I just registered AOLstealsdomainnames.com....guess I'll wait and see if I get any nasty letters......
Heh, you can tick off a bunch more people at the same time.
Host DeCSS, link to DeCSS, host source and binaries for all the peer to peer file sharing programs you can find (Napster, Gnutella, etc), link to other sites with PtoP, link to sites hosting Metallica MP3s, host a web email service and encourage your users to have "questionable" conversations with your service, append "hot" keywords to email sent from your service. Hmm, let's see, MPAA, RIAA, Metallica, FBI, NSA. Yep, that's most of 'em. Go for it!
Good point, and it keeps with The Unix Philosophy (sounds like a Greek god, cue shaft of light through cloud). I have done that with email I consider precious (email from my girlfriend, mostly), and I'll probably start a system like yours when I get a little time.
But, (and there's always a big but) kevin42 had a good point about email access when away from 'the big box'. I just moved home from the dorms, and I'm using my father's home machine for net access, so instead of Eudora or Opera for my email, I'm using Hotmail. [shiver]
I would really like to be able to put my recent email in a web searchable format that I can access from anywhere. Maybe even include PGP/GPG options, if access is via SSL. Basically, I want to be able to get to my email from other machines; whether that means SSL, sniffable web access, or carrier pigeon, I don't really care. I just want to read and send email.
Oops. ESR, RMS, TLA, TBA, IANAL, what's the difference?:)
Thanks. I know their work, and don't confuse the two men when I think of them, but it seems my fingers don't. Err, they do. Umm, they don't know the difference, and they do mix them up. Le sigh.
I couldn't get your website to come up. I assume that you host it on your machine? I like the idea, so I'll keep checking.
My available space is now needed for people, so storage is no longer an option. I have given away as many as I can (not a lot of geeks here). I suppose I will shudder when I toss my volumes of Knuth into the woodstove.
Try offering them for free like RMS does. He wants you to come pick it up, but you can require a SASE (or SASBox:).
I would love to get my hands on a few books on anything technical: programming, chemistry, stress analysis (I'm a Mechanical Engineer), eco-anything, astro-anything, physics, (or non-technical), history, political science, biographies, philosophy, etc. Put some info in your bio/sig, and you'll probably have a dozen emails before Saturday.
Good luck saving your books. (Whenever I think about throwing a book away, I see the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where the young Nazis are burning a pile of books; even ratty old copies of books I have two other editions of. Anything printed seems almost sacred. I can't bring myself to destroy it.)
If you do want to get rid of them, post or email. I'll probably take a few dozen off of your hands.
chris_cantrall@bigfoot.com
Or read Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, wherein an intelectual protected his books from the post-apocolyptic mob by double (triple?) sealing them in ziplocs, and tossing them in the septic tank. (BTW, a septic tank is an underground personal sewage treatment plant for those of us not connected to city sewer. It is definitely not the sort of place people want to look for things, quite smelly.)
I'm not recommending this method to you, but the next time a meteor is forecast to crash into Earth, search Slashdot.:)
I'm afraid that the "zapped city" idea is a hoax, and you bought it.
Maybe. Even probably. But considering power demand, PHB types would keep pushing the power flux (power per unit area) higher and higher until it got into the 'bad for life-forms' range. I don't know if flux that high would ionize the atmosphere in its path, (or cook birds:), or scatter too much, but I try to not under-estimate the stupidity of PHB types. 'Safety is job 1,' and all that.
Solar power? Forget it. You'd have to cover a large portion of the earth's surface to get the kind of power we get from fossil fuel today.
True, but we could collect solar power in orbit, where collection area can be cheaper (big piece of aluminum foil). How do we get that energy down to earth? I don't know; there are some ideas, but they all have big problems.
You could beam the energy down via microwave, but don't let Austin Powers (or Peter Sellers) get ahold of it, or he'll fry a major city. Microwaved people, anyone?
You could pack the energy into some matter, and drop it down for the gravity-dwellers to use. But what form of fuel would you create, and out of what matter? Whatever it is, the energy density would have to be incredible, to justify the cost of dropping (and lifting?) a container to hold it. {Actually, I don't know if this is one of the "common ideas" out there, it just came to me. If you do get it to work, let me know, I'd like to see it.:}
Run cables from the space station to ground. It's only a few thousand miles from geo-sync to the ground. Well, ~22,000 miles, but it is still something to think about. We run cable for ~3000 miles under the Atlantic, why not into orbit? The power generated by the solar station could be transmitted down the cables, for us to use. No frying of major population centers by evil geniuses.
Just a few ideas about alternate power generation.
Probably because the actually teaching portion of the school (CS dept, engineering, arts & humanities, etc) are high quality/high reputation. ResNet affects you, but not as much as your professors and fellow students. Live with it for a year, and move off campus, to the land of DSL.
My tale of trying to view AOL's webmaster page, as linked in the article.
I tried to view the AOL "help" page from Opera 4.02, and the navigation frame on the left didn't show up. Funny, I can view the source.
So I tried IE 5.5, figuring that AOL would support at least that browser (after all, they ship it as part of the package), and the frame's Javascript magically worked.
Then I tried Navigator 4.74, and the Javascript worked again. Magic.
I was then truly intrigued, so I put the page in Amaya (W3C's standard's demonstrating browser/authoring tool), and the page didn't load at all. None of the frames showed up, but I could look at the source if I wanted to.
And I couldn't get Mozilla 17 to load the navigation frame at all, then the reload put the main frame in the navigation frame. (BTW, a connection was refused when attempting to contact webmaster.info.aol.com.) Persistent reloading got the main frame back into the right spot, but I still can't see the Javascript navigation frame on the left, though I can see the source.
K-Meleon also gives me the connection error, but I can't get anything to show up on the screen.
In short, AOL's webmaster info page doesn't seem standard's compliant. Oh, and this is all from Win98, on a T1.
After this, I don't want to read about how to make my pages work with their software. If I can't even see their webpage with my browser, how can I trust them when they tell me what will work with theirs? Their suggestions would probably break Opera or Mozilla.
. ..
Oh, wait, their page has already broken Opera and Mozilla. Should I use "probably break", or should I use "will break (assuming hell doesn't freeze over)"?
How the hell do stories with no comments find their way into the search list, but never reach the front page?
Many stories never make it to the front page, they sit in the Slashbox appropriate to their section. There are a lot of Ask Slashdot's which never make it to the front page. Try fiddling with the settings, add the Ask Slashdot Slashbox to your homepage (remember, check everything in bold if you want to keep the default settings) and watch the box for questions/articles which don't appear on the front page. I have all of my favorite sections on the front page, and I spend about the same amount of time on those articles as I do on the ones from the front page.
Sorry, but you are remembering only part of physics. Before I get all technical, blow up a baloon. Then release the end. Which took energy?
Now, for the serious thermodynamics/fluid mechanics. There are many components of a fluid's energy state: temperature, pressure, velocity, and height.
Temperature: an increase in temperature corresponds to an increase in energy. Pretty simple, rather intuitive. For our case of compressed nitrogen, the N2 is COLD, negative 327 deg Farenheit. So you seem to be right.
Pressure: an increase in pressure corresponds to an increase in energy. Simple and intuitive again. So if we go from high pressure to low pressure, we get energy out. This one is against you. (BTW, this is a great example of the first law of thermodynamics: Energy is not lost. [Ignoring mass-energy, etc.] We had to a lot of work to compress that N2, and lucky for us, that energy is stored inside the N2.)
Velocity: an increase in velocity corresponds to an increase in energy in the fluid. This plus pressure are why airplanes work: the velocity of the air traveling over the top surface increases, and the pressure goes down in such a way to make the energy of the air constant. (The air isn't doing physics to figure this out, but humans like to think that our math and physical theories force nature to do stuff.)
Height: when something is lifted it gains gravitational potential energy. This doesn't really apply here, as the other energies dwarf gravitational considerations.
When liquid nitrogen is brought to room temperature it can either expand, increase pressure, or a combination of both (PV=nRT, temp goes up, the other side has to go up too, since we aren't removing any gas [n]). Both of these will transfer energy to the surroundings, all we have to do is harness it.
The following is an explanation of what happens with the air on an airplane wing. BTW, sometimes reality is explained by seeing what might happen otherwise, and realizing that it defies "common sense". This isn't fool-proof (think quantum mechanics), but it's helpful when you're trying to wrap your head around a concept.
The fluid velocity must increase so that the air which went under the wing meets up with the air that went over the top of the wing. If it didn't, there would be a section of wing with no air next to it: a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum (funny, there's so much of it just a few thousand miles away), so the air fills in that vacuum.
Whenever my friends have talked about 'Geek vs Nerd' a few people always say:
"A nerd is someone who is involved with science, technology, and computers, but a geek
likes them."
Since you're here, reading this, you are probably a geek. After all, you seem to like sci/tech/comp. BTW, under this scheme, geek is a sub-set of nerd.
The article states further on that the space shuttle could return to earth even if the main engine was inoperable. If I understood it correctly, the shuttle would "slingshot" aroud Mars to Venus, then "slingshot" around Venus to Earth.
The space shuttle wasn't mentioned in the article, and it isn't a good vehicle for inter-planetary travel. A Mars vehicle would be built for the trip, in Earth orbit. You probably knew that, and just used the first craft that popped into your head, but I thought I'd be redundant and say it anyway.
Maybe I wasn't making my point clearly enough. The last/. article to appear on the front page is dated ~11am, and then one shows up at ~21:40 (all times California-centric). More than ten ( 10 ) hours between stories. It just seems odd for the middle of the day (US time), even if it is Friday and a slow news day.
And the only pocket protector I have in this county is leather, with my initials embossed on it. I may be a geek, but I'm a geek with class.:)
Well, K5 was done for fun. But then a &#$%*(#$ attacked it and Rusty had to shut it down for a while. I hope he brings it back.
Rusty didn't charge for the site, he put ads up. And not to pay his salary, to keep the site going. Sometimes something is done for fun, or for good. But there are many immature people who like the power of destruction, but don't know the passive joy restraint can bring. (I like fire, I like explosions, I like guns. But I live in a forest, and I will kick your butt if you leave a fire unattended. I'm an engineer, so I know the joy of building, and the pain of loss an explosion can bring. And I'm human, so I aim my guns at paper targets up against really heavy backdrops.)
Ask Slashdot: Online Rights And Real World Censorship?"
Posted by Cliff on 10:57 Friday 11 August 2000
and then the current story was posted:
RemarQ.com Shutting Down
Posted by emmett on 21:40 Friday 11 August 2000
Seems like quite a quiet time. Is there some bug, was there a DoS, did someone else get married? Did the Geek Compound get invaded?
For a while there, I thought/. might be under an administrative DoS attack, a variant on what happened to Rusty and K5. (The variation being that the DoS didn't affect users participation in/. but did prevent the 'big kahunas' from updating/.) Glad to see that I was wrong (or you fixed it).
It's silly to expect a department to provide a machine for any old project a student might do for a class or independent research project.
Not to mention that research might be purely personal. I'm a mechanical engineering student, the CS department isn't going to provide me with tools and sanction to learn networking architecture, and it shouldn't have to.
I should be allowed to do personal network research. If I want to see how network tools work, and see what kinds of services can be run, I shouldn't need anyone's sanction to do so. I'm doing runtime research, why is that different from library research?
I'm a student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. A friend of mine, a sophmore computer science student named Paul, was accused and found guilty of port scanning, under a proposed Responsible Use Policy. You heard me correctly, proposed. Sigh.
I summarize some of the details below, but you can read all about it at the site his friends set up. FreePaul has details, transcripts, audio recordings, musings, and propaganda for you to enjoy.
Basically, Paul had a job in town doing admin work on some computers. He was working on those machines from his dorm room, and had to reboot them a few times (I don't know why. I do know he runs Linux on his personal box.), so each time they rebooted, the dynamically allocated IP was new. Meaning he had to find it again. He knew what range the IP would be in, so he scanned that range to find his machines. He did this, depending on who you believe, between four and a dozen times, over a day or three (again, conflicting stories). He then set up a script enabling the computer to email him with its IP when it reboots, so he didn't need to scan anymore. But someone had already complained.
Apparently, the school networking guys got a complaint from off-campus ("Hey, I'm being scanned by x.y.z.r on your campus. Do something!") and called up Paul, saying 'Don't do that anymore.' This was after Paul had set up the script, so he had no more reason to scan. School networking seemed OK with this, so it seemed everything was hunky-dory (um, that's slang for "just fine").
Then the school's Judicial Affairs department heard about it. And they started going after Paul with a vengance. Paul wasn't told about certain rights he had in the process, rights declared in California State Law. Judicial Affairs violated State law in the course of the investigation and prosecution (Notice of Hearing was a big one). It seems like Judicial Affairs was trying to make an example of him. Even if all the accusations against him are true, JA still was out of line in the details of the prosecution of the case. I happen to beleive that the charges aren't right, but even if they are, there has been a mis-carraige of what I think of as Justice.
Now, how does this affect you, and your department's struggle with your Acceptable Use Policy? Be careful. Look at the mechanisms used to prosecute students who violate policies. If you think certain problems are minor compared to others (pinging isn't as bad as running BackOrifice on your professor's computer), try to put those judgements of relative harm into the policy as recomendations for punishments. The people who are now in charge of prosecuting students may be great people, kind, generous, wanting to help. But those people may leave, and the replacements may get on a power-trip, or may think that making a few 'examples' will "keep the little buggers in line". Do your best to make that very hard.
As I write this, I am QUITE frustrated with Netscape. I like Netscape: the browser, the mail client (which doubles nicely as a news reader), even the cute little composer. I've used Navigator for at least 4 years, and I'm used to it. I have occasionally reached a Zen state of surfing (like Deep Hack Mode) using Navigator; and I think you will agree when I say that acheiving 'Zen anything' is darn hard to do in a Microsoft OS. Browser performance is a critical issue for me, as I really need the web: I use it for school research, personal research, entertainment, and job hunting. But recently, my favorite browser, Ye Ol' Netscape, has let me down.
A little personal history might be in order to help explain my position.
I've been using Navigator because I like it, and because I don't want to encourage MS too much. For a long time, Netscape was the big shot, and I was in the 'cool' crowd. Then IE got better, and better, and bundled, and bundled, while Netscape didn't get better (or bundled), and I was a minority. Now IE is used by, what, 74% of the surfers? Whatever the ~exact number, Navigator (or the standards) are not thought of when many people make web pages, so I miss those 'new and improved features'. I don't blame MS for feature-creep (too much), because that's what Netscape did before, that's where HTML 3.2 came from, and that is where some innovation on the web comes from.
I like speed, so for a long time, I didn't update my browser, knowing bloat would slow my old machine. (I started with Netscape 3.0, Win 3.1, on my 486DX 80 MHz, 16MB RAM, 256KB of video RAM, and 500MB drive in 1996. I bought a Pentium 233MMX, 80 MB, 2MB video RAM, 2 GB drive in 1998. Not a speed demon.) But I began to worry about bugs and exploits, and some pages not loading properly, so I began updating my browser.
Last year when I switched from Netscape Mail to Eudora because of PGP support, I tried to find a copy of the most recent Navigator as a stand-alone browser. Too bad for me. So I tried using Navigator 4.0x, but I can't see PNGs, plugins are hard to deal with, and it just doesn't let me do as much as more recent versions of Netscape. So I use Netscape 4.5, 4.7, 4.7x. I'm not happy, but at least everything works.
Well, everything did work, but I've been having problems with Netscape 4.73 and 4.74 dieing on me in the strangest ways. They die messily, taking down Win98 when they go. This happens every other day or so. I can't tell if Windows has been up too long (6 hours is too long?!?), if Netscape has been on too long (never heard of such a problem), or if Mercury is ascending. But I can't rely on Netscape anymore, and I don't want to lose data in other programs.
But Mozilla is there to save me! Hurray! Three cheers to RMS, ESR, GNU, FSF, BSD, and every other acronym who is working to make software free and high in quality!!
So I get M16 and test it. Bugs, but it works. Why don't I see images, is it just me? Slow, but it might just be my old 233MHz/80MB RAM/Win98. And it's standards compliant. Woohoo!
Hey, Netscape 6, PR1, cool. Bugs, but it works. I still don't see GIFs. Oh, well.
M17, even better. Still no images. I can live.
Netscape 6, PR2. Arrrgghhh!! It crashed right after the install. The install felt like a 56k, not my T1. Where is that uninstall, get it off of my machine.
So I gave in to the dark side, and updated the pre-installed IE 4.xxx to IE 5.5, hoping for functionality and stability. Which is why I'm viewing Slashdot from IE 5.5 now. I don't like it, but I don't see any other immediate choices. I'm going to look for a stable Netscape 4.5/7, but my hope is diminishing. My machine might be haunted. I might be cursed to IE until I have time to format, reinstall, and try again.
I feel let down. Maybe unreasonably, but that's how I feel. Why do I have problems with two consecutive versions of Netscape? I updated 4.73 to get rid of the problems, but wound up with problems. I like Mozilla, but it's in beta, so I don't want to rely on it.
BTW, I'm in MS for two reasons:
I'm a student in Mechanical Engineering, and the popular engineering software is written for MS, (AutoCAD had cut support for Unix before Linux became popular) and I need MS to work for school.
I'm a student in Mechanical Engineering: and I have no time, I tried RedHat on another partition, but it wasn't worth 30% of my 2 gig drive when I only used it a few times a week to learn/play.
Side rant: I had to install VBScripting to use 'Windows Update', to get 'Critical Security Updates'!! Talk about irony, install and enable VBS to update Security!
You must cause any work that you distribute or publish...
The GPL does not cover code modified for personal use, only code which is distributed.
That still leaves the problem of what 'distribution' is, especially within companies. If Bob writes a mode for Emacs to ease coding of scalable vector graphics at his company, and it becomes really popular in the company, is it being distributed? Many people are using it, but in their capacity as employees of XML Graphics, Inc. Legally, a company is considered a single entity, a fictional person. So it could be that only one person uses the new code, that person being XML Graphics, Inc. But many humans are using the code: Bob, Sarah, John, etc. The definition of 'distribution' is not very clear here.
So the in-house developer has to worry about the definition of 'distribute'. I think that in-house code need'nt be released under the GPL, but I Am Not RMS (IANRMS), etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Host DeCSS, link to DeCSS, host source and binaries for all the peer to peer file sharing programs you can find (Napster, Gnutella, etc), link to other sites with PtoP, link to sites hosting Metallica MP3s, host a web email service and encourage your users to have "questionable" conversations with your service, append "hot" keywords to email sent from your service. Hmm, let's see, MPAA, RIAA, Metallica, FBI, NSA. Yep, that's most of 'em. Go for it!
Call us from jail. :)
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
But, (and there's always a big but) kevin42 had a good point about email access when away from 'the big box'. I just moved home from the dorms, and I'm using my father's home machine for net access, so instead of Eudora or Opera for my email, I'm using Hotmail. [shiver]
I would really like to be able to put my recent email in a web searchable format that I can access from anywhere. Maybe even include PGP/GPG options, if access is via SSL. Basically, I want to be able to get to my email from other machines; whether that means SSL, sniffable web access, or carrier pigeon, I don't really care. I just want to read and send email.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Thanks. I know their work, and don't confuse the two men when I think of them, but it seems my fingers don't. Err, they do. Umm, they don't know the difference, and they do mix them up. Le sigh.
I couldn't get your website to come up. I assume that you host it on your machine? I like the idea, so I'll keep checking.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
I would love to get my hands on a few books on anything technical: programming, chemistry, stress analysis (I'm a Mechanical Engineer), eco-anything, astro-anything, physics, (or non-technical), history, political science, biographies, philosophy, etc. Put some info in your bio/sig, and you'll probably have a dozen emails before Saturday.
Good luck saving your books. (Whenever I think about throwing a book away, I see the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where the young Nazis are burning a pile of books; even ratty old copies of books I have two other editions of. Anything printed seems almost sacred. I can't bring myself to destroy it.)
If you do want to get rid of them, post or email. I'll probably take a few dozen off of your hands.
chris_cantrall@bigfoot.com
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
I'm not recommending this method to you, but the next time a meteor is forecast to crash into Earth, search Slashdot. :)
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
- You could beam the energy down via microwave, but don't let Austin Powers (or Peter Sellers) get ahold of it, or he'll fry a major city. Microwaved people, anyone?
- You could pack the energy into some matter, and drop it down for the gravity-dwellers to use. But what form of fuel would you create, and out of what matter? Whatever it is, the energy density would have to be incredible, to justify the cost of dropping (and lifting?) a container to hold it. {Actually, I don't know if this is one of the "common ideas" out there, it just came to me. If you do get it to work, let me know, I'd like to see it.
:}
- Run cables from the space station to ground. It's only a few thousand miles from geo-sync to the ground. Well, ~22,000 miles, but it is still something to think about. We run cable for ~3000 miles under the Atlantic, why not into orbit? The power generated by the solar station could be transmitted down the cables, for us to use. No frying of major population centers by evil geniuses.
Just a few ideas about alternate power generation.Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Ooohhhhh, the puns, the puns! Make it stop. Make it stop!
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
In short, AOL's webmaster info page doesn't seem standard's compliant. Oh, and this is all from Win98, on a T1.
After this, I don't want to read about how to make my pages work with their software. If I can't even see their webpage with my browser, how can I trust them when they tell me what will work with theirs? Their suggestions would probably break Opera or Mozilla.
. . .
Oh, wait, their page has already broken Opera and Mozilla. Should I use "probably break", or should I use "will break (assuming hell doesn't freeze over)"?Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Sorry, but you are remembering only part of physics. Before I get all technical, blow up a baloon. Then release the end. Which took energy?
Now, for the serious thermodynamics/fluid mechanics. There are many components of a fluid's energy state: temperature, pressure, velocity, and height.
- Temperature: an increase in temperature corresponds to an increase in energy. Pretty simple, rather intuitive. For our case of compressed nitrogen, the N2 is COLD, negative 327 deg Farenheit. So you seem to be right.
- Pressure: an increase in pressure corresponds to an increase in energy. Simple and intuitive again. So if we go from high pressure to low pressure, we get energy out. This one is against you. (BTW, this is a great example of the first law of thermodynamics: Energy is not lost. [Ignoring mass-energy, etc.] We had to a lot of work to compress that N2, and lucky for us, that energy is stored inside the N2.)
- Velocity: an increase in velocity corresponds to an increase in energy in the fluid. This plus pressure are why airplanes work: the velocity of the air traveling over the top surface increases, and the pressure goes down in such a way to make the energy of the air constant. (The air isn't doing physics to figure this out, but humans like to think that our math and physical theories force nature to do stuff.)
- Height: when something is lifted it gains gravitational potential energy. This doesn't really apply here, as the other energies dwarf gravitational considerations.
When liquid nitrogen is brought to room temperature it can either expand, increase pressure, or a combination of both (PV=nRT, temp goes up, the other side has to go up too, since we aren't removing any gas [n]). Both of these will transfer energy to the surroundings, all we have to do is harness it.The following is an explanation of what happens with the air on an airplane wing. BTW, sometimes reality is explained by seeing what might happen otherwise, and realizing that it defies "common sense". This isn't fool-proof (think quantum mechanics), but it's helpful when you're trying to wrap your head around a concept.
The fluid velocity must increase so that the air which went under the wing meets up with the air that went over the top of the wing. If it didn't, there would be a section of wing with no air next to it: a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum (funny, there's so much of it just a few thousand miles away), so the air fills in that vacuum.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
And the only pocket protector I have in this county is leather, with my initials embossed on it. I may be a geek, but I'm a geek with class. :)
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Rusty didn't charge for the site, he put ads up. And not to pay his salary, to keep the site going. Sometimes something is done for fun, or for good. But there are many immature people who like the power of destruction, but don't know the passive joy restraint can bring. (I like fire, I like explosions, I like guns. But I live in a forest, and I will kick your butt if you leave a fire unattended. I'm an engineer, so I know the joy of building, and the pain of loss an explosion can bring. And I'm human, so I aim my guns at paper targets up against really heavy backdrops.)
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
For a while there, I thought /. might be under an administrative DoS attack, a variant on what happened to Rusty and K5. (The variation being that the DoS didn't affect users participation in /. but did prevent the 'big kahunas' from updating /.) Glad to see that I was wrong (or you fixed it).
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Not to mention that research might be purely personal. I'm a mechanical engineering student, the CS department isn't going to provide me with tools and sanction to learn networking architecture, and it shouldn't have to.
I should be allowed to do personal network research. If I want to see how network tools work, and see what kinds of services can be run, I shouldn't need anyone's sanction to do so. I'm doing runtime research, why is that different from library research?
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
I summarize some of the details below, but you can read all about it at the site his friends set up. FreePaul has details, transcripts, audio recordings, musings, and propaganda for you to enjoy.
Basically, Paul had a job in town doing admin work on some computers. He was working on those machines from his dorm room, and had to reboot them a few times (I don't know why. I do know he runs Linux on his personal box.), so each time they rebooted, the dynamically allocated IP was new. Meaning he had to find it again. He knew what range the IP would be in, so he scanned that range to find his machines. He did this, depending on who you believe, between four and a dozen times, over a day or three (again, conflicting stories). He then set up a script enabling the computer to email him with its IP when it reboots, so he didn't need to scan anymore. But someone had already complained.
Apparently, the school networking guys got a complaint from off-campus ("Hey, I'm being scanned by x.y.z.r on your campus. Do something!") and called up Paul, saying 'Don't do that anymore.' This was after Paul had set up the script, so he had no more reason to scan. School networking seemed OK with this, so it seemed everything was hunky-dory (um, that's slang for "just fine").
Then the school's Judicial Affairs department heard about it. And they started going after Paul with a vengance. Paul wasn't told about certain rights he had in the process, rights declared in California State Law. Judicial Affairs violated State law in the course of the investigation and prosecution (Notice of Hearing was a big one). It seems like Judicial Affairs was trying to make an example of him. Even if all the accusations against him are true, JA still was out of line in the details of the prosecution of the case. I happen to beleive that the charges aren't right, but even if they are, there has been a mis-carraige of what I think of as Justice.
Now, how does this affect you, and your department's struggle with your Acceptable Use Policy? Be careful. Look at the mechanisms used to prosecute students who violate policies. If you think certain problems are minor compared to others (pinging isn't as bad as running BackOrifice on your professor's computer), try to put those judgements of relative harm into the policy as recomendations for punishments. The people who are now in charge of prosecuting students may be great people, kind, generous, wanting to help. But those people may leave, and the replacements may get on a power-trip, or may think that making a few 'examples' will "keep the little buggers in line". Do your best to make that very hard.
Good luck.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Well, there is the W3C standard, mentioned in a Slashdot article from Saturday.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
A little personal history might be in order to help explain my position.
- I've been using Navigator because I like it, and because I don't want to encourage MS too much. For a long time, Netscape was the big shot, and I was in the 'cool' crowd. Then IE got better, and better, and bundled, and bundled, while Netscape didn't get better (or bundled), and I was a minority. Now IE is used by, what, 74% of the surfers? Whatever the ~exact number, Navigator (or the standards) are not thought of when many people make web pages, so I miss those 'new and improved features'. I don't blame MS for feature-creep (too much), because that's what Netscape did before, that's where HTML 3.2 came from, and that is where some innovation on the web comes from.
- I like speed, so for a long time, I didn't update my browser, knowing bloat would slow my old machine. (I started with Netscape 3.0, Win 3.1, on my 486DX 80 MHz, 16MB RAM, 256KB of video RAM, and 500MB drive in 1996. I bought a Pentium 233MMX, 80 MB, 2MB video RAM, 2 GB drive in 1998. Not a speed demon.) But I began to worry about bugs and exploits, and some pages not loading properly, so I began updating my browser.
- Last year when I switched from Netscape Mail to Eudora because of PGP support, I tried to find a copy of the most recent Navigator as a stand-alone browser. Too bad for me. So I tried using Navigator 4.0x, but I can't see PNGs, plugins are hard to deal with, and it just doesn't let me do as much as more recent versions of Netscape. So I use Netscape 4.5, 4.7, 4.7x. I'm not happy, but at least everything works.
Well, everything did work, but I've been having problems with Netscape 4.73 and 4.74 dieing on me in the strangest ways. They die messily, taking down Win98 when they go. This happens every other day or so. I can't tell if Windows has been up too long (6 hours is too long?!?), if Netscape has been on too long (never heard of such a problem), or if Mercury is ascending. But I can't rely on Netscape anymore, and I don't want to lose data in other programs.But Mozilla is there to save me! Hurray! Three cheers to RMS, ESR, GNU, FSF, BSD, and every other acronym who is working to make software free and high in quality!!
- So I get M16 and test it. Bugs, but it works. Why don't I see images, is it just me? Slow, but it might just be my old 233MHz/80MB RAM/Win98. And it's standards compliant. Woohoo!
- Hey, Netscape 6, PR1, cool. Bugs, but it works. I still don't see GIFs. Oh, well.
- M17, even better. Still no images. I can live.
- Netscape 6, PR2. Arrrgghhh!! It crashed right after the install. The install felt like a 56k, not my T1. Where is that uninstall, get it off of my machine.
So I gave in to the dark side, and updated the pre-installed IE 4.xxx to IE 5.5, hoping for functionality and stability. Which is why I'm viewing Slashdot from IE 5.5 now. I don't like it, but I don't see any other immediate choices. I'm going to look for a stable Netscape 4.5/7, but my hope is diminishing. My machine might be haunted. I might be cursed to IE until I have time to format, reinstall, and try again.I feel let down. Maybe unreasonably, but that's how I feel. Why do I have problems with two consecutive versions of Netscape? I updated 4.73 to get rid of the problems, but wound up with problems. I like Mozilla, but it's in beta, so I don't want to rely on it.
BTW, I'm in MS for two reasons:
Side rant: I had to install VBScripting to use 'Windows Update', to get 'Critical Security Updates'!! Talk about irony, install and enable VBS to update Security!
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
That still leaves the problem of what 'distribution' is, especially within companies. If Bob writes a mode for Emacs to ease coding of scalable vector graphics at his company, and it becomes really popular in the company, is it being distributed? Many people are using it, but in their capacity as employees of XML Graphics, Inc. Legally, a company is considered a single entity, a fictional person. So it could be that only one person uses the new code, that person being XML Graphics, Inc. But many humans are using the code: Bob, Sarah, John, etc. The definition of 'distribution' is not very clear here.
So the in-house developer has to worry about the definition of 'distribute'. I think that in-house code need'nt be released under the GPL, but I Am Not RMS (IANRMS), etc.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
IANAL: I Am Not A Lawyer
TINALA: This Is Not A Legal Advisory
But what the heck is IYNOTTALLIYJ? ... ?
If You're Not On The Take
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...