He voted for the Communications Decency Act. Ask him how tighter controls on distribution and copying of porn can help fatten the bottom line of the commercial pornography industry. ___
Europe did very well standing America off against Russia, got the Marshall Plan, spendy tourists, and unloaded all that dusty art (which otherwise that French guy would have run off with an squirled in the attic until his mamma could get rid of it). Now the great and lesser European nations are all cowering because they're afraid of being overrun by kids mostly named Mohammed. If all the Mohammeds will just leave them alone they'll be perfectly happy to help them build nukes and other nastiness to go after the tasteless United States, which has decimated their cinema industries.
Ah, but clever W. has put it to Putin that we can hammer the treacherous Euros from both sides, and tony Tony will help! That leaves only the French nuclear arsenal, and perhaps China's - if they can make a deal - plus whoever survives tomorrow's Indo-Pak Kablooey - against the mightiest champion of freedom, or anything else for that matter, this side of the Sun.
Looks like a good time to emigrate to New Zealand, what? Now, exactly why are you concerned about your privacy? Do you really think you'll be let in anywhere nice without your Microsoft Passport once you're on the run and the fun's begun? Oh yeah, you'll be real happy about having arranged to be left off Bill 'God' Gates' list then! You don't think it's already occured to Him to buy up all the pleasant real estate, especially the land with His favorite critters, sheep? ___
A client recently had their Win consultant in to install new hardware for the mail server. Took the first one down, and the mail spooled as designed on the backup mx I run on Linux for 'em. Consultant did the Win software install and suddenly the new machine took all the mail spooled for it and rejected it as having "no such user." With Win, to install the software is to turn it on. Never mind that it should be configured before going live. Not like *nix, where if I install sendmail it isn't running until I explicitly run it.
MS should be sure that installing software does not ever, in itself, enable it, when that software is any sort of daemon. Ought to be illegal.
Re:Where there is death, there is hope.
on
RIP: Stephen Jay Gould
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Gould was important because his theory of punctuated evolution reconciled evolutionary theory with Marxist revolutionary theory. The previous attempt to bring Marx and Darwin together by the Soviet "scientist" Lysenko, had been an embarrassing failure.
Oh my, now Gould has reconciled the far right with evolution (miracle of miracles) by driving them to find common cause with incremental evolutionists against his punctuated equalibrium.
Where that goes far wrong, though, is in thinking that Gould believed evolution had anything to do with human society (aside from society being made up of animals who are a product of evolution). His analysis of why Dawkins claims for memes just don't work as an extension of evolutionary theory specifically denies that evolutionary explanations apply within human cultures except as an awkward metaphor (since the types of constraints on the propogation of genes don't apply to memes, the algorithms don't, either). Where his opposition was using metaphors badly and losely, he was insisting on the strict logical formalisms which science requires. So it may be true that the right wing should hate him for pulling the rug out from under social Darwinism; but he was hardly proposing punctuated equilibrium as the model for socialist revolution!
___
AOL's Tucson call center
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2
Saw a billboard in Tucson a month back advertising for customer retention specialists for AOL. Claimed you could make better than $50,000 a year. That sort of claim usually means they're paying by commission - so whenever you get through to such a specialist and you aren't retained, it's straight out of the specialist's pocket. No wonder the guy thought you were being nasty to him. ___
He says to disrupt your competitors, not your customers. If we consider this gem against the wisdom of Douglas Adams, we can guess that Christensen believes your customers are over 35:
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things. (The Salmon of Doubt)
Isn't it safe to say, and to bet your business, that some people (ever over 35) want to be disrupted? And does Christensen actually know any of the students at MIT? ___
Secondly, going through the computer stream, the business stream, or both, in college, will give you extra perspective on where the demands of management and the coders are coming from, and how to balance their requests. You'll be able to do a better job (not all of the job is technical).
Yeah. There are a lot more people who know how to code than there are people who both understand coding and the part of business or the world that the code has to function in. Consultants who know how to talk to both coders and users are worth, on average, more than either. And sysadmins, except on the lowest level, often have to deal with users, coders and consultants.
Now, there may be little reason to study "computer science." You can learn enough, as you already know, to be a good sysadmin on the side. It would make more sense to find some area of activity where you really like the sort of people who are attracted to it, and then learn that subject. Then you'll be in a great position to sysadmin for the networks run for the people in that area (which may not even be business - _everyone_ increasingly has to be networked to get their work done).
___
You can't skip the ads if the ads are smoothly integrated with the shows. And that would mean more of the showtime at least being used for the show and its characters, even if there were some obvious product placements in it.
The down side is that the shows then become less attractive in syndication, where the placed products could be in conflict with new ads introduced, and the new ads could be skipped. But then with digital technology, this stuff could be morphed, the brand of beer or whatever could easily change.
If somehow we're going to tax the Net and distribute it to musicians (by what formula?), how about another tax to be distributed to writers? And what about visual artists? How about erotic visual artists?
Let's be honest about it: music is just a branch of the sex industry. (Okay, we still have military music too, but you're downloading that, right?) So if we don't want a tax supporting the sex industry, we should probably disallow erotic artists, whether visual or aural. Still, shouldn't Net users everywhere pay a tax to subsidize the valuable time/.'s writers invest in the insightful (hint) public service of posts just like this one! ___
Linux is a virus using human engineering as a vector to infect hardware whose natural symbiont is Windows.
Linux is a woman who gives you the sex for free but then wants you to maintain her forever; Windows is the (sometimes diseased) whore who takes cash up front but then insists you cannot touch her in certain ways.
Linux is a vehicle suited for the smart and poor; Windows is a better ride for the stupid and rich. So if Linux wins, the world ends up with more smart poor; if Windows, more stupid rich. ___
In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said community standards would not work in cyberspace. He said "the community that wishes to live without certain material not only rids itself, but the entire Internet of the offending speech."
He said speech is effectively prohibited whenever the least tolerant communities find it harmful to minors.
Stevens expressed concern the law could cover advertisements, online magazines, bulletin boards, chat rooms, stock photo galleries, Web diaries and a variety of illustrations encompassing a vast number of messages.
So we can talk freely only with people whose identities we can prove we have verified. And anything I might suggest (involving a Coke can and a Justice) here could land me and/or the proprietors in jail because some kid might read this in a jurisdiction where it's only considered proper to use Pepsi, and perhaps even one so backwards that only bottles are acceptible.
BTW, don't we now know that the great trove of old paintings of eroticized, crucified saints and Jesus lead directly to sexual abuse of children by priests? Should these images, too dangerous even for priests, be allowed before children in any context?
This Court should be impeached for its conduct in the last election. Then we need a tolerable president to appoint a new one.
___
What's disturbing about Friedman's editorial reporting is that the majority of Muslims, throughout the Muslim world, are ready to believe stuff like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (on sale in the main Saudi airports) and the theory that 4000 Jews skipped work in the Trade Center on 9/11.
Now, living in a country where the chief law enforcement officer believes that certain cats are agents of Satan, and the president has doubts about evolution, I'm hesitant to condemn another culture for a haphazard relationship to standards of truth and critical thought. On the other hand, as/. shows, we are hardly the sheep being led to slaughter here that, say, the Palestinian children are - and anyone who believes that Hamas is not thoroughly evil for leading children to suicide attacks has no morality at all.
Okay, so the first problem about current Muslim cultures is that something over 90% of the populations, according to polls, has no standard of objective truth. The second thing wrong with Muslim culture is that the religion itself is centered on the long-term goal of utter obliteration of all worship of anything or any being outside of Allah and his alleged One Prophet. Like Nazism or Trotsky-ism or Leninism or Maoism, there is no place in Mohammedist doctrine for anything like an ecumenical approach.
There is plenty of beautiful architecture, art, poetry, even philosophy from the Islamic past (the philosophy was actually Greek, and the math Indian, but at least credit them with a fine sense of design and verse). But theirs was a religion of crusade and slaughter far moreso than the free nations of Europe ever were. And turnabout is fair play. If Muslims can learn to discern truth according to modern standards of science and critical thought (even as primitive as these standards will seem from a few centuries hence) then we need not conquer them nor undermine the other aspects of their religion - especially if they also open to the spiritual possiblity that this may be a world in which there are many things and beings truly beautiful and worthy of worship, and that any "prophet" who would deny that beauty or holiness is seriously derranged, and leading others into not just danger, but evil. If, after admitting the scientific standard for mundane facts, and recognizing the diversity of the holy, they still want to call themselves 'Muslims,' that shouldn't be a problem. ____
2. Employing more locals rather than shipping IT money out of town
So you have the best side of Republicanism (1), plus an economic policy that keeps jobs at home just like good Democrats (if there are any left anywhere) want (2) - all in one move. Perfecto! ___
While 'borging is currently primitive, we aren't far away from a day when we'll be using technology for memory extension. Yet when we go to share excerpts from the 'film' of our day with other people, it will turn out that our digitized record contains a number of things we've experienced that are currently regulated as intellectual property. Your record of your day turns out not to belong to you.
Speaking of records, consider what this technology will do for sound when everyone who attends a concert (or just listens to the radio) is able to play back portions of their augmented memory at will. Whether this is in the form of speakers or jacked in more directly to your neurons doesn't change the basic problem. When technology makes augmented memory available it will be a 'killer ap,' and whole industries will be opposed to it, attempting to cripple it by schemes such as forcing watermarking into content and mandating blocking or degrading of that content in memory augmentation devices.
But do we want to enter the new era intentionally crippling ourselves in service to the profits of old business models? Current research shows that the blind can be enabled to see by transforming visual information into aural patterns. Since the process uses a laptop, what's 'seen' can be saved to disk. Should this data be bowlderized if it includes Mickey Mouse on a TV in the background? We could make an exception for the 'disabled,' but 20 years from now not being 'borged with fully capable equipment will be seen as a disability.
The cleanest thing to do is establish a doctrine that experience belongs to the experiencer, and can be freely shared with others. Anything less than this, and we'll be inviting all sorts of corporate and governmental characters to become literally engaged in censoring what's 'inside' our 'borged heads.
___
Among my inalienable rights is the right to see and hear this world, and the right to communicate what I have seen and heard. These are at the heart of an open mind and free speech, which are rights that any just government depends on, and not the other way around. What has been before my senses I have a right to be cognizant of, to remember, and to portray. I can describe it, I can paint it, I can photograph it, I can record it. And I can transmit my experiences to others. This is "fair use" which comes before the law. No law, whether enforced by a dictator or by a majority, can legitimately encroach on these rights, which in no way remove real property from anyone. The right to be aware and communicate in the world is arguably more fundamental than the right to own real property, since it has to do with the right to own oneself and ones experiences; but in this case there is no conflict with the right to own real property. If you put a high wall around your real property, then I cannot view it. But if you leave your property on view, it is fair use for me to share that view with whomever, and however, I like. Anything less would be theft from me of what is inalienably mine as an individual, and owe to no government, let alone industrial monopoly.
I block mail originating from all.cn|kr|tw registered IP addresses.
Since I'm too lazy to remember how to look that up, where's the master list of IP assignment by country? Certainly would make sense to be ready to just shut down mail and other connections from a certain country's IP in time of crisis - although bad policy at other times. Of course, that does nothing about compromised systems that haven't been firewalled against, say, Chinese IPs, but as a first approximation of crisis defense it would be useful if we all had the IP ranges at hand to plug into firewalls and smtp. ____
Programmable viruses (as mentioned), which could be used to target specific groups or people (program by DNA)
There's an ethical/pragmatic decision here: Do you design the nano to destroy those with or without some specific genetic marker? For instance, let's say you had two markers, one that invariably indicated some French descent, and one that likewise indicated German. If you're trying to favor the French by hitting everyone with the German marker, you'll also hit a lot of the French; if you go with hitting those without the French marker, you'll leave some of the Germans untouched.
So it's not too viable a weapon, because you always end up with mixed-breed cousins of those you just offed pissed and coming after you.
___
Linux boxes don't go obsolete because they get incrementally upgraded, and the old parts are kept for emergency repairs or recycled into units for friends or schools which, because even a 486 runs a decent Linux Webserver, don't end up on the curb like M$ OS idiot boxen. M$ OS users also upgrade incrementally, but toss the old parts, and by about when they've replaced most of the box they upgrade the OS. So put the tax squarely on the M$ OS license. Further two social goods at once.
Smart site that, setting the style on their body text so that in Mozilla it's teeny-tiny. This form of compression saves the reader from time otherwise spent scrolling the screen. It saved me the time of even reading at all.
What ever did happen to the idea that the Web is about letting the user set their browser's default type size to suit their eyes, and writing pages that honor the user's preference? ___
Who at/. wants to deny some lonely child the pleasure of having a machine as best friend? Like, we're worried about socialization? That's just so lame. By the time today's kids grow up robots really will be the best friends to have. Remember kids, humans carry much worse diseases than cooties... and they're kinda dumb... and they don't fully love and appreciate you.
On Unix, don't expect a big performance boost with the new release. In tests of Apache 2.0 vs. Apache 1.3.24 running on Red Hat Inc.'s Red Hat Linux 7.2, performance was nearly identical (though still very good). However, platforms such as Solaris and AIX, where a process switch is relatively slower than it is on Linux, will benefit much more from Apache 2.0's hybrid process/thread design.
So because Linux was already better tuned as an OS for Web serving, the new Apache, which compensates for less capable OS's such as Solaris, AIX and Windows, takes away performance advantage of Linux. This will result in a fragmenting of the Web OS market, and less Linux innovation, hindering the world economy. Do the Apache developers have no shame?
Further studies showed that atmosphere with extra carbon dioxide only results in increased plant yields if the soil is also enriched beyond the normal soils - the plants in place are already evolved for maximum efficiency of carbon dioxide use given the current fertility of the natural soils. So you can get a boost in plant growth if you fertilize - which requires vast amounts of oil and results in serious downstream pollution; but as far as, say, forests go, you get virtually no gain from extra atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Fortunately there hasn't been any major influx of subversive music into the larger culture since that grungy NW stuff came out of KCMU, Seattle and KAOS, Olympia, back when rents were still cheap enough in the NW that musicians still woodsheded there.
It's taken two score years to heal the damage done to Western Civilization by Elvis. Thank Jesus our corporations are ahead of the creative urges today, and may the government preserve them there. ____
How about a collaborative, distributed system where each crucial piece of software by default (overridable of coure) registers with a listserv which sends only security announcements related to that particular component? This might not work so well for, say, the multitude of GNU utilities, but it would be quite convenient for the kernel and the major daemons a typical server runs. The trick is to have the notices originate with the project responsible for the daemons - open soure projects, unlike Microsofties, usually are the first best source on vulnerabilities. Securityfocus is good, and general mailing lists devoted to daemons are good, and even just reading/. is good, but it would spare the busy sysadmin part of the drudge of the duty of diligence if (s)he could keep a mailbox which received all of and only security notices pertinent to services which are really at issue, with these notices originating, whenever possible, from the project maintainers. Either part of the open source project RFC could be "Set up a security listserv and subscribe by default on installation," or there could be something centralized that consolidated across projects.
I have stuff running in two-year-old versions, and stuff I updated last week, and I'm much better off than if everything just had the average version of a year ago. Age by itself is meaningless and would be a nuisance. ___
Slashdot Mirror
He voted for the Communications Decency Act. Ask him how tighter controls on distribution and copying of porn can help fatten the bottom line of the commercial pornography industry.
___
Europe did very well standing America off against Russia, got the Marshall Plan, spendy tourists, and unloaded all that dusty art (which otherwise that French guy would have run off with an squirled in the attic until his mamma could get rid of it). Now the great and lesser European nations are all cowering because they're afraid of being overrun by kids mostly named Mohammed. If all the Mohammeds will just leave them alone they'll be perfectly happy to help them build nukes and other nastiness to go after the tasteless United States, which has decimated their cinema industries.
Ah, but clever W. has put it to Putin that we can hammer the treacherous Euros from both sides, and tony Tony will help! That leaves only the French nuclear arsenal, and perhaps China's - if they can make a deal - plus whoever survives tomorrow's Indo-Pak Kablooey - against the mightiest champion of freedom, or anything else for that matter, this side of the Sun.
Looks like a good time to emigrate to New Zealand, what? Now, exactly why are you concerned about your privacy? Do you really think you'll be let in anywhere nice without your Microsoft Passport once you're on the run and the fun's begun? Oh yeah, you'll be real happy about having arranged to be left off Bill 'God' Gates' list then! You don't think it's already occured to Him to buy up all the pleasant real estate, especially the land with His favorite critters, sheep?
___
A client recently had their Win consultant in to install new hardware for the mail server. Took the first one down, and the mail spooled as designed on the backup mx I run on Linux for 'em. Consultant did the Win software install and suddenly the new machine took all the mail spooled for it and rejected it as having "no such user." With Win, to install the software is to turn it on. Never mind that it should be configured before going live. Not like *nix, where if I install sendmail it isn't running until I explicitly run it.
MS should be sure that installing software does not ever, in itself, enable it, when that software is any sort of daemon. Ought to be illegal.
Oh my, now Gould has reconciled the far right with evolution (miracle of miracles) by driving them to find common cause with incremental evolutionists against his punctuated equalibrium.
Where that goes far wrong, though, is in thinking that Gould believed evolution had anything to do with human society (aside from society being made up of animals who are a product of evolution). His analysis of why Dawkins claims for memes just don't work as an extension of evolutionary theory specifically denies that evolutionary explanations apply within human cultures except as an awkward metaphor (since the types of constraints on the propogation of genes don't apply to memes, the algorithms don't, either). Where his opposition was using metaphors badly and losely, he was insisting on the strict logical formalisms which science requires. So it may be true that the right wing should hate him for pulling the rug out from under social Darwinism; but he was hardly proposing punctuated equilibrium as the model for socialist revolution!
___
Saw a billboard in Tucson a month back advertising for customer retention specialists for AOL. Claimed you could make better than $50,000 a year. That sort of claim usually means they're paying by commission - so whenever you get through to such a specialist and you aren't retained, it's straight out of the specialist's pocket. No wonder the guy thought you were being nasty to him.
___
Isn't it safe to say, and to bet your business, that some people (ever over 35) want to be disrupted? And does Christensen actually know any of the students at MIT?
___
Yeah. There are a lot more people who know how to code than there are people who both understand coding and the part of business or the world that the code has to function in. Consultants who know how to talk to both coders and users are worth, on average, more than either. And sysadmins, except on the lowest level, often have to deal with users, coders and consultants.
Now, there may be little reason to study "computer science." You can learn enough, as you already know, to be a good sysadmin on the side. It would make more sense to find some area of activity where you really like the sort of people who are attracted to it, and then learn that subject. Then you'll be in a great position to sysadmin for the networks run for the people in that area (which may not even be business - _everyone_ increasingly has to be networked to get their work done).
___
You can't skip the ads if the ads are smoothly integrated with the shows. And that would mean more of the showtime at least being used for the show and its characters, even if there were some obvious product placements in it.
The down side is that the shows then become less attractive in syndication, where the placed products could be in conflict with new ads introduced, and the new ads could be skipped. But then with digital technology, this stuff could be morphed, the brand of beer or whatever could easily change.
So that's what will happen.
___
If somehow we're going to tax the Net and distribute it to musicians (by what formula?), how about another tax to be distributed to writers? And what about visual artists? How about erotic visual artists?
/.'s writers invest in the insightful (hint) public service of posts just like this one!
Let's be honest about it: music is just a branch of the sex industry. (Okay, we still have military music too, but you're downloading that, right?) So if we don't want a tax supporting the sex industry, we should probably disallow erotic artists, whether visual or aural. Still, shouldn't Net users everywhere pay a tax to subsidize the valuable time
___
Linux is a virus using human engineering as a vector to infect hardware whose natural symbiont is Windows.
Linux is a woman who gives you the sex for free but then wants you to maintain her forever; Windows is the (sometimes diseased) whore who takes cash up front but then insists you cannot touch her in certain ways.
Linux is a vehicle suited for the smart and poor; Windows is a better ride for the stupid and rich. So if Linux wins, the world ends up with more smart poor; if Windows, more stupid rich.
___
So we can talk freely only with people whose identities we can prove we have verified. And anything I might suggest (involving a Coke can and a Justice) here could land me and/or the proprietors in jail because some kid might read this in a jurisdiction where it's only considered proper to use Pepsi, and perhaps even one so backwards that only bottles are acceptible.
BTW, don't we now know that the great trove of old paintings of eroticized, crucified saints and Jesus lead directly to sexual abuse of children by priests? Should these images, too dangerous even for priests, be allowed before children in any context?
This Court should be impeached for its conduct in the last election. Then we need a tolerable president to appoint a new one.
___
What's disturbing about Friedman's editorial reporting is that the majority of Muslims, throughout the Muslim world, are ready to believe stuff like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (on sale in the main Saudi airports) and the theory that 4000 Jews skipped work in the Trade Center on 9/11.
/. shows, we are hardly the sheep being led to slaughter here that, say, the Palestinian children are - and anyone who believes that Hamas is not thoroughly evil for leading children to suicide attacks has no morality at all.
Now, living in a country where the chief law enforcement officer believes that certain cats are agents of Satan, and the president has doubts about evolution, I'm hesitant to condemn another culture for a haphazard relationship to standards of truth and critical thought. On the other hand, as
Okay, so the first problem about current Muslim cultures is that something over 90% of the populations, according to polls, has no standard of objective truth. The second thing wrong with Muslim culture is that the religion itself is centered on the long-term goal of utter obliteration of all worship of anything or any being outside of Allah and his alleged One Prophet. Like Nazism or Trotsky-ism or Leninism or Maoism, there is no place in Mohammedist doctrine for anything like an ecumenical approach.
There is plenty of beautiful architecture, art, poetry, even philosophy from the Islamic past (the philosophy was actually Greek, and the math Indian, but at least credit them with a fine sense of design and verse). But theirs was a religion of crusade and slaughter far moreso than the free nations of Europe ever were. And turnabout is fair play. If Muslims can learn to discern truth according to modern standards of science and critical thought (even as primitive as these standards will seem from a few centuries hence) then we need not conquer them nor undermine the other aspects of their religion - especially if they also open to the spiritual possiblity that this may be a world in which there are many things and beings truly beautiful and worthy of worship, and that any "prophet" who would deny that beauty or holiness is seriously derranged, and leading others into not just danger, but evil. If, after admitting the scientific standard for mundane facts, and recognizing the diversity of the holy, they still want to call themselves 'Muslims,' that shouldn't be a problem.
____
Here we have a government that is:
1. Seriously stalling on tax collections and
2. Employing more locals rather than shipping IT money out of town
So you have the best side of Republicanism (1), plus an economic policy that keeps jobs at home just like good Democrats (if there are any left anywhere) want (2) - all in one move. Perfecto!
___
Speaking of records, consider what this technology will do for sound when everyone who attends a concert (or just listens to the radio) is able to play back portions of their augmented memory at will. Whether this is in the form of speakers or jacked in more directly to your neurons doesn't change the basic problem. When technology makes augmented memory available it will be a 'killer ap,' and whole industries will be opposed to it, attempting to cripple it by schemes such as forcing watermarking into content and mandating blocking or degrading of that content in memory augmentation devices.
But do we want to enter the new era intentionally crippling ourselves in service to the profits of old business models? Current research shows that the blind can be enabled to see by transforming visual information into aural patterns. Since the process uses a laptop, what's 'seen' can be saved to disk. Should this data be bowlderized if it includes Mickey Mouse on a TV in the background? We could make an exception for the 'disabled,' but 20 years from now not being 'borged with fully capable equipment will be seen as a disability.
The cleanest thing to do is establish a doctrine that experience belongs to the experiencer, and can be freely shared with others. Anything less than this, and we'll be inviting all sorts of corporate and governmental characters to become literally engaged in censoring what's 'inside' our 'borged heads.
___
Among my inalienable rights is the right to see and hear this world, and the right to communicate what I have seen and heard. These are at the heart of an open mind and free speech, which are rights that any just government depends on, and not the other way around. What has been before my senses I have a right to be cognizant of, to remember, and to portray. I can describe it, I can paint it, I can photograph it, I can record it. And I can transmit my experiences to others. This is "fair use" which comes before the law. No law, whether enforced by a dictator or by a majority, can legitimately encroach on these rights, which in no way remove real property from anyone. The right to be aware and communicate in the world is arguably more fundamental than the right to own real property, since it has to do with the right to own oneself and ones experiences; but in this case there is no conflict with the right to own real property. If you put a high wall around your real property, then I cannot view it. But if you leave your property on view, it is fair use for me to share that view with whomever, and however, I like. Anything less would be theft from me of what is inalienably mine as an individual, and owe to no government, let alone industrial monopoly.
I block mail originating from all .cn|kr|tw registered IP addresses.
Since I'm too lazy to remember how to look that up, where's the master list of IP assignment by country? Certainly would make sense to be ready to just shut down mail and other connections from a certain country's IP in time of crisis - although bad policy at other times. Of course, that does nothing about compromised systems that haven't been firewalled against, say, Chinese IPs, but as a first approximation of crisis defense it would be useful if we all had the IP ranges at hand to plug into firewalls and smtp.
____
___
There's an ethical/pragmatic decision here: Do you design the nano to destroy those with or without some specific genetic marker? For instance, let's say you had two markers, one that invariably indicated some French descent, and one that likewise indicated German. If you're trying to favor the French by hitting everyone with the German marker, you'll also hit a lot of the French; if you go with hitting those without the French marker, you'll leave some of the Germans untouched.
So it's not too viable a weapon, because you always end up with mixed-breed cousins of those you just offed pissed and coming after you.
___
Linux boxes don't go obsolete because they get incrementally upgraded, and the old parts are kept for emergency repairs or recycled into units for friends or schools which, because even a 486 runs a decent Linux Webserver, don't end up on the curb like M$ OS idiot boxen. M$ OS users also upgrade incrementally, but toss the old parts, and by about when they've replaced most of the box they upgrade the OS. So put the tax squarely on the M$ OS license. Further two social goods at once.
Smart site that, setting the style on their body text so that in Mozilla it's teeny-tiny. This form of compression saves the reader from time otherwise spent scrolling the screen. It saved me the time of even reading at all.
What ever did happen to the idea that the Web is about letting the user set their browser's default type size to suit their eyes, and writing pages that honor the user's preference?
___
Who at /. wants to deny some lonely child the pleasure of having a machine as best friend? Like, we're worried about socialization? That's just so lame. By the time today's kids grow up robots really will be the best friends to have. Remember kids, humans carry much worse diseases than cooties ... and they're kinda dumb ... and they don't fully love and appreciate you.
So because Linux was already better tuned as an OS for Web serving, the new Apache, which compensates for less capable OS's such as Solaris, AIX and Windows, takes away performance advantage of Linux. This will result in a fragmenting of the Web OS market, and less Linux innovation, hindering the world economy. Do the Apache developers have no shame?
Further studies showed that atmosphere with extra carbon dioxide only results in increased plant yields if the soil is also enriched beyond the normal soils - the plants in place are already evolved for maximum efficiency of carbon dioxide use given the current fertility of the natural soils. So you can get a boost in plant growth if you fertilize - which requires vast amounts of oil and results in serious downstream pollution; but as far as, say, forests go, you get virtually no gain from extra atmospheric carbon dioxide.
... the walls of the city shake"
- Ed Sanders quoting Plato.
Fortunately there hasn't been any major influx of subversive music into the larger culture since that grungy NW stuff came out of KCMU, Seattle and KAOS, Olympia, back when rents were still cheap enough in the NW that musicians still woodsheded there.
It's taken two score years to heal the damage done to Western Civilization by Elvis. Thank Jesus our corporations are ahead of the creative urges today, and may the government preserve them there.
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How about a collaborative, distributed system where each crucial piece of software by default (overridable of coure) registers with a listserv which sends only security announcements related to that particular component? This might not work so well for, say, the multitude of GNU utilities, but it would be quite convenient for the kernel and the major daemons a typical server runs. The trick is to have the notices originate with the project responsible for the daemons - open soure projects, unlike Microsofties, usually are the first best source on vulnerabilities. Securityfocus is good, and general mailing lists devoted to daemons are good, and even just reading /. is good, but it would spare the busy sysadmin part of the drudge of the duty of diligence if (s)he could keep a mailbox which received all of and only security notices pertinent to services which are really at issue, with these notices originating, whenever possible, from the project maintainers. Either part of the open source project RFC could be "Set up a security listserv and subscribe by default on installation," or there could be something centralized that consolidated across projects.
I have stuff running in two-year-old versions, and stuff I updated last week, and I'm much better off than if everything just had the average version of a year ago. Age by itself is meaningless and would be a nuisance.
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