RMS came onto the OpenBSD-misc mailing list in January to inform the subscribers that he had deemed OBSD to be non-free. Much wonderment ensued.
It transpired that the ports collection contained some non-free software. If one pkg_adds such software one sees a warning that the package is considered non-free, but this was not sufficient for RMS. It seems that he'd rather a user be inhibited from installing any non-free software that be allowed to express free will.
His position has now been set to music in the OpenBSD 4.3 theme song, ``Home to Hypocrisy''.
I don't personally use non-free software but neither would I consider preventing others from doing so.
> NewEgg has a few color laser printers in the $200 range, so I find your post to be highly suspect.
Generally the toner cartridges are about $100 ( 50 UKP here for HP ) and the printer won't function if one of the four CMYK carts runs-dry. So I don't know if the fabled cost-benefit of lasers holds true anymore.
> But hey, China still does not have one - so #4, here we come...
China is hedging its bets. It is a participant in Galileo and is also maintaining a regional positioning system using Beidou sats.
The latter was announced to be operational with only two geostationary sats launched, which is insufficient to provide positional data. This led to speculation that the ground station had to perform an iterative calculation of the user's altitude before determining position and relaying this back via the sats.
Since then, a third and a fourth sat were launched ( sufficient to remove time bias and allow receivers to calculate position ) and now a fifth.
> unless you belive the NSA has a secret lab of mathmaticians that > are years ahead of the rest of them, Hell no.
Hell, yes. You might like to familiarise yourself with the story of the DES S-boxes. NSA cryptologists were 20 years ahead of the field. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that differential cryptanalysis became known to public researchers and, no surprise, the mysterious changes that the NSA had recommended to the s-box design did indeed harden the cypher against this vector.
Nonsense! My UK ISP guarantees no throttling, port blocking or traffic shaping, all for about 3 UKP more than the average monthly charge and a contract period of just four weeks. They do have transfer caps on all packages but AFAIK you can select up to 60 GB.
I'm not mentioning them by name because we like the exclusivity! Look around and you'll find them.
> Something simple like runing a small phpBB system is now > a full time job because of all the bots infesting it.
I would normally suggest an up-front charge of, say, $10 per account through an online payment service that is credited back after a random period. Perhaps that is too cumbersome for an enthusiast board, though.
If your board is focused on a single hobby ( say, for example, WW2 warbirds ) then why not use a contextual question as part of the sign-up. Such as ``How many Fw 190s are in this image?'' or ``Who was the highest-scoring RAF NCO airman?''. Questions that no bot could answer and which also set the bar for membership.
> You expect these companies to just plop their product on the shelf quietly and hope that in a year or two word of mouth is so good they actually make a profit on it?
Absolutely.
Companies which rely on advertising are generally those making lowest-cost items that have offer no quality or durability in excess of the market median.
Have you ever seen an advertisement for Koga Bicycles? Or Hilleberg tents? Companies of that calibre have a different philosophy:
Make a quality product;
Submit products for competitive review;
Rely on word-of-mouth to spread their customer base.
> It's not the mail services themselves that are the problem,
Yes, it is.
The majority of the ``spam problem'' has arisen because some companies started to provide free e-mail accounts. This was not a humanitarian gesture on their part - they want eyeballs for their ads and demographics for their marketing.
Of course, human nature is to try and get something for free. So instead of using their ISP's e-mail service, or paying a nominal fee for hosted e-mail ( as part of their domain registration package, for example ) people flock to these free services. Spammers aren't far behind.
I have no sympathy for Google, Yahoo or Microsoft in this scenario and no sympathy for people too greedy and selfish to pay a fraction of an hour's earnings for an e-mail account that provides so much ongoing benefit.
> our only hope at this point is if the gov't becomes ensnarled in such gridlock that it grinds to a complete halt.
Not being a USian, I was under the impression that there were several avenues by which US citizens could resist overbearing government impositions. For example, some particular Amendments to your Constitution?
Alas, this appears only to be hyperbole. The only recourse is inaction.
> What worries me about Gandi is that they don't offer auto renewing
That may be because Gandi do not own the domain name, the purchaser does. They cannot extend the contract because they are not the owners of the domain.
On the plus side, this prevents the domain being locked-away indefinitely by being auto-renewed into the registrar's name. One domain name that I abandoned eight years ago is still being auto-renewed by the registrar in the vain hope that I might pay their extortionate fees.
> because most people keep their data in their home directory.
Are you sure? In every UNIX installation that I have experienced, and by extension on my own machine,/home/${USER} contains only dot-files. Yes, losing those would be a nuisance for a few hours, but all important data ( files, photos etc ) is under source control on other partitions. No user can rm -rf/svnroot.
> But the parts in question are from designs in the 1960s
These parts are not simple percussion fuses; these are Permissive Action Linked hardware.
PALs have been under constant development since the 1950s and ordnance packages are regularly updated with refined PALs.
A PAL will, for example, generate a detonation signal only when barometric, aerodynamic and cryptographic parameters are fulfilled.
Fortunately, PALs are designed to be tamper-proof. Well, the first generation wasn't overly robust ( along the lines of the old ``cut the red wire'' film plot ) but contemporary ones ( Level 5? ) are very sophisticated pieces of kit.
> Javascript is truly complex when it comes to cross-browser > compatibility and object management.
That's not Javascript's complexity, that's the DOM.
{Java|ECMA}script is an elegant language that can implement just about any programming paradigm that you desire ( functional, OO, AO, procedural... ).
``Cross-browser compatibility'' has nothing whatsoever to do with the ECMAScript spec. Here I am, executing some commands in the see-shell interpreter. I see no complexity.
> A typical cruise ship gets around 20 knots, so it would take > 150 hours, or a little over 6 days for the trip.
Cruise ship design and performance is orthogonal to that of ocean liners.
A typical mid-1930s monohull liner such as the ``Normandie'' could average 31 knots westbound and nearly 32 knots eastbound on the North Atlantic. If we assume that 70 years later we can only match that performance it still reduces the journey time to four days.
Towards the end of the ocean liner era vessels such as the ``France'' were designed which were intended to combine liner duties with off-peak cruising, excelling at neither role.
> We don't know how exactly what the service pack's code structure > looks like
Correct. But the code structure itself is a reflection of the company's competency or otherwise. If they created such an umanageable mess that they cannot perform modular upgrades, then this ultimately reflects on their design compentency.
You appear to be willing to give them a pass on this because OS Upgrades Are Difficult. Yes, they are. But to a company such as Microsoft, Difficult should not equate to Impossible.
> This isn't limited to computer science students.
Quite true, but why do Google restrict participation to students?
The first goal listed on their SoC FAQ is:
``Get more open source code created and released for the benefit of all''
So why exclude professional developers who could crank out code?
I would dearly like to take a two-month sabbatical from work and concentrate solely on writing code. There are huge voids in the provision of free astronomical tools that could be addressed. But finances dictate otherwise.
Instead, vast swathes of time and money will be wasted as students learn about version control, rediscover elementary mistakes and become entrapped in the politics of open source.
> The B2 has IR reducing measures as part of its design.
The entire airframe emits IR and there's nothing that can be done to defeat imaging IR sensors except, perhaps, to produce giant smokescreens ahead of the aircraft.
Some years ago at the SBAC Farnborough show an MBDA Rapier battery achieved a firing solution against the B-2 using IIR tracking. The footage was widely shown on TV. Of course this isn't directly relevant as the B-2 was outside its normal operating envelope but it does demonstrate that black body radiation is a bummer.
Slashdot Mirror
RMS came onto the OpenBSD-misc mailing list in January to inform the subscribers that he had deemed OBSD to be non-free. Much wonderment ensued.
It transpired that the ports collection contained some non-free software. If one pkg_adds such software one sees a warning that the package is considered non-free, but this was not sufficient for RMS. It seems that he'd rather a user be inhibited from installing any non-free software that be allowed to express free will.
His position has now been set to music in the OpenBSD 4.3 theme song, ``Home to Hypocrisy''.
I don't personally use non-free software but neither would I consider preventing others from doing so.
> NewEgg has a few color laser printers in the $200 range, so I find your post to be highly suspect.
Generally the toner cartridges are about $100 ( 50 UKP here for HP ) and the printer won't function if one of the four CMYK carts runs-dry. So I don't know if the fabled cost-benefit of lasers holds true anymore.
Me, I stocked-up on LaserJet II carts years ago!
> But hey, China still does not have one - so #4, here we come...
China is hedging its bets. It is a participant in Galileo and is
also maintaining a regional positioning system using Beidou sats.
The latter was announced to be operational with only two geostationary
sats launched, which is insufficient to provide positional data. This
led to speculation that the ground station had to perform an iterative
calculation of the user's altitude before determining position and relaying
this back via the sats.
Since then, a third and a fourth sat were launched ( sufficient to remove
time bias and allow receivers to calculate position ) and now a fifth.
> unless you belive the NSA has a secret lab of mathmaticians that
> are years ahead of the rest of them, Hell no.
Hell, yes. You might like to familiarise yourself with the story
of the DES S-boxes. NSA cryptologists were 20 years ahead of the
field. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that differential cryptanalysis
became known to public researchers and, no surprise, the mysterious
changes that the NSA had recommended to the s-box design did indeed
harden the cypher against this vector.
> I would remove every character that didn't *have* to be there for it to render properly.
Wouldn't it have been more efficient to enable server-side compression..? Then the characters that DID need to be there would have benefited, too.
> For my part, I eventually did cave in and block Google Groups-originating posts entirely.
A great many people, myself included, concur.
I don't necessarily agree with the language and sentiment expressed by the initiator of that project, but his principle is sound.
I have submitted a number of Usenet spam reports through Google Group's unlinked contact page, but as expected no feedback or action resulted.
> they're all at it,
Nonsense! My UK ISP guarantees no throttling, port blocking or traffic shaping, all for about 3 UKP more than the average monthly charge and a contract period of just four weeks. They do have transfer caps on all packages but AFAIK you can select up to 60 GB.
I'm not mentioning them by name because we like the exclusivity! Look around and you'll find them.
Not all ISPs are evil.
> Something simple like runing a small phpBB system is now
> a full time job because of all the bots infesting it.
I would normally suggest an up-front charge of, say, $10 per
account through an online payment service that is credited
back after a random period. Perhaps that is too cumbersome
for an enthusiast board, though.
If your board is focused on a single hobby ( say, for example,
WW2 warbirds ) then why not use a contextual question as part of
the sign-up. Such as ``How many Fw 190s are in this image?''
or ``Who was the highest-scoring RAF NCO airman?''. Questions
that no bot could answer and which also set the bar for membership.
> For those of us without credit cards, it's usually the only option.
Hurrah for alternatives that accept cash!
Click And Buy
> You expect these companies to just plop their product on the shelf quietly and hope that in a year or two word of mouth is so good they actually make a profit on it?
Absolutely.
Companies which rely on advertising are generally those making lowest-cost items that have offer no quality or durability in excess of the market median.
Have you ever seen an advertisement for Koga Bicycles? Or Hilleberg tents? Companies of that calibre have a different philosophy:
> It's not the mail services themselves that are the problem,
Yes, it is.
The majority of the ``spam problem'' has arisen because some companies started to provide free e-mail accounts. This was not a humanitarian gesture on their part - they want eyeballs for their ads and demographics for their marketing.
Of course, human nature is to try and get something for free. So instead of using their ISP's e-mail service, or paying a nominal fee for hosted e-mail ( as part of their domain registration package, for example ) people flock to these free services. Spammers aren't far behind.
I have no sympathy for Google, Yahoo or Microsoft in this scenario and no sympathy for people too greedy and selfish to pay a fraction of an hour's earnings for an e-mail account that provides so much ongoing benefit.
> our only hope at this point is if the gov't becomes ensnarled in such gridlock that it grinds to a complete halt.
Not being a USian, I was under the impression that there were several avenues by which US citizens could resist overbearing government impositions. For example, some particular Amendments to your Constitution?
Alas, this appears only to be hyperbole. The only recourse is inaction.
> What worries me about Gandi is that they don't offer auto renewing
That may be because Gandi do not own the domain name, the purchaser does. They cannot extend the contract because they are not the owners of the domain.
On the plus side, this prevents the domain being locked-away indefinitely by being auto-renewed into the registrar's name. One domain name that I abandoned eight years ago is still being auto-renewed by the registrar in the vain hope that I might pay their extortionate fees.
> because most people keep their data in their home directory.
/home/${USER} contains only /svnroot.
Are you sure? In every UNIX installation that I have experienced,
and by extension on my own machine,
dot-files. Yes, losing those would be a nuisance for a few hours,
but all important data ( files, photos etc ) is under source control
on other partitions. No user can rm -rf
> However I do understand how breaks work.
Apparently not well enough to know how to spell BRAKES...
> I use linux and devote a virtual desktop to it.
Congratulations. You've just learned THE ENTIRE POINT of
virtual desktops: grouping related things
> # Blocking trash websites
> 127.0.0.2 doubleclick.net
> 127.0.0.2 doubleclick.com
That'll waste cycles actually trying to communicate.
Use 0.0.0.0 as the IP instead, as a null route. No packets
will be tx on that route.
> But the parts in question are from designs in the 1960s
These parts are not simple percussion fuses; these are Permissive
Action Linked hardware.
PALs have been under constant development since the 1950s and ordnance
packages are regularly updated with refined PALs.
A PAL will, for example, generate a detonation signal only when barometric, aerodynamic and cryptographic parameters are fulfilled.
Fortunately, PALs are designed to be tamper-proof. Well, the first generation
wasn't overly robust ( along the lines of the old ``cut the red wire'' film
plot ) but contemporary ones ( Level 5? ) are very sophisticated pieces of kit.
> Javascript is truly complex when it comes to cross-browser
> compatibility and object management.
That's not Javascript's complexity, that's the DOM.
{Java|ECMA}script is an elegant language that can implement just
about any programming paradigm that you desire ( functional,
OO, AO, procedural... ).
``Cross-browser compatibility'' has nothing whatsoever to do with
the ECMAScript spec. Here I am, executing some commands in the
see-shell interpreter. I see no complexity.
> A typical cruise ship gets around 20 knots, so it would take
> 150 hours, or a little over 6 days for the trip.
Cruise ship design and performance is orthogonal to that of ocean
liners.
A typical mid-1930s monohull liner such as the ``Normandie'' could
average 31 knots westbound and nearly 32 knots eastbound on the
North Atlantic. If we assume that 70 years later we can only match
that performance it still reduces the journey time to four days.
Towards the end of the ocean liner era vessels such as the ``France''
were designed which were intended to combine liner duties with
off-peak cruising, excelling at neither role.
But I reckon dirigibles are the future...
> We don't know how exactly what the service pack's code structure
> looks like
Correct. But the code structure itself is a reflection of the
company's competency or otherwise. If they created such an
umanageable mess that they cannot perform modular upgrades, then
this ultimately reflects on their design compentency.
You appear to be willing to give them a pass on this because OS
Upgrades Are Difficult. Yes, they are. But to a company such as
Microsoft, Difficult should not equate to Impossible.
> code.google.com works for everyone.
There is no $4500 stipend to cover my sabbatical whilst I concentrate
on improving the lot of the World.
So it doesn't work for me.
> This isn't limited to computer science students.
Quite true, but why do Google restrict participation to students?
The first goal listed on their SoC FAQ is:
``Get more open source code created and released for the benefit of all''
So why exclude professional developers who could crank out code?
I would dearly like to take a two-month sabbatical from work and
concentrate solely on writing code. There are huge voids in the
provision of free astronomical tools that could be addressed. But
finances dictate otherwise.
Instead, vast swathes of time and money will be wasted as students
learn about version control, rediscover elementary mistakes and
become entrapped in the politics of open source.
Thanks for nothing, Google.
> The B2 has IR reducing measures as part of its design.
The entire airframe emits IR and there's nothing that can
be done to defeat imaging IR sensors except, perhaps,
to produce giant smokescreens ahead of the aircraft.
Some years ago at the SBAC Farnborough show an MBDA Rapier
battery achieved a firing solution against the B-2 using
IIR tracking. The footage was widely shown on TV. Of course
this isn't directly relevant as the B-2 was outside its normal
operating envelope but it does demonstrate that black body
radiation is a bummer.
> I was aware we had cool toys, but not THIS cool:
Compared to the Safeguard Perimeter Acquisition Radar, that's just a toy.
The PAR consumed more than 7MW operating and was built from 100,000 tons of
concrete and nearly 8,000 tons of steel.
Here's a picture:
http://srmsc.org/par2000.html