the fact that our bodies don't make us good hunters
H. Sapiens is unquestionably the most successful hunter on the planet, for three reasons:
We communicate (and can therefore cooperate) with each other better than any other species. Humans successfuly hunted the largest and most dangerous animals using stone-age technology. Name one other species that was capable of bringing down a wooly mammoth in it's prime.
We're capable of abstract thought, which allows us to adopt more complex and effective hunting strategies.
We excel at using tools. Many species use tools (EG, sea otters use rocks to crack open shellfish), so the argument that using a pointy stick or a rock (or any other weapon) to hunt is somehow "unnatural" doesn't hold water.
At least in Maryland, you are legally entitled to be paid for accumulated vacation time (but not sick leave) when you leave. It's part of the pay you've already earned.
That's my experience too. I've only had one potential employer refuse to modify an IP agreement so that I retain ownership of my private work. Needless to say, I declined that offer.
In fact this issue makes a pretty good litmus test of whether you want to work for a company or not. If an employer tries to get you to sign your private life away, that should be a red flag which should make you dig deeper and question the company's motives. If they give you any resistance to changing the terms at all, RUN for the nearest exit.
Or even more to the point, the terms of the OSS license force the work to be released publicly.
For a company that relies on OSS software for it's core business, it may make financial sense to hire one of the core maintainers full-time, so that they are guaranteed to get the features and bug fixes THEY need.
the established parties unable to get their acts together
Unfortunately that is not the case today. The Republicans are very organized and disciplined -- just look at the Congressional voting record and see how many Republicans vote against the party line, particuarly on policy issues and spending. The main unifying force behind the GOP is, frightenly, the Religious Right; and their theocratic agenda is driving policy. The fiscal conservitives who are socially moderate are a distinct minority.
At the national level, the Democrats are floundering, but at the local level the Democratic machine is still chugging along strong as ever.
I don't consider "our business model has been made obsolete by technology" to be a legitimate gripe.
"Intellectual Property" is a legal fiction, created with the explicit purpose of encouraging progress in the arts and sciences. In the days before costless electronic duplication, granting a temporary legal monopoly on a work was a good strategy to achieve this end. However, modern technology has called into question the validity of this definition of "property". It's legitimate to challenge the notion that a particular combination of words, sounds, and images can be owned for all eternity (even if eternity is purchased on an installment plan).
I think tolerance and inclusion are far more important lessons than tying a knot or having a circle jerk about how much we love being Christians
If you want a Boy/Girl Scout type organization for your kids without the right wing Christian bias, I suggest you check out Spiral Scouts. Tolerance and inclusion are some of the key values that they teach. Knot tying is optional (but still a useful skill for campers to know).
Cancer: The problem there is, evolution doesn't optimize for the effeciency of individuals, but of the species as a whole. It's very possible that the flaw that allows for cancer (which seems to be present throughout most mammalian life) has other benefits.
Not necessarily. Cancer is largely irrelevant to (and immune from) evoloutionary forces because it typically does not affect creatures until after they are past breeding age. From an evolutionary standpoint, once you have passed on your genes and ensured the survival of your progeny, you are effectively irrelevant.
The only evolutionary argument I can see for cancer or other late-life diseases is that an early death after the breeding/childrearing years gives the species a survival advantage by reducing competition for scarce resources. A population that dies young might have an evoloutionary advantage over one with better longevity: because short life allows the environment to sustain a larger population of breeders and juveniles, the short-lived population would be able to out-breed the long-lived one.
Oh, should have mentioned that the best way to do it is to run squid (or some other web proxy) on bobshost, and configure your browser to use the forwarded port as it's proxy. This way, all your surfing will be done over the encrypted channel. It may be a bit slow, depending on how much bandwith bobshost has, but at least it's secure.
SSH tunnels are your friend. If you have sshd running on the webmail server, just do:
ssh -L 8888:localhost:80 bobshost.mydomain.com
Then browse to http://localhost:8888/ and the webserver on bobshost will think you're connecting from localhost. If you want to relay the connection to a third-party site, just do:
Either way, all your employer will see is the encrypted stream going to bobshost. Windows users can grab PuTTY if they need a SSH client. The plink utility is (mostly) command-line compatable with OpenSSH.
login attempts to invalid accounts automatically ban your ip, for example
Bad idea -- you're setting yourself up for a denial of service attack. All someone has to do is hit you with packets forged so they look like they're coming from some legitimate address, and the user at that address is banned.
I see the same kind of stuff in my SSH logs. The probes have a pretty consistant pattern, so I'm convinced it's an automated tool of some kind running on a compromised system. I think the most likely case is that it's a worm which looks for a specific sshd version with an exploitable bug or default installation. Looks likt this is just one more reason to enforce manditory public key authentication.
Example:
Apr 26 05:51:02 imladris sshd[10950]: Did not receive identification string from::ffff:84.247.44.80 Apr 26 05:52:49 imladris sshd[10967]: Invalid user anonymous from::ffff:84.247.44.80 Apr 26 05:52:51 imladris sshd[10967]: Failed password for invalid user anonymous from::ffff:84.247.44.80 port 3253 ssh2 Apr 26 05:52:54 imladris sshd[10969]: Invalid user bruce from::ffff:84.247.44.80 Apr 26 05:52:56 imladris sshd[10969]: Failed password for invalid user bruce from::ffff:84.247.44.80 port 3305 ssh2 Apr 26 05:52:59 imladris sshd[10971]: Invalid user chuck from::ffff:84.247.44.80 Apr 26 05:53:02 imladris sshd[10971]: Failed password for invalid user chuck from::ffff:84.247.44.80 port 3380 ssh2 Apr 26 05:53:05 imladris sshd[10973]: Invalid user darkman from::ffff:84.247.44.80 Apr 26 05:53:07 imladris sshd[10973]: Failed password for invalid user darkman from::ffff:84.247.44.80 port 3453 ssh2 Apr 26 05:53:10 imladris sshd[10975]: Invalid user hostmaster from::ffff:84.247.44.80 Apr 26 05:53:12 imladris sshd[10975]: Failed password for invalid user hostmaster from::ffff:84.247.44.80 port 3518 ssh2 Apr 26 05:53:15 imladris sshd[10977]: Invalid user jeffrey from::ffff:84.247.44.80 Apr 26 05:53:22 imladris sshd[10977]: Failed password for invalid user jeffrey from::ffff:84.247.44.80 port 3582 ssh2
This is a chatlog featuring some idiot. The reason this is not funny is simple: there are a million of this guy, and we've all seen it before.
It's funny BECAUSE we've seen it all before.
New recruits have been getting sent out for things like left-handed smoke shifters, buckets of prop wash, pieces of shore line, and similar fool's errands for as long as there have been armies. Gofer jokes and snipe hunts are old as the hills, but it's still funny when you find someone clueless enough to fall for one.
Pranking clueless newbies is a time-honored tradition, and is a necessary rite of passage for the prankee.
On looking at the weblogs, it looks like 80-90% of all traffic is attempted hacks
If your traffic pattern is like mine, 99% of these "hack" attempts are really IIS worms trying to propegate. It's sad to say that after nearly 4 years NIMDA, Code Red/Blue, and their spawn are still a daily annoyance. As long as you don't have an unpatched IIS instance open to the world, these attacks are no threat.
The worms were polluting my weblogs so badly that I had to set up conditional logging in Apache to send them to a seperate log:
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/c/winnt" ATTACK SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/c/winnt" NO_LOGACCESS # etc CustomLog logs/attack_log common env=ATTACK CustomLog logs/access_log common env=!NO_LOGACCESS
<Location/> Order Allow,Deny Allow from all Deny from env=ATTACK ErrorDocument 403 "Worm Attack - Access Denied" </Location>
None at all. Taco's trying to drum up ad impressions by posting an intentionally inflamatory article. Push the GPL Violation hot-button around here and people get more worked up than a bunch of Southern Baptists do over gay marriage.
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At least in Maryland, you are legally entitled to be paid for accumulated vacation time (but not sick leave) when you leave. It's part of the pay you've already earned.
In fact this issue makes a pretty good litmus test of whether you want to work for a company or not. If an employer tries to get you to sign your private life away, that should be a red flag which should make you dig deeper and question the company's motives. If they give you any resistance to changing the terms at all, RUN for the nearest exit.
For a company that relies on OSS software for it's core business, it may make financial sense to hire one of the core maintainers full-time, so that they are guaranteed to get the features and bug fixes THEY need.
I wish I could take credit for the line in your sig; It's properly attributed to Ed Howdershelt.
At the national level, the Democrats are floundering, but at the local level the Democratic machine is still chugging along strong as ever.
"Intellectual Property" is a legal fiction, created with the explicit purpose of encouraging progress in the arts and sciences. In the days before costless electronic duplication, granting a temporary legal monopoly on a work was a good strategy to achieve this end. However, modern technology has called into question the validity of this definition of "property". It's legitimate to challenge the notion that a particular combination of words, sounds, and images can be owned for all eternity (even if eternity is purchased on an installment plan).
(Not so far-fetched, actually; there are computer-controlled sewing machines that can do embroidery out there)
Q: Why do Scotsmen wear kilts?
A: Because sheep can hear a zipper at 200 paces.
Same thing we do every night, Pinkey, try and take over the world!
The only evolutionary argument I can see for cancer or other late-life diseases is that an early death after the breeding/childrearing years gives the species a survival advantage by reducing competition for scarce resources. A population that dies young might have an evoloutionary advantage over one with better longevity: because short life allows the environment to sustain a larger population of breeders and juveniles, the short-lived population would be able to out-breed the long-lived one.
Oh, should have mentioned that the best way to do it is to run squid (or some other web proxy) on bobshost, and configure your browser to use the forwarded port as it's proxy. This way, all your surfing will be done over the encrypted channel. It may be a bit slow, depending on how much bandwith bobshost has, but at least it's secure.
In practice, they aren't.
New recruits have been getting sent out for things like left-handed smoke shifters, buckets of prop wash, pieces of shore line, and similar fool's errands for as long as there have been armies. Gofer jokes and snipe hunts are old as the hills, but it's still funny when you find someone clueless enough to fall for one.
Pranking clueless newbies is a time-honored tradition, and is a necessary rite of passage for the prankee.
Oh, I think it is real. There are a lot of clueless wannabe script kiddies out there who are too idiotic to know what 127.0.0.1 is
The worms were polluting my weblogs so badly that I had to set up conditional logging in Apache to send them to a seperate log:
Can we moderate an entire story as "Flamebait"?