language, suitable for teaching but not for real programming.

Pascal has since been entirely displaced (mainly by C ) from the niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems programming, and from its role as a teaching language by Java.

(reference) Now, since you were honest enough to admit you like Pascal, I'll be fair and admit that this position I've listed above is very, very old. It may be outdated now. Or maybe it isn't. I don't know.

Pascal n.

An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline language ). The hackish point of view on Pascal was probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&R fame) entitled "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", which was turned down by the technical journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was eventually published in "Comparing and Assessing Programming Languages", edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is worth repeating here, because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself after many years of improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. (The entire essay is available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html.) At the end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote:

9. There is no escape

This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler that defines the "standard procedures". The language is closed.

People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others.

I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language, suitable for teaching but not for real programming.

Pascal has since been entirely displaced (mainly by C ) from the niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems programming, and from its role as a teaching language by Java.

(reference) Now, since you were honest enough to admit you like Pascal, I'll be fair and admit that this position I've listed above is very, very old. It may be outdated now. Or maybe it isn't. I don't know.

Pascal n.

An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline language ). The hackish point of view on Pascal was probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&R fame) entitled "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", which was turned down by the technical journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was eventually published in "Comparing and Assessing Programming Languages", edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is worth repeating here, because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself after many years of improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. (The entire essay is available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html.) At the end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote:

9. There is no escape

This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler that defines the "standard procedures". The language is closed.

People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others.

I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language, suitable for teaching but not for real programming.

Pascal has since been entirely displaced (mainly by C ) from the niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems programming, and from its role as a teaching language by Java.

(reference) Now, since you were honest enough to admit you like Pascal, I'll be fair and admit that this position I've listed above is very, very old. It may be outdated now. Or maybe it isn't. I don't know.

Pascal n.

An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline language ). The hackish point of view on Pascal was probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&R fame) entitled "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", which was turned down by the technical journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was eventually published in "Comparing and Assessing Programming Languages", edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is worth repeating here, because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself after many years of improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. (The entire essay is available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html.) At the end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote:

9. There is no escape

This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler that defines the "standard procedures". The language is closed.

People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others.

I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language, suitable for teaching but not for real programming.

Pascal has since been entirely displaced (mainly by C ) from the niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems programming, and from its role as a teaching language by Java.

(reference) Now, since you were honest enough to admit you like Pascal, I'll be fair and admit that this position I've listed above is very, very old. It may be outdated now. Or maybe it isn't. I don't know.

Hmm, I'm pretty sure it was always Command-Z, no mousing required, but it was before it was called the Command key. It was just that key with the weird symbol on it (personally I called it "funnykey" back in the mid-80s). The Jargon file lists it under "feature key".

I know on the IIgs and some Mac keyboards it was the same as the open-Apple key (I forget what the closed-Apple key was used for). On the original mac, though, I think it just had the symbol. A google search on Apple's site turns up a number of images of keyboards among other things, though not one of the original Mac.

So the question left is, was there a documented implementation of Undo on a computer before the original Mac? Perhaps in some old word processing programs? I know there were some I used on the Apple II, but I certainly can't remember what functions they had after 20-some-odd years.

Cracking is the stupidest term.

Cracking is the stupidest term.

Cracking is the stupidest term.

ESR also links to DeCSS - although the link seems to work randomly (didn't work yesterday, today it was OK).
---

Does it work? There's lots of evidence it's worked for a lot of people who've tried it (including me).

Does it always work, for everyone, in every project? That's an open question.

Pair programming is not the first XP practice a project should try. Could a project get a lot of value out of XP without doing pair programming? I think yes, and I'm an advocate of programming in pairs; the question is open to debate.

This pathetic meme will live on as long as it gets a *chortle* for being a "witty" and politically correct mispelling of an otherwise 'uncivilized' curse word.

--

Oh, and that "$" instead of an "S" in Microsoft is really mature.

It's okay, we're allowed. ESR said so(scroll to the bottom). Yeah I know, I'm pathetic.

Don't forget that his writings have been given as one of the main reasons that Netscape went open-source (here's a document from his site, and there are multiple references to this fact if you Google for them). Say what you want about Mozilla, but there's no denying that it's had a positive impact on the open-source movement in the last year or two and has finally broken the Internet away from the 98%+ market share that IE used to enjoy.

Correct Link

Why not this one, though?

His main claim to popularity comes from writing "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". The problem is that the seminal understandings that sprang from that lightweight volume are now considered common knowledge. ESR was the first to codify into easily-understood form the innate truths about free software development that people had long since suspected.

He's come out with some more good ones (in particular, I like "Homesteading the Noosphere), but he hasn't written any work with more impact than than "Cathedral". He was also the first to publish the original "Halloween Document", which showed that Microsoft was, at last, taking the GNU/Linux threat seriously.

These days, almost everybody in the free-software/OSS development world understands the difference between the Bazaar and Cathedral development methods. They often consciously choose one or the other, or to develop according to Cathedral methodology, and transition to Bazaar after initial successful release. People understand the success of the development of GNU/Linux now, and despite what some will try to say, most really didn't until 1996 and the CaTB publication.

Lately, he's mostly a critic. Fetchmail is very slow on the development side these days, and his efforts to create a new build system for the Linux kernel were not accepted (killer effort, though, and well thought out, just too politically charged and too sweeping of a change for most people's tastes). However, he's still an exceptionally influential self-appointed Linux advocate. His opinions are read by millions of readers in and out of the free software community.

For the bio on the stuff he's done that has had a massive impact on the free/oss software scene, check out his bio: http://tuxedo.org/~esr/resume.html

Regardless, he has many publications in print and does a lot of speaking conventions. Like Bruce Perens, who is also influential in the community, he chose the role of public advocate for GNU/Linux for himself, and has been very successful in that role.

You can't buy Unreal II or a 4GHz Pentium either, but they're not "vaporware" because no one expects them to be out yet.

I remember when in a previous company we had 12 IT professionals, six with "Computer Science" degrees - you know what I mean NpComplete/Knuth/Z stuff. The computer scientists were mostly people with good or very good first degrees and some with masters and PhDs.

The technical management, myself included, had mostly science or engineering degrees of varying quality. After a turbulent time, and some job losses, which we managed humanely, we took stock. We concluded that most of our technical problems were down to the computer scientists. We never really managed to explain why. The computer scientists were undoubtedly clever, hard working and pleasant people.

I know other people have found the same problem - one with a spooky similarity to our own. I have tried lots of explanations but most of them do not quite fit. Has anybody got any?

Was it us or was it them? Or a clash of cultures?

Are Eric Raymond's comments relevant?

"I can't give complete instructions on how to learn to program here -- it's a complex skill. But I can tell you that books and courses won't do it (many, maybe most of the best [open programmers] are self-taught)."
( How To Become A Hacker)

Absolutely. I have a GNU/Linux (Debian) system at home which uses Fetchmail to pop emails off my ISP account. Fetchmail delivers to Postfix for local delivery. Postfix calls Procmail as part of its configuration. Procmail first pipes incoming mails through Spamassassin. If Spamassassin decides that the mail is suspect, it is placed in to a "caughtspam" mbox for later examination/deletion.

The postfix config is a basic:
mailbox_command = procmail -a "$EXTENSION"

The procmail config is as simple as:
:0fw
| spamassassin

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
caughtspam

This has cut down my personal time spent on processing emails by many many times. OK, so it's not exactly the most computationally cheap method of filtering spam, but the box isn't doing anything else particularly important and CPU cycles are cheap.

All I now need to do is go through the "caughtspam" mbox every now and again (nicely managed using Mutt) and double-check whether anything has slipped through. Only one email has been badly marked by Spamassassin and that was due to the sender incorporating lots of spam phrases in the email.

This really exists:

Mozilla has an "up, next, previous, first, last, etc" set of buttons that you can use to browse an ordered set of pages. go to the magic cauldron for an example. The html listed below makes this work and (i believe...) is part of the html 4 standard.

[link HREF="magic-cauldron-3.html" REL=next]
[link HREF="magic-cauldron-1.html" REL=previous]
[link HREF="magic-cauldron.html#toc2" REL=contents]

Finally a use for Write-Only Memory!

Hackish speech generally features extremely precise diction, careful word choice, a relatively large working vocabulary, and relatively little use of contractions or street slang. Dry humor, irony, puns, and a mildly flippant attitude are highly valued -- but an underlying seriousness and intelligence are essential. One should use just enough jargon to communicate precisely and identify oneself as a member of the culture; overuse of jargon or a breathless, excessively gung-ho attitude is considered tacky and the mark of a loser.

Kibo?

I am not Kibo.

Kibo was James "Kibo" Parry, who can still be found at http://www.kibo.com/.

KIBO == Knowledge In, Bullshit Out.

--Jim

Godwin's Law prov. [Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.

It is incredible that you can speak of enjoying free software and curse RMS in the same breath.

This statement is heresy ONLY if you believe Free Software and RMS are synonymous. I believe they are not. Free Software existed well before RMS, and will exist well after he is gone. He only "created" Free Software if you accept his conceit that Free Software is only software that follows his definitions of Free. I do not. He has contributed a lot to this world, but didn't invent the world. Many people don't realize that The Cathedral and the Bazaar wasn't necessarily contrasting the development styles of commercial software vs. free software, but different styles of development within Free Software itself, and the RMS driven gcc was the example of the "closed" Cathedral. Because of the lack of innovation in gcc, especially around the time ANSI C++ came out and it needed large changes, folks forked gcc into egcs, a more "bazaar" style development model, that eventually became the offical gcc. Or are you saying Eric Raymond has nothing to say on the topic of Free Software because he differs with RMS?

Or if this was a troll, nevermind.

Perhaps in the future, those who are spearheading this project can do a map tracing of El Camino Real de California, or whatever it's formally known as (more coloquially known as El Camino Bignum). I'd love to see where that runs in conjunction with current roads, but that's just me.

Stylesheets are nice for simple text styling, but can't even be depended on for font sizes! (Don't believe me? Set up a web page with a style

BODY { font-size: medium }

And see how it shows up on IE, IE for Mac, Netscape, and Netscape for Mac. They'll all be different sizes, last time I checked.)

Yeah, well, try these:

BODY { font-size: 14px; }

BODY { font-size: 12pt; }

I'll bet you'll find that those will display similarly on all browsers on all platforms. This of course assumes the same font, and that all the platforms have similar DPI settings. However, there are plenty of people who need the text to be larger than many sites provide (OK, Sprint?! 10px Verdana? *squint squint*) and get quite understandably annoyed when you've confined the text into a little bitty group of pixels.

If you want overly-anal control of the exact font size, you should be specifying it in pixels or, preferably, points. IE doesn't "magnify" fonts set with either, but Mozilla will magnify both. I consider both behaviors to be wrong, I think the Right Thing would be to scale up the points-to-pixels conversion as text is magnified, and leave things specified in pixels alone. Or, if pixel-sized font is scaled, then the "virtual pixel" to "real pixel" conversion should be scaled everywhere, including with <img>s.

Bottom line: "medium" is a browser-based setting. It's supposed to change from browser-to-browser (well, it should be expected to change - it doesn't have to). So complaining that the browsers don't have a uniform definition of "medium" when there isn't one is kind of silly.

Actually, "creeping featurism" is an actual term.

And here you thought you were being funny.

Yeah, I've never heard of creeping featurism either. Must be some perversion of the phrase feature creep only losers use.

Real losers would use something like feeping creaturism, thinking they were being funny.

Yeah, I've never heard of creeping featurism either. Must be some perversion of the phrase feature creep only losers use.

Real losers would use something like feeping creaturism, thinking they were being funny.

Yeah, I've never heard of creeping featurism either. Must be some perversion of the phrase feature creep only losers use.

Real losers would use something like feeping creaturism, thinking they were being funny.

Uhh, actually, see creeping featurism and also feeping creaturism in ESR's Jargon File.

Uhh, actually, see creeping featurism and also feeping creaturism in ESR's Jargon File.

HUH?!?

Dude, what the hell do you expect when they're using Intercal as their base dev platform?

Guess I'd better watch out. One of the two surviving Hurd developers might have mod points. :)

Alternative reference, but I'm not sure who had it first.

Don't forget the little-known bash command, watch. Executes a certain command once every two seconds, by default. D'ya suppose that would be useful for this purpose?

The watch command is more useful when you need to monitor output of some other command which itself takes little time to execute but the output is changing (like watch who or watch ps or watch ls -sh) but when all you need is to constantly run something over and over again, then while true; do command; done may be better than watch command but of course TMTOWTDI.

Please take a look at http://www.antispews.org for more information before using SPEWS.

Actually, antispews.org is likely being operated by spammers, as the Osirusoft FAQ suggests. (If nothing else, they are spammers of USENET newsgroups, since they kiboze for references to "SPEWS" and troll in response, much as Serdar Argic once did with "Turkey".) Naturally, spammers are pissed off at SPEWS, because it is simply put the most effective tool presently in the field for denying spammers access to (1) victims, and (2) willing ISPs to host them. Innumerable spammers have been terminated as a result of SPEWS listings.

There is no conceivable informed controversy as to whether or not SPEWS is effective at getting spammers off the Net. Whether or not SPEWS is a good tool for your site to use as a tool for reducing your spam count is quite another question. In my personal experience (as a security and email administrator for my site, which is a research institution) SPEWS is extremely valuable. I read my mail logs and ascertain that SPEWS usage blocks spam, with a remarkably low incidence of false positives.

In the past week, our incoming mail server has blocked 969 messages on account of SPEWS, with zero reports of false positives from our users. (To be honest, we get about one such report a month, and we whitelist the offending IP address. It's usually in China; we have several Chinese researchers.) Our locally maintained blacklist blocks about twice as much spam, and our use of sbl.spamhaus.org blocks about five times as much -- but that is biased by the fact that we consult those lists before SPEWS, and there is a good deal of overlap between them.

I would not recommend that ISPs who offer email service to their users use SPEWS by default, though it would be a valuable optional service. The DNSBLs I would recommend everyone use are:

• sbl.spamhaus.org, which lists only netblocks occupied by known repeat spam offenders
• relays.ordb.org, which lists only open mail relays; and
• proxies.relays.monkeys.com, which lists only open proxies.

These are all low-to-no-false-positives lists which I feel comfortable recommending to every ISP regardless of its stance on SPEWS.

For historical reference, read about Hitler and WW2.

Does this mean the argument is over now? ;-)

In a Slashdot posting published today, RMS distances himself from the Open Source movement because (he says) we avoid talking about "freedom, about principle, about the rights that computer users are entitled to".

He's right.

The best way I have seen to enforce is through a little social engineering known as baggy pantsing

People usually fall for this trick exactly one-time.

Has anyone seen my pants?

``The nice thing about strong encryption is that it should be pretty much indistinguishable from random noise, so the this signal would be indistinguishable from background noise.''
Meaning that, according to the infinite monkey theorem, some computers are going to randomly authenticate users and decrypt data. ;-)

"Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy."

Barring the radiation from space and other warranty-voiders, PC hardware has (except for the occasional bad capacitors) been very sturdy. My PCjr still runs, my Leading Edge XT still runs. What is so unreal that I cannot even fathom it, is that the software has run on this thing for as long as it has, without getting corrupted, always booting fine when they need to reboot, etc. Only now in this late hour are major companies starting to remember the K.I.S.S. Principle that led their forefathers, and in doing so, counting on linux. The fewer variables, the more dependable the result.

Hey, in this case it's more like twisting orcs into, ...ehm orcs.
I mean, it's not like MS Bob wasn't evil and rude in the first place.

RMS dislikes the use of "win" to refer to the MS Windows platform because he regards using MS Windows as a loss, not a win. So in the GNU Emacs source code, all variables and functions in the MS Windows port that had been named win32-* were changed to w32-*.

Additionally, In the Emacs manual, "MS-DOG" is used to reference MS-DOS.