We need a million geek march on washington... although with all the technology most of us would bring, it would probably turn into a lan party. It would be fun nonetheless.
And what, pray tell, would be wrong with a milion node lan party on the Washington mall?
I think it's a damn good idea.
How about Halloween Weekend (in honor of the Documents)? that's far enough away from now to give everyone time to plan, and close enough to the Elections so that they won't forget. You can get cheap tix to Dulles or BWI in the fall, and if we're lucky it won't rain.
Alert the media! Geeks march on D.C.! Film at 11...
-- Somebody, somewhere, is going to rate this Funny. He'd be wrong....
That has already totally turned me off. This website at best will prepare people for using linux in an environment that will have a systems administrator who will do all the difficult stuff[...]
I know, I know, it's more fun when they let you load your own box. But in the Real World, they plump a box down on your desk, preloaded with all the stuff you Will Use, and bid you do your duty. Some folks let you download your favourite apps, some don't. My last job was pretty cavalier about it ("wow! you get all that off the net for free? Where do we get more?"); my current job would probably have a kitten if they knew I had Emacs loaded native to my PC (despite the fact that Perl is sine qua non for this environment)....
But really. How many folks actually install their own operating system, except for maybe BSD and Be? Most folks (WinDoze, Mac, and anything bigger) get their 'puters preinstalled, and an increasing number of Linuxites show up at an install party and get the gurus to set it up for them...
You and I and anyone reading this works in a rarified atmosphere of ubergeeks, where recompiling the kernel is a daily occurrence. We're way beyond Six Sigma here...
Welcome to the Real World, where Everyone Else just turns on their computer and expects it to Just Work.
-- warpeightbot, GaTech ICS '90 gus Baird (RIP) Linux: The Choice of a GNU Generation
Was to simply get on the Linux Users' Group mailing list of the target city and _ask_. It took a bit the first time, but the second time (different city), I had a contact in a week and an offer in three.
Networking, networking, networking.
-- See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too;-) -- Linus
Your post seems to advocate an absolute right to speech without [consideration to its likely effects]. Do I misunderstand you? If not how do you propose to avoid these problems?
Fair question. For which I have an answer.
Your fist, my nose.
That is where the line is drawn. The old Flip Wilson line "The devil made me do it" is an abandonment of personal responsibility. One is free to say what one wants; one is also free to decide what to do about it. It is the rioters who are at fault, not the so-called inciter. If they use force against people or property, they should be brought to justice.
Now, it is the function of government to punish force, or fraud. If one can prove an inciter to riot used some sort of fraud (anything from fallacious argument to outright lies) to inspire the people to riot, then he can and should be held responsible in civil court for his damages. Same thing with "fire" in a crowded theatre... unless there really is a fire, in which case Good Sam clauses apply.
It's about each person taking responsibility for his or her own self, and not being led around by the likes of the last scuzzball orator they just heard, no matter how outrageous it might have been, or how much sense it might make.
-- "It seemed the logical thing to do at the time." -- Sarek
I really think you're being knee-jerk about the Holocaust. I don't see the connection at all. It's just some pompous corporate posturing by some guys who would rather protect the market share they inherited than risk innovation.
No, Jamie is right. Censorship is a slippery slope; once you start down it, everything is vulnerable. The Germans are particularly sensitive about the topic.
The Jews have a saying, which, for personal and private reasons, I share.
Never Again.
One doesn't squash Holocaust-deniers, or Marxists, or pedophiles, or any idea, no matter how revolting. One holds it out for the world to see... and ridicule and spit upon and point and laugh and use as an object lesson for your kids when they're old enough to handle it. This is why my mother has not one, but two, copies of Mein Kampf (one in the original German). These ideas, and the havoc they're capable of wreaking on the entire world, should not be forgotten.
To hide them, pretend they do not exist, suppress them, not teach our children how to handle them, is unhealthy, dysfunctional, and a recipe for disaster. There will always be Bad Men out there, with terrible weapons and evil intent, and it is up to us, and our children as they grow, and their children's children, to always be ready to deal with them with dispatch.... and without sinking to their level. We must learn our history, and the lessons it contains... or we are doomed to repeat it.
The Germans want to censor. What really doesn't matter, we must do what we can to stop them, simply on principle.... because censorship leads to thoughtcrime, and everyone who has ever read 1984 knows where that leads.
Microsystems also asked the judge to order the Swedish Internet company where the bypass utility is published to turn over records identifying everyone who visited the Web site or downloaded the program.
Knee-Jerk response: I went and downloaded the application straight away. What the hell do they think they're going to do with the logs? Should I expect a Mattel-In-Black to arrive at my front door in the early hours?
OK, people, what are we going to really do about this thing?
If I were those Swedish dudes, my logs, if any, would be a figment of Mattel's imagination. "Don't run'em, your honor. Violation of privacy." In other words, Bork you very much, Mattel. If, of course, it ever came to that; if I were the Swedish ambassador, I'd be giving that judge the dipolmatic finger when it came to any half-baked ideas of extradition.... Maybe it'll teach our American bureaucracy a thing or two about soveriegnity. They need to learn that.
OK, now the hard part. How do we as geeks, the denizens of cyberspace, prevail upon Mattel to BUTT OUT of our millieu? Bigger question: How do we enforce the idea that, barring outright thievery or violation of a contract, there is free speech in cyberspace (barring the "printing press" rule i.e. no free speech if you don't own the box)?
I don't have an answer to that, but we need a way or three to lean on Mattel, MPAA, the Imperial Federal Government dominant in North America, and anyone else who gets in our way. (Hear that, BorgieBill?) Whining on here won't do it.
It is tribal knowledge that the MSCE test is purely on paper. On the other hand, the RHCE has two hands-on, no-notes lab sections without which you will not pass the exam.... and from what I've heard, the upper-grade CISCO exams are multi-day multi-machine nightmares.
The real irony is that Microsoft is entirely, albeit indirectly, responsible for its own downfall. To-wit:
Microsoft wrote and marketed the OS that made the Intel platform a commodity, enabling both Linus and the BSD folks to get off the ground in the early 90's, and also the Be folks later.
They then proceeded to pile on the bloatware, tightly coupled and closed standard, to the point where fast, tight, loosely coupled code could not only outperform it easily, but was much more stable.
Now they've proceeded to cheese off all the folks that were dedicated to their paradigm, and those folks are now looking for alternatives to preaching the Microsoft party line.
To quote somebody most folks equate with Bill Gates, "Now your failure is complete." No, I don't expect M$ to go bankrupt overnight. This is, after all, a multi, multi-billion dollar outfit; they can pay paychecks out of petty cash for quite a while. But this may well be the deluge that melts the giant's feet of clay...
So we've run about the typical time elapsed between dev kernel versions but the current kernel version is half that of normal so it makes me wonder if we're ready yet.
Yes.
Linus set out to only include a limited set of stuff in the new kernel, so that that thumping huge 27-month gap wouldn't happen again. The fact that there have only been 51 blockpoints is a reflection of the decreased new-feature count. As it is, he'd have liked to have been done by December, but you know how things go... as it is we're getting one a year and being lucky to do so, at this rate.
It's still a helluva job, and everyone hacking on it deserves every scrap of recognition they get, in the form of long green or otherwise.
-- "Uncle Cosmo... why do they call this a word processor?"
"It's simple, Skyler... you've seen what food processors do to food, right?" -- MacNelley, "Shoe"
I'm going to go out on a limb, and post this not as an AC (which would be safe, but relatively unheard) but as myself, because I think it needs to be heard.
When are we going to figure out that what 534 boneheads and one libertarian (the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Ron Paul) vote on up there in the District O'Crime, aka The Law, means exactly jack when it comes to what you and I do on a daily basis? How many of us speed on a daily basis? Even better: How many of us actually stop the car completely every time at a stop sign when nothing is coming? I thought so.
The Law can't be everywhere.
What does this mean for you and me and the DMCA? Nothing, really. The DMCA is worth less than the paper it's printed on.
On the other hand, it also means a lot. It means that we've just been pushed (back) over the line into being a culture of outlaws, like our predecessors in the Sixties. This is constraining, in that some of us will have consequences for exercising our freedom of choice. It is also freeing, in the idea that, hey, if we're going to be outlaws, we may as well act like it. They can't kill the net, they can only push it underground. You guys still remember how to do Fido and UUCP, don't you? We can also tunnel protocols across the "legit" Net, encrypt our data, steganize it, all sorts of shifty things to keep The Man off our backs. The tech to do this is already out there, in the clear, currently unfettered. All we have to do is USE IT.
Bottom line is, I agree with a previous poster. If we don't like what Big Brother is doing, t'hell with him. See to it that he doesn't get any of our money, or our friends' money. Support your local mom and pop band. ISP. Grocery/health food store. Credit union. (Get the hell out of Megabank.... but that's a whole 'nother can of worms)
In short, make the message resoundingly clear with our silence: Big Brother, stick it.
-- "Take this jooooob and shove it, I ain't workin' here no more...." -- George Jones
Obviously, the RIAA is mostly concerned about scaring people at this point. If they can make people think that they will actually get in trouble for making MP3's of any type, it will scare people away from the technology. Isn't that essentially FUD?
Yes.
RIAA and friends want to make it impossible to copy anything. They also want to control who can originate content (q.v. DeCSS). They would love to be able to control how often we could even play a given piece of media, or limit us to streaming audio across the net so that we couldn't even own the media in the first place.
Why?
Because they want their cut.
But we can stop this, if we put our minds to it. Remember DiVX? That evil little play-for-play disk that Circuit City and (Sony? refresh my memory....) tried to foist on us? Did we not squash it like a bug? can we not do it again? Are we men, or are we Logitech?
CHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGE!:)
Seriously, folks, if we bitch loudly and long enough to the right folks, get all het up and throw a few bucks each in the right pockets (EFF), we can nip this thing in the bud, and tell RIAA they can take their micromanagement of my PRIVATE LIFE and shove it where the sun don't shine.
The whole thing is fscked up anyway; bands spend 2-300 days a year on the road promoting their latest blood, sweat and tears giving concerts at $50 a pop, and who gets rich? Some fat cat in an ivory tower who can't carry a tune in a bucket. Two things are trying to solve that. One is the fact that pressing CD's is so cheap any two-bit outfit can hit the club circuit and hawk their own, and the other is the pay-for-download MP3 sites, where small-time artists can get the dough for good jam with no media costs involved. Neither involves signing your life away to some fat cat.
You know what? RIAA HATES that. We should love it. We should support it. See that it thrives. Make the old adage true: Money talks, bullshit walks.
Vote with your feet... and your ones and tens.
-- That Shaft, he's one baaaad mutha- (Hush your mouth!) I'm just talkin' 'bout Shaft! (We can dig it!)
The bears repeating: Anonymity is the ONLY shield against the tyranny of the majority. Without it, you kill freedom of speech. Some things are simply TOO dangerous to put your name on.
Amen. Only in the last fifty years have certain religions become something you could talk about with people you didn't trust with their hand on the trapdoor lever when your neck was in a noose... and even then in certain places it's still a good way to get the authorities asking your children questions without the benefit of a lawyer... or worse. Certain political views will still get you ostracized in places like California or even Seattle. Being a union member will still get you run out of Rutherford County, Tennessee on a rail (last I checked) (the Nissan workers LIKE their Japanese management, thank you very much).
So yeah, it won't get you burned at the stake anymore, but a lot of views are definitely not career-enhancing moves, and since making rent is rather important, a lack of anonymity would, nay, does, definitely have a chilling effect on free speech. I really like the fact that Taco has allowed for us to post anonymously here; I've used the facility more than once. (Sometimes you just want to make a smart-ass comment; sometimes you want to say something really controversial, like expressing the possibility that a little open revolution might be needed.)
To be perfectly honest, I think the U.S. Government is going to have a real fun time trying to trace the entire Internet.... the Aussies are already figuring that out. I ga-ron-tee that the first time there are rumblings of this kind of tracing, somebody is going to run off to Christmas Island and set up a server farm....
and I would be one of the first jokers to pony up the fifty bucks to get an account on it. Damn straight.
-- The tree of liberty is water'd with the blood of patriots and tyrants alike. -- Jefferson (quoted from memory)
Where have you been for the last decade? Perl killed shell scripting for non-trivial automation years ago.
Exqueeze me??
Perl is great when you have megagobs of memory and storage to throw around. It won't, however, fit onto a floppy disk; the perl5 package (just perl itself, we're not even talking tcl/tk here) is 13mb. That's a whole box of floppy disks.
No, dude, the shell is NOT dead. There is NO substitute for #!/bin/sh when space gets tight and the rubber really meets the road. Same reason you don't even see vi on a rescue disk anymore, it's pico. Unix the old fashioned way. Tight as a Scot's purse and sharper than his tongue.
With regards to [alphabet soup], how does everyone here feel about something like the additional (and user-defined) attributes in the BeOS file system, where all the additional e-mail info (subject, header, etc. is contained in attributes attached to the main document.
I like it. I find those mailing lists which explicitly tag their e-mail with Subject: [LISTNAME] make it real easy to sort mail into appropriate folders so that I can search them for content and not have a cluttered Inbox. (No, I have a webmail interface, no Procmail available.)
I think being able to attach attributes such as Project: to files and then being able to dynamically resort the filesystem view based on those would be a Good Thing.... right now I have to go to two or three places (mail archives, local drive, multiple server drives) to find info on something; if I could have the box load the attributes for all mounted filesystems, then I could just look for everything on Project Purple and there they'd all be. Big time savings. More profit. Take Friday off.:)
As for hierarchy, I think Jakob tried to make the point, and I think I agree with him, it's not necessarily hierarchy, but grouping, that makes things work.... some files in hierarchy "a" also fit the paradigm for hierarchy "b" (like, say, the Junkbuster proxy, which belongs in/usr/local/bin because it's not part of the distro, but belongs in/sbin because it's a daemon... give it "Source: local" and "Security-class: daemon" and it works right).... symlinks are an evil kludge; unfortunately, they work...
-- "There's more than one way to do it." -- Perl slogan
why don't OS manufacturers and distributors bundle IJB or something similar with their product?
Good question. IJB is 100% (almost fanatically) GNU, so no one in the Linux community would have a problem shipping it.... Ditto anybody else who isn't allergic to the GPL.
However, the Berkeley folks might have a problem with the "GPL Virus" on their distros; what's more, I'll bet you a jelly donut Bill Gates (that's Mister Big Brother to you:) would never, ever include a piece of amateur-written, untested, probably virus-laden software on his professionally-built, expensive release CD.... oh, come on, what do you have to hide? [remove tongue from cheek]
No, I think it's a damn fine idea and we ought to drop it in the ears of folks like Bob Young, Bruce Perens, Larry Augustin (he's no distromeister but he does build boxen that could be preconfigured...) post-haste.
Come to think of it, I think I installed IJB from RPM anyway, so it would be dead simple for the Red Hat and SuSE folks to simply sweep it onto the CD.... and the Debian and Slack folks could just run alien... boom, problem solved.
If we can get'em to do it...
-- "See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too;-)" -- Linus Torvalds
If you want to [do something against the Constitution] you have to amend the Constitution.
You wish.
What about the Brady Bill? What about all this "hate crimes" legislation? What about Federal prohibition of certain substances? What about the Federal ban on legitimate weaponry carried by legitimate, law-abiding adult citizens into the badlands of certain major metropolitan areas, just because they happen to be college campuses (q.v. Georgia Tech)? What about Federal intervention into healthcare programs, the generation of electric power and the marketing thereof to the people, the education of our children? The Document says provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare, not the other way around... (For those of you wondering about generating power, look at TVA... the Tennessee Valley Authority came into that area, arbitrarily took people's lands by flooding them, paid them a pittance, and sent them on their way. They took over the electric power business in the area with their dams, and justified it in the name of interstate commerce with the locks they built. Harrumph.)
I could go on, but the fact remains that there is very little of the original Bill of Rights that really sticks absolutely anymore. What of the cases actually make it to the Supreme Court are usually ajudicated appropriately, but how many of us have the resources to fight a case that far? Damned few. I have several cases I would like to bring, mostly involving illegal random searches, and one involving intimidation by a certain small-town Georgia cop, but even at my salary I can't afford the bevy of lawyers it would take to do it justice (pun intentional)...
Which is a damned shame and tends to give me an itchy trigger finger.
-- Freedom is built on four boxes: Soap, Ballot, Jury, and Cartridge.
Hot damn. A raid on the Evil Empire. I knew I left Dixie and came all the way out here for more than just the greenbacks.... sign me up for sniper duty!
(you know, the truly scary part of this is that, if we really, really wanted to, we could organize and execute one of these little raids so fast Bill Gates' head would swim... vive l'Internet, ne-c'est-pas?)
-- Tar Heels don't run, Tennesseeans always Volunteer, and every Georgia boy knows his shotgun. Woe be to he who crosses the man who's all three. -- me "And Texas gratefully remembers them all." -- Dillon Pyron, on t.p.guns
WHAT?!?!? Bring me the head of whoever moderated that down!!!! And get that article back to +5 Funny where the hell it belongs! T'hell with my karma, fsck'em if they can't take a joke!
You do have a right to the source code, under the GPL. This is law. However much like the Constitutional American "Right to Bear Arms". I have the right to deny you access for exercising this right. While you can bear a concealed handgun, you are not allowed to bring it on a public bus, or many places of business. The signs usually say something like 'No firearms beyond this point'. Which is basically making people to give up their Constitutional rights to bear arms. The rules here will be similar.
What homeboy hasn't realized is that both limitations on the Second Amendment for law abiding citizens and limitations on the GPL for law-abiding Quake players are both stupid and unconstitutional/illegal. The fact that neither of these has been properly tested in court is irrevelant. He's just wrong.
The GPL is an obligation to the distributor of the source, not the recipient. The right/responsibility to bear arms is protected for the bearer, not the business.
Here's to the abridgers of both the 2nd and the GPL having their day in court.... and leaving in shame.
Does not. It's the only position that is defensible, and the American Library Association, a bunch of people who know a whole lot more about books than I do, knows it and espouses it. Any other approach runs into the quid custodes problem, which ultimately leads to a repeat of the Inquisition.
Yes, pointing out other solutions is useful. Matter of fact, that's probably the best way. But I have no sympathy for parents who indulge in electronic babysitting of any form. This whole raising kids by proxy thing is not only producing parents who have forgotten what civil rights (and their corresponding responsibilities) are, but are ultimately responsible for things like Columbine. But I digress.
There are some folks who will listen. Address them. (Frankly, I think a real good solution is simply to remove the 'Net access altogether from the kids' section and replace it with a copy of Britannica... in all honesty, thinking as a parent, the uncensored Net is no place for unsupervised younglings. If Mother wants to sign for her kids' adult-grade library card, including a release of liability, that's her problem.) But when we consider adults in the adult section of a public library, paid for by you and me the taxpayers, censorship in any form has no place. It very simply constitutes prior restraint on free speech, and any such restraint, no matter how small, must be opposed, lest we gradually and by degrees lose all our rights. Some folks learned the hard way about sixty years ago about defending their rights, and that so-called "middle ground," and six million of them paid with their lives. Sorry, I don't intend to go quietly.
There's two sides to this. One is that some people use the "square-headed girlfriend" for escape. They don't WANT to interact f2f. When they do, it's about the world in the box. This is, of course, bad, and generally to be avoided.
The flip side is those of us who use the box to augment, add to, facilitate, and generally improve the relationships we already have, or would not have had but for the wonders of modern technology. I know for myself that were it not for the Net I would still be single in Atlanta and miserable rather than married, in Seattle, and reasonably happy and improving. So there.
But there is a third possibility (sorry, Arlo) a third possibility that no one has considered yet.
It's quite obvious to the casual Slashdot reader (which is different from the casual observer) that Stanford ignored the reality of the situation. Nobody has yet bothered to ask why.
I think I know. Flame me if you think I'm out in left field, but here goes:
I think They are scared. "They" are the pointy haired bosses, the university deans, the brokers, everyone who's a middleman and raking in the cash. They see the potential for their power to slip away, for mere mortals to talk directly to God without purchasing an indulgence from the local priesthood. People like Bob Young and Jeff Bezos and a couple gents named Larry and you and me have, not overtly, but just as loudly, nailed our 95 Theses to the doors of Redmond and 1600 Pennsylvania.... and the fertilizer is beginning to hit the rotating ventilation device. But it's no longer politic to simply send in the Knights Templar and squash the revolution. First you have to demonize it in the press. Alternatively you can attempt (Microsoft, Algore, AOL) to co-opt it for yourself.
[skip a bit, brother]
Ultimately it's about control. The Big Bwanas see us scurrying around down here plotting world domination and they don't like that idea because it means they'll have to drive a Neon instead of a Nine-Four-Four. So they get all het up about regulating the net and filtering it and keeping pr0n away from short people and bomb making info out of the hands of those Bearded Fellows (hey, I resemble that remark...) and ultimately grinding it down and mixing it with water and making it into the same kind of Soylent Green we've been sucking off the OTHER Glass Teat since our mothers were in grade school.
Bleah! Pfui! yak! barf. Get that stuff away from me, it rots your brain.
So what are we supposed to do about it anyway?
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. Keep banging away at your Open Source projects, keep hacking on wireless internet, keep sending those checks to EFF and friends, and above all, don't let the bastards get you down. Don't even let them slow you down. If it's obvious to you that they aren't interested in listening, put it in granny low, sound the horn, and floor it. They were warned.
The 21st century is coming thru, boys and girls, and we are in the driver's seat. Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
Get yourself a fuzz buster (radar detector) unless 55mph is acceptable to you, some small towns finance their sherrif departments by fining speeding motorists who are passing by.
It's not quite that bad anymore. The limit on Rt 66 proper in NM/AZ/CA is 60, IIRC, and if you really want to go fast, it parallels Interstate 40 for much of that route, on which the speed limit is 70mph+.... Keep in mind that Route 66 is still a bumpy little two-lane road, which means you have to pass against oncoming traffic when (not if) you get stuck behind some geriatric farmer in a pickup truck doing 35mph, AND risk your suspension while doing so... Interstate 40 is a modern, limited-access freeway with high speed limits, police call boxes in case you have problems... and plenty of exits off onto "Historic Route 66" where all the tourist-trap trinket shops are. What often happens is that Route 66 goes through a downtown area, while the Interstate goes around it. That way you can exit off, go into town, find the library and get your Net fix, find a hotel and sleep, get some food, then continue on your way, following the old highway until it re-joined the Interstate.
That's my two bits on how to do the trip... and since I did something similar not too long ago (Knoxville, TN to Seattle via I-40 until it ran out, then via 101 and I-5), I can also tell you that your GSM phone isn't worth a tinker's damn over long stretches of NM and AZ; as they said, you'll want an American PCS/Analog phone.
Good luck on the trip; it's quite an experience, not to be missed. I don't think I'd ever do it again, but I'm glad I did the once.
Suggestion: If you can, extend your trip a bit, and take California 1 up the coast at least as far as San Francisco; if possible, continue on US 101 from there to Seattle. (CA 1 and US 101 meet at the Golden Gate bridge.) You will miss some of the more spectacular scenery in the country if you don't... and some of the better food, too. Things to look for: The Big Sur area (between Ventura and Santa Cruz) (get some clam chowder); Santa Cruz itself (good place for quaint shops); Chinatown in San Francisco; the Golden Gate itself; California wine country (anything north of LA, but concentrated in the Napa valley between San Francisco and west of Sacramento); and the volcanoes (Mt. Shasta, which I-5 goes RIGHT by, Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, and Mt. Ranier). Of course, Seattle proper is its own story....:)
1) Unknown crackers launch DoS against biggest commercial websites. No one takes credit. Matter of fact, no one that I know of has posted a trace on these jokers.
2) NSA has been yelling about this sort of thing for months.
3) The current administration just happens to be trying to fund its current Internet security initiative.
4) The FBI just happens to have something that they "just wrote" in order to deal with precisely this kind of attack, one we haven't seen before on this scale. It's closed source. It wants to run as root.
Yeah, right.
Where are spaf and the boys when you need them? I'd like to see them take the Fibbie's code apart byte by byte and make sure they're not up to something themselves.
Gods help us if they are.
(I know, call me paranoid, fsck my karma to hell, but bigod no steenking revenooer is getting in MY box quite so easily....hmph.)
-- "We are the FBI, we have no sense of humor that we know of." -- Tommy Lee Jones ("K"), "Men In Black"
make sure you're using tcpwrappers to secure any services that are running - ftp especially.
Even better: Get xinetd (or have your maintenance guys do it)... think regular inetd + tcpwrappers + configurable logging + no extra process overhead for all this functionality.... no, I don't have the URL, but it should be on freshmeat, rpmfind, and such like....
Even comes complete with a tool for converting your/etc/inetd.conf file to its own format... c'est cool.
The point of the 33133+3 h^x0r d00d's existience is to see just how big a stink he can raise. Well, he sure raised a stink all right. The previous posters' comments are dead on. We're about two steps shy of one of two things: Total chaos on the Net, or (more likely) an event that will make the Inquisition seem like a polite conversation over tea and crumpets.
These kiddies need to be taken a clue, personally and fast: you're turning the global sandbox you play in into a litter box, and if you don't clean up your act RIGHT NOW, Big Brother is going to dump you (*and us*) right down the latrine.
How that clue is delivered is none of my business.
The US Congress has already passed a law restricting the imaging of Israel.
What bugs me most about this is that Congress thinks they can legislate such "dangerous behavior" out of existience. I have news for Congress: Tennessee's #1 cash crop is illegal. Translation: Congress' power to legislate behavior is exactly squat.
Which is as it should be.
Mere posession of information (DeCSS) should not be illegal. If I want to go have a spysat take pictures if the Israeli version of Area 51, MY GOVERNMENT has no business holding a gun to my head and telling me I can't.
Now, if I go use that pic to lob a SCUD missile in on the runway, the Israelis have the right to make me face a firing squad. But the UNITED STATES fscking GOVERNMENT has no business poking its nose in my hard drive, period, end of sentence.
Assuming, of course, they can make heads or tails of it, or want to bother devoting a supercomputer to a small-time maverick like me...:)
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's a damn good idea.
How about Halloween Weekend (in honor of the Documents)? that's far enough away from now to give everyone time to plan, and close enough to the Elections so that they won't forget. You can get cheap tix to Dulles or BWI in the fall, and if we're lucky it won't rain.
Alert the media! Geeks march on D.C.! Film at 11...
--
Somebody, somewhere, is going to rate this Funny. He'd be wrong....
But really. How many folks actually install their own operating system, except for maybe BSD and Be? Most folks (WinDoze, Mac, and anything bigger) get their 'puters preinstalled, and an increasing number of Linuxites show up at an install party and get the gurus to set it up for them...
You and I and anyone reading this works in a rarified atmosphere of ubergeeks, where recompiling the kernel is a daily occurrence. We're way beyond Six Sigma here...
Welcome to the Real World, where Everyone Else just turns on their computer and expects it to Just Work.
--
warpeightbot, GaTech ICS '90 gus Baird (RIP)
Linux: The Choice of a GNU Generation
Networking, networking, networking.
-- ;-)
See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux,
you have to be a sneaky bastard too
-- Linus
Your fist, my nose.
That is where the line is drawn. The old Flip Wilson line "The devil made me do it" is an abandonment of personal responsibility. One is free to say what one wants; one is also free to decide what to do about it. It is the rioters who are at fault, not the so-called inciter. If they use force against people or property, they should be brought to justice.
Now, it is the function of government to punish force, or fraud. If one can prove an inciter to riot used some sort of fraud (anything from fallacious argument to outright lies) to inspire the people to riot, then he can and should be held responsible in civil court for his damages. Same thing with "fire" in a crowded theatre... unless there really is a fire, in which case Good Sam clauses apply.
It's about each person taking responsibility for his or her own self, and not being led around by the likes of the last scuzzball orator they just heard, no matter how outrageous it might have been, or how much sense it might make.
--
"It seemed the logical thing to do at the time." -- Sarek
The Jews have a saying, which, for personal and private reasons, I share.
Never Again.
One doesn't squash Holocaust-deniers, or Marxists, or pedophiles, or any idea, no matter how revolting. One holds it out for the world to see... and ridicule and spit upon and point and laugh and use as an object lesson for your kids when they're old enough to handle it. This is why my mother has not one, but two, copies of Mein Kampf (one in the original German). These ideas, and the havoc they're capable of wreaking on the entire world, should not be forgotten.
To hide them, pretend they do not exist, suppress them, not teach our children how to handle them, is unhealthy, dysfunctional, and a recipe for disaster. There will always be Bad Men out there, with terrible weapons and evil intent, and it is up to us, and our children as they grow, and their children's children, to always be ready to deal with them with dispatch.... and without sinking to their level. We must learn our history, and the lessons it contains... or we are doomed to repeat it.
The Germans want to censor. What really doesn't matter, we must do what we can to stop them, simply on principle.... because censorship leads to thoughtcrime, and everyone who has ever read 1984 knows where that leads.
--
It Means Us, Too
-- Afterword to 1984
If I were those Swedish dudes, my logs, if any, would be a figment of Mattel's imagination. "Don't run'em, your honor. Violation of privacy." In other words, Bork you very much, Mattel. If, of course, it ever came to that; if I were the Swedish ambassador, I'd be giving that judge the dipolmatic finger when it came to any half-baked ideas of extradition.... Maybe it'll teach our American bureaucracy a thing or two about soveriegnity. They need to learn that.
OK, now the hard part. How do we as geeks, the denizens of cyberspace, prevail upon Mattel to BUTT OUT of our millieu? Bigger question: How do we enforce the idea that, barring outright thievery or violation of a contract, there is free speech in cyberspace (barring the "printing press" rule i.e. no free speech if you don't own the box)?
I don't have an answer to that, but we need a way or three to lean on Mattel, MPAA, the Imperial Federal Government dominant in North America, and anyone else who gets in our way. (Hear that, BorgieBill?) Whining on here won't do it.
OK, guys, suggestions?
The real irony is that Microsoft is entirely, albeit indirectly, responsible for its own downfall. To-wit:
- Microsoft wrote and marketed the OS that made the Intel platform a commodity, enabling both Linus and the BSD folks to get off the ground in the early 90's, and also the Be folks later.
- They then proceeded to pile on the bloatware, tightly coupled and closed standard, to the point where fast, tight, loosely coupled code could not only outperform it easily, but was much more stable.
- Now they've proceeded to cheese off all the folks that were dedicated to their paradigm, and those folks are now looking for alternatives to preaching the Microsoft party line.
To quote somebody most folks equate with Bill Gates, "Now your failure is complete." No, I don't expect M$ to go bankrupt overnight. This is, after all, a multi, multi-billion dollar outfit; they can pay paychecks out of petty cash for quite a while. But this may well be the deluge that melts the giant's feet of clay...--
Timberrrrrrrrrrrr!
Linus set out to only include a limited set of stuff in the new kernel, so that that thumping huge 27-month gap wouldn't happen again. The fact that there have only been 51 blockpoints is a reflection of the decreased new-feature count. As it is, he'd have liked to have been done by December, but you know how things go... as it is we're getting one a year and being lucky to do so, at this rate.
It's still a helluva job, and everyone hacking on it deserves every scrap of recognition they get, in the form of long green or otherwise.
-- ... why do they call this a word processor?"
"Uncle Cosmo
"It's simple, Skyler ... you've seen what food processors do to food, right?"
-- MacNelley, "Shoe"
When are we going to figure out that what 534 boneheads and one libertarian (the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Ron Paul) vote on up there in the District O'Crime, aka The Law, means exactly jack when it comes to what you and I do on a daily basis? How many of us speed on a daily basis? Even better: How many of us actually stop the car completely every time at a stop sign when nothing is coming? I thought so.
The Law can't be everywhere.
What does this mean for you and me and the DMCA? Nothing, really. The DMCA is worth less than the paper it's printed on.
On the other hand, it also means a lot. It means that we've just been pushed (back) over the line into being a culture of outlaws, like our predecessors in the Sixties. This is constraining, in that some of us will have consequences for exercising our freedom of choice. It is also freeing, in the idea that, hey, if we're going to be outlaws, we may as well act like it. They can't kill the net, they can only push it underground. You guys still remember how to do Fido and UUCP, don't you? We can also tunnel protocols across the "legit" Net, encrypt our data, steganize it, all sorts of shifty things to keep The Man off our backs. The tech to do this is already out there, in the clear, currently unfettered. All we have to do is USE IT.
Bottom line is, I agree with a previous poster. If we don't like what Big Brother is doing, t'hell with him. See to it that he doesn't get any of our money, or our friends' money. Support your local mom and pop band. ISP. Grocery/health food store. Credit union. (Get the hell out of Megabank.... but that's a whole 'nother can of worms)
In short, make the message resoundingly clear with our silence: Big Brother, stick it.
--
"Take this jooooob and shove it,
I ain't workin' here no more...."
-- George Jones
RIAA and friends want to make it impossible to copy anything. They also want to control who can originate content (q.v. DeCSS). They would love to be able to control how often we could even play a given piece of media, or limit us to streaming audio across the net so that we couldn't even own the media in the first place.
Why?
Because they want their cut.
But we can stop this, if we put our minds to it. Remember DiVX? That evil little play-for-play disk that Circuit City and (Sony? refresh my memory....) tried to foist on us? Did we not squash it like a bug? can we not do it again? Are we men, or are we Logitech?
CHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGE! :)
Seriously, folks, if we bitch loudly and long enough to the right folks, get all het up and throw a few bucks each in the right pockets (EFF), we can nip this thing in the bud, and tell RIAA they can take their micromanagement of my PRIVATE LIFE and shove it where the sun don't shine.
The whole thing is fscked up anyway; bands spend 2-300 days a year on the road promoting their latest blood, sweat and tears giving concerts at $50 a pop, and who gets rich? Some fat cat in an ivory tower who can't carry a tune in a bucket. Two things are trying to solve that. One is the fact that pressing CD's is so cheap any two-bit outfit can hit the club circuit and hawk their own, and the other is the pay-for-download MP3 sites, where small-time artists can get the dough for good jam with no media costs involved. Neither involves signing your life away to some fat cat.
You know what? RIAA HATES that. We should love it. We should support it. See that it thrives. Make the old adage true: Money talks, bullshit walks.
Vote with your feet... and your ones and tens.
--
That Shaft, he's one baaaad mutha-
(Hush your mouth!)
I'm just talkin' 'bout Shaft!
(We can dig it!)
So yeah, it won't get you burned at the stake anymore, but a lot of views are definitely not career-enhancing moves, and since making rent is rather important, a lack of anonymity would, nay, does, definitely have a chilling effect on free speech. I really like the fact that Taco has allowed for us to post anonymously here; I've used the facility more than once. (Sometimes you just want to make a smart-ass comment; sometimes you want to say something really controversial, like expressing the possibility that a little open revolution might be needed.)
To be perfectly honest, I think the U.S. Government is going to have a real fun time trying to trace the entire Internet.... the Aussies are already figuring that out. I ga-ron-tee that the first time there are rumblings of this kind of tracing, somebody is going to run off to Christmas Island and set up a server farm....
and I would be one of the first jokers to pony up the fifty bucks to get an account on it. Damn straight.
--
The tree of liberty is water'd with the blood of patriots and tyrants alike. -- Jefferson (quoted from memory)
Perl is great when you have megagobs of memory and storage to throw around. It won't, however, fit onto a floppy disk; the perl5 package (just perl itself, we're not even talking tcl/tk here) is 13mb. That's a whole box of floppy disks.
No, dude, the shell is NOT dead. There is NO substitute for #!/bin/sh when space gets tight and the rubber really meets the road. Same reason you don't even see vi on a rescue disk anymore, it's pico. Unix the old fashioned way. Tight as a Scot's purse and sharper than his tongue.
Glenn Stone
Clan Gordon
I think being able to attach attributes such as Project: to files and then being able to dynamically resort the filesystem view based on those would be a Good Thing.... right now I have to go to two or three places (mail archives, local drive, multiple server drives) to find info on something; if I could have the box load the attributes for all mounted filesystems, then I could just look for everything on Project Purple and there they'd all be. Big time savings. More profit. Take Friday off. :)
As for hierarchy, I think Jakob tried to make the point, and I think I agree with him, it's not necessarily hierarchy, but grouping, that makes things work.... some files in hierarchy "a" also fit the paradigm for hierarchy "b" (like, say, the Junkbuster proxy, which belongs in /usr/local/bin because it's not part of the distro, but belongs in /sbin because it's a daemon... give it "Source: local" and "Security-class: daemon" and it works right).... symlinks are an evil kludge; unfortunately, they work...
--
"There's more than one way to do it." -- Perl slogan
However, the Berkeley folks might have a problem with the "GPL Virus" on their distros; what's more, I'll bet you a jelly donut Bill Gates (that's Mister Big Brother to you :) would never, ever include a piece of amateur-written, untested, probably virus-laden software on his professionally-built, expensive release CD.... oh, come on, what do you have to hide? [remove tongue from cheek]
No, I think it's a damn fine idea and we ought to drop it in the ears of folks like Bob Young, Bruce Perens, Larry Augustin (he's no distromeister but he does build boxen that could be preconfigured...) post-haste.
Come to think of it, I think I installed IJB from RPM anyway, so it would be dead simple for the Red Hat and SuSE folks to simply sweep it onto the CD.... and the Debian and Slack folks could just run alien... boom, problem solved.
If we can get'em to do it...
-- ;-)"
"See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too
-- Linus Torvalds
What about the Brady Bill? What about all this "hate crimes" legislation? What about Federal prohibition of certain substances? What about the Federal ban on legitimate weaponry carried by legitimate, law-abiding adult citizens into the badlands of certain major metropolitan areas, just because they happen to be college campuses (q.v. Georgia Tech)? What about Federal intervention into healthcare programs, the generation of electric power and the marketing thereof to the people, the education of our children? The Document says provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare, not the other way around... (For those of you wondering about generating power, look at TVA... the Tennessee Valley Authority came into that area, arbitrarily took people's lands by flooding them, paid them a pittance, and sent them on their way. They took over the electric power business in the area with their dams, and justified it in the name of interstate commerce with the locks they built. Harrumph.)
I could go on, but the fact remains that there is very little of the original Bill of Rights that really sticks absolutely anymore. What of the cases actually make it to the Supreme Court are usually ajudicated appropriately, but how many of us have the resources to fight a case that far? Damned few. I have several cases I would like to bring, mostly involving illegal random searches, and one involving intimidation by a certain small-town Georgia cop, but even at my salary I can't afford the bevy of lawyers it would take to do it justice (pun intentional)...
Which is a damned shame and tends to give me an itchy trigger finger.
--
Freedom is built on four boxes: Soap, Ballot, Jury, and Cartridge.
(you know, the truly scary part of this is that, if we really, really wanted to, we could organize and execute one of these little raids so fast Bill Gates' head would swim... vive l'Internet, ne-c'est-pas?)
--
Tar Heels don't run, Tennesseeans always Volunteer, and every Georgia boy knows his shotgun. Woe be to he who crosses the man who's all three. -- me
"And Texas gratefully remembers them all." -- Dillon Pyron, on t.p.guns
WHAT?!?!? Bring me the head of whoever moderated that down!!!! And get that article back to +5 Funny where the hell it belongs! T'hell with my karma, fsck'em if they can't take a joke!
The GPL is an obligation to the distributor of the source, not the recipient. The right/responsibility to bear arms is protected for the bearer, not the business.
Here's to the abridgers of both the 2nd and the GPL having their day in court.... and leaving in shame.
Yes, pointing out other solutions is useful. Matter of fact, that's probably the best way. But I have no sympathy for parents who indulge in electronic babysitting of any form. This whole raising kids by proxy thing is not only producing parents who have forgotten what civil rights (and their corresponding responsibilities) are, but are ultimately responsible for things like Columbine. But I digress.
There are some folks who will listen. Address them. (Frankly, I think a real good solution is simply to remove the 'Net access altogether from the kids' section and replace it with a copy of Britannica... in all honesty, thinking as a parent, the uncensored Net is no place for unsupervised younglings. If Mother wants to sign for her kids' adult-grade library card, including a release of liability, that's her problem.) But when we consider adults in the adult section of a public library, paid for by you and me the taxpayers, censorship in any form has no place. It very simply constitutes prior restraint on free speech, and any such restraint, no matter how small, must be opposed, lest we gradually and by degrees lose all our rights. Some folks learned the hard way about sixty years ago about defending their rights, and that so-called "middle ground," and six million of them paid with their lives. Sorry, I don't intend to go quietly.
--
Never Again the Burning
There's two sides to this. One is that some people use the "square-headed girlfriend" for escape. They don't WANT to interact f2f. When they do, it's about the world in the box. This is, of course, bad, and generally to be avoided.
The flip side is those of us who use the box to augment, add to, facilitate, and generally improve the relationships we already have, or would not have had but for the wonders of modern technology. I know for myself that were it not for the Net I would still be single in Atlanta and miserable rather than married, in Seattle, and reasonably happy and improving. So there.
But there is a third possibility (sorry, Arlo) a third possibility that no one has considered yet.
It's quite obvious to the casual Slashdot reader (which is different from the casual observer) that Stanford ignored the reality of the situation. Nobody has yet bothered to ask why.
I think I know. Flame me if you think I'm out in left field, but here goes:
I think They are scared. "They" are the pointy haired bosses, the university deans, the brokers, everyone who's a middleman and raking in the cash. They see the potential for their power to slip away, for mere mortals to talk directly to God without purchasing an indulgence from the local priesthood. People like Bob Young and Jeff Bezos and a couple gents named Larry and you and me have, not overtly, but just as loudly, nailed our 95 Theses to the doors of Redmond and 1600 Pennsylvania.... and the fertilizer is beginning to hit the rotating ventilation device. But it's no longer politic to simply send in the Knights Templar and squash the revolution. First you have to demonize it in the press. Alternatively you can attempt (Microsoft, Algore, AOL) to co-opt it for yourself.
[skip a bit, brother]
Ultimately it's about control. The Big Bwanas see us scurrying around down here plotting world domination and they don't like that idea because it means they'll have to drive a Neon instead of a Nine-Four-Four. So they get all het up about regulating the net and filtering it and keeping pr0n away from short people and bomb making info out of the hands of those Bearded Fellows (hey, I resemble that remark...) and ultimately grinding it down and mixing it with water and making it into the same kind of Soylent Green we've been sucking off the OTHER Glass Teat since our mothers were in grade school.
Bleah! Pfui! yak! barf. Get that stuff away from me, it rots your brain.
So what are we supposed to do about it anyway?
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. Keep banging away at your Open Source projects, keep hacking on wireless internet, keep sending those checks to EFF and friends, and above all, don't let the bastards get you down. Don't even let them slow you down. If it's obvious to you that they aren't interested in listening, put it in granny low, sound the horn, and floor it. They were warned.
The 21st century is coming thru, boys and girls, and we are in the driver's seat. Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
--
My name.... is NEO!
That's my two bits on how to do the trip... and since I did something similar not too long ago (Knoxville, TN to Seattle via I-40 until it ran out, then via 101 and I-5), I can also tell you that your GSM phone isn't worth a tinker's damn over long stretches of NM and AZ; as they said, you'll want an American PCS/Analog phone.
Good luck on the trip; it's quite an experience, not to be missed. I don't think I'd ever do it again, but I'm glad I did the once.
Suggestion: If you can, extend your trip a bit, and take California 1 up the coast at least as far as San Francisco; if possible, continue on US 101 from there to Seattle. (CA 1 and US 101 meet at the Golden Gate bridge.) You will miss some of the more spectacular scenery in the country if you don't... and some of the better food, too. Things to look for: The Big Sur area (between Ventura and Santa Cruz) (get some clam chowder); Santa Cruz itself (good place for quaint shops); Chinatown in San Francisco; the Golden Gate itself; California wine country (anything north of LA, but concentrated in the Napa valley between San Francisco and west of Sacramento); and the volcanoes (Mt. Shasta, which I-5 goes RIGHT by, Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, and Mt. Ranier). Of course, Seattle proper is its own story.... :)
If you think you'll get that far, look me up. :)
warp eight bot
Dixie ex-patriate happy in Seattle
1) Unknown crackers launch DoS against biggest commercial websites. No one takes credit. Matter of fact, no one that I know of has posted a trace on these jokers.
2) NSA has been yelling about this sort of thing for months.
3) The current administration just happens to be trying to fund its current Internet security initiative.
4) The FBI just happens to have something that they "just wrote" in order to deal with precisely this kind of attack, one we haven't seen before on this scale. It's closed source. It wants to run as root.
Yeah, right.
Where are spaf and the boys when you need them? I'd like to see them take the Fibbie's code apart byte by byte and make sure they're not up to something themselves.
Gods help us if they are.
(I know, call me paranoid, fsck my karma to hell, but bigod no steenking revenooer is getting in MY box quite so easily....hmph.)
--
"We are the FBI, we have no sense of humor that we know of." -- Tommy Lee Jones ("K"), "Men In Black"
Even comes complete with a tool for converting your /etc/inetd.conf file to its own format... c'est cool.
--
Authority, hell, question reality.
Because you can.
The point of the 33133+3 h^x0r d00d's existience is to see just how big a stink he can raise. Well, he sure raised a stink all right. The previous posters' comments are dead on. We're about two steps shy of one of two things: Total chaos on the Net, or (more likely) an event that will make the Inquisition seem like a polite conversation over tea and crumpets.
These kiddies need to be taken a clue, personally and fast: you're turning the global sandbox you play in into a litter box, and if you don't clean up your act RIGHT NOW, Big Brother is going to dump you (*and us*) right down the latrine.
How that clue is delivered is none of my business.
What bugs me most about this is that Congress thinks they can legislate such "dangerous behavior" out of existience. I have news for Congress: Tennessee's #1 cash crop is illegal. Translation: Congress' power to legislate behavior is exactly squat.
Which is as it should be.
Mere posession of information (DeCSS) should not be illegal. If I want to go have a spysat take pictures if the Israeli version of Area 51, MY GOVERNMENT has no business holding a gun to my head and telling me I can't.
Now, if I go use that pic to lob a SCUD missile in on the runway, the Israelis have the right to make me face a firing squad. But the UNITED STATES fscking GOVERNMENT has no business poking its nose in my hard drive, period, end of sentence.
Assuming, of course, they can make heads or tails of it, or want to bother devoting a supercomputer to a small-time maverick like me... :)