>my doubts begin here - who determines how >well the proxy is/needs to be/ setup, is it @Home >or will they submit the proxys to some kind of >test that has been agreed on by the Usenet >community??????
They'll submit the proxies (and all the rest of their system) to a test that has been agreed on by the usenet community: namely, "whatever it takes to make the spam stop". That's all the UDP cares about; there's no allowance for "well, we tried". Either they fix the spam problem or they don't, and if they don't, they stay UDPed.
@Home may choose to solve the problem by setting up their routers to block news connections. They may solve it by sending techs out to all their customers' houses and fixing these apparently mis-configured proxies by hand. They may solve it by cancelling service on anyone who looks like Canter & Siegel. They may do something else entirely. It doesn't matter, so long as it stops the flood of spam.
I think this article misses the same point lots of techies miss. In spite of the fact that these are significant issues which will have a major impact on the way people live their lives in the upcoming network-centred era, most people neither understand nor care about things like encryption, taxation, the patent threat, or stupid ideas like deep-link banning. They just don't WANT to understand high tech or the complexities thereof.
We'll know for sure when the masses hit the polls, but I'll bet that technology issues will remain unimportant until the wars have been fought and there are no big decisions left to make. Then, once the issues are simplified past the point of meaningfulness, we'll see them used prominently in political campaigns.
>At an intuitive level, we all know generally what's right & wrong, >and the law should basically state that on paper & make people accountable for it.
We all may have an intuition about what actions are right or wrong (though I'm not willing to bet on it), but finding two people with the same intuitions about right and wrong would be as hard as finding two identical snowflakes. So whose intuition about right and wrong should we put on paper? The only way you can make a list of rules that will keep everybody happy would be to generalize past the point of usefulness.
It just isn't as simple as "put it down on paper and make everybody accountable to it." You can't even do that with the laws of physics.:-)
You mention something that is, in my book, quite important - 24 hour services!
Not being able to order pizza at 4 AM can put a serious crimp in your hacking style, and is a strong disincentive toward living in that particular area.
I agree, Austin is cool. If I had to live in the South, it's where I'd go. But I rather disagree with what you call "good weather". To me, the boiling treacle that passes for air qualifies as "unbearably fucking hot." I dunno, maybe Texans never leave the air conditioning? They sure never seem to leave their cars, given the way the city sprawls out all over everywhere... maybe it's all that cheap fuel, messing with their brains.
All I want with social security is some damn honesty. Roll the social security tax into the income taxes and tell everyone under 50 or so, "sorry bucko, you ain't getting any".
Hear, hear. I wasn't so fond of the 68000 itself, but the 68020 and later were a joy to write asm for. Remember the 68040's MOVE16? Boy, did that make blitters sing...
Oh well. Those days are long gone... I've avoided needing to learn x86 assembly so far...
>Maybe the centris got it's name because of the lc >near the Center of the word.
Heh.
At the time, the "Performa" line were the cheap home/school beginner models, the "Quadra" machines were the high-end testosterone boxes, and "Centris" referred to mid-range machines for average business use. The connotation is obvious.
Apple rapidly overwhelmed itself in a flood of nearly-indistinguishable computer models. Buyers couldn't tell the difference either. The Centris name disappeared in less than two years.
And yeah, it was a silly name.:-)
-Mars
Re:Why I hate Mac keyboards
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 1
WTF is a "nipple"? The word is "tit".
Don't believe me? Ask Robin Williams. (No, not THAT Robin Williams, the one who writes books about desktop publishing.)
On the other hand, the metaphor's derivation is obvious either way, so does it really matter?:-)
The really confusing thing about Apple changing the placement of the nib/nipple/tit/pip/bumps on their keyboards is that the Mac I use at work has 'em on F and J and the Macs I use at home all have 'em on D and K. This is almost as confusing as having the window manager on my Linux box at work set "point to type" and at home "click to type".
I'm not terribly fond of Apple's USB keyboard. The Page Up and Down keys are tiny and hard to hit accurately, which is a pain since I use them constantly. The arrow keys, too, are difficult to use precisely. Still, the keyboard has a solid-ish feel, and clicks correctly. Aside from the clunky, awkward key sizing & placement, it feels pretty good.
-Mars
Re:Of Keyboards and Repeat
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 1
Putting caps lock on a newbie keyboard is something like outfitting a student driver with a Chevy Suburban. It's a complete waste at best and a damned nuisance to everyone else on the road at worst. Everything else in computing-land these days is set up so that a new user can jump in without hurting themself or anyone else - why not build keyboards that way too?
There are two basic complaints with Yucca Mountain.
1. A permanent dump for nuclear waste needs to be geologically stable. Five-meter-thick concrete walls don't do you much good if the earth's crust goes "pop". Shortly after Yucca Mountain was declared "stable", a fairly significant earthquake hit it. This does not inspire confidence in the site's long term ability to safely contain dangerous waste.
2. The state of Nevada has no nuclear reactors, and thus produces no nuclear waste. From what I recall hearing when I lived there, this was decided by referendum and may reasonably be described as the preference of the folks who live there. Many people thus feel that it is unjust for the DOE to dump most of the nation's waste in Nevada. Thus the omnipresent "Nevada Is Not A Wasteland" bumper stickers.
So there is a little more to the debate than "people who don't know much about nuclear energy."
I've named every machine I've ever owned, starting with a Macintosh Plus called "Ad Astra". Later I replaced him with Falcon, toted a laptop named Sarabande, and replaced him with Lilie, who was much cuter. My DOS using friends all thought this was a crackpot thing to do; their computers tended to have names like "the computer". And the idea of a machine's personality having gender amused them, though it seemed quite natural to me (why would we call a cool new machine "sexy" if it didn't have a sex?).
I always speculated that DOS and Windows users didn't name their machines because the clone PCs they used had no personality...
Times have changed. It seems like "power users" on all platforms like to name their machines now. I suspect this has something to do with increased familiarity with Unix-land and networking, and perhaps also with the rise of build-it-yourself PCs. Not hard to see how people would feel like naming a box they'd built up from parts.
Back on the topic: the company I used to work for was MountainGate, which made the choice of machine-naming convention automatic. I worked on dana, tressider, snowking, and skiddaw. Arrarat ran the DNS, k2 was the CVS repository, and Everest was a four-processor SGI Challenge-L that sat in the corner and did nothing. It worked well, and new employees got nice and familiar with the atlas.
The LAN at home isn't nearly so organized. If you can think up a naming scheme that explains Falcon 2, Lizard, Moria, Crowley, Aziraphale, and Carmen Bellona, please let me know!:-)
>Granted this method does not work for those that need sexual gratification on demand.
You say this like it's a bad thing. Isn't the ability to have sexual intercourse without getting pregnant the whole reason birth control exists? Suggesting that people practice birth control by refraining from sex (either totally or during certain times of a woman's cycle) sounds to me like advising people to cut down on auto-generated air pollution by staying at home. It may work, but it doesn't make much sense to cut oneself off from the advantages of living with a group of human beings when less drastic solutions like riding a bike or taking a bus are available.
>It is not guess work, rather it is scientific fact.
It is quite close to guess work for the untrained non-scientists doing the actual measuring and computing involved.
You do have some points: Intermittent abstinence is better than nothing, and I did fail to distinguish between abstinence based on the timing of a woman's period and abstinence based on temperatures. In my view, however, both methods are undesirable, as they do not solve the problem - they merely dodge it. They do not provide protection, physical or chemical, against pregnancy. Regardless of whatever effectiveness it has, abstinence is merely avoidance, and not a true solution.
It takes a bit of luck in addition to that education and commitment. And it's not an option for everyone; some women's cycles just aren't that predictable.
Check this out for a more fair analysis than I could give: http://www.plannedparenthood.org/BIRTH-CONTROL/C ONTRACHOICES.HTM#FAMs
I'm sure the rhythm method is better than nothing, but there's no way you could get me to rely on it. I'll take latex and hormones over thermometers and guesswork any day.
Ingenuity is fine, but all it can do is make us more efficient. It can't create resources that aren't there. Geometric population growth and finite resources will always be headed for a collision; all that our inventions and technology can do is slow down the inevitable. The problem of population must be solved in social terms.
Even if you imagine that our inventiveness will take us all the way to the earth's carrying capacity for human life, what happens then? Do we just magically stop breeding? Or do we experience a Malthusian crash?
Let's imagine that 100% efficient human society for a moment. Our resources: the sun's light, the earth's matter, our brains. We perform our own photosynthesis, recycle our own water. Nothing on earth but humans, rock, and an ocean. I don't know about you, but this doesn't sound like much fun to me.
The question to ask is not how many people can the earth hold; it's how many people can we really stand to live with.
You've found a good CVS client for Mac? Please share! I want to hear about it.
I do CVS on my Mac by mounting an AFP share from my Linux box, copying the source tree back and forth, and then using cvs on the Linux box. It's lots easier than struggling with that piece of crap "MacCVS Pro" Netscape released...
Try Feria. Yes, it's expensive, but it's great stuff. And it has this really interesting quality of changing colour depending on how bright the light is.
I use their "Chocolate Cherry" colour. My hair is one shade browner than black inside, but as soon as I step out into the Big Blue Room it turns brilliant red.
I can get the same effect by turning on all the fluorescent lights over my desk, which usually remain off.
Heck no. Aside from the fact that IT workers tend to be raging individualists, unions work against the very principles that make IT jobs fun in the first place.
Actually, if I recall correctly, they had the term first, and we stole it. "Open source", in intelligence-security-spy-whatever circles, refers to publicly available information sources like newspapers and television stations.
So if they want to use their version of the term to describe this article, who are we to argue?:-)
>It is this: that human life is sacred. It is >sacred because it is a gift of God, and we are >made in His image. It is a gift, and therefore we >have it by simply being born into this world.
While I'm sure this makes a lot of sense to you, not everyone shares your religious beliefs. It's fine to use those beliefs to determine the parameters of your own behaviour. What's not fine is to use the tenets of your religion as moral backing for public policy.
Since we are talking public policy here, I suggest that you either limit your proposal to countries with explicitly religious governments, or try again with a secular support for your position rather than a religious one.
The "successfully evolved" past civilisations to which you refer existed in a much more difficult world. As recently as a hundred years ago, it was commonplace even in industrial nations for one or more of a couple's children to die before reaching adulthood. Laws against birth control, abortion, and infanticide made some sense in that environment.
People are no longer quite so rare as they once were - we hit 6 billion next week - and no longer so difficult to raise. There is no scarcity of children - the problem these days is convincing people to STOP reproducing. The situation is not what it once was.
So I don't buy your look to history as justification for a ban on infanticide. How do we really know infanticide does not confer a competitive advantage on a 21st century civilisation? Must we write it off simply because it didn't work for our ancestors, whose world was so different than our own?
In addition, let me refer you to the practices of certain inhabitants of the northern polar regions who routinely killed female babies in order to keep their group's sexes balanced. Since males tended to die younger, raising all females to maturity would have left them too few men to bring in meat, and they'd have starved. There's an example for you - a society that, until recently, depended on infanticide for success.
The "bright white line" to which you refer does not exist. Killing people is quite OK and has always been so, as long as it's done in the correct setting. Killing as an act of war or (in some places) as punishment for a particularly heinous crime is often considered morally good. It's OK to kill someone if they attack you; it's even almost OK to kill someone if they steal your lover. In past civilisations, killing was OK in many more situations - as part of a duel, because the victim had the wrong religion, because the victim had sex with someone of a different race, because they ignored your fancy uniform and refused to do what you told them, as part of a religious rite.
It _is_ for us to decide, whether we're bright or not; there's no one else around to do the deciding for us. I don't know what the answer to this particular question is, but I do know that it is a question we need to ask.
Back when the CDA originally came out, there was a suggestion that, should the measure pass, we should all simply substitute the word "exon" for all instances of the word "fuck". This being, of course, in honour of Senator Exon who had introduced the bill. The idea was received with rather widespread approval...
Slashdot Mirror
>my doubts begin here - who determines how
>well the proxy is/needs to be/ setup, is it @Home
>or will they submit the proxys to some kind of
>test that has been agreed on by the Usenet
>community??????
They'll submit the proxies (and all the rest of their system) to a test that has been agreed on by the usenet community: namely, "whatever it takes to make the spam stop". That's all the UDP cares about; there's no allowance for "well, we tried". Either they fix the spam problem or they don't, and if they don't, they stay UDPed.
@Home may choose to solve the problem by setting up their routers to block news connections. They may solve it by sending techs out to all their customers' houses and fixing these apparently mis-configured proxies by hand. They may solve it by cancelling service on anyone who looks like Canter & Siegel. They may do something else entirely. It doesn't matter, so long as it stops the flood of spam.
-Mars
Interesting. That's kind of a relief, if it's as simple as it looks.
Now, the question is: Will they be able to translate that fear into sane choices at the polls? If not, it doesn't really matter...
-Mars
I think this article misses the same point lots of techies miss. In spite of the fact that these are significant issues which will have a major impact on the way people live their lives in the upcoming network-centred era, most people neither understand nor care about things like encryption, taxation, the patent threat, or stupid ideas like deep-link banning. They just don't WANT to understand high tech or the complexities thereof.
We'll know for sure when the masses hit the polls, but I'll bet that technology issues will remain unimportant until the wars have been fought and there are no big decisions left to make. Then, once the issues are simplified past the point of meaningfulness, we'll see them used prominently in political campaigns.
-Mars
>At an intuitive level, we all know generally what's right & wrong,
:-)
>and the law should basically state that on paper & make people accountable for it.
We all may have an intuition about what actions are right or wrong (though I'm not willing to bet on it), but finding two people with the same intuitions about right and wrong would be as hard as finding two identical snowflakes. So whose intuition about right and wrong should we put on paper? The only way you can make a list of rules that will keep everybody happy would be to generalize past the point of usefulness.
It just isn't as simple as "put it down on paper and make everybody accountable to it." You can't even do that with the laws of physics.
-Mars
You mention something that is, in my book, quite important - 24 hour services!
Not being able to order pizza at 4 AM can put a serious crimp in your hacking style, and is a strong disincentive toward living in that particular area.
Convenience is king, in both space AND time.
-Mars
I agree, Austin is cool. If I had to live in the South, it's where I'd go. But I rather disagree with what you call "good weather". To me, the boiling treacle that passes for air qualifies as "unbearably fucking hot." I dunno, maybe Texans never leave the air conditioning? They sure never seem to leave their cars, given the way the city sprawls out all over everywhere... maybe it's all that cheap fuel, messing with their brains.
The congress ave. bridge is neat.
-Mars
>NYC: It _is_ the center of the world.
:-)
Only to people who've never experienced London
-Mars
All I want with social security is some damn honesty. Roll the social security tax into the income taxes and tell everyone under 50 or so, "sorry bucko, you ain't getting any".
That's the truth anyway, so why not admit it?
-Mars
Hear, hear. I wasn't so fond of the 68000 itself, but the 68020 and later were a joy to write asm for. Remember the 68040's MOVE16? Boy, did that make blitters sing...
Oh well. Those days are long gone... I've avoided needing to learn x86 assembly so far...
-Mars
>Maybe the centris got it's name because of the lc
:-)
>near the Center of the word.
Heh.
At the time, the "Performa" line were the cheap home/school beginner models, the "Quadra" machines were the high-end testosterone boxes, and "Centris" referred to mid-range machines for average business use. The connotation is obvious.
Apple rapidly overwhelmed itself in a flood of nearly-indistinguishable computer models. Buyers couldn't tell the difference either. The Centris name disappeared in less than two years.
And yeah, it was a silly name.
-Mars
WTF is a "nipple"? The word is "tit".
:-)
Don't believe me? Ask Robin Williams. (No, not THAT Robin Williams, the one who writes books about desktop publishing.)
On the other hand, the metaphor's derivation is obvious either way, so does it really matter?
The really confusing thing about Apple changing the placement of the nib/nipple/tit/pip/bumps on their keyboards is that the Mac I use at work has 'em on F and J and the Macs I use at home all have 'em on D and K. This is almost as confusing as having the window manager on my Linux box at work set "point to type" and at home "click to type".
I'm not terribly fond of Apple's USB keyboard. The Page Up and Down keys are tiny and hard to hit accurately, which is a pain since I use them constantly. The arrow keys, too, are difficult to use precisely. Still, the keyboard has a solid-ish feel, and clicks correctly. Aside from the clunky, awkward key sizing & placement, it feels pretty good.
-Mars
Putting caps lock on a newbie keyboard is something like outfitting a student driver with a Chevy Suburban. It's a complete waste at best and a damned nuisance to everyone else on the road at worst. Everything else in computing-land these days is set up so that a new user can jump in without hurting themself or anyone else - why not build keyboards that way too?
-Mars
There are two basic complaints with Yucca Mountain.
1. A permanent dump for nuclear waste needs to be geologically stable. Five-meter-thick concrete walls don't do you much good if the earth's crust goes "pop". Shortly after Yucca Mountain was declared "stable", a fairly significant earthquake hit it. This does not inspire confidence in the site's long term ability to safely contain dangerous waste.
2. The state of Nevada has no nuclear reactors, and thus produces no nuclear waste. From what I recall hearing when I lived there, this was decided by referendum and may reasonably be described as the preference of the folks who live there. Many people thus feel that it is unjust for the DOE to dump most of the nation's waste in Nevada. Thus the omnipresent "Nevada Is Not A Wasteland" bumper stickers.
So there is a little more to the debate than "people who don't know much about nuclear energy."
-Mars
I've named every machine I've ever owned, starting with a Macintosh Plus called "Ad Astra". Later I replaced him with Falcon, toted a laptop named Sarabande, and replaced him with Lilie, who was much cuter. My DOS using friends all thought this was a crackpot thing to do; their computers tended to have names like "the computer". And the idea of a machine's personality having gender amused them, though it seemed quite natural to me (why would we call a cool new machine "sexy" if it didn't have a sex?).
:-)
I always speculated that DOS and Windows users didn't name their machines because the clone PCs they used had no personality...
Times have changed. It seems like "power users" on all platforms like to name their machines now. I suspect this has something to do with increased familiarity with Unix-land and networking, and perhaps also with the rise of build-it-yourself PCs. Not hard to see how people would feel like naming a box they'd built up from parts.
Back on the topic: the company I used to work for was MountainGate, which made the choice of machine-naming convention automatic. I worked on dana, tressider, snowking, and skiddaw. Arrarat ran the DNS, k2 was the CVS repository, and Everest was a four-processor SGI Challenge-L that sat in the corner and did nothing. It worked well, and new employees got nice and familiar with the atlas.
The LAN at home isn't nearly so organized. If you can think up a naming scheme that explains Falcon 2, Lizard, Moria, Crowley, Aziraphale, and Carmen Bellona, please let me know!
-Mars
>Granted this method does not work for those that need sexual gratification on demand.
You say this like it's a bad thing. Isn't the ability to have sexual intercourse without getting pregnant the whole reason birth control exists? Suggesting that people practice birth control by refraining from sex (either totally or during certain times of a woman's cycle) sounds to me like advising people to cut down on auto-generated air pollution by staying at home. It may work, but it doesn't make much sense to cut oneself off from the advantages of living with a group of human beings when less drastic solutions like riding a bike or taking a bus are available.
>It is not guess work, rather it is scientific fact.
It is quite close to guess work for the untrained non-scientists doing the actual measuring and computing involved.
You do have some points: Intermittent abstinence is better than nothing, and I did fail to distinguish between abstinence based on the timing of a woman's period and abstinence based on temperatures. In my view, however, both methods are undesirable, as they do not solve the problem - they merely dodge it. They do not provide protection, physical or chemical, against pregnancy. Regardless of whatever effectiveness it has, abstinence is merely avoidance, and not a true solution.
-Mars
It takes a bit of luck in addition to that education and commitment. And it's not an option for everyone; some women's cycles just aren't that predictable.
C ONTRACHOICES.HTM#FAMs
Check this out for a more fair analysis than I could give:
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/BIRTH-CONTROL/
I'm sure the rhythm method is better than nothing, but there's no way you could get me to rely on it. I'll take latex and hormones over thermometers and guesswork any day.
-Mars
Ingenuity is fine, but all it can do is make us more efficient. It can't create resources that aren't there. Geometric population growth and finite resources will always be headed for a collision; all that our inventions and technology can do is slow down the inevitable. The problem of population must be solved in social terms.
Even if you imagine that our inventiveness will take us all the way to the earth's carrying capacity for human life, what happens then? Do we just magically stop breeding? Or do we experience a Malthusian crash?
Let's imagine that 100% efficient human society for a moment. Our resources: the sun's light, the earth's matter, our brains. We perform our own photosynthesis, recycle our own water. Nothing on earth but humans, rock, and an ocean. I don't know about you, but this doesn't sound like much fun to me.
The question to ask is not how many people can the earth hold; it's how many people can we really stand to live with.
Six billion, and feeling pretty damn crowded.
-Mars
You've found a good CVS client for Mac? Please share! I want to hear about it.
I do CVS on my Mac by mounting an AFP share from my Linux box, copying the source tree back and forth, and then using cvs on the Linux box. It's lots easier than struggling with that piece of crap "MacCVS Pro" Netscape released...
-Mars
Try Feria. Yes, it's expensive, but it's great stuff. And it has this really interesting quality of changing colour depending on how bright the light is.
I use their "Chocolate Cherry" colour. My hair is one shade browner than black inside, but as soon as I step out into the Big Blue Room it turns brilliant red.
I can get the same effect by turning on all the fluorescent lights over my desk, which usually remain off.
I don't think they make blue, though.
-Mars
Heck no. Aside from the fact that IT workers tend to be raging individualists, unions work against the very principles that make IT jobs fun in the first place.
-Mars
Actually, if I recall correctly, they had the term first, and we stole it. "Open source", in intelligence-security-spy-whatever circles, refers to publicly available information sources like newspapers and television stations.
:-)
So if they want to use their version of the term to describe this article, who are we to argue?
-Mars
>But if this man starts indoctrinating his students, that's quite another.
What, his students can't think for themselves, as you apparently can?
Let people make up their own minds.
-Mars
>It is this: that human life is sacred. It is
>sacred because it is a gift of God, and we are
>made in His image. It is a gift, and therefore we
>have it by simply being born into this world.
While I'm sure this makes a lot of sense to you, not everyone shares your religious beliefs. It's fine to use those beliefs to determine the parameters of your own behaviour. What's not fine is to use the tenets of your religion as moral backing for public policy.
Since we are talking public policy here, I suggest that you either limit your proposal to countries with explicitly religious governments, or try again with a secular support for your position rather than a religious one.
-Mars
The "successfully evolved" past civilisations to which you refer existed in a much more difficult world. As recently as a hundred years ago, it was commonplace even in industrial nations for one or more of a couple's children to die before reaching adulthood. Laws against birth control, abortion, and infanticide made some sense in that environment.
People are no longer quite so rare as they once were - we hit 6 billion next week - and no longer so difficult to raise. There is no scarcity of children - the problem these days is convincing people to STOP reproducing. The situation is not what it once was.
So I don't buy your look to history as justification for a ban on infanticide. How do we really know infanticide does not confer a competitive advantage on a 21st century civilisation? Must we write it off simply because it didn't work for our ancestors, whose world was so different than our own?
In addition, let me refer you to the practices of certain inhabitants of the northern polar regions who routinely killed female babies in order to keep their group's sexes balanced. Since males tended to die younger, raising all females to maturity would have left them too few men to bring in meat, and they'd have starved. There's an example for you - a society that, until recently, depended on infanticide for success.
The "bright white line" to which you refer does not exist. Killing people is quite OK and has always been so, as long as it's done in the correct setting. Killing as an act of war or (in some places) as punishment for a particularly heinous crime is often considered morally good. It's OK to kill someone if they attack you; it's even almost OK to kill someone if they steal your lover. In past civilisations, killing was OK in many more situations - as part of a duel, because the victim had the wrong religion, because the victim had sex with someone of a different race, because they ignored your fancy uniform and refused to do what you told them, as part of a religious rite.
It _is_ for us to decide, whether we're bright or not; there's no one else around to do the deciding for us. I don't know what the answer to this particular question is, but I do know that it is a question we need to ask.
-Mars
Back when the CDA originally came out, there was a suggestion that, should the measure pass, we should all simply substitute the word "exon" for all instances of the word "fuck". This being, of course, in honour of Senator Exon who had introduced the bill. The idea was received with rather widespread approval...
-Mars