Huh? Presumably by "potentially spurious traffic" you mean any SYN+ACK packets coming from the server that is being attacked? How are you going to identify which of those are legit and which aren't? You _do_ need to expand on this because frankly it is not clear how you would do this, given the problems I have already explained.
I would suggest you read about Stateful Packet Inspection, I am quite at a loss to know why you are not already aware that it is a standard feature in firewalls these days. As for how do you recognise which packets to apply a rule to, you could start by the method you used to identify packets to block.. eg the host and destination. Depending on the attack pattern you could narrow the scope from there.
The server is unlikely to be initiating connections. However, that is irrelevant since blocking SYN+ACK packets that the server sent would stop it *accepting* connections, not making them (and is exactly what the ISPs have been doing which you are complaining about!)
Admittedly I got SYN+ACK the wrong way round but the point stands that they should be using some sort of connection tracking to make it irrelevant. To expand on that, they should be using connection tracking specifically on connections which have been identified either by host or target. The method to identify these could even be the same they used for blocking the SYN+ACK packets (IE, manually).
Wrong. The only way you are going to work out which SYN+ACK packets are legitimate is by watching the SYN packets leaving your network and then somehow distributing that information across all the routers that the SYN+ACK packets might take to enter your network. This is easy where you have symmetric routing since no distribution needs to be done, but in the case of asymmetric routing it is a hard problem.
Which should be accounted for when you design the network not when you are faced with an attack. You already give one possible solution (shared state tables) but there are other options to at least limit the effect of stateful packet inspection in asymmetric environments.
Regardless, asymmetric routing problems are limited to the connections you apply the rules to so if you lack the ability to do a perfect system you can still filter the traffic more effectively than a complete block.
Actually, yes. At the bandwidths you're talking about, you have to track a very large number of connections and look them up at extremely high speeds.
Yes, you would, wouldn't you? Care to 'expand' on how routers that can handle over 5.5Gbps of stateful inspection aren't up to the task? Consider the nature of the attack and that should be plenty. 4chan was getting potentially bandwidth raped by the DDOS, I somehow doubt the traffic 4chan would be able to send out in SYN+ACK would make AT&T's routers blink if they were set up properly. You shouldn't need to even track all connections, only the ones from 4chan.
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but you appear to have seen someone saying "this is a solution" and accepted it more or less at face value rather than thinking it through to the logical conclusions and seeing why it is flawed and largely unworkable. This may be because you haven't had a lot of experience about how large networks, and the internet at large, work - I don't know.
And you appear to lack imagination or just couldn't be arsed to do a job properly, touche.
It doesn't really expand on a method of doing this, but usually you would use connection tracking, whereby you remember the state of all connections running through the router. This is a pretty resource intensive setup and is nigh on unworkable in networks with asymmetric or non-deterministic routing. I.e. it isn't something that I would expect an ISP as big as AT&T to be able to implement, especially at the drop of a hat. Sure, it's easy enough to do on your home network, but it just ain't going to work at the ISP level without some *serious* effort.
It doesn't expand because there is nothing to expand on unless you're filtering all packets rather than only those that have been identified as potentially spurious traffic. Yes, you block potentially legitimate SYN+ACK packets but considering this is a web host we're talking about.. when is the server going to be initiating connections? The point is, it is still blocking all the unwanted traffic through that link while still allowing people to access the site. Issues about asymmetric routing are more applicable to the proxy approach, the only effect it has on rejecting unsolicited ACKS is limited to connections determined to be potential flood targets. The same connections that AT&T blocked anyway.
The method described here will lead to you being able to connect to *any* server, even if it isn't accepting connections. Only once the connection is fully established will the real server be contacted, whereupon you may well discover that the server doesn't accept connections on that port, or doesn't even exist. If my ISP pulled that kind of stunt, I'd be finding a new ISP as soon as possible and I would be advising my customers to do the same because messing with network traffic like that is going to cause all sorts of "weird shit" problems, cause software to use incorrect error messages when reporting failures and generally make debugging network issues absolute hell.
Again, why would you filter all traffic with this rule? You first identify a problem host and its target then you apply an appropriate filter rule. The advantage of this option over the first is you do not lose any legitimate traffic in either direction at the cost of load on the router. Anyone complaining about unexpected behaviour should be thankful that they aren't being rejected outright. The biggest disadvantage is likely to be as you pointed out before, that the rule is unsuitable for asymmetric routing.
Both of the above methods also suffer from the exact same problem that SYN cookies were invented to prevent - namely, there is a device on the network which has to remember the status of all the pending connections which may have been started by spoofed packets. Sure, your firewall is protecting the real server from seeing these spoofed packets, but the firewall itself will collapse under the load of tracking millions of half-open connections from an attacker.
Geez, you think hardware is the limiting factor? Are you living in 2001 ?. Of course none of the solutions are 100% perfect, if they were then they would have probably been a standard part of TCP/IP anyway. The goal in these situations is to limit the damage and that is apparently something that AT&T were incapable or unwilling to do. I'm just barely a layperson in these matters and I can spot the many flaws in their approach. If it wasn't their own customers access they were restricting then I'd agree that there is no obligation to do what is technically possible over what is easiest.
Possibly the first sensible suggestion I've seen on this topic (from Slashdot at least). Still, you'd hope they could afford to buy some decent hardware capable of filtering this kind of stuff out based on the behaviour rather than the source.
The block is gone. It was for 4chans own good. They have been DDoSed for weeks. AT&T just stopped access for a short bit. Settle the heck down.
What sort of attack was it that stopping access helped 4chan? From what I've read so far I thought it was a spoofed SYN attack aimed at 4chan with AT&T as the spoofed addresses. Your scenario does not fit this at all.
Really it should never be necessary to block legitimate traffic if you have sufficient hardware to filter your link. I would expect any ISP but especially one as big as AT&T to have hardware capable of filtering out DOS attacks at a rate equal to their links capacity. The only issue should be if you have insufficient bandwidth on a link outside your network and that is something you have limited control over anyway certainly not a sufficient excuse in itself to block rather than filter.
Then I do it again. And again. I effectively flood both you and 4chan with meaningless traffic. Your traffic problems are even worse, because if you have a firewall blocking the RST packets, then 4chan will send you 4 ACK packets (depending on configuration) for every SYN packet I send them.
I don't see why AT&T would choose blocking access entirely over some pretty simple filtering to let legitimate traffic through while stopping the flood getting past their first router.
There should be no difference between the two unless they have inadequate hardware not capable of filtering at capacity. Exactly the same amount of flooded traffic is stopped whether you filter it or block the source.
I think the real story here is AT&T being idiots who got caught with their pants down by a 13ish year old exploit that even the most inexperienced network admin should be able to find a solution for within 5 minutes of googling.
there was nothing they could do but pull the plug on the source of the collateral ACKs
You were doing so great until this bit. Or I hadn't realised that one of the biggest ISPs in the USA lacked the capability to do something as simple as filtering out unwanted ACKs.
You were certainly right about there being a knee-jerk reaction, pity it appears to be yours.
I'm sorry, how many major parties does America have? Which one of the two is the 'liberal' party?
America may be built on a legal foundation of individual freedom but I do not see how that translates into a more pro-freedom society. It is America we have to blame for ditching their own constitution in order to pass ever longer copyright law, why would I trust the system with more fundamental rights? While I am not proud of my country I have to laugh at anyone who thinks America is better than us, the fact that you're so desperate to be is an indication of how blind you are to your own problems.
Obama did though so GP's sentence is at worse grammatically ambiguous. Bush merely signed the amendment after having proposed the short term amendment that had just expired. Bush also weighed in heavily on what the bill should do, quote: "President Bush said he would not sign any bill that did not provide retroactive immunity for telecommunications corporations".
Not just $5 billion but $5 trillion if you are referring to the quoted piece. I find it hilarious that politicians are prone to accept these figures without a hint of substance or peer review. Even if the figure is accurate (and I've no reason to suppose they couldn't count up $5 trillion from transactions in IP), the equation is not complete without all information being considered equally. Some ones they likely missed are:
Diversity of wealth (how this money was spread around, how much of that $5 trillion ended up in the pockets of big business execs)
Inefficiency (how much extra money was spent due to restrictions imposed by the system)
Comparitive value (how much are we ending up spending on entertainment compared to other more essential services)
Those are just a few I can think of off the top of my head, there are many more considerations if you are being as thorough as you should be (and they can be described better than I have too). Basically, without some real unbiased academic brain power sorting through the figures then the figures are pointless.
Given though the change in things from copying being a natural barrier to being an unnatural barrier, do you really believe he would still think copyright the best way of doing things? The guy was very smart, I do not doubt that if he lived today he would see more opportunities than were available when he made that speech. The other aspect is given hindsight, would he lament the negative effect copyright has had to be more harmful than the positive effect he envisioned?
I would argue that given the history of the lengths people will go to abusing copyright we should focus our energies on alternative methods rather than trying to tie copyright down to what it was in the first place.
She didn't say she doesn't have some sort of firewall. Stopping infected machines communicating isn't a job of antivirus programs and a properly configured firewall is far more effective at stopping your data getting out than any antivirus.
Virtualbox doesn't run on "*nix", so the simplicity of your example is misleading. Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris are the only supported operating systems. The guest OS support is similarly limited.
Hang on, suddenly MacOSX, linux and OpenSolaris are not *nix?
MacOSX is registered Unix 03, OpenSolaris is based on System V Unix and Linux is a non registered Unix clone. Which of those don't you consider *nix? The ones without nix on the end (which leaves Linux) or the ones that aren't Unix (which at least leaves MacOSX)?
You could also throw FreeBSD into the mix which is similar to Linux in that it conforms to many of the same standards without being registered as Unix, there is an experimental version of VirtualBox available for FreeBSD.
Nevemind, I'm blind, it's here: "If they want to frequent this site from home in their private time that is when their right". Still, I don't think they were saying that going on the site was illegal (or they are really ill informed). At worst it would be against the workplace policy but that should not be in itself illegal. I think they were referring to the expression of views from the site in front of people who would likely be offended by them. Which would be analogous to sexually harassing someone in the workplace.
Want to protest that? Then don't say "it shouldn't be illegal". You should made sure when the laws were introduced that it didn't become illegal by doing the same thing the petitioners did. Make your case and show that YOUR case benefits the greater good (gets the most people to vote for you).
You seem to have a strange contradiction going, or a lack of distinction between peoples opinions and action. On the one hand you are saying 'don't say it shouldn't be illegal' yet on the other you are saying 'change the law the same way the people who made it illegal did'. It is hard to do the latter without the former as public opinion is formed largely through communication.
I don't buy the argument that people should have done something about it at the time either. I wasn't around or wasn't eligible to vote when the majority of our society was put into law, that is aside from an argument that the system isn't adequate for its intended purposes anyway. There needs to be no excuse for bad laws, the whole idea of having a well educated legislative body to come up with these laws is to put the political will into effective laws. If the problem with raves is about fire safety and other issues of regulation then concentrate on those aspects. Even if you are unsympathetic to those who caused the problem you're jeopardising the system in a number of ways for future generations including ensuring that they can have no respect for the system.
What you seem to be posing is that people should be penalised for engaging in a non harmful activity associated with other activities that are harmful and that if the majority agree that the non harmful activity is bad it should be against the law. I would argue that the system should be more robust than a simple majority rule, if for nothing else then because it effects more than the current voting population. The law about raves quite clearly picks out the type of music which is completely irrelevant to the underlying problems it is trying to prevent. If the aims of the law and the actual effect of the law do not match then it should not have been passed as law. If the aim of the law was to criminalize people for listening to a certain type of music then that is plainly bigotry and conflicts with reasoning used in other, more fundamental laws and again should not be passed as law.
If the process for making law was as simple as you seem to think then we could do away with a good chunk of the law and political system and just have a web site for people to submit proposals and vote on laws at. Ironically, while defending the spirit of the law process, I don't actually think it is the best way to do things let alone think that the current system is capable of meeting its own targets (as the rave legislation shows).
Neo-liberals (or libertarians as they are called in the US) are as a rule against laws banning drugs. Their main tenet is that individual liberties should be maximized and government influence minimized. So they are generally vehemently to government regulations - be it of drugs or of the market. Saying that neo-liberals see people as "entirely selfish entities, plotting and scheming against one-another" is a very slanted and twisted version of the of their core belief: that each individual is an end in himself/herself. Put in other words that your life belongs to you and that nobody has the right to enslave you, be it for the benefit for one other individual or a whole society.
Neo-Liberal can mean many things, the GP was referring to Neo-Liberal as the label for Thatcher's economic policies. This is hinted at by his later reference in the same paragraph to the free market and seems a perfectly acceptable use of the term both backed up by Wikipedia and numerous dictionaries. Please don't have a go at people for your failure to recognise their use of ambiguous words in unfamiliar contexts.
Note: For those of you who haven't seen any Adam Curtis documentaries: He's like Michael Moore, but without the humor and with less fact checking. The documentaries are similar in style and quality to "Moon Hoax" documentaries and have the same ratio of facts to speculation.
Could it be.. from the similarity of your description and the content of your post.. could you be.. Adam Curtis?!
I would suppose that you either lack imagination or are at some level (wittingly or unwittingly that is) choose not to cooperate with the test. That in itself may be indicative of paranoia or some similar such condition but more likely it is just basic survival instincts not letting you submit yourself to what you perceive to be the whim of a relative stranger.
The big issue is although the tests primary use is to get a reading from someone who is otherwise uncooperative with the psychiatrist, a lot of the cases where someone may be uncooperative would also make the test unreliable.
What that does not talk about are all the other times when the record company invested the same amount of money and lost all of it do to any number of reasons including talent that simply goes south and is never heard from again.
I am unsure of your point, are you suggesting that artists tend to steal lots of expensive equipment? because I fail to see how else the record company could make a significant enough loss for this to be an issue. Perhaps you are instead suggesting that the record companies pay for the artists to use a studio without supervising them? In which case I would suggest that they are a bit less business wise than you seem to think.
Idealistic kids should never sign shit without someone advising them of exactly what they are signing. The dollar signs are flashing in their eyes just as much as the A&R guys and that is the simple truth of it, they are both greedy.
What does idealistic have to do with it? I agree that people of limited experience should never sign 'shit' (what an apt use of that word), without independent advice. The suggestion that all ignorant people are greedy is insubstantial though.
There is a local kid here in Oakland that has some pretty good chops and makes pretty good music. He was offered a letter of intent. He showed it to me before he signed it. I told him just write on it, in your hand-writing, "The term of this letter shall not exceed three months from the sate of signing."
Bully for you, maybe there is hope for the world if such a cynical person as yourself can be so altruistic. In fact, I'd say that supports my view that systems rewarding good intention are preferable to systems that reward exploitation and limit the effect of good intention.
They don't call it the music business for nothing.
They don't have to call it the music business at all, I'm all for them calling it 'get rich quick'. I don't think it would be any more or less relevant.
I personally believe IP law needs serious reform, but you have to draw the line someplace.
'Drawing a line' in common usage refers to being forced to make an arbitrary decision based on a fuzzy distinction. I would think that if you applied that to this subject it would be a better argument against copyright as arbitrary decisions are rarely sought after.
And least you forget, all record companies are evil ( even though they lay out huge sums of money and make a suckers bet every time they back a new artist ) and deserve absolutely no return on their investment.
I think perhaps Steve Albini answered that one well enough some 15 or so years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? Presumably by "potentially spurious traffic" you mean any SYN+ACK packets coming from the server that is being attacked? How are you going to identify which of those are legit and which aren't? You _do_ need to expand on this because frankly it is not clear how you would do this, given the problems I have already explained.
I would suggest you read about Stateful Packet Inspection, I am quite at a loss to know why you are not already aware that it is a standard feature in firewalls these days. As for how do you recognise which packets to apply a rule to, you could start by the method you used to identify packets to block.. eg the host and destination. Depending on the attack pattern you could narrow the scope from there.
The server is unlikely to be initiating connections. However, that is irrelevant since blocking SYN+ACK packets that the server sent would stop it *accepting* connections, not making them (and is exactly what the ISPs have been doing which you are complaining about!)
Admittedly I got SYN+ACK the wrong way round but the point stands that they should be using some sort of connection tracking to make it irrelevant. To expand on that, they should be using connection tracking specifically on connections which have been identified either by host or target. The method to identify these could even be the same they used for blocking the SYN+ACK packets (IE, manually).
Wrong. The only way you are going to work out which SYN+ACK packets are legitimate is by watching the SYN packets leaving your network and then somehow distributing that information across all the routers that the SYN+ACK packets might take to enter your network. This is easy where you have symmetric routing since no distribution needs to be done, but in the case of asymmetric routing it is a hard problem.
Which should be accounted for when you design the network not when you are faced with an attack. You already give one possible solution (shared state tables) but there are other options to at least limit the effect of stateful packet inspection in asymmetric environments.
Regardless, asymmetric routing problems are limited to the connections you apply the rules to so if you lack the ability to do a perfect system you can still filter the traffic more effectively than a complete block.
Actually, yes. At the bandwidths you're talking about, you have to track a very large number of connections and look them up at extremely high speeds.
Yes, you would, wouldn't you? Care to 'expand' on how routers that can handle over 5.5Gbps of stateful inspection aren't up to the task? Consider the nature of the attack and that should be plenty. 4chan was getting potentially bandwidth raped by the DDOS, I somehow doubt the traffic 4chan would be able to send out in SYN+ACK would make AT&T's routers blink if they were set up properly. You shouldn't need to even track all connections, only the ones from 4chan.
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but you appear to have seen someone saying "this is a solution" and accepted it more or less at face value rather than thinking it through to the logical conclusions and seeing why it is flawed and largely unworkable. This may be because you haven't had a lot of experience about how large networks, and the internet at large, work - I don't know.
And you appear to lack imagination or just couldn't be arsed to do a job properly, touche.
It doesn't really expand on a method of doing this, but usually you would use connection tracking, whereby you remember the state of all connections running through the router. This is a pretty resource intensive setup and is nigh on unworkable in networks with asymmetric or non-deterministic routing. I.e. it isn't something that I would expect an ISP as big as AT&T to be able to implement, especially at the drop of a hat. Sure, it's easy enough to do on your home network, but it just ain't going to work at the ISP level without some *serious* effort.
It doesn't expand because there is nothing to expand on unless you're filtering all packets rather than only those that have been identified as potentially spurious traffic. Yes, you block potentially legitimate SYN+ACK packets but considering this is a web host we're talking about.. when is the server going to be initiating connections? The point is, it is still blocking all the unwanted traffic through that link while still allowing people to access the site. Issues about asymmetric routing are more applicable to the proxy approach, the only effect it has on rejecting unsolicited ACKS is limited to connections determined to be potential flood targets. The same connections that AT&T blocked anyway.
The method described here will lead to you being able to connect to *any* server, even if it isn't accepting connections. Only once the connection is fully established will the real server be contacted, whereupon you may well discover that the server doesn't accept connections on that port, or doesn't even exist. If my ISP pulled that kind of stunt, I'd be finding a new ISP as soon as possible and I would be advising my customers to do the same because messing with network traffic like that is going to cause all sorts of "weird shit" problems, cause software to use incorrect error messages when reporting failures and generally make debugging network issues absolute hell.
Again, why would you filter all traffic with this rule? You first identify a problem host and its target then you apply an appropriate filter rule. The advantage of this option over the first is you do not lose any legitimate traffic in either direction at the cost of load on the router. Anyone complaining about unexpected behaviour should be thankful that they aren't being rejected outright. The biggest disadvantage is likely to be as you pointed out before, that the rule is unsuitable for asymmetric routing.
Both of the above methods also suffer from the exact same problem that SYN cookies were invented to prevent - namely, there is a device on the network which has to remember the status of all the pending connections which may have been started by spoofed packets. Sure, your firewall is protecting the real server from seeing these spoofed packets, but the firewall itself will collapse under the load of tracking millions of half-open connections from an attacker.
Geez, you think hardware is the limiting factor? Are you living in 2001 ?. Of course none of the solutions are 100% perfect, if they were then they would have probably been a standard part of TCP/IP anyway. The goal in these situations is to limit the damage and that is apparently something that AT&T were incapable or unwilling to do. I'm just barely a layperson in these matters and I can spot the many flaws in their approach. If it wasn't their own customers access they were restricting then I'd agree that there is no obligation to do what is technically possible over what is easiest.
Possibly the first sensible suggestion I've seen on this topic (from Slashdot at least). Still, you'd hope they could afford to buy some decent hardware capable of filtering this kind of stuff out based on the behaviour rather than the source.
Here's a report
from 2001 on the effectiveness of available hardware at filtering SYN packets. Eight years later, what excuse do they have?
If IP source headers are spoofed to somewhere else, say to AT&T networks, it makes sense to filter them
... while allowing legitimate traffic through.
There, fixed that for you.
The block is gone. It was for 4chans own good. They have been DDoSed for weeks. AT&T just stopped access for a short bit. Settle the heck down.
What sort of attack was it that stopping access helped 4chan? From what I've read so far I thought it was a spoofed SYN attack aimed at 4chan with AT&T as the spoofed addresses. Your scenario does not fit this at all.
Really it should never be necessary to block legitimate traffic if you have sufficient hardware to filter your link. I would expect any ISP but especially one as big as AT&T to have hardware capable of filtering out DOS attacks at a rate equal to their links capacity. The only issue should be if you have insufficient bandwidth on a link outside your network and that is something you have limited control over anyway certainly not a sufficient excuse in itself to block rather than filter.
Then I do it again. And again. I effectively flood both you and 4chan with meaningless traffic. Your traffic problems are even worse, because if you have a firewall blocking the RST packets, then 4chan will send you 4 ACK packets (depending on configuration) for every SYN packet I send them.
I don't see why AT&T would choose blocking access entirely over some pretty simple filtering to let legitimate traffic through while stopping the flood getting past their first router.
There should be no difference between the two unless they have inadequate hardware not capable of filtering at capacity. Exactly the same amount of flooded traffic is stopped whether you filter it or block the source.
I think the real story here is AT&T being idiots who got caught with their pants down by a 13ish year old exploit that even the most inexperienced network admin should be able to find a solution for within 5 minutes of googling.
there was nothing they could do but pull the plug on the source of the collateral ACKs
You were doing so great until this bit. Or I hadn't realised that one of the biggest ISPs in the USA lacked the capability to do something as simple as filtering out unwanted ACKs.
You were certainly right about there being a knee-jerk reaction, pity it appears to be yours.
When did Slashdot turn into the jocks locker room?
I'm sorry, how many major parties does America have? Which one of the two is the 'liberal' party?
America may be built on a legal foundation of individual freedom but I do not see how that translates into a more pro-freedom society. It is America we have to blame for ditching their own constitution in order to pass ever longer copyright law, why would I trust the system with more fundamental rights? While I am not proud of my country I have to laugh at anyone who thinks America is better than us, the fact that you're so desperate to be is an indication of how blind you are to your own problems.
Obama did though so GP's sentence is at worse grammatically ambiguous. Bush merely signed the amendment after having proposed the short term amendment that had just expired. Bush also weighed in heavily on what the bill should do, quote: "President Bush said he would not sign any bill that did not provide retroactive immunity for telecommunications corporations".
Not just $5 billion but $5 trillion if you are referring to the quoted piece. I find it hilarious that politicians are prone to accept these figures without a hint of substance or peer review. Even if the figure is accurate (and I've no reason to suppose they couldn't count up $5 trillion from transactions in IP), the equation is not complete without all information being considered equally. Some ones they likely missed are:
Those are just a few I can think of off the top of my head, there are many more considerations if you are being as thorough as you should be (and they can be described better than I have too). Basically, without some real unbiased academic brain power sorting through the figures then the figures are pointless.
Being ironic isn't a failure.
Given though the change in things from copying being a natural barrier to being an unnatural barrier, do you really believe he would still think copyright the best way of doing things? The guy was very smart, I do not doubt that if he lived today he would see more opportunities than were available when he made that speech. The other aspect is given hindsight, would he lament the negative effect copyright has had to be more harmful than the positive effect he envisioned?
I would argue that given the history of the lengths people will go to abusing copyright we should focus our energies on alternative methods rather than trying to tie copyright down to what it was in the first place.
She didn't say she doesn't have some sort of firewall. Stopping infected machines communicating isn't a job of antivirus programs and a properly configured firewall is far more effective at stopping your data getting out than any antivirus.
Virtualbox doesn't run on "*nix", so the simplicity of your example is misleading. Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris are the only supported operating systems. The guest OS support is similarly limited.
Hang on, suddenly MacOSX, linux and OpenSolaris are not *nix?
MacOSX is registered Unix 03, OpenSolaris is based on System V Unix and Linux is a non registered Unix clone. Which of those don't you consider *nix? The ones without nix on the end (which leaves Linux) or the ones that aren't Unix (which at least leaves MacOSX)?
You could also throw FreeBSD into the mix which is similar to Linux in that it conforms to many of the same standards without being registered as Unix, there is an experimental version of VirtualBox available for FreeBSD.
Nevemind, I'm blind, it's here: "If they want to frequent this site from home in their private time that is when their right". Still, I don't think they were saying that going on the site was illegal (or they are really ill informed). At worst it would be against the workplace policy but that should not be in itself illegal. I think they were referring to the expression of views from the site in front of people who would likely be offended by them. Which would be analogous to sexually harassing someone in the workplace.
Who were you replying to? The post I just read doesn't mention anything about posting while on the job.
Want to protest that? Then don't say "it shouldn't be illegal". You should made sure when the laws were introduced that it didn't become illegal by doing the same thing the petitioners did. Make your case and show that YOUR case benefits the greater good (gets the most people to vote for you).
You seem to have a strange contradiction going, or a lack of distinction between peoples opinions and action. On the one hand you are saying 'don't say it shouldn't be illegal' yet on the other you are saying 'change the law the same way the people who made it illegal did'. It is hard to do the latter without the former as public opinion is formed largely through communication.
I don't buy the argument that people should have done something about it at the time either. I wasn't around or wasn't eligible to vote when the majority of our society was put into law, that is aside from an argument that the system isn't adequate for its intended purposes anyway. There needs to be no excuse for bad laws, the whole idea of having a well educated legislative body to come up with these laws is to put the political will into effective laws. If the problem with raves is about fire safety and other issues of regulation then concentrate on those aspects. Even if you are unsympathetic to those who caused the problem you're jeopardising the system in a number of ways for future generations including ensuring that they can have no respect for the system.
What you seem to be posing is that people should be penalised for engaging in a non harmful activity associated with other activities that are harmful and that if the majority agree that the non harmful activity is bad it should be against the law. I would argue that the system should be more robust than a simple majority rule, if for nothing else then because it effects more than the current voting population. The law about raves quite clearly picks out the type of music which is completely irrelevant to the underlying problems it is trying to prevent. If the aims of the law and the actual effect of the law do not match then it should not have been passed as law. If the aim of the law was to criminalize people for listening to a certain type of music then that is plainly bigotry and conflicts with reasoning used in other, more fundamental laws and again should not be passed as law.
If the process for making law was as simple as you seem to think then we could do away with a good chunk of the law and political system and just have a web site for people to submit proposals and vote on laws at. Ironically, while defending the spirit of the law process, I don't actually think it is the best way to do things let alone think that the current system is capable of meeting its own targets (as the rave legislation shows).
Neo-liberals (or libertarians as they are called in the US) are as a rule against laws banning drugs. Their main tenet is that individual liberties should be maximized and government influence minimized. So they are generally vehemently to government regulations - be it of drugs or of the market. Saying that neo-liberals see people as "entirely selfish entities, plotting and scheming against one-another" is a very slanted and twisted version of the of their core belief: that each individual is an end in himself/herself. Put in other words that your life belongs to you and that nobody has the right to enslave you, be it for the benefit for one other individual or a whole society.
Neo-Liberal can mean many things, the GP was referring to Neo-Liberal as the label for Thatcher's economic policies. This is hinted at by his later reference in the same paragraph to the free market and seems a perfectly acceptable use of the term both backed up by Wikipedia and numerous dictionaries. Please don't have a go at people for your failure to recognise their use of ambiguous words in unfamiliar contexts.
Note: For those of you who haven't seen any Adam Curtis documentaries: He's like Michael Moore, but without the humor and with less fact checking. The documentaries are similar in style and quality to "Moon Hoax" documentaries and have the same ratio of facts to speculation.
Could it be.. from the similarity of your description and the content of your post.. could you be.. Adam Curtis?!
I would suppose that you either lack imagination or are at some level (wittingly or unwittingly that is) choose not to cooperate with the test. That in itself may be indicative of paranoia or some similar such condition but more likely it is just basic survival instincts not letting you submit yourself to what you perceive to be the whim of a relative stranger.
The big issue is although the tests primary use is to get a reading from someone who is otherwise uncooperative with the psychiatrist, a lot of the cases where someone may be uncooperative would also make the test unreliable.
Here it is, as you asked so nicely.
Wikipedia would appear to disagree with you.
Depends on whether they factor in types of death, are 'ideal' weight people more likely to die while doing extreme sports?
What that does not talk about are all the other times when the record company invested the same amount of money and lost all of it do to any number of reasons including talent that simply goes south and is never heard from again.
I am unsure of your point, are you suggesting that artists tend to steal lots of expensive equipment? because I fail to see how else the record company could make a significant enough loss for this to be an issue. Perhaps you are instead suggesting that the record companies pay for the artists to use a studio without supervising them? In which case I would suggest that they are a bit less business wise than you seem to think.
Idealistic kids should never sign shit without someone advising them of exactly what they are signing. The dollar signs are flashing in their eyes just as much as the A&R guys and that is the simple truth of it, they are both greedy.
What does idealistic have to do with it? I agree that people of limited experience should never sign 'shit' (what an apt use of that word), without independent advice. The suggestion that all ignorant people are greedy is insubstantial though.
There is a local kid here in Oakland that has some pretty good chops and makes pretty good music. He was offered a letter of intent. He showed it to me before he signed it. I told him just write on it, in your hand-writing, "The term of this letter shall not exceed three months from the sate of signing."
Bully for you, maybe there is hope for the world if such a cynical person as yourself can be so altruistic. In fact, I'd say that supports my view that systems rewarding good intention are preferable to systems that reward exploitation and limit the effect of good intention.
They don't call it the music business for nothing.
They don't have to call it the music business at all, I'm all for them calling it 'get rich quick'. I don't think it would be any more or less relevant.
Don't waste your breath on these miscreants. These people create no artistic works, they make nothing of artistic value, they simply believe they can take what they want when they want it. They believe © means they have a right to copy and give away anything they please.
+++!!!ERROR!!!+++ Sarcasm Quota Exceeded, Please Insert Cheese.
I personally believe IP law needs serious reform, but you have to draw the line someplace.
'Drawing a line' in common usage refers to being forced to make an arbitrary decision based on a fuzzy distinction. I would think that if you applied that to this subject it would be a better argument against copyright as arbitrary decisions are rarely sought after.
And least you forget, all record companies are evil ( even though they lay out huge sums of money and make a suckers bet every time they back a new artist ) and deserve absolutely no return on their investment.
I think perhaps Steve Albini answered that one well enough some 15 or so years ago.