> I'm confused. Which is it supposed to be? Are > Gentoo users full of crap, or are they correct?
for almost all programs, it's not going to be *noticably* any faster. on average, you can get maybe 1% to 5% performance improvement from CPU-optimised binaries. this generally isn't worth the time and effort it takes to do the custom compile.
for heavy graphics processing or number crunching, you'll probably notice that. you almost certainly wouldn't notice it on anything else.
so, yes, the gentoo users are full of crap....the same kind of crap that obsessive overclockers are full of when they get so self-impressed by the 1% extra performance that they get out of their combination CPU/egg-frier.
i should add that the only program that really is worth recompiling for your own system is the kernel.
distribution-supplied "stock" kernels are useful for installing a system with but as soon as the system is running, the best thing to do is to download the latest kernel source and compile a new kernel targetted for exactly your hardware (and save yourself some hassle by compiling drivers/modules for hardware you *might* have in the nearish future)
> But this can be a false economy, especially with > programs that are used frequently: precompiled > binaries will never run as quickly as those > compiled with the right optimizations for your > own machine.
actually, the obsession with recompiling so-called "optimised" binaries is a false economy. the benefits are minimal while the effort can be considerable (especially for newbies - who are generally the kind of people are impressed by silly ideas like this).
distcc is a useful tool for those who actually need it but for the vast majority of programs used by the vast majority of people, the average 1-5% performance improvement that can be gained by optimising a compile for your exact CPU will never even come close to compensating for the amount of time spent on editing Makefiles and compiling the software. Like everything else, optimisation is subject to the law of diminishing returns.
CPU intensive programs (e.g. 3d rendering and other number crunching apps) can benefit from optimised compilation and may, IFF you use them a lot, be worth recompiling for your system....but in general, it's not worth the bother.
similarly, it may be worth while recompiling heavily used server software (e.g. apache, or postgres) on dedicated servers - but most such services are I/O bound, not CPU bound. Spending hours to shave off a few CPU cycles here and there is generally not worth it....you're better off spending time and money upgrading your disks or installing more RAM.
> Yes, imagine that. See, the bible wasn't written > yesterday in English directly to you. The New > Testament was written 2000 years ago in a > different language by authors living in a > different culture.
so, then, why do you fundies insist that the only valid translation of the original documents is one that was written about 1400 years later in a completely different country, different part of the world, and (most importantly), completely different culture?
why do you fundies completely reject more scholarly translations that attempt to translate the original documents into modern language?
why is it that the political and moral climate of Middle Ages England is so fundamental to your definition of a religion which originated thousands of miles away in the Middle East?
and what lesson is your god teaching those millions who starve to death in famine, or those tortured, raped, and murdered in some genocidal program, or those bombed to death in the name of liberation?
what exactly is the lesson here? "don't be born poor", perhaps? or maybe "don't be black/jewish/indian/cambodian/ugandan/iraqi or one of dozens of other persecuted groups"? how about "choose to have rich, white parents"?
valuable lesson, that. it's just too bad that most of the world's population don't seem capable of learning it, huh?
this idea that human suffering is an expression of "God's" educational love is morally bankrupt - one of the most disgusting ideas ever to be conceived.
the solution is obvious: un-President Bush can declare that the martians have weapons of mass destruction, and have to be stopped regardless of cost.
when it becomes obvious even to the American public that they don't actually have the weapons, Bush can change the story to regime change for the purpose of rescuing martian princesses.
> The issue with allowing this is that terrorist > organizations, who are generally well funded, may > be able to check associates against the list and > verify they are not listed.?
yes, that's one of the problems with it.
another problem is "what is the definition of a terrorist?", and the related issue of "who gets to decide?"
will, say, greenpeace be classified as a terrorist organisation because they "cause economic harm" to US interests? what level of dissent, membership of which political and/or protest organisations will cause someone to be classified as a terrorist?
(this is not as ridiculous as it sounds - i've already heard several oil & forestry industry representatives refer stridently to environmental activists as "terrorists")
what happens to an individual who is a member of so-called terrorist organisations like Greenpeace or the Sierra Club or some other moderate activist group? will they be able to get a job? will they be able to buy a plane ticket or a train ticket? will they be able to go to public events, e.g. purchase tickets to a concert? will they be refused a bank account because the govt checks says "Yes -- they are associated with terrorist groups"?
say goodbye to the right to dissent. going, going....gone.
> In Instant Runoff, the D party loses the first > place. So those votes are discounted and the 30% > who voted D,R,G put R in the first place.
yes, that's how preferential voting is supposed to work. those who voted D,R,G preferred R over G, so that's how they voted. they want their vote to go to R rather than G.
this is not a problem. this is the way it is supposed to work.
btw, your example is very contrived and simplistic. there wouldn't be an easy 3 way split like that, ballot papers would be marked in *EVERY* possible combination, even those that seem to make no sense.
btw, this style of voting has worked in australia for nearly 100 years now. it works. the only improvement i'd like to see is a "none of the above" option....if somebody can't beat NOTA in a ballot then they don't deserve to sit in parliament.
also btw, another electoral change that you americans sorely need is compulsory voting (since voting is secret, what that really means is compulsory brief attendance at a voting booth on election day).
the advantage to compulsory voting is that may of the marginalised and the outcasts of society actually bother to vote, since they have to turn up anyway (of course, some of them will just turn in an informal vote - e.g. writing "F..K YOU" on the ballot, but even that is better than the apathy of not turning up at all.)
yeah....and all those sick people are costing you money too - you're subsidising THEIR health-care with your increased premiums.
and don't forget about all those parasitic losers who indulge in dangerous activities which risk life, limb, and health-insurance expenses - dangerous activities like walking, running, driving, playing sport, abseiling, sky-diving, scuba diving, bungee jumping...in fact, just about any activity.
just like smoking, these are all lifestyle choices - people voluntarily CHOOSE to do all these things, so perhaps these activities shouldn't be covered by insurance either. these irresponsible and selfish bastards can make other choices if they want their insurance to cover them.
Your anger is misdirected. you should be angry at your ISP who has failed to provide the service you paid for, not at SPEWS who are providing a valuable service listing the IP addresses of spam-friendly ISPs.
SPEWS owes you nothing, you are not their customer.
it is your ISP that repeatedly failed to get rid of their spamming customer. they (and the spammers they accept money from) are the ones at fault here.
these shows don't exist to belittle men. they do that, but it's secondary - and only done so far as is necessary to further the primary agenda.
the primary agenda is to *normalise* the behaviour of these slovenly fucks, to normalise and promote the patriarchal hierarchy within their antiquarian families. these shows teach the great unwashed masses just how their lives should be run, how they should inter-relate with each other, i.e. they illustrate the Natural Order Of Things (as decided by conservative old farts).
in short, these shows are regressive propaganda promoting an archaic and conservative agenda....and you've bought into it if your yearning for 1950s style trash is anything to go by.
> While they have to provide the source to the > kernel if they are including it in hardware they > are selling there is no compulsion to release > their drivers - just like nVidia, [...]
wrong.
distributing a binary-only driver by itself is a completely different thing to distributing hardware plus kernel plus binary driver as one product.
while the former is a grey-area (there are compelling arguments both for and against the legality of that), the latter is explicitly covered in the GPL.
to quote from section 3 of the GPL:
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
(emphasis added)
it is that last qualifier that is significant here. if you distribute any GPL-linked or derived binary *WITH* any GPL-licensed code then *ALL* of the code must be released under the terms of the GPL.
yes, it is Fred's account. but it's not Fred's telephone number.
this may seem like a silly distinction to make, but there are some circumstances where it is essential - e.g. ex-wife or ex-husband still sharing an account (stupid, but it happens) and not wanting their ex-spouse to know where they live or what their phone number is. more likely is ex-husband ringing ISP and just asking for the list of phone numbers used by his ex-wife's account.....or just anyone ringing the ISP and claiming to be a customer and asking for the list of phone numbers.
There's no way for the ISP to know the circumstances or the truth in any such request, so they should as a matter of policy if not law refuse to provide any such details without a court order or search warrant. at the most, they should refer the caller to the relevant police/law-enforcement authority.
> No law prevents AOL from telling Fred what > number his account has logged > in from.
depends what country you're in.
In Australia, at least, it is the CALLER's privacy that needs to be protected, regardless of who they are claiming to be when they call - this applies whether the phone call is voice or data.
In Australia, the Telecommunications Act has stiff penalties (including gaol time) for breaching privacy - the only safe answer for an ISP to give a customer when they ask for a list of phone numbers used to dial in to their account is "please contact the police, that information can only be given in response to a court order or search warrant".
You're missing one crucial point: the "small government is better" message *IS* the agenda of big business.
You americans are so obsessively paranoid about the evils of government that you completely ignore and are completely blind to the evils of business (which, in many cases, is actually the evil behind evil government anyway - look at who's behind your current en-elected un-President for example).
the worst thing you americans ever did was to remove the requirement that corporations, in order to have status as a legal entity in their own right, had to both have a charter AND act in the public interest. as soon as that requirement was dropped (IIRC it was some time around the late 1880s or 1890s), you created a monster that took over your country and is now bent on taking over the rest of the world (what little it hasn't already conquered). you're still paying for that mistake now. and the rest of the world is still paying for that mistake.
Re:which taxes? Income taxes? Social Security tax?
on
Tech Rich Get Richer
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· Score: 0
> Last I checked, social programs don't hire people.
they used to, before that kind of thing became unfashionable in financial circles....which happened about the time that they decided that massive government projects were worth a lot of money that they'd rather have for themselves.
so, the kind of infrastructure projects that used to be directly government-run (like roads, highways, dams, etc) were "outsourced" to consulting firms. instead of having govt. employed engineers, project managers, overseers, labourers, etc employed as public servants acting in the public interest, everything went through several levels of consultants, each of which took a cut.
because of this, the creation of infrastructure and employment for the working classes became secondary objectives at best. the primary objective was profit.
which is why, these days, we have the peculiarly american notion that "welfare" is a dirty word if it isn't preceded by "corporate".
yeah, Firefly is another exception. i once saw a description of it as "rednecks in space" which is partially true, but the show (like other Joss Whedon creations) had a lot more depth and credibility than most american TV shows. a shame it got axed.
i've seen a few episodes of Enterprise. it's probably the most "science-fiction" of all the ST spinoff series. nothing special, but not annoyingly stupid or banal.
DS9 just disgusts me. i made the mistake of watching an episode the other night. some stupid story about a doctor(?) unwillingly recruited by some secret federation spy group and sent to the romulan planet, where he discovers and foils a plot to assassinate a senator...like he was supposed to because the whole thing was a scam setup by the spy group to prove that their tame senator was beyond reproach. very predictable.
what disgusted me about it, though, was not the predictable story-line, the wooden acting, the crappy dialogue...no, what disgusted me was the smug holier-than-thou moral superiority of the Americans oops i mean the Federation. like many mainstream US shows, it's just propaganda designed to present the "Good Guys" (i.e. Americans or their future desecendants, the Federation) as well-meaning, slightly naive helpful spreaders of truth, justice, and democracy who can do no wrong.
the doctor in the show had major moral quandaries over whether it was right to spy on the romulans or not - even though the romulans were only recent (and notoriously untrustworthy) allies. he espoused the view that "they're allies, it would be rude to distrust them so we have to make sure we're completely vulnerable to them". yeah, sure. nobody is that stupid. not even americans. it is, however, an image of yourselves that americans LOVE to promote, that it is your well-meaning & good-natured naivete that gets you into trouble, that the problems America causes in the world are unfortunate mistakes due to lack of understanding rather than ruthless exploitation and callous disregard for the consequences.
i can never quite figure out if that propaganda is intended for internal US consumption or if it's intended to fool anyone out in the real world. i tend to assume the former as the rest of the world has a much less one-sided & filtered view of American activities.
i did get the impression that DS9 is what passes for a serious attempt at depicting moral ambiguity on american TV. sad, really.
on to other topics...
voyager is science fiction-ish with way too much soap opera. i can watch it if i switch off my brain....but then, it's pretty hard to think too badly of a show that has seven-of-nine in a skin-tight uniform:)
NG is just pure soap-opera in space-ships. no science-fiction at all.
the "Law and Order" series are complete crap. they're worse than just mindless garbage, they're obvious propaganda designed to push a hard-line right wing POV with some touchy-feely window dressing showing that all cops are really nice people and sometimes they just have to break the law to enforce it. but it's ok, because good guys can do no wrong. right makes might and the end justifies the means, and that any trick to undermine a suspect's civil rights is ok because *all* bad guys are so bad that anything you do to stop them is justified.
one of the L&O shows that i've seen has some kind of psychologist on staff working with the cops....he comes out with the most outrageously moronic psycho-babble. the kind of air-headed crap that even a new-age bimbo would be embarrassed by...and he's supposed to be portraying a professional psychologist or something.
this should be no great surprise, though. most american TV and movies are directly funded by the US military and other groups with an interest in propagandising the population. this is why you'll never see on TV on Arab who is a human being rather than a psychotic mass-murderer, and why you'll never see a drug user who isn't a drug abuser with ser
they clearly demonstrated their agression and expansionist/imperialist designs by having obscenely large numbers of their children die from leukaemia caused by the depleted uranium shells left behind by America in the 1991 Gulf War.
Also, half a million dead due to the US-sponsored UN sanctions against Iraq just proves how evil Iraqis are. if they weren't evil, we wouldn't be slaughtering them, would we?
if you believe any of the above, here's some more "truth" for you:
might makes right fox news war is peace freedom is slavery ignorance is strength arbeit macht frei
> Well, even the assumption of easy access to > local space is proving wrong. It's difficult, > expensive and risky to move mass from the > surface of the Earth into near orbit and > prohibitively expensive to move it further than > that.
getting mass into space is difficult and expensive.
moving it around once it's up there is relatively cheap (especially if you're in no great hurry for it to arrive somewhere and don't want to change course too often).
even getting it up there *could* be made cheap if we gave enough of a damn about it. current estimates are that we could build a space elevator within 15 years for around $10 billion USD, if we wanted to (and that's without assuming any breakthrough technological developments).
to put that into perspective, that's a miniscule fraction of what was spent just recently destroying the civilian infrastructure in Iraq.
there's any amount of money available for blowing things up, very little for creating things.
> And has he picked up anything by Kim Stanley > Robinson, Iain Banks, or David Brin lately?
agreed on KSR and IB.
odd that you should mention David Brin, though. he was a promising author who started off with some excellent early novels but quickly developed a severe case of contractual obligation sequilitis. the second Uplift series (especially the last two books) was just plain silly.
but the irony is that Brin has also ranted several times about the trend towards escapist fantasy and black and white Good vs Evil and away from complex moral ambiguity.
In fact, the first thing i thought when i read spider robinson's op-ed piece was that it was just a simplistic rehashing of david brin's (well-written and argued) rant.
Trek's crap, especially NG and the other days-of-our-lives-in-space startrek spinoff series. the original trek had crap stories and crap acting, but at least it was science fiction rather than soap opera.
Buffy isn't...although it was becoming more and more like a boring soap opera in the last two seasons (OTOH it did redeem itself with a fairly decent ending). i really couldn't care less about their screwed up personal relationships (and willow made the most unconvincing TV dyke i've ever seen), i just wanted more cool-looking demons and vampires and stuff.
IMO, american TV producers don't have the faintest idea how to do science fiction...which is odd, because some excellent SF is written by Americans. maybe it just doesn't survive the television industry (unless it's done outside of the country, like Farscape...US production and money backing it, mostly non-US cast & crew)
btw, how did Farscape rate in america? my bet is not very well. all those non-american accents would have made it unpopular...and unrealistic too, because everyone knows that aliens speak American and have middle-class american values.
> postfix's convoluted incoming vs outgoing > filtering;
you obviously don't know postfix at all, because postfix has no concept of "incoming" or "outgoing" mail.
ALL mail is "incoming" because it all gets stored in the queue upon receipt (whether via smtp, or local injection), and ALL mail is "outgoing" because it all gets delivered from the queue.
> Perhaps someday someone will write a simple > sendmail replacement that is feature-for-feature > compatible, but simply has simpler code and a > more straight-forward config syntax (the only > two real failings of sendmail).
somebody has, and there is. it's called "postfix".
MX records may *NOT* point to CNAMEs. the *ONLY* thing that they may point to is an A record.
CNAMEs don't work, IP addresses don't work, an MX record has to point at an A record.
(not that this has anything to do with whether someone is a spammer or not....just with whether they have sufficient clue to be trusted near a DNS server).
Slashdot Mirror
> I'm confused. Which is it supposed to be? Are
> Gentoo users full of crap, or are they correct?
for almost all programs, it's not going to be *noticably* any faster. on average, you can get maybe 1% to 5% performance improvement from CPU-optimised binaries. this generally isn't worth the time and effort it takes to do the custom compile.
for heavy graphics processing or number crunching, you'll probably notice that. you almost certainly wouldn't notice it on anything else.
so, yes, the gentoo users are full of crap....the same kind of crap that obsessive overclockers are full of when they get so self-impressed by the 1% extra performance that they get out of their combination CPU/egg-frier.
i should add that the only program that really is worth recompiling for your own system is the kernel.
distribution-supplied "stock" kernels are useful for installing a system with but as soon as the system is running, the best thing to do is to download the latest kernel source and compile a new kernel targetted for exactly your hardware (and save yourself some hassle by compiling drivers/modules for hardware you *might* have in the nearish future)
> But this can be a false economy, especially with
> programs that are used frequently: precompiled
> binaries will never run as quickly as those
> compiled with the right optimizations for your
> own machine.
actually, the obsession with recompiling so-called "optimised" binaries is a false economy. the benefits are minimal while the effort can be considerable (especially for newbies - who are generally the kind of people are impressed by silly ideas like this).
distcc is a useful tool for those who actually need it but for the vast majority of programs used by the vast majority of people, the average 1-5% performance improvement that can be gained by optimising a compile for your exact CPU will never even come close to compensating for the amount of time spent on editing Makefiles and compiling the software. Like everything else, optimisation is subject to the law of diminishing returns.
CPU intensive programs (e.g. 3d rendering and other number crunching apps) can benefit from optimised compilation and may, IFF you use them a lot, be worth recompiling for your system....but in general, it's not worth the bother.
similarly, it may be worth while recompiling heavily used server software (e.g. apache, or postgres) on dedicated servers - but most such services are I/O bound, not CPU bound. Spending hours to shave off a few CPU cycles here and there is generally not worth it....you're better off spending time and money upgrading your disks or installing more RAM.
> I have exactly this problem and have to pay
> $10 / year to have access to a smtp server that
> will allow me to log-in from any IP.
boohoo....$10/year. that's almost 3 cents a day. my heart bleeds for you.
> Yes, imagine that. See, the bible wasn't written
> yesterday in English directly to you. The New
> Testament was written 2000 years ago in a
> different language by authors living in a
> different culture.
so, then, why do you fundies insist that the only valid translation of the original documents is one that was written about 1400 years later in a completely different country, different part of the world, and (most importantly), completely different culture?
why do you fundies completely reject more scholarly translations that attempt to translate the original documents into modern language?
why is it that the political and moral climate of Middle Ages England is so fundamental to your definition of a religion which originated thousands of miles away in the Middle East?
and what lesson is your god teaching those millions who starve to death in famine, or those tortured, raped, and murdered in some genocidal program, or those bombed to death in the name of liberation?
what exactly is the lesson here? "don't be born poor", perhaps? or maybe "don't be black/jewish/indian/cambodian/ugandan/iraqi or one of dozens of other persecuted groups"? how about "choose to have rich, white parents"?
valuable lesson, that. it's just too bad that most of the world's population don't seem capable of learning it, huh?
this idea that human suffering is an expression of "God's" educational love is morally bankrupt - one of the most disgusting ideas ever to be conceived.
the solution is obvious: un-President Bush can declare that the martians have weapons of mass destruction, and have to be stopped regardless of cost.
when it becomes obvious even to the American public that they don't actually have the weapons, Bush can change the story to regime change for the purpose of rescuing martian princesses.
> The issue with allowing this is that terrorist
> organizations, who are generally well funded, may
> be able to check associates against the list and
> verify they are not listed.?
yes, that's one of the problems with it.
another problem is "what is the definition of a terrorist?", and the related issue of "who gets to decide?"
will, say, greenpeace be classified as a terrorist organisation because they "cause economic harm" to US interests? what level of dissent, membership of which political and/or protest organisations will cause someone to be classified as a terrorist?
(this is not as ridiculous as it sounds - i've already heard several oil & forestry industry representatives refer stridently to environmental activists as "terrorists")
what happens to an individual who is a member of so-called terrorist organisations like Greenpeace or the Sierra Club or some other moderate activist group? will they be able to get a job? will they be able to buy a plane ticket or a train ticket? will they be able to go to public events, e.g. purchase tickets to a concert? will they be refused a bank account because the govt checks says "Yes -- they are associated with terrorist groups"?
say goodbye to the right to dissent. going, going....gone.
it wouldn't matter much if it did happen - it would have a life-span of a few hours at most...it IS running on MS Windows, remember.
> In Instant Runoff, the D party loses the first
> place. So those votes are discounted and the 30%
> who voted D,R,G put R in the first place.
yes, that's how preferential voting is supposed to work. those who voted D,R,G preferred R over G, so that's how they voted. they want their vote to go to R rather than G.
this is not a problem. this is the way it is supposed to work.
btw, your example is very contrived and simplistic. there wouldn't be an easy 3 way split like that, ballot papers would be marked in *EVERY* possible combination, even those that seem to make no sense.
btw, this style of voting has worked in australia for nearly 100 years now. it works. the only improvement i'd like to see is a "none of the above" option....if somebody can't beat NOTA in a ballot then they don't deserve to sit in parliament.
also btw, another electoral change that you americans sorely need is compulsory voting (since voting is secret, what that really means is compulsory brief attendance at a voting booth on election day).
the advantage to compulsory voting is that may of the marginalised and the outcasts of society actually bother to vote, since they have to turn up anyway (of course, some of them will just turn in an informal vote - e.g. writing "F..K YOU" on the ballot, but even that is better than the apathy of not turning up at all.)
yeah....and all those sick people are costing you money too - you're subsidising THEIR health-care with your increased premiums.
and don't forget about all those parasitic losers who indulge in dangerous activities which risk life, limb, and health-insurance expenses - dangerous activities like walking, running, driving, playing sport, abseiling, sky-diving, scuba diving, bungee jumping...in fact, just about any activity.
just like smoking, these are all lifestyle choices - people voluntarily CHOOSE to do all these things, so perhaps these activities shouldn't be covered by insurance either. these irresponsible and selfish bastards can make other choices if they want their insurance to cover them.
> IMO, as far as the US administration is
> concerned, the long-term economic benefits of
> invading Iraq outweighs the interim costs.
more to the point, the interim costs don't matter, because those who make the profit aren't the ones who are paying.
the guiding principle of those in charge of the US (and world) economy is "socialise expenses, privatise profits".
Once you realise this, many things that appear to make no sense at all begin to make perfect sense.
Your anger is misdirected. you should be angry at your ISP who has failed to provide the service you paid for, not at SPEWS who are providing a valuable service listing the IP addresses of spam-friendly ISPs.
SPEWS owes you nothing, you are not their customer.
it is your ISP that repeatedly failed to get rid of their spamming customer. they (and the spammers they accept money from) are the ones at fault here.
you don't get it, do you?
these shows don't exist to belittle men. they do that, but it's secondary - and only done so far as is necessary to further the primary agenda.
the primary agenda is to *normalise* the behaviour of these slovenly fucks, to normalise and promote the patriarchal hierarchy within their antiquarian families. these shows teach the great unwashed masses just how their lives should be run, how they should inter-relate with each other, i.e. they illustrate the Natural Order Of Things (as decided by conservative old farts).
in short, these shows are regressive propaganda promoting an archaic and conservative agenda....and you've bought into it if your yearning for 1950s style trash is anything to go by.
> kernel if they are including it in hardware they
> are selling there is no compulsion to release
> their drivers - just like nVidia, [...]
wrong.
distributing a binary-only driver by itself is a completely different thing to distributing hardware plus kernel plus binary driver as one product.
while the former is a grey-area (there are compelling arguments both for and against the legality of that), the latter is explicitly covered in the GPL.
to quote from section 3 of the GPL:
(emphasis added)
it is that last qualifier that is significant here. if you distribute any GPL-linked or derived binary *WITH* any GPL-licensed code then *ALL* of the code must be released under the terms of the GPL.
> It's Fred's account.
yes, it is Fred's account. but it's not Fred's telephone number.
this may seem like a silly distinction to make, but there are some circumstances where it is essential - e.g. ex-wife or ex-husband still sharing an account (stupid, but it happens) and not wanting their ex-spouse to know where they live or what their phone number is. more likely is ex-husband ringing ISP and just asking for the list of phone numbers used by his ex-wife's account.....or just anyone ringing the ISP and claiming to be a customer and asking for the list of phone numbers.
There's no way for the ISP to know the circumstances or the truth in any such request, so they should as a matter of policy if not law refuse to provide any such details without a court order or search warrant. at the most, they should refer the caller to the relevant police/law-enforcement authority.
> No law prevents AOL from telling Fred what
> number his account has logged
> in from.
depends what country you're in.
In Australia, at least, it is the CALLER's privacy that needs to be protected, regardless of who they are claiming to be when they call - this applies whether the phone call is voice or data.
In Australia, the Telecommunications Act has stiff penalties (including gaol time) for breaching privacy - the only safe answer for an ISP to give a customer when they ask for a list of phone numbers used to dial in to their account is "please contact the police, that information can only be given in response to a court order or search warrant".
personally, i think that's a Good Thing.
You're missing one crucial point: the "small government is better" message *IS* the agenda of big business.
You americans are so obsessively paranoid about the evils of government that you completely ignore and are completely blind to the evils of business (which, in many cases, is actually the evil behind evil government anyway - look at who's behind your current en-elected un-President for example).
the worst thing you americans ever did was to remove the requirement that corporations, in order to have status as a legal entity in their own right, had to both have a charter AND act in the public interest. as soon as that requirement was dropped (IIRC it was some time around the late 1880s or 1890s), you created a monster that took over your country and is now bent on taking over the rest of the world (what little it hasn't already conquered). you're still paying for that mistake now. and the rest of the world is still paying for that mistake.
> Last I checked, social programs don't hire people.
they used to, before that kind of thing became unfashionable in financial circles....which happened about the time that they decided that massive government projects were worth a lot of money that they'd rather have for themselves.
so, the kind of infrastructure projects that used to be directly government-run (like roads, highways, dams, etc) were "outsourced" to consulting firms. instead of having govt. employed engineers, project managers, overseers, labourers, etc employed as public servants acting in the public interest, everything went through several levels of consultants, each of which took a cut.
because of this, the creation of infrastructure and employment for the working classes became secondary objectives at best. the primary objective was profit.
which is why, these days, we have the peculiarly american notion that "welfare" is a dirty word if it isn't preceded by "corporate".
yeah, Firefly is another exception. i once saw a description of it as "rednecks in space" which is partially true, but the show (like other Joss Whedon creations) had a lot more depth and credibility than most american TV shows. a shame it got axed.
:)
i've seen a few episodes of Enterprise. it's probably the most "science-fiction" of all the ST spinoff series. nothing special, but not annoyingly stupid or banal.
DS9 just disgusts me. i made the mistake of watching an episode the other night. some stupid story about a doctor(?) unwillingly recruited by some secret federation spy group and sent to the romulan planet, where he discovers and foils a plot to assassinate a senator...like he was supposed to because the whole thing was a scam setup by the spy group to prove that their tame senator was beyond reproach. very predictable.
what disgusted me about it, though, was not the predictable story-line, the wooden acting, the crappy dialogue...no, what disgusted me was the smug holier-than-thou moral superiority of the Americans oops i mean the Federation. like many mainstream US shows, it's just propaganda designed to present the "Good Guys" (i.e. Americans or their future desecendants, the Federation) as well-meaning, slightly naive helpful spreaders of truth, justice, and democracy who can do no wrong.
the doctor in the show had major moral quandaries over whether it was right to spy on the romulans or not - even though the romulans were only recent (and notoriously untrustworthy) allies. he espoused the view that "they're allies, it would be rude to distrust them so we have to make sure we're completely vulnerable to them". yeah, sure. nobody is that stupid. not even americans. it is, however, an image of yourselves that americans LOVE to promote, that it is your well-meaning & good-natured naivete that gets you into trouble, that the problems America causes in the world are unfortunate mistakes due to lack of understanding rather than ruthless exploitation and callous disregard for the consequences.
i can never quite figure out if that propaganda is intended for internal US consumption or if it's intended to fool anyone out in the real world. i tend to assume the former as the rest of the world has a much less one-sided & filtered view of American activities.
i did get the impression that DS9 is what passes for a serious attempt at depicting moral ambiguity on american TV. sad, really.
on to other topics...
voyager is science fiction-ish with way too much soap opera. i can watch it if i switch off my brain....but then, it's pretty hard to think too badly of a show that has seven-of-nine in a skin-tight uniform
NG is just pure soap-opera in space-ships. no science-fiction at all.
the "Law and Order" series are complete crap. they're worse than just mindless garbage, they're obvious propaganda designed to push a hard-line right wing POV with some touchy-feely window dressing showing that all cops are really nice people and sometimes they just have to break the law to enforce it. but it's ok, because good guys can do no wrong. right makes might and the end justifies the means, and that any trick to undermine a suspect's civil rights is ok because *all* bad guys are so bad that anything you do to stop them is justified.
one of the L&O shows that i've seen has some kind of psychologist on staff working with the cops....he comes out with the most outrageously moronic psycho-babble. the kind of air-headed crap that even a new-age bimbo would be embarrassed by...and he's supposed to be portraying a professional psychologist or something.
this should be no great surprise, though. most american TV and movies are directly funded by the US military and other groups with an interest in propagandising the population. this is why you'll never see on TV on Arab who is a human being rather than a psychotic mass-murderer, and why you'll never see a drug user who isn't a drug abuser with ser
> Where is this "agression" of which you speak?
they clearly demonstrated their agression and expansionist/imperialist designs by having obscenely large numbers of their children die from leukaemia caused by the depleted uranium shells left behind by America in the 1991 Gulf War.
Also, half a million dead due to the US-sponsored UN sanctions against Iraq just proves how evil Iraqis are. if they weren't evil, we wouldn't be slaughtering them, would we?
if you believe any of the above, here's some more "truth" for you:
might makes right
fox news
war is peace
freedom is slavery
ignorance is strength
arbeit macht frei
those of you who are offended by the above lies might like to take a look at http://www.studentsfororwell.org/
> Well, even the assumption of easy access to
> local space is proving wrong. It's difficult,
> expensive and risky to move mass from the
> surface of the Earth into near orbit and
> prohibitively expensive to move it further than
> that.
getting mass into space is difficult and expensive.
moving it around once it's up there is relatively cheap (especially if you're in no great hurry for it to arrive somewhere and don't want to change course too often).
even getting it up there *could* be made cheap if we gave enough of a damn about it. current estimates are that we could build a space elevator within 15 years for around $10 billion USD, if we wanted to (and that's without assuming any breakthrough technological developments).
to put that into perspective, that's a miniscule fraction of what was spent just recently destroying the civilian infrastructure in Iraq.
there's any amount of money available for blowing things up, very little for creating things.
> And has he picked up anything by Kim Stanley
5 /brin_main/ for example.
> Robinson, Iain Banks, or David Brin lately?
agreed on KSR and IB.
odd that you should mention David Brin, though. he was a promising author who started off with some excellent early novels but quickly developed a severe case of contractual obligation sequilitis. the second Uplift series (especially the last two books) was just plain silly.
but the irony is that Brin has also ranted several times about the trend towards escapist fantasy and black and white Good vs Evil and away from complex moral ambiguity.
see http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/1999/06/1
In fact, the first thing i thought when i read spider robinson's op-ed piece was that it was just a simplistic rehashing of david brin's (well-written and argued) rant.
Trek's crap, especially NG and the other days-of-our-lives-in-space startrek spinoff series. the original trek had crap stories and crap acting, but at least it was science fiction rather than soap opera.
Buffy isn't...although it was becoming more and more like a boring soap opera in the last two seasons (OTOH it did redeem itself with a fairly decent ending). i really couldn't care less about their screwed up personal relationships (and willow made the most unconvincing TV dyke i've ever seen), i just wanted more cool-looking demons and vampires and stuff.
IMO, american TV producers don't have the faintest idea how to do science fiction...which is odd, because some excellent SF is written by Americans. maybe it just doesn't survive the television industry (unless it's done outside of the country, like Farscape...US production and money backing it, mostly non-US cast & crew)
btw, how did Farscape rate in america? my bet is not very well. all those non-american accents would have made it unpopular...and unrealistic too, because everyone knows that aliens speak American and have middle-class american values.
> postfix's convoluted incoming vs outgoing
> filtering;
you obviously don't know postfix at all, because postfix has no concept of "incoming" or "outgoing" mail.
ALL mail is "incoming" because it all gets stored in the queue upon receipt (whether via smtp, or local injection), and ALL mail is "outgoing" because it all gets delivered from the queue.
> Perhaps someday someone will write a simple
> sendmail replacement that is feature-for-feature
> compatible, but simply has simpler code and a
> more straight-forward config syntax (the only
> two real failings of sendmail).
somebody has, and there is. it's called "postfix".
the data is not correct.
MX records may *NOT* point to CNAMEs. the *ONLY* thing that they may point to is an A record.
CNAMEs don't work, IP addresses don't work, an MX record has to point at an A record.
(not that this has anything to do with whether someone is a spammer or not....just with whether they have sufficient clue to be trusted near a DNS server).