Several of the reviews here say they loved the stories as a child, but have a harder time enjoying them now that they understand the Christian allegories.
To them I would say that perhaps the Narnia stories are the clearest picture of Christianity they have yet seen. I started with the Narnia books, and proceeded to digest and understand a HUGE amount of Christian literature, both highbrow and lowbrow. I now go back to the Narnian books (and the Screwtape letters, The Great Divorce, and some books by John Eldridge) and find them to be probably the most accurate pictures of Christianity written since the Gospels.
That you find other pictures of Christianity repellent could be a combinations of three factors.
1) The "other stories" you are being told are being told badly, or are just plain wrong. God does not approve all articles before publication. 2) The "other stories" you are being told reveal things in yourself that you are not prepared to deal with yet. 3) You understand the greater story, and simply wish to align yourself with evil instead of good.
That's been my life's story anyway. It always seems to come down to one of those three things.
What a great way to see that they get banned from corporate desktops across the planet.
This will change Opera browser installs on enterprise systems to go from "officially not allowed but generally ignored" to "hunted down and killed at every opportunity".
I fought it for a year or so, coding up custom filters, using spam assassin, you name it, and finally just gave up and blackholed it.
Spammers are trying dictionary attacks against domains to try and guess live accounts. I would get 500+ copies of the same message to made up names in alphebetical order a day.
That being said, I have since gotten on the Gmail beta, and just forward all my mail there now. It has a far better spam rejection rate then anything else I have tried, so if you forward all your mail to a google account and let them try and sort out the spam, it would probably be usable (and maybe even helpful to them to train their filters).
This is a fantastic little unit, way ahead of it's time. Great display, takes 4 AAA if you want (goes for weeks on $8 NiMh), accepts compact flash cards and mmc cards, has a serial port with the old fashioned palm connector, runs plam OS...
The battery form factor is fantastic. Use cheap NiMh's, and if they die while on the road, get a set of alkalines, use them for a month, and just throw them away and go back to the rechargables.
It also has some a very nice "backup to compact flash" feature built into the ROMS, so you can back it up to compact flash, let the batteries die, and bring it back to exactly where you left it in less then 15 seconds after you slap in a new set.
It also has built in support for several 802.11 compact flash wireless cards, though that asks a lot of the batteries.
You can also power the thing through the palm universal connector (12v), which makes it a lot more flexible as something like a GPS tool (how I use it on my motorcycle).
Definately the most under appreciated palm ever built.
Re:Mendelson's Electronic Surplus, Dayton OH
on
Great Surplus Stores?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Rumor has it there is an entire Huey somewhere on the second floor, completely dis-assembled and in carefully marked and tagged ziplock bags.
The place is amazing... the electrical / electronics floor is probably about 2 acres (seriously). Electrolytic capacitors the size of a trash can... all sorts of very cool stuff (and lots of total junk also).
This sounds like an honest question, so I will answer it honestly.
Accountability rocks. The trick is to find commited like minded friends that genuinely care about you, and you invest in each others lives.
I can tell them "I want to spend more time with my children, I know that I am missing out on a huge part of life and will regret it when they grow up, but I am really struggling with making the time to spend time with them, and need your help doing it"
These people, if they really are good accountability partners, will ask you every week how you are doing. They will probe and try to understand the real reasons you might be struggling with it, help you track your progress, give you outside perspectives, give you suggestions based on their own experience that would help, lots of real help to making real progress on important issues. They will refer you to professional help if it looks like that is necessary, or just help remind you of what you know is important when you don't feel like you have the energy to do it.
So thats the accountability component of it. Ask any recovering alchoholic. God / AA based programs have like an 8 times higher success rates then non God non accountable programs. These things really work.
The reason people might consider porn bad is a different question I will address seperately...
First of all, it is not a big stretch to assume it requires the exploitation of women. It is generally legal and it is a free country where people can do stupid things to themselves whenever they want, so it *would* be a stretch to say it should be illegal. But there are a lot of legal things that are distasteful, that people may decide they don't want to support it or be a part of. That does not mean they aren't tempted by it or don't want it, it means they believe it does more damage then good (to themselves and others) in the long run.
Porn is something that gives you momentary and intense stimulation of a pleasure center... it hits like a drug, just monitor the body responses of somebody that is not sensitized to it when they see it. Heart rate goes through the roof, skin flushes, things swell;) brain activity goes nuts. Also note that the more porn you see, the "harder" porn you need to get that same response... Sound familiar? So for a non-trivial number of people, Porn is a effectively a drug that they abuse. Just like alcohol, or pot, or other moderatly powerful drugs (drugs that are psychologically addictive and not necessarily chemically addictive).
(footnote... that gives me a laugh, I remember from high school health class circa 1983 that they described cocaine as "non addictive" because it lacked some of the chemical ramifications of heroin and morphene... What total and utter bullsh*t... just look at the effect crack (concentrated and cheap cocaine) has had on the inner cities, and you tell me it is not addictive)....
Anyway, another reason porn is destructive is obvious if you think about it. Imagine you are having sex with your favorite supermodel. It would be great, right? OK, now imagine you are having sex with someone who is totally unattractive to you, both in looks, in personality, they smell bad, they say rude things, they insult you and abuse you and disrespect you in every way. The physical sensations are not a lot different between the two scenarios, but there is a HUGE difference in the way your brain translates those sensations to actual perceptions of pleasure.
So there is a HUGE psychological component to the degree to which you enjoy sex. And pornography (as well as premarital, or non monogamous sex) wreaks havoc with that whole mechanisim, it really pollutes it and messes up the whole system. When I was in college, I could not find a person that would agree with me. Now, at the age of 37, I can't find a person that would disagree with me. Ignore me at your peril.
And as for this particular product, it has it's place. I could bypass it in about a minute, but even among the technical friends I have, not many could unless I told them a couple tricks.
And internet porn is a bigger problem then other porn. It is in my house, waiting for me at 2 in the morning when I had a fight with my wife, or a terrible day at work, or one too many beers. The AA guys have a great acronym... HALT (hungry angry lonely tired). If you are any two of these things, your risk of abuse of a self destructive behaviour goes through the roof! I don't have to get dressed, go out in the car, and go somewhere and buy it and bring it back... it is totally anonymous, and there is effectively NO obstacle between me and internet porn. Maybe 20 keystrokes, thats it.
I doubt anyone will read this, but there is an honest answer to the question.
If black, Jews, or Asians were treated with the same bigotry and contempt that Christians are treated here on Slashdot....... But I told myself I was not going to go there... where is that (bite my toungue emoticon:) ).
Take a deep breath and read the story before going off here (unlike the editors who post these stories)...
The guy *worked* for a legal company that had access to sensitive company documents. He *stole* the documents, then released them to the underground web sites.
This was not some clever hacker sitting in a basement and figuring a bunch of stuff out with a soldering iron in one hand and scope probes in the other.
How would you feel if some clerk at your university office did the same thing with your class transcripts? Some waiter posted your charge card number? Some guy at the help desk of your ISP sold your email account and password to a company that writes spammer distribution programs?
There are legitimate issues with the DCMA and similar legislation and common law that *really need* to be hammered out. Waving guys like this around as "little guy getting stuck by the man" is the *worst* thing we can do for sensible legislation.
I have been administering systems for over a decade now. I do many of the technical interviews for the company I work for... or at least I did when we were hiring:( . Dismiss me if you want, I don't particularly care, but be aware it may be me or somebody much like me, on the other end of the phone the next time you try and get a job.
For everyone whining about the fact that he says a good sysadmin should have strong opinions based on experience... If you think that every problem is going to be so clear cut and so clean that you can just bang out an optimal solution and provide a clean and mathmatical defense for it, all you have done are home or academic excercises.
The problem domain for solutions is so incredibly broad, and so incredibly rich, that if you are not depending on collection of good solid abstract rules of thumb and effective practices, you will never get to a good solution. You have to use intuition to narrow down the problem domain to a few concrete approaches, and then apply logic and experience to decide which of them to implement and how.
These are not opinions like "NT Sucks, Linux rules", these are opinions like "I don't want to hinge my business case on an operating system controlled by a single vendor". I don't want an enterprise IT infrastructure that depends on technology that only runs on non-scalable hardware". "I don't want an operating system that I cannot remotely administer". "I want an operating system that allows me to update and maintian, stop, and start some subsystems without effecting other subsystems". "I want an operating system where I can apply security patches without being forced to install operating system updates". You get the idea.
Having an open mind is important, but at some point you have to get off your ass and decide something, and act upon that decision. The older I get, the more important I have realized this becomes.
A group of people with "strong opinions based on experience" can get together and hammer out a list of pro's and cons, and come up with an excellent solution to a problem, fully aware of what the solution does well and where it will be weak. It will be a stressfull meeting, and tempers may occasionally flare, but when you finally grind through it you will end up on solid ground, and everyone will likely be on board.
A bunch of people with "open minds and no strong opinions" are going to dither about endlessly and end up with an unfocused, innefective, designed by committe monstrosity.
Acedemia is all about exploration and investigation. Work is about getting things done. Note though that even the academia people typically won't get much "exploration" done if their home made router is down because it is an old Linux box built around a $20 commodity power supply that just went up in smoke, and the only guy that knew how to set up the IPTables to get the routing right left to go to grad school 3 months ago.
I am with this guy... a lack of a strong opinion and the ability to defend it, suggests to me a lack of experience. How on earth can you do something day in and day out, sweat over it, bleed over it, live and die by it, day by day and year by year, and not form an opinion?
You said galeon, so you must be on Linux. Just rename/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so and/usr/lib/netscape/plugins/libflashplayer.so (this is a red hat 8 system, your files may be elsewhere but will probably have the same name). Keep them around, in case you need them later, but give them some nonsense extension (like.backup).
I just threw together a quick perl script called "toggleflash" that turns flash on or off. It is left off nearly all the time, and makes the whole web experience far nicer. I only leave it in case some idiot web site depends on it for navigation and I HAVE to use their services.
Thats not true (though in fairness you had no way of knowing that from my post, so your criticism is valid).
The particular idea was only workable if distributed with a particular type of hardware. If it had to be seperately obtained and installed, it ceased to be very useful. I can't go into much more detail then that (the IDEA was not mine, and not mine to give away regardless how unmarketable it turned out to be).
As I stated in the post, I had an idea of MY OWN, that I did publish open source. It is used by a small number of people, but they do find it useful. (see backburner on freshmeat). I did it because the idea was mine to give away (I came up with it), I had the time and interest available to do the work, and I wanted to give back to the community.
Software does indeed have to be better then the rest, I agree. But copyright and patent law do have a place to enforce contracts and to foster innovation. When Linux was released, it built upon a well established architecture and used a widely available set of tools and resources, so a gifted hacker from Finland could throw it together in a year while in grad school. We are lucky he did.
But it was not innovative, and was not a lot of research and development, it was mostly implementation.
If a company wanted to develop the next huge paradigm shift for computers and computer use, and it required new hardware, new software, and completely new ways of thinking, and required thousands of staff and tens of years and millions of dollars in investment, they would NOT DO IT unless they had some legal protections to recoup their investment down the road.
That's not to say some "open" group could not go together and do the same thing, but it is a lot less likely, especially on the hardware end of things where the capitolization costs really start to eat you up.
And that does not even begin to consider how much of the open source movement is actually funded by "the evil corporate empire". Had I not been working for "the man", or by government funded by taxes taken from "the man", I would have been far more worried about where I am going to get my next meal then worried about writing a tool that facilitates backing up software across widely varied mediums.
In hindsight, I would say Microsoft DID aggressively improve windows constantly, and that was the only reason they stay one step ahead of everyone else. It's just that their idea of "improvement" is to add features, not to improve stablity, portability and interaoperability. Not the direction I would have gone as an engineer, but sure as heck the direction the stockholders (the people funding the work) wanted. It sold.
And with that same hand on your heart, where would software be in general, or for that matter the hardware we run our beloved Linux operating system on, be today without patent and copyright law? Would Linux exist at all if AT&T could not have made a business case for funding an "idea incubator"?
The whole hardware versus software thing as being fundamentally different is a flawed argument as well. Is software worth "nothing" because it can be easily reproduced? Why is that different then an integrated circuit, which can be duplicated for pennies if I don't have to design it. I asked Stallman this question personally, and he refused to even address it, and proceeded a few minutes later to sexually harass (by any definition I have ever seen) a member of the local Linux Users Group.
In Stallmans case, M&M's should be free, unless you are an attractive blonde, in which case he may publically pressure you to eat them from his hand, shortly after expressing how marriage is an exploitive and oppresive patricharical institution. Sheesh... talk about exploititive.
Patent law, like any law, attempts to resolve grey areas and create social contracts that reach the best balance of competing needs.
Obviously, trying to patent something like the wheel is silly, and a patent granted for something so obvious is wrong.
On the other hand, consider something like Olestra (a non fat butter substitute that never really went anywhere). Proctor and Gamble spent tens of millions of dollars trying to make this work, and had a decent product, but by the time they had finished development and gotten past all the government regulatory testing and hurdles, the patent life was down to 5 years or so left. Thats a lot of investment to re-coup in such a short time. After that, it all became public domain, though last I heard P&G was trying to get an extension. Lots of companies took note of this, and I promise it has resulted in lots of products we would all like to have being abandoned for fear of repeating this scenario.
If someone was trying to patent or copyright a "network communications system" to prevent other people from using networks without paying royalties, that would of course be wrong. On the other side, if a certian Redmond software company took the latest RedHat distribution, ran a sed command s/RedHat/Microsoft/g against, slapped a new label on it that read "windows XP extreme", and started selling it at CompUSA, then Red Hat should have legal recourse to have them stopped.
The first time I bought a house, when I was going into the process, I thought the mountian of legal documents were an idiot pain in the rear. By the time I was done, I thanked God for every one of them. Arguing that "legal documents are too complicated and too confusing" is like saying "why can't C++ be more readable". It has constraints and requirements for precision that do not easily translate to high readability. It should always be a goal, but you can't sacrifice precision and completeness for "friendlyness". You hire a coder to understand your C++, you hire a lawyer to understand your contracts.
Last year, an associate came to me with an interesting idea for a very simple but very usefull piece of software. He had the business sense and the capitol, I could code. I threw together a fully functional prototype in a weekend, worked perfectly. It would have been sold to larger hardware companies for free inclusion with products, would have gone for pennies a license, and would have been very usefull (though certianly not revolutionary by any means).
It would have cost us about $15,000 to develop, market, and release it (much of which was simply the paperwork for setting up the corporation and doing the marketing). We were on track to pull the trigger until our legal counsel managed to scare up a public domain program that was remotely similiar (though never used and out in a completely different context).
The day we found out, we immediatly dropped all efforts, had a nice dinner, and went on our seperate ways. We had no way to recoup the investment of time and money we would have had to put into it to get it finished and out to the public. Anyone that argues that patents and copyrights do NOT foster innovation is simply wrong (and more then likely on a government payroll). I have had a firsthand experience where lack of patentabilty stopped an otherwise useful project dead in its tracks.
And before you go flaming, I have written and released open source software. That was my idea, it was interesting to me, and I wanted of my own free will to give back to the community. That model works fine also, but it is not the only viable one.
Stupid patents are granted, but they don't often stand, and they are not easy to get. Don't make a fool of yourself by being a knee jerk reactionary and making blanket statements like "proprietary software is evil" or "there is no such thing as intellectual property". The laws exist to help manage these grey areas, and they will always be compromises between different needs.
First, grow beyond just talking about things, and start doing things. Second, grow beyond just doing things, and grow to doing things that get results. Tilting at windmills might make you feel morally superior, but you will never accomplish much and you will be a real bore at parties.
If this stuff really bothers you, Either develop, improve, and release open source software, or work to improve the more idiotic aspects of the laws that exist or are being proposed. Do something that actually results in an improvement in the situation, don't just bury your head in the sand and keep believing there is no good reason for copyright and patent law. No one will take you seriously.
Google indexes the internet, Lexis-Nexis indexes... err... just about everything else.
There are "production" groups in Lexis-Nexis taking old law books by the boxload and putting them on scanners, manually correcting the resulting OCR'd files, and manually indexing them according to about a gazillion different catagories. I was walking through one of the copy rooms and saw some of the old material being copied... it was (as I recall) Fullers original patent for the steam engine.
They also index local and national publications of all sorts, and have the results available faster then I had imagined possible.
Oh... and guess who has more content archived and indexed and available for search and delivery... Google (the entire internet) or Lexis-Nexis (with their own private databases)... To put it another way, which do you think has more data... the world wide web, or the Lexis-Nexis databases?:) I think you will be suprised at the answer (unless you use Lexis-Nexis).
So when somebody portscans my system, I can't prosecute them because they "did nothing illegal". Even if they root my box, I can't prosecute because they "were just exposing how flawed my security system is"...
When somebody distributes a copy of an MP3 ripped from a licensed piece of music, it's OK because you would not have bought the album anyway;) and information wants to be free.
But somebody changes your homepage, and suddenly it's a job for the federal government.
BTW, the DCMA, as stupid and flawed as it is, probably gives you some legitimate avenues to address this sort of offensive behavior.
I know the DCMA is the only reason you won't be seeing those dreaded "smart links" in the next version of Internet Explorer.
Keyword searching is a Dead-End Technology... Some other dead ends:
Monolithic kernels.
Internal combustion engines.
etc...
You get the idea... often a sub-optimal but very well understood approach will be significantly more usefull then a theoretically superior but unworkable approach. With the rate of change of the internet, I don't know how else you could possibly keep up to date.
I am amazed at how good a job Google does every time I search. It's performance and accuracy are nothing short of astounding if you understand the nature and size of the solution space they cover.
A related question would be to consider lynx, and just code your app up as all cgi based with a central apache server.
Lynx gives you the "gui", and you can support both text and graphical terminals, you have the ultimate in portability, and you client server architecture is completely a done deal for you.
I was waiting for somebody to bring this up... Most importantly, with AutoCf (free from HandEra) you can set things up so that applications appear to run directly from compact flash (they actually swap, but do so with the granularity of a record (512 bytes I think)) so long as the application writer followed the basic rules suggested for Palm OS developers.
Such a critter for Sony is starting to show up in beta (and handspring has flirted with the idea), but HandEra (formerly TRG) is the only one that has really delivered. Plus I would much rather have compact flash expansion then some sort of mickey mouse memory stick that offers far less for much more.
The HandEra 330 also manages to pack either 4 AAA (think NiMh rechargables or Duracell Ultras) or a lithium ion battery pack internal to the normal Palm III form factor, as well as an integrated voice recorder application (that can go to either compact flash or MMC). It has a souped up dragonball CPU as well, for one of the fastest palms around.
What is really interesting to me is that a small group of hackers from Des Moines can consistently kick the butt of huge conglemerates such as the likes of Palm and Sony in terms of real world device functionality. I thought that era of computing technology had ended... it's nice to see it can still be done.
And whilst I'm burning Karma anyway... anyone notice the headline contradicts the story?
Headline: Court: Abortion Threats OK
From 2nd paragraph: "If defendants threatened to commit violent acts, by working alone or with others, then their [works] could properly support the verdict," Cricuit Judge Alex Kozinski wrote (typo theirs, judge describing why the verdict against the site was not supported)
Well, which is it? Does the AP writer have an agenda here? That's a pretty big mistake to make on a headline... they are starting to look like slashdot:)
This was fought tooth and nail by that bastion of non-partisian free speach advocates the ACLU right? I must have missed the link to the ACLU press release talking about what a victory this is for the first ammendment.
Oh wait... this regarded free speach by a bunch of right wing religious nuts... never mind. Heck, they are probably lucky the ACLU did not file a friend of the court brief arguing that since this was posted on a partially federally subsidised internet, it violated the separation of church and state and must be removed!
Bill (who thinks the aforementioned site was evil, but did want to take the opportunity to point out the hypocrisy in the ACLU)
Perhaps part of the RIAA motive is to cause individuals trying to share copyrighted music to violate more laws (and thus raise the stakes for prosecution).
Now, instead of just being charged with unlawfull distribution of copyrighted works, you can be charged with something more serious, as you must claim to be the copyright holder to "opt in" with whoever controls the list (even if it is napster). This probably opens up significant new areas for prosecution, perhaps moving the offense from misdemeanor to felony.
Of course, none of this matters to the slashdot crowd, who always argues in favor of napster in terms of exclusively non infringing usage.
Yeah, copy control sucks, but it's a fact of life that companies developing media these days are gonna do it
TRG (now HandEra) has been offering a Palm device (TRG Pro) for over a year now that has a compact flash slot, 8MB of ram, and 2mb of flash ram. It is the same form factor as the Palm III, which while not as slim as the PalmV series is still very portable. TRG also typically has OS updates available and ready to be flashed even before palm.
TRG has also been leading the pack in terms of software that does the necessary swapping behind the scenes to make the compact flash expansion appear to be transparently available to palm applications.
The judicial system protects those of us interested in liberty from those of us who aren't who seem to often make their way into the legislative and executive branches. A woman's Right to Choose would not exist if the Supreme Court weren't there to protect it. Why? There are lots of stupid, vocal Southern social conservatives in Congress. These people, who are as far from Libertarian as you can imagine, want things like creationism taught in schools and they want to return women to the kitchen and the bedroom.
You do people on both sides of an important issue a great disservice when you attempt to misrepresent an important issue like abortion.
You will find the great majority of people interested in ending abortion motivated by the constitution, to which the right to not be killed is fundamental.
You will find the great majority of people interested in maintaining the rights to abortion motivated by the desire for a woman to be able to live her life as she desires.
The real question here has to be to determine at which point a life actually begins, and at which point an individual is protected by the constitution. It is an important question, and one that can be tricky to answer when the stakes are so high.
But taking the views of an extremely small and vocal minority, and trying to paint about 50% of the population with that brush, only serves to divide and inflame people while demonstrating your ignorance.
Sorry if this sounds a little harsh... but I think this is too important an issue to be trivialized and misrepresented, no matter which side you are on.
Bill
(eliminating my +1 bonus because this is way off topic)...
Compare the environmental conditions in east and west Germany at the fall of the Berlin wall for a nice little data point on the environmental impact of communisim versus capitolism.
When are people going to dump toxic waste in the back yard of the house I own? When they dig my overheated M1-Garand out from under a small mountain of spent and smoking.30-06 shells.
When is a government owned truck going to dump toxic waste on government owned plot? Hell if I know, or could even find out, or would be willing to risk my life to stop it.
Many Republicians feel that a large and powerfull government will be the absolute WORST environmental steward, and they have quite a bit of history to back them up.
Is that fair to the artists who conceived the album, wrote the songs, performed the songs, etc??? I think not
Ummm... in order for this to happen, Chicago would have to have signed a contract with said company and accepted goods and services in exchange for an agreement to assign ownership and control to works produced to the label.
This is just contract law. Not to mention, that the album may very well have never been produced at all had the label not paid for studio and production costs, and funded the musicians so they could write music instead of flipping burgers.
One could make a pretty good arguement that the record labels and software houses are unfairly engaging in monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior, but to argue against the existence of copyright is basically arguing against the existence of contract law... which might be fine for some college kid with no assets... but it would make the real world grind to a screaching halt.
Go try and buy a house. You and the sellers sign a contract that defines who does what when, what legal conditions must be met by each, and what information is required to be disclosed by whom. Without it, a transaction of this scale would be impossible. It's complicated an annoying, but both parties come out of it protected, informed, and with the goods or compensation they agreed to.
Software and music licenses are just another form of contract law. If you want to complain about potential anti trust (illegal monopoly) arguments against the RIAA (music) or Microsoft, then you probably have a good case, but to argue against individuals agreeing to legally binding contracts is just silly.
Slashdot Mirror
Several of the reviews here say they loved the stories as a child, but have a harder time enjoying them now that they understand the Christian allegories.
To them I would say that perhaps the Narnia stories are the clearest picture of Christianity they have yet seen. I started with the Narnia books, and proceeded to digest and understand a HUGE amount of Christian literature, both highbrow and lowbrow. I now go back to the Narnian books (and the Screwtape letters, The Great Divorce, and some books by John Eldridge) and find them to be probably the most accurate pictures of Christianity written since the Gospels.
That you find other pictures of Christianity repellent could be a combinations of three factors.
1) The "other stories" you are being told are being told badly, or are just plain wrong. God does not approve all articles before publication.
2) The "other stories" you are being told reveal things in yourself that you are not prepared to deal with yet.
3) You understand the greater story, and simply wish to align yourself with evil instead of good.
That's been my life's story anyway. It always seems to come down to one of those three things.
LOL!
Minotaur: "Numbers don't win battles"
Peter: "No, but I'm sure they help"
Bob: "Hi! I'm Bob. I'm a tomatoe, and I am here to help!"
It would not have been any more absurd then Jar Jar...
What a great way to see that they get banned from corporate desktops across the planet.
This will change Opera browser installs on enterprise systems to go from "officially not allowed but generally ignored" to "hunted down and killed at every opportunity".
I fought it for a year or so, coding up custom filters, using spam assassin, you name it, and finally just gave up and blackholed it.
Spammers are trying dictionary attacks against domains to try and guess live accounts. I would get 500+ copies of the same message to made up names in alphebetical order a day.
That being said, I have since gotten on the Gmail beta, and just forward all my mail there now. It has a far better spam rejection rate then anything else I have tried, so if you forward all your mail to a google account and let them try and sort out the spam, it would probably be usable (and maybe even helpful to them to train their filters).
But I already knew IBM was versus Microsoft...
(note for humor impaired... check my slashdot nick, which existed LONG before any popular movies, and has absolutely nothing to do with Mr. Gates)...
This is a fantastic little unit, way ahead of it's time. Great display, takes 4 AAA if you want (goes for weeks on $8 NiMh), accepts compact flash cards and mmc cards, has a serial port with the old fashioned palm connector, runs plam OS...
The battery form factor is fantastic. Use cheap NiMh's, and if they die while on the road, get a set of alkalines, use them for a month, and just throw them away and go back to the rechargables.
It also has some a very nice "backup to compact flash" feature built into the ROMS, so you can back it up to compact flash, let the batteries die, and bring it back to exactly where you left it in less then 15 seconds after you slap in a new set.
It also has built in support for several 802.11 compact flash wireless cards, though that asks a lot of the batteries.
You can also power the thing through the palm universal connector (12v), which makes it a lot more flexible as something like a GPS tool (how I use it on my motorcycle).
Definately the most under appreciated palm ever built.
Rumor has it there is an entire Huey somewhere on the second floor, completely dis-assembled and in carefully marked and tagged ziplock bags.
The place is amazing... the electrical / electronics floor is probably about 2 acres (seriously). Electrolytic capacitors the size of a trash can... all sorts of very cool stuff (and lots of total junk also).
This sounds like an honest question, so I will answer it honestly.
;) brain activity goes nuts. Also note that the more porn you see, the "harder" porn you need to get that same response... Sound familiar? So for a non-trivial number of people, Porn is a effectively a drug that they abuse. Just like alcohol, or pot, or other moderatly powerful drugs (drugs that are psychologically addictive and not necessarily chemically addictive).
:) ).
Accountability rocks. The trick is to find commited like minded friends that genuinely care about you, and you invest in each others lives.
I can tell them "I want to spend more time with my children, I know that I am missing out on a huge part of life and will regret it when they grow up, but I am really struggling with making the time to spend time with them, and need your help doing it"
These people, if they really are good accountability partners, will ask you every week how you are doing. They will probe and try to understand the real reasons you might be struggling with it, help you track your progress, give you outside perspectives, give you suggestions based on their own experience that would help, lots of real help to making real progress on important issues. They will refer you to professional help if it looks like that is necessary, or just help remind you of what you know is important when you don't feel like you have the energy to do it.
So thats the accountability component of it. Ask any recovering alchoholic. God / AA based programs have like an 8 times higher success rates then non God non accountable programs. These things really work.
The reason people might consider porn bad is a different question I will address seperately...
First of all, it is not a big stretch to assume it requires the exploitation of women. It is generally legal and it is a free country where people can do stupid things to themselves whenever they want, so it *would* be a stretch to say it should be illegal. But there are a lot of legal things that are distasteful, that people may decide they don't want to support it or be a part of. That does not mean they aren't tempted by it or don't want it, it means they believe it does more damage then good (to themselves and others) in the long run.
Porn is something that gives you momentary and intense stimulation of a pleasure center... it hits like a drug, just monitor the body responses of somebody that is not sensitized to it when they see it. Heart rate goes through the roof, skin flushes, things swell
(footnote... that gives me a laugh, I remember from high school health class circa 1983 that they described cocaine as "non addictive" because it lacked some of the chemical ramifications of heroin and morphene... What total and utter bullsh*t... just look at the effect crack (concentrated and cheap cocaine) has had on the inner cities, and you tell me it is not addictive)....
Anyway, another reason porn is destructive is obvious if you think about it. Imagine you are having sex with your favorite supermodel. It would be great, right? OK, now imagine you are having sex with someone who is totally unattractive to you, both in looks, in personality, they smell bad, they say rude things, they insult you and abuse you and disrespect you in every way. The physical sensations are not a lot different between the two scenarios, but there is a HUGE difference in the way your brain translates those sensations to actual perceptions of pleasure.
So there is a HUGE psychological component to the degree to which you enjoy sex. And pornography (as well as premarital, or non monogamous sex) wreaks havoc with that whole mechanisim, it really pollutes it and messes up the whole system. When I was in college, I could not find a person that would agree with me. Now, at the age of 37, I can't find a person that would disagree with me. Ignore me at your peril.
And as for this particular product, it has it's place. I could bypass it in about a minute, but even among the technical friends I have, not many could unless I told them a couple tricks.
And internet porn is a bigger problem then other porn. It is in my house, waiting for me at 2 in the morning when I had a fight with my wife, or a terrible day at work, or one too many beers. The AA guys have a great acronym... HALT (hungry angry lonely tired). If you are any two of these things, your risk of abuse of a self destructive behaviour goes through the roof! I don't have to get dressed, go out in the car, and go somewhere and buy it and bring it back... it is totally anonymous, and there is effectively NO obstacle between me and internet porn. Maybe 20 keystrokes, thats it.
I doubt anyone will read this, but there is an honest answer to the question.
If black, Jews, or Asians were treated with the same bigotry and contempt that Christians are treated here on Slashdot....... But I told myself I was not going to go there... where is that (bite my toungue emoticon
Take a deep breath and read the story before going off here (unlike the editors who post these stories)...
The guy *worked* for a legal company that had access to sensitive company documents. He *stole* the documents, then released them to the underground web sites.
This was not some clever hacker sitting in a basement and figuring a bunch of stuff out with a soldering iron in one hand and scope probes in the other.
How would you feel if some clerk at your university office did the same thing with your class transcripts? Some waiter posted your charge card number? Some guy at the help desk of your ISP sold your email account and password to a company that writes spammer distribution programs?
There are legitimate issues with the DCMA and similar legislation and common law that *really need* to be hammered out. Waving guys like this around as "little guy getting stuck by the man" is the *worst* thing we can do for sensible legislation.
I have been administering systems for over a decade now. I do many of the technical interviews for the company I work for... or at least I did when we were hiring :( . Dismiss me if you want, I don't particularly care, but be aware it may be me or somebody much like me, on the other end of the phone the next time you try and get a job.
For everyone whining about the fact that he says a good sysadmin should have strong opinions based on experience... If you think that every problem is going to be so clear cut and so clean that you can just bang out an optimal solution and provide a clean and mathmatical defense for it, all you have done are home or academic excercises.
The problem domain for solutions is so incredibly broad, and so incredibly rich, that if you are not depending on collection of good solid abstract rules of thumb and effective practices, you will never get to a good solution. You have to use intuition to narrow down the problem domain to a few concrete approaches, and then apply logic and experience to decide which of them to implement and how.
These are not opinions like "NT Sucks, Linux rules", these are opinions like "I don't want to hinge my business case on an operating system controlled by a single vendor". I don't want an enterprise IT infrastructure that depends on technology that only runs on non-scalable hardware". "I don't want an operating system that I cannot remotely administer". "I want an operating system that allows me to update and maintian, stop, and start some subsystems without effecting other subsystems". "I want an operating system where I can apply security patches without being forced to install operating system updates". You get the idea.
Having an open mind is important, but at some point you have to get off your ass and decide something, and act upon that decision. The older I get, the more important I have realized this becomes.
A group of people with "strong opinions based on experience" can get together and hammer out a list of pro's and cons, and come up with an excellent solution to a problem, fully aware of what the solution does well and where it will be weak. It will be a stressfull meeting, and tempers may occasionally flare, but when you finally grind through it you will end up on solid ground, and everyone will likely be on board.
A bunch of people with "open minds and no strong opinions" are going to dither about endlessly and end up with an unfocused, innefective, designed by committe monstrosity.
Acedemia is all about exploration and investigation. Work is about getting things done. Note though that even the academia people typically won't get much "exploration" done if their home made router is down because it is an old Linux box built around a $20 commodity power supply that just went up in smoke, and the only guy that knew how to set up the IPTables to get the routing right left to go to grad school 3 months ago.
I am with this guy... a lack of a strong opinion and the ability to defend it, suggests to me a lack of experience. How on earth can you do something day in and day out, sweat over it, bleed over it, live and die by it, day by day and year by year, and not form an opinion?
You said galeon, so you must be on Linux. Just rename /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so and /usr/lib/netscape/plugins/libflashplayer.so (this is a red hat 8 system, your files may be elsewhere but will probably have the same name). Keep them around, in case you need them later, but give them some nonsense extension (like .backup).
I just threw together a quick perl script called "toggleflash" that turns flash on or off. It is left off nearly all the time, and makes the whole web experience far nicer. I only leave it in case some idiot web site depends on it for navigation and I HAVE to use their services.
Thats not true (though in fairness you had no way of knowing that from my post, so your criticism is valid).
:) )
The particular idea was only workable if distributed with a particular type of hardware. If it had to be seperately obtained and installed, it ceased to be very useful. I can't go into much more detail then that (the IDEA was not mine, and not mine to give away regardless how unmarketable it turned out to be).
As I stated in the post, I had an idea of MY OWN, that I did publish open source. It is used by a small number of people, but they do find it useful. (see backburner on freshmeat). I did it because the idea was mine to give away (I came up with it), I had the time and interest available to do the work, and I wanted to give back to the community.
Software does indeed have to be better then the rest, I agree. But copyright and patent law do have a place to enforce contracts and to foster innovation. When Linux was released, it built upon a well established architecture and used a widely available set of tools and resources, so a gifted hacker from Finland could throw it together in a year while in grad school. We are lucky he did.
But it was not innovative, and was not a lot of research and development, it was mostly implementation.
If a company wanted to develop the next huge paradigm shift for computers and computer use, and it required new hardware, new software, and completely new ways of thinking, and required thousands of staff and tens of years and millions of dollars in investment, they would NOT DO IT unless they had some legal protections to recoup their investment down the road.
That's not to say some "open" group could not go together and do the same thing, but it is a lot less likely, especially on the hardware end of things where the capitolization costs really start to eat you up.
And that does not even begin to consider how much of the open source movement is actually funded by "the evil corporate empire". Had I not been working for "the man", or by government funded by taxes taken from "the man", I would have been far more worried about where I am going to get my next meal then worried about writing a tool that facilitates backing up software across widely varied mediums.
In hindsight, I would say Microsoft DID aggressively improve windows constantly, and that was the only reason they stay one step ahead of everyone else. It's just that their idea of "improvement" is to add features, not to improve stablity, portability and interaoperability. Not the direction I would have gone as an engineer, but sure as heck the direction the stockholders (the people funding the work) wanted. It sold.
And with that same hand on your heart, where would software be in general, or for that matter the hardware we run our beloved Linux operating system on, be today without patent and copyright law? Would Linux exist at all if AT&T could not have made a business case for funding an "idea incubator"?
The whole hardware versus software thing as being fundamentally different is a flawed argument as well. Is software worth "nothing" because it can be easily reproduced? Why is that different then an integrated circuit, which can be duplicated for pennies if I don't have to design it. I asked Stallman this question personally, and he refused to even address it, and proceeded a few minutes later to sexually harass (by any definition I have ever seen) a member of the local Linux Users Group.
In Stallmans case, M&M's should be free, unless you are an attractive blonde, in which case he may publically pressure you to eat them from his hand, shortly after expressing how marriage is an exploitive and oppresive patricharical institution. Sheesh... talk about exploititive.
(but I digress
Patent law, like any law, attempts to resolve grey areas and create social contracts that reach the best balance of competing needs.
Obviously, trying to patent something like the wheel is silly, and a patent granted for something so obvious is wrong.
On the other hand, consider something like Olestra (a non fat butter substitute that never really went anywhere). Proctor and Gamble spent tens of millions of dollars trying to make this work, and had a decent product, but by the time they had finished development and gotten past all the government regulatory testing and hurdles, the patent life was down to 5 years or so left. Thats a lot of investment to re-coup in such a short time. After that, it all became public domain, though last I heard P&G was trying to get an extension. Lots of companies took note of this, and I promise it has resulted in lots of products we would all like to have being abandoned for fear of repeating this scenario.
If someone was trying to patent or copyright a "network communications system" to prevent other people from using networks without paying royalties, that would of course be wrong. On the other side, if a certian Redmond software company took the latest RedHat distribution, ran a sed command s/RedHat/Microsoft/g against, slapped a new label on it that read "windows XP extreme", and started selling it at CompUSA, then Red Hat should have legal recourse to have them stopped.
The first time I bought a house, when I was going into the process, I thought the mountian of legal documents were an idiot pain in the rear. By the time I was done, I thanked God for every one of them. Arguing that "legal documents are too complicated and too confusing" is like saying "why can't C++ be more readable". It has constraints and requirements for precision that do not easily translate to high readability. It should always be a goal, but you can't sacrifice precision and completeness for "friendlyness". You hire a coder to understand your C++, you hire a lawyer to understand your contracts.
Last year, an associate came to me with an interesting idea for a very simple but very usefull piece of software. He had the business sense and the capitol, I could code. I threw together a fully functional prototype in a weekend, worked perfectly. It would have been sold to larger hardware companies for free inclusion with products, would have gone for pennies a license, and would have been very usefull (though certianly not revolutionary by any means).
It would have cost us about $15,000 to develop, market, and release it (much of which was simply the paperwork for setting up the corporation and doing the marketing). We were on track to pull the trigger until our legal counsel managed to scare up a public domain program that was remotely similiar (though never used and out in a completely different context).
The day we found out, we immediatly dropped all efforts, had a nice dinner, and went on our seperate ways. We had no way to recoup the investment of time and money we would have had to put into it to get it finished and out to the public. Anyone that argues that patents and copyrights do NOT foster innovation is simply wrong (and more then likely on a government payroll). I have had a firsthand experience where lack of patentabilty stopped an otherwise useful project dead in its tracks.
And before you go flaming, I have written and released open source software. That was my idea, it was interesting to me, and I wanted of my own free will to give back to the community. That model works fine also, but it is not the only viable one.
Stupid patents are granted, but they don't often stand, and they are not easy to get. Don't make a fool of yourself by being a knee jerk reactionary and making blanket statements like "proprietary software is evil" or "there is no such thing as intellectual property". The laws exist to help manage these grey areas, and they will always be compromises between different needs.
First, grow beyond just talking about things, and start doing things. Second, grow beyond just doing things, and grow to doing things that get results. Tilting at windmills might make you feel morally superior, but you will never accomplish much and you will be a real bore at parties.
If this stuff really bothers you, Either develop, improve, and release open source software, or work to improve the more idiotic aspects of the laws that exist or are being proposed. Do something that actually results in an improvement in the situation, don't just bury your head in the sand and keep believing there is no good reason for copyright and patent law. No one will take you seriously.
Bill
Google indexes the internet, Lexis-Nexis indexes... err... just about everything else.
:) I think you will be suprised at the answer (unless you use Lexis-Nexis).
;)
There are "production" groups in Lexis-Nexis taking old law books by the boxload and putting them on scanners, manually correcting the resulting OCR'd files, and manually indexing them according to about a gazillion different catagories. I was walking through one of the copy rooms and saw some of the old material being copied... it was (as I recall) Fullers original patent for the steam engine.
They also index local and national publications of all sorts, and have the results available faster then I had imagined possible.
Oh... and guess who has more content archived and indexed and available for search and delivery... Google (the entire internet) or Lexis-Nexis (with their own private databases)... To put it another way, which do you think has more data... the world wide web, or the Lexis-Nexis databases?
And you should see their server room
Bill
So when somebody portscans my system, I can't prosecute them because they "did nothing illegal". Even if they root my box, I can't prosecute because they "were just exposing how flawed my security system is"...
;) and information wants to be free.
When somebody distributes a copy of an MP3 ripped from a licensed piece of music, it's OK because you would not have bought the album anyway
But somebody changes your homepage, and suddenly it's a job for the federal government.
BTW, the DCMA, as stupid and flawed as it is, probably gives you some legitimate avenues to address this sort of offensive behavior.
I know the DCMA is the only reason you won't be seeing those dreaded "smart links" in the next version of Internet Explorer.
Some other dead ends:
You get the idea... often a sub-optimal but very well understood approach will be significantly more usefull then a theoretically superior but unworkable approach. With the rate of change of the internet, I don't know how else you could possibly keep up to date.
I am amazed at how good a job Google does every time I search. It's performance and accuracy are nothing short of astounding if you understand the nature and size of the solution space they cover.
Bill
Like hell offtopic... thats a good suggestion...
A related question would be to consider lynx, and just code your app up as all cgi based with a central apache server.
Lynx gives you the "gui", and you can support both text and graphical terminals, you have the ultimate in portability, and you client server architecture is completely a done deal for you.
Totally flexible, totally portable, totally scalable.
Bill
I was waiting for somebody to bring this up... Most importantly, with AutoCf (free from HandEra) you can set things up so that applications appear to run directly from compact flash (they actually swap, but do so with the granularity of a record (512 bytes I think)) so long as the application writer followed the basic rules suggested for Palm OS developers.
Such a critter for Sony is starting to show up in beta (and handspring has flirted with the idea), but HandEra (formerly TRG) is the only one that has really delivered. Plus I would much rather have compact flash expansion then some sort of mickey mouse memory stick that offers far less for much more.
The HandEra 330 also manages to pack either 4 AAA (think NiMh rechargables or Duracell Ultras) or a lithium ion battery pack internal to the normal Palm III form factor, as well as an integrated voice recorder application (that can go to either compact flash or MMC). It has a souped up dragonball CPU as well, for one of the fastest palms around.
What is really interesting to me is that a small group of hackers from Des Moines can consistently kick the butt of huge conglemerates such as the likes of Palm and Sony in terms of real world device functionality. I thought that era of computing technology had ended... it's nice to see it can still be done.
Bill
And whilst I'm burning Karma anyway... anyone notice the headline contradicts the story?
:)
Headline: Court: Abortion Threats OK
From 2nd paragraph: "If defendants threatened to commit violent acts, by working alone or with others, then their [works] could properly support the verdict," Cricuit Judge Alex Kozinski wrote (typo theirs, judge describing why the verdict against the site was not supported)
Well, which is it? Does the AP writer have an agenda here? That's a pretty big mistake to make on a headline... they are starting to look like slashdot
Bill
This was fought tooth and nail by that bastion of non-partisian free speach advocates the ACLU right? I must have missed the link to the ACLU press release talking about what a victory this is for the first ammendment.
Oh wait... this regarded free speach by a bunch of right wing religious nuts... never mind. Heck, they are probably lucky the ACLU did not file a friend of the court brief arguing that since this was posted on a partially federally subsidised internet, it violated the separation of church and state and must be removed!
Bill (who thinks the aforementioned site was evil, but did want to take the opportunity to point out the hypocrisy in the ACLU)
Perhaps part of the RIAA motive is to cause individuals trying to share copyrighted music to violate more laws (and thus raise the stakes for prosecution).
Now, instead of just being charged with unlawfull distribution of copyrighted works, you can be charged with something more serious, as you must claim to be the copyright holder to "opt in" with whoever controls the list (even if it is napster). This probably opens up significant new areas for prosecution, perhaps moving the offense from misdemeanor to felony.
Of course, none of this matters to the slashdot crowd, who always argues in favor of napster in terms of exclusively non infringing usage.
Bill
Yeah, copy control sucks, but it's a fact of life that companies developing media these days are gonna do it
TRG (now HandEra) has been offering a Palm device (TRG Pro) for over a year now that has a compact flash slot, 8MB of ram, and 2mb of flash ram. It is the same form factor as the Palm III, which while not as slim as the PalmV series is still very portable. TRG also typically has OS updates available and ready to be flashed even before palm.
TRG has also been leading the pack in terms of software that does the necessary swapping behind the scenes to make the compact flash expansion appear to be transparently available to palm applications.
Bill (happy owner)...
The judicial system protects those of us interested in liberty from those of us who aren't who seem to often make their way into the legislative and executive branches. A woman's Right to Choose would not exist if the Supreme Court weren't there to protect it. Why? There are lots of stupid, vocal Southern social conservatives in Congress. These people, who are as far from Libertarian as you can imagine, want things like creationism taught in schools and they want to return women to the kitchen and the bedroom.
You do people on both sides of an important issue a great disservice when you attempt to misrepresent an important issue like abortion.
You will find the great majority of people interested in ending abortion motivated by the constitution, to which the right to not be killed is fundamental.
You will find the great majority of people interested in maintaining the rights to abortion motivated by the desire for a woman to be able to live her life as she desires.
The real question here has to be to determine at which point a life actually begins, and at which point an individual is protected by the constitution. It is an important question, and one that can be tricky to answer when the stakes are so high.
But taking the views of an extremely small and vocal minority, and trying to paint about 50% of the population with that brush, only serves to divide and inflame people while demonstrating your ignorance.
Sorry if this sounds a little harsh... but I think this is too important an issue to be trivialized and misrepresented, no matter which side you are on.
Bill
(eliminating my +1 bonus because this is way off topic)...
Arghhh.... must resist bait... arrhgggh...
.30-06 shells.
Aw heck. CHOMP!
Compare the environmental conditions in east and west Germany at the fall of the Berlin wall for a nice little data point on the environmental impact of communisim versus capitolism.
When are people going to dump toxic waste in the back yard of the house I own? When they dig my overheated M1-Garand out from under a small mountain of spent and smoking
When is a government owned truck going to dump toxic waste on government owned plot? Hell if I know, or could even find out, or would be willing to risk my life to stop it.
Many Republicians feel that a large and powerfull government will be the absolute WORST environmental steward, and they have quite a bit of history to back them up.
Bill
Is that fair to the artists who conceived the album, wrote the songs, performed the songs, etc??? I think not
Ummm... in order for this to happen, Chicago would have to have signed a contract with said company and accepted goods and services in exchange for an agreement to assign ownership and control to works produced to the label.
This is just contract law. Not to mention, that the album may very well have never been produced at all had the label not paid for studio and production costs, and funded the musicians so they could write music instead of flipping burgers.
One could make a pretty good arguement that the record labels and software houses are unfairly engaging in monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior, but to argue against the existence of copyright is basically arguing against the existence of contract law... which might be fine for some college kid with no assets... but it would make the real world grind to a screaching halt.
Go try and buy a house. You and the sellers sign a contract that defines who does what when, what legal conditions must be met by each, and what information is required to be disclosed by whom. Without it, a transaction of this scale would be impossible. It's complicated an annoying, but both parties come out of it protected, informed, and with the goods or compensation they agreed to.
Software and music licenses are just another form of contract law. If you want to complain about potential anti trust (illegal monopoly) arguments against the RIAA (music) or Microsoft, then you probably have a good case, but to argue against individuals agreeing to legally binding contracts is just silly.
IMHO of course.
Bill