Computers weren't designed to do stuff people can't do, they were designed to cut down on the number of skilled people needed by doing it faster.
So, if you use computers to count ballots I can compromise one programmer and throw the election without a trace (true - read up on it!) but if you use people to do the counting the sheer number of ballots pushes the number of people I have to suborn in order to throw a single election into impractical numbers, making it nearly certain that determined investigators would catch me.
Because large elections are still being held all over the world without computers, there are strong, highly evolved methods of doing so, and there are willing volunteers to man the necessary positions, so computers simply aren't needed.
The target child, who isn't starving, eats his food (that's already there before the laptop ever entered the scene) and pedals his laptop and creates a link in the mesh network that enables children farther from the Internet link to communicate. He looks up the how-to on hydro-from-junk and he and his teenage sister build a microturbine from a 2 liter soda-bottle and then they don't have to pedal anything any more and the mesh is up 24x7.
Some other child, who IS starving, who somehow got a laptop even though there aren't any being distributed to starving children, is now able to link to the Internet even though he's 200 miles from the nearest Internet link. He finds out how to make a solar cooker from trash, reducing deforestation in his area and allowing him to barter the fuel he gathers for more food instead of burning it, or spend his time building cookers for his neighbors instead of gathering fuel. Or he finds out what locally valueless resource he can sell to the next tribe down and becomes the classic Alger rags-to-riches hero. Or he does something we can't anticipate, using local intellectual resources we don't know about, because he's part of the largest free wireless communications network there is, built by and for children who live in conditions we don't have to endure.
You are arguing against a fantasy that you've built up in your mind, where OLPC is about giving computers to people with no food. That's not what's happening, and even if it was it wouldn't hurt anyone because they could sell the technology for food - a generator is worth money everywhere, even where people are starving. There's isn't actually any wind-up laptop, you know - that idea went out the window early in the design stage - these machines come with a separate foot-powered generator that is easily driven from a pulley.
As for the zealotry and demogougery (I like that word, incidentally, though I assume it's a typo) you're the one who started the demagoguery duel we're embroiled in. You started it with the "stop wasting resources we could use to feed the starving children" schtick, and continued it by saying things about OLPC that simply are not true.
You are continuing to talk without doing your homework, and that's one of the reasons your comments about "North Americans don't know deprivation" pushed my button. For example:
You say "..the solution they had was aimed at the wrong problem". The solution they have is not meant to be the solution for your problem definition. You clearly haven't looked at what the project is intended to accomplish.
You say "the windup laptop project might have done some good in..." The OLPC project, which is not a "windup laptop project" any more than Habitat for Humanity is a rose gardening project, is not targeted at any area where there is no food to be had. Again, you didn't bother to see what the project is about. And yes, Habitat has planted at least one rose garden, I was there personally.
You say "Why did the OLPC project fail...". It hasn't failed, in fact so far it is succeeding beyond expectations. The idea (which you still aren't understanding) of improving educational opportunities in the 3rd world through the grass-roots introduction of mesh networking in a receptive population (children) has taken off and is winning mindshare. The only thing that "failed" was a dumb petition with a totally unrealistic goal that had no connection with the OLPC project other than wishful thinking by the petitioners.
I'll certainly agree with you that technology alone isn't the answer to social inequities, especially those caused by geography. It can be, however, a key part of educational efforts that allow people to build their own "fishing pole", without giving them either fish or poles.
When you say that I (since I'm a North American who has lived only in this country) cannot comprehend the needs of the third world, with the clear implication that you can, and I say "well, what's your cred? How did you get your position of authority? What are you doing to solve the problems you are on about?" that's not a diversionary question. It's telling you that pontification on/. has to be backed up with something if you want your ideas to carry weight.
Thanks for the tip, I'll hold Digium's feet to the fire if necessary. I'm hoping to be able to use their product in the near future, but support is the key issue (otherwise I'd just roll my own).
I remember hearing about some guys named Brian and Dennis and uh I forget the third guy's name - it was back in the 60's - trying to write an operating system based on the idea that each part should do one distinct thing, and do it well. I don't know if anything ever came of it, but I thought that it sounded like a good idea.
Damn, that is a good idea. Wish somebody would do it!
There were these other guys in the 70s (curiously enough also named Brian and Dennis) who wrote an operating system that treated everything as a file, and files as streams of characters terminated by an end-of-file character. This let you do cool stuff like I/O redirection and pipes very easily. Their operating system was called "Eunuchs" or something like that, and it had some pretty damn good small focused apps in it. That wasn't the point of the system, though - the system was a reaction to the prevailing culture of separate drivers for everything instead of a simple generic file paradigm for all I/O.
Of course, eventually Emacs and tin were written, and that was the end of small focused apps for all practical purposes. Nowadays people think perl is elegant, and most operating systems are written by penguins.
But I guess that's not "true" starvation to you. Why do you feel you are qualified to define "proper appreciation" and "true starvation"?
I personally know an American woman (Rev. Nancy Dean) who went 30 days without food in 2006. You think your concepts of starvation are more meaningful than hers? I don't see her criticising efforts to bring third world children into the networked world. Quite the opposite!
Your scoffing at the good works of others seems like a weak attempt to justify not doing good works. Are you actively involved in starvation relief, or some other project that is suffering because of the OLPC project's efforts? Can you justify your scorn with more than a bon mot?
I don't think any insult you took was needless; I'd call it deserved. You can't convert butter to guns, or vice versa.
There are no resources being diverted. There is nothing being "used up". No project anywhere in existence to help people in the target area is being hindered by OLPC. None of the target children are going to starve due to any factor involving the project.
The leaders of the project (as you would know if you were doing something more useful than criticizing good works) have pre-tested the concept. They provided used laptops gathered from eBay to information-deprived schoolchildren in the target areas. They documented the results, which were astonishingly good and reached far beyond your simplistic guns.vs. butter imaginings. It appears you have done no research whatsoever on this project - especially given your comment "What the heck is a starving 13 year old going to do with a windup notebook in a place with no other electricity, or network?. One of many answers to that question is "generate electricity, a network, and an income to buy food".
If you wish to FORCE people who WANT to wind laptops to do something else with their time, you are advocating SLAVERY, regardless of how noble your think-of-the-starving-children arguments may seem. If you think the target for the project does not WANT to wind laptops you are UNINFORMED.
So, you are actively involved in providing this stuff, right? How many kids have you adopted so far?
Or are you just interesting in criticizing other people's efforts on slashdot?
If you actually did your research you'd know Negroponte spends most of his time in the place you are describing, and has pretty good credentials for knowing what he's doing. How many 3rd worlders do you personally communicate with on a daily basis?
These are the problems that must be solved FIRST and foremost before the higher goals can be tackled.
So, nobody should ever work on concurrent problem solving. Since any really bad problem has a worst component, and we need to tackle the worst problem FIRST. Solving a problem we can actually solve now is bad, because we should throw all our resources on a more pressing problem that we know we can't solve now.
I tried it in FC5 with that chipset (IW2200BG) and it only worked with unencrypted or trivially encrypted connections. No 802.1x or WPA no matter how I fiddled with it. I tried it with ndiswrapper and a Dell chipset and it had even worse problems - dropped connections right and left - even though everything was fine as long as I did not fire up Xwindows.
If it can't manage EAP-TLS or PEAP it's not very useful to me. If it can't do what available command-line tools do I'm going to use the command line tools (and I do).
Talking to Fedora devs at linuxworld Boston, it was all about jiggly windows.
YAWN.
Are they shipping a Network Manager package that works better than the command line tools yet? Oh, only if you use a wireless chipset that one of the Fedora devs happens to have on his laptop, eh? That's what I thought.
Seriously, I have nothing against the Fedora team - this is not meant to be a flame - but their priorities are so far away from mine (mine include bulletproof wireless access and security managment with WPA, 802.1x, etc.) that they are unlikely to build anything that will work for me.
Jiggly windows, I just don't even see that as worth advertising... you can get that from a 1970s era mainframe, just by taking some 1970s era drugs.
Unfortunately, there's no consensus on which to use,
That depends on what you mean by consensus, yer honor. There is no consensus regarding the existence of oxygen if you require 100% of all oxygen-using creatures to agree. There is, however, a consensus among email experts that SPF is the standard to use right now and that DKIM is the standard for the near future.
...and that means that they're all basically useless. One of these mechanisms would only become useful if virtually everybody used it, because then people could refuse to accept e-mail that didn't use it.
No. This is a false dilemma. It's also the reason to use SPF right now, today, because SPF explicitly works around the problem of uneven adoption. You get a subset of the benefits of SPF just by implementing the easy half (publishing SPF in your DNS, a five minute job) and a larger subset by implementing the hard part (SPF checking, requires more knowledge). You get 100% of the benefits when the whole world uses it, true, but you get a huge benefit right off the bat - enough to be worth doing now.
Gmail and yahoo both use DomainKeys, which suggests that it's something that can really be implemented successfully in the real world.
I don't agree that because huge companies with titanic resources can use something that implies that everybody can use it. Put another way, professional basketball players can slam-dunk, that doesn't imply that anyone else can.
Looking at the Wikipedia articles, Sender ID seems to have problems because it breaks preexisting standards (see "Standardization issues"). My impression is that a lot of people looked at DomainKeys and said, "oooh, scary, it uses crypto." But hey, this is 2006, not 1992. Strong crypto is everywhere. Is there any reason not to go ahead and standardize on DomainKeys?
Well, there's the fact that DKIM is the successor to Domain Keys, so you might want to go with the more evolved standard instead of version 1.0. If you want an old standard that works, use SPF. Graduate to DKIM when it is supported by the vast majority of MTAs... like SPFv1 already is.
Oh, and getting back on topic: ignore SenderID. It's not only broken (the technical standard is factually incorrect) it's also just another big corporate "embrace and extend" strategy - dominate the market by forcing everyone else to spend resources on compatibility with your not-quite-to-spec implementation of a not-quite-standard. Ride SPF until you can switch horses to DKIM.
those weren't cloned potatoes, there were four types of potatoes involved, though that is a lack of diversity compared to the number of types available.
At the time of the Great Potato Famine, the vast majority of Ireland's potatoes were propagated vegetatively by cutting out the eyes and replanting them, which produces clones. The only variation between individual plants was due to viral accumulation, which is not a good thing. Sexual reproduction of plants (which we now know supports beneficial variation) was purposely prevented by the Irish farmers.
The dominant potato of pre-famine Ireland was the infamous "lumper".
Decentralized vote counting reduces the damage that individual fraudsters can implement to the point where the inevitable human corruption will tend to cancel itself out. Centralized vote counting, which is made possible by the elimination of paper ballots, amplifies the ability of individuals to influence the vote, to the point where elections can literally be stolen at the national level.
Do you trust any single programming-for-profit team more than you trust the co-operative efforts of thousands of grass-roots volunteers located all over the country?
Humans have tried relying on cloned foodstuffs in the past, you know.
In the USA we called it "The Irish Potato Famine".
A single disease organism infected a cloned crop and wiped out the Irish food supply overnight, remember that? Somewhere between 500,000 and 1,500,000 people died? Ring any bells?
I'd think a bunch of computer geeks would understand the dangers of monoculture, and how clones represent the ultimate monoculture...
What is this, the Usenet Oracle?
on
Oracle Linux?
·
· Score: 1
I know that Oracle has been doing a lot more than databases recently, will they go the extra mile and create their own stripped down Linux kernel? If they do, will companies switch to database solutions that are running Oracle only software for the benefits of support and (hopefully) stability?
Like all slashdotters, I can see the future in glorious, perfect technicolor, so the way this question is posed makes perfect sense.
Anyway, Oracle doesn't need their own distro, they can just ship Andrew's, or Linus's, or Marcello's branch and declare that "The One True Linux". I think people who will spend the $$$ for Oracle would definitely drink that koolaid. But why would you assume a "stripped down" kernel is in the works? If Oracle's going to brand their distro, it would be focused on their toolset, but not necessarily lacking any standard kernel features.
Will businesses switch? Magic 8-ball says, "YES", if they are already running dedicated Oracle servers, and "NO" if they are supporting other apps on the same servers.
in this day and age, should a government-chosen domain registry be allowed to enforce their own moral code on the public?
The answer on any day in any age is "yes, as long as alternatives are available, any registry should be able to brand themselves any way they choose". It appears that the Irish registry has chosen "we're OK with the bit of ultra-violence, but no form of sex (not even consensual, repoductive, or mutually satsifying) may be mentioned" for their service branding.
I guess the.ie registrars want to identify with the existing stereotype of the Irish as a violent and sexually repressed people. I would recommend that Irish folks who disagree should not burn down the registrar, but instead create a new one with policies more acceptable to them.
If you are OK with a vehicle that has a 30 mile range, a top speed under 50 mph, perhaps the e-volks is for you. But in general the frameless construction and torsion bar suspension of the old Beetles makes them an extremely poor choice for electric vehicles (you wouldn't know this from the amazing number of people who've done it... unless you actually talk to those people, that is!).
The Porsche 914, Chevy S-10 pickup, and the Volkswagen Rabbit, on the other hand, all make for excellent conversion vehicles with good range and no "disintegrating suspension" problems from excessive battery weight.
Look for Bruce Parmenter's S-10 or Michael Brown's Voltsrabbit. Or just go to Shari Prange's Electro Automotive site and look at the fine, well supported, time-tested kits for sale there. Shari, Bruce and Michael have been driving electric conversions daily for a decade or more.
Overall, I could have saved money with gas, and the environmental difference is negligible.
I've actually saved money on my Prius. I've had it since 2001, and the rise in gas prices has paid for the difference in cost between the Prius and the Echo (comparable non-hybrid car of the time). That's mostly a product of how much I drive (lots) and the circumstances (very much stop'n'go). I certainly didn't expect to break even on gas, and honestly I wouldn't have except for smilin' George Bush and his "war to keep Texas oil expensive".
You're wrong about the environmental impact, though; your individual impact is certainly negligible, but the impact of all us Prius drivers is astonishingly large (after all, we've got 90% less emissions than similar cars) and more than outweighs the environmental costs of building the vehicles.
Problem solved, oh, maybe five years ago. It amazes me that anyone just figured this was a problem NOW.
I've received hundreds, if not thousands, of emails with a {disarmed} header modification inserted by MailScanner... it's quite interesting to learn who is routinely inserting tracking bugs in their mailings.
I suppose you could also use transparent caching a'la squid to bumfuzzle some of the trackers and speed up browsing for your end users at the same time. But it seems like nowadays the bugs usually contain individualized tracking codes that would make it through the cache anyway.
You just have to strip out external references and tell the end users "that guy who sent you this is using a broken mailer". That's the strategy the HTML addicts used to create this problem, after all - they told the clueless that HTML was normal and that anybody who couldn't read it was using broken or obsolete software. I use the same line (which happens to be true) if somebody complains that they can't read company XYZ's mailings because the image links have been stripped out; "oh, company XYZ is using a broken obsolete mailer that puts external links into the text; until they learn to use the Internet you'd better find a new company to deal with or stick to phone calls".
No. Big ISPs are failing to do their job right.
on
The BBC's Honeypot PC
·
· Score: 1
On the other hand, what would cleaning up the net really do?
Save billions of man-hours.
It would cost a decent amount of time, money and effort,
Not really. The "problem networks" (typically cable broadband nets such as Comcast) already own the equipment and technology to kill 80% of the worms extant in less than a week. I've told Comcast how to do it a couple of times already, but they are not interested.
only to see new and better exploits coming out as a result of our efforts.
I prefer to do something rather than theorize about the possible futility of doing something. YMMV.
The burden should be, and is on the OS to handle these threats and protect its users.
No. Chickens and eggs. The ISPs are already managing a dynamic environment and can respond to the changes you yourself say are certain to result from stopping any particular exploit. The DOCSIS2 protocol they use can easily be leveraged to reroute all infected PCs (which are quite easy to detect from their traffic patterns, or their DNS activity) to a "clean-up segment" where they can no longer attack others, but where antivirus vendors can pay to maintain a presence. By contrast, the OS is installed and then exists fairly statically on the local PC, unless you run an update protocol, which can be hacked to spread further malware of course. Unless you believe it is possible to ship a 100% bug-free OS (which I do not think is possible) the onus is AND MUST BE on the network operators to detect and contain malware-spewing boxes. It's the gray goo problem in miniature, perhaps.
These people writing exploits will likely never stop unless we can find away to easily identify and prosecute the source of said exploits.
Or make them pointless by creating a reactive immune system on the net itself. I would pay extra to be on such a net; so would Ma and Pa Kettle. Such a net would be cheaper to run, too, since it would waste less bandwidth and storage on spamblowers and the like. Lots of major corporations run clean internal nets.
Slashdot Mirror
Common misconception.
Computers weren't designed to do stuff people can't do, they were designed to cut down on the number of skilled people needed by doing it faster.
So, if you use computers to count ballots I can compromise one programmer and throw the election without a trace (true - read up on it!) but if you use people to do the counting the sheer number of ballots pushes the number of people I have to suborn in order to throw a single election into impractical numbers, making it nearly certain that determined investigators would catch me.
Because large elections are still being held all over the world without computers, there are strong, highly evolved methods of doing so, and there are willing volunteers to man the necessary positions, so computers simply aren't needed.
Make sense?
The target child, who isn't starving, eats his food (that's already there before the laptop ever entered the scene) and pedals his laptop and creates a link in the mesh network that enables children farther from the Internet link to communicate. He looks up the how-to on hydro-from-junk and he and his teenage sister build a microturbine from a 2 liter soda-bottle and then they don't have to pedal anything any more and the mesh is up 24x7.
Some other child, who IS starving, who somehow got a laptop even though there aren't any being distributed to starving children, is now able to link to the Internet even though he's 200 miles from the nearest Internet link. He finds out how to make a solar cooker from trash, reducing deforestation in his area and allowing him to barter the fuel he gathers for more food instead of burning it, or spend his time building cookers for his neighbors instead of gathering fuel. Or he finds out what locally valueless resource he can sell to the next tribe down and becomes the classic Alger rags-to-riches hero. Or he does something we can't anticipate, using local intellectual resources we don't know about, because he's part of the largest free wireless communications network there is, built by and for children who live in conditions we don't have to endure.
You are arguing against a fantasy that you've built up in your mind, where OLPC is about giving computers to people with no food. That's not what's happening, and even if it was it wouldn't hurt anyone because they could sell the technology for food - a generator is worth money everywhere, even where people are starving. There's isn't actually any wind-up laptop, you know - that idea went out the window early in the design stage - these machines come with a separate foot-powered generator that is easily driven from a pulley.
As for the zealotry and demogougery (I like that word, incidentally, though I assume it's a typo) you're the one who started the demagoguery duel we're embroiled in. You started it with the "stop wasting resources we could use to feed the starving children" schtick, and continued it by saying things about OLPC that simply are not true.
You are continuing to talk without doing your homework, and that's one of the reasons your comments about "North Americans don't know deprivation" pushed my button. For example:
/. has to be backed up with something if you want your ideas to carry weight.
You say "..the solution they had was aimed at the wrong problem". The solution they have is not meant to be the solution for your problem definition. You clearly haven't looked at what the project is intended to accomplish.
You say "the windup laptop project might have done some good in..." The OLPC project, which is not a "windup laptop project" any more than Habitat for Humanity is a rose gardening project, is not targeted at any area where there is no food to be had. Again, you didn't bother to see what the project is about. And yes, Habitat has planted at least one rose garden, I was there personally.
You say "Why did the OLPC project fail...". It hasn't failed, in fact so far it is succeeding beyond expectations. The idea (which you still aren't understanding) of improving educational opportunities in the 3rd world through the grass-roots introduction of mesh networking in a receptive population (children) has taken off and is winning mindshare. The only thing that "failed" was a dumb petition with a totally unrealistic goal that had no connection with the OLPC project other than wishful thinking by the petitioners.
I'll certainly agree with you that technology alone isn't the answer to social inequities, especially those caused by geography. It can be, however, a key part of educational efforts that allow people to build their own "fishing pole", without giving them either fish or poles.
When you say that I (since I'm a North American who has lived only in this country) cannot comprehend the needs of the third world, with the clear implication that you can, and I say "well, what's your cred? How did you get your position of authority? What are you doing to solve the problems you are on about?" that's not a diversionary question. It's telling you that pontification on
Thanks for the tip, I'll hold Digium's feet to the fire if necessary. I'm hoping to be able to use their product in the near future, but support is the key issue (otherwise I'd just roll my own).
There were these other guys in the 70s (curiously enough also named Brian and Dennis) who wrote an operating system that treated everything as a file, and files as streams of characters terminated by an end-of-file character. This let you do cool stuff like I/O redirection and pipes very easily. Their operating system was called "Eunuchs" or something like that, and it had some pretty damn good small focused apps in it. That wasn't the point of the system, though - the system was a reaction to the prevailing culture of separate drivers for everything instead of a simple generic file paradigm for all I/O.
Of course, eventually Emacs and tin were written, and that was the end of small focused apps for all practical purposes. Nowadays people think perl is elegant, and most operating systems are written by penguins.
But I guess that's not "true" starvation to you. Why do you feel you are qualified to define "proper appreciation" and "true starvation"?
I personally know an American woman (Rev. Nancy Dean) who went 30 days without food in 2006. You think your concepts of starvation are more meaningful than hers? I don't see her criticising efforts to bring third world children into the networked world. Quite the opposite!
Your scoffing at the good works of others seems like a weak attempt to justify not doing good works. Are you actively involved in starvation relief, or some other project that is suffering because of the OLPC project's efforts? Can you justify your scorn with more than a bon mot?
I don't think any insult you took was needless; I'd call it deserved. You can't convert butter to guns, or vice versa.
.vs. butter imaginings. It appears you have done no research whatsoever on this project - especially given your comment "What the heck is a starving 13 year old going to do with a windup notebook in a place with no other electricity, or network?. One of many answers to that question is "generate electricity, a network, and an income to buy food".
There are no resources being diverted. There is nothing being "used up". No project anywhere in existence to help people in the target area is being hindered by OLPC. None of the target children are going to starve due to any factor involving the project.
The leaders of the project (as you would know if you were doing something more useful than criticizing good works) have pre-tested the concept. They provided used laptops gathered from eBay to information-deprived schoolchildren in the target areas. They documented the results, which were astonishingly good and reached far beyond your simplistic guns
If you wish to FORCE people who WANT to wind laptops to do something else with their time, you are advocating SLAVERY, regardless of how noble your think-of-the-starving-children arguments may seem. If you think the target for the project does not WANT to wind laptops you are UNINFORMED.
So, you are actively involved in providing this stuff, right? How many kids have you adopted so far?
Or are you just interesting in criticizing other people's efforts on slashdot?
If you actually did your research you'd know Negroponte spends most of his time in the place you are describing, and has pretty good credentials for knowing what he's doing. How many 3rd worlders do you personally communicate with on a daily basis?
So, nobody should ever work on concurrent problem solving. Since any really bad problem has a worst component, and we need to tackle the worst problem FIRST. Solving a problem we can actually solve now is bad, because we should throw all our resources on a more pressing problem that we know we can't solve now.
What a sickening, morally bankrupt argument.
You just got trolled HARD.
"More secure or just a racket?"
C'mon, ScuttleMonkey, are you trying to get a job as a pollster for Karl Rove?
"Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?"
I tried it in FC5 with that chipset (IW2200BG) and it only worked with unencrypted or trivially encrypted connections. No 802.1x or WPA no matter how I fiddled with it. I tried it with ndiswrapper and a Dell chipset and it had even worse problems - dropped connections right and left - even though everything was fine as long as I did not fire up Xwindows.
If it can't manage EAP-TLS or PEAP it's not very useful to me. If it can't do what available command-line tools do I'm going to use the command line tools (and I do).
Talking to Fedora devs at linuxworld Boston, it was all about jiggly windows.
YAWN.
Are they shipping a Network Manager package that works better than the command line tools yet? Oh, only if you use a wireless chipset that one of the Fedora devs happens to have on his laptop, eh? That's what I thought.
Seriously, I have nothing against the Fedora team - this is not meant to be a flame - but their priorities are so far away from mine (mine include bulletproof wireless access and security managment with WPA, 802.1x, etc.) that they are unlikely to build anything that will work for me.
Jiggly windows, I just don't even see that as worth advertising... you can get that from a 1970s era mainframe, just by taking some 1970s era drugs.
No. This is a false dilemma. It's also the reason to use SPF right now, today, because SPF explicitly works around the problem of uneven adoption. You get a subset of the benefits of SPF just by implementing the easy half (publishing SPF in your DNS, a five minute job) and a larger subset by implementing the hard part (SPF checking, requires more knowledge). You get 100% of the benefits when the whole world uses it, true, but you get a huge benefit right off the bat - enough to be worth doing now.
I don't agree that because huge companies with titanic resources can use something that implies that everybody can use it. Put another way, professional basketball players can slam-dunk, that doesn't imply that anyone else can.
Well, there's the fact that DKIM is the successor to Domain Keys, so you might want to go with the more evolved standard instead of version 1.0. If you want an old standard that works, use SPF. Graduate to DKIM when it is supported by the vast majority of MTAs... like SPFv1 already is.
Oh, and getting back on topic: ignore SenderID. It's not only broken (the technical standard is factually incorrect) it's also just another big corporate "embrace and extend" strategy - dominate the market by forcing everyone else to spend resources on compatibility with your not-quite-to-spec implementation of a not-quite-standard. Ride SPF until you can switch horses to DKIM.
The dominant potato of pre-famine Ireland was the infamous "lumper".
You can't count votes with software.
Decentralized vote counting reduces the damage that individual fraudsters can implement to the point where the inevitable human corruption will tend to cancel itself out. Centralized vote counting, which is made possible by the elimination of paper ballots, amplifies the ability of individuals to influence the vote, to the point where elections can literally be stolen at the national level.
Do you trust any single programming-for-profit team more than you trust the co-operative efforts of thousands of grass-roots volunteers located all over the country?
My children are also unbeatable DNA-powered tic-tac-toe players.
It wasn't hard to make them. Kind of fun, actually.
Humans have tried relying on cloned foodstuffs in the past, you know.
In the USA we called it "The Irish Potato Famine".
A single disease organism infected a cloned crop and wiped out the Irish food supply overnight, remember that? Somewhere between 500,000 and 1,500,000 people died? Ring any bells?
I'd think a bunch of computer geeks would understand the dangers of monoculture, and how clones represent the ultimate monoculture...
Anyway, Oracle doesn't need their own distro, they can just ship Andrew's, or Linus's, or Marcello's branch and declare that "The One True Linux". I think people who will spend the $$$ for Oracle would definitely drink that koolaid. But why would you assume a "stripped down" kernel is in the works? If Oracle's going to brand their distro, it would be focused on their toolset, but not necessarily lacking any standard kernel features.
Will businesses switch? Magic 8-ball says, "YES", if they are already running dedicated Oracle servers, and "NO" if they are supporting other apps on the same servers.
I guess the
If you are OK with a vehicle that has a 30 mile range, a top speed under 50 mph, perhaps the e-volks is for you. But in general the frameless construction and torsion bar suspension of the old Beetles makes them an extremely poor choice for electric vehicles (you wouldn't know this from the amazing number of people who've done it... unless you actually talk to those people, that is!).
The Porsche 914, Chevy S-10 pickup, and the Volkswagen Rabbit, on the other hand, all make for excellent conversion vehicles with good range and no "disintegrating suspension" problems from excessive battery weight.
Look for Bruce Parmenter's S-10 or Michael Brown's Voltsrabbit. Or just go to Shari Prange's Electro Automotive site and look at the fine, well supported, time-tested kits for sale there. Shari, Bruce and Michael have been driving electric conversions daily for a decade or more.
You're wrong about the environmental impact, though; your individual impact is certainly negligible, but the impact of all us Prius drivers is astonishingly large (after all, we've got 90% less emissions than similar cars) and more than outweighs the environmental costs of building the vehicles.
www.sendmail.org
www.mailscanner.info
www.pmail.com
Problem solved, oh, maybe five years ago. It amazes me that anyone just figured this was a problem NOW.
I've received hundreds, if not thousands, of emails with a {disarmed} header modification inserted by MailScanner... it's quite interesting to learn who is routinely inserting tracking bugs in their mailings.
I suppose you could also use transparent caching a'la squid to bumfuzzle some of the trackers and speed up browsing for your end users at the same time. But it seems like nowadays the bugs usually contain individualized tracking codes that would make it through the cache anyway.
You just have to strip out external references and tell the end users "that guy who sent you this is using a broken mailer". That's the strategy the HTML addicts used to create this problem, after all - they told the clueless that HTML was normal and that anybody who couldn't read it was using broken or obsolete software. I use the same line (which happens to be true) if somebody complains that they can't read company XYZ's mailings because the image links have been stripped out; "oh, company XYZ is using a broken obsolete mailer that puts external links into the text; until they learn to use the Internet you'd better find a new company to deal with or stick to phone calls".
Not really. The "problem networks" (typically cable broadband nets such as Comcast) already own the equipment and technology to kill 80% of the worms extant in less than a week. I've told Comcast how to do it a couple of times already, but they are not interested.
I prefer to do something rather than theorize about the possible futility of doing something. YMMV.
No. Chickens and eggs. The ISPs are already managing a dynamic environment and can respond to the changes you yourself say are certain to result from stopping any particular exploit. The DOCSIS2 protocol they use can easily be leveraged to reroute all infected PCs (which are quite easy to detect from their traffic patterns, or their DNS activity) to a "clean-up segment" where they can no longer attack others, but where antivirus vendors can pay to maintain a presence. By contrast, the OS is installed and then exists fairly statically on the local PC, unless you run an update protocol, which can be hacked to spread further malware of course. Unless you believe it is possible to ship a 100% bug-free OS (which I do not think is possible) the onus is AND MUST BE on the network operators to detect and contain malware-spewing boxes. It's the gray goo problem in miniature, perhaps.
Or make them pointless by creating a reactive immune system on the net itself. I would pay extra to be on such a net; so would Ma and Pa Kettle. Such a net would be cheaper to run, too, since it would waste less bandwidth and storage on spamblowers and the like. Lots of major corporations run clean internal nets.
Real rail guns have names like "Big Bertha", "Julie" or "the Paris Gun".
Physics geeks need to make up a new name for their amped-up jacob's ladders and stop stealing googlespace and wikishare from World War veterans.
Why can't it be a spark gun? A jake gun? A Tesla gun? Oh, that last one's taken.