a business's obligation to file incorporation papers (including a physical address)
I'm not aware of any requirement that one's home address and phone number be made available to all comers.
#include <ianal.h>
However, the name and address of the registered agent (attorney) for the corporation has to be there so that any potential legal adversary can serve papers at the right place. Legal papers that have been served upon the registered agent thereby have been served upon the corporation itself.
So a registrar that allows you to use a proxy for the publicly-posted contact info isn't doing anything wrong. By putting that name in the WHOIS, you're effectively appointing that entity as your agent.
The reviewer didn't get this at all. He complained about how inconvenient it would be to have to use yum to get OO.o or, a RH disk to install a package not on the Cobind CD. Let me repeat those last three words:
the Cobind CD
That's one CD, folks. Uno. Eins. Distros like Cobind, Knoppix, etc. have as a design constraint that they must be able to install (or run) a functioning system from a single CD, rather than RH's 3, or SuSE's you-might-as-well-just-go-with-the-DVD ensemble. The idea here is to show that you can get a fronking lot of software on just one CD, when it's written right.
Console crash course . . . It is completely unrealistic to expect your avg user . . . to work with a console.
If you look at the top of the page, you'll see this is subtitled: (emphasis mine)
A roadmap for
developers making the transition to Linux
A developer had damned well be able to do everything from the command line. Learning to write good install scripts to insulate that user from the ugly details is exactly that a developer should do. I'd even say it's his job to make things work for the average user
Republicans and Dems have become just two sides of the same coin
They've been that way for a while. Fundamentally, they're both in the business of FUDding their core constituencies about the other party's core constituencies, making them so afraid of the 'bad guys' that they have to vote for the 'good guys'.
Philosophically, they enable each other. They want to separate liberty from responsibility.
Democrats/liberals want people to have freedom in the bedroom, but share the costs of the exercise of that freedom.
Republicans/conservatives want people to have freedom in the boardroom, but share the costs of the exercise of that freedom. [Lewis Black puts it humorously: Republicans want me to make money, but won't let me spend it on drugs and hookers, so what's the point?]
Then the other side claims the cost of freedom is too high, and uses that as an excuse to clamp down on it. The end result is that we end up with less freedom, and the costs of exercising what we have left are diffused throughout the nation, so we get to pay the price for other people's vices instead of our own, without even getting to experience the pleasures.
the casino can avoid prediction, by simply spinning the wheel faster
Here's the problem in a nutshell:
The whole calculation would need to have been completed in just a few seconds, as the dealer cuts off betting after the ball has rolled three times around the wheel.
If the casino would change this rule ever so slightly, and cut off betting before the ball is released, there would be no way anyone could predict where the ball would go. Casinos don't want to do this, however, because it slows down the action, reducing the rate at which money can be extracted from the customers, and quite possibly the interest in the game. Perhaps cutting off at two revolutions would be a good compromise?
Historical quirk: I live in Kansas City, KS. Across the state line in MO there are riverboat casinos that were originally approved under the language that mentioned 'games of skill'. At that time, video draw poker was legal, because of the skill involved in deciding which cards to hold, and which to discard, but not the run-of-the-mill slots (which have since been allowed by changes in the law).
At that time, this method of winning at roulette, or card counting at the blackjack table, could not have been opposed by the casinos because they had to maintain the legal theory that skill was involved in these games. The boats in MO quickly adopted rules for the number of decks in the shoe, how far into it a reshuffle is done, and the delta between minimum and maximum bets, so as to make counting irrelevant. I believe those rules remain in effect today...
...because it's easier to just make the method of 'cheating' ineffective than to try to figure out who's doing it.
if it's been in orbit since 1996, why has it only just been found?
(Well, it isn't really 'in orbit'. If it were, it would stay that way indefinitely, not 'leave orbit' 10 years later.)
Because it's really small. It was discovered when it was very close to its point of closest approach to the Earth. Since that time, it's been tracked well enough that it's possible to project that path into the future and the past to arrive at the 10-year 'phase' statement.
I'm not sure how much of an 'extension' is really required here. I make it a matter of policy in my shell scripts to do
Self=`basename $0`
and use that value in the script itself as its name. This way, if anyone ever wants to change the name of the script, they, uh, change the name of the script. The -[Hh]* option for help, as well as any log file names based on $Self, then correctly specify the new name.
Of course we don't have executables with names like "Mozilla Firefox", because that's not geeky enough. Still, it should be trivial for any app to allow configuration of the name it displays in the title bar.
I can imagine what would happen, just for example, if The Bride of Monster (Personnel Manager at a sheltered workshop, dealing with handicapped adults) installed a copy of The GIMP on a computer at work, to save their tight budget the expense of buying Photoshop for working up sales brochures and such... Being able to change it so it says 'GNU Image Manipulation' or just 'GNU Image' might save her from the wrath of uptight Politically Correct types.
How exactly can you verify that there's not a Windows print server on a non-local subnet that you want to use?
I thought the same thing, and emailed ESR to that effect on the 11th of this month:
I have been saying for some time that the biggest hurdle for Linux right now is the difficulty of configuring the system for a non-geek. But I can't go along with you on this:
> If the preceding rules leave just one choice, so inform the user and go straight to the form for that queue type.
I spend a fair amount of effort getting character-based tools (Bourne scripts that run on SCO Open Server, AIX, and occasionally HP-UX and Linux, to be precise) for non-technical users to work, including the frequently daunting task of autodetecting configurations to come up with reasonable defaults. I have learned the hard way that autodetection is never 100%. Even Microsoft gets this - their 'Wizards' always have a check box or button for [x] Let me choose/configure/whatever. Just because no Jet Direct is found on your local subnet via autodetection doesn't mean that you don't want to configure printing to it. It might be on the other side of a router.
Should autodetection offer the most likely prospects for what the user intends? Absolutely. But there must always be a clearly-labelled way to explore other options. It's easy enough to do...
Which printer do you wish to configure?
Windows Print Shares: [ ] \\DEXTER\HP HP DeskJet 656c [ ] \\DEEDEE\EPSON Epson Stylus C84 Unix Print Shares [LPD]: [ ] pana@192.168.1.200 Panasonic KXP-1100 HP JetDirect: [ ] 192.168.1.50:9100 HP LaserJet 4L [ ] 192.168.1.50:9101 Dymo SE-300 [ ] 192.168.1.50:9102 Generic Centronics OTHER [ ] I don't see the printer in this list.
Then, to deny bob rights, add bob to the deny group
This is one of the MS Best Practice recommendations. Always assign permissions based on groups, even if that means creating a Group of One, which seems like extra work at first blush. But in the long run, it simplifies management.
The real-life example I give is the group "President of the United States of America", which is by definition a Group of One. When Bush was sworn in, rather than having whether to reassign all kinds of rights that Clinton had (nuke-you-lur launch codes [equal time: Carter, who was a nuclear engineer, pronounced it 'nuke-ee-ahh'] vs. ownership of NY home that qualified Hillary to run for Senate) it would just be a matter of adding Bush to the group and taking Clinton out of it, while leaving his other group memberships ("Husband of Hillary", "Member of Democratic Party",...) alone.
What about legally requiring the use of META tags.
No. you have it backwards again. It's your job to block any sites that do not use whatever method you're proposing to allow your kids into the titty bar, onto the nuclear submarine, into the Bradley, or onto the streets of Baghdad, without seeing or hearing things that you believe will hurt their psyches. The default assumption is, and must always be, that the Internet is appropriate for consenting adults.
I support it being illegal to fraudulently use a META tag to claim that a site is age-appropriate, based on whatever standard of age-appropriateness you're talking about. But fraud is already illegal, so we don't need any special new law to make it so (although one that codifies penalties for certain kinds of fraud wouldn't raise my hackles awfully much.)
If you want META, I think you ought to write up an RFC codifying a standard. Something like
That's a pretty lightweight protocol, which allows sites to certify compliance with whatever authority's standards you might care about. The filtering software can use various criteria of your choosing to whitelist safe sites, including allowing you to add certain sites or even entire domains to your own whitelist, while only making it illegal to take the deliberate action of declaring compliance falsely, and allowing every existing web page to remain legal (because none of them contain these META tags in the first place).
Keep your kids off the Internet if you don't like it the way it is. The people who built it never for one moment claimed it was built for children, and it's wrong to impose a law at this date that places such a positive obligation upon webmasters.
DOD employees including uniformed military (the expression 'curse like a sailor' comes to mind, although jarheads, grunts, and flyboys hold their own)
DOD contractors in industry
researches at universities and technical institutes.
But demanding that adult sites label themselves as adult is the wrong way to go, and mandating a particular filtering scheme for everyone is worse yet.
Somewhere along the line, somebody decided the it was important for schools to be connected to the Internet. And now they're shocked, shocked! at what they've found. It's as if a teacher took a bunch of grade-school kids on a field trip to a titty bar and then demanded that the authorities shut it down.
If someone wants to create a TLD like.kids, and make whatever rules they want for their piece of cyberspace, more power to them. Net Nanny and its ilk can whitelist the 'safe' sites, blacklist the 'unsafe' ones, and parents who want their kids subjected to such filters may choose to employ them.
As a father (and grandfather!) I have always figured that if my children want to look at something really perverted, it's their desire to look at it that's the problem, so me putting up filters really won't accomplish much other than protecting them against fat-fingering an URL (or forgetting that the White House is part of the.governmnent
Why do they even bother buying the rights to something they couldn't really care less about, artistically?
Because movie studios exist to make money, not art. This is going to be another Starship Troopers, only it will have even less to do with the book of the same title. The really sad part is that we're going backwards:
Asimov's Laws effectively ended the 'Frankenstein' phase of robot stories in written SF.
Good SF at least takes a shot at taking into account the sociopolitical aspects of technology. It's obvious that we will never be legally allowed to build AI that controls potentially lethal force without some protection against it being used against us. [Exceptions will of course be made for DoD robots, but they will no doubt have their own safeguards.]
Once Asimov's Laws were in print, SF authors could never get away with selling books about robots going amok and turning on their human masters. Everyone knew that the government would demand the Three Laws or a close analogue be installed in every robot
Ah, well. Movies tend not to be as intellectually evolved as books, so we're treated to the Terminator series, and now the greatest spectacle of script syncretism since The Tower and The Glass Inferno movie adaptations were forged into The Towering Inferno. I'll probably contribute to the insanity by paying to watch this bastard, then look forward to seeing it parodied in a future Scary Movie release.
Now all I need to do is know or guess anything on your whitelist
...and be able to impersonate one of those 'things' (email source addresses).
see my response to someone else for details on how to deal with such shenanigans.
The REAL problem is that spammers will start collection email-pairs instead of simple emails and simply circumvent any whitelist. They already do collect addresses out of chain-emails and mailing lists, they just need to collect the FROM address as a second field to the TO address and go on happily
...which is only a problem if a spammer can forge a FROM address in the first place. SPF closes that loophole, allowing white/blacklists to work again. If there's one thing in the article I agree with completely, it's that there is no Magic Bullet -- we need
SPF to deal with forged headers
White- & Blacklists for people we already know.
Challenge/Response for people we don't know yet.
Bayesian filters
Special tokens for web sites that let you send a news item to a friend's email by attaching a brief signed personal message (that includes the date and title of the news article to prevent replay attacks) that grants a one-time pass through the filters and C/R.
These tools can be used in various combinations:
During the 'transitional phase' of SPF, source addresses that lack SPF records in DNS would go through challenge/response as an alternative. The
challenge email could even include URLs with FAQs about how to implement SPF, handy for forwarding to your mail administrator.
Those tokens might be treated by the Bayesian filter as just one more hint as to whether something is spam. The preprocessor might replace a validated signature with:
<spampass from="dumbfriend@aol.com" date="Fri Mar 12 07:27:46 2004" title="Spam White Paper"/>
which might not boost the rating of the email at all, if prior spampasses from this same friend have generally ended up manually marked 'spam' by the recipient.
I just copied that challenge into IrfanView and had it reduce the number of colors to 2. It came out quite readable, which suggests that OCR would be able to take it from there nicely. I bet someone could throw together some Script Fu for the GIMP to convert those pictures to text with a reasonable accuracy rate. Bear in mind that the technique doesn't have to be anywhere near 100% accurate to be worth the effort for the spammer, who already has a business model based on a fraction of a percent of his emails actually generating a response.
What I take issue with is this paragraph from the article:
CR deadlock. Alice tells Bill to email her friend Charlie. Bill sends an email to Charlie. Charlie's CR system intercepts the email and sends a challenge to Bill. Unfortunately, Bill's CR system intercepts Charlie's challenge and issues its own challenge. Since neither user actually receives the challenge, neither user will receive the email. And since the emails are unsolicited and unexpected, neither user knows to look for the pending challenge. In essence, if two people both use CR systems, then they will not be able to communicate with each other.
This is leaving out a key feature of any decent challenge system... When Bill tries to send an email to Charlie in the first place, Charlie's email address is automatically added to Bill's whitelist. So Charlie's challenge, showing his address as its source, flies straight to Bill's Inbox without a hitch.
If Bill were so arrogant as to think he could send email to someone not on his whitelist, then he deserves not to have his email go through.
Exactly. In this way, you change them from being passive patients who see medicine as something done to them, into active participants in their health.
I work support for a medical practice management software company, and take an analogous attiude toward how I work with my patients, er, customers (who might include you for all I know). When they are receptive to the approach, I enlist them in managing their computing experience. I educate them on how to avoid some problems, and some common troubleshooting steps they can use before that first call to Support.
I have created one-page 'cheat sheets' to fax or email explaining how to roll back a Win98 Registry, or do XP System Restore, (collectively, the second thing to do with a suddenly-malfunctioning Windows PC, right after trying a cold boot). I've built some shell scripts for the *nix servers that allow them to quickly handle some routine maintenance tasks that previously would have required a Support tech to dial into their system. I explain in non-technical language why I want them to try various things to diagnose/resolve a problem, rather than talking down to them as if my expertise (relative to theirs) were a license for condescension.
So now instead of being impotent, helpless, hopeless and frustrated (ultimately taking that frustration out by complaining to our management or even getting lawyers involved), they feel empowered. Since they have participated in their 'treatment' they are substantially less likely to complain about it or sue somebody. The smart ones (like you) know this approach works with their patients, and recognize it when I use it on them.
someone accidentally said "patent" instead of "copyright..."
Given the way that SCO keeps changing its story
It's about trade secrets.
No, it's about copyrights.
There are millions and millions of lines.
Well, there's <errno.h>
We won't sue end users.
Yes we will.
I can't fault anyone for confabulating patents and copyrights in decribing what their contention du jour (de l'heure?) is.
"probe for supported", as he is asking for in his article
But what kills me is the way he asks for it:
Networked JetDirect
. ..
If the designers were half-smart about UI issues (like, say, Windows programers) they'd probe the local network neighborhood and omit the impossible entries.
I do tech support for a living, and have walked countless people through the process of adding printers to Windows. I consider Jet Direct printing the most supportable situation for printer sharing, and until Windows 2000 you couldn't even use one without a disk from HP that teaches Windows how to see a printer on 9100/tcp (or 9101,9102 for 3-port JDs). Once JD support has been installed, Win98 is on a roughly equal footing with 2000 and XP.
In any case, Windows terminology dictates that a JetDirect is a 'Local' printer (in the sense that there is no computer on the network managing the print queue to qualify it as a 'Network' printer, equivalent to the Unix terminology of 'remote') and in order to set up such a printer one must Add a Port (Standard TCP/IP). It is at this point, and only at this point, where various versions of Windows will attempt to autodetect something. So ESR is giving Windows designers credit for far more than they've actually done
Slashdot Mirror
So a registrar that allows you to use a proxy for the publicly-posted contact info isn't doing anything wrong. By putting that name in the WHOIS, you're effectively appointing that entity as your agent.
Slashdot: Olds and Dupes. Stuff you've heard about before.
Philosophically, they enable each other. They want to separate liberty from responsibility.
-
Democrats/liberals want people to have freedom in the bedroom, but share the costs of the exercise of that freedom.
-
Republicans/conservatives want people to have freedom in the boardroom, but share the costs of the exercise of that freedom.
Then the other side claims the cost of freedom is too high, and uses that as an excuse to clamp down on it. The end result is that we end up with less freedom, and the costs of exercising what we have left are diffused throughout the nation, so we get to pay the price for other people's vices instead of our own, without even getting to experience the pleasures.[Lewis Black puts it humorously: Republicans want me to make money, but won't let me spend it on drugs and hookers, so what's the point?]
Historical quirk: I live in Kansas City, KS. Across the state line in MO there are riverboat casinos that were originally approved under the language that mentioned 'games of skill'. At that time, video draw poker was legal, because of the skill involved in deciding which cards to hold, and which to discard, but not the run-of-the-mill slots (which have since been allowed by changes in the law). At that time, this method of winning at roulette, or card counting at the blackjack table, could not have been opposed by the casinos because they had to maintain the legal theory that skill was involved in these games. The boats in MO quickly adopted rules for the number of decks in the shoe, how far into it a reshuffle is done, and the delta between minimum and maximum bets, so as to make counting irrelevant. I believe those rules remain in effect today...
Because it's really small. It was discovered when it was very close to its point of closest approach to the Earth. Since that time, it's been tracked well enough that it's possible to project that path into the future and the past to arrive at the 10-year 'phase' statement.
Of course we don't have executables with names like "Mozilla Firefox", because that's not geeky enough. Still, it should be trivial for any app to allow configuration of the name it displays in the title bar.
I can imagine what would happen, just for example, if The Bride of Monster (Personnel Manager at a sheltered workshop, dealing with handicapped adults) installed a copy of The GIMP on a computer at work, to save their tight budget the expense of buying Photoshop for working up sales brochures and such... Being able to change it so it says 'GNU Image Manipulation' or just 'GNU Image' might save her from the wrath of uptight Politically Correct types.
The real-life example I give is the group "President of the United States of America", which is by definition a Group of One. When Bush was sworn in, rather than having whether to reassign all kinds of rights that Clinton had (nuke-you-lur launch codes [equal time: Carter, who was a nuclear engineer, pronounced it 'nuke-ee-ahh'] vs. ownership of NY home that qualified Hillary to run for Senate) it would just be a matter of adding Bush to the group and taking Clinton out of it, while leaving his other group memberships ("Husband of Hillary", "Member of Democratic Party",...) alone.
I support it being illegal to fraudulently use a META tag to claim that a site is age-appropriate, based on whatever standard of age-appropriateness you're talking about. But fraud is already illegal, so we don't need any special new law to make it so (although one that codifies penalties for certain kinds of fraud wouldn't raise my hackles awfully much.)
If you want META, I think you ought to write up an RFC codifying a standard. Something like
That's a pretty lightweight protocol, which allows sites to certify compliance with whatever authority's standards you might care about. The filtering software can use various criteria of your choosing to whitelist safe sites, including allowing you to add certain sites or even entire domains to your own whitelist, while only making it illegal to take the deliberate action of declaring compliance falsely, and allowing every existing web page to remain legal (because none of them contain these META tags in the first place).Keep your kids off the Internet if you don't like it the way it is. The people who built it never for one moment claimed it was built for children, and it's wrong to impose a law at this date that places such a positive obligation upon webmasters.
- DOD employees including uniformed military (the expression 'curse like a sailor' comes to mind, although jarheads, grunts, and flyboys hold their own)
- DOD contractors in industry
- researches at universities and technical institutes.
But demanding that adult sites label themselves as adult is the wrong way to go, and mandating a particular filtering scheme for everyone is worse yet. Somewhere along the line, somebody decided the it was important for schools to be connected to the Internet. And now they're shocked, shocked! at what they've found. It's as if a teacher took a bunch of grade-school kids on a field trip to a titty bar and then demanded that the authorities shut it down.If someone wants to create a TLD like .kids, and make whatever rules they want for their piece of cyberspace, more power to them. Net Nanny and its ilk can whitelist the 'safe' sites, blacklist the 'unsafe' ones, and parents who want their kids subjected to such filters may choose to employ them.
As a father (and grandfather!) I have always figured that if my children want to look at something really perverted, it's their desire to look at it that's the problem, so me putting up filters really won't accomplish much other than protecting them against fat-fingering an URL (or forgetting that the White House is part of the .governmnent
Asimov's Laws effectively ended the 'Frankenstein' phase of robot stories in written SF. Good SF at least takes a shot at taking into account the sociopolitical aspects of technology. It's obvious that we will never be legally allowed to build AI that controls potentially lethal force without some protection against it being used against us. [Exceptions will of course be made for DoD robots, but they will no doubt have their own safeguards.] Once Asimov's Laws were in print, SF authors could never get away with selling books about robots going amok and turning on their human masters. Everyone knew that the government would demand the Three Laws or a close analogue be installed in every robot
Ah, well. Movies tend not to be as intellectually evolved as books, so we're treated to the Terminator series, and now the greatest spectacle of script syncretism since The Tower and The Glass Inferno movie adaptations were forged into The Towering Inferno. I'll probably contribute to the insanity by paying to watch this bastard, then look forward to seeing it parodied in a future Scary Movie release.
-
SPF to deal with forged headers
- White- & Blacklists for people we already know.
- Challenge/Response for people we don't know yet.
- Bayesian filters
- Special tokens for web sites that let you send a news item to a friend's email by attaching a brief signed personal message (that includes the date and title of the news article to prevent replay attacks) that grants a one-time pass through the filters and C/R.
These tools can be used in various combinations:During the 'transitional phase' of SPF, source addresses that lack SPF records in DNS would go through challenge/response as an alternative. The challenge email could even include URLs with FAQs about how to implement SPF, handy for forwarding to your mail administrator.
Those tokens might be treated by the Bayesian filter as just one more hint as to whether something is spam. The preprocessor might replace a validated signature with:
which might not boost the rating of the email at all, if prior spampasses from this same friend have generally ended up manually marked 'spam' by the recipient.What I take issue with is this paragraph from the article:
This is leaving out a key feature of any decent challenge system... When Bill tries to send an email to Charlie in the first place, Charlie's email address is automatically added to Bill's whitelist. So Charlie's challenge, showing his address as its source, flies straight to Bill's Inbox without a hitch. If Bill were so arrogant as to think he could send email to someone not on his whitelist, then he deserves not to have his email go through.I work support for a medical practice management software company, and take an analogous attiude toward how I work with my patients, er, customers (who might include you for all I know). When they are receptive to the approach, I enlist them in managing their computing experience. I educate them on how to avoid some problems, and some common troubleshooting steps they can use before that first call to Support.
I have created one-page 'cheat sheets' to fax or email explaining how to roll back a Win98 Registry, or do XP System Restore, (collectively, the second thing to do with a suddenly-malfunctioning Windows PC, right after trying a cold boot). I've built some shell scripts for the *nix servers that allow them to quickly handle some routine maintenance tasks that previously would have required a Support tech to dial into their system. I explain in non-technical language why I want them to try various things to diagnose/resolve a problem, rather than talking down to them as if my expertise (relative to theirs) were a license for condescension.
So now instead of being impotent, helpless, hopeless and frustrated (ultimately taking that frustration out by complaining to our management or even getting lawyers involved), they feel empowered. Since they have participated in their 'treatment' they are substantially less likely to complain about it or sue somebody. The smart ones (like you) know this approach works with their patients, and recognize it when I use it on them.
In any case, Windows terminology dictates that a JetDirect is a 'Local' printer (in the sense that there is no computer on the network managing the print queue to qualify it as a 'Network' printer, equivalent to the Unix terminology of 'remote') and in order to set up such a printer one must Add a Port (Standard TCP/IP). It is at this point, and only at this point, where various versions of Windows will attempt to autodetect something. So ESR is giving Windows designers credit for far more than they've actually done