Hand-counting? But what about all the companies that sell voting machinery? Think of the impact on jobs, on industry!
Clearly, these 'volunteers' are unacceptable. Maybe hand counting would work if the government subcontracted counting to a company which charged hundreds of millions to employ counters at minimum wage, and keep the rest for shareholders.
As much as I'd hate to see internet tax, it might be a mechanism to fight SPAM.
If the government was able to see all the email someone sends (that in itself is a big bad!), then why would you bother taxing spam when you could just ban it outright?
Let's keep in mind there is probably an entire section in draft legislation, which was reduced to a few sentences in a press release, which the media reduced to the phrase "list generation software."
We won't know what this actually means until the bill appears before parliament.
One concern is that a sufficiently vague definition could cause legal concerns with software that has legitimate uses - for instance, something like SELECT DISTINCT sender_address FROM usenet_posts; on a database like Google Groups could generate a list of email addresses, how should things be phrased to make sure Google Groups is in the clear?
Lots of people seem to think that regulation is the solution to overly long and/or complex EULAs. I disagree - I say let the market decide.
If an EULA is just too complex, what a user should do is reject it and take their business elsewhere. The company presenting the EULA will have to fix it, or die in the marketplace.
The only problem at the moment is people blindly clicking 'Yes' because they don't think it matters - perhaps once enough people are burnt this will change.
(For the record: I happen to believe that EULAs on products you've already paid for (ie you only see them once you break the shrinkwrap and run the installer) should not be binding, but for a different reason - you've already bought the product and the conditions of sale can't change after the sale is completed.)
In 5 minutes I can set up a bogus one-time pgp sig and send you spam that you could positivly prove came from bogus-Me.
You're missing my point.. grandparent post was yet another if we just adjust the protocol so we can authenticate senders rant, and I'm saying the technology is already there. I mentioned S/MIME for a reason - there are CAs who will, today, give you a certificate if and only if you can prove who you are. It's conceivable that a central trusted authority could do the same with signing PGP certificatess.
I left unsaid that you'd need widespread use for it to become useful. While that's true, it's no more true of existing technologies than the magical way of authenticating senders that the original poster wanted invented.
Not opening strange e-mail attachments helps to keep Windows secure (not to mention it's plain common sense), but it isn't enough.
I use mutt to read most of my mail (years ago, I used pine.) Opening strange attachments isn't an issue for me, and shouldn't be for anyone else. If there is executable code in an attachment.. my client will show me executable code, it sure as hell won't run it. That's common sense.
Get US-encoded DVD's? Does the submitter mean getting those DVD's in Australia [...] fat chance.
There's no law against selling them here, and many niche stores (the same sort of places that sell roleplaying games and comic books) sell them openly - as in big friggin' signs saying "Region 1, NTSC."
The mainstream stores don't sell them, because (a) the 'mainstream' titles are all available as Region 4 (b) it's too much trouble dealing with all the people who'd return titles complaining "it doesn't work?" "You were told you needed a region free player, right?" "Yes, but I don't care about any of that techno babble..." (c) it's expensive for stores to import them
Mainstream department stores do, however, happily sell region free/select players.
I think the SPAM problem could be largely mitigated by altering the SMTP protocol to include cryptographic signatures which are used to authenticate the email address listed in the email's "From" field.
SMTP doesn't know about the From: field. Or the To: field, for that matter.
Why dont all the vendors individually sue SCO? SCO will run out of money before it can address any of them.
IANAL, but I believe that if, say, the Debian project sue shortly after Red Hat does, the judge can and will delay a trial until Red Hat vs SCO is resolved. Idea being to protect SCO from barratry, and to not waste the court's time by debating essentially the same case twice.
Re:Why does SRC ports have to be DISTRO Specific?
on
The GNU-Darwin World
·
· Score: 1
Because a collection of source ports is basically what a distro is:)
Something to keep in mind is that ideally, the generic stuff that can be shared between ports (eg 64bit/endianness friendlyness, not relying on the idiosyncracies of one particular OS) eventually ends up in the program's main source tree.
A friend of mine studies in Australia, and was instructed to not base the idea in one of his comp.sci papers on Linux. Because of the SCO scare.
If it's just ideas, then copyrights can't apply - only patents. Patents only restrict the distribution of a product - you can discuss ideas patented by SCO in an academic paper to your hearts content and SCO can't touch you.
Either there's more to the story, or the professor is extremely misguided and should leave this stuff to the uni legal people.
Anyways, I'll try to explain the problematic of the web-based applications: No deployment.
If you're an enterprise, you already have a remote deployment solution (Ghost images, Ghost packages, Microsoft's SMS packages) or you should do - how do you deploy fresh installations and updates to local applications like your office suite, web browser, email program etc?
OSS Community: Businesses should adopt open source software and get away from MS.
Business Guy: I'd love to if you just has [feature] which MS has and makes my life a lot easier.
OSS Community: Create it yourself, lamer.
But if you turn it around things are no better.
Microsoft: We produce stable enterprise quality solutions for business. Buy our stuff.
Business Guy: I'd love to if you just had [feature] which [some other software that may or may not be open source] has and makes my life a lot easier.
Microsoft:*something along the lines of utter silence*
Unless you're a valued customer in a niche market, any software will probably not work exactly the way you want it to, and specific requests for features will fall on deaf ears.
If, say, you wanted some feature in MS Excel, your best bet at getting it implemented would be putting resources (hours from an internal employee, or dollars for a contractor) into getting it scripted in VBScript. Ditto for OOo's spreadsheet - no better, no worse.
It is not native, it uses QT which uses custom widget
I'm pretty sure QT on OS X uses the native Aqua widgets, rather than rendering it's own. Ditto for Windows XP (otherwise themes wouldn't work..)
It's true that on plenty of platforms (Windows prior to XP, Motif, raw X11 etc) that QT does all of it's own drawing and doesn't rely on the native UI for anything more advanced than a window, however that's not true here.
I'd agree with the judges reasoning if the pop-up box to install Gator (it's an ActiveX component I believe, and there's a standard MSIE dialog box which prompts the user) said 'Do you with to install "Gator, a program which places additional advertising onto webpages. Part of the revenue from this business goes back to the website you're trying to visit"'.
However, the text presented to the user comes from the component author, and every time I've come across Gator it's along the lines of '"Date/Time checker, a program that blah blah blah enhances your internet experience blah blah blah" by Gator Corporation.' NO MENTION of replacing or adding ads to web pages.
Sure, it doesn't say that Gator doesn't do anything else, but I don't see how this is any different than, say, yet another chain mail which also happens to mail itself to everyone in your mailbox automatically. The primary purpose of the software is hostile and hidden to the user installing it, which is about as 'trojan horse' as you can get.
Re:Requires Microsoft Visual C++
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
·
· Score: 1
Compiling PHP for Windows requires the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler version 6.0 or later.
I also hear that running PHP for Windows requires the Microsoft Windows operating system version NT4.0 or later. *gasp*
(Disclaimer: I'm not a networks person, just a frustrated end user)
This doesn't sound like the line APNIC peddles when people actually ask it for IP addresses. When I can get a real, routable IP for every computer on my home network, and my office network, without paying a notable sum per IP because otherwise my ISP wouldn't have any address space left.. then there will be enough IP addresses.
WAIX is possibly the largest peering point in the southern hemisphere.. pretty much every ISP in the state connects to it to exchange data with each other. Some people like to set up machines with IPs that will not be routed over anything but WAIX, for things like local mirrors where communication with the non-WAIX world would be an unwanted expense. WAIX has adopted the convention of using 172.16-31.* IPs (these are "local" addresses just like 10.* and 192.168.*) - my understanding is that they know this is an utterly broken approach, but the only way since APNIC won't give WAIX a "real" IP range to do it with!
Not giving out portable IP ranges willy-nilly is understandable, since otherwise routing tables would balloon out unreasonably. But when rules on handing out IPs to established networks are as anal as APNIC's, the only possible explanation is that they need to strictly ration the too-small supply of IP addresses.
Well, there's always Plan 9's fossil [bell-labs.com]. Oh... you mean Linux software?
Hmm, interesting, thanks for that.
We're actually a FreeBSD/MacOS X/Win32 shop, and the nice thing about CVS is that we can run the client (and indeed the server, although we've never served from anything but BSD) on each of the machines. I haven't looked closely but in principle I suppose it should be possible to NFS export a fossil repository from Plan 9..
Slashdot Mirror
Hand-counting? But what about all the companies that sell voting machinery? Think of the impact on jobs, on industry!
Clearly, these 'volunteers' are unacceptable. Maybe hand counting would work if the government subcontracted counting to a company which charged hundreds of millions to employ counters at minimum wage, and keep the rest for shareholders.
Nice injection attack. Hmm, I wonder if feeding such a URL to a censorware site could get all of verisign.com in some blacklists?
If the government was able to see all the email someone sends (that in itself is a big bad!), then why would you bother taxing spam when you could just ban it outright?
Let's keep in mind there is probably an entire section in draft legislation, which was reduced to a few sentences in a press release, which the media reduced to the phrase "list generation software."
We won't know what this actually means until the bill appears before parliament.
One concern is that a sufficiently vague definition could cause legal concerns with software that has legitimate uses - for instance, something like SELECT DISTINCT sender_address FROM usenet_posts; on a database like Google Groups could generate a list of email addresses, how should things be phrased to make sure Google Groups is in the clear?
Lots of people seem to think that regulation is the solution to overly long and/or complex EULAs. I disagree - I say let the market decide.
If an EULA is just too complex, what a user should do is reject it and take their business elsewhere. The company presenting the EULA will have to fix it, or die in the marketplace.
The only problem at the moment is people blindly clicking 'Yes' because they don't think it matters - perhaps once enough people are burnt this will change.
(For the record: I happen to believe that EULAs on products you've already paid for (ie you only see them once you break the shrinkwrap and run the installer) should not be binding, but for a different reason - you've already bought the product and the conditions of sale can't change after the sale is completed.)
You're missing my point .. grandparent post was yet another if we just adjust the protocol so we can authenticate senders rant, and I'm saying the technology is already there. I mentioned S/MIME for a reason - there are CAs who will, today, give you a certificate if and only if you can prove who you are. It's conceivable that a central trusted authority could do the same with signing PGP certificatess.
I left unsaid that you'd need widespread use for it to become useful. While that's true, it's no more true of existing technologies than the magical way of authenticating senders that the original poster wanted invented.
PGP and S/MIME allow you to trust the origin of email. Both have been around for years
From the article:
I use mutt to read most of my mail (years ago, I used pine.) Opening strange attachments isn't an issue for me, and shouldn't be for anyone else. If there is executable code in an attachment .. my client will show me executable code, it sure as hell won't run it. That's common sense.
There's no law against selling them here, and many niche stores (the same sort of places that sell roleplaying games and comic books) sell them openly - as in big friggin' signs saying "Region 1, NTSC."
The mainstream stores don't sell them, because (a) the 'mainstream' titles are all available as Region 4 (b) it's too much trouble dealing with all the people who'd return titles complaining "it doesn't work?" "You were told you needed a region free player, right?" "Yes, but I don't care about any of that techno babble..." (c) it's expensive for stores to import them
Mainstream department stores do, however, happily sell region free/select players.
SMTP doesn't know about the From: field. Or the To: field, for that matter.
By SCO's reasoning, the BSD license would be invalid for the same reason as the GPL.
IANAL, but I believe that if, say, the Debian project sue shortly after Red Hat does, the judge can and will delay a trial until Red Hat vs SCO is resolved. Idea being to protect SCO from barratry, and to not waste the court's time by debating essentially the same case twice.
Because a collection of source ports is basically what a distro is :)
Something to keep in mind is that ideally, the generic stuff that can be shared between ports (eg 64bit/endianness friendlyness, not relying on the idiosyncracies of one particular OS) eventually ends up in the program's main source tree.
If it's just ideas, then copyrights can't apply - only patents. Patents only restrict the distribution of a product - you can discuss ideas patented by SCO in an academic paper to your hearts content and SCO can't touch you.
Either there's more to the story, or the professor is extremely misguided and should leave this stuff to the uni legal people.
If you're an enterprise, you already have a remote deployment solution (Ghost images, Ghost packages, Microsoft's SMS packages) or you should do - how do you deploy fresh installations and updates to local applications like your office suite, web browser, email program etc?
.. and that interactivity is hard to achieve in a web browser, maybe this application doesn't belong in a web browser. Just a hunch.
But if you turn it around things are no better.
Microsoft: We produce stable enterprise quality solutions for business. Buy our stuff.
Business Guy: I'd love to if you just had [feature] which [some other software that may or may not be open source] has and makes my life a lot easier.
Microsoft: *something along the lines of utter silence*
Unless you're a valued customer in a niche market, any software will probably not work exactly the way you want it to, and specific requests for features will fall on deaf ears.
If, say, you wanted some feature in MS Excel, your best bet at getting it implemented would be putting resources (hours from an internal employee, or dollars for a contractor) into getting it scripted in VBScript. Ditto for OOo's spreadsheet - no better, no worse.
I'm pretty sure QT on OS X uses the native Aqua widgets, rather than rendering it's own. Ditto for Windows XP (otherwise themes wouldn't work..)
It's true that on plenty of platforms (Windows prior to XP, Motif, raw X11 etc) that QT does all of it's own drawing and doesn't rely on the native UI for anything more advanced than a window, however that's not true here.
I meant the website you're trying to visit at the time the popup to install Gator appears.
I'd agree with the judges reasoning if the pop-up box to install Gator (it's an ActiveX component I believe, and there's a standard MSIE dialog box which prompts the user) said 'Do you with to install "Gator, a program which places additional advertising onto webpages. Part of the revenue from this business goes back to the website you're trying to visit"'.
However, the text presented to the user comes from the component author, and every time I've come across Gator it's along the lines of '"Date/Time checker, a program that blah blah blah enhances your internet experience blah blah blah" by Gator Corporation.' NO MENTION of replacing or adding ads to web pages.
Sure, it doesn't say that Gator doesn't do anything else, but I don't see how this is any different than, say, yet another chain mail which also happens to mail itself to everyone in your mailbox automatically. The primary purpose of the software is hostile and hidden to the user installing it, which is about as 'trojan horse' as you can get.
I also hear that running PHP for Windows requires the Microsoft Windows operating system version NT4.0 or later. *gasp*
Microsoft used patents to kill ASF support in VirtualDub.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a networks person, just a frustrated end user)
This doesn't sound like the line APNIC peddles when people actually ask it for IP addresses. When I can get a real, routable IP for every computer on my home network, and my office network, without paying a notable sum per IP because otherwise my ISP wouldn't have any address space left .. then there will be enough IP addresses.
WAIX is possibly the largest peering point in the southern hemisphere .. pretty much every ISP in the state connects to it to exchange data with each other. Some people like to set up machines with IPs that will not be routed over anything but WAIX, for things like local mirrors where communication with the non-WAIX world would be an unwanted expense. WAIX has adopted the convention of using 172.16-31.* IPs (these are "local" addresses just like 10.* and 192.168.*) - my understanding is that they know this is an utterly broken approach, but the only way since APNIC won't give WAIX a "real" IP range to do it with!
Not giving out portable IP ranges willy-nilly is understandable, since otherwise routing tables would balloon out unreasonably. But when rules on handing out IPs to established networks are as anal as APNIC's, the only possible explanation is that they need to strictly ration the too-small supply of IP addresses.
Oh dear. He sounds miserable now, but wait until SCO (formerly known as Caldera) sues his ass for.. well, something!
Hmm, interesting, thanks for that.
We're actually a FreeBSD/MacOS X/Win32 shop, and the nice thing about CVS is that we can run the client (and indeed the server, although we've never served from anything but BSD) on each of the machines. I haven't looked closely but in principle I suppose it should be possible to NFS export a fossil repository from Plan 9..