When did Free Speech become about allowing more bits to be pushed around in the network? Raw data can't be speech; information has to be meaningful and understandable, and understood, to be speech. Running an open mail relay, especially one which is known to be relaying spam, viruses, etc, actually hampers the flow of free speech, since it makes valuable information more difficult to find amid the junk.
If you want to apply the usual ethics about freedom of speech, you ought to require him to use some form of authentication for his friends, to ensure that their speech is accessable (since he won't be blacklisted) and free of excessive noise (spam, viruses).
VPN tunneling, IMAP, shell accounts, webmail, authenticated POP, and POP over SSH come to mind.
Of course, I'm assuming that spam and viruses are not valuable examples of free speech in action, a view that may be difficult to justify. I consider them to not be speech for the same reason that I don't think the signals generated by a garage door opener are speech--they are signals, possibly meaningful in some context, whose intended purpose as used is to cause some event to occur. The spammer says, "I push this button, and our monthly page views go up!"; the virus distributor says, "I push this button, and 3y3 0wnz j00!"; I say, "I push this button, and my garage opens!" In none of these cases is the button pusher trying to convey any information to another person. If the signal (virus, merchandise, scam) is itself an object of conversation, I can see it being speech, but that context isn't relevant to open mail relays.
Your analogy limps pretty badly. I think that few people would deny that plans and blueprints are preferred methods of communications among civil engineers. The bridge itself would be more like object code, which only the truly l33t use to communicate with other humans. Source code, on the other hand, is perfectly valid means of communication. Ever see a civil engineering textbook with an actual bridge in it? How about a programming book with source code?
No, not really. With DNS, non-authoritative servers keep a cache of lookups, but the lookups don't keep floating around on the cable. If another non-authoritative server needs to look up the same record, it has to establish another connection.
With this system, the data stays on the line. If it were used for DNS, that would mean something like the root servers would broadcast their _entire_ database, and the packets would keep circling the loop for a while until the root servers update them again. Any lookups, then, would only have to look at the packets already there; no connection necessary.
Of course, 10GB isn't nearly enough storage capacity to hold all the root servers' data. And that doesn't even include any subdomains. Their data would have to be there too if DNS would really work like that.
It could be really cool for distributed processing, though. Reserve a certain portion of the available bandwidth as shared memory, so that every box can read simultaneously. I think that's more what the article had in mind.
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To go outside the mythos is to become insane...
So what about Debian? Which isolated region will it be relegated to? And to think, you said "the American is idealistic," using Red Hat. I suppose if people never travel, and multilingual/multicultural people never spread ideas across language or culture boundaries, then Linux distros will become wildly divergent. The core kernel will be essentially the same, though.
Interestingly enough, though, I use Debian. My neighbor uses Red Hat. Another neighbor uses Slackware. My best friend uses SuSE. Another friend uses (gasp) FreeBSD. All within an hour's drive of good-old-English-speaking Detroit, Michigan. Of course, I speak a little Spanish, and the SuSE user fluently reads and writes ancient Greek, but I don't think either of those facts influenced our distro choices. We're all native English speakers.
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To go outside the mythos is to become insane...
Yes, in fact, there is book piracy. Lots of it. I used to work for a bookstore across the street from a major engineering company. Every week, eight or ten engineers would come in and _each_ buy $800 or so in mechanical engineering, programming, UNIX administration, and database books. The following week, they would return all those books, having freshly photocopied them, and purchase more. We had a three-ring binder full of names of people who were never allowed to return books at our store for this reason.
Do I think there should be more legal restrictions on book piracy? No. I think, for example, that teachers should be able to make copies to distribute in classes, especialy for book excerpts. You want to keep a photocopy of your book to read on the bus and not risk ruining the original? Go ahead. Want to type up an HTML version of your book and read it from any of your computers? Just don't advertize it to the general public. Loan your book to a friend? Feel free. Copying books is not much more difficult than copying software.
And book publishers don't labor under the delusion that they still own the book after you buy it. Copyright doesn't work that way, contrary to what music and video publishers would have you believe. You buy the *right* to view/listen to/read the material packaged in the media. The media itself is irrelevant. If I buy a book, I simultaneously buy the right to put that book's text on audio tape, CD, DVD, mp3, video of me reading, other paper, transparency, braille rock carving, and whatever other media I find convenient for getting that text into my head. If I buy a DVD, I buy the same package of rights, but the manufacturers and publishers have decided that I can't be trusted to have the tools to exercise those rights.
I have a DVD of a Stevie Ray Vaughan concert. I bought it. Legally. In a store. The right to consume that content is mine. And it's damn cool to see the way his hands fly over the guitar. But I'd like to take the audio portion, put it on CD, and listen to it in my car. Law lets me do this. I'm not selling, renting, giving, loaning, etc. this material to anyone else. I'm taking audio that I have paid for the right to hear and putting it on another medium that is more convenient for me. Nothing is wrong with this, except that companies won't make hardware that does it for fear of getting their asses sued off for selling something that *could* allow someone to make illegal copies. Time to ban Xerox machines. Throw out the pencil, you could transcribe the lyrics to a Popular Band(tm) song with that. It's dangerous!
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To go outside the mythos is to become insane...
The story you reference speaks only about rewriting existing apps. The whole basis of the author's argument is that all your code has already been debugged and used, and throwing it away reintroduces most of the bugs that you spent all that time fixing. If you're writing software for the first time, you don't have that tested codebase to begin with. Scrapping all the code for version 0.001 and rewriting from scratch for 0.002 makes sense if that will make debugging easier. That's completely different from writing a major upgrade for an existing piece of software.
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To go outside the mythos is to become insane...
Coasters stick to the bottom of coffee cups because the condensation forms a seal around the bottom of the cup. Lifting the cup tries to expand the air trapped between the curved surface of the cup and the coaster. If the air does not expand enough, or the surface tension of the condensation ring doesn't break, then the coaster lifts. With a hole in the center, air from the room can enter between the coaster and cup and equalize the pressure, which lets the coaster fall. So AOL realized that no matter how light they make their coasters, they will never stick to coffee cups (as long as the coffee ring doesn't act like glue). Since light coasters work as well as heavy coasters when there's a hole in the middle, AOL can save lots of money by making them lighter.
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To go outside the mythos is to become insane...
What possible good does it do to give script-kiddies the tools they need to bust systems that, otherwise, they are too stupid to be able to figure out themselves?
It gives people who run their own systems a very conrete way to tell if they're vulnerable. When I'm not sure if my particular config is vulnerable, I'll grab an exploit and see for myself.
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To go outside the mythos is to become insane...
While there was commercial software, there was open source, too. I got my start in the mid '80s on a TI-99/4a. All my software came from printouts and MicroPendium (sp? It's been a long time) Magazine. Hell, I didn't even have a disk drive. All my "closed source" software was in cartridge form. We didn't have the term "open source" because it was inconceivable that you could get software without source code (And no, it wasn't all in BASIC. I had a bunch of assembly code too. It was harder to read, but still source.) And I started decades late, in terms of when free (in any sense) source code was common.
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To go outside the mythos is to become insane...
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to apply the usual ethics about freedom of speech, you ought to require him to use some form of authentication for his friends, to ensure that their speech is accessable (since he won't be blacklisted) and free of excessive noise (spam, viruses). VPN tunneling, IMAP, shell accounts, webmail, authenticated POP, and POP over SSH come to mind.
Of course, I'm assuming that spam and viruses are not valuable examples of free speech in action, a view that may be difficult to justify. I consider them to not be speech for the same reason that I don't think the signals generated by a garage door opener are speech--they are signals, possibly meaningful in some context, whose intended purpose as used is to cause some event to occur. The spammer says, "I push this button, and our monthly page views go up!"; the virus distributor says, "I push this button, and 3y3 0wnz j00!"; I say, "I push this button, and my garage opens!" In none of these cases is the button pusher trying to convey any information to another person. If the signal (virus, merchandise, scam) is itself an object of conversation, I can see it being speech, but that context isn't relevant to open mail relays.
Your analogy limps pretty badly. I think that few people would deny that plans and blueprints are preferred methods of communications among civil engineers. The bridge itself would be more like object code, which only the truly l33t use to communicate with other humans. Source code, on the other hand, is perfectly valid means of communication. Ever see a civil engineering textbook with an actual bridge in it? How about a programming book with source code?
No, not really. With DNS, non-authoritative servers keep a cache of lookups, but the lookups don't keep floating around on the cable. If another non-authoritative server needs to look up the same record, it has to establish another connection.
With this system, the data stays on the line. If it were used for DNS, that would mean something like the root servers would broadcast their _entire_ database, and the packets would keep circling the loop for a while until the root servers update them again. Any lookups, then, would only have to look at the packets already there; no connection necessary.
Of course, 10GB isn't nearly enough storage capacity to hold all the root servers' data. And that doesn't even include any subdomains. Their data would have to be there too if DNS would really work like that.
It could be really cool for distributed processing, though. Reserve a certain portion of the available bandwidth as shared memory, so that every box can read simultaneously. I think that's more what the article had in mind.
--
To go outside the mythos is to become insane...
So what about Debian? Which isolated region will it be relegated to? And to think, you said "the American is idealistic," using Red Hat. I suppose if people never travel, and multilingual/multicultural people never spread ideas across language or culture boundaries, then Linux distros will become wildly divergent. The core kernel will be essentially the same, though.
Interestingly enough, though, I use Debian. My neighbor uses Red Hat. Another neighbor uses Slackware. My best friend uses SuSE. Another friend uses (gasp) FreeBSD. All within an hour's drive of good-old-English-speaking Detroit, Michigan. Of course, I speak a little Spanish, and the SuSE user fluently reads and writes ancient Greek, but I don't think either of those facts influenced our distro choices. We're all native English speakers.
--
To go outside the mythos is to become insane...
Yes, in fact, there is book piracy. Lots of it. I used to work for a bookstore across the street from a major engineering company. Every week, eight or ten engineers would come in and _each_ buy $800 or so in mechanical engineering, programming, UNIX administration, and database books. The following week, they would return all those books, having freshly photocopied them, and purchase more. We had a three-ring binder full of names of people who were never allowed to return books at our store for this reason.
Do I think there should be more legal restrictions on book piracy? No. I think, for example, that teachers should be able to make copies to distribute in classes, especialy for book excerpts. You want to keep a photocopy of your book to read on the bus and not risk ruining the original? Go ahead. Want to type up an HTML version of your book and read it from any of your computers? Just don't advertize it to the general public. Loan your book to a friend? Feel free. Copying books is not much more difficult than copying software.
And book publishers don't labor under the delusion that they still own the book after you buy it. Copyright doesn't work that way, contrary to what music and video publishers would have you believe. You buy the *right* to view/listen to/read the material packaged in the media. The media itself is irrelevant. If I buy a book, I simultaneously buy the right to put that book's text on audio tape, CD, DVD, mp3, video of me reading, other paper, transparency, braille rock carving, and whatever other media I find convenient for getting that text into my head. If I buy a DVD, I buy the same package of rights, but the manufacturers and publishers have decided that I can't be trusted to have the tools to exercise those rights.
I have a DVD of a Stevie Ray Vaughan concert. I bought it. Legally. In a store. The right to consume that content is mine. And it's damn cool to see the way his hands fly over the guitar. But I'd like to take the audio portion, put it on CD, and listen to it in my car. Law lets me do this. I'm not selling, renting, giving, loaning, etc. this material to anyone else. I'm taking audio that I have paid for the right to hear and putting it on another medium that is more convenient for me. Nothing is wrong with this, except that companies won't make hardware that does it for fear of getting their asses sued off for selling something that *could* allow someone to make illegal copies. Time to ban Xerox machines. Throw out the pencil, you could transcribe the lyrics to a Popular Band(tm) song with that. It's dangerous!
--
To go outside the mythos is to become insane...
The story you reference speaks only about rewriting existing apps. The whole basis of the author's argument is that all your code has already been debugged and used, and throwing it away reintroduces most of the bugs that you spent all that time fixing. If you're writing software for the first time, you don't have that tested codebase to begin with. Scrapping all the code for version 0.001 and rewriting from scratch for 0.002 makes sense if that will make debugging easier. That's completely different from writing a major upgrade for an existing piece of software.
--
To go outside the mythos is to become insane...
Coasters stick to the bottom of coffee cups because the condensation forms a seal around the bottom of the cup. Lifting the cup tries to expand the air trapped between the curved surface of the cup and the coaster. If the air does not expand enough, or the surface tension of the condensation ring doesn't break, then the coaster lifts. With a hole in the center, air from the room can enter between the coaster and cup and equalize the pressure, which lets the coaster fall. So AOL realized that no matter how light they make their coasters, they will never stick to coffee cups (as long as the coffee ring doesn't act like glue). Since light coasters work as well as heavy coasters when there's a hole in the middle, AOL can save lots of money by making them lighter.
--
To go outside the mythos is to become insane...
What, do you think it isn't? I don't know any geeks who haven't launched spuds at least a few times.
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To go outside the mythos is to become insane...
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To go outside the mythos is to become insane...
While there was commercial software, there was open source, too. I got my start in the mid '80s on a TI-99/4a. All my software came from printouts and MicroPendium (sp? It's been a long time) Magazine. Hell, I didn't even have a disk drive. All my "closed source" software was in cartridge form. We didn't have the term "open source" because it was inconceivable that you could get software without source code (And no, it wasn't all in BASIC. I had a bunch of assembly code too. It was harder to read, but still source.) And I started decades late, in terms of when free (in any sense) source code was common.
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To go outside the mythos is to become insane...
Umm...no. That story is still there, if you mean "Red Hat Claims They Started the Open Source Revolution" I just reloaded the main page to make sure.
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To go outside the mythos is to become insane...