And everytime I see a site that has a FAQ that's not a Wiki I cringe. Most sites might as well call it a NFAQ (not-frequently asked questions). Exactly who's questions do they typically answer (not mine), and how many times do I have to ask a question before it becomes frequent? Or for that matter, how do I even ask a question? For 95% of the FAQs out there those are hard to answer questions.
The advantage of a Wiki is that the users can guide the content, rather than some marketing droid making up questions he wished users asked.
[Sure, I do know there are supposed FAQ applications which allow users to post questions, but nobody seems to use those either. A Wiki makes it immediate.]
None. As long as you're not using active cooling (such as refrigeration, chilling, peltiers, etc) then ambient humidity will have the same effect with or without water cooling. Condensation is only a problem if you attempt cooling below the ambient air temperature. Almost all watercooling setups are passive (in terms of heat transfer, not pumping).
Watercooling is just an extremely efficient way to move heat from point A to point B (the CPU die to the radiator). It's not really "cooling" per se.
What's next, banning cell phone cameras in book stores, or libraries?
This sort of HTML onfuscation abuse is just the beginning. This is a general problem with any sufficiently rich presentation language. There are hundreds of different ways to obfuscate things.
Just wait until MS finally decides to properly support PNG alpha transparency! Combine this with CSS absolute positioning, and you'll start seeing images which are composited from many different layers of semi-translucent images; each of which is just noise of it's own. You also have already seen for a long time the cutting up of images into many small pieces.
This could be taken to an extreme as well. With absolute positioning you could also do this with text as well as images. Just position each letter on the page separately and randomize the order in which they appear in the HTML stream. Or even worse, use a custom downloaded font, where the glyphs are all randomized, so although it may look like an "A", it's really in the slot for a "Q"...try to cut and paste that.
Consider the PDF format as an extreme of where XHTML+CSS+DHTML+PNG can go wrt. obfuscation. Sure, the determined and savy can always get the text copied out; but that doesn't mean its not going to be very difficult.
I've thought exactly that since this was first discussed. This is essentially a watermarking technique. But if all graphics software is mandated not to allow editing or printing of any images which contain that watermark pattern, then what's to prevent anybody from abusing that just like the DMCA to prevent fair use by just embedding that watermark on everything. You'll soon see those little O-patterns on every page in magazines and CD album art.
Come on, that theory just doesn't make sense. If I wanted "unbiased" information about the latest in kidnapping those "evil" Americans, would I look to Al-Jezerra as the best source because it's closest?
You can't pick one example as proof of a theory of bias, and especially so when you define "lack of bias" as whatever viewpoint you agree with.
And what do you mean "particularly under this latest administration". Since when is the popular news media the mouthpiece for the administration...especially this one?
This seems like it's making the same old assumptions. That *if* it's music or video, then the copyright *must* be owned by RIAA/MPAA. This is all about control, not copyrights.
If I own the copyright (say because I produced it), or I have the permission of the copyright owner (which may be, gasp, somebody besides the **AA); then WHY in the world can't I do with it what I want? I certainly can give somebody a copy of a book in secrety; or even leave a copy of a newspaper on my chair when I'm done reading it (which is anonymous distribution).
Oh, and what about PUBLIC DOMAIN media files?
See, this whole thing still seems to be the big media industries trying to shut out independent artisits and producers of content. The whole piracy thing is just a smokescreen; the excuse. What they really want is to make it illegal or impossible for anybody besides them to "traffic" in media.
I have had a very favorable experience with AOL. We got blacklisted by them once (not because we were intentionally spamming, but that's when spammers first started taking advantage of "bounce" message hacking).
Anyway after contacting AOL I was able to talk to a postmaster (a real human) on the phone, and he was very pleasant and we worked to resolve the problem within the day. And they also established the feedback loop for us, which actually is a pretty nice service. If for whatever reason spammers get smart again and learn how to hack around SMTP to make us look like spammers, AOL now gives us information and a warning that it is happening and we have a chance to correct it before getting blacklisted.
Now, about SPF and the like, the nice thing about them is that they can allow us to prevent spammer abuse where spammers pretend to be us.
Yes, thanks for the clarification. I was aware of those issues, I just didn't feel like making my post more complicated than necessary to make my point (which was about the legal issues with the file format, not the specifics of typesetting).
I should have said the autohinter works better in *most* cases, since the vast majority of fonts (by quantity) are very poorly hinted or have no hinting. There are exceptions though where very high quality hints are given in fonts, in which case autohinting may produce inferior (yet usable) results. And yes, autohinting definitely works better for "western-style" glyphs.
Do you remember the TrueType font file format? Specifically the "hinting" that was in the file. Since the hints themselves were written in what was arguably a very simple "algorithmic language", they were legally treated as software programs rather than just data. Hence why opensource/free software has to legally ignore the hinting portions of the TrueType file format. (Fortunately for us, their autohinting algorithms turned out to produce better results than explicit hinting).
Usually when someone mentions "XOR" encryption without any further details, the assumption is that one of the two arguments is fixed. And that is very easily broken.
True the XOR operation itself is perhaps one of the most important fundamental operators in cryptography, and when used correctly (like in the one-time-pad) can be extremely secure. But if one of the arguments is fixed (or worse, zero), then it's of little benifit.
Re:Nope, wrong, invalid.. nothing to see here.
on
The End of Encryption?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Additionally it should be noted that there are many complexity classes other than just P and NP, and there are many X such that X > P and X > NP.
So even IF the P?=NP question applies, it doen't mean that cryptography itself is doomed. Just that harder problems might need to be used as the basis.
On first glance the temperment T vs F argument seems to make a lot of sense. But it's not that easy. First, each of the traits are interlinked to some extent; so what a T or F means is somewhat dependent upon the other three traits. And again, the temperments do not define nice little boxes into which each person neatly fits (and stays). The temperment only provides an indication of a person's "norm", without any influence.
Being a T means that you tend to favor reason over emotion (all things being equal). But it doesn't mean you're a Vulcan devoid of feeling. If there's not much logic to be found (or both sides are equally logical), you will trust your emotion. Also being a T has nothing to do with intelligence or the ability to reason correctly...you can be a T and still have a completely flawed understanding of logic. Furthermore, when there outward is stress applied in your decision (such as "will terrorists kill me", or "will higher taxes mean I can't feed my family"), then it's common for a person to act counter to their natural temperment.
The strongest correlation seems to be the whole red states vs blue states...or the geographical environment of urban vs. rural. And as far as I know people of different temperments seem to mix fairly uniformly (as long as you exclude college campuses).
Nonetheless, it is an interesting observation that at least taken on whole, that conservatives tend to argue with logic, while liberals tend to argue with emotion. I wonder if that has always been true, or is just the current manifestation of conservative/libreral mob-think.
No, the "purpose" of patents was to encourge the disclosure of knowledge. The "means" by which it does this is to grant a limited monopoly to those who publically disclose information.
Never do patents protect or grant the right for someone to make money, nor do they even grant the right to use/manufacture the idea that was patented. Patents only restrict anybody else from making money or otherwise using the idea.
This is why the "don't look, don't know" advice is so indicative of a really messed up system. In order to minimize your legal liability, you have to not look at patents...which means the primary purpose of patents (the disclosure and distribution of knowledge) is directly subverted by the very law establishing them.
That's still way to bloated to scale properly to the multiple-thousand user's you're talking about. Anything that requires a separate network connection for each user, and/or requires the server to keep track of all the "listeners" is not very practical.
The better technology for this is multicasting. And specifically the new and much improved multicasting technology built into IPv6.
Re:Running out of IPv6 (not)
on
IPv6 is Here
·
· Score: 2, Informative
IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses. For those who can't count that high, let's see, thats:
in decimal. Just try to use all those up! Well, as long as you don't let the spammers onboard first.
IANA request
on
IPv6 is Here
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The IANA request that ICANN support IPv6 on its root servers is found here. And the timeline given then was:
"...the first of the IPv6 glue records will be added to the root zone on 28 June [2004]."
This is just the first step to real world-wide IPv6 deployment (replacing the mbone experimental setup). You still need to get all the intermediaries like ISPs up to speed.
Tell that one to Netscape, Inc. Netscape was synonomous with "browser", or heck, even with the word "Internet". And Gates was even going around saying the Internet was just a fad. And still the big monopoly crushed them.
Now at least Google doesn't appear to be asleep at the wheel like Netscape was, but Microsoft is sort of like Wal Mart. Doesn't matter who you are or how superior your product/service; if they enter your market you have to be running scared.
The biggest item of interest is all the patents Google has. I normally hate software patents, but that may be what saves Google from the big MS monopoly. And since Google uses Linux, they can flaunt them a bit more than most companies.
Re:Why all the MTA anti-sendmail holy wars?
on
Postfix 2.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Then you really need to check out the latest sendmail. It is WAY better than older releases. I think most of the FUD against sendmail is because nobody is looking at it's current features or design, only what it *was* say 5 or more years ago. Sendmail has not stood still.
It uses capabilities, chroot jails, etc. It is nowdays very good about running with least priviledge, and only a very small kernel of code ever runs with root priviledge in a proper setup anyway. (or if at all if you OS supports capabilities).
The one potentially bad thing about your mention of Postfix using fixed-length records, is that is usually the root cause for buffer overflows. I'm not saying that Postfix is suseptible or not, but actually fixed-length records is not necessarily a universally good security policy. But at least Postfix has some policies, so I have nothing against it. I just can't stand sendmail bashing without the facts.
Why all the MTA anti-sendmail holy wars?
on
Postfix 2.1 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've been using sendmail for nearly 15 years in some pretty complex environments, and am pretty happy with it. But I have nothing against Postfix either (except it has been lacking features, for me, and sendmail works just grand).
I can't quite understand the religous flame wars over MTA choice either. I mean, I can kind of understand the whole emacs vs. vi or gnome vs. KDE. But why fight over MTA's? It seems there is an awful lot of hatred for sendmail, and for no good reason whatsoever. It's just stupid.
I think a lot of it has to do with sendmail having such a long and rich history; anything which has existed for over a decade tends to get a lot of newbie disapproval. Also the configuration can be rather complex, and I think most people who flame about sendmail just don't want to 'fess up to being too dumb to understand it (with my asbestos suit on), and so resort to juvinile name calling.
Also you have to remember that probably 95% or more of the/. readers never use an MTA in anything but the simplest of configurations. Most likely a home computer or a small LAN. Those who have to manage email for large corporations in very complex networks, etc., can appreciate all that raw power and flexibility of sendmail much more. But to most, it seems like an overly complex mess.
And about the security-flaw reasoning. That's just an easy way for flammers to badmouth sendmail without really giving true reasons. Any software which has had such a long history and unbiquitous use as sendmail has a history of security flaws. For that matter Unix itself has had an absolutely abismal security record. And yes, someday Postfix will have it's own history to brag about too. But in all cases the flaws were quickly fixed, and the vast majority of flaws required a very specific configuration to even be a problem. Also many security problems result from improper installation; you can run sendmail in a very security setup if you want (just avoid all the FUD about sendmail). You can't compare Postfix and sendmail based solely upon their history of security, because sendmail's history is decades longer than Postfix's. And sendmail has processed perhaps a million trillion times as many email messages as has Postfix over it's lifetime.
It's great to see this feature added! I've been using sendmail's milter feature (a very similar sockets-based "policy" API) for many years. And I can't live without it now, and there was no way I would even consider looking at any other MTA that didn't have a similar feature. I program my milter's in Python, a bit easier than C. But you should have your choice.
Of course I'm one of those very happy sendmail administrators (we do exist), and I have a relatively complex setup handling hundreds of thousands of messages per day, with very complex routing, etc. But perhaps Postfix is finally serious about providing an alternative (of course I also need TLS and IPv6 built-in like sendmail's had forever).
Why is it funny that the DHS is involved? (US Dept. of Homeland Security for the non-US folks) -- Maybe you were joking? It's hard to tell.
But isn't this exactly the sort of thing that the DHS *should* be involved in? Working with the folks that run the Internet backbone to try to eliminate severe vulnerabilities before they are exploited. And the scale of this one is so large and consequences so great, that having the DHS help coordinate everything is probably quite useful.
I think this is a case where the DHS are the good guys. And there's probably lots more cases that we never hear about.
Python has a few ways to write strings which make working with regular expressions much easier...
You can use """triple-quoted strings""", which can contain newlines and so forth.
You can also use raw strings, with an 'r' prefix, as in r"a\backlash"...which turns off all \-style preprocessing. So that eliminates most cases where you have multiple-backslash explosion.
Their March 2004 Report is online, as well as archives of past reports.
Do NOT rely on any "statistics" from politically motivated people or organizations such as Robert Reich, or even any Republicans. Anybody can manipulate and cherry pick numbers to make them fit their political agenda. Use the BLS numbers only!
Unfortunately since almost all documentaries seem to be created for political/social agendas or with biases, I highly doubt that my suggestion will be used. That's why I as a potential film viewer will almost never watch a documentary on current events, regardless of the position or whether I agree with it. If it doesn't have footnotes and references I can check, I don't want to be fooled into thinking something is fact when it is not.
Did you even read the article? RMS never told Sun what to do. He was speaking to programmers who write software using Sun's Java platform. It is those programmers who think they are writing free software, and may not realize that it really is not free after all. His audience does not include Sun programmers; they are already aware that their software is not free--they need no warning.
He is cautioning those people who desire to write free software to reevaluate whether they are really achieving their own goals, to not be blinded by Java's sexiness and Sun's apparant benevolence. But to say that RMS want's to force Sun to do business in a different way is to read something that I'm not seeing in his article.
"Many of the things that I can do in java would be very hard in any other language..."
You really need to get out more. But I won't waste more space here debating technical misperceptions, this is about freedom.
"I write open source Java libraries under the GPL..."
Ahem, you mean free rather than open? That's RMS's whole point--it's not free. He never said it wasn't open.
"Planting open source seeds in the Java community will help in the liberation of the platform as a whole."
That's sure wishful thinking. I hope you're correct. But there's no way you can make it free. Only Sun can do that, and your seeds aren't falling inside their walls. That's like saying that writing GPL'ed software that runs under Windows will help in the liberation of the Windows platform. You're only fooling yourself, trying to justify using a sexy language. I commend you for GPL'ing your own programs, but you must not be fooled into complacency by your lack of freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
And everytime I see a site that has a FAQ that's not a Wiki I cringe. Most sites might as well call it a NFAQ (not-frequently asked questions). Exactly who's questions do they typically answer (not mine), and how many times do I have to ask a question before it becomes frequent? Or for that matter, how do I even ask a question? For 95% of the FAQs out there those are hard to answer questions.
The advantage of a Wiki is that the users can guide the content, rather than some marketing droid making up questions he wished users asked.
[Sure, I do know there are supposed FAQ applications which allow users to post questions, but nobody seems to use those either. A Wiki makes it immediate.]
None. As long as you're not using active cooling (such as refrigeration, chilling, peltiers, etc) then ambient humidity will have the same effect with or without water cooling. Condensation is only a problem if you attempt cooling below the ambient air temperature. Almost all watercooling setups are passive (in terms of heat transfer, not pumping).
Watercooling is just an extremely efficient way to move heat from point A to point B (the CPU die to the radiator). It's not really "cooling" per se.
What's next, banning cell phone cameras in book stores, or libraries?
This sort of HTML onfuscation abuse is just the beginning. This is a general problem with any sufficiently rich presentation language. There are hundreds of different ways to obfuscate things.
Just wait until MS finally decides to properly support PNG alpha transparency! Combine this with CSS absolute positioning, and you'll start seeing images which are composited from many different layers of semi-translucent images; each of which is just noise of it's own. You also have already seen for a long time the cutting up of images into many small pieces.
This could be taken to an extreme as well. With absolute positioning you could also do this with text as well as images. Just position each letter on the page separately and randomize the order in which they appear in the HTML stream. Or even worse, use a custom downloaded font, where the glyphs are all randomized, so although it may look like an "A", it's really in the slot for a "Q"...try to cut and paste that.
Consider the PDF format as an extreme of where XHTML+CSS+DHTML+PNG can go wrt. obfuscation. Sure, the determined and savy can always get the text copied out; but that doesn't mean its not going to be very difficult.
Maybe we should all go back to ASCII and lynx.
I've thought exactly that since this was first discussed. This is essentially a watermarking technique. But if all graphics software is mandated not to allow editing or printing of any images which contain that watermark pattern, then what's to prevent anybody from abusing that just like the DMCA to prevent fair use by just embedding that watermark on everything. You'll soon see those little O-patterns on every page in magazines and CD album art.
Perhaps there's a "shift-key" exploit for this?
Come on, that theory just doesn't make sense. If I wanted "unbiased" information about the latest in kidnapping those "evil" Americans, would I look to Al-Jezerra as the best source because it's closest?
You can't pick one example as proof of a theory of bias, and especially so when you define "lack of bias" as whatever viewpoint you agree with.
And what do you mean "particularly under this latest administration". Since when is the popular news media the mouthpiece for the administration...especially this one?
This seems like it's making the same old assumptions. That *if* it's music or video, then the copyright *must* be owned by RIAA/MPAA. This is all about control, not copyrights.
If I own the copyright (say because I produced it), or I have the permission of the copyright owner (which may be, gasp, somebody besides the **AA); then WHY in the world can't I do with it what I want? I certainly can give somebody a copy of a book in secrety; or even leave a copy of a newspaper on my chair when I'm done reading it (which is anonymous distribution).
Oh, and what about PUBLIC DOMAIN media files?
See, this whole thing still seems to be the big media industries trying to shut out independent artisits and producers of content. The whole piracy thing is just a smokescreen; the excuse. What they really want is to make it illegal or impossible for anybody besides them to "traffic" in media.
I have had a very favorable experience with AOL. We got blacklisted by them once (not because we were intentionally spamming, but that's when spammers first started taking advantage of "bounce" message hacking).
Anyway after contacting AOL I was able to talk to a postmaster (a real human) on the phone, and he was very pleasant and we worked to resolve the problem within the day. And they also established the feedback loop for us, which actually is a pretty nice service. If for whatever reason spammers get smart again and learn how to hack around SMTP to make us look like spammers, AOL now gives us information and a warning that it is happening and we have a chance to correct it before getting blacklisted.
Now, about SPF and the like, the nice thing about them is that they can allow us to prevent spammer abuse where spammers pretend to be us.
Yes, thanks for the clarification. I was aware of those issues, I just didn't feel like making my post more complicated than necessary to make my point (which was about the legal issues with the file format, not the specifics of typesetting).
I should have said the autohinter works better in *most* cases, since the vast majority of fonts (by quantity) are very poorly hinted or have no hinting. There are exceptions though where very high quality hints are given in fonts, in which case autohinting may produce inferior (yet usable) results. And yes, autohinting definitely works better for "western-style" glyphs.
Do you remember the TrueType font file format? Specifically the "hinting" that was in the file. Since the hints themselves were written in what was arguably a very simple "algorithmic language", they were legally treated as software programs rather than just data. Hence why opensource/free software has to legally ignore the hinting portions of the TrueType file format. (Fortunately for us, their autohinting algorithms turned out to produce better results than explicit hinting).
Usually when someone mentions "XOR" encryption without any further details, the assumption is that one of the two arguments is fixed. And that is very easily broken.
True the XOR operation itself is perhaps one of the most important fundamental operators in cryptography, and when used correctly (like in the one-time-pad) can be extremely secure. But if one of the arguments is fixed (or worse, zero), then it's of little benifit.
Additionally it should be noted that there are many complexity classes other than just P and NP, and there are many X such that X > P and X > NP.
So even IF the P?=NP question applies, it doen't mean that cryptography itself is doomed. Just that harder problems might need to be used as the basis.
On first glance the temperment T vs F argument seems to make a lot of sense. But it's not that easy. First, each of the traits are interlinked to some extent; so what a T or F means is somewhat dependent upon the other three traits. And again, the temperments do not define nice little boxes into which each person neatly fits (and stays). The temperment only provides an indication of a person's "norm", without any influence.
Being a T means that you tend to favor reason over emotion (all things being equal). But it doesn't mean you're a Vulcan devoid of feeling. If there's not much logic to be found (or both sides are equally logical), you will trust your emotion. Also being a T has nothing to do with intelligence or the ability to reason correctly...you can be a T and still have a completely flawed understanding of logic. Furthermore, when there outward is stress applied in your decision (such as "will terrorists kill me", or "will higher taxes mean I can't feed my family"), then it's common for a person to act counter to their natural temperment.
The strongest correlation seems to be the whole red states vs blue states...or the geographical environment of urban vs. rural. And as far as I know people of different temperments seem to mix fairly uniformly (as long as you exclude college campuses).
Nonetheless, it is an interesting observation that at least taken on whole, that conservatives tend to argue with logic, while liberals tend to argue with emotion. I wonder if that has always been true, or is just the current manifestation of conservative/libreral mob-think.
No, the "purpose" of patents was to encourge the disclosure of knowledge. The "means" by which it does this is to grant a limited monopoly to those who publically disclose information.
Never do patents protect or grant the right for someone to make money, nor do they even grant the right to use/manufacture the idea that was patented. Patents only restrict anybody else from making money or otherwise using the idea.
This is why the "don't look, don't know" advice is so indicative of a really messed up system. In order to minimize your legal liability, you have to not look at patents...which means the primary purpose of patents (the disclosure and distribution of knowledge) is directly subverted by the very law establishing them.
That's still way to bloated to scale properly to the multiple-thousand user's you're talking about. Anything that requires a separate network connection for each user, and/or requires the server to keep track of all the "listeners" is not very practical.
The better technology for this is multicasting. And specifically the new and much improved multicasting technology built into IPv6.
IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses. For those who can't count that high, let's see, thats:
, 45 6
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211
in decimal. Just try to use all those up! Well, as long as you don't let the spammers onboard first.
This is just the first step to real world-wide IPv6 deployment (replacing the mbone experimental setup). You still need to get all the intermediaries like ISPs up to speed.
Tell that one to Netscape, Inc. Netscape was synonomous with "browser", or heck, even with the word "Internet". And Gates was even going around saying the Internet was just a fad. And still the big monopoly crushed them.
Now at least Google doesn't appear to be asleep at the wheel like Netscape was, but Microsoft is sort of like Wal Mart. Doesn't matter who you are or how superior your product/service; if they enter your market you have to be running scared.
The biggest item of interest is all the patents Google has. I normally hate software patents, but that may be what saves Google from the big MS monopoly. And since Google uses Linux, they can flaunt them a bit more than most companies.
Then you really need to check out the latest sendmail. It is WAY better than older releases. I think most of the FUD against sendmail is because nobody is looking at it's current features or design, only what it *was* say 5 or more years ago. Sendmail has not stood still.
It uses capabilities, chroot jails, etc. It is nowdays very good about running with least priviledge, and only a very small kernel of code ever runs with root priviledge in a proper setup anyway. (or if at all if you OS supports capabilities).
The one potentially bad thing about your mention of Postfix using fixed-length records, is that is usually the root cause for buffer overflows. I'm not saying that Postfix is suseptible or not, but actually fixed-length records is not necessarily a universally good security policy. But at least Postfix has some policies, so I have nothing against it. I just can't stand sendmail bashing without the facts.
I've been using sendmail for nearly 15 years in some pretty complex environments, and am pretty happy with it. But I have nothing against Postfix either (except it has been lacking features, for me, and sendmail works just grand).
/. readers never use an MTA in anything but the simplest of configurations. Most likely a home computer or a small LAN. Those who have to manage email for large corporations in very complex networks, etc., can appreciate all that raw power and flexibility of sendmail much more. But to most, it seems like an overly complex mess.
I can't quite understand the religous flame wars over MTA choice either. I mean, I can kind of understand the whole emacs vs. vi or gnome vs. KDE. But why fight over MTA's? It seems there is an awful lot of hatred for sendmail, and for no good reason whatsoever. It's just stupid.
I think a lot of it has to do with sendmail having such a long and rich history; anything which has existed for over a decade tends to get a lot of newbie disapproval. Also the configuration can be rather complex, and I think most people who flame about sendmail just don't want to 'fess up to being too dumb to understand it (with my asbestos suit on), and so resort to juvinile name calling.
Also you have to remember that probably 95% or more of the
And about the security-flaw reasoning. That's just an easy way for flammers to badmouth sendmail without really giving true reasons. Any software which has had such a long history and unbiquitous use as sendmail has a history of security flaws. For that matter Unix itself has had an absolutely abismal security record. And yes, someday Postfix will have it's own history to brag about too. But in all cases the flaws were quickly fixed, and the vast majority of flaws required a very specific configuration to even be a problem. Also many security problems result from improper installation; you can run sendmail in a very security setup if you want (just avoid all the FUD about sendmail). You can't compare Postfix and sendmail based solely upon their history of security, because sendmail's history is decades longer than Postfix's. And sendmail has processed perhaps a million trillion times as many email messages as has Postfix over it's lifetime.
It's great to see this feature added! I've been using sendmail's milter feature (a very similar sockets-based "policy" API) for many years. And I can't live without it now, and there was no way I would even consider looking at any other MTA that didn't have a similar feature. I program my milter's in Python, a bit easier than C. But you should have your choice.
Of course I'm one of those very happy sendmail administrators (we do exist), and I have a relatively complex setup handling hundreds of thousands of messages per day, with very complex routing, etc. But perhaps Postfix is finally serious about providing an alternative (of course I also need TLS and IPv6 built-in like sendmail's had forever).
Why is it funny that the DHS is involved? (US Dept. of Homeland Security for the non-US folks) -- Maybe you were joking? It's hard to tell.
But isn't this exactly the sort of thing that the DHS *should* be involved in? Working with the folks that run the Internet backbone to try to eliminate severe vulnerabilities before they are exploited. And the scale of this one is so large and consequences so great, that having the DHS help coordinate everything is probably quite useful.
I think this is a case where the DHS are the good guys. And there's probably lots more cases that we never hear about.
Python has a few ways to write strings which make working with regular expressions much easier...
You can use """triple-quoted strings""", which can contain newlines and so forth.
You can also use raw strings, with an 'r' prefix, as in r"a\backlash"...which turns off all \-style preprocessing. So that eliminates most cases where you have multiple-backslash explosion.
The best factual source for these numbers is directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the US Department of Labor.
Their March 2004 Report is online, as well as archives of past reports.
Do NOT rely on any "statistics" from politically motivated people or organizations such as Robert Reich, or even any Republicans. Anybody can manipulate and cherry pick numbers to make them fit their political agenda. Use the BLS numbers only!
Unfortunately since almost all documentaries seem to be created for political/social agendas or with biases, I highly doubt that my suggestion will be used. That's why I as a potential film viewer will almost never watch a documentary on current events, regardless of the position or whether I agree with it. If it doesn't have footnotes and references I can check, I don't want to be fooled into thinking something is fact when it is not.
Did you even read the article? RMS never told Sun what to do. He was speaking to programmers who write software using Sun's Java platform. It is those programmers who think they are writing free software, and may not realize that it really is not free after all. His audience does not include Sun programmers; they are already aware that their software is not free--they need no warning.
He is cautioning those people who desire to write free software to reevaluate whether they are really achieving their own goals, to not be blinded by Java's sexiness and Sun's apparant benevolence. But to say that RMS want's to force Sun to do business in a different way is to read something that I'm not seeing in his article.
You really need to get out more. But I won't waste more space here debating technical misperceptions, this is about freedom.
Ahem, you mean free rather than open? That's RMS's whole point--it's not free. He never said it wasn't open.
That's sure wishful thinking. I hope you're correct. But there's no way you can make it free. Only Sun can do that, and your seeds aren't falling inside their walls. That's like saying that writing GPL'ed software that runs under Windows will help in the liberation of the Windows platform. You're only fooling yourself, trying to justify using a sexy language. I commend you for GPL'ing your own programs, but you must not be fooled into complacency by your lack of freedom.