One of the problems with self-mailed envelopes is that you can mail an open envelope to yourself and then stuff it later. If I was going to try something like that, I'd put the stamp and address on the back (flap) side. At least that way, you'd have some proof that you hand't opened it since it was mailed.
At best, such self-registration might help you defensively. -- if someone claims that it was their idea and you stole it. Getting it notarized, however, seems like a much better idea, since the notary will place a seal and date directly on the document itself. If in doubt, also leave a copy with the notary.
Registration with the library of comgress is most foolproof since they're provably neutral in any dispute -- and they're the official registrar for copyrights.
This all depends on how much spare time you have. I've taken an issue to the court of appeal and was a good deal more successful than most people would have expected -- The lawyer who refused it said that it wouldn't go anywhere. After the fact, a law professor told me that I'd almost won. (The fact that she knew about at all was what shocked me). If I hadn't given up too soon, it appears that I would have sat a major prescedent.
On the other hand, it probably took me a couple hundred of hours to do the research. By the time I was done, I'd spent enough evenings in the courthouse law library that some of the security guards thought that I was a lawyer.
A lot of the time I spent was understanding the basic rules of court. Now that I have a reasonable understanding of that, I'd be willing to go into court again, if I had to, but it's definitely easier to hire a lawyer to do things, if you have the money.
On the other hand, having watched lawyers in action (and lawyers who apparently had a really good reputation in lawyer circles!), you'd be surprised how limited their logic facilities can seem to be sometimes. Even if you hire lawyers, it wouldn't hurt you to do a quick sanity check on their work.
You're hiring them, and they're nominally acting under your instructions. Don't be afraid to ask questions and make requests. It can save you money and trouble down the road
(btw: Legalese is essentially a natural-language programming language)
I generally check the 'recieved' headers... The box that my ISP recieved the message from is (as far as I'm concerned) the responsible box. That's who I send my complaint emails to.
I just start with the ISP, and then I either use the reverse DNS, or do a traceroute (mtr) to find the responsible ISP for that IP.
For web probes, I use a script on my linux box that auto-mails the responsible ISP. I think I'm down to 2 or 3 probes a day, now.
I've always been of the opinion that that line was the result of self censorship... I think that it was originally
getting laid on your wedding day
But Alanis couldn't get it past the corporate censors.
Most of the other 'ironic' ocurrences have something good, and then a subscript saying why it was ironic. Rain on your wedding day doesn't fit that... it's in the wrong order. 'Rain' is also missing 2 syllables that had to be smoothed over by Alanis' warbling. 'Getting laid', on the other hand...
(we now return you to your regularly scheuled program)
Hmm...Am I the only one who finds it ironic that both the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) and kiddie porn are mentioned in the same post?
That's how they probably found the perv -- scanning files looking for the string NAMBLA, and they found these obscene text files... The rest, as they say, is history (much like the kiddi-porn ex-employee).
The effect is not limited to computing. My friend had a 4G Fujitsu SCSI drive with a 5 year warrenty. It died after 3, and he never bothered to return it for a replacement. Similarly, the 'lifetime warranty' hammer that I managed to bend just got thrown out rather than returned for replacement.
Many rebate programs are predicated on the knowledge that 90% of all customers will never send in their rebate coupons.
I've got and old 4-Gig drive in my secondary machine..
The drive in my *BSD firewall is an 500meg unit (guess how old it is). Dropping warranties (as the headline said) implies that drives have little hope of lasting that long (or, rather, they have a much higher probability of dying long before that).
I guess it shouldn't be that big a shock... As we get closer and closer to physical limits, I can see it becoming harder and harder to guarantee that a unit will stay within specs.
It would make sense that somebody is going to hit the wall first -- most likely those thau put less work into quality control,
A friend of mine ran a small computer shop a while back. He found that RAM prices seemed to always bottom out in early fall.
His explanation was that things would max our around Christmas then oversupply would kick in as summer came by. By the end of the summer, prices would bottom out and the cycle would start again for Christmas.
I don't think that there's much here to say other than you seem to have entirely missed the point.
Btw: Just because somebody isn't getting paid as well as I am doesn't necessarily mean that they're not working as hard. Some people stuck in a minimum wage job, for example may be working their asses off. For them, it's not laziness. It may be the the result of bad choices or bad luck earler in life.
People who aren't willing to work for a living I don't care about. I am, however, willing to give a break to someone who is having a hard time and/or just getting paid a lot less tan me for arduous work.
The following list of words should NOT be used:
* actionable
Actionable is a legal term. If you want to sue the entire legal industry into compliance, I've got a couple of windmills to sell you to practice on.
(you might be able to put them on one of the Microwave tower sites).
so you are going to tell me that when I download 5 DiVX movies a day (700+mb each) that I am *NOT* hogging 3.5G of bandwith for that day?
Guh.
His point was that even when you're not downloading your 3G of files a day, you're still using a good bit of bandwidth. The ofiginal article mentions that 10% of his network's bandwidth could be chopped by simply cutting down on network keep-alive packets. If the grand-parent's comments are any indication, Some P2Ps may be well above that.
Or to put it another way: I'm not saying that you always look stupid -- just when you say things like that.
Sometime in the next week or so, I am going to stop by your home and probe for any security problems that a burglar might exploit.
No problem.. but if I catch you doing such a probe, you had better have a way of proving that you were doing it with the best of intentions.
The degre of my gratitude at such a check would also depend on the situation. If it was known that burglers were running around and making use of these problems, and you were able to prove that you weren't one of them, I might be reasonably thankful. If you came back and told me what was wrong, I would definitely be thankful.
If I actually asked you to do the checks, then you could be sure that I wouldn't sue you for doing what I asked.
Spam today, something else "offensive" tomorrow? How different is this than when Chinese ISPs decide to block Google?
Two different questions:
These lists claim that sites on their lists are open relays. If they list my site because they don't like my politics, I can (and would) sue them for libel.
As for the comparison to China blocking: People in China don't have any choice with this sort or censorship.
If I want to accept email from open relay servers, I can find an ISP that allows this -- or even set up my own, if I have a broadband connection. As things would have it, people tend to like it when spammers get blocked, so the market favours ISPs that do this.
Yes, I agree that we should go after the people who misuse other peoples' boxes and lie about the source. -- In fact I think that I have such a case, and would love a US legal contact who would assist in tracking down and suing a group of people like this. Would you be willing to go in with me on such a case?
On the other hand, allowing someone to use your machine illegally when you know that such use is illegal and likely is known as 'aiding and abetting'. Although spam isn't strictly illegal, I think that the analogy still applies.
"Must be," huh? That's exactly what this guy is upset about. Who are these people who are telling him how to configure his mail servers? Who are they to tell him how much security is enough.
You can configure your server however you want -- On the other hand, if you Insist on configuring it in a way that is documented as allowing spammers to abuse your machine. who are you to tell Me that I have to accept email from such an ill-configured box.
The more interesting absurdity is that he asked these people to test his server. Now he's claiming that he can sue them for doing what he asked them to do.
His site is an open relay.
It is not a completely open relay, but it does allow people to send email through it by saying that they are sending email from his domain. This blocks *some* (really stupid) spammers, but it will allow others.
This is rather like partly dried bullshit. It doesn't smell as bad as completely fresh bullshit, but it still smells -- no matter what you want to call it.
Sendmail config docs give a stern warning about enabling relays based only on the the senders alleged domain name. That the author ignores such warnings and complains about people who complain that his machine is willfully mis-configured is an example of why some people distrust lawyers. I say willfully because most modern mail server configs don't allow domain name spoofing by default.
As my sister (also a lawyer) once said, after a tornado attack: Too bad you can't sue god.
I remember similar things going on in England. As I remember it, there was a big fight going on about who should get what part of the reciprocal payments for customers using the service. This was a couple of years ago.
The real fact of the matter is that the service isn't free.. It's just being paid for through your phone bill.
Because I get my ADSL from my phone company (Telus) I can also pay for it through my phone bill... Does this mean that I'm getting my ADSL for free too?
(at $40CAN/month ($25US) for 1.5megabit down and 500kbit up, some people might claim that I really do)
My understanding is that machines were impervious to the Code Red virus only if the administrator was not religiously installing updates. This is because, although MS released a fix that would have blocked it, that fix was backed out by a later fix.
There was also the case of the time when Microsoft bought Hotmail, and decreed that hotmail shall be moved to NT. Quite the debacle that. I remember the absolute glee of the Sun Microsystem reps when they were able to cackle about Microsoft purchasing $6Million of Sun products to keep Hotmail alive.
"... And every penny of it at full retail. Damned if we're going to give
them any discount -- besides, you know that you've got them by the balls when they come buying Sun equipment. They're not going to do it unless they absolutely have to.
If Microsoft can't make NT work, to the tune of $6M, then don't expect anybody else to.
Please cite examples where "competent" Linux administrators put 2.2 or 2.4 into production use the moment they were released.
It generally doesn't happen. The kernel is not the entirety of what most people think of as Linux. It's just (surprise, surprise) the kernel of an entire operating system.
What 'competent' admins will usually put into production is a specific distribution. I *do* have friends, for example, who put RedHat 7.3 into production as soon as it was released. I even know of cases where the 7.2 beta was put into production (It was stable in the areas what were important, and had wanted components).
People who play with bare kernel releases tend to be hackers and distro developers -- or real hot for a (specific) new capability.
US media is only slightly less biased that Pravda was in Communist days. It proclaims freedom, but self-sensors. Compared to US media, the BBC is definitely better -- but better than the devil doesn't necessarily make one good.
While a lot of the software patents out there are horrible--boo, hiss, yeah, let's move on--either WotC isn't enforcing theirs very well, or an awful lot of computer gaming companies must be paying them royalties. There are plenty of non-D&D computer games that use levelling
Someone at an earlier post mentioned that a lot of other RPG companies have moved away from Level-based development. This might be a mysterious coincidence, or it could be the result of WotC trying to enforce their patent... I can see companies prefering to change their system vs paying tithe or fighting what is quite possibly an invalid patent.
It's probably mostly technical.. Far easier to block 1 or 4 sets of channels than to block 45 of 70 channels -- and probably get it wrong 5%of the time (which, in a city of 1 million subscribers, would be 50K upset customers demanding corrections)
But, when "one wrong move can cost you millions", can you afford a kernel oops because someone forgot a \n?
Like Microsoft "We don't know why all Windows boxes are being hacked" has never had one-off and buffer overflow problems?? A proprietary programmer is no more infallible than an OS one. The big difference with OS is that if the software blows up, you don't have to wait on the pleasure of your supplier to get it fixed.
With Open Source, you can also check the source code yourself and make sure that the really critical stuff isn't missing a \n in a critical place.
Open source doesn't make software perfect -- It just makes it easier to fix.
I discovered that Eliza Dushku is an attractive woman [drunkoffourass.com].
Pretty much have to be. Playing a Vampire Slayer is pretty physical. By the time you work your body into a shape that can handle the stunts, you're pretty much guaranteed to be in nice shape.
(personally, I always thought that Tara (Amber Benson) was the babe of the Buffy series).
Slashdot Mirror
At best, such self-registration might help you defensively. -- if someone claims that it was their idea and you stole it. Getting it notarized, however, seems like a much better idea, since the notary will place a seal and date directly on the document itself. If in doubt, also leave a copy with the notary.
Registration with the library of comgress is most foolproof since they're provably neutral in any dispute -- and they're the official registrar for copyrights.
On the other hand, it probably took me a couple hundred of hours to do the research. By the time I was done, I'd spent enough evenings in the courthouse law library that some of the security guards thought that I was a lawyer.
A lot of the time I spent was understanding the basic rules of court. Now that I have a reasonable understanding of that, I'd be willing to go into court again, if I had to, but it's definitely easier to hire a lawyer to do things, if you have the money.
On the other hand, having watched lawyers in action (and lawyers who apparently had a really good reputation in lawyer circles!), you'd be surprised how limited their logic facilities can seem to be sometimes. Even if you hire lawyers, it wouldn't hurt you to do a quick sanity check on their work.
You're hiring them, and they're nominally acting under your instructions. Don't be afraid to ask questions and make requests. It can save you money and trouble down the road
(btw: Legalese is essentially a natural-language programming language)
I just start with the ISP, and then I either use the reverse DNS, or do a traceroute (mtr) to find the responsible ISP for that IP.
For web probes, I use a script on my linux box that auto-mails the responsible ISP. I think I'm down to 2 or 3 probes a day, now.
I've always been of the opinion that that line was the result of self censorship... I think that it was originally
But Alanis couldn't get it past the corporate censors.Most of the other 'ironic' ocurrences have something good, and then a subscript saying why it was ironic. Rain on your wedding day doesn't fit that... it's in the wrong order. 'Rain' is also missing 2 syllables that had to be smoothed over by Alanis' warbling. 'Getting laid', on the other hand...
(we now return you to your regularly scheuled program)
That's how they probably found the perv -- scanning files looking for the string NAMBLA, and they found these obscene text files... The rest, as they say, is history (much like the kiddi-porn ex-employee).
Many rebate programs are predicated on the knowledge that 90% of all customers will never send in their rebate coupons.
I guess it shouldn't be that big a shock... As we get closer and closer to physical limits, I can see it becoming harder and harder to guarantee that a unit will stay within specs.
It would make sense that somebody is going to hit the wall first -- most likely those thau put less work into quality control,
His explanation was that things would max our around Christmas then oversupply would kick in as summer came by. By the end of the summer, prices would bottom out and the cycle would start again for Christmas.
Btw: Just because somebody isn't getting paid as well as I am doesn't necessarily mean that they're not working as hard. Some people stuck in a minimum wage job, for example may be working their asses off. For them, it's not laziness. It may be the the result of bad choices or bad luck earler in life.
People who aren't willing to work for a living I don't care about. I am, however, willing to give a break to someone who is having a hard time and/or just getting paid a lot less tan me for arduous work.
* actionable
Actionable is a legal term. If you want to sue the entire legal industry into compliance, I've got a couple of windmills to sell you to practice on.
(you might be able to put them on one of the Microwave tower sites).
Guh.
His point was that even when you're not downloading your 3G of files a day, you're still using a good bit of bandwidth. The ofiginal article mentions that 10% of his network's bandwidth could be chopped by simply cutting down on network keep-alive packets. If the grand-parent's comments are any indication, Some P2Ps may be well above that.
Or to put it another way: I'm not saying that you always look stupid -- just when you say things like that.
No problem .. but if I catch you doing such a probe, you had better have a way of proving that you were doing it with the best of intentions.
The degre of my gratitude at such a check would also depend on the situation. If it was known that burglers were running around and making use of these problems, and you were able to prove that you weren't one of them, I might be reasonably thankful. If you came back and told me what was wrong, I would definitely be thankful.
If I actually asked you to do the checks, then you could be sure that I wouldn't sue you for doing what I asked.
Two different questions:
These lists claim that sites on their lists are open relays. If they list my site because they don't like my politics, I can (and would) sue them for libel.
As for the comparison to China blocking: People in China don't have any choice with this sort or censorship.
If I want to accept email from open relay servers, I can find an ISP that allows this -- or even set up my own, if I have a broadband connection. As things would have it, people tend to like it when spammers get blocked, so the market favours ISPs that do this.
Yes, I agree that we should go after the people who misuse other peoples' boxes and lie about the source. -- In fact I think that I have such a case, and would love a US legal contact who would assist in tracking down and suing a group of people like this. Would you be willing to go in with me on such a case?
On the other hand, allowing someone to use your machine illegally when you know that such use is illegal and likely is known as 'aiding and abetting'. Although spam isn't strictly illegal, I think that the analogy still applies.
Great! so not only is his box an open realy, it doesn't even handle legitimate email properly.
Oh, well.
You can configure your server however you want -- On the other hand, if you Insist on configuring it in a way that is documented as allowing spammers to abuse your machine. who are you to tell Me that I have to accept email from such an ill-configured box.
The more interesting absurdity is that he asked these people to test his server. Now he's claiming that he can sue them for doing what he asked them to do.
This is rather like partly dried bullshit. It doesn't smell as bad as completely fresh bullshit, but it still smells -- no matter what you want to call it.
Sendmail config docs give a stern warning about enabling relays based only on the the senders alleged domain name. That the author ignores such warnings and complains about people who complain that his machine is willfully mis-configured is an example of why some people distrust lawyers. I say willfully because most modern mail server configs don't allow domain name spoofing by default.
As my sister (also a lawyer) once said, after a tornado attack:
Too bad you can't sue god.
Virtual mod: +1 funny
The real fact of the matter is that the service isn't free.. It's just being paid for through your phone bill.
Because I get my ADSL from my phone company (Telus) I can also pay for it through my phone bill... Does this mean that I'm getting my ADSL for free too?
(at $40CAN/month ($25US) for 1.5megabit down and 500kbit up, some people might claim that I really do)
There was also the case of the time when Microsoft bought Hotmail, and decreed that hotmail shall be moved to NT. Quite the debacle that. I remember the absolute glee of the Sun Microsystem reps when they were able to cackle about Microsoft purchasing $6Million of Sun products to keep Hotmail alive.
If Microsoft can't make NT work, to the tune of $6M, then don't expect anybody else to.It generally doesn't happen. The kernel is not the entirety of what most people think of as Linux. It's just (surprise, surprise) the kernel of an entire operating system.
What 'competent' admins will usually put into production is a specific distribution. I *do* have friends, for example, who put RedHat 7.3 into production as soon as it was released. I even know of cases where the 7.2 beta was put into production (It was stable in the areas what were important, and had wanted components).
People who play with bare kernel releases tend to be hackers and distro developers -- or real hot for a (specific) new capability.
US media is only slightly less biased that Pravda was in Communist days. It proclaims freedom, but self-sensors. Compared to US media, the BBC is definitely better -- but better than the devil doesn't necessarily make one good.
Someone at an earlier post mentioned that a lot of other RPG companies have moved away from Level-based development.
This might be a mysterious coincidence, or it could be the result of WotC trying to enforce their patent... I can see companies prefering to change their system vs paying tithe or fighting what is quite possibly an invalid patent.
It's probably mostly technical.. Far easier to block 1 or 4 sets of channels than to block 45 of 70 channels -- and probably get it wrong 5%of the time (which, in a city of 1 million subscribers, would be 50K upset customers demanding corrections)
Like Microsoft "We don't know why all Windows boxes are being hacked" has never had one-off and buffer overflow problems?? A proprietary programmer is no more infallible than an OS one. The big difference with OS is that if the software blows up, you don't have to wait on the pleasure of your supplier to get it fixed.
With Open Source, you can also check the source code yourself and make sure that the really critical stuff isn't missing a \n in a critical place.
Open source doesn't make software perfect -- It just makes it easier to fix.
Pretty much have to be. Playing a Vampire Slayer is pretty physical. By the time you work your body into a shape that can handle the stunts, you're pretty much guaranteed to be in nice shape.
(personally, I always thought that Tara (Amber Benson) was the babe of the Buffy series).