So you think you deserve federal aid if your house does get flattened, knowing you live in an area with that risk? That's my problem with it. If you take a risk, cover yourself (insurance or otherwise). Don't expect the rest of us to care..
Quakes are far more rare (as far as actually damaging something) than tornados. Mudslides? Don't live on a river. Fire? Don't live out in the brush. Volcanoes? That's even more rare than quakes.
Tornadoes seem to happen all the time though, every year. And yet people still choose to live in these dangerous areas. They keep getting tons of federal aid to rebuild their houses (maybe not the same specific people each time), every single year.
I say, if you choose to live somewhere unsafe, don't expect the feds to come bail you out. Btw, I'm equally upset about folks living on the California coast whose houses sink into the water/slide, and then have them rebuilt again with other people's money. So I'm not just venting against repeat tornado victims.:)
A compromise would be to hand the developers the game specification documentation and let them choose the language/hardware. Whoever meets the most bullet points in the game spec wins, or whatever metric you want to use..
Sure. The executables are small enough you could probably store them in a directory on each of your slices and each of your partitions in the slices. I like the idea, and I've taken advantage of it before when I couldn't mount / but I could convince the kernel to mount/usr as / in single user.
So what would you suggest? First you say "if anyone can make a certificate, then it's no good", then you say "If I do not qualify to be an ISP, then the internet is a lot less attractive to me". Do you want it such that only ISPs can make certificates, but the only qualification to be an ISP is to run your own mail server? Wouldn't that be the same thing as everyone making a certificate?
Perhaps there could be a few central CAs, run by non-profits (keep Verisign OUT!), to manage signing ISP CAs. That way ISPs couldn't just make their own all the time and expect them to work.
It's more restrictive, but you could presumably get your ISP to sign your certificate. And, if you really wanted to for some reason, you could try to get them to sign your CA, so you could issue certificates.
The cut-off-domains strategy is not very successful today because it's done so very poorly. Many (or most?) spam fighting organizations believe in colateral damage above all else, and more importantly are not run responsibly, so a lot of admins are wary to use them.
However, if the admins could easily turn on and off certain MTAs or CAs access to their mail servers, at will, that would be far more useful. The admins would have the tools to better be in control and to more easily manage the situation.
A lot of spam does come through open relays - a lot also comes through open form feedback scripts. Both would be taken care of by this sort of thing. Even if the form feedback script sent signed e-mails, it'd be trivial to add their signature to the block list.
Personally, I like the idea of every ISP being its own CA and signing for its customers. People could choose not to trust CAs or not to trust specific customers of those CAs. Much easier than the systems we have in place now (IP blocks, keyword parsing).
It's not that I have it disabled, btw. I enjoy some flash. Especially things like Homestar Runner. But, there's no flash client available for FreeBSD (I've tried to use the one in ports but I haven't had much luck and honestly.. haven't spent much time on it.)
But enough of my rants, on to Anti-BB rants! I do appreciate it, as I have shopped there relatively frequently, I'd like to know what to watch out for.
I went to bestbuysux.org, but I don't see anything. I might be missing the magic link to the horror stories. All I see is some 7-11 article. I even checked the source.
Any hints? Or are you suggesting that Best Buy perpetrated the stuff that happened around 2001?
I don't think MS's EULA lets you publish benchmarks of their software, but I could be wrong (that might just be.NET, dunno if 2003 is included). But at least someone could do the Linux side of it.
So now's the opportunity for someone on the Linux side of the fence to issue their own benchmarks, eh? Er, that is, if the MS EULA allows it..
Still, someone could at least try to duplicate the Linux side of the test, describe how they tuned the server, including docs on how people can do it themselves.
That is - view this as an opportunity rather than an invitation to fight and bicker over how they stacked the deck (as if it was the first non-impartial benchmark ever.)
Someone's not doing exactly what you want, you have the option of ignoring him or accepting it because they offer something you want. Am I getting that right?:) Where's the problem here?
Ok, maybe life insurance is different, but I, like most people, have been introduced to the concept of insurance through auto and health insurance companies, which apparently operate VERY differently.
Automotive insurance is required, in my state (or you can put up a bond, if you have the means). You don't get anything back from this if you don't get in an accident during the time you're insured, and it costs a hell of a lot more than $100/year. It's also mandatory to carry comprehensive/collision if you have a car loan. Also, money you never see again, even if you never get into an accident or have any claims.
Health insurance isn't required, but the health insurance companies have employers convinced that if the employee chooses not to have the insurance, that the employee is not to receive additional compensation to make up for it. Last I checked, my health insurance costs the company upwards of $250/mo, while I have required approximately $100 in healthcare over the last 3 or 4 years. Which, btw, went straight to the deductable.
Same with the life insurance provided by the company, except that I've never tried to make a claim on it.
So, I hope you can see why I view all insurance as a scam, or at least witih suspicion - all insurance I've ever dealt with has been a scam.
Maybe it's unfair of me to lump life insurance into it, but I suspect I'm not the only one who's suspicious. Maybe life insurance companies would do well to distance themselves from car and health insurance whereever possible.
I'm not so quick to sacrifice the usefulness of e-mail in order to stop receiving spam. "If your software miscategorizes incoming mail as spam, the terrorists have already won."
But I guess that's the difference between us, the thresholds we'll allow, for a bit of short-term comfort.
The "ask process queue" the other guy posted about sounds like it could be neat. Better if it was a URL you could go to and just click reload periodically.
It's really hard, especially when spammers start playing tricks like putting 3 character random comments between every other letter. If ISPs started checking that out for each message, their load would increase, and spammers would find a new way around it. Ever escalating, with the ISP bearing the brunt of it.
And then what do you do when you say.. sign up for online banking for the first time. They try to send you an e-mail to confirm, but you never receive it. You don't know if they're using thebank.com, thebankonline.com, thebankaccess.com, genericonlinetemplate.com, etc, so you can't whitelist them ahead of time.
The bank could tell you "You will receive an e-mail from foo@bar.com", but they don't at this time, and getting them to change seems like an uphill battle..
Huh, last I saw the US was trying to make sure that spamming is legal, at least for most organizations (politicians, non-profits which can do surveys "Do you prefer the crisp, cool taste of Coca Cola classic to the sewage taste of Pepsi?", etc), with laws written by the DMA.
I view it as a scam because that $100,000 has to come from somewhere - in the case of getting the policy and dying 2 years later, everyone else in the system gets to split the payout for your early death. Also, because of the way this is set up, if there was some sort of mass plague, it could wipe out the insurance company along with its customers, leaving everyone "high and dry". The insurance company could also just have a waiver for mass plagues, still leaving everyone "high and dry".
I don't necessarily like the idea of having everyone else pay for my early death, and I see the system as something that could crumble unless the ins co's play games like not paying benefits for random reasons (or delaying for years as in the case of this offtopic thread). Then again, I don't like the idea of one person being so dependant on another that life insurance is considered necessary.
Not to sound too harsh, but there is always going to be some sort of risk involved in business dealings. More so with insurance companies*. Basically, the moral I take from the story you presented is not to trust that life insurance will definitely be paid out upon my death. If I thought a spouse would need money after I died, I'd diversify. I'd buy some life insurance*, invest in some mutual funds, make sure bills are all paid, etc.
* Of course, I would never actually buy life insurance. Talk about scam among scams. Everyone dies, so how can they make money? By scamming you or the next guy to come along (one way or another).
Burn a backup copy of an OS capable of viewing DivX (FreeBSD w/ mplayer does great) onto one of those DVDs and store it with the collection, just in case. So long as you still have a computer around that can boot FreeBSD (or XP or whatever you choose) you should be OK.
So you think you deserve federal aid if your house does get flattened, knowing you live in an area with that risk? That's my problem with it. If you take a risk, cover yourself (insurance or otherwise). Don't expect the rest of us to care..
Quakes are far more rare (as far as actually damaging something) than tornados. Mudslides? Don't live on a river. Fire? Don't live out in the brush. Volcanoes? That's even more rare than quakes.
:)
Tornadoes seem to happen all the time though, every year. And yet people still choose to live in these dangerous areas. They keep getting tons of federal aid to rebuild their houses (maybe not the same specific people each time), every single year.
I say, if you choose to live somewhere unsafe, don't expect the feds to come bail you out. Btw, I'm equally upset about folks living on the California coast whose houses sink into the water/slide, and then have them rebuilt again with other people's money. So I'm not just venting against repeat tornado victims.
Is glibc out of favor now then? I seem to remember having to have a few different versions of that laying around.
If they're all perfect, 100% matches on the spec, then whoever did it "best" wins - fastest, smoothest, best interface, etc.
:)
Basically, turn it in to an actual *programming* competition rather than a design and programming competition.
Unless, of course, they'd rather have it be the latter, but then they can't call it a pure programming competition.
To me, things like "Perl golf" count as a programming competition.
A compromise would be to hand the developers the game specification documentation and let them choose the language/hardware. Whoever meets the most bullet points in the game spec wins, or whatever metric you want to use..
Sure. The executables are small enough you could probably store them in a directory on each of your slices and each of your partitions in the slices. I like the idea, and I've taken advantage of it before when I couldn't mount / but I could convince the kernel to mount /usr as / in single user.
Yep - what is it, OBD3? The one that transmits data back to the manufacturer/world? Whee.
So what would you suggest? First you say "if anyone can make a certificate, then it's no good", then you say "If I do not qualify to be an ISP, then the internet is a lot less attractive to me". Do you want it such that only ISPs can make certificates, but the only qualification to be an ISP is to run your own mail server? Wouldn't that be the same thing as everyone making a certificate?
Perhaps there could be a few central CAs, run by non-profits (keep Verisign OUT!), to manage signing ISP CAs. That way ISPs couldn't just make their own all the time and expect them to work.
It's more restrictive, but you could presumably get your ISP to sign your certificate. And, if you really wanted to for some reason, you could try to get them to sign your CA, so you could issue certificates.
The cut-off-domains strategy is not very successful today because it's done so very poorly. Many (or most?) spam fighting organizations believe in colateral damage above all else, and more importantly are not run responsibly, so a lot of admins are wary to use them.
However, if the admins could easily turn on and off certain MTAs or CAs access to their mail servers, at will, that would be far more useful. The admins would have the tools to better be in control and to more easily manage the situation.
A lot of spam does come through open relays - a lot also comes through open form feedback scripts. Both would be taken care of by this sort of thing. Even if the form feedback script sent signed e-mails, it'd be trivial to add their signature to the block list.
Personally, I like the idea of every ISP being its own CA and signing for its customers. People could choose not to trust CAs or not to trust specific customers of those CAs. Much easier than the systems we have in place now (IP blocks, keyword parsing).
Thanks.
It's not that I have it disabled, btw. I enjoy some flash. Especially things like Homestar Runner. But, there's no flash client available for FreeBSD (I've tried to use the one in ports but I haven't had much luck and honestly.. haven't spent much time on it.)
But enough of my rants, on to Anti-BB rants! I do appreciate it, as I have shopped there relatively frequently, I'd like to know what to watch out for.
I went to bestbuysux.org, but I don't see anything. I might be missing the magic link to the horror stories. All I see is some 7-11 article. I even checked the source.
Any hints? Or are you suggesting that Best Buy perpetrated the stuff that happened around 2001?
I don't think MS's EULA lets you publish benchmarks of their software, but I could be wrong (that might just be .NET, dunno if 2003 is included). But at least someone could do the Linux side of it.
So now's the opportunity for someone on the Linux side of the fence to issue their own benchmarks, eh? Er, that is, if the MS EULA allows it..
Still, someone could at least try to duplicate the Linux side of the test, describe how they tuned the server, including docs on how people can do it themselves.
That is - view this as an opportunity rather than an invitation to fight and bicker over how they stacked the deck (as if it was the first non-impartial benchmark ever.)
Someone's not doing exactly what you want, you have the option of ignoring him or accepting it because they offer something you want. Am I getting that right? :) Where's the problem here?
Want to see something neat?
Click this. Then click the box next to michael. Then scroll to the bottom and click save. Voila, no michael.
I don't have a problem with michael, but it's sure nice that if I did, I wouldn't have to read his posts. The tools exist, use 'em.
So their stock price is up ~20% over the last five years? Is that supposed to be bad?
Ok, maybe life insurance is different, but I, like most people, have been introduced to the concept of insurance through auto and health insurance companies, which apparently operate VERY differently.
Automotive insurance is required, in my state (or you can put up a bond, if you have the means). You don't get anything back from this if you don't get in an accident during the time you're insured, and it costs a hell of a lot more than $100/year. It's also mandatory to carry comprehensive/collision if you have a car loan. Also, money you never see again, even if you never get into an accident or have any claims.
Health insurance isn't required, but the health insurance companies have employers convinced that if the employee chooses not to have the insurance, that the employee is not to receive additional compensation to make up for it. Last I checked, my health insurance costs the company upwards of $250/mo, while I have required approximately $100 in healthcare over the last 3 or 4 years. Which, btw, went straight to the deductable.
Same with the life insurance provided by the company, except that I've never tried to make a claim on it.
So, I hope you can see why I view all insurance as a scam, or at least witih suspicion - all insurance I've ever dealt with has been a scam.
Maybe it's unfair of me to lump life insurance into it, but I suspect I'm not the only one who's suspicious. Maybe life insurance companies would do well to distance themselves from car and health insurance whereever possible.
I'm not so quick to sacrifice the usefulness of e-mail in order to stop receiving spam. "If your software miscategorizes incoming mail as spam, the terrorists have already won."
But I guess that's the difference between us, the thresholds we'll allow, for a bit of short-term comfort.
The "ask process queue" the other guy posted about sounds like it could be neat. Better if it was a URL you could go to and just click reload periodically.
It's really hard, especially when spammers start playing tricks like putting 3 character random comments between every other letter. If ISPs started checking that out for each message, their load would increase, and spammers would find a new way around it. Ever escalating, with the ISP bearing the brunt of it.
And then what do you do when you say.. sign up for online banking for the first time. They try to send you an e-mail to confirm, but you never receive it. You don't know if they're using thebank.com, thebankonline.com, thebankaccess.com, genericonlinetemplate.com, etc, so you can't whitelist them ahead of time.
The bank could tell you "You will receive an e-mail from foo@bar.com", but they don't at this time, and getting them to change seems like an uphill battle..
Huh, last I saw the US was trying to make sure that spamming is legal, at least for most organizations (politicians, non-profits which can do surveys "Do you prefer the crisp, cool taste of Coca Cola classic to the sewage taste of Pepsi?", etc), with laws written by the DMA.
:)
I could be wrong though.
I view it as a scam because that $100,000 has to come from somewhere - in the case of getting the policy and dying 2 years later, everyone else in the system gets to split the payout for your early death. Also, because of the way this is set up, if there was some sort of mass plague, it could wipe out the insurance company along with its customers, leaving everyone "high and dry". The insurance company could also just have a waiver for mass plagues, still leaving everyone "high and dry".
I don't necessarily like the idea of having everyone else pay for my early death, and I see the system as something that could crumble unless the ins co's play games like not paying benefits for random reasons (or delaying for years as in the case of this offtopic thread). Then again, I don't like the idea of one person being so dependant on another that life insurance is considered necessary.
Not to sound too harsh, but there is always going to be some sort of risk involved in business dealings. More so with insurance companies*. Basically, the moral I take from the story you presented is not to trust that life insurance will definitely be paid out upon my death. If I thought a spouse would need money after I died, I'd diversify. I'd buy some life insurance*, invest in some mutual funds, make sure bills are all paid, etc.
* Of course, I would never actually buy life insurance. Talk about scam among scams. Everyone dies, so how can they make money? By scamming you or the next guy to come along (one way or another).
Burn a backup copy of an OS capable of viewing DivX (FreeBSD w/ mplayer does great) onto one of those DVDs and store it with the collection, just in case. So long as you still have a computer around that can boot FreeBSD (or XP or whatever you choose) you should be OK.
Spelling flames need misspellings. Its the law.
"I am so smart, S M R T! I mean S M A R T." obSimpsonRef