I agree that the election was fixed. So was the last one. So impeach the SOBs! Get their criminal asses thrown in jail, and demand that politicians be accountable for their actions.
If I see that happen, then I'll see some hope for the US recovering.
With all due respect, nuts to your nation. The reelection of Bush lost any sympathy the US might have had in the world community. The sad thing is that there are about 150 million Americans who don't support him, and many of them are intelligent reasonable people, who are getting painted with the brush of "Citizens of Bush's America."
I fully expect to see the US become a has-been world power before I die, and I'm sad to say that they've dug their own grave. What really scares me though, is the collateral damage that the rest of the world will suffer.
First of all, this isn't because Debian is a bad distro--it's actually very good.
It's also not actually because of the painfully slow release model that Debian uses. It's a problem, yes, but not THIS problem.
The problem is that software and OS development shouldn't be about politics and beaurocracy; and quite honestly, people are getting TIRED of the political aspect of the whole damned open source universe.
Write software. Release it according to whatever license you see fit. If you're spending any time at all worrying about election turnout or such things, then register a trademark, get a business license, and start making money. Just keep it all somewhere else.
Every time a web page fails to render in a CSS2-compliant web page, we should file bug reports. Every single #$@&(@$& time. If you're a developer, file one for every page you write that follows CSS2 and doesn't work properly in IE.
Make them suffer by not complying. Cause them enough grief to change their mind.
"But original software is way too expensive, especially for people without their own income."
Um...how do people with no income have computers?
"So piracy will exist as long as prices are so big that allow people to become so rich as to have more money than entire countries."
This is incorrect, or at least incomplete.
Piracy will exist as long as prices are non-zero. If you're charging for something, someone will want a free copy of it. Always. Period.
As an aside, I still haven't seen anyone give an argument showing how someone could be FORCED to use a particular piece of software. You make your own choices. Being "forced" to use a tool is based on your own previously decided constraints (You're going to become a programmer, you're not going to quit when your company puts you on a Windows program, you want(!) to learn Windows, etc.)
Is the software too expensive? Yes, most of it (games generally are dirt cheap for the cost of them), but so what? Either suffer, change the market, or get out.
1) As someone else pointed out, 'market forces' are not coercion. 2) You're getting a paycheck. Buy the fucking software. (Counterpoint: If you're not getting a paycheck, then there's no supposed coercion) 3) OpenOffice opens MSOffice documents quite well, and creates them very well. 4) Exactly who is forcing you to use a computer at all? Are you functionally incapable of doing any non-computing work?
"If you've never given it out then you can't get spammed by definition."
Sure you can. I see it at work all the time. Collect the prefix of an existing email address and append it to a different domain name. "bob237@hotmail.com" becomes "bob237@localisp.com," "bob237@yahoo.com," "bob237@yourcompany.com" and so forth. Not a huge deal for the user bob237 (but a big pain for the mail admins), but a significantly larger one for the user bob.smith@...
Synthetic addresses are a HUGE part of spam. How do I protect myself from that.
And once again, how exactly do I tell spammers that I don't want to talk to them, when they falsify their contact information, and don't read what gets through to them anyways?
Is there anything here that hasn't been said better already by Bruce Schnier? For that matter, is there anything here that Mitnick himself didn't already say in his trial?
People are the weakest link in any security system. This is so well known that it's not even worth talking about, unless you have a new way around it. Kevin, sadly, does not. Training people doesn't work. Not only is your security only as strong as the weakest link in the chain, but it's only as strong as the weakest occurence of that weak link. In other words, unless you can GUARANTEE that 100% of your employees won't be susceptible, training them beyond the obvious (which should be presentable in a half-hour lecture) isn't a useful endeavor.
Schnier has it right: Protection is only a way of giving yourself more time for the detection and response mechanisms to kick in. You won't ever get a secure system by locking all the doors.
Hmm. Now putting my email on a web page with no qualifications is an invitation for mail. Putting my address on a web page with a footnote "ONLY FOR NONCOMMERCIAL COMMUNICATION DIRECTLY RELATED TO THE SUBJECT MATTER OF THIS WEBSITE" or some such thing, I'm explicitly disallowing spam. If I don't have a web page, have never given my email address out publicly, have made absolutely SURE that I clear the "spam me" button (or select the "don't spam me" one, whatever), when I have to give a (reputable?) company an email address, etc., etc.; then I'm also explicitly disallowing spam.
I get well over 100 spam a day to an address that I've NEVER given out.
There are two aspects to the crime here: #1 is the damage to the victim, and spam is definitely less damaging than being beaten or raped. The other is the scale of the victim, which is where it gets trickier. Rape is an act against a person. Spam is an act that damages our society. That's why such laws (and similarly, fraud) have what are otherwise draconian punishments.
Spam is not free speech. You keep saying it is, and you keep pointing that you're a lawyer, but at the end of the day, spam requires the use of MY resources, and I have to explicitly give permission to use those resources.
Maybe the air in your car tires should be up for grabs. I'll come and fill my air tank from your tires, because hey--someone might actually not mind me doing so, and preventing me from getting that air interferes with my freedom of action!
Let's look at this again: "There is no legally significant difference between someone sending you a million emails and someone sending you a million pieces of junk mail."
Yes there is. Bulk junk mail is paid for by the sender. Bulk email is paid for by me.
"In both cases, you can refuse to accept them, or can throw them away unseen, and with virtually no effort on your part."
Try being a professional mail admin at a large company, and then come back and tell me that. In addition to the tens of thousands of dollars we spend on servers, software, and maintenance costs to stop spam, we probably put 10-20 man-hours per week into the problem.
As a lefty long-haired anti-capitalist freak, I...agree. The oil companies know better than anyone just how big their primary and secondary reserves are, and they're scared. That fear has driven them to a certain degree of responsibility, simply because they need to be far-sighted to survive.
Note to RSM: Here's a motherboard. The bios can be flashed onto it. Nobody is preventing you from writing a bios for it, so quit pontificating and screeching, and write the @#$#(*&%@ thing if you want it! Isn't that what open source is all about, after all?
Mark my words. In two years, this will be back, and people will be less resistant. Five years after that, it will become a nationally mandatory perogative.
Personal security erodes over time. Always. Period. Get used to it.
Most companies who base their licensing on processors don't _care_ how many computers you run it on. We've been buying licenses on a per-processor basis in large-scale SMP boxes for decades.
Kind of unfair for the guy who buys a single-processor pizza box for a local database to have to pay the same as someone running a fully populated Sunfire F25k (72 dual-core processors). If you're going to charge $100 per machine, then it doesn't matter, except that Oracle can't survive on $100/machine.
Essentially open source. Go join the consortium, and start building your own processor. Of course, you need your own Fab plant, engineers, material supply chains, circuit designers...
Oh, what do you know? Open source doesn't fix everything after all!
"That's like saying "WHAT? Eating GRUBS??? At least you got FOOD!!!" Sorry, that doesn't wash. Not any more. Not with responsible adults, anyway."
That's almost exactly the response I got from our VP last week, curiously. I suggested that a consulting company charging overtime to customers when you weren't paying any to your employees was a bit questionable, and was told that I should be grateful I ever got hired in the first place.
Interesting. One thing about Apple that's always been different though, is that they have NEVER been a company that existed for the sole purpose of making money. When times were tough, when their stock was at $17, when they seemed about to go belly up, they never turned into a corporate cretin with no focus other than the next quarter's financials. That's always been Apple's biggest strength AND weakness.
HP, on the other hand, seems to have exiled all of their inventiveness, their creativity, their originality, off to Agilent. I don't see anything at HP left to spark a fire.
I hope I'm wrong, but I've seen too many companies turn into greenback zombies.
...for a year. Push out deadlines appropriately. Let them lose money for a year because they didn't support their infrastructure, and THEN announce your new job, unless they get their shit together ASAP.
"Basically, Carly raided HP for millions of dollars for her own greedy ass self. She got huge bonuses while the company declined. While thousands of people lost their jobs at the height of the tech recession, she gave herself a $37million raise. She, and all the plutocratic shitbags like her is the reason why this country is going down the shitter at warp speed."
Amen.
She gutted Lucent, announced when hired on that she was going to gut HP as well, and then proceeded to do just that. She's exactly the sort of amoral corporate criminal that gets rewarded with $21M bonuses for destroying companies, rather than getting tossed in the stocks, where she belongs.
Don't count on HP recovering, though. Business doesn't DO that anymore. If your company is good to work for, it means that you're not squeezing hard enough yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Ron, eh? Would that be Ron Millette, by chance?
I agree that the election was fixed. So was the last one. So impeach the SOBs! Get their criminal asses thrown in jail, and demand that politicians be accountable for their actions.
If I see that happen, then I'll see some hope for the US recovering.
With all due respect, nuts to your nation. The reelection of Bush lost any sympathy the US might have had in the world community. The sad thing is that there are about 150 million Americans who don't support him, and many of them are intelligent reasonable people, who are getting painted with the brush of "Citizens of Bush's America."
I fully expect to see the US become a has-been world power before I die, and I'm sad to say that they've dug their own grave. What really scares me though, is the collateral damage that the rest of the world will suffer.
First of all, this isn't because Debian is a bad distro--it's actually very good.
It's also not actually because of the painfully slow release model that Debian uses. It's a problem, yes, but not THIS problem.
The problem is that software and OS development shouldn't be about politics and beaurocracy; and quite honestly, people are getting TIRED of the political aspect of the whole damned open source universe.
Write software. Release it according to whatever license you see fit. If you're spending any time at all worrying about election turnout or such things, then register a trademark, get a business license, and start making money. Just keep it all somewhere else.
Every time a web page fails to render in a CSS2-compliant web page, we should file bug reports. Every single #$@&(@$& time. If you're a developer, file one for every page you write that follows CSS2 and doesn't work properly in IE.
Make them suffer by not complying. Cause them enough grief to change their mind.
That's nice. Tell me just how well your AMD box stacks up to my Sun F2900.
I love (and own) AMD systems, but they don't compete beyond 2-4 processors. Increasingly, that's where Sun's market is.
"But original software is way too expensive, especially for people without their own income."
Um...how do people with no income have computers?
"So piracy will exist as long as prices are so big that allow people to become so rich as to have more money than entire countries."
This is incorrect, or at least incomplete.
Piracy will exist as long as prices are non-zero. If you're charging for something, someone will want a free copy of it. Always. Period.
As an aside, I still haven't seen anyone give an argument showing how someone could be FORCED to use a particular piece of software. You make your own choices. Being "forced" to use a tool is based on your own previously decided constraints (You're going to become a programmer, you're not going to quit when your company puts you on a Windows program, you want(!) to learn Windows, etc.)
Is the software too expensive? Yes, most of it (games generally are dirt cheap for the cost of them), but so what? Either suffer, change the market, or get out.
1) As someone else pointed out, 'market forces' are not coercion.
2) You're getting a paycheck. Buy the fucking software. (Counterpoint: If you're not getting a paycheck, then there's no supposed coercion)
3) OpenOffice opens MSOffice documents quite well, and creates them very well.
4) Exactly who is forcing you to use a computer at all? Are you functionally incapable of doing any non-computing work?
Just a note here.
"If you've never given it out then you can't get spammed by definition."
Sure you can. I see it at work all the time. Collect the prefix of an existing email address and append it to a different domain name. "bob237@hotmail.com" becomes "bob237@localisp.com," "bob237@yahoo.com," "bob237@yourcompany.com" and so forth. Not a huge deal for the user bob237 (but a big pain for the mail admins), but a significantly larger one for the user bob.smith@...
Synthetic addresses are a HUGE part of spam. How do I protect myself from that.
And once again, how exactly do I tell spammers that I don't want to talk to them, when they falsify their contact information, and don't read what gets through to them anyways?
Is there anything here that hasn't been said better already by Bruce Schnier? For that matter, is there anything here that Mitnick himself didn't already say in his trial?
People are the weakest link in any security system. This is so well known that it's not even worth talking about, unless you have a new way around it. Kevin, sadly, does not. Training people doesn't work. Not only is your security only as strong as the weakest link in the chain, but it's only as strong as the weakest occurence of that weak link. In other words, unless you can GUARANTEE that 100% of your employees won't be susceptible, training them beyond the obvious (which should be presentable in a half-hour lecture) isn't a useful endeavor.
Schnier has it right: Protection is only a way of giving yourself more time for the detection and response mechanisms to kick in. You won't ever get a secure system by locking all the doors.
Hmm. Now putting my email on a web page with no qualifications is an invitation for mail. Putting my address on a web page with a footnote "ONLY FOR NONCOMMERCIAL COMMUNICATION DIRECTLY RELATED TO THE SUBJECT MATTER OF THIS WEBSITE" or some such thing, I'm explicitly disallowing spam. If I don't have a web page, have never given my email address out publicly, have made absolutely SURE that I clear the "spam me" button (or select the "don't spam me" one, whatever), when I have to give a (reputable?) company an email address, etc., etc.; then I'm also explicitly disallowing spam.
I get well over 100 spam a day to an address that I've NEVER given out.
There are two aspects to the crime here: #1 is the damage to the victim, and spam is definitely less damaging than being beaten or raped. The other is the scale of the victim, which is where it gets trickier. Rape is an act against a person. Spam is an act that damages our society. That's why such laws (and similarly, fraud) have what are otherwise draconian punishments.
Spam is not free speech. You keep saying it is, and you keep pointing that you're a lawyer, but at the end of the day, spam requires the use of MY resources, and I have to explicitly give permission to use those resources.
Maybe the air in your car tires should be up for grabs. I'll come and fill my air tank from your tires, because hey--someone might actually not mind me doing so, and preventing me from getting that air interferes with my freedom of action!
Let's look at this again:
"There is no legally significant difference between someone sending you a million emails and someone sending you a million pieces of junk mail."
Yes there is. Bulk junk mail is paid for by the sender. Bulk email is paid for by me.
"In both cases, you can refuse to accept them, or can throw them away unseen, and with virtually no effort on your part."
Try being a professional mail admin at a large company, and then come back and tell me that. In addition to the tens of thousands of dollars we spend on servers, software, and maintenance costs to stop spam, we probably put 10-20 man-hours per week into the problem.
Spam is theft, NOT free speech. Period.
As a lefty long-haired anti-capitalist freak, I...agree. The oil companies know better than anyone just how big their primary and secondary reserves are, and they're scared. That fear has driven them to a certain degree of responsibility, simply because they need to be far-sighted to survive.
Note to RSM: Here's a motherboard. The bios can be flashed onto it. Nobody is preventing you from writing a bios for it, so quit pontificating and screeching, and write the @#$#(*&%@ thing if you want it! Isn't that what open source is all about, after all?
When someone says, "This is the ONLY solution" they're almost invariably wrong.
Biodiesel is one good solution, and may end up being the one that wins out. But it's far from the only viable one.
I know it's a long shot, but what if it's actually a GOOD MOVIE?
I'm not expecting it either, but it's at least theoretically possible.
Mark my words. In two years, this will be back, and people will be less resistant. Five years after that, it will become a nationally mandatory perogative.
Personal security erodes over time. Always. Period.
Get used to it.
Most companies who base their licensing on processors don't _care_ how many computers you run it on. We've been buying licenses on a per-processor basis in large-scale SMP boxes for decades.
Kind of unfair for the guy who buys a single-processor pizza box for a local database to have to pay the same as someone running a fully populated Sunfire F25k (72 dual-core processors). If you're going to charge $100 per machine, then it doesn't matter, except that Oracle can't survive on $100/machine.
Ever hear of SPARC?
Essentially open source. Go join the consortium, and start building your own processor. Of course, you need your own Fab plant, engineers, material supply chains, circuit designers...
Oh, what do you know? Open source doesn't fix everything after all!
"That's like saying "WHAT? Eating GRUBS??? At least you got FOOD!!!" Sorry, that doesn't wash. Not any more. Not with responsible adults, anyway."
That's almost exactly the response I got from our VP last week, curiously. I suggested that a consulting company charging overtime to customers when you weren't paying any to your employees was a bit questionable, and was told that I should be grateful I ever got hired in the first place.
Fuck I hate the corporate mentality.
Interesting. One thing about Apple that's always been different though, is that they have NEVER been a company that existed for the sole purpose of making money. When times were tough, when their stock was at $17, when they seemed about to go belly up, they never turned into a corporate cretin with no focus other than the next quarter's financials. That's always been Apple's biggest strength AND weakness.
HP, on the other hand, seems to have exiled all of their inventiveness, their creativity, their originality, off to Agilent. I don't see anything at HP left to spark a fire.
I hope I'm wrong, but I've seen too many companies turn into greenback zombies.
...for a year. Push out deadlines appropriately. Let them lose money for a year because they didn't support their infrastructure, and THEN announce your new job, unless they get their shit together ASAP.
"Basically, Carly raided HP for millions of dollars for her own greedy ass self. She got huge bonuses while the company declined. While thousands of people lost their jobs at the height of the tech recession, she gave herself a $37million raise. She, and all the plutocratic shitbags like her is the reason why this country is going down the shitter at warp speed."
Amen.
She gutted Lucent, announced when hired on that she was going to gut HP as well, and then proceeded to do just that. She's exactly the sort of amoral corporate criminal that gets rewarded with $21M bonuses for destroying companies, rather than getting tossed in the stocks, where she belongs.
Don't count on HP recovering, though. Business doesn't DO that anymore. If your company is good to work for, it means that you're not squeezing hard enough yet.