Terror is not about killing people, it's about scaring the public and causing them to act a certain way.
Agreed.
The train bombing in Madrid, for example, though didn't kill a whole lot of people, was completely effective because the Spanish public immediately voted in a leader with a soft spot for terrorists,
Bullshit. Aznar was voted out because he had done everything wrong, and the bombings showed conclusively that all the things that had been done to make everybody feel so much safer was a complete failure. Furthermore, he was lying through his teeth about the events as they happened.
Fact is, Spain has dealt with terrorism for many years, and they know very well that you can't fight terrorism with military counterattacks. It simply does not work.
Compare with the US, which has had their tail behind the collective legs since 911, and running scared to abandon every freedom, which is pretty much the only thing the rest of the world has had reason to look up to US for. Great.
Have a look at a piece a friend of mine wrote. He's a native of Madrid, now studying in the US, and one of the most brilliantly intelligent people that I've met. Read it carefully.
In its round-up of the threat the Internet Storm Center bluntly stated that users should if possible "use a browser other then MS Internet Explorer until the current vulnerabilities in MSIE are patched."
and then goes on with links to other browsers in the margin. Not very prominent, but it is a start.
I found this from mainstream Norwegian paper Dagbladet that runs a story on the frontpage entitled "Warns against Internet Explorer".
However, what is the probability of real mail getting rejected by these things.
In my case, with about 30000 messages processed since SA 2.62 was released, that number would be 3 messages. Two of which was from Amnesty International (join!), and was blocked because they are actually using spamware for their mailings, for some mysterious reason. The other was from a friend who got some really bad spammer worm, and consequently got on every block list there is.
These were however not blocked, they just landed among the other spam I let through to a spam folder. I do examine the SA summary of rejected spams occasionally, never seen anything there, and given these numbers, it seems just extremely unlikely that SA will reject any legit mail falsely in my current configuration. One in a million, perhaps...
I've been using SA 2.63 for some time now. At first, my statistics was about 90% rejected at SMTP-time, 0.1% false negatives and 0.01% false positives. Spammers have learned to adapt, so now I have about 2% false negatives.
But SpamAssassin is just getting better and better. Version 3.0 is coming up, and 3.0-pre1 was recently released. I do not have a test system available for it, but those who have may want to take it for a spin.
Especially for large sites, this is extremely interesting. It adds relational database support for the Bayes database, so it should be a lot easier to set up on a large site.
I find the lack of individual training the main reason why SA works so well for me, but not very well at my old university.
I had a lot of time to think about stuff like this during my military service. Lots of nights on guard staring out in the black with nothing to do.
I came to the conclusion that whatever it is, the willingness to kill or die for something is a sure sign of that you have simply become too fanatical.
Once you've accepted that something is worth killing or dying for, you will also become easier to manipulate. Don't give me that "no. not me". I know better than that. I've been manipulated too.
There are always other ways to correct things, and many chances have been lost if you come to the point were you see no other alternative than violence. Just don't let them pass by.
The moment it becomes just another piece of paper we use to wipe our ass with
AFAICS, Bush is wiping his ass with your Constitution every day. Are you going to do something about it? Or are you just going to write about it on/. and let the chances slip by?
To say that either France or Germany, or any country which uses the government to muzzle it's citizenry is just as free as America is fucking ludicrous.
In Europe, like in the US, the ideal is to counter speech with speech. In fact, there's the European Court of Human Rights, and there has been rulings that saying things like "All imigrants should be sterilized upon arrival" is protected speech. It is quite unlikely that many of the proposed things will stand up in that court.
Let the politicians get on with the censorship stuff for a couple of years. It'll fail, and they'll realize it. Then, they'll be more receptive.
I have lobbied for government funding of a project that aims to use RDF to provide metadata to make it easier to find opposing viewpoints, and so fulfil the ideal of counter speech with speech. It has met some interest, but far from enough to get it off the ground. But that's the kind of things that geeks can do to preserve freedom of speech.
This was convenient, I'm doing something similar in near future. Basically, I currently have one 20 GB IDE drive, but I was about to get a new drive to replace the 40 GB in the workstation, so I figured I'd stick that in the file server.
This is going to be software RAID, using Linux.
There are some stuff that I wouldn't need redundancy for, for example/tmp, so I figured I'd stick that in a partition on the part of the drive which isn't mirrored, if it is possible.
Is it?
A part of the point with RAID is that the system won't go down if one drive fails, so a part of the question is what would happen if the larger drive fails, can I have some kind of fallback for the stuff that writes to/tmp?
When RMS says that they can't use a more accurate phrase because English has only one word for "free", what he is really saying is that he didn't pick the right phrase to begin with and is now too stubborn to admit it.
I think you missed the AC's point: He clearly said that both "free software" and "open source" has serious problems. And I wholehartedly agree with that. Furthermore, it is quite clear to me as a Norwegian, where "fri programvare" clearly doesn't include MSIE, that the problem is smaller, but admittedly not non-existent. It is a problem with the English language.
Unfortunately, what RMS has been missing, is that names mean nothing without the connotations it creates. A name which is precise has no value at all if it doesn't give these connotations.
By insisting on GNU/Linux, he has thoroughly shot himself in the foot: To make sure people understand the concept of "free as in speech", the name really doesn't matter: What you have to do is make sure that whatever name gets onto people's lips, they think "free as in speech".
RMS got this backwards, he's got some names that he thinks makes people think "free as in speech", and then he goes around to make people use those names, but generally fail.
That said, I generally use the terms "Free Software" in English and "GNU/Linux" if I refer to the OS.
And none of us had any idea what he was up to just before it happened. I had seen her before, but I really didn't know who she was. I was sitting inside the mixing bus, and we were like "who is she, what's going to happen?" And then we just ran out to congratulate them.
To describe the setup: It's in a rather large park, and in one corner, we have a stage with some good sound and a 40 m^2 big screen, and some TV cameras running around, feeding pictures to a bus. Inside the bus, we're running 4 PCs, each feeding us with web-cast pictures from sources all over the country, and we need to decide what goes on the big screen. Further down in the park, there are about 30 tents, containing the booths of other participants, among those Skolelinux, which sort of had their 1.0 release today... Then, there is a lot of telescopes around that people can use to watch.
You wouldn't believe the stress we had inside that bus, especially at the end. All of a sudden we started getting images from places that had been having nasty weather, including Longyearbyen (for those not in the know, thats at about 78 degrees north). So, we were changing images every few seconds, new ones coming in, we had like 10 screens to attend to, and I was standing there with a walkie-talkie to tell Knut Jørgen what he'll been seeing next. And he had the task of commenting live on scientific data no-one had seen before in front a few thousand people...
But people have been saying it was a great event, and it feels good, I think we succeeded with what we set out to do.
astrological
Uhm. Astronomical. Bad, dot-magnon, bad...;-)
Now I need some sleep too... There hasn't been many hours the last few days...:-)
Yup, I submitted it just after half-way through, but they may not have discovered the post before that, I guess.
I had plans to submit it long ago, but I've been working around-the-clock lately, so I didn't have time to post anything intelligent (?) before about half-way....
I had really great plans that would attract/.-ers, like a dynamically updated bittorrents, but I never got around to do that....
However, for those having timed the contacts, check out my AU calculator! But note that that's a tiny, little Linux box, but I couldn't get the Perl modules I needed installed on the Tru64 boxes that runs the rest. So please be kind to it...:-) It's based on a module I wrote, Astro::SolarParallax, which is on CPAN.
I don't know... There was a case in Norway some years ago, where a moron lawyer sent a whole lot of big powerpoint files to a typo-squatter. The typo-squatter warned him several times that he was sending to a wrong address, still it persisted, and after the lawyer sent the squatter a message worth billions, the lawyer called the police and got the squatter arrested for extortion.
It was a rather weird case, and it bounced between the courts for a while, but I think the final verdict was that the squatter was acquitted on all accounts, and the verdict explicitly stated that if you did not encrypt the communications, you would not have any protection.
I hoped for a while that the verdict would serve as a reminder top lawyers to spend a couple of hours learning howto encrypt messages, but they wear a thick layer of clue-repellent.
That's actually a pretty neat idea!
Someone should really do that!
Think about it: It's something really obvious, since everybody gets tons of these, yep, I agree, spams, so if the patent is granted, you'll have a weapon both against the virus companies that do this, and a great argument against software patents and the incompetent patent office.
The best thing is that since the patent doesn't cover legitimate bounces, it won't hurt anything legitimate.
So, any geeks with patent attorney friends, have a try!
Yup. That was the reason why Russia entered the Napolean wars. They figured it would be so devastating for Napoleon, and send such a clear message it would remain unattractive to start any new wars.
Then, there was the First World War, aka the war to end all wars. That's what they were told, and that's how it was known, untill WW II... Turns out the peace was not a perfect peace after all...
But by stamping out Nazism and establishing democracy, which was the object of WW II, we could get more stability.
And indeed no two democracies has ever gone to war against each other. Democracy is good at that, undoubtedly.
Yeah, that's a really good link. I read the article some time ago, searched for it now, and was about to mod you up when I saw your post, but it was allready at max.
Anyway, the funny thing about Groom lake is that it is supposed to be so very secret, and indeed, there were some really hefty security requirements there.
Still it, is very hard to envision that the Russians didn't have any imagery available to them from pretty early on. So, why would anybody bother to try to keep it secret...?
I guess it is just due to that those paid to be paranoid are really paranoid all over the world. They really loose any reasonable sense of what is worth bothering to keep secret and what is not.
The deal marks the latest in a string of settlements from Microsoft,
Just to comment on it: I didn't see much evidence in the article it really was MS behind this, but I agree that it is hard to see any others settle for something howcome would feel so strongly for.
what has Microsoft got up its collective sleeve?
In my post a few days ago I argued that the browser as we know it is going to be rather irrelevant some day. It's not going to be a standalone application. It's going to be something that runs your applications across the net. I think that is the reality we would be looking at, but I also think that the free software community actually closer than MS to achieve this...
When MS go "there will be no difference between the machine and the net" I go "you mean like there really is no difference between localhost and other hosts?".
I've got only one of those spams in my reject logs, and it had:
SEXUALLY EXPLICIT:
As others have pointed out, the law specifically disallows those tricks. While spammers probably won't care about making it follow the exact phrase, it should be possible to create a Perl regex that deals with most of it, and that may be something for Spamassassin.
I doubt you ate alpaca. It was probably either llama or even just plain old cow meat. Alpacas are just way too expensive to slaughter them for meat.
Have a look at the picture I posted. You'll see a marsh where thousands of alpacas were feeding. There are a lot of them around Cusco. I saw herds of more than a thousand individuals, and the farmers around there sure slaughtered them. As for Llamas, they are very different from alpacas, they are in much smaller numbers around Cusco (in fact, I didn't see any there, only in Ancash).
I can confirm that. I went to Peru two years ago to climb, and upon arriving in Cusco, the first thing was of course to go to a restaurant, feeling slightly adventureous, and try the local specialitites.
I tried the alpaca and it is just awesome. It's like when to try the first bite, you think "well, I'm certainly never have a normal steak again, after tasting this!" Then you realize that this animal lives only at the high plains and marshlands of Peru (and that's how it should be). So, well, I guess I have to do without... Around here, we've got a lot of moose that tastes good too, but alpaca really is the top.
I think we had alpaca steak about twice a day...:-)
Yeah, and I remember coming across a FAQ of US farmers having alpacas, and they had an entry saying something like "Q: Do you eat alpacas? A: No, they are too huggable for that." I went, are you serious...?!?! The best food in the world, and you don't eat it? Well, yeah, they are really cute and huggable, sure, but it's sweet food...!:-)
Well, the article is slashdotted, so I haven't RTFA, but...
I've logged onto a Windows XP machine a couple of times, and what I have found striking is that they try hard to make the whole user interaction thing look like a web page. Looks weird, but that seems to be their thinking.
Except that you can't really have any advanced interaction with a user with just HTML forms, so the next step is clearly to get the rest of the GUI elements of Windows onto the web.
People who are just talking about "the browser" is therefore missing the point: It is not a focus of MS at all: It's applications running over the web, and the browser is not very relevant in this.
The funny thing is that I think it looks like they are allready behind the Free Software and web standards worlds: We've got Mozilla, XUL, we've got Apache and the best XML Application servers, we've got very clean separation of logic from markup (and layout), and we've got XForms, SVG etc. to make it widely standardized.
The only thing we seem to miss is a lot of hackers thinking in terms of using it. Ballmer will be chanting this to his droids when longhorn comes out, so they will use it uncritically. We can start doing it long before MS where it makes sense now.
But my rage at Monsanto masks the fact that GM products themselves are dangerous products that are not fit for consumption and pose a large threat to the long-term viability of live on Earth.
If driven by greed, probably yes. But I do not see the enormous problems you seem to imply if this knowledge is developed in the open, and in an environment that does not encourage greed.
I'd like to point out the ideas of CAMBIA, particularly the ideas of Richard Jefferson. He talks a lot about adopting copyleft-ideas to GMO, and I find that a very interesting approach. I think there is a good middle ground here somewhere, and that it consists mostly of regulating how this knowledge is used.
It is part of it, but you could imagine some non-internventionist God behind the "laws of nature" for example (a common concept among many theistic scientists), which by all means would be relevant, so it is definately a much longer story yes.
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit. Aznar was voted out because he had done everything wrong, and the bombings showed conclusively that all the things that had been done to make everybody feel so much safer was a complete failure. Furthermore, he was lying through his teeth about the events as they happened.
Fact is, Spain has dealt with terrorism for many years, and they know very well that you can't fight terrorism with military counterattacks. It simply does not work.
Compare with the US, which has had their tail behind the collective legs since 911, and running scared to abandon every freedom, which is pretty much the only thing the rest of the world has had reason to look up to US for. Great.
Have a look at a piece a friend of mine wrote. He's a native of Madrid, now studying in the US, and one of the most brilliantly intelligent people that I've met. Read it carefully.
And, oh, BTW, I've got karma to burn.... :-)
and then goes on with links to other browsers in the margin. Not very prominent, but it is a start.
I found this from mainstream Norwegian paper Dagbladet that runs a story on the frontpage entitled "Warns against Internet Explorer".
How about Uzbekistan...? That's probably one of the worst dictators on the planet. but then, he's an "ally"
In my case, with about 30000 messages processed since SA 2.62 was released, that number would be 3 messages. Two of which was from Amnesty International (join!), and was blocked because they are actually using spamware for their mailings, for some mysterious reason. The other was from a friend who got some really bad spammer worm, and consequently got on every block list there is.
These were however not blocked, they just landed among the other spam I let through to a spam folder. I do examine the SA summary of rejected spams occasionally, never seen anything there, and given these numbers, it seems just extremely unlikely that SA will reject any legit mail falsely in my current configuration. One in a million, perhaps...
But SpamAssassin is just getting better and better. Version 3.0 is coming up, and 3.0-pre1 was recently released. I do not have a test system available for it, but those who have may want to take it for a spin.
Especially for large sites, this is extremely interesting. It adds relational database support for the Bayes database, so it should be a lot easier to set up on a large site.
I find the lack of individual training the main reason why SA works so well for me, but not very well at my old university.
I had a lot of time to think about stuff like this during my military service. Lots of nights on guard staring out in the black with nothing to do.
I came to the conclusion that whatever it is, the willingness to kill or die for something is a sure sign of that you have simply become too fanatical.
Once you've accepted that something is worth killing or dying for, you will also become easier to manipulate. Don't give me that "no. not me". I know better than that. I've been manipulated too. There are always other ways to correct things, and many chances have been lost if you come to the point were you see no other alternative than violence. Just don't let them pass by.
AFAICS, Bush is wiping his ass with your Constitution every day. Are you going to do something about it? Or are you just going to write about it on /. and let the chances slip by?
Yup. Sure. Try saying something like sex abstinence programs is meaningless at best, according to all recognized international research. Then come back and report how far you got. If you report success, then we can start talking about the relative merits of free speech in different jurisdictions.
In Europe, like in the US, the ideal is to counter speech with speech. In fact, there's the European Court of Human Rights, and there has been rulings that saying things like "All imigrants should be sterilized upon arrival" is protected speech. It is quite unlikely that many of the proposed things will stand up in that court.
Let the politicians get on with the censorship stuff for a couple of years. It'll fail, and they'll realize it. Then, they'll be more receptive.
I have lobbied for government funding of a project that aims to use RDF to provide metadata to make it easier to find opposing viewpoints, and so fulfil the ideal of counter speech with speech. It has met some interest, but far from enough to get it off the ground. But that's the kind of things that geeks can do to preserve freedom of speech.
This is going to be software RAID, using Linux.
There are some stuff that I wouldn't need redundancy for, for example /tmp, so I figured I'd stick that in a partition on the part of the drive which isn't mirrored, if it is possible.
Is it?
A part of the point with RAID is that the system won't go down if one drive fails, so a part of the question is what would happen if the larger drive fails, can I have some kind of fallback for the stuff that writes to /tmp?
Any advices on this would be appreciated!
I think you missed the AC's point: He clearly said that both "free software" and "open source" has serious problems. And I wholehartedly agree with that. Furthermore, it is quite clear to me as a Norwegian, where "fri programvare" clearly doesn't include MSIE, that the problem is smaller, but admittedly not non-existent. It is a problem with the English language.
Unfortunately, what RMS has been missing, is that names mean nothing without the connotations it creates. A name which is precise has no value at all if it doesn't give these connotations. By insisting on GNU/Linux, he has thoroughly shot himself in the foot: To make sure people understand the concept of "free as in speech", the name really doesn't matter: What you have to do is make sure that whatever name gets onto people's lips, they think "free as in speech".
RMS got this backwards, he's got some names that he thinks makes people think "free as in speech", and then he goes around to make people use those names, but generally fail.
That said, I generally use the terms "Free Software" in English and "GNU/Linux" if I refer to the OS.
That's why "open source" was probably not such a great term anyway...
We had a really great time too! :-)
And none of us had any idea what he was up to just before it happened. I had seen her before, but I really didn't know who she was. I was sitting inside the mixing bus, and we were like "who is she, what's going to happen?" And then we just ran out to congratulate them.
To describe the setup: It's in a rather large park, and in one corner, we have a stage with some good sound and a 40 m^2 big screen, and some TV cameras running around, feeding pictures to a bus. Inside the bus, we're running 4 PCs, each feeding us with web-cast pictures from sources all over the country, and we need to decide what goes on the big screen. Further down in the park, there are about 30 tents, containing the booths of other participants, among those Skolelinux, which sort of had their 1.0 release today... Then, there is a lot of telescopes around that people can use to watch.
You wouldn't believe the stress we had inside that bus, especially at the end. All of a sudden we started getting images from places that had been having nasty weather, including Longyearbyen (for those not in the know, thats at about 78 degrees north). So, we were changing images every few seconds, new ones coming in, we had like 10 screens to attend to, and I was standing there with a walkie-talkie to tell Knut Jørgen what he'll been seeing next. And he had the task of commenting live on scientific data no-one had seen before in front a few thousand people...
But people have been saying it was a great event, and it feels good, I think we succeeded with what we set out to do.
Uhm. Astronomical. Bad, dot-magnon, bad... ;-)
Now I need some sleep too... There hasn't been many hours the last few days... :-)
I think we're working on it... :-)
I had plans to submit it long ago, but I've been working around-the-clock lately, so I didn't have time to post anything intelligent (?) before about half-way....
I had really great plans that would attract /.-ers, like a dynamically updated bittorrents, but I never got around to do that....
However, for those having timed the contacts, check out my AU calculator! But note that that's a tiny, little Linux box, but I couldn't get the Perl modules I needed installed on the Tru64 boxes that runs the rest. So please be kind to it... :-) It's based on a module I wrote, Astro::SolarParallax, which is on CPAN.
It was a rather weird case, and it bounced between the courts for a while, but I think the final verdict was that the squatter was acquitted on all accounts, and the verdict explicitly stated that if you did not encrypt the communications, you would not have any protection.
I hoped for a while that the verdict would serve as a reminder top lawyers to spend a couple of hours learning howto encrypt messages, but they wear a thick layer of clue-repellent.
Think about it: It's something really obvious, since everybody gets tons of these, yep, I agree, spams, so if the patent is granted, you'll have a weapon both against the virus companies that do this, and a great argument against software patents and the incompetent patent office.
The best thing is that since the patent doesn't cover legitimate bounces, it won't hurt anything legitimate.
So, any geeks with patent attorney friends, have a try!
Then, there was the First World War, aka the war to end all wars. That's what they were told, and that's how it was known, untill WW II... Turns out the peace was not a perfect peace after all...
But by stamping out Nazism and establishing democracy, which was the object of WW II, we could get more stability.
And indeed no two democracies has ever gone to war against each other. Democracy is good at that, undoubtedly.
But as Bush has recently established, it is easy to get people to go to war in a democracy as well. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
Anyway, the funny thing about Groom lake is that it is supposed to be so very secret, and indeed, there were some really hefty security requirements there.
Still it, is very hard to envision that the Russians didn't have any imagery available to them from pretty early on. So, why would anybody bother to try to keep it secret...?
I guess it is just due to that those paid to be paranoid are really paranoid all over the world. They really loose any reasonable sense of what is worth bothering to keep secret and what is not.
Just to comment on it: I didn't see much evidence in the article it really was MS behind this, but I agree that it is hard to see any others settle for something howcome would feel so strongly for.
In my post a few days ago I argued that the browser as we know it is going to be rather irrelevant some day. It's not going to be a standalone application. It's going to be something that runs your applications across the net. I think that is the reality we would be looking at, but I also think that the free software community actually closer than MS to achieve this...
When MS go "there will be no difference between the machine and the net" I go "you mean like there really is no difference between localhost and other hosts?".
As others have pointed out, the law specifically disallows those tricks. While spammers probably won't care about making it follow the exact phrase, it should be possible to create a Perl regex that deals with most of it, and that may be something for Spamassassin.
Have a look at the picture I posted. You'll see a marsh where thousands of alpacas were feeding. There are a lot of them around Cusco. I saw herds of more than a thousand individuals, and the farmers around there sure slaughtered them. As for Llamas, they are very different from alpacas, they are in much smaller numbers around Cusco (in fact, I didn't see any there, only in Ancash).
Perhaps you were thinking about Vicunas?
I can confirm that. I went to Peru two years ago to climb, and upon arriving in Cusco, the first thing was of course to go to a restaurant, feeling slightly adventureous, and try the local specialitites.
I tried the alpaca and it is just awesome. It's like when to try the first bite, you think "well, I'm certainly never have a normal steak again, after tasting this!" Then you realize that this animal lives only at the high plains and marshlands of Peru (and that's how it should be). So, well, I guess I have to do without... Around here, we've got a lot of moose that tastes good too, but alpaca really is the top.
I think we had alpaca steak about twice a day... :-)
Yeah, and I remember coming across a FAQ of US farmers having alpacas, and they had an entry saying something like "Q: Do you eat alpacas? A: No, they are too huggable for that." I went, are you serious...?!?! The best food in the world, and you don't eat it? Well, yeah, they are really cute and huggable, sure, but it's sweet food...! :-)
I've logged onto a Windows XP machine a couple of times, and what I have found striking is that they try hard to make the whole user interaction thing look like a web page. Looks weird, but that seems to be their thinking.
Except that you can't really have any advanced interaction with a user with just HTML forms, so the next step is clearly to get the rest of the GUI elements of Windows onto the web.
People who are just talking about "the browser" is therefore missing the point: It is not a focus of MS at all: It's applications running over the web, and the browser is not very relevant in this.
The funny thing is that I think it looks like they are allready behind the Free Software and web standards worlds: We've got Mozilla, XUL, we've got Apache and the best XML Application servers, we've got very clean separation of logic from markup (and layout), and we've got XForms, SVG etc. to make it widely standardized.
The only thing we seem to miss is a lot of hackers thinking in terms of using it. Ballmer will be chanting this to his droids when longhorn comes out, so they will use it uncritically. We can start doing it long before MS where it makes sense now.
What happened to the Afghan eXplorer, a vehicle designed to work as in independent war reporter in insecure zones?
If driven by greed, probably yes. But I do not see the enormous problems you seem to imply if this knowledge is developed in the open, and in an environment that does not encourage greed.
I'd like to point out the ideas of CAMBIA, particularly the ideas of Richard Jefferson. He talks a lot about adopting copyleft-ideas to GMO, and I find that a very interesting approach. I think there is a good middle ground here somewhere, and that it consists mostly of regulating how this knowledge is used.
Uhm, you didn't take two seconds to read what I wrote, did you...?
It is part of it, but you could imagine some non-internventionist God behind the "laws of nature" for example (a common concept among many theistic scientists), which by all means would be relevant, so it is definately a much longer story yes.