When an ex-girlfriend of mine gave notice that she was moving out of her high-rise appt., she got back a letter from the landlord. The letter asked her to sign and return a 'standard form'. The so-called standard form gave the landlord the right to show her apartment at any time they wished without any further notice to her or permission from her. In effect, they were asking her to give up all sorts of tennant and privacy rights for free.
What bothered me is that she even considered signing that letter.
Some companies know that, simply by asking or blustering, they can get people to give away all sorts of rights. It's not limited to Domain names.
If you've ever been stopped by police, they may tell you something like:
Now, We're going to search you. This is a simple search, but if we find anything incriminating on you, we may charge you and use whatever we find in that trial,
OK?
If you say OK, you're not just indicating that you understand what they're going to do. You're giving them consent. Many people don't seem to understand that until you respond with some sort of assent, they usually have no right whatsoever to search you. The police rely on a combination of ignorance and/or docility to get what they want.
We've seen similar bluster attacks with many of the 'cease and desist' letters flowing all over cyber space. Probably the vast majority of them have absolutely no basis in law, but that's irrelevant.
It's like poker. If the people you threaten roll over and play dead, it doesn't matter that the bluff was empty. On the other hand, if they say 'no', you really have nothing on the table other than the time and materials spent making the threat. You can walk away any time you want. If you're already taking on a real case, you can get economy of scale working for you by snarfing a couple of legitimate domains almost for free.
Hmmm, I wonder if you can charge them with blackmail? `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Well, it was late, had a few thousand bugs, and had a lot less than what they originally promised.
2.4 will be late (not as late) probably have a number of bugs (but not 64K worth) and have way more than what was originally promised.
You can flame if you'd like, but I can easily see the value and equity of waiting a bit longer for a lot more. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Talk to an over-clocker. I'm sure that they can do it in the other direction (although they'll probably ask you for a psychiatric report first). `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Back in '92, when I got my first laptop (Powerbook 140), I got to travelling with a nice long (15') extension cord. Thankfully, the Powerbook used 2 prong, so the extension cord could be relatively light. It's actually impressive how many places you can find a 'public' power outlet if you look.
If you get yourself a statpower (or clone), then you can also get 110V out of a cigarette lighter plug in a car. The 50W NotePower unit is a little bit larger than a (US) cigarette package and will run most laptops. I actually wander around with a small jell-cell (originlly put together for remote video work, it now gives me 2 day standby for my analog cellphone), so combined with a note-power I'm rarely short on
emergency power. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Re:Patents are exchanges of power for publication
on
One Click Patent News
·
· Score: 1
You can use Rand's quote as an excuse to become immoral, or you can use it as an excuse to get into action creating a more egalitarian society. The later is the path chosen by people like Ghandi. If you don't like the world the way it is, and you're not willing to work to improve it, then all you really have the right to do is stew in your own juices.
Change, however, occurs communally. As you get others of a like mind working togeher, people join you because they agree wih the vision you have expounded - they are enlivened by the future you are creating. It's how the Open Software movement worked and it's how most other positive change is going to occur in this world.
If you want to change the world, then get at it, and tell us about THAT. If all you want to do is bitch and moan, then line up with people to scream at the moon about your broken dreams. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
As far as I know, you shouldn't have to pay them. You have no contract (either explicit or implicit) to pay them for any service. If there is a law that says that they have to pay you for the difference, it may also state that you have to pay them for a service you didn't contract for.
If there is an explicit law that you have to pay them for the long distance, then you're hooped. Otherwise, you should be able to get away with refusing to pay... Of course, then you might have to deal with the fact that they own your local provider, but I doubt that they also want to loose your local business too. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Re:Patents are exchanges of power for publication
on
One Click Patent News
·
· Score: 2
For example, not one of the organizations concerned about world hunger ever talks about doing the dirty
work of making sure governments don't import the food or resources that undeveloped countries need in order to begin to grow.
A human issue. Today, ending hunger is not primarily a technical or a production issue, it is a human issue. Hunger persists because we, as human beings, have failed to organize our
societies in ways that assure every person the chance to live a healthy and productive life.
You've identified a big (but little examined) problem: Our society runs on the presumption that the way that we do things is for
the greater common good. For example one of the central principles of lasez-faire capitalism is that 'In working for his on good, a man will necessarily also work for the benefit of society'.
If that was true, we wouldn't have any problem with drug dealers and contract killers. ("Just makin' a buck makin you kick the bucket").
Having recognized that distinction, there are a couple of general paths you can take: You can ignore it and pretend that all is OK; you can
work to correct things; you can give up and die.
Unfortunately, you seem to have taken the pessimistic path.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Now, lets see: 2,500 reported bugs for a full distro (including many apps) VS 65,000 for the Base OS
(most apps $extra)
So, just who's full of "Creepy crawly slimey, icky stickey, ucky yucky BUGS?
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Well, there's nothing like the "silently reconfigures all filesystems, making it impossible to back out" issue that Win2K had.
(that having been said, I note that 5.2 chokes on the new partitions that I made with 7.0 -- but that's a documented issue in the release notes)
In many ways, I think that the.0 releases are rather akin to Microsoft's 'public beta' releases (but with fewer bugs than M$'s final releases). There probably wouldn't be much of an issue to make of it if RH wasn't stamping out disks and selling them as a commercial distributions. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
This leads us to the ugly: AOL. Everyone knows that the next big thing will be merging cable and internet
and phone services.
Actually, that might be good... If they were to merge, the FCC might be able to manage them by dint of the telecom (cable/phone) aspects of the company. On the other hand, it might just get ugly as to what the FCC can or can't regulate within a merged net/telecom entity. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
uhm, As far as I know (IANAL -- I aint even a US resident!) you only have the right to know what evidence was gathered in a case where you have been CHARGED. If they don't have enough evidence to charge you, they can generally keep all info they have under wraps until Freedom of Information laws kick in at 20 years.
WRT US Residents VS foreign enemies: A US resident can also be a foreign enemy. Foreign spies working in the states would also be US residents. The CIA couldn't touch a US Citizen, living in the states and subverted/blackmailed by a foreign agency. A list of such people would probably be administered by the FBI and rated top-secret (and shared with the CIA "for use outside the country, only").
I use Telus DSL in Vancouver. I got in relatively early and have been quite happy with it. I'm near the distance limit so I 'only' get 1.5~2mb down. I currently get ~.5mb up.
I'd been having intermittent problems with my old amati modem temporarily loosing signal (repeated 1-12 second outages). Telus recently replaced it with a 3com unit. After an afternoon of problems, it's now been pretty rock solid for the last couple of days. (a running ping test has dropped 5 packets out of 84000 in the last day.
Bandwidth seems clean. I have often gotten downloads in the 25KB~120KB/sec range (as measured by netscape). Evidence from trying multiple downloads with gnapster indicate that bottlenecks are rarely, if ever local.
I've been paying $70CAN ($50US)/month for the service. When they replaced my modem they seem to have downgraded me to $35/month ($20US). Since I don't loose effective bandwidth, I'm not going to complain.
I'd say it's more like the differnce between a taxi and a bike if you're a delivery person. The Taxi's nice but it's shared between hundreds of people, so you only get it for short periods of time.
A bicycle has a more limited range, but it is far cheaper so you can afford to use it all day, every day.
You also have the option of sharing, as opposed to the need.
The fact that the mirror only points straightup isn't that bad. As somoene else pointed out, you can move the target some for tracking, aiming, etc. You may not be able to track the whole sky, but you can build a lot with the $99MIL that you save (like building another 99 telescopes around the world that CAN point where the first one can't.
It would also increase the viewing time by a factor of 100
In other words, you can move your 500GB HARDWARE raid array from your O2 to an intel box, as long as it's created with 4K blocks. This could easily be untrue -- especially for filesystems tuned for large files, where larger block sizes woud make sense. -- So make a backup before you try this at home (You have the O2 at home?)
(Shame about that 2 Terabyte size limit, though. I guess I'm gonna have to go buy myself a couple dozen extra hard disks. (that and a RAID controller).:-)
XFS is totaly designed as a high performance FS.
SGI has a history of being speed-demons. I remember in the mid '80s when they decided to go to X-Windows, someone mentioned that the release was delayed because SGI engineers concluded that the X implementation was too slow and they had to rewrite parts of it to get it up to snuff. I presume that they would do the same thing with a File System generated rom scratch.
For example, if a pilot relies in this system and sees a plane on a collision course, or near collision
course, he might turn, into the path of another aircraft that isn't showing up on the system.
Easy enought to deal with. For aircraft that don't have the new system (and MOST won't for the first couple of years), the ground system coulD easily feed the heritage system date into the GPS datastream. Also, as someone else pointed out, Most aircraft that have advanced navigational systems also have older systems for backup (both in case of failure of the newer system and in case they are in an area where it isn't available).
The idea of a '747 virus', IS intriguing. Fortunately, I doubt that aircraft will do software downloads in mid-flight.
Captain, We're going to have to reboot.
Simmons: How many times have I told you NOT TO UPGRADE WINDOWS WHILE WE'RE LANDING!?!?
Would you suggest the same for budding Libertarians?
Yes, I would. In my world it's far more important that people get involved. You can modify your beliefs on the fly. My first political action was in support of the Conservative party and NAFTA.
Needless to say that my political beliefs have changed, but I think that having gotten involved was an important first step.
I don't think that what I believe is the gospel truth. Even libertarians have stuff to say that's worth listening to (if only to think about why we think what we do).
------ If you believe in political freedom and freedom of action, then your real test is when you're faced with the most fucked-up, morally-repugnant, stupid demagogue you ever believed could exist. If you can understand giving him/her/it the right of freedom of speech, then your are firm in that belief.
Supporting their beliefs, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter.
Realizing that you all think you're responsible for electing These Idiots is what keeps me as a non-voter.
If you don't vote at all, then you're voting for whatever everybody else votes in. Think about it. I've worked for the Green Party for a few years. In the last city election, if about 2000 "disgusted voters" had bothered to come out and register their votes for someone other than the status quo (in a city of 300K people), it would have completely changed the results of the election.
It won't make a difference is a self fulfilling prophesy.
You don't like the DCMA? Go out, find the nearest candidate who voted/campaigned against it, Help in their campaign and make sure that they know why you're doing it. If a local candidate voted for the DCMA, then go out and work for his opponnent and make sure that both sides know why you're doing it. Better yet, offer to work on getting the geek vote out.
Whatever you do, get off of your butt and go do something about it besides talking to a bunch of other geeks who understand how stupid and backwards these laws are.
Those who are not willing to fight for their freedom don't deserve it. -- Malcom X
There is also the question of supporting people who recieved the CueCat in the mail. A company supporting them is free to give them any information they want to. People who asked at Radio Shack (and may or may not be bound by any shrink-wrap agreement) are responsible for ensuring that they don't violate such an agreement. Holding a poster responsible for the subset of CueCat owners who might be bound by a contract is (hopefully) untennable.
At most, you might responsible for putting a notice reminding anybody that might be held to a contract that they should pay attention to
the contract that they 'signed'.
-- IANAL My sister is one, but she doesn't talk to me.
Even if it arrived with the magazine -- Unless it was conspicuously plastered with the 'Free gift included' messages (that I previously thought were PR bunk, and now know are legally required notices disguised as PR bunk). They would be in violation of postal law (you ordered a magazine, not a CD), and any request for payment would be similarly illegal.
Cars that break down a lot more just MIGHT sell more if they were sold by the Mechanics that got
paid to fix them, were much cheaper up front, and people were used to donkey carts. (i.e. even the bad model was a vast improvement on what people were used to).
Any merchandise mailed in violation of subsection (a) of this section, or within the exceptions contained therein, may be treated as a gift by
the recipient,
who shall have the right to retain, use, discard, or dispose of it in any manner he sees fit without any obligation whatsoever to the
sender.
In othere words, people who recieve 'cease and desist' orders should simply quote this part of the code, say that they're helping friends who recieved them in the mail for free and tell them to go smoke their letter.
The original intent of a contract was to document a carefully negotiated agreement so that everybody knew what was negotiated. Everybody signs to say 'yeah this is the agreement that we came to'. That way, if it came down to a question of "was it 3 sheep or 4", you hust had to go back to the piece of paper that everybody signed.
The current use of the contract is nothing like that. Thousands of average Joes get a thing stuck up in front of them with half a dozen pages of fine text and told "click this if you agree". When they click, they're just as tightly bound to the agreement as were the guys that carefully hammered out an agreement over hours (or months) of negotiation.
The difference here, is that only one party has carefully 'negotiated' the agreement. When you sign a contract you are pretending that you carefully negotiated the contract that you sign. Whether or not you read it is pretty much irrelevant. Long wordy contracts actually make it less likely that a customer is actually going to READ a contract. This means that there is more and more that a company can essentially trick you into giving them.
One of the sub-messages of the article is read before you sign. The contract is not for your protection. It is for the benefit of the company. This is especially true if you are making a multi-year agreement. Do the math to determine if you will be willing to walk away from the contract if it turns out to be useless in a year. If you woulen't be willing then you should probably look at talking away from it now. Make sure that they don't have the right to do nasty things like raise the price of the service.
"But it was only $20/month!"
"That was at the beginning of the contract. Since then we've had to deal with... uhm, INFLATION -- Yeah, Inflation! and now we're passing it on to you."
It appears to be simply using NAT with a VERY simple firewall implementation. I THINK that this is pretty much the heart of their security model.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention provides a system which employs NAT in conjunction
with an adaptive security algorithm to keep unwanted packets from external
sources out of a private network. According to this algorithm, packets
are dropped and logged unless they are deemed nonthreatening. Domain
Name Section "DNS" packets and certain types of Internet Control Message
Protocol "ICMP" packets are allowed to enter local network. In addition,
File Transfer Protocol "FTP" data packets are allowed to enter the local
network, but only after it has been established that their destination
on the local network initiated an FTP session.
These and other features and advantages of the present invention will be
presented in more detail in the following specification of the invention
and the figures.
________From the detailed section: ____________
The process by which translation system 34 handles inbound packets
from the Internet (and arriving at NAT system outside interface 18b)
is depicted in a process flow diagram 200 shown in FIG. 5. It should be
understood that this procedure includes an adaptive security algorithm
that does not block outbound packets. In a preferred embodiment, adaptive
security follows these rules:
Allow any TCP connections that originate from the inside network.
Ensure that if an FTP data connection is initiated to a translation slot, there is already an FTP control connection between that translation slot and the
remote host. Also ensure that a port command has been issued between the same two hosts. If these criteria are not met, the attempt to initiate an FTP data
connection is dropped and logged.
Prevent the initiation of a TCP connection to a translation slot from the outside. The offending packet is dropped and logged.
Allow inbound UDP packets only from DNS. NFS is explicitly denied.
Drop and log source routed IP packets sent to any translation slot on the translation system.
Allow only ICMP of types 0, 3, 4, 8, 11, 12, 17 and 18.
Ping requests from outside to dynamic translation slots are silently dropped.
Ping requests to static translation slots are answered.
So, I guess that the obvious question is whether or not anybody publicly discussed the idea of implementing any sort of firewalling on NATs before CISCO submitted their Patent.
Personally, I think that if these kinds of firewall rules were suggested before (with or without NAT), that including a firewall in a NAT router would be an obvious action (especially in a general purpose computer being used as a NAT translator) would be an "obvious improvement".
Actually, rereading this, it seems like a patent for a specific set of firewall rules. Other than checking to see if the NAT address is being used, there seems nothing in this section that's unique to NATs.
Slashdot Mirror
What bothered me is that she even considered signing that letter.
Some companies know that, simply by asking or blustering, they can get people to give away all sorts of rights. It's not limited to Domain names.
If you've ever been stopped by police, they may tell you something like:
If you say OK, you're not just indicating that you understand what they're going to do. You're giving them consent. Many people don't seem to understand that until you respond with some sort of assent, they usually have no right whatsoever to search you. The police rely on a combination of ignorance and/or docility to get what they want.We've seen similar bluster attacks with many of the 'cease and desist' letters flowing all over cyber space. Probably the vast majority of them have absolutely no basis in law, but that's irrelevant.
It's like poker. If the people you threaten roll over and play dead, it doesn't matter that the bluff was empty. On the other hand, if they say 'no', you really have nothing on the table other than the time and materials spent making the threat. You can walk away any time you want. If you're already taking on a real case, you can get economy of scale working for you by snarfing a couple of legitimate domains almost for free.
Hmmm, I wonder if you can charge them with blackmail?
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
2.4 will be late (not as late) probably have a number of bugs (but not 64K worth) and have way more than what was originally promised.
You can flame if you'd like, but I can easily see the value and equity of waiting a bit longer for a lot more.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Talk to an over-clocker. I'm sure that they can do it in the other direction (although they'll probably ask you for a psychiatric report first).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
If you get yourself a statpower (or clone), then you can also get 110V out of a cigarette lighter plug in a car. The 50W NotePower unit is a little bit larger than a (US) cigarette package and will run most laptops. I actually wander around with a small jell-cell (originlly put together for remote video work, it now gives me 2 day standby for my analog cellphone), so combined with a note-power I'm rarely short on emergency power.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Change, however, occurs communally. As you get others of a like mind working togeher, people join you because they agree wih the vision you have expounded - they are enlivened by the future you are creating. It's how the Open Software movement worked and it's how most other positive change is going to occur in this world.
If you want to change the world, then get at it, and tell us about THAT. If all you want to do is bitch and moan, then line up with people to scream at the moon about your broken dreams.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
If there is an explicit law that you have to pay them for the long distance, then you're hooped. Otherwise, you should be able to get away with refusing to pay. .. Of course, then you might have to deal with the fact that they own your local provider, but I doubt that they also want to loose your local business too.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
-
A human issue. Today, ending hunger is not primarily a technical or a production issue, it is a human issue. Hunger persists because we, as human beings, have failed to organize our
societies in ways that assure every person the chance to live a healthy and productive life.
You've identified a big (but little examined) problem:Our society runs on the presumption that the way that we do things is for the greater common good. For example one of the central principles of lasez-faire capitalism is that 'In working for his on good, a man will necessarily also work for the benefit of society'. If that was true, we wouldn't have any problem with drug dealers and contract killers. ("Just makin' a buck makin you kick the bucket").
Having recognized that distinction, there are a couple of general paths you can take: You can ignore it and pretend that all is OK; you can work to correct things; you can give up and die. Unfortunately, you seem to have taken the pessimistic path.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Now, lets see: 2,500 reported bugs for a full distro (including many apps) VS 65,000 for the Base OS (most apps $extra)
So, just who's full of "Creepy crawly slimey, icky stickey, ucky yucky BUGS ?
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
In many ways, I think that the .0 releases are rather akin to Microsoft's 'public beta' releases (but with fewer bugs than M$'s final releases). There probably wouldn't be much of an issue to make of it if RH wasn't stamping out disks and selling them as a commercial distributions.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
WRT US Residents VS foreign enemies: A US resident can also be a foreign enemy. Foreign spies working in the states would also be US residents. The CIA couldn't touch a US Citizen, living in the states and subverted/blackmailed by a foreign agency. A list of such people would probably be administered by the FBI and rated top-secret (and shared with the CIA "for use outside the country, only").
I'd been having intermittent problems with my old amati modem temporarily loosing signal (repeated 1-12 second outages). Telus recently replaced it with a 3com unit. After an afternoon of problems, it's now been pretty rock solid for the last couple of days. (a running ping test has dropped 5 packets out of 84000 in the last day.
Bandwidth seems clean. I have often gotten downloads in the 25KB~120KB/sec range (as measured by netscape). Evidence from trying multiple downloads with gnapster indicate that bottlenecks are rarely, if ever local.
I've been paying $70CAN ($50US)/month for the service. When they replaced my modem they seem to have downgraded me to $35/month ($20US). Since I don't loose effective bandwidth, I'm not going to complain.
The fact that the mirror only points straightup isn't that bad. As somoene else pointed out, you can move the target some for tracking, aiming, etc. You may not be able to track the whole sky, but you can build a lot with the $99MIL that you save (like building another 99 telescopes around the world that CAN point where the first one can't.
It would also increase the viewing time by a factor of 100
(Shame about that 2 Terabyte size limit, though. I guess I'm gonna have to go buy myself a couple dozen extra hard disks. (that and a RAID controller). :-)
XFS is totaly designed as a high performance FS. SGI has a history of being speed-demons. I remember in the mid '80s when they decided to go to X-Windows, someone mentioned that the release was delayed because SGI engineers concluded that the X implementation was too slow and they had to rewrite parts of it to get it up to snuff. I presume that they would do the same thing with a File System generated rom scratch.
The idea of a '747 virus', IS intriguing. Fortunately, I doubt that aircraft will do software downloads in mid-flight.
Yes, I would. In my world it's far more important that people get involved. You can modify your beliefs on the fly. My first political action was in support of the Conservative party and NAFTA. Needless to say that my political beliefs have changed, but I think that having gotten involved was an important first step.
I don't think that what I believe is the gospel truth. Even libertarians have stuff to say that's worth listening to (if only to think about why we think what we do).
------
If you believe in political freedom and freedom of action, then your real test is when you're faced with the most fucked-up, morally-repugnant, stupid demagogue you ever believed could exist. If you can understand giving him/her/it the right of freedom of speech, then your are firm in that belief.
Supporting their beliefs, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter.
If you don't vote at all, then you're voting for whatever everybody else votes in. Think about it. I've worked for the Green Party for a few years. In the last city election, if about 2000 "disgusted voters" had bothered to come out and register their votes for someone other than the status quo (in a city of 300K people), it would have completely changed the results of the election.
It won't make a difference is a self fulfilling prophesy.
You don't like the DCMA? Go out, find the nearest candidate who voted/campaigned against it, Help in their campaign and make sure that they know why you're doing it . If a local candidate voted for the DCMA, then go out and work for his opponnent and make sure that both sides know why you're doing it. Better yet, offer to work on getting the geek vote out.
Whatever you do, get off of your butt and go do something about it besides talking to a bunch of other geeks who understand how stupid and backwards these laws are.
Those who are not willing to fight for their freedom don't deserve it.
-- Malcom X
There is also the question of supporting people who recieved the CueCat in the mail. A company supporting them is free to give them any information they want to. People who asked at Radio Shack (and may or may not be bound by any shrink-wrap agreement) are responsible for ensuring that they don't violate such an agreement. Holding a poster responsible for the subset of CueCat owners who might be bound by a contract is (hopefully) untennable. At most, you might responsible for putting a notice reminding anybody that might be held to a contract that they should pay attention to the contract that they 'signed'.
-- IANAL My sister is one, but she doesn't talk to me.
Even if it arrived with the magazine -- Unless it was conspicuously plastered with the 'Free gift included' messages (that I previously thought were PR bunk, and now know are legally required notices disguised as PR bunk). They would be in violation of postal law (you ordered a magazine, not a CD), and any request for payment would be similarly illegal.
Cars that break down a lot more just MIGHT sell more if they were sold by the Mechanics that got paid to fix them, were much cheaper up front, and people were used to donkey carts. (i.e. even the bad model was a vast improvement on what people were used to).
The current use of the contract is nothing like that. Thousands of average Joes get a thing stuck up in front of them with half a dozen pages of fine text and told "click this if you agree". When they click, they're just as tightly bound to the agreement as were the guys that carefully hammered out an agreement over hours (or months) of negotiation.
The difference here, is that only one party has carefully 'negotiated' the agreement. When you sign a contract you are pretending that you carefully negotiated the contract that you sign. Whether or not you read it is pretty much irrelevant. Long wordy contracts actually make it less likely that a customer is actually going to READ a contract. This means that there is more and more that a company can essentially trick you into giving them.
One of the sub-messages of the article is read before you sign. The contract is not for your protection. It is for the benefit of the company. This is especially true if you are making a multi-year agreement. Do the math to determine if you will be willing to walk away from the contract if it turns out to be useless in a year. If you woulen't be willing then you should probably look at talking away from it now. Make sure that they don't have the right to do nasty things like raise the price of the service.