Scroll to the bottom of Eurasia Overview and you'll see Tommy Franks cheerfully shaking hands with Islam Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan. Here, you see why people really do not believe that the war in Iraq has anything to do with freedom.
In the early 1990-ties, Islam Karimov was a cheap Soviet-style dictator wannabee. But he worked hard, intensive surveillance of pro-democracy workers, rigged elections, and eventually, political assassinations, extensive use of torture, etc., gaining real, dictator power.
Most political dissidents have fled, notably, Mohammad Salih, who ran against Karimov in one of the elections. He was the subject of an assassination attempt, that fortunately failed.
Salih is a member of the Erk Democratic Party.
After 9/11, the US has given Karimov all the support he needs to grow from a dictator wannabee to a full Saddam/Hitler-style tyrant.
There is hardly any serious democratic opposition left in Uzbekistan. What there is, however, is a bunch of extreme muslim fundamentalists, so, should Karimov loose power, it is not going to be the democratic opposition taking over, it is going to be the religious extremists (which is a development we're unsurprisingly seeing in Iraq too).
When I see Tommy Franks shaking hands with of the worst tyrants on the planet, it makes me wanna puke... It is history repeating itself, it is a reminder that Saddam too was a dictator wannabee before Donald Rumsfeld went to shake hands with him in 1984.
If the US wants to have any credibility whatsoever with the war-for-freedom rhetoric, they should at least stop supporting the worst dictators on the planet.
I have been arguing that liability is a good thing for free software, if done right, because vendors selling our products would actually have a product to sell.
Obviously, if individual developers become liable for the code they write, it would be bad. If, OTOH, liability follows the money, it would be a good thing.
If you buy a Red Hat product, Red Hat is held liable for the bugs that may be there, not J. Random Hacker. So, Red Hat would have to thoroughly review the code, employing more people to do it. That way, more hackers could work full-time on free software. Prizes for free swoftware would go up, not a bad thing in itself, and so there will be more money to develop free software.
The product that vendors would sell, is a warranty.
I think the community should support efforts to make those who sell software liable for the products they sell.
You make many good points, I just want to comment on this:
There's no rush to solve this problem. People often fall into the trap of thinking that Linux has to grow in order to survive.
True, Linux will survive, I don't worry about Linux.
But, I worry about society, a lot. Society needs Linux, to, uhm, save the world. We're approaching Stallman's dystopic "right to read"-society at a disturbing pace. Soon, the technical foundations for it is all in place, and we don't know how long it would take for society to transform itself to this dystopia once that has happened.
Free software is the best we can do to avoid it, and for that reason, I would say it is a rush to make it ready for the masses.
Actually, it was this story, posted on a different mailing list that made me realize it was april 1st the other day... Perhaps Yahoo is just a little late and didn't get the joke?
However, there's no way you can prevent spambots from parsing the whole file. If you serve it to them, then they can and will parse whatever is there.
You can try to identify the spambots by looking at e.g. the User-Agent string and serve them false content, but it is not going to be very effective, and you'll get into a similar arms-race with the spammers as we have on the filtering side.
So, then, the idea with providing troll-boxes is that those addresses will get spammed. You can take measures when they are spammed, you can stick them in the teergrube, and you can reject any subsequent messages from the same source to any of the users of the system.
So, the idea with a trollbox is not that you will not get spam to other addresses, the idea is that once the trollbox is spammed, you can take measures against the spammer. Many spamlists are in fact sorted alphabetically... There is a reason why my trollbox begins with aa0...:-)
God, what a perfect representation of what is important to the bush administration. I thought Slashdot may actually avoid this type of propaganda called "reporting."
Yeah, exactly, but since it is such a nice demonstration, I don't see why/. shouldn't post it... I mean, here we are active participants and critical commentators, not the sheep you find in front of TV sets...
(yeah, that's a real, living trollbox, spambots, do your worst!:-) ) Very few users will ever see this, but the spambots will harvest it. It is clear that many of them do.
The other thing you mention, I think that is what is meant by a Teergrube. Marc Merlin has some good stuff on using Exim and SpamAssassin to reject messages or making spammers stick in a teergrube. He has some debs too.
Unfortunately, I haven't had time and I haven't been feeling adventurous enough to try all this, but clearly, it works well.
Re:Offtopic, but this is my opinion dammit
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4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
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· Score: 1
Our POWs are dead meat, fuck 'em, move on. There's only one winner, last man standing.
I think this is an accurate analysis of the situation and the Bush administrations intentions. When you've given up UN, which is the foundation for international law, it is too late to come whining about the Geneva convention. However, it ignores the lessons learnt from several thousand years of war, and there is another unfortunate fact, that it is now so easy to kill the whole population of the earth, that ignoring these lessons may be the last thing we do.
Besides, don't you think that Bush should have told this story to his soldiers: If we go without UN mandate, there is no such thing as international law anymore, which means that you guys, should you be captured, have no rights.
He should have had the decency to ask: "Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?"
Re:A short history of how the U.S. got into this m
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4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
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· Score: 1
But then, reading most of the stuff there, looking around, checking other sources, it seems that PNAC is actually an organization that seems to have these guys as founders, and that their goals are pretty much as stated on the website.
It could still be that the website is a hoax that just exaggerates the propositions of the real PNAC. I just find it very hard to believe that anyone who has grown up in a democracy can go to the extreme lengths that are being proposed on this website.
But then, researching it, it really seems like this website does represent the politics of the Bush administration. And that's really, really scary.
I sure wish I could remember which e-card website she used.
123greetings.com? They spammed me massively, and I wouldn't be surprised if they sold the address too...:-(
Unfortunately, one of my female friends sent me a card to my new address. Haven't got spam from 123greetings.com itself to that address, but I can't trace it if they sold it.
Newbie here too. Anyway, there has been a post on the debian-security list that indicates that the Debian maintainers have made a package with the patch, and there was a response to that post asking WTH are this packages, and that has not been answered yet. Frankly, I have no clue, but I have the package kernel-source-2.4.18 installed, and my hope is that this apt-get upgrade will download a new one when it is available...:-)
According to this page Ericsson has provided the suppressive parts of the Iranian government with noise senders to suppress unwanted broadcasts.
Apparently, Ericsson denies the accusations, and I seriously doubt such senders would have any health effects but Iran has made some good progress lately, and it is very serious if Ericsson provides tools for oppression.
And as for the ERP side, well it's fairly complex but at least if we had an option for something that could run on Linux with say, Oracle or whatever (at least be flexible) database backend...
Hehe, well, I'm certainly not in you position, I'm an astrophysicist who just got the job of selling 100 000 solar eclipse glasses by the end of May...
A completely new thing to me of course, but it started me searching for simple CRM/ERP solutions.
I bumped into Compiere. Not an option for us, but have you looked at it?
OK, dad called me this morning, he was making a presentation with OpenOffice Impress, and everything was working OK (except that it was a bit different from Powerpoint), untill he was about to print.
After hitting print, the keyboard just froze. That's all he could tell me. He found no other way than pushing The Button. Fortunately, I have ext3 on all partitions...:-)
The box is running KDE 3.0.5a, and while he could move the mouse, nothing happened when he pushed the K button, he said.
I haven't been home to check it out, it is not that far away, though. There has also been some problems with this keyboard. It is old and the connection has been bad at times. Dad insisted he had checked and put it firmly back in several times, and hangs at the same spot every time. After all, he is an engineer...:-)
Because it was free as in speech and as in beer. Gopher was not. That's why I became so enthusiastic, allthough it was half a year later (and it still took me another 8 months to make a homepage).
Toby's point is actually very important. While big science projects still exists, it is getting increasingly difficult to get funding for science projects. It is getting really bad. So, while we surely would like to put our equipment outside of that damned atmosphere;-) it just isn't financially feasible to do so. We're stuck here on earth with most of the gear for some time to come.
Then, given how important astronomy has been and still is to the development of science and technology, on the fundamental level, I hope/.ers see that cutting off astronomy from the most important sources of radiation is a Bad Thing[tm], and that alltough deregulating the spectrum may be a good thing, astronomers should be heard.
Nono. IANAG, but IIRC, there were three things that happened at the same time. One thing was that a big asteroid hit the Yucatan peninsula (and thats the crater they have been talking about the last few decades), the second thing was that India began to bump into the rest of Asia and created the Himalayas and stuff. That was pretty messy too. And the last thing I don't remember right now... I haven't read a lot about it lately, but I think I have an idea where I should go looking if I wanted to read up...:-)
From Microsoft itself, advertising MS products, not much, though I think I remember some die-M$-die cries on NANAE some time ago.
However, I'm getting tons of spam from Microsoft-owned bcentral.com, and as far as I am concerned, bcentral is a spamhaus. And that is not only spam from bcentral customers, but also spam advertising bcentral itself.
I suspect that they are spamming old Linkexchange users. Linkexchange was actually pretty cool, as long as you had a better-than-average click-through rate. MS bought Linkexchange in the dot-com days, I pulled out instantly, by apparently, the address I used then followed the purchase through to bcentral, and is now being spammed.
So, yeah, I think I can say that I am being spammed by MS.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and Terry Jones would get really impatient with his neighbors! ;-)
Anyway, I was plugging our own webcast (from four cities in Norway, two of them had great weather), but that is all too late now...
Anybody could implement, but each implementation would have to contain code to keep micropayments going from end-user to the patent holder.
Then, it could be argued, it is our problem to implement things like that, not the patent system.
Again, I'm a devil's advocate now, but I think there are those who think like this.
In the early 1990-ties, Islam Karimov was a cheap Soviet-style dictator wannabee. But he worked hard, intensive surveillance of pro-democracy workers, rigged elections, and eventually, political assassinations, extensive use of torture, etc., gaining real, dictator power.
Most political dissidents have fled, notably, Mohammad Salih, who ran against Karimov in one of the elections. He was the subject of an assassination attempt, that fortunately failed. Salih is a member of the Erk Democratic Party.
After 9/11, the US has given Karimov all the support he needs to grow from a dictator wannabee to a full Saddam/Hitler-style tyrant. There is hardly any serious democratic opposition left in Uzbekistan. What there is, however, is a bunch of extreme muslim fundamentalists, so, should Karimov loose power, it is not going to be the democratic opposition taking over, it is going to be the religious extremists (which is a development we're unsurprisingly seeing in Iraq too).
When I see Tommy Franks shaking hands with of the worst tyrants on the planet, it makes me wanna puke... It is history repeating itself, it is a reminder that Saddam too was a dictator wannabee before Donald Rumsfeld went to shake hands with him in 1984.
If the US wants to have any credibility whatsoever with the war-for-freedom rhetoric, they should at least stop supporting the worst dictators on the planet.
No, but it has been said that .COM signalled the death of NET... :-)
Obviously, if individual developers become liable for the code they write, it would be bad. If, OTOH, liability follows the money, it would be a good thing.
If you buy a Red Hat product, Red Hat is held liable for the bugs that may be there, not J. Random Hacker. So, Red Hat would have to thoroughly review the code, employing more people to do it. That way, more hackers could work full-time on free software. Prizes for free swoftware would go up, not a bad thing in itself, and so there will be more money to develop free software.
The product that vendors would sell, is a warranty.
I think the community should support efforts to make those who sell software liable for the products they sell.
I think the folks at Opera know that adware is not sustainable in the long run, and that they will figure out something when sales decline.
True, Linux will survive, I don't worry about Linux.
But, I worry about society, a lot. Society needs Linux, to, uhm, save the world. We're approaching Stallman's dystopic "right to read"-society at a disturbing pace. Soon, the technical foundations for it is all in place, and we don't know how long it would take for society to transform itself to this dystopia once that has happened.
Free software is the best we can do to avoid it, and for that reason, I would say it is a rush to make it ready for the masses.
Actually, it was this story, posted on a different mailing list that made me realize it was april 1st the other day... Perhaps Yahoo is just a little late and didn't get the joke?
However, there's no way you can prevent spambots from parsing the whole file. If you serve it to them, then they can and will parse whatever is there.
You can try to identify the spambots by looking at e.g. the User-Agent string and serve them false content, but it is not going to be very effective, and you'll get into a similar arms-race with the spammers as we have on the filtering side.
So, then, the idea with providing troll-boxes is that those addresses will get spammed. You can take measures when they are spammed, you can stick them in the teergrube, and you can reject any subsequent messages from the same source to any of the users of the system.
So, the idea with a trollbox is not that you will not get spam to other addresses, the idea is that once the trollbox is spammed, you can take measures against the spammer. Many spamlists are in fact sorted alphabetically... There is a reason why my trollbox begins with aa0... :-)
Yeah, exactly, but since it is such a nice demonstration, I don't see why /. shouldn't post it... I mean, here we are active participants and critical commentators, not the sheep you find in front of TV sets...
Hehe, BTW FWIW he is also a well-known Lumber Cartel Agent [tinlc] and a NANAE regular. Was anyway when I frequented NANAE.
<link rel="DoNotEmail" href="mailto:aa0u@kjernsmo.net" />
(yeah, that's a real, living trollbox, spambots, do your worst! :-) ) Very few users will ever see this, but the spambots will harvest it. It is clear that many of them do.
The other thing you mention, I think that is what is meant by a Teergrube. Marc Merlin has some good stuff on using Exim and SpamAssassin to reject messages or making spammers stick in a teergrube. He has some debs too.
Unfortunately, I haven't had time and I haven't been feeling adventurous enough to try all this, but clearly, it works well.
I think this is an accurate analysis of the situation and the Bush administrations intentions. When you've given up UN, which is the foundation for international law, it is too late to come whining about the Geneva convention. However, it ignores the lessons learnt from several thousand years of war, and there is another unfortunate fact, that it is now so easy to kill the whole population of the earth, that ignoring these lessons may be the last thing we do.
Besides, don't you think that Bush should have told this story to his soldiers: If we go without UN mandate, there is no such thing as international law anymore, which means that you guys, should you be captured, have no rights.
He should have had the decency to ask: "Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?"
But then, reading most of the stuff there, looking around, checking other sources, it seems that PNAC is actually an organization that seems to have these guys as founders, and that their goals are pretty much as stated on the website.
It could still be that the website is a hoax that just exaggerates the propositions of the real PNAC. I just find it very hard to believe that anyone who has grown up in a democracy can go to the extreme lengths that are being proposed on this website.
But then, researching it, it really seems like this website does represent the politics of the Bush administration. And that's really, really scary.
123greetings.com? They spammed me massively, and I wouldn't be surprised if they sold the address too... :-(
Unfortunately, one of my female friends sent me a card to my new address. Haven't got spam from 123greetings.com itself to that address, but I can't trace it if they sold it.
That's all I have for the moment...
So, where are the packages? Me, I grabbed the most recent kernel-source-2.4.18 I could find, but that doesn't seem patched.
But then, there shouldn't be many remote normal-user exploits on my box either, so I'm not really that worried.
Apparently, Ericsson denies the accusations, and I seriously doubt such senders would have any health effects but Iran has made some good progress lately, and it is very serious if Ericsson provides tools for oppression.
Consider a boycot.
Hehe, well, I'm certainly not in you position, I'm an astrophysicist who just got the job of selling 100 000 solar eclipse glasses by the end of May...
A completely new thing to me of course, but it started me searching for simple CRM/ERP solutions.
I bumped into Compiere. Not an option for us, but have you looked at it?
After hitting print, the keyboard just froze. That's all he could tell me. He found no other way than pushing The Button. Fortunately, I have ext3 on all partitions... :-)
The box is running KDE 3.0.5a, and while he could move the mouse, nothing happened when he pushed the K button, he said.
I haven't been home to check it out, it is not that far away, though. There has also been some problems with this keyboard. It is old and the connection has been bad at times. Dad insisted he had checked and put it firmly back in several times, and hangs at the same spot every time. After all, he is an engineer... :-)
Anybody seen this behaviour...?
Because it was free as in speech and as in beer. Gopher was not. That's why I became so enthusiastic, allthough it was half a year later (and it still took me another 8 months to make a homepage).
Then, given how important astronomy has been and still is to the development of science and technology, on the fundamental level, I hope /.ers see that cutting off astronomy from the most important sources of radiation is a Bad Thing[tm], and that alltough deregulating the spectrum may be a good thing, astronomers should be heard.
Also, for more about the dark sky problem, check out the International Dark Sky Association.
Nono. IANAG, but IIRC, there were three things that happened at the same time. One thing was that a big asteroid hit the Yucatan peninsula (and thats the crater they have been talking about the last few decades), the second thing was that India began to bump into the rest of Asia and created the Himalayas and stuff. That was pretty messy too. And the last thing I don't remember right now... I haven't read a lot about it lately, but I think I have an idea where I should go looking if I wanted to read up... :-)
However, I'm getting tons of spam from Microsoft-owned bcentral.com, and as far as I am concerned, bcentral is a spamhaus. And that is not only spam from bcentral customers, but also spam advertising bcentral itself.
I suspect that they are spamming old Linkexchange users. Linkexchange was actually pretty cool, as long as you had a better-than-average click-through rate. MS bought Linkexchange in the dot-com days, I pulled out instantly, by apparently, the address I used then followed the purchase through to bcentral, and is now being spammed.
So, yeah, I think I can say that I am being spammed by MS.