Which makes me slightly to the right and slightly libertarian.
I remember taking that same test a long while back, but as more and more injustices to people's freedom have happened (such as it now being illegal for Canadians to participate in American TV culture, and my being painted a criminal every time I buy a CDR by the Canadian piracy tax) I've moved far away from my original position, which was give or take spot on with Gandhi.
Funny how certain leaders can do that to people...
>some idiot writes one (terrible) book and everyone screams about term limits.. and dictatorships.
I have no clue what book you're talking about.
I was referring to Chretien as a dictator in the fashion that he ousts from office anyone who doesn't 100% support him. This is the non-violent method of silencing people when you are a dictator. The violent method would be to punch people in the face when they are protesting against you. Both of which Chretien has done.
Please, though, I'm interested in whatever book it is you're talking about.
Since you mentioned it, I'm probably going to vote for the Freedom Party if there's ever a member in my town.
>I'd have more then you, but a few years back/. 'lost' 200 or so of my comments.:-D
Oh yeah?:-)
I posted before there were even user accounts. Now just try to find those old posts (and I even used my real email address back them -- glad I don't now!).
1171 posts and climbing. And yes, I've been told that I need to do something other than slashdot.
I tell them that its the most constructive, least annoying way for me to waste my time at work! I mean, would they rather me have real discussions with them? That's why my journal is for!
(Anyways, good to meet someone else in the 4 digit post range. Its the first I've seen over about 300... I was getting worried I might win a prize or get stuck in the slash HOF -- its 'bout time they added a category for us!)
>Good luck finding out who they are. Good luck finding out the correct address so you can serve them. Good luck getting a judgement, and even if you do have a judgement, good luck collecting even a single dollar from them.
Allow me to demonstrate:
Ahoy-hoy! Hello sir, this is a carpet cleaners phoning to inform you of our new service line. Ok Yes, we can offer you a free carpet cleaning estimate right away. That's interesting. I know. We have many people waiting to take advantage of an offer as exciting as ours. You did know that we offer the super-deluxe Mega-Advantage carpet stain riddance solution along with our usual 2-hours and its dry guarantee, sir? No, I didn't We also offer a host of other solutions which the estimators would be happy to explain to you in detail when they visit your house. When could we put you down for a free in-home evaluation and estimate of our carpet cleaning service. Well, I'm not exactly sure. My schedule is awful busy this week. I don't suppose you could give me a number I can call you back on after I check with my secretary as to when I'm not so busy. Sir, this free estimate will only take a few minutes of your time. I'm not sure of that. My house is quite large, 25,000 square feet. And I have a 100,000 sq. ft. office building I might be interested in hiring your services for. I really think I'd prefer to discuss this at a later time with your manager. That's excellent sir. I'll forward you to our manager. Barry here. What can I do for you? Well, Barry, I have a _very_ large office building that I would like cleaned, but I'm far too busy to discuss it right now. We're talking 100 k sq. feet. I'd really like to meet you in person at your business, or phone you back at a later time, preferably during business hours No problem. You can call me or leave a voicemail at 555-1212, x2600 at any time Thank you. I'll be contacting you shortly. Bye then [click]
Phone the number, listen to the message, get the name of the company from either a reverse lookup or (luckily) from the message. Next time a carpet cleaners phones...
Ahoy-hoy Carpet cleaing service. Can I interes -- Is this XYZ carpet cleaners Uh, yes it is. What can I do for you. You can take me off your calling list immediately. Good-bye [click]
There ya go. All it takes is social engineering, and it's only one call.
>Note also that this process is rather arduous, requires several inconvenient trips through traffic to the bad part of town where the courthouse always is, and many hours on your own time performing research, looking up the law, etc
Its the TCPA, a Federal Law. 16 CFR 310.4(b)(1) for reference.
A small claims judge won't expect that amount of legal reading, anyways. But it always helps. Really, a small claims judge should be very familiar with this law.
And it'd probably only take 10 minutes in court (the company probably won't even show up). Budda-bing, budda-boom. No tracers involved at all.
You call a friend. You tell him to call your cell. You are next door to him.
According to your plan, this is a free call, as all local calls are free in North America.
Now, explain to me how they are going to make money on the cellphone system in this fashion, and don't forget the pay-as-you-go systems that would only require a single "refill" for the life of the phone if it only received incoming calls. And try to keep it under 100 words.
>And you can't use up all the good sun anyway because a lot is still going to be needed for agriculture.
Not to mention that the amount required would ruin more land for our use than nuclear waste disposal areas. And, worse yet, these giant wind generators will be stuck on the good land (like you say) rather than all being gathered up in Siberia.
>What do you do with the nuclear waste that is generated by nuclear power plants? I suppose this waste is very good for the environment.
No, that's why you use it up in slow-poke reactors.
I wish more environmentalists would come up with pro-active solutions rather that destructive ones. Their demand that there be no more nukes has stunted our ability to rid ourselves of this waste in a safe, and highly useful manner.
To Americans, our Reform / PC parties (do they still exist? I haven't followed the Feds for a while) barely scratch center. Everyone else is left.
Trust me on this, or find the study on the 'Net a polling company did last year that proves it...
Not that this makes our government any worse. However, its about time we adopted a 2 term maximum. Its beginning to feel a little too much like a dictatorship here. Ugh.
Hopefully the bad products are weeded out through the testing of an entire country, and we and up with the best combination of price and features later on.
I'd rather have a TV or laptop that's 2 or 3 years out of date than one that is more expensive and is full of features I don't need or want.
Only one of these are "shallow" copies. That's if, by shallow copies, you mean not identical except for the translation and enchanced Japanese content (I can't read Japanese, but I think I can assume that a Japanese Amazon will carry japanese books, a Japanese Yahoo Japanese sites, a Japanese Google Japanese translations).
I suppose if you mean shallow as in feeling, well, I don't get it. Websites don't exactly have feelings -- especially corporate websites...
>To sum it up, this is a managed, secure, opt-in service. If you don't like the terms, you don't sign up and it won't cost you a dime. You can hardly expect a better deal than that.
In that case, I'm all turned about on the issue then. But I don't expect a lot of "customers"...
>If anyone can show me any hard evidence that suggests more than 1% of users of P2P software(s) use it for anything other than getting music/movies/software for free
Do they plan to send part of the proceeds from each spam to the ISP who receives it, and/or the direct recipient of the mail should they be paying by the byte (like myself)?
If not, I'd consider this a fraudulent way of making money.
>Probably only one in 10,000 people running apache could have found OR fixed that last root expoit on their own machine.
Perhaps so, but if a program were making a connection of a specific port, how hard would a:
grep -r [port number] *
really be?
I would suggest that for many problems, especially backdoors (however, certainly not all) the fix should be obvious to anyone who has read a book on C.
>Have YOU ever looked at it?
I've not contracted a problem similar to the BitchX one, and others tend to be patched fast enough its not a problem.
However, if I did see this activity that the backdoored BitchX causes, I would have certainly teared into the source.
Like a surprising many other people. I only look at the source when I need to. But if I couldn't on those occasions when I needed to, I'd be sunk, or at least very disappointed.
>And it wasn't in a day either, it took neary a week.
That's why you have the source. Need a patch faster?
FIX IT YOURSELF!
>Other people hacked at it. DIDN'T FIX IT, but SAID they did and tried distributing a broken patch. HORRAY OPEN SOURCE!
If you're a moron who runs patches from random people thinking that's your fix, well, guess what! That's as dumb as running cracks on windows programs to bypass time limits! Don't come running to me when you do idiotic things.
>We had to wait for the vendor to patch.
Only because either your company was to friggin' lame to have an in-house coder, or the program wasn't that important to you.
My whole point, which you have failed miserably to disprove, is that you can fix open source software yourself if the vendor fails you. If you choose not to do so, that's your problem, not mine.
>Code is generally FAR too complicated for anyone not familiar with it to just start hacking away at a "fix"
Either hire competent coders, or don't fix the problem, but instead disable it.
Disabling a problem might leave you missing features, but its a hell of a lot easier, and a hell of a lot better than the closed source alternative of simply not running the program at all.
Case-in-point: Apache can have the problem disabled with a simple config hack if you weren't competent enough to have proper programmers to repair the problem properly.
In short, don't blame open source for your company's/government's incompetence. And if it isn't for a company/government, I doubt that turning off the service for a week will seriously impede your way of life.
When your closed-source OSes firewall alerts you to a problem, can you find it? Can you fix it?
Now, when this happens on an open-source OS, can you find and fix it?
BitchX certainly isn't a critical application. But what if this was your web server? Do you wait until your vendor can supply you a fix, or would you (as a developer) rather tear into the code and fix it in a few minutes?
That's the big difference. Its not just in the detection, but also in the speed of repair and availability of a fix.
IMHO, closed-source software is simply not on the ball when it comes to getting patches out within a reasonable amount of time (which, to me, is under 24 hours of being alerted for a critical application). At least with open-source, if the vendor won't help you, you can at least help yourself.
Is that freon and CFCs are too heavy to reach the ozone in any form unless your favourite airliner has a leaky air conditioner.
I can probably dredge up some support for the above, if you care to see it (its a little hard, though, as the whole CFC scare happened before the internet's prime time).
At the price of NVRAM, you can slowly close the performance gap and possibly increase reliability past that of the NVRAM by buying 100 drives and RAID-1ing them. And you'll still save money!
Just an idea: You might want to look past the parts you're replacing for the problem (although I'm sure you have already -- just a reminder). I'd start with the power supply, and end with the environment the machine is in.
And which DVD burner did you have? I just bought one and at the price I paid I'm starting to feel uneasy...:-/
Slashdot Mirror
>Please, take the survey @ Political Compass [politicalcompass.org]
FYI:
Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: 1.12
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -2.36
Which makes me slightly to the right and slightly libertarian.
I remember taking that same test a long while back, but as more and more injustices to people's freedom have happened (such as it now being illegal for Canadians to participate in American TV culture, and my being painted a criminal every time I buy a CDR by the Canadian piracy tax) I've moved far away from my original position, which was give or take spot on with Gandhi.
Funny how certain leaders can do that to people...
>It's easy to use, it's just there apparently isn't some kind of control panel item or icon to run it, and no indication that the program even exists.
This is why the web exists.
>some idiot writes one (terrible) book and everyone screams about term limits.. and dictatorships.
I have no clue what book you're talking about.
I was referring to Chretien as a dictator in the fashion that he ousts from office anyone who doesn't 100% support him. This is the non-violent method of silencing people when you are a dictator. The violent method would be to punch people in the face when they are protesting against you. Both of which Chretien has done.
Please, though, I'm interested in whatever book it is you're talking about.
Since you mentioned it, I'm probably going to vote for the Freedom Party if there's ever a member in my town.
>I'd have more then you, but a few years back /. 'lost' 200 or so of my comments. :-D
:-)
Oh yeah?
I posted before there were even user accounts. Now just try to find those old posts (and I even used my real email address back them -- glad I don't now!).
1171 posts and climbing. And yes, I've been told that I need to do something other than slashdot.
I tell them that its the most constructive, least annoying way for me to waste my time at work! I mean, would they rather me have real discussions with them? That's why my journal is for!
(Anyways, good to meet someone else in the 4 digit post range. Its the first I've seen over about 300... I was getting worried I might win a prize or get stuck in the slash HOF -- its 'bout time they added a category for us!)
>Perhaps you meant to reply to the parent of my post
Yo. Sorry 'bout that. Its a bad day, and if you're not surfing at -1 it screws up the reply (or so it seems) when there's an AC reply below...
>Good luck finding out who they are. Good luck finding out the correct address so you can serve them. Good luck getting a judgement, and even if you do have a judgement, good luck collecting even a single dollar from them.
Allow me to demonstrate:
Ahoy-hoy!
Hello sir, this is a carpet cleaners phoning to inform you of our new service line.
Ok
Yes, we can offer you a free carpet cleaning estimate right away.
That's interesting.
I know. We have many people waiting to take advantage of an offer as exciting as ours. You did know that we offer the super-deluxe Mega-Advantage carpet stain riddance solution along with our usual 2-hours and its dry guarantee, sir?
No, I didn't
We also offer a host of other solutions which the estimators would be happy to explain to you in detail when they visit your house. When could we put you down for a free in-home evaluation and estimate of our carpet cleaning service.
Well, I'm not exactly sure. My schedule is awful busy this week. I don't suppose you could give me a number I can call you back on after I check with my secretary as to when I'm not so busy.
Sir, this free estimate will only take a few minutes of your time.
I'm not sure of that. My house is quite large, 25,000 square feet. And I have a 100,000 sq. ft. office building I might be interested in hiring your services for. I really think I'd prefer to discuss this at a later time with your manager.
That's excellent sir. I'll forward you to our manager.
Barry here. What can I do for you?
Well, Barry, I have a _very_ large office building that I would like cleaned, but I'm far too busy to discuss it right now. We're talking 100 k sq. feet. I'd really like to meet you in person at your business, or phone you back at a later time, preferably during business hours
No problem. You can call me or leave a voicemail at 555-1212, x2600 at any time
Thank you. I'll be contacting you shortly.
Bye then
[click]
Phone the number, listen to the message, get the name of the company from either a reverse lookup or (luckily) from the message. Next time a carpet cleaners phones...
Ahoy-hoy
Carpet cleaing service. Can I interes --
Is this XYZ carpet cleaners
Uh, yes it is. What can I do for you.
You can take me off your calling list immediately. Good-bye
[click]
There ya go. All it takes is social engineering, and it's only one call.
>Note also that this process is rather arduous, requires several inconvenient trips through traffic to the bad part of town where the courthouse always is, and many hours on your own time performing research, looking up the law, etc
Its the TCPA, a Federal Law. 16 CFR 310.4(b)(1) for reference.
A small claims judge won't expect that amount of legal reading, anyways. But it always helps. Really, a small claims judge should be very familiar with this law.
And it'd probably only take 10 minutes in court (the company probably won't even show up). Budda-bing, budda-boom. No tracers involved at all.
I will go through this one more time.
You call a friend. You tell him to call your cell. You are next door to him.
According to your plan, this is a free call, as all local calls are free in North America.
Now, explain to me how they are going to make money on the cellphone system in this fashion, and don't forget the pay-as-you-go systems that would only require a single "refill" for the life of the phone if it only received incoming calls. And try to keep it under 100 words.
Thank you.
>But distributing power over large distances incur large losses.
Not at a 1/2 million volts (some places use that voltage now, others may go higher).
Assuming you want to transfer 2.1 MW of power, that's 4.2 Amps.
Here's a chart to help with the below.
Line loss at 000 AWG for 500 km (for example):
Ploss = I^2 * R
Ploss = 4.2^2 * (0.2 * 500)
Ploss = 17.64 * 100
Ploss = 0.001764 MW (assuming the earth as a return)
Ploss = 0.003528 MW (assuming a two wire system)
Of course, this is over-simplified, but I doubt the losses will even reach 1% with anything I haven't thought of factored in.
>And you can't use up all the good sun anyway because a lot is still going to be needed for agriculture.
Not to mention that the amount required would ruin more land for our use than nuclear waste disposal areas. And, worse yet, these giant wind generators will be stuck on the good land (like you say) rather than all being gathered up in Siberia.
>What do you do with the nuclear waste that is generated by nuclear power plants? I suppose this waste is very good for the environment.
No, that's why you use it up in slow-poke reactors.
I wish more environmentalists would come up with pro-active solutions rather that destructive ones. Their demand that there be no more nukes has stunted our ability to rid ourselves of this waste in a safe, and highly useful manner.
>(right of centre and further right of centre)
To Americans, our Reform / PC parties (do they still exist? I haven't followed the Feds for a while) barely scratch center. Everyone else is left.
Trust me on this, or find the study on the 'Net a polling company did last year that proves it...
Not that this makes our government any worse. However, its about time we adopted a 2 term maximum. Its beginning to feel a little too much like a dictatorship here. Ugh.
They get the good and the bad products.
Hopefully the bad products are weeded out through the testing of an entire country, and we and up with the best combination of price and features later on.
I'd rather have a TV or laptop that's 2 or 3 years out of date than one that is more expensive and is full of features I don't need or want.
What are you talking about?
Only one of these are "shallow" copies. That's if, by shallow copies, you mean not identical except for the translation and enchanced Japanese content (I can't read Japanese, but I think I can assume that a Japanese Amazon will carry japanese books, a Japanese Yahoo Japanese sites, a Japanese Google Japanese translations).
I suppose if you mean shallow as in feeling, well, I don't get it. Websites don't exactly have feelings -- especially corporate websites...
>To sum it up, this is a managed, secure, opt-in service. If you don't like the terms, you don't sign up and it won't cost you a dime. You can hardly expect a better deal than that.
In that case, I'm all turned about on the issue then. But I don't expect a lot of "customers"...
>If anyone can show me any hard evidence that suggests more than 1% of users of P2P software(s) use it for anything other than getting music/movies/software for free
:-)
And that's illegal now?
I'd better nuke all my Linux CDRs right away!
Do they plan to send part of the proceeds from each spam to the ISP who receives it, and/or the direct recipient of the mail should they be paying by the byte (like myself)?
If not, I'd consider this a fraudulent way of making money.
>Is that spam?
Yes, and if I were a sysadmin that received your email, I'd simply firewall you off my subnet.
You have no right to advertise to me. If you want to send me an email, make sure it is ontopic for the email address you've found.
I really doubt any websites you've found had "send your advertising here" email addresses.
Next thing people will say that looking companies up in the yellow pages and dialing them by hand to advertise to them is not telemarketing.
>Probably only one in 10,000 people running apache could have found OR fixed that last root expoit on their own machine.
Perhaps so, but if a program were making a connection of a specific port, how hard would a:
grep -r [port number] *
really be?
I would suggest that for many problems, especially backdoors (however, certainly not all) the fix should be obvious to anyone who has read a book on C.
>Have YOU ever looked at it?
I've not contracted a problem similar to the BitchX one, and others tend to be patched fast enough its not a problem.
However, if I did see this activity that the backdoored BitchX causes, I would have certainly teared into the source.
Like a surprising many other people. I only look at the source when I need to. But if I couldn't on those occasions when I needed to, I'd be sunk, or at least very disappointed.
>And it wasn't in a day either, it took neary a week.
That's why you have the source. Need a patch faster?
FIX IT YOURSELF!
>Other people hacked at it. DIDN'T FIX IT, but SAID they did and tried distributing a broken patch. HORRAY OPEN SOURCE!
If you're a moron who runs patches from random people thinking that's your fix, well, guess what! That's as dumb as running cracks on windows programs to bypass time limits! Don't come running to me when you do idiotic things.
>We had to wait for the vendor to patch.
Only because either your company was to friggin' lame to have an in-house coder, or the program wasn't that important to you.
My whole point, which you have failed miserably to disprove, is that you can fix open source software yourself if the vendor fails you. If you choose not to do so, that's your problem, not mine.
>Code is generally FAR too complicated for anyone not familiar with it to just start hacking away at a "fix"
Either hire competent coders, or don't fix the problem, but instead disable it.
Disabling a problem might leave you missing features, but its a hell of a lot easier, and a hell of a lot better than the closed source alternative of simply not running the program at all.
Case-in-point: Apache can have the problem disabled with a simple config hack if you weren't competent enough to have proper programmers to repair the problem properly.
In short, don't blame open source for your company's/government's incompetence. And if it isn't for a company/government, I doubt that turning off the service for a week will seriously impede your way of life.
The difference:
When your closed-source OSes firewall alerts you to a problem, can you find it? Can you fix it?
Now, when this happens on an open-source OS, can you find and fix it?
BitchX certainly isn't a critical application. But what if this was your web server? Do you wait until your vendor can supply you a fix, or would you (as a developer) rather tear into the code and fix it in a few minutes?
That's the big difference. Its not just in the detection, but also in the speed of repair and availability of a fix.
IMHO, closed-source software is simply not on the ball when it comes to getting patches out within a reasonable amount of time (which, to me, is under 24 hours of being alerted for a critical application). At least with open-source, if the vendor won't help you, you can at least help yourself.
Is that freon and CFCs are too heavy to reach the ozone in any form unless your favourite airliner has a leaky air conditioner.
I can probably dredge up some support for the above, if you care to see it (its a little hard, though, as the whole CFC scare happened before the internet's prime time).
Did I say ISO...
Meant normal people.
At the price of NVRAM, you can slowly close the performance gap and possibly increase reliability past that of the NVRAM by buying 100 drives and RAID-1ing them. And you'll still save money!
Just an idea: You might want to look past the parts you're replacing for the problem (although I'm sure you have already -- just a reminder). I'd start with the power supply, and end with the environment the machine is in.
:-/
And which DVD burner did you have? I just bought one and at the price I paid I'm starting to feel uneasy...
>Pick one?
Sentence fragment.
"Sentence fragment is a sentence fragment."
"Oh no! Linguo melting!"
Or something like that...
>Why do they call it an exclamation point, when it's clearly not a point, but a point and line?
That's because ISO calls it a bang.