You are absolutely correct. One of the things that truly bothered me when I was working in education was this whole idea that education is a business and students are customers. A university should pursue knowledge -- not more customers. I think many universities have forgotten that this is where their purpose really lies.
You've got to remember what the University installs these networks for: learning. Not copyright infringement, and not telephone calls.
WRT napster: I am well aware that it could be used for the transfer of non-copyrighted MP3's. But the fact of the matter is that it is not. I will challenge anyone to show me that even 1% of the MP3's available on Napster are not copyrighted. And this thing is using 20% of the bandwidth on a lot of campuses! If students in fact own the CD's, why can't they just rip their own copies?
So don't talk to me about Napster. As for DialPad: that is also a purely economic decision in most cases. Yeah, it only eats about 20K/sec. But remember that's 20K/sec for hours on end. It adds up.
To call these censorship is to abuse the term censorship. Nobody is preventing you from saying ANYTHING! They are just choosing not to pay for you to say it! There's nothing stopping you from going out and getting your own ISP.
I'm sure many of you will claim that "this is just the start of censorhip" and "a little bit of censorship is like being a little bit pregnant". Here's the thing you've got to remember: when you cry "censorship" over petty stuff like this, you will not be able to get my attention when there really is censorship. For example, the DeCSS stuff is quite disturbing from a free speech point of view. But by hassling with dialpad.com, you are losing credibility for that battle.
I admit it... I'm one in a thousand (give or take). When people ask why I act so immature, I usually explain that I just turned seven, so please give me a break.:-)
OTOH -- I have to say that to blow off Y2K issues at this point is a mistake. The mystique of the rollover was a bunch of nonsense -- and we all knew it. But that doesn't mean that there are no real problems. I have seen quite a few screwed up perl scripts, for example. And it really seems to me that, had we done nothing, some bad things could have happened.
I'd wait until a few billing cycles are through before I called the problem over.
FWIW, there are other ways to solve this. Nameley, you could setup a secondary address on each interface, then setup host routes for the secondary addresses.
Under Linux, the commands would look something like this (this is off the top of my head. YMMV. IANAL. IYHDBUIANR (if your hard drive blows up I am not responsible):
On the first host:
ifconfig eth0:1 192.168.123.1 netmask 255.255.255.252 broadcast 192.168.123.3 route add -net 192.168.123.0 gw 192.168.123.1
On the scond host: ifconfig eth0:1 192.168.123.2 netmask 255.255.255.252 broadcast 192.168.123.3 route add -net 192.168.123.0 gw 192.168.123.2
(those commands are probably wrong. Subnet calculations like that are a pain in the neck and I'm too lazy to check them).
The only downside would be that all your traffic would still go out over the cable modem. To fix that (mostly), trade in your hub on a switch. Switches are getting really cheap nowadays.
I will agree to all of these except possibly irrelevant. The point of free speech is not freedom to use dirty words -- it is freedom to express ideas. Name me one idea that cannot be adequately expressed without vulgarity?
Don't get me wrong. I think NSI and other registrars limiting this is silly and a waste of time. But I also think it is silly to argue about it.
Remember when free speech was about allowing the communist party? Or open discussion of serious societal problems (cf. Howl by Ginsberg). Or any kind of literature... Or even "give peace a chance!"? Or freedom of religious expression and exploration?
And now the best we can do for censorship is a few words that only crepuscular fools use anyway in our domain names. I'm not sure whether that means that there is hardly any censorship, or whether it means that we have so thouroughly censored our own intellects that we are no longer dangerous anyway.
Could someone who knows comment on what happens if you register with a company and they go out of business? I.e. Let's say you use joker.com (who are in Germany if memory serves) and they go under next tuesday. What happens?
I've been very happy with Register.com so far. While they are a bit cheezy and the same $$ as NSI, they offer a service that I really appreciate: they provide DNS servers. This can be a real pain in the neck, because, too often, the hosting providers don't know what the heck they are doing.
Also, it let's me be absolutely sure that I own the DNS, since the ISP never touches it. This may seem paranoid, but I've been burned before by these ISP's who will "manage your domain name".
One of the problems with the current mod system is insightful comments are often missed because they are so far down the story that the moderators have used up their points on trolls before they get to them.
Notwithstanding the form factor, having a very featurful bootable rescue CD is a great idea.
Sadly, the CD's from most of the distros are useless for rescue, since they only have the bare minimum to install the OS. Has LinuxCare made ISO images available?
I used to be rather into the whole talker/chat/irc scene. (Friends don't let friends IRC -- remember this). Anyway, the one thing I noticed was that you could/always/ tell when someone was faking their gender.
Usually, when I met someone who was "cross-dressing", I found that I was rather suspicious of them in general. When the nickname was ambiguous, I tended to correctly label the gender subconsciously. And I was always right.
The fact is that, despite what many people claim, there are some serious psychological and behavioural differences between men and women. And, if you pay attention, you can almost always spot the fakes.
Err... I think you are missing my point. My point is that, while someone who was anti-filter would suppose that the fix was not in, someone who is pro-filter could very well suppose that the fix is in. "Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view".
I've never seen a society where everyone is so keen to be the underdog.
You're making an assumption. Namely, you are assuming that of the "fix is in", it would be in for censorship. I think you will find that AFA and friends will feel like the "fix is in" for pornography.
Both sides would be wrong.
Just goes to prove that you can't oversimplify issues by claiming that anything is fixed. Too often, we create general principles where none is warranted.
Am I the only one around here who prefers Go to Chess?
For those of you not familiar with it, Go is a Japanese equivalent to chess. Some claim that Chess is a distant descendant of it. It's much more artistic than Chess -- you can tell a whole lot about a person from their Go playing.
You complain that "nothing anyone does is going to stop fundamentalists from bringing issues like this to America's ballots."
Are you aware of what fundamentalism is? It was defined in a series of books published around the turn of the century. The books were published by a Texas millionaire who got religion. Their most distinctive feature is that they set forth a very specific doctrine of Biblical authority. They then interpret this in ways that tend (In my opinion) to stray towards legalism. (Legalism being defined as the state wherein laws are obeyed for the sake of laws, and that regards our salvation as coming from obedience to those laws rather than through the sovereign power of God.) Notice I say stray toward, not that all fundamentalists are legalists -- for the record.
I will bet you just about anything that most of the people you refer to are not fundamentalists. Probably not even close. Instead, they are concerned citizens who have legitimate concerns about the kind of material they are paying tax dollars to pull into the library. While most of them are probably conservative Christians, I stronly doubt most of them are fundamentalists. And, for what it's worth, they probably can't define fundamentalism either.
By labeling them "fundamentalists", you engage in the worst kind ad hominem argument, playing on the prejudices of your audience against "fundies" (even though few can define it any more than you can.)
Consider all the whining you hear around here when some poor innocent mistakenly calls a "cracker" a "hacker". You engage in just as bad when you label all conservative Christians as fundamentalists. Worse, your attempt to imply that anyone who evinces a conventional moral code is a "fundamentalist" right-wing conservative "political Christian" (i.e. member of the religious right) is at least as pernicious as the "if he knows too much about computers, watch him, he'll probably hack your computers" that I ran into in college.
*sigh* I will tell you right now that, if you rely on the evening news for your understanding of theology, you will no more understand it that the average CNN viewer understands computer security. Like computers, the issues are complex (maybe more complex). If you will not study, then don't comment.
You know... You're right. I guess I imagined that whole business with the adulteress who Jesus let off the hook.
To spout this, you have got to be a troll burned by the worst of fundamentalism (and no, I'm not a fundamentalist). I'm sorry that you have been so wounded.
Momentarily, we will have a large number of posts pointing out that Bruno was burned at the stake by the Roman inquisition. They will claim that this was wrong, that no one should be burned at the stake for honestly seeking truth. They will claim that this was an unconscionable sin which Jesus would have been ashamed of.
And they'd be right.
But they would also claim that this invalidates belief in Jesus. There, they would be wrong. The actions of misguided people abusing Jesus' name 400 years ago have nothing to do with my faith now -- although they do serve to point out some of the hazards awaiting those who forget the church's purpose.
Hmm... However, I think this is a case where intent was important. My intent was simply to indicate that I am quite the Linux fanatic. Maybe I should've been more careful in my phrasing.
This guy is right on the money. The biggest problem that Linux faces is the arrogance of its users. (And before someone calls this a flame and moderates it to oblivion, let me point out that I have probably been using Linux since before you ever heard of it (1993)). I love Linux. It's productive for me. It's fun. It encourages cool new things.
But I don't think that OS nirvana has yet been reached. Capability based systems sound very cool.
On the topic of flame... I'm actually starting to wonder whether some of the flaming (and possible the ridiculous number of trolls on/. for the past month or so) is not being subsidized by someone who would rather Linux not succeed.
I mean... seriously. I know that I don't know any Linux users who act as stupidly as a lot of the trolls act.
Kind of like a college computer lab, right? Lots of people around, no one would look at porn? Wrong. I used to run a college computer lab. And we had a persistent problem with people looking at porn in it. Your ideas don't match reality. Time to change the ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
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WRT napster: I am well aware that it could be used for the transfer of non-copyrighted MP3's. But the fact of the matter is that it is not. I will challenge anyone to show me that even 1% of the MP3's available on Napster are not copyrighted. And this thing is using 20% of the bandwidth on a lot of campuses! If students in fact own the CD's, why can't they just rip their own copies?
So don't talk to me about Napster. As for DialPad: that is also a purely economic decision in most cases. Yeah, it only eats about 20K/sec. But remember that's 20K/sec for hours on end. It adds up.
To call these censorship is to abuse the term censorship. Nobody is preventing you from saying ANYTHING! They are just choosing not to pay for you to say it! There's nothing stopping you from going out and getting your own ISP.
I'm sure many of you will claim that "this is just the start of censorhip" and "a little bit of censorship is like being a little bit pregnant". Here's the thing you've got to remember: when you cry "censorship" over petty stuff like this, you will not be able to get my attention when there really is censorship. For example, the DeCSS stuff is quite disturbing from a free speech point of view. But by hassling with dialpad.com, you are losing credibility for that battle.
Never cry wolf.
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OTOH -- I have to say that to blow off Y2K issues at this point is a mistake. The mystique of the rollover was a bunch of nonsense -- and we all knew it. But that doesn't mean that there are no real problems. I have seen quite a few screwed up perl scripts, for example. And it really seems to me that, had we done nothing, some bad things could have happened.
I'd wait until a few billing cycles are through before I called the problem over.
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Under Linux, the commands would look something like this (this is off the top of my head. YMMV. IANAL. IYHDBUIANR (if your hard drive blows up I am not responsible):
(those commands are probably wrong. Subnet calculations like that are a pain in the neck and I'm too lazy to check them).The only downside would be that all your traffic would still go out over the cable modem. To fix that (mostly), trade in your hub on a switch. Switches are getting really cheap nowadays.
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Don't get me wrong. I think NSI and other registrars limiting this is silly and a waste of time. But I also think it is silly to argue about it.
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And now the best we can do for censorship is a few words that only crepuscular fools use anyway in our domain names. I'm not sure whether that means that there is hardly any censorship, or whether it means that we have so thouroughly censored our own intellects that we are no longer dangerous anyway.
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Also, it let's me be absolutely sure that I own the DNS, since the ISP never touches it. This may seem paranoid, but I've been burned before by these ISP's who will "manage your domain name".
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Threshold -1, Flat mode, and newest first
One of the problems with the current mod system is insightful comments are often missed because they are so far down the story that the moderators have used up their points on trolls before they get to them.
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Sadly, the CD's from most of the distros are useless for rescue, since they only have the bare minimum to install the OS. Has LinuxCare made ISO images available?
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Get out of my way... I need to back away slowly.
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Usually, when I met someone who was "cross-dressing", I found that I was rather suspicious of them in general. When the nickname was ambiguous, I tended to correctly label the gender subconsciously. And I was always right.
The fact is that, despite what many people claim, there are some serious psychological and behavioural differences between men and women. And, if you pay attention, you can almost always spot the fakes.
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I've never seen a society where everyone is so keen to be the underdog.
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Both sides would be wrong.
Just goes to prove that you can't oversimplify issues by claiming that anything is fixed. Too often, we create general principles where none is warranted.
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For those of you not familiar with it, Go is a Japanese equivalent to chess. Some claim that Chess is a distant descendant of it. It's much more artistic than Chess -- you can tell a whole lot about a person from their Go playing.
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Are you aware of what fundamentalism is? It was defined in a series of books published around the turn of the century. The books were published by a Texas millionaire who got religion. Their most distinctive feature is that they set forth a very specific doctrine of Biblical authority. They then interpret this in ways that tend (In my opinion) to stray towards legalism. (Legalism being defined as the state wherein laws are obeyed for the sake of laws, and that regards our salvation as coming from obedience to those laws rather than through the sovereign power of God.) Notice I say stray toward, not that all fundamentalists are legalists -- for the record.
I will bet you just about anything that most of the people you refer to are not fundamentalists. Probably not even close. Instead, they are concerned citizens who have legitimate concerns about the kind of material they are paying tax dollars to pull into the library. While most of them are probably conservative Christians, I stronly doubt most of them are fundamentalists. And, for what it's worth, they probably can't define fundamentalism either.
By labeling them "fundamentalists", you engage in the worst kind ad hominem argument, playing on the prejudices of your audience against "fundies" (even though few can define it any more than you can.)
Consider all the whining you hear around here when some poor innocent mistakenly calls a "cracker" a "hacker". You engage in just as bad when you label all conservative Christians as fundamentalists. Worse, your attempt to imply that anyone who evinces a conventional moral code is a "fundamentalist" right-wing conservative "political Christian" (i.e. member of the religious right) is at least as pernicious as the "if he knows too much about computers, watch him, he'll probably hack your computers" that I ran into in college.
*sigh* I will tell you right now that, if you rely on the evening news for your understanding of theology, you will no more understand it that the average CNN viewer understands computer security. Like computers, the issues are complex (maybe more complex). If you will not study, then don't comment.
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To spout this, you have got to be a troll burned by the worst of fundamentalism (and no, I'm not a fundamentalist). I'm sorry that you have been so wounded.
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And they'd be right.
But they would also claim that this invalidates belief in Jesus. There, they would be wrong. The actions of misguided people abusing Jesus' name 400 years ago have nothing to do with my faith now -- although they do serve to point out some of the hazards awaiting those who forget the church's purpose.
Just thought I'd mention that. :) -1 here I come!
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But I don't think that OS nirvana has yet been reached. Capability based systems sound very cool.
On the topic of flame... I'm actually starting to wonder whether some of the flaming (and possible the ridiculous number of trolls on /. for the past month or so) is not being subsidized by someone who would rather Linux not succeed.
I mean... seriously. I know that I don't know any Linux users who act as stupidly as a lot of the trolls act.
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The bill is Senate bill 372.
Please call and oppose this! (You can only call if you live in Virginia). It took me less than 2 minutes to call.
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