2)"A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law."
Not the case here. Property laws are a fundamental of the US code, which was written by democratically elected officials. IP laws predate the RIAA.
I claim that the current US copyright law is in violation of the Constitution. This makes it "unjust" in accordance with definition 2, quoted above. Congress has exceeded its legitimate authority, granted to it by the electorate, through the means of the Constitution.
We haven't explicitly been denied the right to vote; but when our votes mean nothing, isn't it the same thing?
How do we vote to repeal the Patriot act? How do we vote to repeal the DMCA? How do we vote to repeal the Sonny Bono copyright extension, and all the other extensions that were passed in the previous (20th) century, in clear violation of the Constitution's directive that copyright must be given only "for limited Times" (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8)?
When Congress can violate the supreme law of the land so flagrantly, isn't it more than a bit hypocritical for them to expect us to obey the "laws" that they created? In fact, I'd say that comes pretty close to meeting definition number 1 of "unjust law" -- 1)"An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself."
If the Constitution isn't binding on Congress, then I don't see why the DMCA should be binding on me.
The word in question is copyright, not copywrite. Specifically, it is the right to copy. It has nothing to do with writing.
Copyright is a noun, but it's being used as a verb, colloquially, with increasingly frequency. But I beg you, when you verb it, please spell and pronounce it correctly! It should be copyrighted, not copywritten.
Of course, if you wanted to be entirely formal about it, you wouldn't verb it at all. You'd use a phrase like "works which are covered by copyright". (You can't actually copyright anything that's material, i.e. tangible.)
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000
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Non-commercial bulk email is just as much of a potential hassle as commercial email. I don't want religious fanatics, politicians or charities to get a free pass to spam me just because their bulk email is "non-commercial"...
In theory, the potential may be just as bad. But in practice, I've only ever received one "religious spam", (probably because I have the word "agnostic" on my home page). It didn't bother me very much, because it was just one message. If I started getting as many religious spams as I do commercial spams, then I might revise my opinion.
Suppose you posted online about how frustrated you were with a particular problem, and a company had a product/service which could solve your problem, and a representative crafted an individual message to you in direct response to your posted message [...]
That's something of a grey area. Personally, I'd consider that "solicited", and I wouldn't be offended by the offer, as long as the message was done with a bit of taste and class. (Flashing red letters or scantily clad models would be a major turn-off in this case, unless I had been asking for "help" in meeting scantily clad models.)
I draw the line thus: if I actually ask for help in some area, then good-taste commercial offers are OK. If someone does a data mining operation and learns that I once worked with a product which resembles theirs, and then sends me commercials for their product, that's not OK. Other people may draw the line differently, which is what makes this an interesting field.
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000
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For most people, unsolicited email isn't the problem. Unsolicited bulk email is the problem.
I disagree. Unsolicited commercial email is the problem. I don't care how many other people received the same message, so bulk doesn't bother me. What bothers me is having commercials shoved in my face.
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000
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For example, you see one of your own message IDs in the References: header of an incoming message. That tells you that it's a solicited response to one of your own messages.
No, it doesn't. It simply tells you that the person sending the message managed to get hold of the message ID of something you wrote once upon a time. The spam (if it's spam) might be totally unrelated to the original topic of conversation.
I send messages to several different mailing lists which cover a variety of topics. Searching for my name or e-mail address in Google would generate hundreds, if not thousands, of Message IDs which a spammer could insert into the headers of their messages.
I cannot see any way in which your proposal differentiates genuine responses from automated bot-harvested Message ID spamming. Sure, it raises the bar for spamming by a small amount; but mainly it would only affect new mail addresses or people who never write anything (publically).
Re:Lessening Spam: The True Hollywood Story
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turn off the preview window.
The what?
Here's another suggestion: use mutt. When you receive HTML e-mail (all HTML, with no text/plain part), you won't even see the message -- you'll just see a line or two printed by mutt saying that this is HTML, and that you'll have to manually select which MIME part to view, and how to view it. At that point, you can just delete the message, unread, since any e-mail that's all-HTML is not worth reading.[0] Mutt isn't a web browser disguised as an MUA, so it won't download any web-bug images, etc. And you don't need a friggin' mouse to run it.
[0]Unless, of course, it's your domain registrar's "you have 60 days to renew" warning. But you can usually distinguish those from spam by the headers. (Why do domain registrars send such god-awful Windows-user-ish messages? Don't they know that people who register domains are generally technically competent? Eh, who knows....)
Re:not the answer - you got that right!
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don't you think all of this inter-server communication will significantly increase the traffic on the Internet considering how much email is sent around by legitimate people?
Not if it decreases spam and Microsoft Outlook worms. The bandwidth used by those (especially the worms) is far greater than what you'd get from a few DNS lookups.
I tried watching the "movies" on my NWN installation on Windows 98 Second Edition. It was unbearable. They'd have 3 seconds of voice, then it would pause for 2 seconds, then 2 more seconds of voice, pause, etc. Eventually I just hit ESC or Space Bar or whatever it was to skip past them.
You should try Freenet some time, or any other high-latency system. Clicking on a Freenet URL causes a request to be sent to the local Freenet node, which then initiates a search for the key within the network. This could be instantaneous (well, within a second) if the key is already in the local node's data store, or it could take several minutes to query other nodes. It may not even find the key at all.
So, if you want to look at, say, 10 Freenet sites today, you don't look at them one at a time! You'd be there all day staring at the blinking red/yellow lights. What you do instead, is middle-click each site and let it do its searching in its own tab. When they start to appear, the tab changes its label from "Loading..." to the first part of the site's name.
Was 5 naked people at once really not enough?
Most of those sites have about 20 to 25 images per page, plus ads. So I guess not.
(Many Freenet sites have far more than 20 images per page. Freenet's pages tend to be larger than web pages, since there's so much latency associated with each page. It's therefore better to put as much as is reasonably possible on one page, than to spread it across multiple pages.)
And... Freenet is written in Java! So we've come full circle, and the Subject line is almost relevant once again!:-)
I did something similar to this. Recently I was shopping online for a new computer system (x86, built from user specifications). I started at pricewatch, and went through the list of vendors who were offering systems that roughly matched my criteria.
One by one, I went through their web sites. Every single one of them seemed to be using the same template code! It was quite easily noticeable, because it didn't work in a web browser -- it required Javascript. When I looked at the "Page Source", it was all cookie-cutter identical, except for the actual text and the names of the images. I don't have Javascript turned on, and I certainly wasn't about to turn it on for some fucked-in-the-head site navigation system from a can.
Then eventually I came to http://www.unitedmicro.com/ -- and they had real HTML! I could browse their site with a standard web browser.
So, I bought a computer from them. It's not a major purchase -- not like a house or a car -- but it's certainly significant. And more importantly, I told them, on their feedback form at the end of the online shopping session, why I had chosen them.
Yes, quite. Ian Clarke has tried to put together an automatic slashdot-story-Freenet-insertion script, but there are many issues here:
Most people aren't running Freenet nodes yet.
Freenet routing isn't even close to perfect yet; documents inserted into the network are not always retrievable at a reasonable HTL.
Insertion takes a while, and you can't publish the Freenet key of your mirror until you've finished the insertion. (Warning: this is a simplification!)
Whoever intends to insert the site into Freenet must first be able to retrieve a copy of it himself. The only reasonable way to ensure that this will happen would be for the story submitter to mirror it himself first, before submitting the story. I say this because the Slashdot editorial staff does not appear to be willing or able to perform this duty themselves. (In a perfect universe, the Slashdot crew would already be doing something like this.)
My upload speed is capped at around 128 Kb/s, and (unless you pay extra) most basic DSL services have similar caps.
I get ADSL from my local telephone company (CenturyTel). It's a 512/256 connection, so my upload is twice what a typical cable modem user gets. And I consider this to be a relatively slow DSL connection. (But I've had very few problems with the service, especially compared to some DSL horror stories I've heard.)
you can't leave your computer on when you're not in front of it.
Has anyone ever seen that in a real cable TOS agreement, or are you just making it up 'cause it sounds good?
I assure you, I am neither evil enough nor imaginative enough to make this stuff up. This is a paraphrase of one of the terms in the Adelphia Powerlink ToS when I read it a few years ago. I was utterly outraged by the sheer gall of those incompetent ninnies. I think that if I had signed up with them, I would have broken every single one of their terms instantly. Of course, I did not sign up with them! That would have been insane.
Of course, it's possible that they might have changed their ToS by now. Let's see... google, click, click.... OK, first visible change is that they've converted their ToS into a PDF file, so I can't view it normally in a web browser. God, I hate PDF! OK, download the PDF file, file up Acrobat, prepare to be visually nauseated... ooh, such tiny little blurry unreadable fonts! Make me suffer some more!
Well, it seems that they have updated their ToS and AUP (acceptable use policy) since I last read it. Or at least, in the time that I permitted myself to squint at the horrid little writing, I was unable to find that clause. When I originally evaluated this ToS, though, it was in there. It was probably cut-and-pasted from a dial-up ToS.
Of course, their ToS are still draconian and laughable. You still can't run any sort of service, and you can't run a NAT. I still wouldn't sign up with them.
What an utterly appalling waste of time! They talk about the speeds of these services using a single number, as if they offered symmetric capacities. Everyone knows that the common residential Internet services are asymmetric, with upload typically being one-half to one-tenth of the download. But they don't even talk about upload, which is where DSL stomps all over cable's ass.
Nor do they talk about terms of service, which is where DSL stomps all over what was left of cable's ass. Read a typical cable modem service ToS some time -- go on, I dare you! You can't run anything but Windows, you can't run NAT, you can't run services, you can't leave your computer on when you're not in front of it. Now read a DSL ToS for comparison.
But this "article" (more like propaganda from the cable companies) doesn't discuss any of that. They pretend that the only thing that matters is how fast you can download pr0n. And if that's what you want -- to sit in front of a mouse-driven boob tube and salivate over pictures all day long -- then sure, cable modem service is for you. Go knock yourself out.
Argh! I click on this story on the right hand side of the main page (because I only read/. once a day, so half the new stories are off on the right margin). It sounds interesting -- "Where Does Spam Come From?". What could it be -- a case study of a spammer? An analysis of SMTP traffic, a breakdown of which countries send the most, or a review of tools and tricks used by spammers to work around the fact that there aren't as many open relays these days?
No! Sorry, Greg, thanks for reading -- it's just a list of ways that people harvest addresses from web sites.
Gee, thanks for nothing. I know they have my e-mail address! Here it is again, for all the spammers that couldn't find it: greg@wooledge.org. I don't hide it. I'd like to go back to the 1990 Internet where I didn't have to hide it. I refuse to stick my head in the sand to try to hide from the spammers. Munged addresses are worse than spam.
What I'd really like to see would be something a bit more useful, and less trivial, like the recent Stopping Rumpelstiltskin Attacks (these are particularly vicious against qmail, since qmail-smtpd doesn't look up local users during the SMTP conversation; it accepts all messages to the domain, and then if they aren't valid during delivery, they're supposed to bounce -- guess what, they can't bounce, so they go to postmaster -- me). Or how to work around spam that comes to me as postmaster when someone uses a bogus user address in my domain as the envelope sender address when they're spamming someone else (illustration: spammer A sends a message to luser B but puts randomname@wooledge.org as the envelope sender. B accepts it because wooledge.org is a valid domain, but then when it's not deliverable, it tries to bounce it to randomname@wooledge.org, which my MTA of course accepts, but can't deliver, so the fucking thing ends up in my mail box, with about 3 levels of error messages prepended to it. Fortunately, spam is almost always HTML these days, so I'd actually have to exert effort to read through the markup.)
If I owned a car, found a way to easily duplicate it verbatim and then started giving those duplicates away I would be denying the car manufacturer money that is rightly theirs.
What the fuck?? Were you dropped on your head when you were a baby?
I'm so flabbergasted by this sentence that I can't even think of a coherent response to it! Excuse me while I weep for the future of my country.
To hell with builds! I want a document that tells a Mozilla newbie like me how to compile this monstrosity myself! Because I'm sitting here on an HP-UX 10.20 system, and last time I saw a pig, its aerodynamics left a bit to be desired.
Come on, people, just one little 800 byte HTML file?
cvs -d:pserver:foo@bar/junk login password is "foobar" cvs -z3 -d:pserver:foo@bar/junk co phoenix cd phoenix CC=/where/I/put/gcc-3.2./configure --disable-gronkler-engine make
If you can't build this thing in 10 steps or less, how the hell do you ever expect it to be useful? Or is it supposed to be a "rite of passage" build system, like nethack's? And if I can't build it with gcc, then fuck it. I am not going to track down version 3.78.123-a-9q of proprietary HP C++ compiler #74 which requires a codeword to install.
(Sorry if I sound more bitter than usual. But the mozilla developers are truly on a different planet from the rest of us. Even filing a bug is a major chore, which has a serious impact on their QA. They should take a hint from Debian: apt-get install reportbug; reportbug.)
Yeah, that always struck me as a bit odd. I remember using Chimera on Ultrix back in 1995 or so. Then suddenly last year someone did a Mac-only browser based on Mozilla, and called it "Chimera", and nobody but me seemed to know there was a conflict.:(
I'm glad to see I'm not alone, though. It makes me feel a bit less ancient.
when they disrupt traffic, and potentially disrupt emergency services, such as Police, Fire Department, or Ambulance traffic, they've definately crossed the line.
Don't you think that the protestors would step out of the way to let an ambulance through? These are human beings. They can think.
In fact, there was a traffic-disruption protest in downtown Cleveland last Friday. If I didn't have a wife and kids waiting for me at home, I probably would have been in it.
They *are* guilty as charged, guilty of copyright violation,
I'm calling troll on this one. You can't be this stupid and still be able to operate a keyboard.
Just for the rest of you, here are the two primary reasons why that comment was not correct:
People are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
The student in question actually created a search engine; he did not offer any files himself. If this student is guilty of "vicarious copyright infringement", or whatever term the lawyers will use for this case, then so is Google.
If I release a song with somebody else's lyrics and music and pass it off as if it is my own keeping all profits. I am STEALING music.
Well, in that case I'd use the word "plagiarism" (or the verb form, plagiarize).
I'm glad to see that people are still fighting the good fight against the propaganda of the RIAA which is trying its bloody hardest to corrupt the words "steal" and "theft" to mean things that they don't actually mean. For a while, I tried to do so as well -- and any time a slashdot story about copyright came out, and the econodwarfs started chanting "copying is theft!" I would try to correct them, at least once per story. But I became lazy and pessimistic over time; the stupid are just so numerous and... well, stupid... that it's overwhelming.
Copying is just that, copying. It's still illegal, but it is NOT stealing.
I use mozilla to browse Freenet. The latency on Freenet requests is enormous, on the order of minutes. If you middle-click to open a whole slew of tabs, each one of which is a Freenet request for a page that's not yet in your Freenet node, then each one has to go search the network to try to find its data. When you visit the tab to see why it still says "Loading", all you see is "about:blank" in the URL bar, so you don't know which link you clicked.
Then, suppose your Freenet node crashes. This happens -- a lot for some of us, using Kaffe -- now you need to resubmit those queries, but all you have is "about:blank", so you can't just hit "Reload". You have to try to remember what page you were trying to get, then go find another page that links to it, then find the link again, then middle-click it, and start all over from square 1.
And you can't reasonably type Freenet URLs, either. They don't look like "http://www.CofE.com/". They look like "http://127.0.0.1:8888/SSK@9G4s~jLQJB7ALQg-v2q5xKA Jy9YPAgM/CofE//".
Slashdot Mirror
2)"A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law."
Not the case here. Property laws are a fundamental of the US code, which was written by democratically elected officials. IP laws predate the RIAA.
I claim that the current US copyright law is in violation of the Constitution. This makes it "unjust" in accordance with definition 2, quoted above. Congress has exceeded its legitimate authority, granted to it by the electorate, through the means of the Constitution.
We haven't explicitly been denied the right to vote; but when our votes mean nothing, isn't it the same thing?
How do we vote to repeal the Patriot act? How do we vote to repeal the DMCA? How do we vote to repeal the Sonny Bono copyright extension, and all the other extensions that were passed in the previous (20th) century, in clear violation of the Constitution's directive that copyright must be given only "for limited Times" (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8)?
When Congress can violate the supreme law of the land so flagrantly, isn't it more than a bit hypocritical for them to expect us to obey the "laws" that they created? In fact, I'd say that comes pretty close to meeting definition number 1 of "unjust law" -- 1)"An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself."
If the Constitution isn't binding on Congress, then I don't see why the DMCA should be binding on me.
Copywritten material...
The word in question is copyright, not copywrite. Specifically, it is the right to copy. It has nothing to do with writing.
Copyright is a noun, but it's being used as a verb, colloquially, with increasingly frequency. But I beg you, when you verb it, please spell and pronounce it correctly! It should be copyrighted, not copywritten.
Of course, if you wanted to be entirely formal about it, you wouldn't verb it at all. You'd use a phrase like "works which are covered by copyright". (You can't actually copyright anything that's material, i.e. tangible.)
Non-commercial bulk email is just as much of a potential hassle as commercial email. I don't want religious fanatics, politicians or charities to get a free pass to spam me just because their bulk email is "non-commercial"...
In theory, the potential may be just as bad. But in practice, I've only ever received one "religious spam", (probably because I have the word "agnostic" on my home page). It didn't bother me very much, because it was just one message. If I started getting as many religious spams as I do commercial spams, then I might revise my opinion.
Suppose you posted online about how frustrated you were with a particular problem, and a company had a product/service which could solve your problem, and a representative crafted an individual message to you in direct response to your posted message [...]
That's something of a grey area. Personally, I'd consider that "solicited", and I wouldn't be offended by the offer, as long as the message was done with a bit of taste and class. (Flashing red letters or scantily clad models would be a major turn-off in this case, unless I had been asking for "help" in meeting scantily clad models.)
I draw the line thus: if I actually ask for help in some area, then good-taste commercial offers are OK. If someone does a data mining operation and learns that I once worked with a product which resembles theirs, and then sends me commercials for their product, that's not OK. Other people may draw the line differently, which is what makes this an interesting field.
For most people, unsolicited email isn't the problem. Unsolicited bulk email is the problem.
I disagree. Unsolicited commercial email is the problem. I don't care how many other people received the same message, so bulk doesn't bother me. What bothers me is having commercials shoved in my face.
For example, you see one of your own message IDs in the References: header of an incoming message. That tells you that it's a solicited response to one of your own messages.
No, it doesn't. It simply tells you that the person sending the message managed to get hold of the message ID of something you wrote once upon a time. The spam (if it's spam) might be totally unrelated to the original topic of conversation.
I send messages to several different mailing lists which cover a variety of topics. Searching for my name or e-mail address in Google would generate hundreds, if not thousands, of Message IDs which a spammer could insert into the headers of their messages.
I cannot see any way in which your proposal differentiates genuine responses from automated bot-harvested Message ID spamming. Sure, it raises the bar for spamming by a small amount; but mainly it would only affect new mail addresses or people who never write anything (publically).
turn off the preview window.
The what?
Here's another suggestion: use mutt. When you receive HTML e-mail (all HTML, with no text/plain part), you won't even see the message -- you'll just see a line or two printed by mutt saying that this is HTML, and that you'll have to manually select which MIME part to view, and how to view it. At that point, you can just delete the message, unread, since any e-mail that's all-HTML is not worth reading.[0] Mutt isn't a web browser disguised as an MUA, so it won't download any web-bug images, etc. And you don't need a friggin' mouse to run it.
[0]Unless, of course, it's your domain registrar's "you have 60 days to renew" warning. But you can usually distinguish those from spam by the headers. (Why do domain registrars send such god-awful Windows-user-ish messages? Don't they know that people who register domains are generally technically competent? Eh, who knows....)
don't you think all of this inter-server communication will significantly increase the traffic on the Internet considering how much email is sent around by legitimate people?
Not if it decreases spam and Microsoft Outlook worms. The bandwidth used by those (especially the worms) is far greater than what you'd get from a few DNS lookups.
gcc 2.95 was a merge of egcs back into gcc. So now you know two. :)
I tried watching the "movies" on my NWN installation on Windows 98 Second Edition. It was unbearable. They'd have 3 seconds of voice, then it would pause for 2 seconds, then 2 more seconds of voice, pause, etc. Eventually I just hit ESC or Space Bar or whatever it was to skip past them.
You're not missing much. Really.
You should try Freenet some time, or any other high-latency system. Clicking on a Freenet URL causes a request to be sent to the local Freenet node, which then initiates a search for the key within the network. This could be instantaneous (well, within a second) if the key is already in the local node's data store, or it could take several minutes to query other nodes. It may not even find the key at all.
:-)
So, if you want to look at, say, 10 Freenet sites today, you don't look at them one at a time! You'd be there all day staring at the blinking red/yellow lights. What you do instead, is middle-click each site and let it do its searching in its own tab. When they start to appear, the tab changes its label from "Loading..." to the first part of the site's name.
Was 5 naked people at once really not enough?
Most of those sites have about 20 to 25 images per page, plus ads. So I guess not.
(Many Freenet sites have far more than 20 images per page. Freenet's pages tend to be larger than web pages, since there's so much latency associated with each page. It's therefore better to put as much as is reasonably possible on one page, than to spread it across multiple pages.)
And... Freenet is written in Java! So we've come full circle, and the Subject line is almost relevant once again!
I did something similar to this. Recently I was shopping online for a new computer system (x86, built from user specifications). I started at pricewatch, and went through the list of vendors who were offering systems that roughly matched my criteria.
One by one, I went through their web sites. Every single one of them seemed to be using the same template code! It was quite easily noticeable, because it didn't work in a web browser -- it required Javascript. When I looked at the "Page Source", it was all cookie-cutter identical, except for the actual text and the names of the images. I don't have Javascript turned on, and I certainly wasn't about to turn it on for some fucked-in-the-head site navigation system from a can.
Then eventually I came to http://www.unitedmicro.com/ -- and they had real HTML! I could browse their site with a standard web browser.
So, I bought a computer from them. It's not a major purchase -- not like a house or a car -- but it's certainly significant. And more importantly, I told them, on their feedback form at the end of the online shopping session, why I had chosen them.
Yes, quite. Ian Clarke has tried to put together an automatic slashdot-story-Freenet-insertion script, but there are many issues here:
My upload speed is capped at around 128 Kb/s, and (unless you pay extra) most basic DSL services have similar caps.
I get ADSL from my local telephone company (CenturyTel). It's a 512/256 connection, so my upload is twice what a typical cable modem user gets. And I consider this to be a relatively slow DSL connection. (But I've had very few problems with the service, especially compared to some DSL horror stories I've heard.)
you can't leave your computer on when you're not in front of it.
Has anyone ever seen that in a real cable TOS agreement, or are you just making it up 'cause it sounds good?
I assure you, I am neither evil enough nor imaginative enough to make this stuff up. This is a paraphrase of one of the terms in the Adelphia Powerlink ToS when I read it a few years ago. I was utterly outraged by the sheer gall of those incompetent ninnies. I think that if I had signed up with them, I would have broken every single one of their terms instantly. Of course, I did not sign up with them! That would have been insane.
Of course, it's possible that they might have changed their ToS by now. Let's see... google, click, click.... OK, first visible change is that they've converted their ToS into a PDF file, so I can't view it normally in a web browser. God, I hate PDF! OK, download the PDF file, file up Acrobat, prepare to be visually nauseated... ooh, such tiny little blurry unreadable fonts! Make me suffer some more!
Well, it seems that they have updated their ToS and AUP (acceptable use policy) since I last read it. Or at least, in the time that I permitted myself to squint at the horrid little writing, I was unable to find that clause. When I originally evaluated this ToS, though, it was in there. It was probably cut-and-pasted from a dial-up ToS.
Of course, their ToS are still draconian and laughable. You still can't run any sort of service, and you can't run a NAT. I still wouldn't sign up with them.
What an utterly appalling waste of time! They talk about the speeds of these services using a single number, as if they offered symmetric capacities. Everyone knows that the common residential Internet services are asymmetric, with upload typically being one-half to one-tenth of the download. But they don't even talk about upload, which is where DSL stomps all over cable's ass.
Nor do they talk about terms of service, which is where DSL stomps all over what was left of cable's ass. Read a typical cable modem service ToS some time -- go on, I dare you! You can't run anything but Windows, you can't run NAT, you can't run services, you can't leave your computer on when you're not in front of it. Now read a DSL ToS for comparison.
But this "article" (more like propaganda from the cable companies) doesn't discuss any of that. They pretend that the only thing that matters is how fast you can download pr0n. And if that's what you want -- to sit in front of a mouse-driven boob tube and salivate over pictures all day long -- then sure, cable modem service is for you. Go knock yourself out.
Argh! I click on this story on the right hand side of the main page (because I only read /. once a day, so half the new stories are off on the right margin). It sounds interesting -- "Where Does Spam Come From?". What could it be -- a case study of a spammer? An analysis of SMTP traffic, a breakdown of which countries send the most, or a review of tools and tricks used by spammers to work around the fact that there aren't as many open relays these days?
No! Sorry, Greg, thanks for reading -- it's just a list of ways that people harvest addresses from web sites.
Gee, thanks for nothing. I know they have my e-mail address! Here it is again, for all the spammers that couldn't find it: greg@wooledge.org. I don't hide it. I'd like to go back to the 1990 Internet where I didn't have to hide it. I refuse to stick my head in the sand to try to hide from the spammers. Munged addresses are worse than spam.
What I'd really like to see would be something a bit more useful, and less trivial, like the recent Stopping Rumpelstiltskin Attacks (these are particularly vicious against qmail, since qmail-smtpd doesn't look up local users during the SMTP conversation; it accepts all messages to the domain, and then if they aren't valid during delivery, they're supposed to bounce -- guess what, they can't bounce, so they go to postmaster -- me). Or how to work around spam that comes to me as postmaster when someone uses a bogus user address in my domain as the envelope sender address when they're spamming someone else (illustration: spammer A sends a message to luser B but puts randomname@wooledge.org as the envelope sender. B accepts it because wooledge.org is a valid domain, but then when it's not deliverable, it tries to bounce it to randomname@wooledge.org, which my MTA of course accepts, but can't deliver, so the fucking thing ends up in my mail box, with about 3 levels of error messages prepended to it. Fortunately, spam is almost always HTML these days, so I'd actually have to exert effort to read through the markup.)
If I owned a car, found a way to easily duplicate it verbatim and then started giving those duplicates away I would be denying the car manufacturer money that is rightly theirs.
What the fuck?? Were you dropped on your head when you were a baby?
I'm so flabbergasted by this sentence that I can't even think of a coherent response to it! Excuse me while I weep for the future of my country.
the end user can pay $5 and download a burn-once file
There's no such thing as a self-destructing file. Either you have the file, or you don't have it.
Well, unless you use Microsoft programs. In that case, your data may disappear at any time.
Take SCO for example.
... please!
To hell with builds! I want a document that tells a Mozilla newbie like me how to compile this monstrosity myself! Because I'm sitting here on an HP-UX 10.20 system, and last time I saw a pig, its aerodynamics left a bit to be desired.
:pserver:foo@bar/junk login :pserver:foo@bar/junk co phoenix ./configure --disable-gronkler-engine
Come on, people, just one little 800 byte HTML file?
cvs -d
password is "foobar"
cvs -z3 -d
cd phoenix
CC=/where/I/put/gcc-3.2
make
If you can't build this thing in 10 steps or less, how the hell do you ever expect it to be useful? Or is it supposed to be a "rite of passage" build system, like nethack's? And if I can't build it with gcc, then fuck it. I am not going to track down version 3.78.123-a-9q of proprietary HP C++ compiler #74 which requires a codeword to install.
(Sorry if I sound more bitter than usual. But the mozilla developers are truly on a different planet from the rest of us. Even filing a bug is a major chore, which has a serious impact on their QA. They should take a hint from Debian: apt-get install reportbug; reportbug.)
Yeah, that always struck me as a bit odd. I remember using Chimera on Ultrix back in 1995 or so. Then suddenly last year someone did a Mac-only browser based on Mozilla, and called it "Chimera", and nobody but me seemed to know there was a conflict. :(
I'm glad to see I'm not alone, though. It makes me feel a bit less ancient.
when they disrupt traffic, and potentially disrupt emergency services, such as Police, Fire Department, or Ambulance traffic, they've definately crossed the line.
Don't you think that the protestors would step out of the way to let an ambulance through? These are human beings. They can think.
In fact, there was a traffic-disruption protest in downtown Cleveland last Friday. If I didn't have a wife and kids waiting for me at home, I probably would have been in it.
They *are* guilty as charged, guilty of copyright violation,
I'm calling troll on this one. You can't be this stupid and still be able to operate a keyboard.
Just for the rest of you, here are the two primary reasons why that comment was not correct:
If I release a song with somebody else's lyrics and music and pass it off as if it is my own keeping all profits. I am STEALING music.
Well, in that case I'd use the word "plagiarism" (or the verb form, plagiarize).
I'm glad to see that people are still fighting the good fight against the propaganda of the RIAA which is trying its bloody hardest to corrupt the words "steal" and "theft" to mean things that they don't actually mean. For a while, I tried to do so as well -- and any time a slashdot story about copyright came out, and the econodwarfs started chanting "copying is theft!" I would try to correct them, at least once per story. But I became lazy and pessimistic over time; the stupid are just so numerous and... well, stupid... that it's overwhelming.
Copying is just that, copying. It's still illegal, but it is NOT stealing.
Well said.
Me too!
A Jy9YPAgM/CofE//".
I use mozilla to browse Freenet. The latency on Freenet requests is enormous, on the order of minutes. If you middle-click to open a whole slew of tabs, each one of which is a Freenet request for a page that's not yet in your Freenet node, then each one has to go search the network to try to find its data. When you visit the tab to see why it still says "Loading", all you see is "about:blank" in the URL bar, so you don't know which link you clicked.
Then, suppose your Freenet node crashes. This happens -- a lot for some of us, using Kaffe -- now you need to resubmit those queries, but all you have is "about:blank", so you can't just hit "Reload". You have to try to remember what page you were trying to get, then go find another page that links to it, then find the link again, then middle-click it, and start all over from square 1.
And you can't reasonably type Freenet URLs, either. They don't look like "http://www.CofE.com/". They look like "http://127.0.0.1:8888/SSK@9G4s~jLQJB7ALQg-v2q5xK