Say someone runs a mail server which responds to known spam sources by slowing down to a character a second or so.
Should this be illegal?
Because whenever I see simple descriptions of what "net neutrality" ought to be, it seems to me that they are advocating making basic security provisions like "throttle or block attackers" illegal too, because there's no exceptions suggested for them.
Rift has had some issues with chat and ability lag. So they've overhauled their chat server. Predictably, it's been broken a lot. But Trion being Trion, this meant that we had actual devs (not "community reps", actual people who work on code) posting on the forums saying what was wrong, what they had fixed internally, and that they might try that if they had another crash, then putting that live, then reverting when it had problems... Actual information about what was wrong.. They seem to have fixed the worst of it now, so of course they are sending out freebies to all the players. Note: Not all the paying players. All the players, period. They are pretty good about compensation for problems.
Also this patch, they decided to make some mounts account-wide; if you get them on any character, all your characters get them. This will, of course, be retroactive, although it'll take a day or so for the updates. And of course, people asked what happens if you already bought one of these for two characters. Answer: They already thought about this, they checked the logs, this will affect very few players, but if you're one of them, file a ticket and customer support will make things right.
Basically, they are a company whose devs are active and engaged, who talk to people, and who try to make things right and are not afraid to admit their errors. They have consistently gone far above and beyond what you'd expect if you were familiar with more traditional MMO customer service. Excellent company in general. And they do make mistakes, but because they're willing to fix them, I am okay with that -- and I find I actually prefer it a lot to companies that refuse to take risks, and then don't fix things that were just bad ideas to begin with.
I'm an Internet troll, and I actually do have most of the diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder. But... A long time ago, I realized that being mean to people was not a winning strategy. So I tend towards Kibological trolling; more emphasis on funny, less on mean. I don't want to get people mad or upset, because that's boring. I want to do things that are funny. I want people to laugh when they realize they've been trolled, not get mad.... Unless, of course, they're the boring kind of Internet trolls, the ones who are so proud of how they're all disengaged and uncaring. Them, I want mad. I want them to realize that being emotionally engaged against your will isn't really all that fun, and I want them to do it in a way that provides entertainment to all the people they've been upsetting. Ideally, I want them to end up laughingstocks so that when they try to make people mad, people just laugh at them for being ineffective.
This is way more interesting, and way more fun, than spamming chat with stupid racist remarks to try to get a rise out of people. Same instincts, by and large, I just decided to apply them in ways which create situations that are more fun for me and other people instead of less fun.
So basically, I think their conclusions are sort-of-valid, they're just looking only at one subset of trolling, and not the most interesting one.
I mean, so far as I know, they at least thought about asking for permission, and maybe technically he did say "no", but I think it's pretty obvious he meant "yes", so what's the problem?
1. Passionate about programming. 2. Passionate about programming this in particular.
I'm in general passionate about programming. You cannot easily stop me from programming. I do it habitually and constantly.
Doesn't mean I particularly care about any given task I'm working on. What it does mean is that I have the level of competence that comes from doing a thing you love for >20 years, which is valuable in its own right. If I'm feeling sorta under the weather and I work five hours before I say "screw it, I'm not feeling like working on this", I am still gonna produce better output from that work day than someone who doesn't care about programming will produce from working ten hours because they're obsessed with their job.... actually, the biggest improvement I've made in my work in the last decade was learning to recognize when I am just Not Getting Traction, and just walk away. Yeah, I'm "working" less, except that the rate of stupid and easily-avoided errors has dropped enough to more than make up for it.
It may be pure FUD, but someone (I have long since forgotten whom, regrettably) who claimed to represent the FSF once told me that if I released code, and someon else then linked my code with GPL'd code, I was obliged to make my code available under the GPL. I don't think that's right, but I certainly wouldn't want to be a lot of money, or perhaps my entire company, on it being wrong...
I think the main issue is that there's plenty of prior examples showing people ending up in legal entanglements due to merely looking at code that someone else claims impose license terms. It's extremely hard to prove you didn't copy something if you did look at it, but if you have an ironclad rule of not even looking, you have a much easier case to make when arguing that you can't possibly have copied it.
I think that mostly comes down to the AT&T/BSD lawsuits tying up BSD development for a couple of years. Had that not happened, I'm not at all sure Linux would have gotten as much of a sudden rush of interest as it did. Or, heck, come into existence at all; I think Linus has said that if he could have easily just worked on BSD, he might have.
Basically, the GPLv3 is an attempt to do the same things for the GPL that the DMCA did for DRM schemes. Since users were inexplicably not happily complying with a particular set of restrictions, and were finding ways to circumvent them, add more legal language to make sure the full force of law can be brought to bear on people who don't agree with us about how to use our stuff.
Every time I have a problem with Python, or something in it doesn't fit an existing and established workflow, or set of tools, the response is the same: "Why are you stupidly having requirements which we did not consider important in making our decisions?" I'm still expected to support some of the stuff I maintain for RHEL 5. Initial release, 2007. Therefore, Python 2.5 is the newest version that they could possibly have selected. And upgrading from one version of Python to another is not guaranteed to be stable. So anything I'm doing that has to run on RHEL 5 has to run on Python 2.5...
And that's really nothing particularly horrible. Many coding standards still aren't entirely comfortable with reliance on features introduced in C99, let alone C11.
Depends. I have very, very, rarely written letters other than email, and in context, it sounds very much like the agency people have a specific standard of letters in mind, which is not necessarily documented, but which you have to comply with in order to get a response...
Voter ID laws don't just require "photo ID", but very specific photo IDs. Furthermore, there's not much evidence that any of whatever vote fraud is happening would be stopped by them. On the other hand, you know who do get stopped from voting by these laws? College students, poor folks, eldery folks... Groups that tend to vote Democrat, in other words.
Voter ID proposals are basically fraudulent in and of themselves; they propose a course of action which doesn't do anything to solve the underlying problems, but has huge side-effects they aren't willing to talk about.
I would say that we have no science which is more-proven than evolution at this point. There's a strict formal defintion of "proof", under which, well, we've never proven anything in science, and some people will dispute whether we've proven anything in math. Mostly, though, science deals in things we've not yet ruled out, not things we've "proven". But if something isn't ruled out after a whole lot of testing, that functions like "proven".
We have comparable amounts of supporting evidence for the claims "hydrogen atoms have a single proton" and "life as we know it developed over time through the process of evolution".
Except in fact you can teach special relativity just fine without referring to the luminiferous aether. Intelligent design isn't a competing theory; it's a tax dodge.
Let us know when you've proven anything without making a few untestable assumptions. (Try "my sensory experience in some way reflects a world external to me". Good luck on that one; if no one's managed to prove it convincingly yet, I doubt you'll be the one.)
I mean, seriously. Do you honestly think that, alone among mammals, humans don't have sexual dimorphism in their brains along with the rest of their bodies, which produces instincts?
Because once you grant that the dimorphism exists, it's pretty obvious that sometimes it'll misalign with the rest of the body, same way things like that happen to all sorts of other things during development.
You know, when you say you have friends who are members of a group, and you use a slur for them, that tends to be unpersuasive.
Anyway, no, not the social roles, the differences don't appear to vary at all with hormone treatments, or how people have behaved, or whether they've transitioned or been living as one gender or the other. You can research this yourself, it should take about 5 seconds tops to think of a set of search terms that will get you lots of papers.
This is basically the opposite of good advice, and none of it conforms to any experience I've ever had, or that anyone I know has had. I have a psychiatric diagnosis or two, and I've gotten treatment, and you know what? It's made my life a heck of a lot better actually getting some help. I've never had a doctor try to somehow disregard physical illnesses based on this, either.
The thing with "treatments" in scare quotes is a pretty strong indication that you're not merely unaware of the state of the art in the field, but actively avoiding any risk of being contaminated by actual information about it. And I guess if you wanna be that way on your own dime, that's your business, but when you start telling other people they should avoid basic health care services because you're afraid of them, that's sorta harmful to other people.
What's odd is that I meet an occasional person who diligently doesn't collect stamps, has books full of no-stamps, and spends a lot of time telling other people how much fun it is to not collect stamps. And who, in fact, puts more time into it than I usually put into my hobbies.
Replying to my own post because a thing happened in Rift: In the last three or four days, there's been a sudden influx of GMs showing up in channels and actually doing stuff. Some of the high-profile trolls have discovered to their dismay that suddenly the GMs are willing to push buttons that were previously mostly theoretical.
It is truly amazing how much clue they don't have. UI in Lua is not an unheard-of choice, and some games have done quite well with that and produced robust and secure interfaces, with clear limits to their APIs. Apparently, FF14 is not one of them.
Common sense is nothing at all to do with "learning things without being specifically taught". Common sense normally means "having roughly the expected set of intuitions", which includes a fair amount of instinct (which, by definition, you don't "learn"), and also a lot of stuff that actually is taught. Meanwhile, whole categories of learning and theorizing are not at all "common sense".
This is why absent-minded professors are a trope; because people can be quite good at learning things without being taught them, inferring, and so on... and still not remember to bring an umbrella when it looks like rain.
Rift: By far my favorite of the games. I don't play it, though, because they've basically abandoned even the pretense of enforcing any of their rules. Wanna tell everyone that "abbos" are basically monkeys and ought to be gassed? Talk about how you want to rape someone's kids? Spend your evenings making jokes about how much you hate gays? Go to the designated RP server just to stalk RPers around and harass them? Right now, Rift is your best choice. Particularly mystifying, because in basically every other category, Rift's devs strike me as among the most passionate and skilled in the field, and also some of the most engaged with their customer base. Except on this one thing. Unfortunately, social interaction is the biggest thing by far about MMOs for me. And yes, I'm aware that every game has some of that. What's different is that in Rift, the same person can be using the same character to do this for, quite literally, over a year without them being told to stop. One person I know once got into an argument and told another player he was going to rape them with a knife; he did get contacted by a GM, who apparently suggested that maybe he should tone it down a bit. F2P model is, thus far, surprisingly non-abusive. In particular, if you want to just play the game without ever paying a penny, that's actually viable. Performance not nearly as good as it should be, but they're actively working on it; until recently, the bulk of the game's rendering engine was not multicore-friendly.
FF14 ARR: The parts that are good are amazing. But in other respects, they have taken incompetence to a whole new level. It took them ages to solve the VERY challenging problem that their spam filter wouldn't notice that you were sending 2-3 messages a second to a channel as long as each message varied by a few characters, for instance. Rumor has it that they've had exploits which allowed malicious users to, for instance, sell a stack of 99 cheap items to a vendor, but inform the game that they had sold very expensive items. Or instantly level themselves to the level cap by handing in a single quest. Probably mostly fixed by now, but that these things were wrong in a game which is already a re-release from a company with prior experience is insane. On the other hand, very pretty, very atmospheric, good storytelling. But it is a Final Fantasy game; it is literally a few minutes from when you create your character to the first time you are able to move, and even then you simply aren't allowed turn around and walk the other way until you've talked to your quest giver. No, really. And yet, it's pretty fun. Sub-only. Performance is pretty decent, although the previous release was apparently bad. Special mention for the very deep and full-featured crafting system, which I personally find to be the most fun part of it.
D&D Online: F2P model a little harsher than, say, Rift. However, a sufficiently patient player can probably unlock all the restricted content through in-game activity. Or just sub for a while. This game is not really D&D -- if you are familiar with the 3.5 rules, it will screw you up as much as it helps you. It is, however, the minmaxer paradise. This is a game which absolutely, unconditionally, rewards people who are good at thinking out how to make their numbers stack for best results. Very unusual mechanics in a number of ways; for instance, you don't get XP from killing mobs, only from achieving objectives. No automatic healing just from not being in combat, and if you aren't playing with difficulty turned down (there's settings for that), you can run out of resources trying to do a quest. Graphics are sort of unimpressive compared to a lot of other games. On the other hand, has a native mac client, which can matter if you have a mac or have friends who prefer the mac. Runs well on older hardware. Insane depth of character creation, and after you cap out, you can restart the character as anything else, only with small permanent bonuses. Which stack.
I got this one because it was free. TL2 has DRM of some sort, and can't be gotten through GOG or whatever. Admittedly, server-based is sort of DRM-ish, but there's also the fact that this gets constant updates and fixes and improvements.
Slashdot Mirror
Say someone runs a mail server which responds to known spam sources by slowing down to a character a second or so.
Should this be illegal?
Because whenever I see simple descriptions of what "net neutrality" ought to be, it seems to me that they are advocating making basic security provisions like "throttle or block attackers" illegal too, because there's no exceptions suggested for them.
Why I like Rift:
Rift has had some issues with chat and ability lag. So they've overhauled their chat server. Predictably, it's been broken a lot. But Trion being Trion, this meant that we had actual devs (not "community reps", actual people who work on code) posting on the forums saying what was wrong, what they had fixed internally, and that they might try that if they had another crash, then putting that live, then reverting when it had problems... Actual information about what was wrong.. They seem to have fixed the worst of it now, so of course they are sending out freebies to all the players. Note: Not all the paying players. All the players, period. They are pretty good about compensation for problems.
Also this patch, they decided to make some mounts account-wide; if you get them on any character, all your characters get them. This will, of course, be retroactive, although it'll take a day or so for the updates. And of course, people asked what happens if you already bought one of these for two characters. Answer: They already thought about this, they checked the logs, this will affect very few players, but if you're one of them, file a ticket and customer support will make things right.
Basically, they are a company whose devs are active and engaged, who talk to people, and who try to make things right and are not afraid to admit their errors. They have consistently gone far above and beyond what you'd expect if you were familiar with more traditional MMO customer service. Excellent company in general. And they do make mistakes, but because they're willing to fix them, I am okay with that -- and I find I actually prefer it a lot to companies that refuse to take risks, and then don't fix things that were just bad ideas to begin with.
I'm an Internet troll, and I actually do have most of the diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder. But... A long time ago, I realized that being mean to people was not a winning strategy. So I tend towards Kibological trolling; more emphasis on funny, less on mean. I don't want to get people mad or upset, because that's boring. I want to do things that are funny. I want people to laugh when they realize they've been trolled, not get mad. ... Unless, of course, they're the boring kind of Internet trolls, the ones who are so proud of how they're all disengaged and uncaring. Them, I want mad. I want them to realize that being emotionally engaged against your will isn't really all that fun, and I want them to do it in a way that provides entertainment to all the people they've been upsetting. Ideally, I want them to end up laughingstocks so that when they try to make people mad, people just laugh at them for being ineffective.
This is way more interesting, and way more fun, than spamming chat with stupid racist remarks to try to get a rise out of people. Same instincts, by and large, I just decided to apply them in ways which create situations that are more fun for me and other people instead of less fun.
So basically, I think their conclusions are sort-of-valid, they're just looking only at one subset of trolling, and not the most interesting one.
I mean, so far as I know, they at least thought about asking for permission, and maybe technically he did say "no", but I think it's pretty obvious he meant "yes", so what's the problem?
I tried sending email to the listed address. It bounced. I sort of feel like this undermines the perception that you're listening.
That said, glad to see you're acknowledging the feedback.
If you want to hear from us on the beta, why does mail to the given email address bounce? Maybe fix your stuff.
1. Passionate about programming.
2. Passionate about programming this in particular.
I'm in general passionate about programming. You cannot easily stop me from programming. I do it habitually and constantly.
Doesn't mean I particularly care about any given task I'm working on. What it does mean is that I have the level of competence that comes from doing a thing you love for >20 years, which is valuable in its own right. If I'm feeling sorta under the weather and I work five hours before I say "screw it, I'm not feeling like working on this", I am still gonna produce better output from that work day than someone who doesn't care about programming will produce from working ten hours because they're obsessed with their job. ... actually, the biggest improvement I've made in my work in the last decade was learning to recognize when I am just Not Getting Traction, and just walk away. Yeah, I'm "working" less, except that the rate of stupid and easily-avoided errors has dropped enough to more than make up for it.
It may be pure FUD, but someone (I have long since forgotten whom, regrettably) who claimed to represent the FSF once told me that if I released code, and someon else then linked my code with GPL'd code, I was obliged to make my code available under the GPL. I don't think that's right, but I certainly wouldn't want to be a lot of money, or perhaps my entire company, on it being wrong...
I think the main issue is that there's plenty of prior examples showing people ending up in legal entanglements due to merely looking at code that someone else claims impose license terms. It's extremely hard to prove you didn't copy something if you did look at it, but if you have an ironclad rule of not even looking, you have a much easier case to make when arguing that you can't possibly have copied it.
I think that mostly comes down to the AT&T/BSD lawsuits tying up BSD development for a couple of years. Had that not happened, I'm not at all sure Linux would have gotten as much of a sudden rush of interest as it did. Or, heck, come into existence at all; I think Linus has said that if he could have easily just worked on BSD, he might have.
Basically, the GPLv3 is an attempt to do the same things for the GPL that the DMCA did for DRM schemes. Since users were inexplicably not happily complying with a particular set of restrictions, and were finding ways to circumvent them, add more legal language to make sure the full force of law can be brought to bear on people who don't agree with us about how to use our stuff.
Every time I have a problem with Python, or something in it doesn't fit an existing and established workflow, or set of tools, the response is the same: "Why are you stupidly having requirements which we did not consider important in making our decisions?" I'm still expected to support some of the stuff I maintain for RHEL 5. Initial release, 2007. Therefore, Python 2.5 is the newest version that they could possibly have selected. And upgrading from one version of Python to another is not guaranteed to be stable. So anything I'm doing that has to run on RHEL 5 has to run on Python 2.5...
And that's really nothing particularly horrible. Many coding standards still aren't entirely comfortable with reliance on features introduced in C99, let alone C11.
Depends. I have very, very, rarely written letters other than email, and in context, it sounds very much like the agency people have a specific standard of letters in mind, which is not necessarily documented, but which you have to comply with in order to get a response...
Voter ID laws don't just require "photo ID", but very specific photo IDs. Furthermore, there's not much evidence that any of whatever vote fraud is happening would be stopped by them. On the other hand, you know who do get stopped from voting by these laws? College students, poor folks, eldery folks... Groups that tend to vote Democrat, in other words.
Voter ID proposals are basically fraudulent in and of themselves; they propose a course of action which doesn't do anything to solve the underlying problems, but has huge side-effects they aren't willing to talk about.
I would say that we have no science which is more-proven than evolution at this point. There's a strict formal defintion of "proof", under which, well, we've never proven anything in science, and some people will dispute whether we've proven anything in math. Mostly, though, science deals in things we've not yet ruled out, not things we've "proven". But if something isn't ruled out after a whole lot of testing, that functions like "proven".
We have comparable amounts of supporting evidence for the claims "hydrogen atoms have a single proton" and "life as we know it developed over time through the process of evolution".
Except in fact you can teach special relativity just fine without referring to the luminiferous aether. Intelligent design isn't a competing theory; it's a tax dodge.
Let us know when you've proven anything without making a few untestable assumptions. (Try "my sensory experience in some way reflects a world external to me". Good luck on that one; if no one's managed to prove it convincingly yet, I doubt you'll be the one.)
How does it seem unlikely?
I mean, seriously. Do you honestly think that, alone among mammals, humans don't have sexual dimorphism in their brains along with the rest of their bodies, which produces instincts?
Because once you grant that the dimorphism exists, it's pretty obvious that sometimes it'll misalign with the rest of the body, same way things like that happen to all sorts of other things during development.
You know, when you say you have friends who are members of a group, and you use a slur for them, that tends to be unpersuasive.
Anyway, no, not the social roles, the differences don't appear to vary at all with hormone treatments, or how people have behaved, or whether they've transitioned or been living as one gender or the other. You can research this yourself, it should take about 5 seconds tops to think of a set of search terms that will get you lots of papers.
This is basically the opposite of good advice, and none of it conforms to any experience I've ever had, or that anyone I know has had. I have a psychiatric diagnosis or two, and I've gotten treatment, and you know what? It's made my life a heck of a lot better actually getting some help. I've never had a doctor try to somehow disregard physical illnesses based on this, either.
The thing with "treatments" in scare quotes is a pretty strong indication that you're not merely unaware of the state of the art in the field, but actively avoiding any risk of being contaminated by actual information about it. And I guess if you wanna be that way on your own dime, that's your business, but when you start telling other people they should avoid basic health care services because you're afraid of them, that's sorta harmful to other people.
That's a fairly good summary.
What's odd is that I meet an occasional person who diligently doesn't collect stamps, has books full of no-stamps, and spends a lot of time telling other people how much fun it is to not collect stamps. And who, in fact, puts more time into it than I usually put into my hobbies.
Replying to my own post because a thing happened in Rift: In the last three or four days, there's been a sudden influx of GMs showing up in channels and actually doing stuff. Some of the high-profile trolls have discovered to their dismay that suddenly the GMs are willing to push buttons that were previously mostly theoretical.
So I'm suddenly a lot more interested in it.
It is truly amazing how much clue they don't have. UI in Lua is not an unheard-of choice, and some games have done quite well with that and produced robust and secure interfaces, with clear limits to their APIs. Apparently, FF14 is not one of them.
Common sense is nothing at all to do with "learning things without being specifically taught". Common sense normally means "having roughly the expected set of intuitions", which includes a fair amount of instinct (which, by definition, you don't "learn"), and also a lot of stuff that actually is taught. Meanwhile, whole categories of learning and theorizing are not at all "common sense".
This is why absent-minded professors are a trope; because people can be quite good at learning things without being taught them, inferring, and so on... and still not remember to bring an umbrella when it looks like rain.
Rift: By far my favorite of the games. I don't play it, though, because they've basically abandoned even the pretense of enforcing any of their rules. Wanna tell everyone that "abbos" are basically monkeys and ought to be gassed? Talk about how you want to rape someone's kids? Spend your evenings making jokes about how much you hate gays? Go to the designated RP server just to stalk RPers around and harass them? Right now, Rift is your best choice. Particularly mystifying, because in basically every other category, Rift's devs strike me as among the most passionate and skilled in the field, and also some of the most engaged with their customer base. Except on this one thing. Unfortunately, social interaction is the biggest thing by far about MMOs for me. And yes, I'm aware that every game has some of that. What's different is that in Rift, the same person can be using the same character to do this for, quite literally, over a year without them being told to stop. One person I know once got into an argument and told another player he was going to rape them with a knife; he did get contacted by a GM, who apparently suggested that maybe he should tone it down a bit. F2P model is, thus far, surprisingly non-abusive. In particular, if you want to just play the game without ever paying a penny, that's actually viable. Performance not nearly as good as it should be, but they're actively working on it; until recently, the bulk of the game's rendering engine was not multicore-friendly.
FF14 ARR: The parts that are good are amazing. But in other respects, they have taken incompetence to a whole new level. It took them ages to solve the VERY challenging problem that their spam filter wouldn't notice that you were sending 2-3 messages a second to a channel as long as each message varied by a few characters, for instance. Rumor has it that they've had exploits which allowed malicious users to, for instance, sell a stack of 99 cheap items to a vendor, but inform the game that they had sold very expensive items. Or instantly level themselves to the level cap by handing in a single quest. Probably mostly fixed by now, but that these things were wrong in a game which is already a re-release from a company with prior experience is insane. On the other hand, very pretty, very atmospheric, good storytelling. But it is a Final Fantasy game; it is literally a few minutes from when you create your character to the first time you are able to move, and even then you simply aren't allowed turn around and walk the other way until you've talked to your quest giver. No, really. And yet, it's pretty fun. Sub-only. Performance is pretty decent, although the previous release was apparently bad. Special mention for the very deep and full-featured crafting system, which I personally find to be the most fun part of it.
D&D Online: F2P model a little harsher than, say, Rift. However, a sufficiently patient player can probably unlock all the restricted content through in-game activity. Or just sub for a while. This game is not really D&D -- if you are familiar with the 3.5 rules, it will screw you up as much as it helps you. It is, however, the minmaxer paradise. This is a game which absolutely, unconditionally, rewards people who are good at thinking out how to make their numbers stack for best results. Very unusual mechanics in a number of ways; for instance, you don't get XP from killing mobs, only from achieving objectives. No automatic healing just from not being in combat, and if you aren't playing with difficulty turned down (there's settings for that), you can run out of resources trying to do a quest. Graphics are sort of unimpressive compared to a lot of other games. On the other hand, has a native mac client, which can matter if you have a mac or have friends who prefer the mac. Runs well on older hardware. Insane depth of character creation, and after you cap out, you can restart the character as anything else, only with small permanent bonuses. Which stack.
TSW: Buy-to-play. Lots of stuff you might
I got this one because it was free. TL2 has DRM of some sort, and can't be gotten through GOG or whatever. Admittedly, server-based is sort of DRM-ish, but there's also the fact that this gets constant updates and fixes and improvements.