Re:This is about Freedom. Is that important to you
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The Stallman Factor
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· Score: 2
So you're saying, to fight MS, you want to become MS, just without also making any money. Outstanding. We'll put out sub-standard crap but people will use it anyway because it has the right name, and eventually we'll make it all work correctly. Or maybe not, because we were too busy adding another cool feature. That's what BillG has said for years, and what you're saying now. Shit, at least he got something from it, you're aiming more toward the pissing yourself in dark slacks effect: you get a warm feeling, but no-one else much notices. Linux developers can and do write good code. Because they want to, and choose to. The freedom of open source helps, but they still need to pay attention and do some good work. What's the point of having that freedom and not ever using it for the purposes it was designed for? Open source software gives developers the best tools available to do great things. But if everyone spends all their time focusing on the "open source" and not enough time on the "software", no-one else will care. If open source software gets marginalized, because all of the biggest projects fail due to too much time was spent worrying about ideological purity and kowtowing to the RMS blessed political commissars, Gates and MS still win. But you'll have lots and lots of shiny freedom to show to your friends.
And, yeah, I'm writing this on an xp box, because that offers me the best applications currently. And I'm sitting behind an openbsd box as my firewall, because that offers the best security. And my web and other internet servers are on a Linux box, which does the best job at that role. It'd be great if all of those boxes could run Linux and I could do all that I'm doing now with my current setup, as well or better. But I can't, because too many whiny bastards would rather spend their time bitching about the politics of software rather than the quality of software. But wow, doesn't that freedom feel nice.
Re:This is about Freedom. Is that important to you
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The Stallman Factor
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· Score: 2
The most important aspect of Linux isn't the freedom, it's the goddamn functionality. You want religion, shave your head and join a cult. You want good software, install what works best.
The idea that it's the politics that are the most important part of the free software movement, rather than whether the product is worth a damn, is why some of the most prominent products in the fight against Microsoft are such total abortions - because the folks working on them didn't care enough about writing good code. I've read lots of interviews by folks in the Mozilla camp, and they all talk about how it's important to have alternatives to MS, blah, blah, blah. None of them say anything at all about the code actually being something I would choose solely on the merits. Why not? Because they spent too much time giving interviews about how important what they were doing was, and not enough time making it *good*. I saw a rambling apologia for Mozilla on newsforge, with ol' roblimo talking about how mozilla - despite its many obvious and glaring flaws - was so great compared to MS because it had stuff like pop-up blocking built right in instead of requiring a third party add-on like IE. Never mind that this bloatware bundling from the vendor at the expense of clean code is exactly what most everyone, likely including roblimo, hates about most every other program from MS, particularly Office. But when mozilla, the politically correct choice, does it, its a brilliant decision that makes the app his favorite in the category.
RMS wrote good code. The politics came afterward, and that's the way it should be. The product comes first. The willingness to accept crap as long as it has the right name on it is why MS software is so popular despite being so flawed. I thought that was what everyone here on/. was fighting against, not what they wanted to emulate. Instead of wasting time and effort putting GNU/ in front of damn near everything, type just that much as new code, or documentation, or calm rational promotion of Linux and open software. A few characters at a time, you can create something useful, instead of just contibuting to a long distance hand-job for RMS. Let's concentrate on making things better instead of worrying about making them ideologically pure.
Bloody hell, I wasn't claiming that no-one in the third world was capable of speaking English, I was merely inquiring whether such persons would find such an extension so valuable and desirable.
And sure, other languages (particularly Romance languages) have cognates of professional beginning with the same three letters, but I doubt that many of them commonly use pro as a short form of the word. (The only saving grace of annoying pedantry is precision. Without that, one is merely being annoying.) Let's acknowledge that.pro is primarily targeted at an English speaking audience. Plenty of room for complaint over ICANN's English-centrism exists here, please direct such grumbles to them, not me, thank you.
And I think it's great that Moldova and Tuvalu and the like got a great windfall from random chance giving them a good name. (Though I wish Cocos Islands had hit ClearChannel communications up for more money for.CC, those guys are responsible for the pathetic state of radio in the US and I wish that someone got some use from them.) My point wasn't that this was a bad thing, just that it wasn't so bad that someone commercial got.pro either. I doubt that anything beyond the original standards or country codes will have long-term value for domains. Once the system fragments much more it will lose all possible value - if one can append _anything_ to the end of a domain as the TLD, what, then, is the point of the TLD? At that point it's just a long arbitrary name with no hierarchical structure, and who would pay $300 for that? At that price, the.pro registrar will crash and burn and the TLD will either go away or go to someone else who may treat it better. Let the market decide.
Sure,.pro is a monopoly. In the same sense that Pepsi has a monopoly on, well, Pepsi. Plenty of other beverages in the world, but you bet, only Pepsi can sell Pepsi. Bastards.
Why would a professional in a third world country want an uncommon TLD that is just part of an *English* word? There are lots of other domain names possible, no-one at all is forced to use.pro, and frankly if that name did become wildly popular there is nothing stopping the country registrars from offering.pro.au or.pro.uk and the like. If you want to get angry about something absurd in this market, complain about how small countries got good extensions just by a quirk in their names. No-one seems to be complaining about the folks in Moldova who got.MD, you'd think doctors would be lining up for that one. And the folks in Tonga just sold off the rights to.TO to some corporation. Tuvalu went for the big bucks with.TV, what did they do to deserve a good name for free? That sort of thing seems far more unfair than some desparate internet company trying to cash in on a new TLD by charging higher rates.
And while $300 does seem a little stiff as domain registration fees go, its still pretty cheap compared to other means of creating name awareness - that's the equivalent of a couple of boxes of business cards, some letterhead, and a small sign over the door. Not a big ticket item for a company looking to improve their image.
Well, that's a start, but my point wasn't that the Microsoft permissions were so spectacular, but that Linux wasn't any better and in many cases was worse. Having to resort to patches and add-ons to extend the flawed and simplistic *nix permission system so that it is almost kinda sorta equivalent to the microsoft offering is absurd. Any *nix should be better than Microsoft on any aspect of security right out of the box, no exceptions, no excuses.
The existing *nix file permission structure has simply outlived it's usefulness, and needs to be discarded entirely rather than kept hobbling along with stopgap code. I find it irrational that with all of the advances and alternative file systems being developed for Linux - and with all of the emphasis put on security - that there is not a new file system available or in development with built-in support for a permission structure at least equal, if not in every way superior, to what is available elsewhere. Is everyone just hoping the NSA will do it for you? Open Source software allows developers to draw on the strengths of decades of good work in *nix development. It shouldn't, however, be forced to keep old weaknesses, too.
Sadly, the NTFS file system has a richer system of file and directory permissions than anything Linux has to offer. Which is of course made moot by exploits that give the Microsoft user system level privileges, but the simplistic owner/group/world permission structure common to *nix systems is not a key selling point. The best permission structure I've personally dealt with was Novell's NDS, but they mistreated their sales channel so badly over the years they'd have troubling selling water to a guy who was on fire. Too bad, their cascading inheritance model was just amazing.
All of this is beside the point anyway, as the article deals with folks misusing resources they already have access to, not problems with people getting at files they are not normally allowed to see. A Linux user is just as capable as a windows user of burning files he has rights to onto a CD.
"On a related note, the percentage of IPv4-adresses assigned to American (US) organisations, businesses, people is unproportionally high"
Umm, maybe because the internet was *invented* here, and the early adopters got large netblocks assigned? Lets not go all tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy theorist over this, ok? It's not because the US is just mean to you poor downtrodden Europeans, we just had a head start and given the projected usage - that we now know was far below what actually happened - the allocation system wasn't too terribly efficient, because no-one thought it needed to be. As late as the 1996, setting up a business ISDN account with a mid-size local ISP got us a full 254 addresses assigned, even though we only really needed one of them and had just 5 employees. Now, if I still had those addresses, I could probably make more renting them out than the company paid me in salary. Who knew?
What's to prepare for? They are either legal or they aren't. If they bought a bulk license then they only have to find a few pieces of paper. All the arguments that kids may have installed warez that they haven't had time to police so it isn't fair to drop in on the schools on short notice are absurd. What M$ software do they think the kids are putting on the boxes? There may well be illegal apps the kids have put on the machines - which means that the admins are just slack bastards, those machines ought to be completely locked down and/or re-imaged from a clean source regularly, a single piece of porn in a school machine will lead to mass firings and lawsuits - but I doubt any of the software is from Microsoft. They are looking for office and upgraded operating systems, maybe some of the games MS released, not mp3z. All of which is either a huge download from a warez site or comes only on CD, and takes up a large amount of HD space anyway, not something a kid can really sneak onto a machine without the teachers noticing.
Having done software audits before, mostly in a rush before the real, external auditors got there, I know that asking for more time to prepare really means "we won't have enough time to hide the evidence of our serious and potentially expensive guilt." And converting to Linux or some other open source OS is not a real option, no matter how much the Portland LUG would like to think so. I'd suspect that the number of commercial children's educational programs, particularly the multimedia intensive applications, written for *nix is vanishingly small, if not actually zero. The rest of the software the kids need is ideally the same software they'll run into in the outside world as they grow up - you think the wacky, hard to use, "almost comparable" *nix office apps qualify? Um, no. Usability is a great requirement, too, also something Linux does particularly badly at. It'd be great if the option did exist, but it doesn't. Maybe the office workers can convert, and perhaps they are the big culprits anyway, but the machines the children use need to be windows or mac. A linux box, no matter its other advantages and political desirability, is about as useful to teach kids as a c-64. These are existing machines, so even Linux' ability to run well on older hardware just doesn't matter, the boxes are already in place. Most of Linux' strongest points aren't relevant in an educational environment (except maybe price), and the rest just don't make up for the shortcomings.
And how useful is it for Linux to be known as the last refuge of the scofflaws? You think it will help Linux or any other free software if a mass conversion is viewed with suspicion, as if the only reason most folks convert is to avoid the fines for their piracy, not because Linux really was a better choice? No, I don't think so. If the school system really wants to convert, they need to stand the audit, take their lumps, *then* switch, with as much fanfare and media attention as possible. Not sneak over to Linux in the night, one step ahead of the auditors.
That's what called "fair use". An unauthorized copy is technically piracy, but is legally permitted under current law. So my install of a purchased software package on my other computer is essentially legally pirated software.
Of course, if anyway tries to report me for that, I'll just smack them in the head, 'cuz they'll have to have been in my house to see that.
Yah, how long before the hackers get involved? This was invented over by MIT after all, so it can't be long before folks have devices to order rounds for folks who aren't done yet, order goofy girly drinks with umbrellas in them instead of the beer the person had been drinking, or even jam a specific mug so that your annoying drunk buddy won't get any more until he gets off his lazy ass and staggers off to the bar.
And wouldn't these need a GPS beacon so that a waitress would know *where* the empty was? And maybe some sort of means of determining what the person was drinking, either special glasses for each offering or have the glasses be uniquely ID'd and the contents updated by the staff at each refill? Yikes. Too hard to implement, too easy to mess with. The only tech advance the local bar needs is some form of EZ-Pass, so I can just wave my keychain at a sensor and they send me a bill or charge my credit card instead of messing with change. That I could use.
With all of these endless/. posts about how Linux will rule the world, I have yet to see a single post explaining how programmers will ever get paid. Don't any of you want to write code for a living? Open Source companies can make money, sure, charging for services. But services cannot pay for programmers. Let me repeat that so that everyone is sure to see it: services cannot pay for programmers.
Since Open Source code is, well, Open, absolutely any service provider or consultant has access to the same software. If company A pays programmers to write code which is contributed to the community and makes their money selling services related to that code, and company B has no programmers but offers the exact same services for the exact same code, the company B will always be able to make more profit than company A. Because company B is in the exact same business as company A, but doesn't have to pay programmers. They can cut their costs below company A, stealing their business, and still enjoy higher margins. Company A either fires the programmers or dies.
A company can only afford to pay programmers if they have name recognition high enough to charge higher prices for services, or don't give feedback to the community about upcoming releases until its actually out so that they have a big enough head start to give competitive advantage, or they use closed code. That means they either pimp themselves, act like weasels, or go proprietary. Nice way to make a living. The Open Source movement lives on successfully, but the coders end up eating a lot of ramen and working at Circuit City. The only model I've seen so far depends on coders working for free. Volunteerism is great, but you can't base a business on altruism. Besides, in some ways making money off of unpaid workers is worse than Nike using cheap foreign labor - at least the foreign labor gets *something* for their effort. With few exceptions, contributing to Open Source is like pissing yourself in dark slacks - you get a warm feeling, but nobody else notices.
Can some of the clever folks here at/. come up with a way for Open Source to succeed and pay programmers at the same time?
Wasn't there a joke about MS thinking about selling office furniture? Something about a beta tester signing up because he was used to getting shrink wrapped stool samples from Microsoft anyway? Mebbe I'm forgetting...
The Scientologists don't mention it much, but y'know that L. Ron Hubbard is dead, right? Not much chance of him allowing or not allowing anything at the present moment. If he had any ability to exert influence from beyond the grave, do you think he'd have allowed Travolta to turn one of his novels into one of the worst cinematic turds of all time? Nope, just cultists and con-men running the show there now, with one group having gotten out of the habit of actually thinking stuff through, and the other starting to believe their own scam.
I'm glad Google has come around and done the right thing, but I'm disappointed that they ever gave in to the wack jobs in the first place.
Question: if the secret teachings of the Scientologists are actually ancient knowledge handed down by superior beings, wouldn't the copyright period have already expired? If the works *are* copyrightable, doesn't that indicate that the documents are a new creation authored in the last 75 years? Hmmm....
Don't mess with any of the fields in emails, or forward anything to the gov't types. Just create a few web pages with the email addresses of the folks you want to take official notice of the problem, and let the spam spiders do all the work. A few test posts to usenet with those addresses included for those harvesters would also help.
Any deception on your part makes you look bad, not the poor mislead spammer. Spammers are bad enough on their own, just maybe they need a push to go after the people you want particularly mad at spam.
The budget isn't that big. To you and me $6 million USD is a pretty sexy number, but once they've paid themselves, their lawyers, and their lobbyists, they wouldn't have enough money to buy even a single congresscritter, much less be able to exert significant influence around the world.
I suspect a lot of the budget that isn't going to the law firm is going to pay for all the meetings in out-of-the-way places they use to hide what they're up to while pretending to be global. Ghana?!? Who had that bright idea? Including all the laptops of members and lackeys and press, the number of PCs in Ghana likely doubled for the duration of the conference. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose.
I can't comment on whether some anime featuring powered armor appeared before the book, though I would tend to doubt it as Heinlein won the 1959 Hugo award for Starship Troopers. (The Hugo isn't awarded for comics, this was for the actual book.) I've seen several places claim that Heinlein invented powered armor in that work. Maybe they were incorrect, but given that you weren't even within a generation on your guess as to when the book was written - Google is your friend - it's possible that your recollection is simply off after so much time.
Well, since most of the folks on here apparently only know Starship Troopers from the suckass movie - where they not only aren't in armor, they don't even have long sleeved shirts - I'm glad at least someone made the connection. Robert Heinlein *invented* the idea of powered armor in that book. Anime may have borrowed it, but it was RAH who started it all.
Though the artist rendering does demonstrate what sorts of comic books that guy reads. At least he didn't do the female version, with breasts each bigger than the helmet. Too bad the artist missed the important point that with nano-scale materials, the suit could funtion while still being flexible enough that you wouldn't need those multi-part joints, which are only needed in bulky or rigid materials. But it looked cool.
Well, except that the primary advocate of the DMCA in congress is a member of the opposition party to said popular president, so a better case could be made that 90% of the population oppose it. Especially given that said advocate - a doddering old imbecile named Hollings who is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hollywood - has taken to simply inventing things when attacking the current president, due either to a total lack of ethics or incipient senility.
I see what you're saying, but I don't agree that domain names and trademarks are sufficiently similar that ownership of a trademark automatically entitles the owner to also have the domain, and additional domains based on it, with no effort on their part. Domains are cheap and becoming cheaper all the time. There is just no excuse to let a domain name go unclaimed for long periods and then leap on it only after someone else wants it. This should be considered the same as forgetting to file basic paperwork, you snooze you lose, no mulligans or do-overs or "I-meant-tos". I'd be amenable to a formal ruling, or even black letter law, that not pursuing a domain name does not count as failing to protect a trademark, but if the trademark owner can't be bothered to spend less than the cost of a fscking happy meal per month to own the domain outright I don't think they are entitled to any consideration.
I support the rights of corporations to protect their intellectual property, including rights to domain names containing trademarks. However, I don't think they should retain the right to those domains if they don't pursue them within a certain period. How did this retroactive ownership come about, when it doesn't exist anywhere else that I'm aware of in IP law? If company A produces a product called "tradenameA" but doesn't actually go forward with the process to own that trademark, in everything other than domain names they are just out of luck. If company B decides to trademark "tradenameA", company A doesn't get to sue to demand that it be given up, especially not years later. All company A gets to do is seethe.
Why can companies with established trademarks wait for years and years without registering a domain - which they were free to do at any time until someone else grabbed it - and then successfully sue to get the domain only after a third party got the ignored name? I'd give a company six months to a year after registering the trademark to have first option on all unused domains with that trademark, but after that their inaction would leave affected domains forever out of their legal grasp. Throw in a similar grandfather period for every other company starting from a fixed date, to cover all old trademarks that haven't yet been pursued. Past that date, their rights to that name are the same as anyone else, first-come first-served.
Especially now that large corporations can be their own registrar, there is just no possible excuse for them not pre-emptively registering any possible desired, unused domain name. For ($30/month? IIRC), any company can register every possible variant of a trademark they like, from common spelling errors to "-sucks" &etc. But if they don't take action, they give up their rights to future action. Simple as that.
ps - anyone want to help the process along with a GPL home registrar solution? Just download, compile, pay your monthlies, and you're ready to register vanity domains for all of your friends, co-workers, pets, to your hearts content. I'm sure there are some other requirements, but I'd suspect a large number of ISPs and decent sized companies and non-profits would qualify.
Hello? All money that the gov't has comes from someone else, but it's still public money. And as everyone has pointed out, unemployment benefits are a form of insurance, not an entitlement. Just like every other form of insurance, you don't get a payout just by asking, you have to meet the terms. In this case, you have to look for work. The amount brought in by employers is not enough to cover everyone paying into it at the same time, just that fraction likely to need it. By receiving benefits that one is not entitled to, by virtue of not living up to the requirements, one is taking money away from a limited resource that could be better spent on someone willing to play by the rules. Even in basic economics textbooks, if you aren't looking for work you don't count as unemployed. If you are no longer classified as unemployed, you don't receive unemployment benefits. Receiving an insurance benefit when you do not meet the criteria is fraud, exactly the same as if you faked a back injury to get workman's comp.
Your post indicates a basic lack of understanding about how unemployment works. The government doesn't keep track of how much has been paid into an unemployment fund on behalf of each employee, so that said employee can draw down off of their own contributions. That's absurd. There is no umemployment savings fund for you and you alone. Two folks who are laid off from the same job get the same benefits, no matter that one is just a few years out of college and the other has been a full-time worker for 30 years.
And you must live in a pretty damn affluent area if you truly believe that "if you don't put the money in, you don't get the money back". That might, maybe, be the ideal case for Social Security, but for the overwhelming majority of government payouts directly to an individual the most money comes out to those who have put the least in - y'know, the poor? A guy paying taxes on 100K a year isn't going to be getting foodstamps, or running up Medicaid bills. He doesn't need it.
I'm certainly not going to get into a lengthy argument about the purpose of taxes, though with Libertarians in this thread it might be a fun exercise, but you need to be a lot more sure of what you are talking about before you call me a moron.
You're defending a guy's right to sponge off of public money and you have a.sig supporting the Libertarian party? Wow, that's irony.
To be eligible for unemployment, one must actively seek work. Pretty simple. Just noting on a webpage that gets a lot of hits that you are out of work doesn't count, or else just posting a resume on Monster would get you max benefits. The last thing you want to do after you get caught is fight it out in court. Not only will you have zero chance of winning, you'll likely just annoy the gov't into seeking recovery of previous payments and even charging you with fraud. The real moral of this story is that if you are leeching off unemployment and aren't even using some of the tried and true dodges to pretend you are seeking work, then don't draw attention to yourself. I mean, if you can't even be bothered to give cash to a buddy with a business and have him then write you a check for the same amount as payment for a "consulting job" so that you can use the check as proof of seeking gainful employment, why should anyone care? That's just disrespectful.
1) You can just go ahead and notify all of the proper folks - ISP, blackhole lists, &etc. in advance. Not only will this server never legitimately send mail, so filtering everything that appears to come from it is desired anyway, putting your self on the open relay lists is a great way to attract low end spammers.
2) The code is provably not an email server, and will never be used as such. Of course, one should always check with one's uplevel provider to make sure of their policies, but running a daemon that responds like a relay but never actually sends a single email anywhere is unlikely to be illegal.
3) It doesn't matter. The simple act of the spammer checking to see if mail is delivered to a known location is enough to ID the source as an abuser - it isn't necessary for them to do anything else. The server is not advertised as being a mail server and will therefore attract not one single legitimate access. Any source that sends the trap server anything at all on port 25 beyond portscan traffic should be logged, filtered, and reported. (I don't like portscans, either, but this is to be specific against spammers.) Sure, it would be nice if the spammer spent more time with the server so that more of his operating habits could be revealed, from his test methods to the fingerprints of his outbound messages, but by touching the system at all he has already been caught. That's the beauty of running a honeytrap that is narrowly targeted and isn't advertised - there is no valid traffic to be ignored, no innocent use that needs to be permitted while sifting traffic logs for attacks. Barring use of psychic abilities, the only way for a spammer to know that the box in question is a trap is to access it in a way that will already catch them out. It might not be enough to get them TOSsed off their ISP, but it will be enough to get them known as a spammer and possibly added to the filter lists.
Teergrube MTA's don't help ID spammers, they just work off of a known list of addresses. It's a neat idea, but it has no value for previously unknown sources. From what I've read, teergrubing is a response to spam, not a means of detection.
So you have the honeypot act as - or even be based on - common versions of sendmail. If the spammers decide to filter out those servers for use out of fear that it'll be a honeypot, that's already a big victory. "Oh, darn, the trap system isn't as effective 'cuz the bastards just stopped making use of any of the servers based on the most popular mail system code in the world. Horrors!" Heh. And there is no legitimate reason for anyone to run any tests against the trap servers - the addresses aren't advertised, only folks hunting for an open relay will ever touch them. The test activity itself is enough to ID the source as a spammer, so that the netblock can be filtered and passed to other concerned admins, and the logs of the testing can be used to develop better defenses against future attacks. Just like any other form of IDS.
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So you're saying, to fight MS, you want to become MS, just without also making any money. Outstanding. We'll put out sub-standard crap but people will use it anyway because it has the right name, and eventually we'll make it all work correctly. Or maybe not, because we were too busy adding another cool feature. That's what BillG has said for years, and what you're saying now. Shit, at least he got something from it, you're aiming more toward the pissing yourself in dark slacks effect: you get a warm feeling, but no-one else much notices. Linux developers can and do write good code. Because they want to, and choose to. The freedom of open source helps, but they still need to pay attention and do some good work. What's the point of having that freedom and not ever using it for the purposes it was designed for? Open source software gives developers the best tools available to do great things. But if everyone spends all their time focusing on the "open source" and not enough time on the "software", no-one else will care. If open source software gets marginalized, because all of the biggest projects fail due to too much time was spent worrying about ideological purity and kowtowing to the RMS blessed political commissars, Gates and MS still win. But you'll have lots and lots of shiny freedom to show to your friends.
And, yeah, I'm writing this on an xp box, because that offers me the best applications currently. And I'm sitting behind an openbsd box as my firewall, because that offers the best security. And my web and other internet servers are on a Linux box, which does the best job at that role. It'd be great if all of those boxes could run Linux and I could do all that I'm doing now with my current setup, as well or better. But I can't, because too many whiny bastards would rather spend their time bitching about the politics of software rather than the quality of software. But wow, doesn't that freedom feel nice.
The most important aspect of Linux isn't the freedom, it's the goddamn functionality. You want religion, shave your head and join a cult. You want good software, install what works best.
/. was fighting against, not what they wanted to emulate. Instead of wasting time and effort putting GNU/ in front of damn near everything, type just that much as new code, or documentation, or calm rational promotion of Linux and open software. A few characters at a time, you can create something useful, instead of just contibuting to a long distance hand-job for RMS. Let's concentrate on making things better instead of worrying about making them ideologically pure.
The idea that it's the politics that are the most important part of the free software movement, rather than whether the product is worth a damn, is why some of the most prominent products in the fight against Microsoft are such total abortions - because the folks working on them didn't care enough about writing good code. I've read lots of interviews by folks in the Mozilla camp, and they all talk about how it's important to have alternatives to MS, blah, blah, blah. None of them say anything at all about the code actually being something I would choose solely on the merits. Why not? Because they spent too much time giving interviews about how important what they were doing was, and not enough time making it *good*. I saw a rambling apologia for Mozilla on newsforge, with ol' roblimo talking about how mozilla - despite its many obvious and glaring flaws - was so great compared to MS because it had stuff like pop-up blocking built right in instead of requiring a third party add-on like IE. Never mind that this bloatware bundling from the vendor at the expense of clean code is exactly what most everyone, likely including roblimo, hates about most every other program from MS, particularly Office. But when mozilla, the politically correct choice, does it, its a brilliant decision that makes the app his favorite in the category.
RMS wrote good code. The politics came afterward, and that's the way it should be. The product comes first. The willingness to accept crap as long as it has the right name on it is why MS software is so popular despite being so flawed. I thought that was what everyone here on
Bloody hell, I wasn't claiming that no-one in the third world was capable of speaking English, I was merely inquiring whether such persons would find such an extension so valuable and desirable.
.pro is primarily targeted at an English speaking audience. Plenty of room for complaint over ICANN's English-centrism exists here, please direct such grumbles to them, not me, thank you.
.CC, those guys are responsible for the pathetic state of radio in the US and I wish that someone got some use from them.) My point wasn't that this was a bad thing, just that it wasn't so bad that someone commercial got .pro either. I doubt that anything beyond the original standards or country codes will have long-term value for domains. Once the system fragments much more it will lose all possible value - if one can append _anything_ to the end of a domain as the TLD, what, then, is the point of the TLD? At that point it's just a long arbitrary name with no hierarchical structure, and who would pay $300 for that? At that price, the .pro registrar will crash and burn and the TLD will either go away or go to someone else who may treat it better. Let the market decide.
And sure, other languages (particularly Romance languages) have cognates of professional beginning with the same three letters, but I doubt that many of them commonly use pro as a short form of the word. (The only saving grace of annoying pedantry is precision. Without that, one is merely being annoying.) Let's acknowledge that
And I think it's great that Moldova and Tuvalu and the like got a great windfall from random chance giving them a good name. (Though I wish Cocos Islands had hit ClearChannel communications up for more money for
Sure, .pro is a monopoly. In the same sense that Pepsi has a monopoly on, well, Pepsi. Plenty of other beverages in the world, but you bet, only Pepsi can sell Pepsi. Bastards.
.pro, and frankly if that name did become wildly popular there is nothing stopping the country registrars from offering .pro.au or .pro.uk and the like. If you want to get angry about something absurd in this market, complain about how small countries got good extensions just by a quirk in their names. No-one seems to be complaining about the folks in Moldova who got .MD, you'd think doctors would be lining up for that one. And the folks in Tonga just sold off the rights to .TO to some corporation. Tuvalu went for the big bucks with .TV, what did they do to deserve a good name for free? That sort of thing seems far more unfair than some desparate internet company trying to cash in on a new TLD by charging higher rates.
Why would a professional in a third world country want an uncommon TLD that is just part of an *English* word? There are lots of other domain names possible, no-one at all is forced to use
And while $300 does seem a little stiff as domain registration fees go, its still pretty cheap compared to other means of creating name awareness - that's the equivalent of a couple of boxes of business cards, some letterhead, and a small sign over the door. Not a big ticket item for a company looking to improve their image.
Well, that's a start, but my point wasn't that the Microsoft permissions were so spectacular, but that Linux wasn't any better and in many cases was worse. Having to resort to patches and add-ons to extend the flawed and simplistic *nix permission system so that it is almost kinda sorta equivalent to the microsoft offering is absurd. Any *nix should be better than Microsoft on any aspect of security right out of the box, no exceptions, no excuses.
The existing *nix file permission structure has simply outlived it's usefulness, and needs to be discarded entirely rather than kept hobbling along with stopgap code. I find it irrational that with all of the advances and alternative file systems being developed for Linux - and with all of the emphasis put on security - that there is not a new file system available or in development with built-in support for a permission structure at least equal, if not in every way superior, to what is available elsewhere. Is everyone just hoping the NSA will do it for you? Open Source software allows developers to draw on the strengths of decades of good work in *nix development. It shouldn't, however, be forced to keep old weaknesses, too.
Sadly, the NTFS file system has a richer system of file and directory permissions than anything Linux has to offer. Which is of course made moot by exploits that give the Microsoft user system level privileges, but the simplistic owner/group/world permission structure common to *nix systems is not a key selling point. The best permission structure I've personally dealt with was Novell's NDS, but they mistreated their sales channel so badly over the years they'd have troubling selling water to a guy who was on fire. Too bad, their cascading inheritance model was just amazing.
All of this is beside the point anyway, as the article deals with folks misusing resources they already have access to, not problems with people getting at files they are not normally allowed to see. A Linux user is just as capable as a windows user of burning files he has rights to onto a CD.
"On a related note, the percentage of IPv4-adresses assigned to American (US) organisations, businesses, people is unproportionally high"
Umm, maybe because the internet was *invented* here, and the early adopters got large netblocks assigned? Lets not go all tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy theorist over this, ok? It's not because the US is just mean to you poor downtrodden Europeans, we just had a head start and given the projected usage - that we now know was far below what actually happened - the allocation system wasn't too terribly efficient, because no-one thought it needed to be. As late as the 1996, setting up a business ISDN account with a mid-size local ISP got us a full 254 addresses assigned, even though we only really needed one of them and had just 5 employees. Now, if I still had those addresses, I could probably make more renting them out than the company paid me in salary. Who knew?
What's to prepare for? They are either legal or they aren't. If they bought a bulk license then they only have to find a few pieces of paper. All the arguments that kids may have installed warez that they haven't had time to police so it isn't fair to drop in on the schools on short notice are absurd. What M$ software do they think the kids are putting on the boxes? There may well be illegal apps the kids have put on the machines - which means that the admins are just slack bastards, those machines ought to be completely locked down and/or re-imaged from a clean source regularly, a single piece of porn in a school machine will lead to mass firings and lawsuits - but I doubt any of the software is from Microsoft. They are looking for office and upgraded operating systems, maybe some of the games MS released, not mp3z. All of which is either a huge download from a warez site or comes only on CD, and takes up a large amount of HD space anyway, not something a kid can really sneak onto a machine without the teachers noticing.
Having done software audits before, mostly in a rush before the real, external auditors got there, I know that asking for more time to prepare really means "we won't have enough time to hide the evidence of our serious and potentially expensive guilt." And converting to Linux or some other open source OS is not a real option, no matter how much the Portland LUG would like to think so. I'd suspect that the number of commercial children's educational programs, particularly the multimedia intensive applications, written for *nix is vanishingly small, if not actually zero. The rest of the software the kids need is ideally the same software they'll run into in the outside world as they grow up - you think the wacky, hard to use, "almost comparable" *nix office apps qualify? Um, no. Usability is a great requirement, too, also something Linux does particularly badly at. It'd be great if the option did exist, but it doesn't. Maybe the office workers can convert, and perhaps they are the big culprits anyway, but the machines the children use need to be windows or mac. A linux box, no matter its other advantages and political desirability, is about as useful to teach kids as a c-64. These are existing machines, so even Linux' ability to run well on older hardware just doesn't matter, the boxes are already in place. Most of Linux' strongest points aren't relevant in an educational environment (except maybe price), and the rest just don't make up for the shortcomings.
And how useful is it for Linux to be known as the last refuge of the scofflaws? You think it will help Linux or any other free software if a mass conversion is viewed with suspicion, as if the only reason most folks convert is to avoid the fines for their piracy, not because Linux really was a better choice? No, I don't think so. If the school system really wants to convert, they need to stand the audit, take their lumps, *then* switch, with as much fanfare and media attention as possible. Not sneak over to Linux in the night, one step ahead of the auditors.
That's what called "fair use". An unauthorized copy is technically piracy, but is legally permitted under current law. So my install of a purchased software package on my other computer is essentially legally pirated software.
Of course, if anyway tries to report me for that, I'll just smack them in the head, 'cuz they'll have to have been in my house to see that.
Yah, how long before the hackers get involved? This was invented over by MIT after all, so it can't be long before folks have devices to order rounds for folks who aren't done yet, order goofy girly drinks with umbrellas in them instead of the beer the person had been drinking, or even jam a specific mug so that your annoying drunk buddy won't get any more until he gets off his lazy ass and staggers off to the bar.
And wouldn't these need a GPS beacon so that a waitress would know *where* the empty was? And maybe some sort of means of determining what the person was drinking, either special glasses for each offering or have the glasses be uniquely ID'd and the contents updated by the staff at each refill? Yikes. Too hard to implement, too easy to mess with. The only tech advance the local bar needs is some form of EZ-Pass, so I can just wave my keychain at a sensor and they send me a bill or charge my credit card instead of messing with change. That I could use.
With all of these endless /. posts about how Linux will rule the world, I have yet to see a single post explaining how programmers will ever get paid. Don't any of you want to write code for a living? Open Source companies can make money, sure, charging for services. But services cannot pay for programmers. Let me repeat that so that everyone is sure to see it: services cannot pay for programmers.
/. come up with a way for Open Source to succeed and pay programmers at the same time?
Since Open Source code is, well, Open, absolutely any service provider or consultant has access to the same software. If company A pays programmers to write code which is contributed to the community and makes their money selling services related to that code, and company B has no programmers but offers the exact same services for the exact same code, the company B will always be able to make more profit than company A. Because company B is in the exact same business as company A, but doesn't have to pay programmers. They can cut their costs below company A, stealing their business, and still enjoy higher margins. Company A either fires the programmers or dies.
A company can only afford to pay programmers if they have name recognition high enough to charge higher prices for services, or don't give feedback to the community about upcoming releases until its actually out so that they have a big enough head start to give competitive advantage, or they use closed code. That means they either pimp themselves, act like weasels, or go proprietary. Nice way to make a living. The Open Source movement lives on successfully, but the coders end up eating a lot of ramen and working at Circuit City. The only model I've seen so far depends on coders working for free. Volunteerism is great, but you can't base a business on altruism. Besides, in some ways making money off of unpaid workers is worse than Nike using cheap foreign labor - at least the foreign labor gets *something* for their effort. With few exceptions, contributing to Open Source is like pissing yourself in dark slacks - you get a warm feeling, but nobody else notices.
Can some of the clever folks here at
Wasn't there a joke about MS thinking about selling office furniture? Something about a beta tester signing up because he was used to getting shrink wrapped stool samples from Microsoft anyway? Mebbe I'm forgetting...
The Scientologists don't mention it much, but y'know that L. Ron Hubbard is dead, right? Not much chance of him allowing or not allowing anything at the present moment. If he had any ability to exert influence from beyond the grave, do you think he'd have allowed Travolta to turn one of his novels into one of the worst cinematic turds of all time? Nope, just cultists and con-men running the show there now, with one group having gotten out of the habit of actually thinking stuff through, and the other starting to believe their own scam.
I'm glad Google has come around and done the right thing, but I'm disappointed that they ever gave in to the wack jobs in the first place.
Question: if the secret teachings of the Scientologists are actually ancient knowledge handed down by superior beings, wouldn't the copyright period have already expired? If the works *are* copyrightable, doesn't that indicate that the documents are a new creation authored in the last 75 years? Hmmm....
Don't mess with any of the fields in emails, or forward anything to the gov't types. Just create a few web pages with the email addresses of the folks you want to take official notice of the problem, and let the spam spiders do all the work. A few test posts to usenet with those addresses included for those harvesters would also help.
Any deception on your part makes you look bad, not the poor mislead spammer. Spammers are bad enough on their own, just maybe they need a push to go after the people you want particularly mad at spam.
The budget isn't that big. To you and me $6 million USD is a pretty sexy number, but once they've paid themselves, their lawyers, and their lobbyists, they wouldn't have enough money to buy even a single congresscritter, much less be able to exert significant influence around the world.
I suspect a lot of the budget that isn't going to the law firm is going to pay for all the meetings in out-of-the-way places they use to hide what they're up to while pretending to be global. Ghana?!? Who had that bright idea? Including all the laptops of members and lackeys and press, the number of PCs in Ghana likely doubled for the duration of the conference. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose.
I can't comment on whether some anime featuring powered armor appeared before the book, though I would tend to doubt it as Heinlein won the 1959 Hugo award for Starship Troopers. (The Hugo isn't awarded for comics, this was for the actual book.) I've seen several places claim that Heinlein invented powered armor in that work. Maybe they were incorrect, but given that you weren't even within a generation on your guess as to when the book was written - Google is your friend - it's possible that your recollection is simply off after so much time.
Well, since most of the folks on here apparently only know Starship Troopers from the suckass movie - where they not only aren't in armor, they don't even have long sleeved shirts - I'm glad at least someone made the connection. Robert Heinlein *invented* the idea of powered armor in that book. Anime may have borrowed it, but it was RAH who started it all.
Though the artist rendering does demonstrate what sorts of comic books that guy reads. At least he didn't do the female version, with breasts each bigger than the helmet. Too bad the artist missed the important point that with nano-scale materials, the suit could funtion while still being flexible enough that you wouldn't need those multi-part joints, which are only needed in bulky or rigid materials. But it looked cool.
-reemul
Well, except that the primary advocate of the DMCA in congress is a member of the opposition party to said popular president, so a better case could be made that 90% of the population oppose it. Especially given that said advocate - a doddering old imbecile named Hollings who is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hollywood - has taken to simply inventing things when attacking the current president, due either to a total lack of ethics or incipient senility.
But thanks for taking an interest.
I see what you're saying, but I don't agree that domain names and trademarks are sufficiently similar that ownership of a trademark automatically entitles the owner to also have the domain, and additional domains based on it, with no effort on their part. Domains are cheap and becoming cheaper all the time. There is just no excuse to let a domain name go unclaimed for long periods and then leap on it only after someone else wants it. This should be considered the same as forgetting to file basic paperwork, you snooze you lose, no mulligans or do-overs or "I-meant-tos". I'd be amenable to a formal ruling, or even black letter law, that not pursuing a domain name does not count as failing to protect a trademark, but if the trademark owner can't be bothered to spend less than the cost of a fscking happy meal per month to own the domain outright I don't think they are entitled to any consideration.
I support the rights of corporations to protect their intellectual property, including rights to domain names containing trademarks. However, I don't think they should retain the right to those domains if they don't pursue them within a certain period. How did this retroactive ownership come about, when it doesn't exist anywhere else that I'm aware of in IP law? If company A produces a product called "tradenameA" but doesn't actually go forward with the process to own that trademark, in everything other than domain names they are just out of luck. If company B decides to trademark "tradenameA", company A doesn't get to sue to demand that it be given up, especially not years later. All company A gets to do is seethe.
Why can companies with established trademarks wait for years and years without registering a domain - which they were free to do at any time until someone else grabbed it - and then successfully sue to get the domain only after a third party got the ignored name? I'd give a company six months to a year after registering the trademark to have first option on all unused domains with that trademark, but after that their inaction would leave affected domains forever out of their legal grasp. Throw in a similar grandfather period for every other company starting from a fixed date, to cover all old trademarks that haven't yet been pursued. Past that date, their rights to that name are the same as anyone else, first-come first-served.
Especially now that large corporations can be their own registrar, there is just no possible excuse for them not pre-emptively registering any possible desired, unused domain name. For ($30/month? IIRC), any company can register every possible variant of a trademark they like, from common spelling errors to "-sucks" &etc. But if they don't take action, they give up their rights to future action. Simple as that.
ps - anyone want to help the process along with a GPL home registrar solution? Just download, compile, pay your monthlies, and you're ready to register vanity domains for all of your friends, co-workers, pets, to your hearts content. I'm sure there are some other requirements, but I'd suspect a large number of ISPs and decent sized companies and non-profits would qualify.
-reemul
Hello? All money that the gov't has comes from someone else, but it's still public money. And as everyone has pointed out, unemployment benefits are a form of insurance, not an entitlement. Just like every other form of insurance, you don't get a payout just by asking, you have to meet the terms. In this case, you have to look for work. The amount brought in by employers is not enough to cover everyone paying into it at the same time, just that fraction likely to need it. By receiving benefits that one is not entitled to, by virtue of not living up to the requirements, one is taking money away from a limited resource that could be better spent on someone willing to play by the rules. Even in basic economics textbooks, if you aren't looking for work you don't count as unemployed. If you are no longer classified as unemployed, you don't receive unemployment benefits. Receiving an insurance benefit when you do not meet the criteria is fraud, exactly the same as if you faked a back injury to get workman's comp.
Your post indicates a basic lack of understanding about how unemployment works. The government doesn't keep track of how much has been paid into an unemployment fund on behalf of each employee, so that said employee can draw down off of their own contributions. That's absurd. There is no umemployment savings fund for you and you alone. Two folks who are laid off from the same job get the same benefits, no matter that one is just a few years out of college and the other has been a full-time worker for 30 years.
And you must live in a pretty damn affluent area if you truly believe that "if you don't put the money in, you don't get the money back". That might, maybe, be the ideal case for Social Security, but for the overwhelming majority of government payouts directly to an individual the most money comes out to those who have put the least in - y'know, the poor? A guy paying taxes on 100K a year isn't going to be getting foodstamps, or running up Medicaid bills. He doesn't need it.
I'm certainly not going to get into a lengthy argument about the purpose of taxes, though with Libertarians in this thread it might be a fun exercise, but you need to be a lot more sure of what you are talking about before you call me a moron.
You're defending a guy's right to sponge off of public money and you have a .sig supporting the Libertarian party? Wow, that's irony.
To be eligible for unemployment, one must actively seek work. Pretty simple. Just noting on a webpage that gets a lot of hits that you are out of work doesn't count, or else just posting a resume on Monster would get you max benefits. The last thing you want to do after you get caught is fight it out in court. Not only will you have zero chance of winning, you'll likely just annoy the gov't into seeking recovery of previous payments and even charging you with fraud. The real moral of this story is that if you are leeching off unemployment and aren't even using some of the tried and true dodges to pretend you are seeking work, then don't draw attention to yourself. I mean, if you can't even be bothered to give cash to a buddy with a business and have him then write you a check for the same amount as payment for a "consulting job" so that you can use the check as proof of seeking gainful employment, why should anyone care? That's just disrespectful.
I'll take this point by point:
1) You can just go ahead and notify all of the proper folks - ISP, blackhole lists, &etc. in advance. Not only will this server never legitimately send mail, so filtering everything that appears to come from it is desired anyway, putting your self on the open relay lists is a great way to attract low end spammers.
2) The code is provably not an email server, and will never be used as such. Of course, one should always check with one's uplevel provider to make sure of their policies, but running a daemon that responds like a relay but never actually sends a single email anywhere is unlikely to be illegal.
3) It doesn't matter. The simple act of the spammer checking to see if mail is delivered to a known location is enough to ID the source as an abuser - it isn't necessary for them to do anything else. The server is not advertised as being a mail server and will therefore attract not one single legitimate access. Any source that sends the trap server anything at all on port 25 beyond portscan traffic should be logged, filtered, and reported. (I don't like portscans, either, but this is to be specific against spammers.) Sure, it would be nice if the spammer spent more time with the server so that more of his operating habits could be revealed, from his test methods to the fingerprints of his outbound messages, but by touching the system at all he has already been caught. That's the beauty of running a honeytrap that is narrowly targeted and isn't advertised - there is no valid traffic to be ignored, no innocent use that needs to be permitted while sifting traffic logs for attacks. Barring use of psychic abilities, the only way for a spammer to know that the box in question is a trap is to access it in a way that will already catch them out. It might not be enough to get them TOSsed off their ISP, but it will be enough to get them known as a spammer and possibly added to the filter lists.
Teergrube MTA's don't help ID spammers, they just work off of a known list of addresses. It's a neat idea, but it has no value for previously unknown sources. From what I've read, teergrubing is a response to spam, not a means of detection.
So you have the honeypot act as - or even be based on - common versions of sendmail. If the spammers decide to filter out those servers for use out of fear that it'll be a honeypot, that's already a big victory. "Oh, darn, the trap system isn't as effective 'cuz the bastards just stopped making use of any of the servers based on the most popular mail system code in the world. Horrors!" Heh. And there is no legitimate reason for anyone to run any tests against the trap servers - the addresses aren't advertised, only folks hunting for an open relay will ever touch them. The test activity itself is enough to ID the source as a spammer, so that the netblock can be filtered and passed to other concerned admins, and the logs of the testing can be used to develop better defenses against future attacks. Just like any other form of IDS.