The truth is that these home-grown spam mitigation methods do have their problems.
One of them is evident in the article: well-meaning users often do not understand what might be insecure about their server configurations, or what might need to be done to fix them. I am very comfortable with sendmail configuration, and I can tell you that setting up the authorizations correctly for mobile users to be able to send email safely is a narrow, twisty labyrinth in comparison to the big, flashing exit door marked "promiscuous relay".
Another problem in the home-grown nature of these solutions is the tendency for them to be personality-driven, instead of professional. Often, IP addresses (or even whole ISPs) are placed on blacklists because the blacklist maintainer does not mind creating a little collateral damage if they think it might create a little extra pressure on a spammer or an ISP.
Some blacklists have blocked out entire hosting companies, including some of the biggest ones on the net, simply because they did not think they acted with sufficient alacrity against spammers in their midsts. This kind of wild overkill is unfortunately too common, and perhaps it's a good argument in favor of for-profit blacklisting, which would probably exert some good influence on the question of list quality.
Earthlink rejects mail from any IP address that belongs to a dial-up pool that attempts to connect to their SMTP servers.
Ostensibly, this is done to reduce "direct-to-mx" spam, which is a very common spammer tactic.
Unfortunately, it also makes life harder on the home linux enthusiast, or home business operator who might be running their own perfectly legitimate sendmail server. All part of the collateral damage in the spam wars: Internet access and Internet business are slowly becoming more expensive and possibly moving out of the reach of people with limited means.
So what should we do?
First, I think that current law against junk faxes should be extended to include junk emails. This would not eliminate spam, but it would give us the ability to correct the spammers who operate out in the open.
As a Libertarian, I want to jealously guard the right of the people to freedom of expression. But that right does not and cannot include the right to expropriate other people's time or money. You have a right to make your voice heard. You do not have a right to force me to pay for it.
Second, I think that we should be careful about the blacklists that we use, and prefer those operated by recognizable and accountable companies wherever possible.
Finally, I think that for the forseeable future, filtering at the user desktop will be necessary.
(Cards-on-the-table time: I am working on a new solution for end users to eliminate spam from their inboxes. It is based on a new method, and it will work for any user who uses a POP email account. It will be ready for public beta soon. Please write to me if you want to learn more.)
The struggle against spam is definitely picking up, and I think that a new equilibrium is approaching.
It was apparently such an advantageous mutation that it quickly swept through the human population (10,000 - 20,000 years) almost entirely wiping out earlier versions
Realize that what we're saying here is that the individuals who had this mutation had a reproductive advantage over others. Since making new sounds doesn't increase the number of live births per "litter", this finding inevitably means that smooth-talking cavemen got all the girls.
Clearly, it must be that this mutation allowed the creation of the earliest dating technology: the pick up line.
Doubtless, such old pick up lines as "Hey, baby! Want to come back to my cave and see my bison paintings?" date back to this early period and have been passed down to us through the ages.
The bottom line: all voting systems have the potential for inaccuracy and abuse, and nearly all of them experience inaccuracy and abuse every time they are used. We have faith in the outcomes mostly because the overall result usually does not differ very much from our shared sense of who really "won."
As the Massachusetts state chair of the Libertarian Party, and a two-time candidate for public office, I have had an exposure to the voting process and the people who conduct it that many other voters have not had. Here's what I can tell you:
At every Libertarian primary, we collect stories of votes not counted, votes incorrectly counted, and voters confused or abused by the system.
In one case, some of our voters reported that they were actually asked to sign their ballots!
In others cases, five people in a precinct will swear they've voted in the primary, but only three votes will show in the official tally.
Then there's the actual abuse.
A fellow who used to work with another party once explained to me how unscrupulous operatives routinely abuse the system by taking advantage of the fact that Massachusetts law does not require voters to present identification when they vote.
I don't wish to give unnecessary detail, but suffice it to say that I do believe that some small level of vote fraud is present in most elections, even here in the United States.
It is interesting to note, however, that when one Massachusetts town tried to mitigate the problem by requiring voters to show ID, the Democrats successfully fought the practice in federal court by alleging that requiring identification is an unfair burden on the indigent.
For the most part, these issues arise not because people are malicious (although some inevitably are), but primarily because poll workers are well-meaning, underpaid, undertrained, and perfectly normal, fallible human beings.
These problems are usually too small to notice against the bulk of legitimately cast and properly counted votes, except when the total number of votes cast is small (like in a small precinct) or when the overall result is very close (as in Florida in 2000).
In general, it is not possible to get a "perfect" result from any voting system. The best that we can do is accept our imperfect knowledge and stand behind the result that most reasonably appears to be true.
That's not always easy. But if you want to make sure the result means something, the best thing to do about it is help to ensure that the result is not small or close by going out and casting your ballot for the candidates you like best.
All of society's most complex and vexing problems, convenienty broken down into small, manageable chunks so that millions of individuals would each be able to derive a little personal gain from voluntarily solving some small aspect of the big picture and all of them could come together to build complex and beneficial systems for all mankind!
Why, that would be GREAT!!
I have a name for it, too: we'll call it: Capitalism!
Yes, it's the ever-present/. cliche. The summary appears to have been written without reference to the underlying article.
This statement:
Day/night temperature differences rose 3 degrees Celsius in some areas...
is completely backwards
From the article
A team of climatologists presented their work Tuesday, showing that temperatures in the United States fluctuated by 1.2 degrees Celsius more when airplanes were grounded than when normal flight patterns prevailed. That is, planes in the sky dampen the variability between day and nighttime temperatures. More air travel, the researchers suggest,
brings less meteorological difference between noon and midnight.
Now, whether this is a good thing or a bad thing can certainly be debated, and I expect the very next post in this topic to come from some hopelessly silly GreenPeace activist admonishing us all to stop flying in planes and start hugging dolphins.
But at least let's start the discussion by actually reading the article first.
Re:$ == legitimacy in business
on
StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"What we obtain too
cheaply we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only that gives
everything its value." -- Thomas Paine
Year in and year out, the new cars that are rated the highest are the ones that cost the most money. Generally speaking, this is not because expensive cars are so much better than others, but primarily because those who pay are obliged, in their own minds, to evaluate what they received more highly, or call themseles fools for having made the bargain.
why would a memo stating that "hey, we should do this" NOT be allowed?
Because presenting a random email from one employee is not the same thing as demonstrating the intent or the actual practices of the company.
Or do you think that you speak for Slashdot?
One opinion is just that: one opinion.
Surely you don't think that if a Microsoft employee had written a "memo" (let's face it, these are just captured emails) advocating that their $40B be used to purchase NASA, that Bill Gates was intending to go into the commercial launch business, do you?
Remove the need to be commercially competitive, and the quality of the programmes goes up...
I'm sure you meant to say that without competition the quality goes down.
Or is the BBC the one exception to the laws of supply and demand?
It's amazing to me that people in a supposedly free country will chastise dictatorships around the world for maintaining state-run broadcast media, but then blindly defend the same practice in their own back yards as enlightened and advanced.
Sheer foolishness
That said, the idea that I am somehow obliged to watch the ads that pay for the programming is so mind-numbingly stupid as to be unworthy of comment.
You can have my Tivo when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
What would happen, for example, if Windows were "licensed" to exclude its use in conjunction with certain free software -- such as -- oh say -- Wine. Wine works better with Windows binary libraries accessible, and Microsoft might be thinking about some kind of anti-free-software clause in the Windows license.
MS already had their shot at such a strategy. Substantially before WINE, there was WABI, a product developed by Praxsys Corp (later bought by and popularized by Sun Microsystems) that also permitted Win16 and Win32 binaries to run on UN*X workstations.
I worked on WABI at both Praxsys and at Sun as both a developer and a project manager.
WABI actually required the use of MS-WIN binaries to operate properly. MS never prohibited that use. Their only response was to rev their software faster to prevent Sun from keeping up. (A strategy that worked better than we liked to admit, it can now be said.)
NEWS FROM THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY
2600 Virginia Avenue, NW, Suite 100
Washington DC 20037
World Wide Web: http://www.LP.org
For release: April 10, 2002
For additional information:
George Getz, Press Secretary
Phone: (202) 333-0008 Ext. 222
E-Mail: pressreleases@hq.LP.org
New copyright protection bill would turn
government into entertainment 'rent-a-cop'
WASHINGTON, DC -- The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television
Promotion Act (CBDTPA), a bill that would supposedly reduce digital
piracy, should be rejected by Congress because it would turn the
government into a "rent-a-cop" for the entertainment industry, the
Libertarian Party said today.
"The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act will not
only inconvenience consumers and throw roadblocks in the way of new
technology, it will vastly expand the power of the government," warned
the party's executive director, Steve Dasbach.
"While the federal government may have a legitimate role in protecting
copyrighted material, that role does not extend to acting as a
technology rent-a-cop to protect the profits of huge entertainment
corporations like Disney, Sony, and DreamWorks."
Last week, Senator Ernest F. Hollings (D-SC) filed S-2048, the Consumer
Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act.
The bill would make it a federal crime -- punishable by five years in
jail and a $500,000 fine -- to sell software or hardware that does not
contain shielding measures that make it impossible to play or copy
protected materials like songs, movies, or TV shows.
The bill's provisions would apply to computers, video-editing software,
CD players, VCRs, MP3 players and software, DVD players, and
televisions, among others. The copyright-protection technology would be
determined either by manufacturers and entertainment companies, or
mandated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
The CBDTPA is allegedly designed to stop digital piracy, which has
become an increasing problem now that everything from songs to movies
are in digital form, and downloadable from the Internet.
But the CBDTPA goes far beyond any reasonable role the government might
have in protecting copyrighted works, said Dasbach.
"According to the Constitution, the federal government has the power to
'promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for
limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their
respective writings and discoveries,'" he noted. "In other words,
Congress can grant exclusive copyrights, which entertainers can defend,
as necessary, by filing copyright infringement lawsuits.
"The CBDTPA, by contrast, gets the federal government involved in the
production of everything from televisions to computers, and software
programs to operating systems. And, instead of just targeting criminals
who illegally steal copyrighted materials, it treats every consumer as
a potential digital pirate -- while turning federal bureaucrats into
the Digital Police."
Further, said Dasbach, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television
Promotion Act would:
Inconvenience consumers who want to use copyrighted materials they
legitimately purchased.
"The bill would make it impossible for you to turn a CD you purchased
into MP3 songs to play on your computer," he said. "It guts the
traditional notion of 'fair use,' which allows consumers non-commercial
reproduction rights."
Act as an expensive form of "corporate welfare."
"Federally mandated copyright-protection technology will not only drive
up the cost of computers, DVD players, and VCRs, it may force consumers
to purchase multiple copies of movies and albums -- pouring billions of
extra dollars into the pockets of wealthy conglomerates," he said.
Make "open-access" operating systems like Linux illegal. Linux's
source code is freely available, making it impossible to guarantee the
secrecy of the copy-protection scheme, as required by the CBDTPA.
"The bill is a dream come true for Bill Gates, because it could make it
illegal to own one of the most successful operating system competitors
to Microsoft Windows," he said. "The result would be to stifle
competition in the computer industry."
In short, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act
is an overly broad, overly rigid, and overly intrusive response to the
problem of digital piracy, said Dasbach.
"Digital piracy is a real dilemma, and the entertainment industry has a
real challenge ahead of it -- to figure out how to make a profit and
protect artists in a digital age," he said. "But the solution is not to
pass the CBDTPA, which would turn the federal government into the
omnipresent technology police, and treat every consumer like a
criminal."
Can you sell the idea of open source or low-cost IT options in a political race?
Sure.
The question is: do the people want it?
This is a common mistake that new candidates make: Trying to "sell the people" on something that's important to the candidate without asking whether the people care about it in the first place.
Your experience in building IT infrastructure certainly could be something that helps create the image that you're ready for the job, if the job has an obvious computer component to it.
But chances are the people care more about issues that are accessible to them. Issues like crime, education, the economy, or (lately) their personal safety.
What you should do is ask the people what they want and then try to find a way to show them that they can get it by supporting you.
This emphatically does not mean that you should just tell them what they want to hear. Stick with what you know and who you are. But if you're not presenting it in terms of what the people want, (instead of what you happen to think is kewl), then you're wasting your time and theirs.
the challenges and problems of filtering for an entire nation...
Yeah, like sleeping at night.
Anyone who can work on such a system should go join their brethren in the taliban. Self-respecting (not to mention Constitution-respecting) Americans who don't feel quesy about such things are clearly lacking a moral compass.
Frontsight's Handgun School for Pilots can train commercial pilots and other individuals (such as law enforcement pros) how to safely use a handgun for defense on an airplane.
He also answers the most common questions about handguns on airplanes:
Won't the bullets punch holes in the plane? A: with the right ammunition, NO. Frangible ammunition has a very, very low chance of penetrating the plane's skin or damaging its systems.
But if the plane's skin is punctured, won't the plane crash? A: Probably not. Modern plans have redundant systems. The most important need would be to reduce altitude to ensure that the occupants could breath without supplemental oxygen.
Like most/. readers, I'm not crazy about the idea of random face searches in public places, either with or without technological assistance.
However, it occurs to me that there is a possibly legitimate use for face recognition programs that might actually improve security and would not infringe on anyone's rights.
Instead of training the face recognition on the passengers to find specific individuals in a sea of innocents, let's place the cameras in the maintenance hangars and around the planes. Then have them look for faces that don't belong.
By having a record of the employees who are supposed to be handling the planes on a given day, and making sure that no others are getting their hands on the planes, we could actually use this technology to make things better instead of worse.
OK, now someone tell me what part of all of this doesn't make sense, or what I forgot.
If cable operators would stop filtering out silly things like port 80, and start filtering out forged packets, we might actually be able to stop some of these attacks before they start.
If you see a packet transmitted from a cable modem in your network and it claims to be from outside your network, drop it on the floor, it's not a valid packet.
If the packet is going to into a cable modem, but its origination claims it came from that cable modem, drop it on the floor, it's not a valid packet.
If the packet has address 0.0.0.0 as its origin or destination, drop it on the floor, it's not a valid packet.
Don't think this happens? Get a firewall and you can watch these packets go by all day long.
Blocking port 80 is the only practical way providers such as @home have to control code red. I'm on their network...
Respectfully, that's a load of crap.
I've got a Linux host connected to the AT&T network (they were better as MediaOne), and not only can I produce for you a log of the CodeRed infected customer machines that need to be dropped off the net until their owners get smart, but I also have a firewall in place and I routinely spend 2 hours each week reading the firewall logs and reporting on various l0sers who love to attack the ATT network.
I pay ATT around $200 each month for various services, including cable, telephone, and internet.
I'm policing their network for them because they apparently can't be bothered.
You'd think they'd treat people like me as heroes, or at least good customers.
I leave it to you to decide how we have really been treated.
"We're the phone company. We don't care. We don't have to."
The computer is a mind amplifier, not a mind improver. Whatever natural abilities, proclivities, and personality you have will get bigger, more expansive, and more expressive with the computer.
Unfortunately, not everyone has something nice to amplify. Some people are anti-social. Some are neurotic. Some are insecure. Some have addictive personalities.
As always, it's not about the tool, it's about how you use it.
Remember also that when cold fusion was in the news, Rifkin greeted the idea of cheap and plentiful energy with horror and disdain.
He likened the idea to "giving a revolver to an infant."
Rifkin's comments contain barely concealed enmity for science, progress, and humanity. He's not the sort of person you should get your opinions from uncritically.
Slashdot Mirror
A segment architecture for memory wasn't nasty enough, now we want to have a segment register for the registers?
Thanks, no.
I know: Maybe if we all start calling it KDE/Linux, they'll be satisfied.
The attitude that only "l33t hax0rs" should be allowed to run software is, sadly, just as common as it is wrong.
Mail servers are hard to configure, people have businesses to run, and accidents happen.
The right question is: "how do we make misconfigurations less likely?" Not, "how do we more effectively disdain folks to whom they occur?"
The truth is that these home-grown spam mitigation methods do have their problems.
One of them is evident in the article: well-meaning users often do not understand what might be insecure about their server configurations, or what might need to be done to fix them. I am very comfortable with sendmail configuration, and I can tell you that setting up the authorizations correctly for mobile users to be able to send email safely is a narrow, twisty labyrinth in comparison to the big, flashing exit door marked "promiscuous relay".Another problem in the home-grown nature of these solutions is the tendency for them to be personality-driven, instead of professional. Often, IP addresses (or even whole ISPs) are placed on blacklists because the blacklist maintainer does not mind creating a little collateral damage if they think it might create a little extra pressure on a spammer or an ISP.
Some blacklists have blocked out entire hosting companies, including some of the biggest ones on the net, simply because they did not think they acted with sufficient alacrity against spammers in their midsts. This kind of wild overkill is unfortunately too common, and perhaps it's a good argument in favor of for-profit blacklisting, which would probably exert some good influence on the question of list quality.
Earthlink rejects mail from any IP address that belongs to a dial-up pool that attempts to connect to their SMTP servers.
Ostensibly, this is done to reduce "direct-to-mx" spam, which is a very common spammer tactic. Unfortunately, it also makes life harder on the home linux enthusiast, or home business operator who might be running their own perfectly legitimate sendmail server. All part of the collateral damage in the spam wars: Internet access and Internet business are slowly becoming more expensive and possibly moving out of the reach of people with limited means.
So what should we do?
First, I think that current law against junk faxes should be extended to include junk emails. This would not eliminate spam, but it would give us the ability to correct the spammers who operate out in the open.
As a Libertarian, I want to jealously guard the right of the people to freedom of expression. But that right does not and cannot include the right to expropriate other people's time or money. You have a right to make your voice heard. You do not have a right to force me to pay for it.
Second, I think that we should be careful about the blacklists that we use, and prefer those operated by recognizable and accountable companies wherever possible.
Finally, I think that for the forseeable future, filtering at the user desktop will be necessary.
(Cards-on-the-table time: I am working on a new solution for end users to eliminate spam from their inboxes. It is based on a new method, and it will work for any user who uses a POP email account. It will be ready for public beta soon. Please write to me if you want to learn more.)
The struggle against spam is definitely picking up, and I think that a new equilibrium is approaching.
It was apparently such an advantageous mutation that it quickly swept through the human population (10,000 - 20,000 years) almost entirely wiping out earlier versions
Realize that what we're saying here is that the individuals who had this mutation had a reproductive advantage over others. Since making new sounds doesn't increase the number of live births per "litter", this finding inevitably means that smooth-talking cavemen got all the girls.
Clearly, it must be that this mutation allowed the creation of the earliest dating technology: the pick up line.
Doubtless, such old pick up lines as "Hey, baby! Want to come back to my cave and see my bison paintings?" date back to this early period and have been passed down to us through the ages.
The bottom line: all voting systems have the potential for inaccuracy and abuse, and nearly all of them experience inaccuracy and abuse every time they are used. We have faith in the outcomes mostly because the overall result usually does not differ very much from our shared sense of who really "won."
As the Massachusetts state chair of the Libertarian Party, and a two-time candidate for public office, I have had an exposure to the voting process and the people who conduct it that many other voters have not had. Here's what I can tell you:
At every Libertarian primary, we collect stories of votes not counted, votes incorrectly counted, and voters confused or abused by the system.
In one case, some of our voters reported that they were actually asked to sign their ballots!
In others cases, five people in a precinct will swear they've voted in the primary, but only three votes will show in the official tally.
Then there's the actual abuse.
A fellow who used to work with another party once explained to me how unscrupulous operatives routinely abuse the system by taking advantage of the fact that Massachusetts law does not require voters to present identification when they vote.
I don't wish to give unnecessary detail, but suffice it to say that I do believe that some small level of vote fraud is present in most elections, even here in the United States.
It is interesting to note, however, that when one Massachusetts town tried to mitigate the problem by requiring voters to show ID, the Democrats successfully fought the practice in federal court by alleging that requiring identification is an unfair burden on the indigent.
For the most part, these issues arise not because people are malicious (although some inevitably are), but primarily because poll workers are well-meaning, underpaid, undertrained, and perfectly normal, fallible human beings.
These problems are usually too small to notice against the bulk of legitimately cast and properly counted votes, except when the total number of votes cast is small (like in a small precinct) or when the overall result is very close (as in Florida in 2000).
In general, it is not possible to get a "perfect" result from any voting system. The best that we can do is accept our imperfect knowledge and stand behind the result that most reasonably appears to be true.
That's not always easy. But if you want to make sure the result means something, the best thing to do about it is help to ensure that the result is not small or close by going out and casting your ballot for the candidates you like best.
All of society's most complex and vexing problems, convenienty broken down into small, manageable chunks so that millions of individuals would each be able to derive a little personal gain from voluntarily solving some small aspect of the big picture and all of them could come together to build complex and beneficial systems for all mankind!
Why, that would be GREAT!!
I have a name for it, too: we'll call it: Capitalism!
Yes, it's the ever-present /. cliche. The summary appears to have been written without reference to the underlying article.
This statement:
Day/night temperature differences rose 3 degrees Celsius in some areas...is completely backwards
From the article
Now, whether this is a good thing or a bad thing can certainly be debated, and I expect the very next post in this topic to come from some hopelessly silly GreenPeace activist admonishing us all to stop flying in planes and start hugging dolphins.
But at least let's start the discussion by actually reading the article first.
-- Thomas Paine
Year in and year out, the new cars that are rated the highest are the ones that cost the most money. Generally speaking, this is not because expensive cars are so much better than others, but primarily because those who pay are obliged, in their own minds, to evaluate what they received more highly, or call themseles fools for having made the bargain.
Because presenting a random email from one employee is not the same thing as demonstrating the intent or the actual practices of the company.
Or do you think that you speak for Slashdot?
One opinion is just that: one opinion.
Surely you don't think that if a Microsoft employee had written a "memo" (let's face it, these are just captured emails) advocating that their $40B be used to purchase NASA, that Bill Gates was intending to go into the commercial launch business, do you?
I'm sure you meant to say quadrant 3: "authoritarian"
Libertarians would let you decide for yourself whether you should use open software or not.
Authoritarians (like RMS) want to decide for you.
Libertarians would let you decide for yourself what to charge for your services and products.
Authoritarians (like RMS) want to decide for you.
RMS is an authoritarian, through and through.
I'm sure you meant to say that without competition the quality goes down.
Or is the BBC the one exception to the laws of supply and demand?
It's amazing to me that people in a supposedly free country will chastise dictatorships around the world for maintaining state-run broadcast media, but then blindly defend the same practice in their own back yards as enlightened and advanced.
Sheer foolishness
That said, the idea that I am somehow obliged to watch the ads that pay for the programming is so mind-numbingly stupid as to be unworthy of comment.
You can have my Tivo when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
MS already had their shot at such a strategy. Substantially before WINE, there was WABI, a product developed by Praxsys Corp (later bought by and popularized by Sun Microsystems) that also permitted Win16 and Win32 binaries to run on UN*X workstations.
I worked on WABI at both Praxsys and at Sun as both a developer and a project manager.
WABI actually required the use of MS-WIN binaries to operate properly. MS never prohibited that use. Their only response was to rev their software faster to prevent Sun from keeping up. (A strategy that worked better than we liked to admit, it can now be said.)
NEWS FROM THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY
2600 Virginia Avenue, NW, Suite 100
Washington DC 20037
World Wide Web: http://www.LP.org
For release: April 10, 2002
For additional information:
George Getz, Press Secretary
Phone: (202) 333-0008 Ext. 222
E-Mail: pressreleases@hq.LP.org
New copyright protection bill would turn government into entertainment 'rent-a-cop'
WASHINGTON, DC -- The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), a bill that would supposedly reduce digital piracy, should be rejected by Congress because it would turn the government into a "rent-a-cop" for the entertainment industry, the Libertarian Party said today.
"The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act will not only inconvenience consumers and throw roadblocks in the way of new technology, it will vastly expand the power of the government," warned the party's executive director, Steve Dasbach.
"While the federal government may have a legitimate role in protecting copyrighted material, that role does not extend to acting as a technology rent-a-cop to protect the profits of huge entertainment corporations like Disney, Sony, and DreamWorks."
Last week, Senator Ernest F. Hollings (D-SC) filed S-2048, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act.
The bill would make it a federal crime -- punishable by five years in jail and a $500,000 fine -- to sell software or hardware that does not contain shielding measures that make it impossible to play or copy protected materials like songs, movies, or TV shows.
The bill's provisions would apply to computers, video-editing software, CD players, VCRs, MP3 players and software, DVD players, and televisions, among others. The copyright-protection technology would be determined either by manufacturers and entertainment companies, or mandated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
The CBDTPA is allegedly designed to stop digital piracy, which has become an increasing problem now that everything from songs to movies are in digital form, and downloadable from the Internet.
But the CBDTPA goes far beyond any reasonable role the government might have in protecting copyrighted works, said Dasbach.
"According to the Constitution, the federal government has the power to 'promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their respective writings and discoveries,'" he noted. "In other words, Congress can grant exclusive copyrights, which entertainers can defend, as necessary, by filing copyright infringement lawsuits.
"The CBDTPA, by contrast, gets the federal government involved in the production of everything from televisions to computers, and software programs to operating systems. And, instead of just targeting criminals who illegally steal copyrighted materials, it treats every consumer as a potential digital pirate -- while turning federal bureaucrats into the Digital Police."
Further, said Dasbach, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act would:
"The bill would make it impossible for you to turn a CD you purchased into MP3 songs to play on your computer," he said. "It guts the traditional notion of 'fair use,' which allows consumers non-commercial reproduction rights."
"Federally mandated copyright-protection technology will not only drive up the cost of computers, DVD players, and VCRs, it may force consumers to purchase multiple copies of movies and albums -- pouring billions of extra dollars into the pockets of wealthy conglomerates," he said.
"The bill is a dream come true for Bill Gates, because it could make it illegal to own one of the most successful operating system competitors to Microsoft Windows," he said. "The result would be to stifle competition in the computer industry."
In short, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act is an overly broad, overly rigid, and overly intrusive response to the problem of digital piracy, said Dasbach.
"Digital piracy is a real dilemma, and the entertainment industry has a real challenge ahead of it -- to figure out how to make a profit and protect artists in a digital age," he said. "But the solution is not to pass the CBDTPA, which would turn the federal government into the omnipresent technology police, and treat every consumer like a criminal."
There is nothing new under the sun.
Yes!
Honestly, folks, what we have here is an over-intellectualized pissing contest over who is more "cultured."
bzzzt
"I'm sorry, that's incorrect, but thanks for playing"
ALL entertainment borrows from other entertainment. Some well, some poorly. Over time, a collection of "archtypical" stories has emerged.
They're fun to compare. But other than that, it's no big deal
Move along. This isn't the topic you're looking for.
Can you sell the idea of open source or low-cost IT options in a political race?
Sure.
The question is: do the people want it?
This is a common mistake that new candidates make: Trying to "sell the people" on something that's important to the candidate without asking whether the people care about it in the first place.
Your experience in building IT infrastructure certainly could be something that helps create the image that you're ready for the job, if the job has an obvious computer component to it.
But chances are the people care more about issues that are accessible to them. Issues like crime, education, the economy, or (lately) their personal safety.
What you should do is ask the people what they want and then try to find a way to show them that they can get it by supporting you.
This emphatically does not mean that you should just tell them what they want to hear. Stick with what you know and who you are. But if you're not presenting it in terms of what the people want, (instead of what you happen to think is kewl), then you're wasting your time and theirs.
Yeah, like sleeping at night.
Anyone who can work on such a system should go join their brethren in the taliban. Self-respecting (not to mention Constitution-respecting) Americans who don't feel quesy about such things are clearly lacking a moral compass.
He also answers the most common questions about handguns on airplanes:
A: with the right ammunition, NO. Frangible ammunition has a very, very low chance of penetrating the plane's skin or damaging its systems.
A: Probably not. Modern plans have redundant systems. The most important need would be to reduce altitude to ensure that the occupants could breath without supplemental oxygen.
There's more. Check out the article to find out.
However, it occurs to me that there is a possibly legitimate use for face recognition programs that might actually improve security and would not infringe on anyone's rights.
Instead of training the face recognition on the passengers to find specific individuals in a sea of innocents, let's place the cameras in the maintenance hangars and around the planes. Then have them look for faces that don't belong.
By having a record of the employees who are supposed to be handling the planes on a given day, and making sure that no others are getting their hands on the planes, we could actually use this technology to make things better instead of worse.
OK, now someone tell me what part of all of this doesn't make sense, or what I forgot.
If cable operators would stop filtering out silly things like port 80, and start filtering out forged packets, we might actually be able to stop some of these attacks before they start.
If you see a packet transmitted from a cable modem in your network and it claims to be from outside your network, drop it on the floor, it's not a valid packet.
If the packet is going to into a cable modem, but its origination claims it came from that cable modem, drop it on the floor, it's not a valid packet.
If the packet has address 0.0.0.0 as its origin or destination, drop it on the floor, it's not a valid packet.
Don't think this happens? Get a firewall and you can watch these packets go by all day long.
Respectfully, that's a load of crap.
I've got a Linux host connected to the AT&T network (they were better as MediaOne), and not only can I produce for you a log of the CodeRed infected customer machines that need to be dropped off the net until their owners get smart, but I also have a firewall in place and I routinely spend 2 hours each week reading the firewall logs and reporting on various l0sers who love to attack the ATT network.
I pay ATT around $200 each month for various services, including cable, telephone, and internet.
I'm policing their network for them because they apparently can't be bothered.
You'd think they'd treat people like me as heroes, or at least good customers.
I leave it to you to decide how we have really been treated.
"We're the phone company. We don't care. We don't have to."
The computer is a mind amplifier, not a mind improver. Whatever natural abilities, proclivities, and personality you have will get bigger, more expansive, and more expressive with the computer.
Unfortunately, not everyone has something nice to amplify. Some people are anti-social. Some are neurotic. Some are insecure. Some have addictive personalities.
As always, it's not about the tool, it's about how you use it.
He likened the idea to "giving a revolver to an infant."
Rifkin's comments contain barely concealed enmity for science, progress, and humanity. He's not the sort of person you should get your opinions from uncritically.
Doesn't anyone make products anymore, or is it all just press releases?
Check out this article in ComputerWorld.
Typical speeds for 3G devices will be more like one-third of this advertised maximum or less.
Most users will experience something like 600Kpbs (because the spectrum is shared among many users).
Not that 600Kbps wouldn't be an improvement, but 2.4Mpbs it isn't.