Why is it that conservatives stop being conservative when large corporations want things to go their way in defiance of the wishes of the marketplace (such as file sharing)?
Don't ask me! I'm conservative, vote Republican...and love sharing music, software, etc. Of course, I'm not a politician, so maybe my values would be radically altered if I was accepting massive contributions from the Arrr Aye Double A.
I suspect that liberal and conservative doesn't mean much to politicians on issues like this; it's who will get them re-elected. Who contributes the most money to their re-election campaign? Large, powerful lobbies; corporations, unions, PACs of different stripes. We'd put some serious campaign spending limits in place, if the people who have authority to do that were not the ones who stand to lose the most from it. Talk about the fox being in charge of the henhouse...
I automatically block anything registered as a Comcast dynamic IP because it's always spam. Without question. If it's legit, it should go through the Comcast mail server. Keep in mind that this only blocks dynamic IPs if it's registered as a dynamic IP; I assume if you're smart enough to run your own nameserver and fill out all the ICAN'T-related paperwork, you're smart enough not to click on the file somebody "send you to have your advice".
Let's face it, the people who on here who use different networks, run their 5000-person listserv from home, etc are few and far between and could be whitelisted by Comcast. The vast majority of mail senders are schmucks who expected the computer to be a new kind of TV and now pollute the Internet with hundreds of spam mails.
Complaining about not being able to use a mail server on a Comcast dynamic IP is like complaining about getting blocked by the majority of the Internet because your mail server is an open relay, or getting kicked off IRC because you use AOL. If you want mail access to the Internet and not just the ISP mail gateway, you should do three things: STFU, move to a static IP, and get yourself a hostname that doesn't look like "ip55643234-luser-65-43-231-30-hugecablegiant.com".
There are more types of nerds than just computer nerds. There are anime, physics, and biology articles on here sometimes as well...are you going to discount those just because they have nothing to do with that overclocked Athlon you've got running Debian in your parents' basement?
I believe that most nerds feel interest in all things nerdly (word? maybe that should be "nerdy") whether it's their thing or not. Although computers and their programming are my primary fields of interest, I've got to admit I'm interested when the subject turns to war gaming, RPGs, minor points of history, artificial languages and grammars, model rocketry, physics experiments...it all comes with the way of thinking.
If you want electronics and only electronics, try another site or set your filters accordingly.
1. As you say, there is the privacy angle, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Add to that the massive expense, political wrangling, and "spam breaks" on the part of government to certain groups (politicians, charities, maybe some corporations) and we'd end up with a boondoggle of huge proportions. I work for the federal government and have some first-hand experience with this. Government projects do not mix well with computers, and the less regulated the Internet is, the better for all concerned.
2. Mail outside the country would still have to come into the US (relatives, friends, business partners from all corners of the globe), which would require a spam catcher...which puts us back in the position we started because we already have antispam software at the ISP level, for the most part. Just a lot of it doesn't work very well. At this point, the government would be the mail gateway; they'd buy some POS from a major antispam vendor through GSA (whatever it is, it won't be open source), and we'd have a multi-billion-dollar antispam gateway that doesn't work.
Not to be rude, but if a little voice inside your head starts saying, "Why shouldn't the government just come up with a solution?", you should put your fingers in your ears and start going, "la la la la la can't hear you la la la la!..." It's not the social/political/economic problems of this solution you should be looking at yet; it's just the fact that it won't fly technologically.
At my workplace, the word came down that telecommuting was allowed. Following this order, lower-level managers, who still measure work by the amount of hours the cubicle is occupied, made a rule that no one could telecommute...except managers. Funny how that works...
Yesterday I went to a different site where I had no cubicle. I forwarded my cubicle phone to my work cellphone and my work email to my Linux laptop via Citrix. The serial console to the server I was working on, in the dark, dirty basement, I forwarded via a terminal server to the laptop as well.
Then I went outside, enjoyed the nice weather, and paid no attention to either my laptop or my phone.:)
Giving a score, and then completely invalidating it by demanding perfection in it, is used by a lot of organizations. It perfectly captures the underlying evil behind managerial "rah rah we're a team and we're the best" thinking.
Kia Motors does this. When you buy a car or get service, you're warned to give full marks (10/10) across the board if you want the guy who changed your oil to keep his job. In fact, although Kia calls you independently to get the scores, if you give anything under 10, the desk operator will ask you, "Do you really want to do this? The person who helped you will be fired if you don't give the 10."
Col. Hackworth, a US expatriate (and badass) who does a lot of writing about bullshit in the Army, mentions that this kind of thing got added at one point (around the early 60s) where every soldier had to be a perfect marksman on pain of being demoted. The way soldiers would get around this was by having a buddy stick holes in their paper targets with a pencil indicating perfect shots.
That cable installer who put in your physics prof's cable was most likely fired instantly, just because your prof understood statistics and not managerial politics.
And what, a scant two centuries ago slavery was still the norm in the US? (FYI, the slavery system was abolished thousands of years ago in China.)
The slavery system was abhorred by most of the founders of the US, and there was a plan to abolish slavery in the works. Slavery had nothing to do with the system of government; it had to do with the economics of the Southern States. And as you see, the Constitution was updated to take care of that issue.
You live your way, and I live mine. I don't want people asserting their values on me.
So it's perfectly alright if we are allied with a country where saying something critical of the government could cost you your life? After all, it's their culture. It's not really "oppression"; it's just their idea of "freedom". As you can see, that's a ridiculous argument; allowing such abuse limits freedom for everyone by setting a precedent that gets used by every crummy dictator in the world (Suharto, the ex-dictator of Indonesia, used the same argument you're using now as an excuse for his draconian measures). I recall seeing a bumper sticker used by many liberals in my city. It says "No one is free when others are oppressed".
You may not see a need for the right to bear arms, and that's OK. It's never been used for its designated purpose yet (armed resistance against a tyrannical government), mostly due to the check-and-balance system, and hopefully it never will have to be, but it's there, and someday it might be necessary. It's a lot easier to subjugate a country when you don't have to face the prospect of house-to-house fighting and guerilla warfare across its entirety; right now, anyone who is interested in seizing power in the US, including anyone in the US government, will be forced to consider this prospect.
Almost anyone can get into college, but I view that as a good thing. High school is basically elementary school for people in their teens; you are on a strict schedule and are told what to do. That's not to say talent is stomped on in high school, but it's harder to do actual research the same way as in college; high school is a system based on quantity. The best teachers I had set the class up as much like a college class as they could.
The reason why I mention this is that high school is not a good proving ground for college. People might have the ability to do the work, but be bored and unchallenged, eventually getting sloppy (spoken from first-hand experience; I worked twice as hard in my shop classes, and was far happier, than in Global Studies or Health, where I knew the material but did a lackluster job). People who do the best work in high school often have discovered the key to the system -- fat margins, size-14 fonts, pseudo-intellectual musings to make the writing an "impenetrable fog" as Bill Watterson calls it, doing the two extra word problems...sliding through. They often get a rude awakening in college.
The second year of college is, and should be, the real test. The first year is still a lot like high school, with more freedom. The second year you start the real work on your major and will soon drop it unless you love it. By the middle of my first year, CS was more about sorting methods, big-O notation, and low-level instructions than about "Hello, World!", and the people who thought it was "How To Make Lots of Money By Playing Video Games" dropped like flies. Many others, including myself, decided they loved it even if it condemned them to a life of wandering through out-of-date code and crufted databases.
Although many people complain about morons who play good football getting accepted, let's face it: They're a privileged few who are the exception, not the rule. The thing we should really be complaining about is the increasingly high prices of universities that are almost impossible to pay without external help (scholarships, loans, etc).
I'm surprised this one hasn't got modded Troll yet. Oh well, I'll bite...
No, it's not shocking at all. Unfortunately, this is what we can fully expect from an oppressive, non-democratic government. It also tells us Westerners the kinds of things to watch out for in our own governments -- there but for the grace of God, and all. It seems outrageous to us now, but liberty has to be continually guarded and fought for, again and again, because we can be assured of the continued existance of dictators and wannabe dictators on both ends of the political spectrum. Someday in the near future, that news article could be about us.
The UK is more restrictive in many ways than the US (no right to bear arms, and a scant two centuries ago insulting the king could cost you your head, if I remember correctly). However, it had a strong concept of freedom and independence which was inherited by the first American colonists, who "fixed" many of the abuses of the English system that existed at the time, in the Constitution. Hence the Bill of Rights, separation of Church and State, division of power among three major bodies...lack of a king...etc.
Privoxy can already block these with a couple judicious regexps, and it shouldn't be any trouble at all for Mozilla to block these as well. If you want to block floaters in advance of this tech being adopted by every unscrupulous marketeer in existence, try going to Kompas (Indonesian news site). They're filled with them, but a few rules should clean 'em up.
Marketroids have to learn that you catch a lot more flies with honey than with vinegar. At this point, nstead of being in any way interested in the product, the user just gets annoyed and tries to find a way to make the advertisement go away...or goes to a different site.
Isn't it obvious? GOOD SF doesn't sell. Cheap commercialized tripe does.
Good SF? You're talking about Mutant X! Andromeda was at least watchable (slightly better than Enterprise, IMHO), but Mutant X was horrible...almost as bad as The Lost World. The only thing worse I could think of is if someone made a TV series out of "Battlefield Earth". Oops, better not give 'em any ideas....
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (*) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (*) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (*) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries (*) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (*) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (*) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (*) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck (*) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (*) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I very strongly suggest you leave your 'France' jokes at home.
Saying that the US doesn't care (except a few members of Amnesty International) when France complains about prisoner execution or attacking Iraq may have been said in a flippant way, but it's not a joke. It's the truth. The same goes for most other countries, but the parent poster mentioned France specifically.
Just because no one's listening doesn't mean the US shouldn't comment. France certainly comments whenever we execute a prisoner or drop bombs on a third-world country...not that anyone listens to them either.:)
The US government has to comment to save face in front of MS, because MS 0wnz it through its deadly addiction to the crack-rock called MS Office. If you've ever worked at a.gov, you'd know that most IT people there physically cannot think of any solution other than a Microsoft solution. Most of them can't understand why anyone would want to release software for free. And they're not even politicians. Gates isn't even paying them off!
Also, this wasn't the first, but it was the biggest EU antitrust fine in history (from what I hear). Some of the economy wonks in the government probably think that this is an attempt to get a leg up on the US software industry.
It's idiotic, I know, but this explains some of what the government does.
That's somewhat of a ridiculous comparison. If you're going to compare OSS and closed source methodologies, you should not do the equivalent of comparing a teen garage band with the New York Philharmonic. A better comparison would be "enterprise" closed source, versus open source that has a lot of manpower behind it.
The open source that tends to get used the most is the stuff that has a strong userbase and active developers. The 14-year-old-written "this is l33t so I wrote it, visit my blog d00d!@!@!!" kind of software is occasionally useful if you need something to do a small, handy thing on your workstation, but rarely gets used heavily in production -- even by workplaces using open source.
More likely, the software written is by some post-graduate or a group of programming enthusiasts who are interested in the program concept or have found it useful and decided to help improve it. Most of the GNU software, MailScanner (an extremely flexible virus/spam gateway), and the Linux kernel itself, is written in this manner. Many of them release designs and papers, something which the companies you're speaking of often keep in-house and hidden from the public.
Now to my personal mistrusts. I personally mistrust software that's probably written by someone with a passing familiarity with Visual Basic, who does not speak my language and does not document the program properly. If you wonder what I mean, try installing some of that "bonus software" that comes with your inkjet, scanner, or CD writer on your system and you'll learn a painful lesson. Not all software written by a company is good, or even has a reasonable design behind it -- and sometimes, even with a reasonable design it's still programmed badly.
There is no place in the Bible that claims that Earth is the only source of life in the universe. In addition, by "religion", you are most likely referring only to the three major monotheistic ones: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
Plenty of Christians believed that the earth was not the center of the universe even back when this was the prevailing worldview. The Bible itself does not stipulate that Earth is the center of the universe. Aristotle believed that Earth was the center of the universe (plenty of his contemporaries disagreed), and his works became "canonized" as the only view during the Middle Ages, along with other great thinkers of the ancient world such as Ptolemy, who used an overly complex method to explain the orbits of heavenly bodies, and Galen, who was the first doctor in the West to link the nervous system to the brain, but based all his findings on pig anatomy (couldn't dissect humans back then).
Having a religion does not exclude common sense. In persisting in this belief, many atheists (or at least./ atheists) are often more intolerant and ignorant than followers of organized religion.
I, on the other hand, like MS better than Verisign.
If I don't want to use IE, Idon'thaveto.
I am not forced to use their product or to see their ads if I choose differently.
Having a poor browser does not break any other Internet applications. This does.
Re:The sooner sendmail is consigned...
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Postfix
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· Score: 1, Funny
It's widely been a subject of suspicious conjecture that Sendmail was written at the University of Berkeley shortly after LSD was invented in the same university.
I have Postfix on a box at my work here, and am loving it...too bad Sendmail on the production systems, its sendmail.cf hacked by dozens of admins before me, will never go away. If you wonder why, try working for a federal government bureaucracy and making any change whatsoever to the status quo.
Doesn't matter which administration at this point. Keep in mind whose administration was in office when the DMCA got passed.
Whether Bush or Kerry gets into office in November at this point is entirely moot; neither administration, and very little of Congress, is immune to contributions from large corporations.
Ummm...the right wing wanted this just as bad as the left. The only people who did not want this law were telemarketers.
I don't see how you can claim a law that was so popular on both sides of the fence as some sort of victory for one side or another. The fact is, the right wing likes judges just fine -- when they have problems with a judge, their issue is that the judge may have overstepped his bounds (using interpretation of a case as legislation). They're elected for life (so politics won't affect their performance) because their domain is the interpretation of the existing laws, not the passing of new ones.
In a perfect world, judges would be selected based on how well they can understand the law, but since this is not one of those, fights between Dems and Reps over how conservative or liberal a judge is keeps many judges from being appointed in a timely manner.
personally, I think there is a better solution, stop using 'buffer overflow' languages like C, C++. Anything else: perl, python, java, C# is more secure. Why are all our systems built on such a foundation of instability?
Look at all the ones you mentioned and you've got the answer. P/P/J/C# are interpreted (or run on a VM, which is the same diff from a speed point of view). C/C++ is natively compiled code, i.e. "translated" to assembly for whatever machine it gets compiled on, which is as fast as you can get short of hand-optimizing assembly code.
You're not going to be able to write fast code in Java. You can write fairly quick code in Perl, but C will still usually run about 20% faster at a minimum in my experience. My pet peeve is the people who write Java GUI interfaces instead of writing a regular XWindow/Qt/GLib application. Often it's used to cut porting costs, but programs written this way are slower than hell and still break on a regular basis -- they just don't buffer-overrun.
This troll looks hungry and shows no sign of turning to stone, despite the fact that it's daylight. I think I'll feed him.
So long as you allow developers to do such things as basic arithmetic and variable assignment, you're gonna have to deal with buggy code written by self-recursive sphincter-spelunkers.
Of course! If we just made everything drag-and-drop, developers would barely have to know anything at all! You could just make windows that you draw components onto, then the developer just sets the way he wants it to look and pastes in some code from a website.
What?...Microsoft made that?...and it's called Visual Basic? And it sucks because developers who are trained on it never learned how to assign variables, do basic arithmetic, or program things efficiently?
Yes, VBA is available on most computers, IF the computer is running Microsoft Windows with Microsoft Office.
Yes, VB teaches beginners. It teaches them that the only system worth coding on is a PC running Windows, because otherwise they won't be able to click and drop their components. The first thing a beginner learns is that they can write programs that look just like the Windows programs (i.e. Internet Explorer, Access, Excel), without first hearing that the reason that they can is that they are, in fact, starting the Windows programs, and that little Access app they wrote using New Application.thisMethod and New Application.thatMethod just called two separate copies of an Office application. And guess what? If you forget to "garbage-collect" (well, really Application.Close), which 99% of beginners do, you won't get a warning of any kind. Rather, the applications will just stay in your system memory, waiting for a close command that will never appear. I've seen programs that could use 200K of memory (large in itself, but livable considering the VB interpreter environment) using almost 128 megs.
That's just Visual Basic, which is pretty awful unless you're making a demo for your local suit. VBA is much worse; in fact, I think it's the spawn of Satan himself. At least you know when the application appears, because you have to open it to start your program, but since VBA is just macros within the main window, you cannot create menus, and the first thing you get to choose is the color of your window. This has spawned horrors of beginning GUI design such as magenta-colored windows, script fonts, and labels that respond to clicks to bring up more windows, just because programming is a last resort for VB and VBA; the star of the show is the decision of whether to make your font Script or Wingdings.
This rant should be taken in view of my recent experiences; I have rewritten several programs built by budding VB6.0 programmers in the past few months, each one more horrendous than the last. VB should only be shown to programmers after they have used a programming language, not a set of GUI design macros. Make no mistake, VB is like the cardboard televisions at the local furniture store: for display purposes only.
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Why is it that conservatives stop being conservative when large corporations want things to go their way in defiance of the wishes of the marketplace (such as file sharing)?
Don't ask me! I'm conservative, vote Republican...and love sharing music, software, etc. Of course, I'm not a politician, so maybe my values would be radically altered if I was accepting massive contributions from the Arrr Aye Double A.
I suspect that liberal and conservative doesn't mean much to politicians on issues like this; it's who will get them re-elected. Who contributes the most money to their re-election campaign? Large, powerful lobbies; corporations, unions, PACs of different stripes. We'd put some serious campaign spending limits in place, if the people who have authority to do that were not the ones who stand to lose the most from it. Talk about the fox being in charge of the henhouse...
I automatically block anything registered as a Comcast dynamic IP because it's always spam. Without question. If it's legit, it should go through the Comcast mail server. Keep in mind that this only blocks dynamic IPs if it's registered as a dynamic IP; I assume if you're smart enough to run your own nameserver and fill out all the ICAN'T-related paperwork, you're smart enough not to click on the file somebody "send you to have your advice".
Let's face it, the people who on here who use different networks, run their 5000-person listserv from home, etc are few and far between and could be whitelisted by Comcast. The vast majority of mail senders are schmucks who expected the computer to be a new kind of TV and now pollute the Internet with hundreds of spam mails.
Complaining about not being able to use a mail server on a Comcast dynamic IP is like complaining about getting blocked by the majority of the Internet because your mail server is an open relay, or getting kicked off IRC because you use AOL. If you want mail access to the Internet and not just the ISP mail gateway, you should do three things: STFU, move to a static IP, and get yourself a hostname that doesn't look like "ip55643234-luser-65-43-231-30-hugecablegiant.com" .
There are more types of nerds than just computer nerds. There are anime, physics, and biology articles on here sometimes as well...are you going to discount those just because they have nothing to do with that overclocked Athlon you've got running Debian in your parents' basement?
I believe that most nerds feel interest in all things nerdly (word? maybe that should be "nerdy") whether it's their thing or not. Although computers and their programming are my primary fields of interest, I've got to admit I'm interested when the subject turns to war gaming, RPGs, minor points of history, artificial languages and grammars, model rocketry, physics experiments...it all comes with the way of thinking.
If you want electronics and only electronics, try another site or set your filters accordingly.
Won't work.
1. As you say, there is the privacy angle, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Add to that the massive expense, political wrangling, and "spam breaks" on the part of government to certain groups (politicians, charities, maybe some corporations) and we'd end up with a boondoggle of huge proportions. I work for the federal government and have some first-hand experience with this. Government projects do not mix well with computers, and the less regulated the Internet is, the better for all concerned.
2. Mail outside the country would still have to come into the US (relatives, friends, business partners from all corners of the globe), which would require a spam catcher...which puts us back in the position we started because we already have antispam software at the ISP level, for the most part. Just a lot of it doesn't work very well. At this point, the government would be the mail gateway; they'd buy some POS from a major antispam vendor through GSA (whatever it is, it won't be open source), and we'd have a multi-billion-dollar antispam gateway that doesn't work.
Not to be rude, but if a little voice inside your head starts saying, "Why shouldn't the government just come up with a solution?", you should put your fingers in your ears and start going, "la la la la la can't hear you la la la la!..." It's not the social/political/economic problems of this solution you should be looking at yet; it's just the fact that it won't fly technologically.
At my workplace, the word came down that telecommuting was allowed. Following this order, lower-level managers, who still measure work by the amount of hours the cubicle is occupied, made a rule that no one could telecommute...except managers. Funny how that works...
Yesterday I went to a different site where I had no cubicle. I forwarded my cubicle phone to my work cellphone and my work email to my Linux laptop via Citrix. The serial console to the server I was working on, in the dark, dirty basement, I forwarded via a terminal server to the laptop as well.
Then I went outside, enjoyed the nice weather, and paid no attention to either my laptop or my phone. :)
Giving a score, and then completely invalidating it by demanding perfection in it, is used by a lot of organizations. It perfectly captures the underlying evil behind managerial "rah rah we're a team and we're the best" thinking.
Kia Motors does this. When you buy a car or get service, you're warned to give full marks (10/10) across the board if you want the guy who changed your oil to keep his job. In fact, although Kia calls you independently to get the scores, if you give anything under 10, the desk operator will ask you, "Do you really want to do this? The person who helped you will be fired if you don't give the 10."
Col. Hackworth, a US expatriate (and badass) who does a lot of writing about bullshit in the Army, mentions that this kind of thing got added at one point (around the early 60s) where every soldier had to be a perfect marksman on pain of being demoted. The way soldiers would get around this was by having a buddy stick holes in their paper targets with a pencil indicating perfect shots.
That cable installer who put in your physics prof's cable was most likely fired instantly, just because your prof understood statistics and not managerial politics.
And what, a scant two centuries ago slavery was still the norm in the US? (FYI, the slavery system was abolished thousands of years ago in China.)
The slavery system was abhorred by most of the founders of the US, and there was a plan to abolish slavery in the works. Slavery had nothing to do with the system of government; it had to do with the economics of the Southern States. And as you see, the Constitution was updated to take care of that issue.
You live your way, and I live mine. I don't want people asserting their values on me.
So it's perfectly alright if we are allied with a country where saying something critical of the government could cost you your life? After all, it's their culture. It's not really "oppression"; it's just their idea of "freedom". As you can see, that's a ridiculous argument; allowing such abuse limits freedom for everyone by setting a precedent that gets used by every crummy dictator in the world (Suharto, the ex-dictator of Indonesia, used the same argument you're using now as an excuse for his draconian measures). I recall seeing a bumper sticker used by many liberals in my city. It says "No one is free when others are oppressed".
You may not see a need for the right to bear arms, and that's OK. It's never been used for its designated purpose yet (armed resistance against a tyrannical government), mostly due to the check-and-balance system, and hopefully it never will have to be, but it's there, and someday it might be necessary. It's a lot easier to subjugate a country when you don't have to face the prospect of house-to-house fighting and guerilla warfare across its entirety; right now, anyone who is interested in seizing power in the US, including anyone in the US government, will be forced to consider this prospect.
Almost anyone can get into college, but I view that as a good thing. High school is basically elementary school for people in their teens; you are on a strict schedule and are told what to do. That's not to say talent is stomped on in high school, but it's harder to do actual research the same way as in college; high school is a system based on quantity. The best teachers I had set the class up as much like a college class as they could.
The reason why I mention this is that high school is not a good proving ground for college. People might have the ability to do the work, but be bored and unchallenged, eventually getting sloppy (spoken from first-hand experience; I worked twice as hard in my shop classes, and was far happier, than in Global Studies or Health, where I knew the material but did a lackluster job). People who do the best work in high school often have discovered the key to the system -- fat margins, size-14 fonts, pseudo-intellectual musings to make the writing an "impenetrable fog" as Bill Watterson calls it, doing the two extra word problems...sliding through. They often get a rude awakening in college.
The second year of college is, and should be, the real test. The first year is still a lot like high school, with more freedom. The second year you start the real work on your major and will soon drop it unless you love it. By the middle of my first year, CS was more about sorting methods, big-O notation, and low-level instructions than about "Hello, World!", and the people who thought it was "How To Make Lots of Money By Playing Video Games" dropped like flies. Many others, including myself, decided they loved it even if it condemned them to a life of wandering through out-of-date code and crufted databases.
Although many people complain about morons who play good football getting accepted, let's face it: They're a privileged few who are the exception, not the rule. The thing we should really be complaining about is the increasingly high prices of universities that are almost impossible to pay without external help (scholarships, loans, etc).
I'm surprised this one hasn't got modded Troll yet. Oh well, I'll bite...
No, it's not shocking at all. Unfortunately, this is what we can fully expect from an oppressive, non-democratic government. It also tells us Westerners the kinds of things to watch out for in our own governments -- there but for the grace of God, and all. It seems outrageous to us now, but liberty has to be continually guarded and fought for, again and again, because we can be assured of the continued existance of dictators and wannabe dictators on both ends of the political spectrum. Someday in the near future, that news article could be about us.
The UK is more restrictive in many ways than the US (no right to bear arms, and a scant two centuries ago insulting the king could cost you your head, if I remember correctly). However, it had a strong concept of freedom and independence which was inherited by the first American colonists, who "fixed" many of the abuses of the English system that existed at the time, in the Constitution. Hence the Bill of Rights, separation of Church and State, division of power among three major bodies...lack of a king...etc.
Privoxy can already block these with a couple judicious regexps, and it shouldn't be any trouble at all for Mozilla to block these as well. If you want to block floaters in advance of this tech being adopted by every unscrupulous marketeer in existence, try going to Kompas (Indonesian news site). They're filled with them, but a few rules should clean 'em up.
Marketroids have to learn that you catch a lot more flies with honey than with vinegar. At this point, nstead of being in any way interested in the product, the user just gets annoyed and tries to find a way to make the advertisement go away...or goes to a different site.
Isn't it obvious? GOOD SF doesn't sell. Cheap commercialized tripe does.
Good SF? You're talking about Mutant X! Andromeda was at least watchable (slightly better than Enterprise, IMHO), but Mutant X was horrible...almost as bad as The Lost World. The only thing worse I could think of is if someone made a TV series out of "Battlefield Earth". Oops, better not give 'em any ideas....
The BBC isn't exactly a paragon of accuracy itself sometimes. Neither is NPR, PBS, or the printed press.
They get their souls from the same place as most lawyers, and Darl.
For those who thought the parent wasn't specific enough, that would be /dev/null...
Your article advocates a
(*) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(*) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(*) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(*) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
(*) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(*) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(*) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(*) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(*) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(*) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I very strongly suggest you leave your 'France' jokes at home.
Saying that the US doesn't care (except a few members of Amnesty International) when France complains about prisoner execution or attacking Iraq may have been said in a flippant way, but it's not a joke. It's the truth. The same goes for most other countries, but the parent poster mentioned France specifically.
Just because no one's listening doesn't mean the US shouldn't comment. France certainly comments whenever we execute a prisoner or drop bombs on a third-world country...not that anyone listens to them either. :)
The US government has to comment to save face in front of MS, because MS 0wnz it through its deadly addiction to the crack-rock called MS Office. If you've ever worked at a .gov, you'd know that most IT people there physically cannot think of any solution other than a Microsoft solution. Most of them can't understand why anyone would want to release software for free. And they're not even politicians. Gates isn't even paying them off!
Also, this wasn't the first, but it was the biggest EU antitrust fine in history (from what I hear). Some of the economy wonks in the government probably think that this is an attempt to get a leg up on the US software industry.
It's idiotic, I know, but this explains some of what the government does.
That's somewhat of a ridiculous comparison. If you're going to compare OSS and closed source methodologies, you should not do the equivalent of comparing a teen garage band with the New York Philharmonic. A better comparison would be "enterprise" closed source, versus open source that has a lot of manpower behind it.
The open source that tends to get used the most is the stuff that has a strong userbase and active developers. The 14-year-old-written "this is l33t so I wrote it, visit my blog d00d!@!@!!" kind of software is occasionally useful if you need something to do a small, handy thing on your workstation, but rarely gets used heavily in production -- even by workplaces using open source.
More likely, the software written is by some post-graduate or a group of programming enthusiasts who are interested in the program concept or have found it useful and decided to help improve it. Most of the GNU software, MailScanner (an extremely flexible virus/spam gateway), and the Linux kernel itself, is written in this manner. Many of them release designs and papers, something which the companies you're speaking of often keep in-house and hidden from the public.
Now to my personal mistrusts. I personally mistrust software that's probably written by someone with a passing familiarity with Visual Basic, who does not speak my language and does not document the program properly. If you wonder what I mean, try installing some of that "bonus software" that comes with your inkjet, scanner, or CD writer on your system and you'll learn a painful lesson. Not all software written by a company is good, or even has a reasonable design behind it -- and sometimes, even with a reasonable design it's still programmed badly.
There is no place in the Bible that claims that Earth is the only source of life in the universe. In addition, by "religion", you are most likely referring only to the three major monotheistic ones: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
Plenty of Christians believed that the earth was not the center of the universe even back when this was the prevailing worldview. The Bible itself does not stipulate that Earth is the center of the universe. Aristotle believed that Earth was the center of the universe (plenty of his contemporaries disagreed), and his works became "canonized" as the only view during the Middle Ages, along with other great thinkers of the ancient world such as Ptolemy, who used an overly complex method to explain the orbits of heavenly bodies, and Galen, who was the first doctor in the West to link the nervous system to the brain, but based all his findings on pig anatomy (couldn't dissect humans back then).
Having a religion does not exclude common sense. In persisting in this belief, many atheists (or at least ./ atheists) are often more intolerant and ignorant than followers of organized religion.
I, on the other hand, like MS better than Verisign.
If I don't want to use IE, I don't have to. I am not forced to use their product or to see their ads if I choose differently.
Having a poor browser does not break any other Internet applications. This does.
It's widely been a subject of suspicious conjecture that Sendmail was written at the University of Berkeley shortly after LSD was invented in the same university.
I have Postfix on a box at my work here, and am loving it...too bad Sendmail on the production systems, its sendmail.cf hacked by dozens of admins before me, will never go away. If you wonder why, try working for a federal government bureaucracy and making any change whatsoever to the status quo.
Doesn't matter which administration at this point. Keep in mind whose administration was in office when the DMCA got passed.
Whether Bush or Kerry gets into office in November at this point is entirely moot; neither administration, and very little of Congress, is immune to contributions from large corporations.
Ummm...the right wing wanted this just as bad as the left. The only people who did not want this law were telemarketers.
I don't see how you can claim a law that was so popular on both sides of the fence as some sort of victory for one side or another. The fact is, the right wing likes judges just fine -- when they have problems with a judge, their issue is that the judge may have overstepped his bounds (using interpretation of a case as legislation). They're elected for life (so politics won't affect their performance) because their domain is the interpretation of the existing laws, not the passing of new ones.
In a perfect world, judges would be selected based on how well they can understand the law, but since this is not one of those, fights between Dems and Reps over how conservative or liberal a judge is keeps many judges from being appointed in a timely manner.
personally, I think there is a better solution, stop using 'buffer overflow' languages like C, C++. Anything else: perl, python, java, C# is more secure. Why are all our systems built on such a foundation of instability?
Look at all the ones you mentioned and you've got the answer. P/P/J/C# are interpreted (or run on a VM, which is the same diff from a speed point of view). C/C++ is natively compiled code, i.e. "translated" to assembly for whatever machine it gets compiled on, which is as fast as you can get short of hand-optimizing assembly code.
You're not going to be able to write fast code in Java. You can write fairly quick code in Perl, but C will still usually run about 20% faster at a minimum in my experience. My pet peeve is the people who write Java GUI interfaces instead of writing a regular XWindow/Qt/GLib application. Often it's used to cut porting costs, but programs written this way are slower than hell and still break on a regular basis -- they just don't buffer-overrun.
This troll looks hungry and shows no sign of turning to stone, despite the fact that it's daylight. I think I'll feed him.
So long as you allow developers to do such things as basic arithmetic and variable assignment, you're gonna have to deal with buggy code written by self-recursive sphincter-spelunkers.
Of course! If we just made everything drag-and-drop, developers would barely have to know anything at all! You could just make windows that you draw components onto, then the developer just sets the way he wants it to look and pastes in some code from a website.
What?...Microsoft made that?...and it's called Visual Basic? And it sucks because developers who are trained on it never learned how to assign variables, do basic arithmetic, or program things efficiently?
Oh.
Yes, VBA is available on most computers, IF the computer is running Microsoft Windows with Microsoft Office.
Yes, VB teaches beginners. It teaches them that the only system worth coding on is a PC running Windows, because otherwise they won't be able to click and drop their components. The first thing a beginner learns is that they can write programs that look just like the Windows programs (i.e. Internet Explorer, Access, Excel), without first hearing that the reason that they can is that they are, in fact, starting the Windows programs, and that little Access app they wrote using New Application.thisMethod and New Application.thatMethod just called two separate copies of an Office application. And guess what? If you forget to "garbage-collect" (well, really Application.Close), which 99% of beginners do, you won't get a warning of any kind. Rather, the applications will just stay in your system memory, waiting for a close command that will never appear. I've seen programs that could use 200K of memory (large in itself, but livable considering the VB interpreter environment) using almost 128 megs.
That's just Visual Basic, which is pretty awful unless you're making a demo for your local suit. VBA is much worse; in fact, I think it's the spawn of Satan himself. At least you know when the application appears, because you have to open it to start your program, but since VBA is just macros within the main window, you cannot create menus, and the first thing you get to choose is the color of your window. This has spawned horrors of beginning GUI design such as magenta-colored windows, script fonts, and labels that respond to clicks to bring up more windows, just because programming is a last resort for VB and VBA; the star of the show is the decision of whether to make your font Script or Wingdings.
This rant should be taken in view of my recent experiences; I have rewritten several programs built by budding VB6.0 programmers in the past few months, each one more horrendous than the last. VB should only be shown to programmers after they have used a programming language, not a set of GUI design macros. Make no mistake, VB is like the cardboard televisions at the local furniture store: for display purposes only.