You haven't elaborated much on your situation. To be honest, the scalability and technology available to you has a lot to do with what platform you're using. The initial design of a data-driven web site ultimately determines how easy, securely and efficently it will be to evolve to meet changing needs and increased demand.
Open source technology tends to be more scalable and solid, but even there, a bad choice stifles your progress. If money is no object, I guess you can always scale up, but the commercial platforms often have their admins spending more time patching and maintaining the status quo than progressing. The bigger question is: Did you do your homework when you initially designed the system? If you're stuck, that's likely the problem.
If you have a choice to redesign or redeploy your site, what you need to do is ask yourself, not whether or not the technology you're familiar with can do what you want, but instead, are you using the right technology to do what you want?
Your argument might have some credibility IF there was any consistency to the notion that humanity acts in a moral manner. History hasn't demonstrated this is the case. Present government hasn't demonstrated that is the case. Religion hasn't demonstrated that is the case. So what exactly is your point? Are you suggesting you are the guide by which morality and ethics should be judged? Are you suggesting that there are no bad precedents in play right now and this stem cell issue would tarnish a perfect record of ethics?
With all due respect, fuck you and your hypocritical ethical line. Helping people at no expense of anyone else is not an ethical or moral issue, no matter how much you want to twist it.
If you want to turn this into an issue of ethics, you can exercise it on a personal level by refusing treatment that was the result of stem cell research, then you can die and there will be one less self-righteous dweeb hell bent on fucking up society in the process of promoting his perverted sense of morality.
Merely that equal potential outcomes do not make ethical decisions indistinguishable.
It's not merely about the "outcome"..
If I were to use your logic in a similar analogy it might go like this: If I harvest a certain amount of grain from my farm each year that I do not need, I could give it to hungry people, but I wouldn't have enough to solve the hunger problem, so it would make no difference whether I destroyed the grain or gave it to people needing it.
There is a difference in how you utilize resources. There is an ethical responsibilty to not waste resources when they can serve another useful purpose.
There is absolutely nothing "religious" about the belief that personhood begins at conception (rather than any other point you want to put it). Indeed, the Bible says essentially nothing on the matter.
With all due respect, what are you smoking? The pro-life/pro-choice issue has everything to do with the nature of "life" and sentience, and revolves around conservative christians and their desire to push a government agenda that centers around their religious beliefs. There are literally thousands of different religious interpretations over when life begins. The stem cell issue has been a side battle in the war to abolish legalized abortion. Everyone, apparently except you, is aware of that.
I've joined the EFF and have a bumper sticker on my car. It's one of the best organizations around to help protect the rights of people both on and offline. Everyone needs to support this group.
There's a testimonial to WAPO's brilliant investigative journalists... don't have any details at all, and don't even recognize an obvious alias. Mainstream journalism has totally gone to shit.
If you're an American, I suggest you stop prostyletizing about freedom in China and start trying to preserve it in your own country. Right now, an American's opinion about freedom, even to those in a communist country, doesn't mean much.
When life is so force-fed and censored as it can be in China, outlets like MMORPG's are the only form of "freedom" and people flock to them... so much so that it is an epidemic.
As an "outsider" what makes you think your average Chinese person is wandering around in desperation looking for this so-called "freedom" that he's missing? How is being trapped in a MMORPG with it's own authoritarian arbitrary rule any different from whatever distorted reality you're implying these foreigners live in? And ultimately, how is it really much different from the reality you live in?
Christians, most of which are "convenient Christians" subscribe to the notion that they might as well believe in god, just in case he's really there. Pascal's wager as it's called, is based on the notion that erring on the side of caution when there doesn't seem to be any serious repurcussions is a wise choice, but it seems these same people bury their head in the sand when it comes to the subject of global warming. Wouldn't it seem like a wise idea to assume it might be happening and act to reduce the effects, as opposed to arguing about it?
Regardless of whether global warming is a reality, the solution will involve finding cleaner, cheaper, alternative sources of energy. How can that be a bad thing? Don't start with the bullshit about jobs being lost. We can create just as many job opportunities in the pursuit of alternative energy as are working in the oil industry, paid shill degreed academics, or lobbyists in Washington to pay crooks to write misleading legislation like the "Clear Skies Initiative."
If they can offer this to you to monitor your children, they can offer this to the NSA to monitor you.
Not exactly. They've always offered this to the NSA and it's probably one of the myriad things we don't know about. Regardless of whether or not the service is offered to us.
if you lose your phone the telcos know exactly where the thing is if it's turned on. Will they tell you? No. I wonder how many tens of thousands of phones were unnecessarily replaced because the phone company would rather you buy a new phone than tell you where you lost it.
It's nice to see they're unrestricting some of these services, but I feel I've always had a right to access the Geolocation information on my own property.
First and foremost, the whole nature of the design of Unix/Linux provides a means by which software systems can be updated without any service outage. You cannot do this with any version of Windows. Most Windows-based patches and upgrades require a system reboot, which is downtime. Most unix-based upgrades merely require a quick stop/start/HUP of the services. If their main claim is that updating system components is the basis for downtime, they're smoking crack. Maybe their methodology for testing involved taking the entire system down while they upgraded? Unix doesn't require such drastic measures - Windows probably does, as you probably can't update a running service. By design, Windows is exponentially more prone to downtime in the process of patches and upgrades. It's virtually impossible for them to compare the two OSes on this issue and not be dramatically manipulating the test methods to create bogus results that are in no way reflective of how sysadmins patch and manage their server resources. I call BULLSHIT.
I have unix servers right now with uptime measured in YEARS. There are no Windows boxes that can make that claim. Period. I've had outages on occasion due to DDOS or system probes that caused a process to terminate over the years, but I've never had any type of wholesale outage that you'd typically get with most Windows installations. Does anyone have any details on the methodology of the testing? It's obviously bogus.
People are focusing on the transgression of the guy putting this data on his laptop and taking it out of the building. In reality, you can bet the systems he was working on were networked and he could have accessed the data from his home directly. I'm not sure if there is a simple solution to this other than constantly making sure all data is encrypted wherever it is stored.
Hopefully, they'll also offer alternatives to the 12-Step programs. I'm not quite sure how you're going to wean someone off an obsession with fantasy creatures with the standard 12-step methodology. That seems a bit ironic.
I was at one of John's parties at Comdex in the 80s (it's a whole 'nother story about his parties) and this was at the height of his popularity (IMO) and he's got a little flock of sycophant vendors hovering around him. He walks up to a guy from Intel wearing a tie with a printed circuit board pattern on it. "Nice tie." John says to the guy from Intel, and without saying a word, the guy takes it off and drapes it over Dvorak's neck as a gift offering. I am standing there slightly in awe of the both the gratuitous display of ass-kissing and Dvorak's ability to rack up huge schwag, at which point I say to John, "Good thing you didn't like the guy's pants!"
That's pretty exciting that you're seeing such good results. I'm definitely going to have to check out Dspam.
However, the problem I have with content-based filtering is that it still:
1. Wastes bandwidth, and allows spammers to steal your and others' bandwidth
2. Requires lots of time, additional expense and resources on the server side to analyze mail content.
3. Slows down the mail system dramatically (when compared with no content-based filtering)
4. It "goes through" client e-mail. Some people may not care, but whether it's another person or a computer "reading other peoples' e-mail" is a type of breach of privacy in my book. I imagine most admins don't see it this way, but some of us run mail systems and have as a policy that we totally respect the rights of our customers' privacy, and don't store or process mail content beyond temporarily storing it until the client downloads it. I wonder if some of these learning-based filter systems actually store snippets of client correspondence, possibly even handshaking the data with the mothership, for the purpose of becoming a better filter, and this might compromise privacy and security.
5. Spammers do not know your system is blocking them, so there is no incentive for them to remove your customers from e-mail lists, or stop spamming. (RBLs OTOH do motivate them and increase their cost of doing business)
What are your thoughts about this? Do you have any disagreement in principal at least that you're still pandering to the spammer and his ability to steal resources, and that while you're clearing up your personal spam problem, you're not really doing anything substantive to stop spamming in general?
It is unfortunate that people freak out because even the most efficient spam blocking system will occasionally have a false positive. A lot of this is also the result of spammers themselves, who forge legitimate from addresses on spam sent to other sites, some of which bounces back to the original mailbox from legitimate mail relays who are trying to inform users of an invalid recipient. For this reason, services like Spamcop's SCBL are problemmatic. Manual RBLs are more effective.
However, the real source of the spam problem right now are ISPs who refuse to monitor the illegal activity of their customers. Whether knowingly or unknowningly (and 99.9% of the time it's unknowingly) DUL/Broadband IP space is the source of the vast majority of spam/worm/trojan/phishing e-mails going out.
Every ISP knows this.
Every ISP also can stop it. Every ISP can easily and almost immediately identify zombie PCs.
Why aren't they doing anything about this? This is the $64M question.
My guess is because there are some legitimate companies also engaging in spamming and the ISPs want to protect them; probably the ISPs themselves are involved. For whatever reason, wholesale RBL blacklisting has proven to be the **ONLY** way to force ISPs to start policing and stopping the zombie activity of their customers. When their IP space becomes tainted and unusable for port 25 traffic, they can't resell the space for commercial purposes. I strongly urge all ISPs to adopt a hard line on this issue until all the major broadband providers (Verizon, AT&T, Earthlink, Comcast, etc.) start SHUTTING DOWN THEIR CUSTOMERS' SPAM ZOMBIES!
The next time you're watching TV and you see that boneheaded Earthlink commercial where they talk abot how they stop spam, pick up your phone and call their 800 number and ask them why they don't stop their spam from polluting the rest of the Internet?
All Broadband DUL space should now have port 25 filtered. AOL and Bellsouth and Cox Cable are starting to do this and it not only reduces spam for everyone else, but protects their own customers from being further exploited and compromised.
Slashdot Mirror
After his ball-busting appearance at the National Press Club Dinner, Colbert should have a destroyer named after him.
You haven't elaborated much on your situation. To be honest, the scalability and technology available to you has a lot to do with what platform you're using. The initial design of a data-driven web site ultimately determines how easy, securely and efficently it will be to evolve to meet changing needs and increased demand.
Open source technology tends to be more scalable and solid, but even there, a bad choice stifles your progress. If money is no object, I guess you can always scale up, but the commercial platforms often have their admins spending more time patching and maintaining the status quo than progressing. The bigger question is: Did you do your homework when you initially designed the system? If you're stuck, that's likely the problem.
If you have a choice to redesign or redeploy your site, what you need to do is ask yourself, not whether or not the technology you're familiar with can do what you want, but instead, are you using the right technology to do what you want?
Well, there's one thing you typed wasn't inaccurate... your alias.
Your argument might have some credibility IF there was any consistency to the notion that humanity acts in a moral manner. History hasn't demonstrated this is the case. Present government hasn't demonstrated that is the case. Religion hasn't demonstrated that is the case. So what exactly is your point? Are you suggesting you are the guide by which morality and ethics should be judged? Are you suggesting that there are no bad precedents in play right now and this stem cell issue would tarnish a perfect record of ethics?
With all due respect, fuck you and your hypocritical ethical line. Helping people at no expense of anyone else is not an ethical or moral issue, no matter how much you want to twist it.
If you want to turn this into an issue of ethics, you can exercise it on a personal level by refusing treatment that was the result of stem cell research, then you can die and there will be one less self-righteous dweeb hell bent on fucking up society in the process of promoting his perverted sense of morality.
Merely that equal potential outcomes do not make ethical decisions indistinguishable.
It's not merely about the "outcome"..
If I were to use your logic in a similar analogy it might go like this: If I harvest a certain amount of grain from my farm each year that I do not need, I could give it to hungry people, but I wouldn't have enough to solve the hunger problem, so it would make no difference whether I destroyed the grain or gave it to people needing it.
There is a difference in how you utilize resources. There is an ethical responsibilty to not waste resources when they can serve another useful purpose.
There is absolutely nothing "religious" about the belief that personhood begins at conception (rather than any other point you want to put it). Indeed, the Bible says essentially nothing on the matter.
With all due respect, what are you smoking? The pro-life/pro-choice issue has everything to do with the nature of "life" and sentience, and revolves around conservative christians and their desire to push a government agenda that centers around their religious beliefs. There are literally thousands of different religious interpretations over when life begins. The stem cell issue has been a side battle in the war to abolish legalized abortion. Everyone, apparently except you, is aware of that.
I've joined the EFF and have a bumper sticker on my car. It's one of the best organizations around to help protect the rights of people both on and offline. Everyone needs to support this group.
There's a testimonial to WAPO's brilliant investigative journalists... don't have any details at all, and don't even recognize an obvious alias. Mainstream journalism has totally gone to shit.
If you're an American, I suggest you stop prostyletizing about freedom in China and start trying to preserve it in your own country. Right now, an American's opinion about freedom, even to those in a communist country, doesn't mean much.
Seriously.
Could you imagine an insurance company giving you a discount?
When life is so force-fed and censored as it can be in China, outlets like MMORPG's are the only form of "freedom" and people flock to them... so much so that it is an epidemic.
As an "outsider" what makes you think your average Chinese person is wandering around in desperation looking for this so-called "freedom" that he's missing? How is being trapped in a MMORPG with it's own authoritarian arbitrary rule any different from whatever distorted reality you're implying these foreigners live in? And ultimately, how is it really much different from the reality you live in?
As if Louisiana or the South are the only places where there's goofy legislation!
How about Chicago banning fois gras?
There are stupid politicians who pander to fringe PACs all over the place, especially in Washington D.C.
It used to be that tripe like this would never get to Slashdot.
It's really disappointing.
The only difference now between Slashdot and Digg is the amount of time it takes for bullshit like this to appear on the front page.
Christians, most of which are "convenient Christians" subscribe to the notion that they might as well believe in god, just in case he's really there. Pascal's wager as it's called, is based on the notion that erring on the side of caution when there doesn't seem to be any serious repurcussions is a wise choice, but it seems these same people bury their head in the sand when it comes to the subject of global warming. Wouldn't it seem like a wise idea to assume it might be happening and act to reduce the effects, as opposed to arguing about it?
Regardless of whether global warming is a reality, the solution will involve finding cleaner, cheaper, alternative sources of energy. How can that be a bad thing? Don't start with the bullshit about jobs being lost. We can create just as many job opportunities in the pursuit of alternative energy as are working in the oil industry, paid shill degreed academics, or lobbyists in Washington to pay crooks to write misleading legislation like the "Clear Skies Initiative."
People are fucking stupid sometimes.
If they can offer this to you to monitor your children, they can offer this to the NSA to monitor you.
Not exactly. They've always offered this to the NSA and it's probably one of the myriad things we don't know about. Regardless of whether or not the service is offered to us.
if you lose your phone the telcos know exactly where the thing is if it's turned on. Will they tell you? No. I wonder how many tens of thousands of phones were unnecessarily replaced because the phone company would rather you buy a new phone than tell you where you lost it.
It's nice to see they're unrestricting some of these services, but I feel I've always had a right to access the Geolocation information on my own property.
I found a picture from the study. I think this explains a few things.
First and foremost, the whole nature of the design of Unix/Linux provides a means by which software systems can be updated without any service outage. You cannot do this with any version of Windows. Most Windows-based patches and upgrades require a system reboot, which is downtime. Most unix-based upgrades merely require a quick stop/start/HUP of the services. If their main claim is that updating system components is the basis for downtime, they're smoking crack. Maybe their methodology for testing involved taking the entire system down while they upgraded? Unix doesn't require such drastic measures - Windows probably does, as you probably can't update a running service. By design, Windows is exponentially more prone to downtime in the process of patches and upgrades. It's virtually impossible for them to compare the two OSes on this issue and not be dramatically manipulating the test methods to create bogus results that are in no way reflective of how sysadmins patch and manage their server resources. I call BULLSHIT.
I have unix servers right now with uptime measured in YEARS. There are no Windows boxes that can make that claim. Period. I've had outages on occasion due to DDOS or system probes that caused a process to terminate over the years, but I've never had any type of wholesale outage that you'd typically get with most Windows installations. Does anyone have any details on the methodology of the testing? It's obviously bogus.
People are focusing on the transgression of the guy putting this data on his laptop and taking it out of the building. In reality, you can bet the systems he was working on were networked and he could have accessed the data from his home directly. I'm not sure if there is a simple solution to this other than constantly making sure all data is encrypted wherever it is stored.
I think it's a safe assumption that the guy was KBR, Bechtel or Halliburton, which explains why his identity is being protected.
Hopefully, they'll also offer alternatives to the 12-Step programs. I'm not quite sure how you're going to wean someone off an obsession with fantasy creatures with the standard 12-step methodology. That seems a bit ironic.
I was at one of John's parties at Comdex in the 80s (it's a whole 'nother story about his parties) and this was at the height of his popularity (IMO) and he's got a little flock of sycophant vendors hovering around him. He walks up to a guy from Intel wearing a tie with a printed circuit board pattern on it. "Nice tie." John says to the guy from Intel, and without saying a word, the guy takes it off and drapes it over Dvorak's neck as a gift offering. I am standing there slightly in awe of the both the gratuitous display of ass-kissing and Dvorak's ability to rack up huge schwag, at which point I say to John, "Good thing you didn't like the guy's pants!"
Links to more info on the Best Buy incident here.
That's pretty exciting that you're seeing such good results. I'm definitely going to have to check out Dspam.
However, the problem I have with content-based filtering is that it still:
1. Wastes bandwidth, and allows spammers to steal your and others' bandwidth
2. Requires lots of time, additional expense and resources on the server side to analyze mail content.
3. Slows down the mail system dramatically (when compared with no content-based filtering)
4. It "goes through" client e-mail. Some people may not care, but whether it's another person or a computer "reading other peoples' e-mail" is a type of breach of privacy in my book. I imagine most admins don't see it this way, but some of us run mail systems and have as a policy that we totally respect the rights of our customers' privacy, and don't store or process mail content beyond temporarily storing it until the client downloads it. I wonder if some of these learning-based filter systems actually store snippets of client correspondence, possibly even handshaking the data with the mothership, for the purpose of becoming a better filter, and this might compromise privacy and security.
5. Spammers do not know your system is blocking them, so there is no incentive for them to remove your customers from e-mail lists, or stop spamming. (RBLs OTOH do motivate them and increase their cost of doing business)
What are your thoughts about this? Do you have any disagreement in principal at least that you're still pandering to the spammer and his ability to steal resources, and that while you're clearing up your personal spam problem, you're not really doing anything substantive to stop spamming in general?
Simply put, spam blockers are not too strict.
It is unfortunate that people freak out because even the most efficient spam blocking system will occasionally have a false positive. A lot of this is also the result of spammers themselves, who forge legitimate from addresses on spam sent to other sites, some of which bounces back to the original mailbox from legitimate mail relays who are trying to inform users of an invalid recipient. For this reason, services like Spamcop's SCBL are problemmatic. Manual RBLs are more effective.
However, the real source of the spam problem right now are ISPs who refuse to monitor the illegal activity of their customers. Whether knowingly or unknowningly (and 99.9% of the time it's unknowingly) DUL/Broadband IP space is the source of the vast majority of spam/worm/trojan/phishing e-mails going out.
Every ISP knows this.
Every ISP also can stop it. Every ISP can easily and almost immediately identify zombie PCs.
Why aren't they doing anything about this? This is the $64M question.
My guess is because there are some legitimate companies also engaging in spamming and the ISPs want to protect them; probably the ISPs themselves are involved. For whatever reason, wholesale RBL blacklisting has proven to be the **ONLY** way to force ISPs to start policing and stopping the zombie activity of their customers. When their IP space becomes tainted and unusable for port 25 traffic, they can't resell the space for commercial purposes. I strongly urge all ISPs to adopt a hard line on this issue until all the major broadband providers (Verizon, AT&T, Earthlink, Comcast, etc.) start SHUTTING DOWN THEIR CUSTOMERS' SPAM ZOMBIES!
The next time you're watching TV and you see that boneheaded Earthlink commercial where they talk abot how they stop spam, pick up your phone and call their 800 number and ask them why they don't stop their spam from polluting the rest of the Internet?
All Broadband DUL space should now have port 25 filtered. AOL and Bellsouth and Cox Cable are starting to do this and it not only reduces spam for everyone else, but protects their own customers from being further exploited and compromised.