A great many people don't have the option of NOT driving
That assumes we don't choose where we live and/or work, and that we won't choose to change our lifestyles. A lot more of us than you might think have the option of living much, much closer to where we work and shop, and/or to convenient shared transit, thus making walking, biking, or shared transit a viable option.
The gist of the report is that some films rated PG have as much or more violence as some films rated R. This is no surprise, of course (we all know about lies and statistics), but it's a bit of grist for the mills of those who suggest that ratings, reflecting local social and political mores, often are influenced too much by things that may not be that bad for well-parented children, and not enough by those things that may be much worse.
Agreed. I'm in Canada, and at my.ca addresses I still get lots of spam, as much or more than ever. I even get lots of the "buy prescription drugs from Canada" spams, so it doesn't appear that there's even any basic address checking or targeting being done by spammers.
The version of VersaMail that came with my T3 -- 2.6.1 -- can be used with IMAP/s. In the account setup screens, it's in the 'additional options' section, underneath the port number settings: "Use secure connection (SSL)". Having accessed a couple of accounts that way, I can report that it's worked fine for me.
The new Treo seems to come with version 3.0 of VersaMail. I assume it has at least the same capabilities as the version I have, though the page about the Treo's version says only that it can "get and send mail from SSL mail providers like Comcast." Not the first time Palm's specs have been short on detail, unfortunately.
The CBC has shown an excellent documentary relating to this, comparing the effects of increasing harshness of punishment with increasing emphasis on rehabilitation. It's called To Kill or To Cure, and is worth seeing. If you missed it or don't get CBC TV, there's a good summary on the website.
The documentary covers a lot of interesting ground, but one fact from it that's particularly striking is that an increase in the harshness of punishment doesn't result in a reduction in the crime rate.
Pine has come a long way, and the addition of colors and threading make it much more impressive. Nevertheless...
Reasons why I sometimes hate Mutt:
I would add:
4. the addressbook is crappy
5. IMAP features leave a lot to be desired
Re. 4: sure, but with lbdb, my address book includes my Palm contacts database, my gpg keyring, an ldap server, my old pine addressbook, etc. etc. etc. Without having to import first.
Re. 5: agreed that pine is more polished at IMAP, though it seems to me mutt's biggest shortcoming is a lack of disconnected support (which only Mozilla does well, IMHO). For that, there's offlineimap.
You can also make header colors different than body colors (which you can't do in mutt).
No problem doing that with mutt here. Set colors for hdrdefault and header, plus body.
Where I live, several of my neighbors seem to abhor the idea of access control on their wireless routers. Interestingly, they all seem to prefer 'default' or 'linksys' for their ssid, too.
If you take the actions of your bank seriously -- i.e., whether they attempt to make reasonably responsible decisions about business and social practices -- Citizen's Bank is certainly the leading choice. I'd second any recommendation to give them a try.
Having looked at the document on the Department of Justice's web site, it seems to me that the C|Net report exaggerates more than a little bit.
The document isn't itself a proposal, it's a "Consultation Document," and has as its purpose to guide the modernization of Canada's Criminal Code, with respect to "lawful access" to electronic information. There are laws that are explicit about what the authorities have to do to be allowed to search my home and seize documents, for example; this document is directed towards coming up with similar laws for dealing with electronic property, which currently isn't so explicitly covered in the Criminal Code. The document lists many of the issues involved, and raises the questions that result, such as how long should an ISP be expected to preserve data when ordered to do so (i.e., not by default), and such as how the Criminal Code should cover interception of e-mail.
The only thing really proposed is this: "that all service providers (wireless, wireline and Internet) be required to ensure that their systems have the technical capability to provide lawful access to law enforcement and national security agencies." That's it; the rest of the document deals with how this should be implemented.
There. That should keep CSIS (Canada's version of the CIA) from putting me at the top of their "must eavesdrop" list. At least for a while.:)
I've set up a few machines now, each running Debian (Testing, even), that are now in use as public terminals in a university library. They have a minimum of software installed, but Mozilla and Opera for browsing, Acrobat reader and AbiWord for documents, as well as lynx, telnet, ssh, and scp available in xterms (each launched via xterm's '-e' option, so that the xterm quits when the program running in them quits). For ssh and scp, I wrote a couple of simple scripts, using 'dialog' to get input for hostname, username, etc. I'm using IceWM (no Gnome or KDE), with extremely minimal menus and no logout command; it's very fast, and has a Windows-like theme so that it looks familiar to most people. KDM handles auto-login very nicely. Automount handles floppy disks (so users can copy files to and from remote machines without having local hard disk access). Finally, since the machines have identical hardware, I built a custom kernel package for them.
For a 'guest' account, I set up a user in a unique group, and chown'ed all the files in that user's home directory to root, leaving them read-only for the guest. Problem: some programs expect to be able to write to disk, e.g., Mozilla expects to be able to make changes in $HOME/.mozilla -- so I wrote a simple script for each such program that, if the program isn't already running, will restore.mozilla (or whatever directory/file is appropriate) from a master, root-owned, read-only copy. Beyond that, to increase security on the machines, I turned off the various virtual terminals on the console, tightened up/etc/fstab (noexec in/tmp, for example), configured grub appropriately, set up ssh for remote admin (actually the only way I can get a command line on the machine), and set up some simple firewalling rules.
So far, these machines have been completely stable, and our users have been pleased, even those using it mainly to check Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. It's reasonably easy to duplicate across various machines, too -- for only a few machines, this works fine: dpkg -[get|set]-selections to save and set which packages are installed, plus save settings from/etc, scripts from/usr/local/bin, and preferences from/home/pubacc, all of which are backed up and ready for a reinstall. But, if you've got lots of machines to duplicate, there are likely more efficient methods -- like running a terminal server; see, e.g., the Linux Terminal Server Project or the K12 Linux Project.
My recommendation: it's definitely worth a try setting up Linux machines as public access terminals, especially if the programs the users need are few in number (e.g, web browser, telnet, ssh, and pdf viewer, which is all just about everyone in our library wants on a regular basis). Just be prepared to do a little fiddling or simple script-writing to handle programs that expect read-write access to the guest account's home directory, and/or provide an interface for programs that normally are run from the command line.
Try Galeon. Or kmeleon. Each is a 'lite' browser based on the gecko rendering engine, i.e. the one in Mozilla. They might not be exactly what you have in mind (you may want all of Mozilla's browsing features, for example), but one of them might be what you want.
Slashdot Mirror
That assumes we don't choose where we live and/or work, and that we won't choose to change our lifestyles. A lot more of us than you might think have the option of living much, much closer to where we work and shop, and/or to convenient shared transit, thus making walking, biking, or shared transit a viable option.
A propos this story, the CBC posted a story yesterday with the title, Movie ratings are misleading on violence: study.
The gist of the report is that some films rated PG have as much or more violence as some films rated R. This is no surprise, of course (we all know about lies and statistics), but it's a bit of grist for the mills of those who suggest that ratings, reflecting local social and political mores, often are influenced too much by things that may not be that bad for well-parented children, and not enough by those things that may be much worse.
Agreed. I'm in Canada, and at my .ca addresses I still get lots of spam, as much or more than ever. I even get lots of the "buy prescription drugs from Canada" spams, so it doesn't appear that there's even any basic address checking or targeting being done by spammers.
"steal my wireless"
The version of VersaMail that came with my T3 -- 2.6.1 -- can be used with IMAP/s. In the account setup screens, it's in the 'additional options' section, underneath the port number settings: "Use secure connection (SSL)". Having accessed a couple of accounts that way, I can report that it's worked fine for me.
The new Treo seems to come with version 3.0 of VersaMail. I assume it has at least the same capabilities as the version I have, though the page about the Treo's version says only that it can "get and send mail from SSL mail providers like Comcast." Not the first time Palm's specs have been short on detail, unfortunately.
The CBC has shown an excellent documentary relating to this, comparing the effects of increasing harshness of punishment with increasing emphasis on rehabilitation. It's called To Kill or To Cure, and is worth seeing. If you missed it or don't get CBC TV, there's a good summary on the website.
The documentary covers a lot of interesting ground, but one fact from it that's particularly striking is that an increase in the harshness of punishment doesn't result in a reduction in the crime rate.
A good guess. An alternative: a friend and I once came up with 'Omnia tua castra sunt nobis'.
Re. 4: sure, but with lbdb, my address book includes my Palm contacts database, my gpg keyring, an ldap server, my old pine addressbook, etc. etc. etc. Without having to import first.
Re. 5: agreed that pine is more polished at IMAP, though it seems to me mutt's biggest shortcoming is a lack of disconnected support (which only Mozilla does well, IMHO). For that, there's offlineimap.
No problem doing that with mutt here. Set colors for hdrdefault and header, plus body.See these couple of comments on Macintouch for some info re. the PowerBook/iBook power adapter, including a link to a doc from Apple itself.
The neighbors' wireless network.
Where I live, several of my neighbors seem to abhor the idea of access control on their wireless routers. Interestingly, they all seem to prefer 'default' or 'linksys' for their ssid, too.
If you take the actions of your bank seriously -- i.e., whether they attempt to make reasonably responsible decisions about business and social practices -- Citizen's Bank is certainly the leading choice. I'd second any recommendation to give them a try.
Having looked at the document on the Department of Justice's web site, it seems to me that the C|Net report exaggerates more than a little bit.
:)
The document isn't itself a proposal, it's a "Consultation Document," and has as its purpose to guide the modernization of Canada's Criminal Code, with respect to "lawful access" to electronic information. There are laws that are explicit about what the authorities have to do to be allowed to search my home and seize documents, for example; this document is directed towards coming up with similar laws for dealing with electronic property, which currently isn't so explicitly covered in the Criminal Code. The document lists many of the issues involved, and raises the questions that result, such as how long should an ISP be expected to preserve data when ordered to do so (i.e., not by default), and such as how the Criminal Code should cover interception of e-mail.
The only thing really proposed is this: "that all service providers (wireless, wireline and Internet) be required to ensure that their systems have the technical capability to provide lawful access to law enforcement and national security agencies." That's it; the rest of the document deals with how this should be implemented.
There. That should keep CSIS (Canada's version of the CIA) from putting me at the top of their "must eavesdrop" list. At least for a while.
I've set up a few machines now, each running Debian (Testing, even), that are now in use as public terminals in a university library. They have a minimum of software installed, but Mozilla and Opera for browsing, Acrobat reader and AbiWord for documents, as well as lynx, telnet, ssh, and scp available in xterms (each launched via xterm's '-e' option, so that the xterm quits when the program running in them quits). For ssh and scp, I wrote a couple of simple scripts, using 'dialog' to get input for hostname, username, etc. I'm using IceWM (no Gnome or KDE), with extremely minimal menus and no logout command; it's very fast, and has a Windows-like theme so that it looks familiar to most people. KDM handles auto-login very nicely. Automount handles floppy disks (so users can copy files to and from remote machines without having local hard disk access). Finally, since the machines have identical hardware, I built a custom kernel package for them.
.mozilla (or whatever directory/file is appropriate) from a master, root-owned, read-only copy. Beyond that, to increase security on the machines, I turned off the various virtual terminals on the console, tightened up /etc/fstab (noexec in /tmp, for example), configured grub appropriately, set up ssh for remote admin (actually the only way I can get a command line on the machine), and set up some simple firewalling rules.
/etc, scripts from /usr/local/bin, and preferences from /home/pubacc, all of which are backed up and ready for a reinstall. But, if you've got lots of machines to duplicate, there are likely more efficient methods -- like running a terminal server; see, e.g., the Linux Terminal Server Project or the K12 Linux Project.
For a 'guest' account, I set up a user in a unique group, and chown'ed all the files in that user's home directory to root, leaving them read-only for the guest. Problem: some programs expect to be able to write to disk, e.g., Mozilla expects to be able to make changes in $HOME/.mozilla -- so I wrote a simple script for each such program that, if the program isn't already running, will restore
So far, these machines have been completely stable, and our users have been pleased, even those using it mainly to check Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. It's reasonably easy to duplicate across various machines, too -- for only a few machines, this works fine: dpkg -[get|set]-selections to save and set which packages are installed, plus save settings from
My recommendation: it's definitely worth a try setting up Linux machines as public access terminals, especially if the programs the users need are few in number (e.g, web browser, telnet, ssh, and pdf viewer, which is all just about everyone in our library wants on a regular basis). Just be prepared to do a little fiddling or simple script-writing to handle programs that expect read-write access to the guest account's home directory, and/or provide an interface for programs that normally are run from the command line.
Try Galeon. Or kmeleon. Each is a 'lite' browser based on the gecko rendering engine, i.e. the one in Mozilla. They might not be exactly what you have in mind (you may want all of Mozilla's browsing features, for example), but one of them might be what you want.