Reading between the lines, this guy is tired of not having enough money to get by,
Yeah, that can be tiring...;-)
Perhaps we should start designing a system to get voluntary payments from users to hackers? I'm currently mostly a user, and if simple and secure enough, I would certainly send a coin now and then. Paypal certainly doesn't cut it, so you don't need to mention that...
You take one of the most unreliable forms of disk media, the floppy disc, and expect it to run something continuously and reliably, such as a firewall/router.
That's not how it works. The floppy isn't touched after the system has been booted. You just boot from the floppy, then everything is on a ramdisk.
I set up a box with Coyote Linux (itself based on LRP, IIRC) a year ago. No downtime yet.
The right of free speech is a restriction preventing the government from limiting your speech.
Uhm, talking about planets...: No, that's the US version of free speech, codified in the first amendment. The US is not the whole planet, and for quite a lot of the rest of the planet, that's insufficient protection.
just remember norway's decss-hacker jon johansen. by the written law, he could have ended up in prison for years. but the judge fined him to, what, 30 days community service on probation?
No, the prosecutor understood she was loosing so badly, she proposed that. Jon was acquitted on all accounts, simply because it is obvious that he didn't break that law. It is appealed however.
As for what is going on in Sweden, it is very confusing. I've read everything from "Sweden is banning P2P", to "DeCSS will still be legal, including it is OK to break copy prevention for your own private use."
Gnuheter is probably the place to watch if you read Swedish.
Yes, at least I know it is here in Norway, and it is a Good Thing, definately. However, it is not an absolute right, the editor has still very strong influence on what is allowed in. After all, they have limited space. It can be taken to court I think and the court will decide if the editor has to publish a rebuttal.
and why would internet sites be held to a lesser standard?
Because it is not a "lesser standard". The Internet is different, and, I would say, better suited to support critical debate.
And what is the alternative?
Some naive Semantic Web stuff.
Here goes: I'm hacking on the site of Norwegian Skeptics. There's nothing more valuable to a skeptic than an open, critical debate. I mean, the whole site exists mostly to engage people in debate whatever their position may be.
So, this is my idea, and it is something that I right now implement:
I'll use RDF to make basic statements like "this critizes this", "this supports this".
The idea is that you write a rebuttal, include an RDF statement saying which URI you critisize, and that's it. (I guess we need a law to enforce that cool URIs don't change:-) ).
Some day, will have our browsers detect those links, and provide elaborate listings of the whole debate. Our search engines will index it, and tell us who is engaged in the debate with whom, what URIs contain responses and rebuttals, etc. It is very, very simple really.
What the CoE (an organization I think is the best of EU, and I don't think too highly of EU (I'm Norwegian and voted no at the latest referendum)), should do, is pay for someone to write the code for Mozilla, for IE (if it is even meaningful), and for Google, and license it under a BSD license or drop it in the public domain. It is so typical of legislation bodies. They legislate without even looking to the possibility of creating something that will solve the problem better.
Facing countless lawsuits?
Well, I think this proposal will result in endless lawsuits, yes...:-)
I would extremely surprised if not the first use of this law will be an attack from Church of $cientology against Operation Clambake.
The way this law will be abused, and I'm sure from day 1, will be to direct floods of requests against some pronounced critics, with the intention of breaking their ability to respond and then sue.
On my skepsis.no website, we have, allthough we haven't had a workable content management system, published rebuttals. However, if I had many requests to post rebuttals, I wouldn't have had the time to do it. I would have had to close down the whole site.
This will serve as a DoS-by-lawyer attack on people who haven't got the infrastructure to deal with many rebuttals.
Instead, have someone write the software, it'll work so much better.
Cool! Yep, it is true, you really shouldn't swallow... Liquid Nitrogen expands extremely quickly, you would indeed be in deep trouble if you do... But I've gargled it many times. It's fun.
I'm surprised by two things by this: One is that he even managed to swallow, I haven't really tried, but my experience is that it boils extremely fast, and I would think it would be very hard to do that.
The other surprising thing is that he wasn't more seriously injured, or indeed that he lived to tell about it...
BTW Nobel Prize winner
Douglas Osheroff told me he actually lets that stuff go far down his throat.
I've read one account of a person who regularly gargled with that stuff, until one day he cracked a tooth...
I've done that many times at parties. It is cool in every way you can think of...:-)
My teeth are OK...
Not risk-free of course, and you don't want to get that stuff down in the stomach...:-)
I do things like firewalking (had a world record once, 165 feet, and btw, I think the current listed record is invalid), sticking the hand in molten lead, bed-of-nails, etc.
Icecream is great BTW, it's something the physics department always hands out when it tries to attract potential students...
I'd say that they managed to hide the development and creation of a nuclear weapon, on a project with thousands of staff, pretty well.
Not really. During the war, everybody assumed that everybody else was developing nuclear weapons. I have this from a Joseph Rotblat, who participated in the Manhattan Project himself. It wasn't really secret, it was only the details that were secret.
After the war, it didn't take too long before the Soviets had it too. Allthough it wasn't hard to do, it is quite likely that the Soviets got quite a lot of details from the Manhattan project.
In fact, there were two Norwegian physicist who went to the US a couple of years after the war. They had been on a team that moved into Germany shortly after the troops to secure German high-tech, so you could say they were rather distinguished, but they got a tour on US facilities, and just by the stuff they saw there, they were able to build a nuclear reactor back home. Those secrets were not very carefully guarded.
I've never been a UFO nut, but I decided to read up on a couple of things after watching a big show claiming "Roswell is the greatest mystery in UFOlogy". There are too many obvious cases to spend a lot of time on the bad ones, that's why I look into Roswell. Specifically the online available testimonies of the people who were involved in the first events.
I think you both misinterpreted my post (which may be my fault, of course).
I didn't intend to say that there is a direct link between poverty and terrorism. That is not what we're seeing. Most of the poor population is very passive, sometimes that's good, because most of the population don't want a war, they're not going to kill anybody, and sometimes it is bad, as it is very hard to have a popular uprising against dictators.
What poverty does create, is a general sentiment that someone else is responsible for your misery, a sentiment that can then be exploited. The next problem is that that allthough the vast majority would never resort to terrorism, a very small minority would, and those who think they have the resources to "do something" will "do something". Under the wrong circumstances, this something will be terrorism.
If malaysians were all big, fat and had no percieved enemies, the prime minister would not be listened to, would he?
State media in the region have been brainwashing people into believing that it's the U.S. that is responsible for all of their misery instead of the repressive governments,
Uhm, in Egypt, the US owns the state media. In Egypt (and Jordan), it is illegal to critisize US war efforts.
And because the US wants it to be that way, the US doesn't stand up to put pressure on their allies to allow dissent.
Disclaimer: Didn't RFTA, haven't seen any of the movies.
But I have been to Egypt, and my parents have been there twice. It is a fantastic country, allthough you'll see bottomless poverty like I have seen in no other place. Egyptians, like most arabs, are very friendly and respectful people, very proud of their history and their country, with good reason I might add.
And indeed, islamist extremism is a serious threat to not only most Egyptians, but the entire region , and possibly the whole earth. But it is a problem because people do not have basic human rights. It is the obvious poverty problem. Unemployed people have too much time on their hands, and they are easy prey for extremists.
But they do not have the right to free expression, to peacefully protest, the suppression of the people is what is causing the problem.
In that situation, it is my sincere belief that the problems must be addressed by openness, by allowing people to speak, and by allowing them to participate in society. It is the only way to confront extremism, to insist on more human rights. When exposed to different viewpoints, extremism will be moderated.
It is troubling that if you go into the bazars, you'll hear everybody is a vocal opponent of US foreign policy. So, they have the freedom to say it as long as it is not heard, as long as it is uninfluencial. That is good and all, in many places they cannot do that, but they have very little freedom to say it out loud and clear, the torture chamber awaits you. This is the disturbing fact you never hear about. Everybody is so scared to islamist extremism, nobody thinks about their basic rights.
But, to combat extremists, the only thing you can do is to emphasize, they have rights too.
Mubarak certainly has many qualities as leader, but it is very important not to turn the blind eye to some severe shortcomings.
What this has to do with the Matrix is left as an exercise to the reader...:-)
Yeah, my girlfriend has got a Bernina machine, no USB cable, but a RS232. It is pretty advanced. We haven't called Bernina to ask for the spec yet, but if they wont tell, I would love to hear from other people who have been hacking on something to allow Bernina sewing machines work with Linux.
That's close to what I do, the main difference is that the server is in server hosting somewhere else.
However, I would like the workstation to deliver as much e-mail as it could on it's own, and only resort to the server if it can't.
The workstation is not allways on, it makes quite a lot of noise, so I shut it down if I don't need it.
Consequently, the workstation should relay the message on to the server if it can't deliver it immediately (for some sensible value of immediately), and have the server continue to try to deliver untill the message times out.
Anybody know how to do that?
I'm currently using 3.x on Debian too, but I have considered for a long time using Marc Merlin's 4.x debs (too late, perhaps)
What you were actually seeing was the sun coming up behind some trees. I thought they were rather nice.
Unfortunately, our servers were pretty much wiped out by the flood of requests. We had two AS-20 alphas, each with 2 CPUs and a few gigs of RAM. A nice RAID, and fibrechannel between the disks and the machines, and each of the boxes had a gigabit/s link to the rest of the net. Apache had been recompiled for the occasion, to allow for more children (which was the bottleneck at the Mercury transit). Still, the servers couldn't keep up.
It is the same thing in astronomy. I've seen a windows box in a telescope control room, but I've never seen it turned on... The user end of the data acquisition software is very likely to be on Linux, whereas most other stuff run on a mainframe, which may have other Unices.
Most of this stuff is of course developed in-house, but there are projects that utilize e.g. Mead telescopes, that come with windows telescope control software. In every project of some scale I'm aware of, they have re-written the telescope control software on Linux.
Also, the code is usually freed for such projects. It is not organized, like it largely is in the Free Software community, but if you ask, they're happy to share the code.
So I must admit that I'm rather surprised by this person's trouble... Really, I think that in a scientific project, you would want to make sure you understand as much as possible of the critical pieces from the OS and up, not only your own software that runs on top.
It is true that CDMA has some advantages compared to GSM. Notably, GSM was designed to carry voice, not data.
But then, GSM was rolled out in many parts of Europe a really long time ago, and it works. As opposed to what my friends in the US report, where a cell phone is pretty much useless in most areas, because the CDMA networks simply doesn't work.
But who cares, UMTS is being rolled out... I think I'm not buying the first couple of years, but I'm covered by a UMTS network in the places where I spend most of my time (and for the rest of it, I couldn't care less).
Also note that Danny Weitzner, who posted this story, and who is the W3C Technology and Society Domain Leader, is a very early member of the EFF, at least long before I heard about it. He headed the Washington DC office and was (is?) Deputy Policy Director.
OK, so what are people's favorite overlooked HTTP feature?
Mine are definately content negotation, specifically language negotation, since I develop multilingual websites (yeah, English is not my first language).
I find that extremely useful, yet, nobody cares about it... It is really annoying when you get to a website and you have to choose the language, "Hey, I told you that in my accept-language header, just listen!"
Close... a free market is one where people are free to trade with whomever they want, giving preference to none.
You're right, I should have said "a free market is only efficient if".
Companies don't have incentive to work in an efficient market -- assuming that what you have for sale is just that, your product*, there's nothing to differentiate one company from another.
Sure there is, if you're product is better suited to meet the needs of your customers than the other company's product, you'll win.
Someone will go to bogus-retailer.com rather than a real retailer to get the same item for 3 cents less.
So? If bogus-retailer.com's costs are 0.03 less per shipped item, everything else equal, then who cares if bogus-retailer.com is not sanctioned by Big Manufacturer(R)? Retailers should also cut costs in an efficient market.
I'd love to see a world where all that marketing is worthless, and rather, I'll go to a database where I can read objective information, third-party reviews, and stuff like that.
Basically, I think that free market can be extremely efficient in many situations, but not always, particulary, the free market is not very good at staying free.
More importantly, the driving force behind capitalism is supposed to be the ability for custumers to compare products, and compare the prizes of products.
The free market is only really free if customers have perfect information. That can never happen, but you can strive to get something that works good enough.
If biznisses are allowed to keep information from the market, it is the end of the free market, and in fact, the end of capitalism.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that can be tiring... ;-)
Perhaps we should start designing a system to get voluntary payments from users to hackers? I'm currently mostly a user, and if simple and secure enough, I would certainly send a coin now and then. Paypal certainly doesn't cut it, so you don't need to mention that...
hehe, probably... :-)
That's not how it works. The floppy isn't touched after the system has been booted. You just boot from the floppy, then everything is on a ramdisk.
I set up a box with Coyote Linux (itself based on LRP, IIRC) a year ago. No downtime yet.
Uhm, talking about planets...: No, that's the US version of free speech, codified in the first amendment. The US is not the whole planet, and for quite a lot of the rest of the planet, that's insufficient protection.
other than that, what you write is OK.
Just a normal plastic cup.
Oh, that's the whole point: It evaporates extremely fast, so it boils out and fumes our of your mouth before it is a problem... :-)
No, the prosecutor understood she was loosing so badly, she proposed that. Jon was acquitted on all accounts, simply because it is obvious that he didn't break that law. It is appealed however.
As for what is going on in Sweden, it is very confusing. I've read everything from "Sweden is banning P2P", to "DeCSS will still be legal, including it is OK to break copy prevention for your own private use."
Gnuheter is probably the place to watch if you read Swedish.
Yes, at least I know it is here in Norway, and it is a Good Thing, definately. However, it is not an absolute right, the editor has still very strong influence on what is allowed in. After all, they have limited space. It can be taken to court I think and the court will decide if the editor has to publish a rebuttal.
Because it is not a "lesser standard". The Internet is different, and, I would say, better suited to support critical debate.
Some naive Semantic Web stuff.
Here goes: I'm hacking on the site of Norwegian Skeptics. There's nothing more valuable to a skeptic than an open, critical debate. I mean, the whole site exists mostly to engage people in debate whatever their position may be.
So, this is my idea, and it is something that I right now implement:
I'll use RDF to make basic statements like "this critizes this", "this supports this".
The idea is that you write a rebuttal, include an RDF statement saying which URI you critisize, and that's it. (I guess we need a law to enforce that cool URIs don't change :-) ).
Some day, will have our browsers detect those links, and provide elaborate listings of the whole debate. Our search engines will index it, and tell us who is engaged in the debate with whom, what URIs contain responses and rebuttals, etc. It is very, very simple really.
What the CoE (an organization I think is the best of EU, and I don't think too highly of EU (I'm Norwegian and voted no at the latest referendum)), should do, is pay for someone to write the code for Mozilla, for IE (if it is even meaningful), and for Google, and license it under a BSD license or drop it in the public domain. It is so typical of legislation bodies. They legislate without even looking to the possibility of creating something that will solve the problem better.
Well, I think this proposal will result in endless lawsuits, yes... :-)
I would extremely surprised if not the first use of this law will be an attack from Church of $cientology against Operation Clambake.
The way this law will be abused, and I'm sure from day 1, will be to direct floods of requests against some pronounced critics, with the intention of breaking their ability to respond and then sue.
On my skepsis.no website, we have, allthough we haven't had a workable content management system, published rebuttals. However, if I had many requests to post rebuttals, I wouldn't have had the time to do it. I would have had to close down the whole site.
This will serve as a DoS-by-lawyer attack on people who haven't got the infrastructure to deal with many rebuttals.
Instead, have someone write the software, it'll work so much better.
I'm surprised by two things by this: One is that he even managed to swallow, I haven't really tried, but my experience is that it boils extremely fast, and I would think it would be very hard to do that.
The other surprising thing is that he wasn't more seriously injured, or indeed that he lived to tell about it...
BTW Nobel Prize winner Douglas Osheroff told me he actually lets that stuff go far down his throat.
Not risk-free of course, and you don't want to get that stuff down in the stomach... :-)
I do things like firewalking (had a world record once, 165 feet, and btw, I think the current listed record is invalid), sticking the hand in molten lead, bed-of-nails, etc.
Icecream is great BTW, it's something the physics department always hands out when it tries to attract potential students...
Not really. During the war, everybody assumed that everybody else was developing nuclear weapons. I have this from a Joseph Rotblat, who participated in the Manhattan Project himself. It wasn't really secret, it was only the details that were secret.
After the war, it didn't take too long before the Soviets had it too. Allthough it wasn't hard to do, it is quite likely that the Soviets got quite a lot of details from the Manhattan project.
In fact, there were two Norwegian physicist who went to the US a couple of years after the war. They had been on a team that moved into Germany shortly after the troops to secure German high-tech, so you could say they were rather distinguished, but they got a tour on US facilities, and just by the stuff they saw there, they were able to build a nuclear reactor back home. Those secrets were not very carefully guarded.
I've never been a UFO nut, but I decided to read up on a couple of things after watching a big show claiming "Roswell is the greatest mystery in UFOlogy". There are too many obvious cases to spend a lot of time on the bad ones, that's why I look into Roswell. Specifically the online available testimonies of the people who were involved in the first events.
Here's my take on it (written a few years ago).
Spoiler: I think the whole story has evolved through a series of small exaggerations over time.
I didn't intend to say that there is a direct link between poverty and terrorism. That is not what we're seeing. Most of the poor population is very passive, sometimes that's good, because most of the population don't want a war, they're not going to kill anybody, and sometimes it is bad, as it is very hard to have a popular uprising against dictators.
What poverty does create, is a general sentiment that someone else is responsible for your misery, a sentiment that can then be exploited. The next problem is that that allthough the vast majority would never resort to terrorism, a very small minority would, and those who think they have the resources to "do something" will "do something". Under the wrong circumstances, this something will be terrorism.
If malaysians were all big, fat and had no percieved enemies, the prime minister would not be listened to, would he?
Uhm, in Egypt, the US owns the state media. In Egypt (and Jordan), it is illegal to critisize US war efforts.
And because the US wants it to be that way, the US doesn't stand up to put pressure on their allies to allow dissent.
But I have been to Egypt, and my parents have been there twice. It is a fantastic country, allthough you'll see bottomless poverty like I have seen in no other place. Egyptians, like most arabs, are very friendly and respectful people, very proud of their history and their country, with good reason I might add.
And indeed, islamist extremism is a serious threat to not only most Egyptians, but the entire region , and possibly the whole earth. But it is a problem because people do not have basic human rights. It is the obvious poverty problem. Unemployed people have too much time on their hands, and they are easy prey for extremists.
But they do not have the right to free expression, to peacefully protest, the suppression of the people is what is causing the problem.
In that situation, it is my sincere belief that the problems must be addressed by openness, by allowing people to speak, and by allowing them to participate in society. It is the only way to confront extremism, to insist on more human rights. When exposed to different viewpoints, extremism will be moderated.
It is troubling that if you go into the bazars, you'll hear everybody is a vocal opponent of US foreign policy. So, they have the freedom to say it as long as it is not heard, as long as it is uninfluencial. That is good and all, in many places they cannot do that, but they have very little freedom to say it out loud and clear, the torture chamber awaits you. This is the disturbing fact you never hear about. Everybody is so scared to islamist extremism, nobody thinks about their basic rights.
But, to combat extremists, the only thing you can do is to emphasize, they have rights too.
Mubarak certainly has many qualities as leader, but it is very important not to turn the blind eye to some severe shortcomings.
What this has to do with the Matrix is left as an exercise to the reader... :-)
Yeah, my girlfriend has got a Bernina machine, no USB cable, but a RS232. It is pretty advanced. We haven't called Bernina to ask for the spec yet, but if they wont tell, I would love to hear from other people who have been hacking on something to allow Bernina sewing machines work with Linux.
However, I would like the workstation to deliver as much e-mail as it could on it's own, and only resort to the server if it can't.
The workstation is not allways on, it makes quite a lot of noise, so I shut it down if I don't need it.
Consequently, the workstation should relay the message on to the server if it can't deliver it immediately (for some sensible value of immediately), and have the server continue to try to deliver untill the message times out.
Anybody know how to do that?
I'm currently using 3.x on Debian too, but I have considered for a long time using Marc Merlin's 4.x debs (too late, perhaps)
Cool! Be sure to send them to our photo competition! Especially the last one was nice!
Unfortunately, our servers were pretty much wiped out by the flood of requests. We had two AS-20 alphas, each with 2 CPUs and a few gigs of RAM. A nice RAID, and fibrechannel between the disks and the machines, and each of the boxes had a gigabit/s link to the rest of the net. Apache had been recompiled for the occasion, to allow for more children (which was the bottleneck at the Mercury transit). Still, the servers couldn't keep up.
So, we had some serious traffic here...
Most of this stuff is of course developed in-house, but there are projects that utilize e.g. Mead telescopes, that come with windows telescope control software. In every project of some scale I'm aware of, they have re-written the telescope control software on Linux.
Also, the code is usually freed for such projects. It is not organized, like it largely is in the Free Software community, but if you ask, they're happy to share the code.
So I must admit that I'm rather surprised by this person's trouble... Really, I think that in a scientific project, you would want to make sure you understand as much as possible of the critical pieces from the OS and up, not only your own software that runs on top.
But then, GSM was rolled out in many parts of Europe a really long time ago, and it works. As opposed to what my friends in the US report, where a cell phone is pretty much useless in most areas, because the CDMA networks simply doesn't work.
But who cares, UMTS is being rolled out... I think I'm not buying the first couple of years, but I'm covered by a UMTS network in the places where I spend most of my time (and for the rest of it, I couldn't care less).
Also note that Danny Weitzner, who posted this story, and who is the W3C Technology and Society Domain Leader, is a very early member of the EFF, at least long before I heard about it. He headed the Washington DC office and was (is?) Deputy Policy Director.
Mine are definately content negotation, specifically language negotation, since I develop multilingual websites (yeah, English is not my first language).
I find that extremely useful, yet, nobody cares about it... It is really annoying when you get to a website and you have to choose the language, "Hey, I told you that in my accept-language header, just listen!"
Things are moving sooooo slowly...
Ever hear about taxes....? If you want a working government, you have to pay the prize.
You're right, I should have said "a free market is only efficient if".
Sure there is, if you're product is better suited to meet the needs of your customers than the other company's product, you'll win.
So? If bogus-retailer.com's costs are 0.03 less per shipped item, everything else equal, then who cares if bogus-retailer.com is not sanctioned by Big Manufacturer(R)? Retailers should also cut costs in an efficient market.
I'd love to see a world where all that marketing is worthless, and rather, I'll go to a database where I can read objective information, third-party reviews, and stuff like that.
Basically, I think that free market can be extremely efficient in many situations, but not always, particulary, the free market is not very good at staying free.
The free market is only really free if customers have perfect information. That can never happen, but you can strive to get something that works good enough.
If biznisses are allowed to keep information from the market, it is the end of the free market, and in fact, the end of capitalism.
It is fairly straightforward, really...