Also, when I renewed my EFF membership, the first thing I did was to drop anonymizer.com a note asking if it was anything they could do to undo the damage of the block.
I haven't had a lot good to say about the current US administration, but funding anonymizer for Iranians is a very good move, in fact, I think it is the best thing the US administration has done for Iran and iranians for a very long time.
Yeah, AOL. I don't know how many I've got, but closing in on 500, I would guess. That's a lot of wasted bandwidth.
So, I have actually lost some sleep on how to deal with it meaningfully.
If I accept the e-mail but forward it to Dave Null, I have lost the bandwidth, and pretty much done nothing good. If I bounce the e-mail after accepting it, some innocent bystander, like myself, gets the bounce, and I really don't want to do that. If I reject at SMTP-time, that seems like the best solution, but since I'm pretty much a newbie, I really don't know how to do that.
It doesn't matter if one or two get through, because I'm not vulnerable, but it steals my time, that's one reason I want to filter it.
The other reason is that the majority of the worms hit my spamtraps, and so, I'm a bit anxious how my Bayesian filter will respond to it... Will it be good at identifying viruses, but not so good at killing spam....?
Then, I don't have the CPU to run a full virus scanner.
I figured, the solution could be to run a simple regexp-based scanner that looks through a list of regexps which is updated by a community.
Even though I'm not vulnerable, this stuff has eaten a lot my bandwidth. There has to have been gross negligence on Microsoft's side at some point to allow this, and they should pay for the bandwidth I've lost.
Whatever they say in their EULAs about warranties means nothing, because I've never agreed to it, they are behaving irresponsibly, and I want my money back...
Greece was added to the "Axis of Evil" today. "We have irrefutable evidence that Greece hosts a large number of circumvention experts", a White House spokeswoman said, "and that they are funding terrorists".:-)
Hehe... I've touched 240V a few times. The first time I was three years old. One might wonder what it did to me...:-) Anyway, it is not the voltage that counts, it's the current, and that could be anything. It could kill you, but it might just make you go "oh, whoops".
Hm, I'm not sure I understand what you're saying, but let me try to address some of the issues you raise anyway, as I understand them.
Here in Norway, I can personally choose from a large number of power companies, so seemingly, they meet your condition for a well deregulated market. It still doesn't work, because all the power companies work in the same environment, and since they all make money from hydroelectric power, that means, weather and climate. Now, in the summer, when it is nice and warm, they are not making enough money on the home market, so they sell as much as they can on the international market, so that when the winter comes and we really need that power, there's going to be real scarcity and prices will skyrocket... It has happened every winter since the deregulation occured (I'm fortunate enough to get heat from a nearby plant which produces heat from burning garbage, meaning I get the cheapest of electricity, garbage or oil, but very few are that lucky).
As long as the environmental factors are as dominating as this, deregulation is not going to do a lot of good.
In the telecom market here, the situation was very different, and the deregulation was a good thing, but unfortunately, it was done in a very ill-thought-out manner. The main difference is that there are so many technical things that may be done differently, and it is important that the consumers are allowed to make that decision. The old state monopoly wasn't bad at all. They worked very well there, and Norway had amongst the lowest phone rates in the world. However, they privitized the whole company, but with their market dominance, they are (or were) almost a private monopoly. What they should have done, was to keep the old copper on state hands and commodized it, so that all the other telcos could compete on the same copper, and then gradually phase it out by laying down new wires.
Now, the other problem is that all the telcos aim only at the mass market, and nobody cares about the few geeks... Meaning, there's no way for me to just buy the bandwidth. I have to go for a full package with all kinds of software, webspace, email-addresses and stuff that I don't need, because I run my own server. But this is, I guess, quite a different matter.
Yeah, but since they're saying that they represent the PacMan author it shouldn't help, because they have still not made a good faith confirmation that it actually is PacMan they have found.
What they found was a work by another author, and by claiming they act on behalf of him, they are perjuring themself, because clearly they aren't...
OK, this stuff is really confusing, so any clarification would be great. But I would really think that something like this needs to go to court, because it is really damaging.
This question doesn't have a true or false answer. It was an extremely complex sequence of events.
As for Berlin, well, a million jews would easily have outnumbered the nazis in that city. If you had read your history, you'd know that Berlin was one of the most anti-Hitler cities of Germany. OK, ok, I know, it was just an example, but it is all besides my point, really.
It can indeed be used as an example at what you're aiming at, because the process leading up to Hitler's power-grab could happened in any democracy, and in fact, it happened again in recent years, when Milosevic came into power. Both were elected by a parliamentary democratic system.
However, both had very little popular support in the elections that brought them to power.
So, yes, democracies can become tyrannies, that happens.
However, it is beside my point. And I think Tianamen Square illustrates my point very well, because it wasn't the lack of arms, it was the total apathy among the wast majority of Beijing's population. This guy stopping tanks, if he had been armed with something that could dent the tank, do you really think they wouldn't have gunned him down right away? It is really hard even for trained killers to kill someone that is no threat to you.
It's the apathy that is the problem. Same think in Iraq, "It's all in Allah's hands" (and do dictators know to exploit that!).
It all boils down to this: Are you going to kill your neighbour if he is strongly opposed to what you do? Some lunatics might, but they are small in numbers. Unless you think that your neighbour is armed, and somebody told you that he will kill you if you don't kill him. Then, you might be able to do it.
BTW, I wouldn't want a gun-nut leading my country...:-)
Hm, I just got the latest version installed, using the.debs here. At first it seemed rather daunting, it was quite a lot of dependencies, yes. But once I started to nest it up, it didn't take me more than a few minutes really. And I consider myself a newbie...:-)
It might help that I'm not using the GNOME desktop, so that it doesn't matter if GNOME breaks as long as GnuCash runs. And it seems to run great.
Since I'm using the KDE Desktop, I'd rather use KMyMoney2, but I couldn't get that compiled.
Now, I don't know anything about accounting, so I need to RTFM before I start using it, and I haven't had time for that yet.
Well, I'm European too, and a pacifist. But the funny thing about the US, which I find kind of weird, is their 2nd amendment, which I interprete as being there just for this purpose, if the government becomes too corrupt the only way you can overthrow them is by applying organized violence in the form of a militia.
Myself, I think this is wrong, as there is nothing a million armed men marching on DC can do that a million unarmed can't. The problem isn't arming them, the problem is go get people off their asses.
But since the US has the 2nd amendment, they should at least realize what it means...
Actually, I think it is funny that PSUs with integrated UPSes haven't become more popular. Just give me a minute of power, and I'll change that fuse, that's all I ask for...
Probably, it is because very popular OSes crash so often that a little power blackout doesn't make much of a difference...
I think it would be a good idea, though. And it could communicate with the OS through SMBus or something.
I agree absolutely. I had been brought up on windows, and some of friends even develop stuff on windows, they had told me about the horrors of UNIX. When I started using it in 1994, it took a lot of getting used to. For the first half year or so, I hated it. But then, I realized to what extent you could customize it. Bang, that's it. Never looked back.
Since then, I think Linux has left the other unices far behind, however. My old institute uses Tru64, and it is a complete rectal doloris to get anything compiled on that platform. I found it was better to work on a 1996 era laptop with Linux than a current Tru64 workstation...
Here's the best lobbying effort done in recent years. Basically, Interpol is linking terrorism with piracy of Intellectual Property. They note that it is needed much closer cooperation between police and IPR holders. And who are the IPR holders? here is their list. Yup, those guys have also bought off Interpol. Can only be impressed...:-(
Huh, I thought IrDA was dying...? Bluetooth is supposed to take over for short-range wirelss communications, isn't it? There's an IrDA port on my cell-phone, but when I figured I'd want to connect to my computer, I got a cable instead of an IrDA dongle, though the dongle was actually cheaper.
Mediocre authors won't mind, perhaps, but serious authors should care how the document looks, and not surrender the details to a mechanical whim.
Well, indeed they should care, but they should not dictate. It is I who knows best what is best for me. An excellent author working with an excellent typographer and an excellent designer should be able to hint how a page should look, and when it loads, I might just agree. However, if it is my opinion that the lines are too long, if they are stopping me from changing the number of words on a line, then they have made a very severe mistake, IMNSHO.
It is also very important to keep in mind that people are different, so a one-size-fits-all-solution will be inadequate. An excellent author will have to come up with many different layouts to accomodate for the needs of different people, if he fails to do so, means, to me at least, that he does not care how a page looks for his audience.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with an author writing his own stylesheet, is it?
All can transfer the same information, yes of course. All three rely on different mediums and senses. The internet is akin to reading a book, but without the paper. It is visual. It can be extended but at it's core it is visual. This isn't difficult.
You're starting to sound like a legislator to me;-) (uhm, sorry, that must be one of the most offending things one could write on/. I don't really mean it that hard.)
For one thing, let's not talk about the Internet as a whole. You can do VoIP over the Internet. That's not visual. Let's talk about the web.
But when you're saying that it is visual, you're denying those that are more creative than yourself the right to be just that. That's what happens when a legislator tries to make a law for a medium they don't understand.
When the web was invented, it's intention was to extend very far beyond the visual. It has been dumbed down to being mostly visual, that's true. But what we now have is a very small subset of what it was intended to be. It has all happened because of closed-mindedness, because a majority has never tried to envision a web that you're not reading on a screen. Just try this: Imagine lying back in your favorite chair, listening to the web, and talking to the browser, telling it what links to use?
You don't think it would be cool? Well, I do, and it would have been reality by now if it hadn't been for a bunch of overpaid "web designers" whose main concern was enlarging their ego by presenting pages that looked cool on their own screens. Don't you dare telling me that I shouldn't have the option of listening to web pages!
But again, I'm not meaning this as hard as I write it. I'm just venting frustrations...:-)
I'm enjoying your exchange here, it is very enlightening.
Finally, you've nailed Goldfarb's Conjecture-- the untested hypothesis about the cognitive processes of authors. (That's what I reject.)
OK, I see your point now.
It may indeed be that you are correct, it is not easy for an author to write structured rather than visual content. In the real world we see that the WYSIWYG doctrine is hugely more widespread than structured markup. Even though programs like M$ Word have a styles concept, people are hardly using them, and when you look at web content, it is very rare to see good, structured markup.
All this real-world experience could be interpreted as you being right, and Goldfarb (whose Conjecture I haven't seen before) being wrong. It could be only me and a few others who actually enjoy writing structured documents, and find it so much better.
However, I don't think you can deny that if people would write structured markup I would be extremely useful. Jim's example that search engines could use it to rank hits by looking at the content of em elements (AltaVista did this in the old days, when people still wrote reasonably structured), is a good one. There are more things that read web pages than are human. Or at least it should be that way. But let's be human for a moment: In writings where I come from, you'll hardly see a paragraph beginning with a new line. You'll see it indented with a cm. The visual appearance of a document is largely dependent on cultural conventions. If the p element had been used widely, such cultural conventions could be taken into account by using culturally dependent stylesheets. You can't do that by using two br's. But that's still visual.
What I really want to see, are user agents that are able to fetch information for me, present digests. For example, I once tried to hack a script that would fetch me an abstract of whole-page comments that dialy appear in Norwegian newspapers. I had to give up, because the markup that was used was so hard to make sense out of what was the menus, navigational links, ads and so on, and what was the actual content. If title of the content had been marked up with a h1, this task would be, if not trivial, so at least reasonably easy. It is of course the author's prerogative to provide me with what he wants, but if the author had been interested in advancing technology and culture while he was at it, he could have provided me with markup so that I could have run may script.
So, the question is: Should we just settle with "no advances in this field are possible, people just can't write structured", or should we try to educate them?
Yeah, and besides, if I interprete the article correctly, they are actually planning to show the lab to prospective customers, so what is stopping Free Software geeks from dressing up in suits and go and see what MS thinks is our weakness? Besides the long hair, of course...:-)
AOL. Well, I wasn't under the radar of the sysadmins, but I wouldn't have made statistics. I've been using Linux in two office environments where I was the only one. In one of them, the sysadmin was really happy, he was running Linux on all his servers, and knew he'd never have a problem with me running Linux. The other guy was highly confused, they had NT on everything, pretty much every port on the network is open to intrusion, but he don't know how to close it (and I couldn't tell him, though I suggested they run a Linux firewall instead). Hm, checking now, it still looks bad.
Yeah, and my university institute is running Tru64. They don't particulary like me to run Linux there, but at least they understand it. They're starting a transition to Linux too. Tru64 is dying.
However, if the numbers somebody else posted are correct (SBC makes a whole lot more money than RIAA members), it is very important that we phrase ourselves wisely, because it is now very easy for RIAA to go "oh, the big evil ISPs are taking the bread off the table of the poor, starving artists". When really big gorillas are fighting each other, it is not certain that we win...
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Also, when I renewed my EFF membership, the first thing I did was to drop anonymizer.com a note asking if it was anything they could do to undo the damage of the block.
I haven't had a lot good to say about the current US administration, but funding anonymizer for Iranians is a very good move, in fact, I think it is the best thing the US administration has done for Iran and iranians for a very long time.
Mmmmm, I guess we should start writing Curious Blue, then, and have it ready to fight the Kazaa nodes... :-)
So, I have actually lost some sleep on how to deal with it meaningfully.
If I accept the e-mail but forward it to Dave Null, I have lost the bandwidth, and pretty much done nothing good. If I bounce the e-mail after accepting it, some innocent bystander, like myself, gets the bounce, and I really don't want to do that. If I reject at SMTP-time, that seems like the best solution, but since I'm pretty much a newbie, I really don't know how to do that.
It doesn't matter if one or two get through, because I'm not vulnerable, but it steals my time, that's one reason I want to filter it. The other reason is that the majority of the worms hit my spamtraps, and so, I'm a bit anxious how my Bayesian filter will respond to it... Will it be good at identifying viruses, but not so good at killing spam....?
Then, I don't have the CPU to run a full virus scanner.
I figured, the solution could be to run a simple regexp-based scanner that looks through a list of regexps which is updated by a community.
Anybody else been thinking along the same lines?
Even though I'm not vulnerable, this stuff has eaten a lot my bandwidth. There has to have been gross negligence on Microsoft's side at some point to allow this, and they should pay for the bandwidth I've lost.
Whatever they say in their EULAs about warranties means nothing, because I've never agreed to it, they are behaving irresponsibly, and I want my money back...
Greece was added to the "Axis of Evil" today. "We have irrefutable evidence that Greece hosts a large number of circumvention experts", a White House spokeswoman said, "and that they are funding terrorists". :-)
Hehe... I've touched 240V a few times. The first time I was three years old. One might wonder what it did to me... :-) Anyway, it is not the voltage that counts, it's the current, and that could be anything. It could kill you, but it might just make you go "oh, whoops".
Here in Norway, I can personally choose from a large number of power companies, so seemingly, they meet your condition for a well deregulated market. It still doesn't work, because all the power companies work in the same environment, and since they all make money from hydroelectric power, that means, weather and climate. Now, in the summer, when it is nice and warm, they are not making enough money on the home market, so they sell as much as they can on the international market, so that when the winter comes and we really need that power, there's going to be real scarcity and prices will skyrocket... It has happened every winter since the deregulation occured (I'm fortunate enough to get heat from a nearby plant which produces heat from burning garbage, meaning I get the cheapest of electricity, garbage or oil, but very few are that lucky).
As long as the environmental factors are as dominating as this, deregulation is not going to do a lot of good.
In the telecom market here, the situation was very different, and the deregulation was a good thing, but unfortunately, it was done in a very ill-thought-out manner. The main difference is that there are so many technical things that may be done differently, and it is important that the consumers are allowed to make that decision. The old state monopoly wasn't bad at all. They worked very well there, and Norway had amongst the lowest phone rates in the world. However, they privitized the whole company, but with their market dominance, they are (or were) almost a private monopoly. What they should have done, was to keep the old copper on state hands and commodized it, so that all the other telcos could compete on the same copper, and then gradually phase it out by laying down new wires.
Now, the other problem is that all the telcos aim only at the mass market, and nobody cares about the few geeks... Meaning, there's no way for me to just buy the bandwidth. I have to go for a full package with all kinds of software, webspace, email-addresses and stuff that I don't need, because I run my own server. But this is, I guess, quite a different matter.
NANAE has the C&C warning. However, I think it is your own fault when reading /. knowing full well that people try to be funny here... :-)
What they found was a work by another author, and by claiming they act on behalf of him, they are perjuring themself, because clearly they aren't...
OK, this stuff is really confusing, so any clarification would be great. But I would really think that something like this needs to go to court, because it is really damaging.
As for Berlin, well, a million jews would easily have outnumbered the nazis in that city. If you had read your history, you'd know that Berlin was one of the most anti-Hitler cities of Germany. OK, ok, I know, it was just an example, but it is all besides my point, really.
It can indeed be used as an example at what you're aiming at, because the process leading up to Hitler's power-grab could happened in any democracy, and in fact, it happened again in recent years, when Milosevic came into power. Both were elected by a parliamentary democratic system.
However, both had very little popular support in the elections that brought them to power.
So, yes, democracies can become tyrannies, that happens.
However, it is beside my point. And I think Tianamen Square illustrates my point very well, because it wasn't the lack of arms, it was the total apathy among the wast majority of Beijing's population. This guy stopping tanks, if he had been armed with something that could dent the tank, do you really think they wouldn't have gunned him down right away? It is really hard even for trained killers to kill someone that is no threat to you.
It's the apathy that is the problem. Same think in Iraq, "It's all in Allah's hands" (and do dictators know to exploit that!).
It all boils down to this: Are you going to kill your neighbour if he is strongly opposed to what you do? Some lunatics might, but they are small in numbers. Unless you think that your neighbour is armed, and somebody told you that he will kill you if you don't kill him. Then, you might be able to do it.
BTW, I wouldn't want a gun-nut leading my country... :-)
It might help that I'm not using the GNOME desktop, so that it doesn't matter if GNOME breaks as long as GnuCash runs. And it seems to run great.
Since I'm using the KDE Desktop, I'd rather use KMyMoney2, but I couldn't get that compiled.
Now, I don't know anything about accounting, so I need to RTFM before I start using it, and I haven't had time for that yet.
Your shouting at strawmen. My history teachers were quite good, thank you, but yours doesn't seem to have been doing their job.
Myself, I think this is wrong, as there is nothing a million armed men marching on DC can do that a million unarmed can't. The problem isn't arming them, the problem is go get people off their asses.
But since the US has the 2nd amendment, they should at least realize what it means...
Probably, it is because very popular OSes crash so often that a little power blackout doesn't make much of a difference...
I think it would be a good idea, though. And it could communicate with the OS through SMBus or something.
Since then, I think Linux has left the other unices far behind, however. My old institute uses Tru64, and it is a complete rectal doloris to get anything compiled on that platform. I found it was better to work on a 1996 era laptop with Linux than a current Tru64 workstation...
Here's the best lobbying effort done in recent years. Basically, Interpol is linking terrorism with piracy of Intellectual Property. They note that it is needed much closer cooperation between police and IPR holders. And who are the IPR holders? here is their list. Yup, those guys have also bought off Interpol. Can only be impressed... :-(
Huh, I thought IrDA was dying...? Bluetooth is supposed to take over for short-range wirelss communications, isn't it? There's an IrDA port on my cell-phone, but when I figured I'd want to connect to my computer, I got a cable instead of an IrDA dongle, though the dongle was actually cheaper.
Well, indeed they should care, but they should not dictate. It is I who knows best what is best for me. An excellent author working with an excellent typographer and an excellent designer should be able to hint how a page should look, and when it loads, I might just agree. However, if it is my opinion that the lines are too long, if they are stopping me from changing the number of words on a line, then they have made a very severe mistake, IMNSHO.
It is also very important to keep in mind that people are different, so a one-size-fits-all-solution will be inadequate. An excellent author will have to come up with many different layouts to accomodate for the needs of different people, if he fails to do so, means, to me at least, that he does not care how a page looks for his audience.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with an author writing his own stylesheet, is it?
You're starting to sound like a legislator to me ;-) (uhm, sorry, that must be one of the most offending things one could write on /. I don't really mean it that hard.)
For one thing, let's not talk about the Internet as a whole. You can do VoIP over the Internet. That's not visual. Let's talk about the web.
But when you're saying that it is visual, you're denying those that are more creative than yourself the right to be just that. That's what happens when a legislator tries to make a law for a medium they don't understand.
When the web was invented, it's intention was to extend very far beyond the visual. It has been dumbed down to being mostly visual, that's true. But what we now have is a very small subset of what it was intended to be. It has all happened because of closed-mindedness, because a majority has never tried to envision a web that you're not reading on a screen. Just try this: Imagine lying back in your favorite chair, listening to the web, and talking to the browser, telling it what links to use?
You don't think it would be cool? Well, I do, and it would have been reality by now if it hadn't been for a bunch of overpaid "web designers" whose main concern was enlarging their ego by presenting pages that looked cool on their own screens. Don't you dare telling me that I shouldn't have the option of listening to web pages!
But again, I'm not meaning this as hard as I write it. I'm just venting frustrations... :-)
OK, I see your point now.
It may indeed be that you are correct, it is not easy for an author to write structured rather than visual content. In the real world we see that the WYSIWYG doctrine is hugely more widespread than structured markup. Even though programs like M$ Word have a styles concept, people are hardly using them, and when you look at web content, it is very rare to see good, structured markup.
All this real-world experience could be interpreted as you being right, and Goldfarb (whose Conjecture I haven't seen before) being wrong. It could be only me and a few others who actually enjoy writing structured documents, and find it so much better.
However, I don't think you can deny that if people would write structured markup I would be extremely useful. Jim's example that search engines could use it to rank hits by looking at the content of em elements (AltaVista did this in the old days, when people still wrote reasonably structured), is a good one. There are more things that read web pages than are human. Or at least it should be that way. But let's be human for a moment: In writings where I come from, you'll hardly see a paragraph beginning with a new line. You'll see it indented with a cm. The visual appearance of a document is largely dependent on cultural conventions. If the p element had been used widely, such cultural conventions could be taken into account by using culturally dependent stylesheets. You can't do that by using two br's. But that's still visual.
What I really want to see, are user agents that are able to fetch information for me, present digests. For example, I once tried to hack a script that would fetch me an abstract of whole-page comments that dialy appear in Norwegian newspapers. I had to give up, because the markup that was used was so hard to make sense out of what was the menus, navigational links, ads and so on, and what was the actual content. If title of the content had been marked up with a h1, this task would be, if not trivial, so at least reasonably easy. It is of course the author's prerogative to provide me with what he wants, but if the author had been interested in advancing technology and culture while he was at it, he could have provided me with markup so that I could have run may script.
So, the question is: Should we just settle with "no advances in this field are possible, people just can't write structured", or should we try to educate them?
BTW, the Bugzilla bug is 97806, go have a look (there's no use linking, Bugzilla blocks /. referrals.)
Yeah, and besides, if I interprete the article correctly, they are actually planning to show the lab to prospective customers, so what is stopping Free Software geeks from dressing up in suits and go and see what MS thinks is our weakness? Besides the long hair, of course... :-)
Yeah, and my university institute is running Tru64. They don't particulary like me to run Linux there, but at least they understand it. They're starting a transition to Linux too. Tru64 is dying.
However, if the numbers somebody else posted are correct (SBC makes a whole lot more money than RIAA members), it is very important that we phrase ourselves wisely, because it is now very easy for RIAA to go "oh, the big evil ISPs are taking the bread off the table of the poor, starving artists". When really big gorillas are fighting each other, it is not certain that we win...
Yeah, same thing with orienteering and ski-orienteering! Great idea! I have to build one! :-)