2) On cracker vs. hacker -
Yes, hacker was once used as a complimentary term. Then it was used (mostly by the media) as a derogatory term. Then a subset of the "good" hacker community came out with cracker to differentiate. Well guess what; it didn't catch on. Nobody except a small, vocal subset of the 'good' hackers uses the term, and it's just awkward. It doesn't flow well. Whingeing about "proper" terminology in this circumstance is a lost cause. Use whatever terms make you feel better (either cracker, black hat, malicious hacker, or whatever), but quit getting so bent out of shape over your new term not getting accepted.
<sarcasm> Yeah, and I say we force doctors, dentists, auto mechanics, and every other profession to also abandon their jargon. Doctors can refer to 'oozy boo-boos', dentists will stop calling that stuff on teeth 'calculus', and my mechanic will be free to say 'you offended the magic car god, and an offering of $800 will be needed to make it start again'... oh, wait... I think he tried something like that...
</sarcasm>
And regardless of 'cracker's acceptance, 'Hacker' is not a new term. We own the definition first, last and always. Even if it's never adopted, I'm not relenquishing the proper use of the term. And I often mock anyone that misuses the term. It's fun for me and reinforces their desire to properly use a few fundamental technical terms: cracker, wankin' virus-writer, dirtbag spammer, and piece-of-shit OS.
Wow, 'The perfect weapon kills all of your enemies' reads like the logic of an 18-year-old. Since I turned 18, I've learned:
Injuries are preferred in combat: Kill an opposing combatant, and you take one enemy out of combat; wound him and you take out two or three people (to carry him, provide medical support, etc.). Plus, screaming comrades are a lot more demoralizing and distracting than dead ones.
Most combatants are not eager and hateful. They're conscripts or patriotic supporters of their government. When governments say the fighting should stop, they're happier alive than dead, and within decades most citizens can reconcile the deepest of rifts with former enemies, if their leadership doesn't continue to incite animosity.
In that vein, a man wounded in combat will reconcile, generally. His kids will, too. Kill him, and they'll never forget and are somewhat less likely to forgive.
Most importantly, your argument is hugely simplistic. Ignoring the lack of a pure litmus test that allows you tell the difference between friendlies and enemies, you can't kill *EVERYONE*. There's always a compassionate bystander. Kill a man, his family resents you. Kill a town, and you piss off a lot of friends and relatives. Kill all Iraqis and you just piss off all of the other arab nations. Kill off all the arabs, and muslims worldwide will hold a deep grudge. Once the damage exceeds the personal level, the circle of influence grows.
Sorry for the ad-homenim about you sounding like an 18-yr-old, but you got rated as insightful. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Re:Lots of people don't make the connection but
on
SCO News Roundup
·
· Score: 1
If you remember back to the 1500's there used to be stock markets where pirate ships could get funding to go out and plunder other countries' merchant ships. The risks were high, but the payoff was huge
(snip)
Microsoft will turn into one when they start going downhill, so will the RIAA, etc. If the RIAA can't make money by competition they'll just go back through the past 100 years of copyrights they have and start releasing them
RIAA *WILL* turn into a bunch of rapacious pirates? Geez, for someone that asks me to 'remember back to 1500', you sure haven't been paying close enough attention to the last few years! SonnyBono Act, DMCA, crushing napster, self-destructing cd's, suing 12-year-olds, perverting the law until p2p activity precludes the presumption of innocence, lobbying for more and more draconian and intrusive laws... man, Captain Kidd would be proud.
No, and by that I mean zero, laptops need a DVD-R. Almost no laptops need any 3D accelerator. Why, on god's green earth, do cell phones need a camera? Why does a PDA need enough hardware to play videogames?
<sarcasm>
You're so right. Don't bother examining things in balance. It isn't a question of how many features can be crammed into a device while still attaining the typically-needed battery life. Balance is irrelevant! JUST... SAVE... POWER!
One question: can I at least keep the AC and passenger seats in my car? I realize they're power-hungry features, but I've grown fond of having them there the 20% of the time I use them.
</sarcasm>
Oh, and I think you meant 20 gigs is excessive on an mp3 player. 20 megs is just absurd...
I think the independent record companies should get together and register the phrase "No-Nonsense Indie" (or something like that) as a certification trademark that would certify that:
Check out RIAA Radar. The next best thing to what you're asking for. Also, cdbaby.com, irate, Michael Crawford's article on kuro5hin. No affiliation, no disclaimer, I'm just building a non-*AA way of life.
The real competition between AT@T, Sprint, Verizon, etc. has vastly improved long distance and lowered the rates.
Um, I used to have a real connection, analog, uncompressed, etc. Now I have a acelp-encoded* 2k datastream that makes non-voice sound like shit, introduces a few tenths of a second lag-time and lets them multiplex a dozen calls into what used to be near-immediate and mine-all-mine! I'll grant that things are cheaper, but I don't see the vastly improved part.
Oh, and I'm not so sure about the cheaper part: virtually every calling plan I look at has some absurd gotchas: 5 cents a minute unless you need a calling card. $40 a month for unlimited long distance as long as you're talking to people on the same calling plan, otherwise it's 23 cents a minute daytime, 17 cents a minute evenings. Collect calls at a buck a minute. Direct-dial in-state for seven times the price of interstate calls.
* or whatever protocol. Point being, call bandwidth/quality has been squeezed downward faster than the rates being charged.
Um, a big IANAL here, but the real world has mechanisms that allow a better balance than you're fearing here.
Public use of private property is where I'm thinkin'.
In most of the USA, there are two liability standards:
One for the free use of private property
One for the paid use of private property
Did I mention IANAL? Good. Keep that in mind. Also, what I'm talking about may vary state-to-state, or in various nations, but any state I've lived in has had this sort of law:
If I have a big chunk of land that has a sledding hill on it, and I don't chase people off when they use it, don't post "no-sledding no-trespassing" signs, don't... well, if I just let people use the land... I'm protected by law from being held liable when someone gets hurt. I can even pave a parking lot and make minor improvements geared toward that use. As long as I'm not in it for profit, I'm specifically protected from liability.
On the other hand, if I start making any restrictions, charging fees, or otherwise actively managing the use, I become responsible and liable.
Because the first category of use LITERALLY has a law on the book stating this liability protection (the protection isn't presumed constitutionally or the likes), I'm quite sure that open source code isn't sheltered from liability, even if it is free. But the world is pretty used to the idea that you shouldn't let lawsuit-happy trolls punish someone for being charitable. We could get such a law put in place. I recommend getting a liability loophole here while making shall-remain-nameless big companies spend some of their 97% profit margin on security and be held legally liable for crap code.
Why do I care? Because in the last decade, I'm starting to get consumer electronics devices that lock up and require a power-off reboot. Stuff like my boombox and DVD player should NOT be complicated to the point of crashing due to flawed internal code. This is incredibly unacceptable, but you think my only recourse should be market forces?! Bah. If someone sells me crap, I reserve my "god-given right" to a jury and a lawsuit (not arbitration, but that's another can of worms)! And I say this even though I am a charter member of the we-sue-too-much club of America. I hate lawsuits and am not too fond of lawyers. But I think I'll suck up and hire me a nice vicious one if the crapflood of buggy 5-button devices persists.
Who the hell is moddin' this guy up? Man, where do I start?
It shows why rival MTAs (eg: Postfix) are gaining popularity, when Sendmail could have kept absolute control of the market, merely by being the best.
Sendmail could never ever ever have kept absolute control of the market merely by being the best. Anyone who has administered it pretty much wasn't able to moderate you back to trollsville for this remark because they fell off their chair choking or laughing at this point. Or, like me, they didn't have mod points today.
Sendmail is incredibly:
powerful
arcane
complicated.
By comparison, the others are a walk in the park. But they won't handle all the legacy or rewriting capability sometimes needed in large-sphere enterprise email. And many don't scale for shit. Exim for my laptop or home net, exchange for small turnkey shops, and know enough sendmail to survive...
One of my favorite early usenet sigs went along the line of "Sendmail Administration is not black magic-- there are legitimate technical reasons why it requires the sacrificing of a live chicken." (I've googled for 5 mins and can't find exact quote or origin....anyone?)
Next, did you check the narrowness of this bug? It's a problem in a fairly uncommon non-default sendmail configuration only:
Fixes a potential buffer overflow in ruleset parsing. This problem
is not exploitable in the default sendmail configuration;
only if non-standard rulesets recipient (2), final (4), or
mailer-specific envelope recipients rulesets are used then
a problem may occur. Problem noted by Timo Sirainen.
But, it was found and promptly fixed. Slow news day or obscurity is the only reason it got posted here.
Sendmail, arcane as it is, is the big bad voodoo daddy of mail. I use it, I fear it, and I deeply respect the sendmail development team. Feel free to check my posting history and you'll see I've never wasted keystrokes like this before. Fact is, you've just accomplished a mod-4 troll and I'd say bravo if it wasn't against this particular target.
Now, on to StupidTrollTalkIndicators (to train the untrainable slashdot moderation mindset):
comparing sendmail to hotmail (one's a web app, if that helps you be a bit clueful).
...getting paid to check for this stuff... yeah, that happens on a shoestring quasi-commercial basis: The boss has a money tree he uses to fund a team of fifteen to dig for bugs.
assuming that the bug is old. Sendmail adds about 40 minor tweaks and patches, expands for new circumstances and contracts when optimizations are found... and you think sendmail has always had this obscure little bug? Or that no new bugs are introduced when code is edited?
Ripping on sendmail for them being buggy and quasi-commercial. WTFDYGO having that high horse?! Name a commercial package that is 10% as complicated as parsing all sixty bizillion mail methodologies in use. Now show it is bugfree. You can't and won't.
Ediron's Law: Good engineers make modules, not suites. Microsoft's greatest liability is omnibus code. I dislike that more than antitrust tactics. They refuse to modularize and we're screwed as a result. Sendmail, alas, isn't very modularizable: it still accepts goop from a mainframe that resorts to %-escaping to allow passthru to a legitimate mail relay, because that used to be (and may still be) needed somewhere.
Troll troll troll troll troll. Even a 4-digit id. Sigh... Rob/Taco/etc, gimme the ability to spend my subscription money on mod points for numb-nutz responses like this and other techno-sounding wrongness. I'll start spending like mad!
--
Sosumi did come from the Apple Records situation... http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Records
You're using wikipedia as a reference in a/. debate? Wow...
I mean, you do understand how wiki's are written...
Wow....
Wow. I'm not sure if you're a troll, a genius, a lunatic, or what. Quotin' a wiki to win a debate on computer history trivia. Them's some huge, cast-iron ones you're totin, Mr. Earp. And no, I don't mean the revolvers.
Two cases of sticker shock: first cross-country trip I swerved north to go thru Toronto. Paid $2.50 US a gallon when gas was $1.50 in the US. Luckily, I was back in the car and driving before I did the math to convert $CDN per Liter to $US per gallon, or my screams and cursing might have disturbed the gas station attendant.
Then, Oct of '01, a company trip to Venezuela... $0.68 US a gallon. It's good to be in OPEC, I guess. Gas here was at $1.70 US at the time.
There's another posting that is GREAT for info and links, so I'll stick to side stuff I don't see there. I've looked at hybrids a few times and will buy as soon as one doesn't hurt too much. I don't need a car yet, so I've happily procrastinated 18 months on getting a new car just hoping something better would come out.
Honda had a 2-seater (Insight) that I imagine would be cool for commuters. 2 seats, room for a suitcase, but no room for a family-sized grocery run or backseat for kids. Scratched off my list as a result. Sad to cross it off my list... I've heard people exceeding 70 mpg on this puppy. In fact, I read one hilarious article about people that so obsess the mpg's that they drive in their socks to better finesse the gas peddle. I love it.
Honda's Civic hybrid: cool in a sensible-shoes sort of way. Might buy. Dealbreaker last year was that it sounded too much like henry ford's old rules on paint for cars (any color as long as it's black): The car didn't have options like keyless entry, keyless trunk, came in 2 colors outside and one color inside. For the same money, I could buy a better-equipped Accord. For a non-hybrid civic, there was $2000 price difference, and before the proposed tax incentives for hybrids I calculated out the 15 mpg I'd save would take me over a decade to recoup my savings:
Shifting 30 to 45 mpg priced at $1.60 per gallon, 10k miles per year (Hey, my 93 car is at 106k and I used to cross the country twice a year for grad school!): $178 per year savings (1.60 / 45 * 10000 vs 1.60 / 30 * 10000).
With tax incentives that are now in place, those almost are a free car payment each year. Yumm.
Toyota's Prius: no absolute reason against it comes to mind. It had some of the same numbers above on the price premium vs. a non-HEV. Oh, and rereading other posts I do remember the funky dash constellation (if you haven't seen it, think Jeep CJ goes digital... everything in center of dash, way out of your usual line-of-sight). Perhaps the dash needs to be identical to a regular car. Or not. Maybe we're due for a change, eh? I was fine with it; the car ran fine before I understood the dash, but it'd baffle the shit out of my grandma if I handed her the keys without instructions.
The new Ford SUV: was supposed to come out in '03, now I've read recently it's been pushed back to '04. Given the number of major design oopsies I've encountered in each of these, I can't say it's wise to change buying plans on a 'maybe next year's model' sort of deal. If I get annoyed with my car this winter, I'll buy my favorite non-hybrid and wait for the next car purchase to re-evaluate things.
Early adopter risk: most carry a 10-year electrical system waranty, so the waranty is enough to soothe worries I have of having to eat a few thousand bucks in new-battery costs if they fail after a few years.
First-owner sales have been weak, according to people that sell 'em that I've talked to (but I'm in a VERY rural, non-commuter, redneck sort of area).
I checked resale on eBay: depreciation on older models seemed minor enough to bolster my confidence that they'll hold value.
Right now, my wife has a Durango to handle all them soccer-mom details. We'll buy a hybrid SUV to replace it, if one's out by then and it isn't glaringly flawed.
Oh, and I saw something that said that some vendor (Audi?) was looking to put limited hybrid capability (the electromechanical mechanism at the wheel, I suspect) into a car of theirs to give it all-wheel-drive in a pinch... cooo-ool. If that pans out, I think you'll see hybrid become like Antilock Brakes Systems: a detail that just trickles down from luxury cars to lower-priced models until everything has a handful of the features.
Of course, my crystal ball reading on the average American's love affair with SUV's and Pickups says in the same timeframe we'll all be driving solo in the HOV lane in our HEV-exempted 5-ton humvee-3's that have been miraculously improved through the
I know you come around in later paragraphs to a stance I largely agree with, but about your paragraph 1, I gotta scream: Bullshit, and bite me.
It's very simple, really. Trading songs, movies, or other materials online without permission from the copyright holder of the work is a crime, both in the legal and moral sense. Folks on here love to spout that it is technically "copyright infringement," but it really amounts to stealing, not in the "theft by unlawful taking" sense, but in the sense of using another's property without their permissions.
You've bought into the big lie of Intellectual Property.
Outside of codification in very wrong laws, IP doesn't exist.
It is a legal fiction.
Maybe I'm crazy, but Natural Law HAS to have this as an unarguable base tenet: I don't owe anyone for my thoughts, my lessons learned, things I overheard, and songs I hum or sing. Yet under law, I'm supposed to pay a royalty for singing happy birthday... that's all the proof I need the law is an ass here.
As A FREAKIN' GIFT, my forefathers passed laws to let people have temporary reign over the dissemination of information, called copyright.
IT HAS GOTTEN OUT OF CONTROL. IT BEARS NO RESEMBLANCE TO CONSTITUTIONAL INTENT!
One only has to read court transcripts and the Eldred decision, or congressional quotes, or do any detailed amount of research to see that we're all getting screwed here.
Anticorporatists (is that even a word?) are all worried that we keep becoming less a legal entity than corporations. I'm not paranoid, but I certainly can see as I research the subject and try to talk to family and peers where this sort of doublespeak has led to way too many people believing the law is good and right and life-plus-85 is an OK tradeoff. My question is: tradeoff to WHO!? All I see is a one-way gift for sanctioned monopolists.
Ironically, the world would run just fine with short (15 yr., nonrenewable) copyright law. Every time Disney wants to wake up the cash cow, they just add or edit or do new releases. Look how software is done, do the same with content: This year it's Harry Potter '03 on DVD, next year it's '04, with 5 extra minutes of commentary... I might not buy the new one each year, but large improvements or every decade I'll revisit old purchases. By the time the original content is 15, we're all free to see some true competition and we get our personal thoughts and icons back. Equally good for me is Compulsory Licensing. Look it up yourself, I'm on a rant here, babe...
Last irony: if that dim Bono widow ever got her way and had all copyright extended perpetually, her husband's music would largely fall unusable due to untraceable copyright since he sang freakin' folk song adaptations. Disney would lose 3/4 of their shelf until they managed to negotiate with any/all Grimm heirs, plus whoever else sourced any story similar throughout all of time. Check out the lineage for Snow White. Figure out all the heirs who'd deserve compensation for the use of their ancestors' personal story for the Robin Hood story. See... it's absurd. Disney carefully adds just enough time to not even have to pay up to precopyright stories dating from the 19th century, for this very reason. This is a can of worms they don't want, since it'd make fractionation of Native American lands look simple (Again, look it up: a big US-ian lawsuit against the US Department of the Interior because of how screwed up land ownership in tribal reservations has gotten).
We're getting robbed. Disney's got the gun. I'll obey the law but I won't speak kindly of it.
Flame Off.
ps: I'm a writer. My own argument is against my best financial interests. Reconcile THAT before you dismiss me.
No disclaimer needed; I have no affiliation with the site. I just like tools that let me find good music while boycotting RIAA. Also, check out CDBaby and Michael Crawford's recent kuro5hin article.
On a side note, I struck up a conversation this evening with the local mom-n-pop video rental guy. He has a tool to polish scratched discs (CD's, DVD's) and I asked how rental lifespan varied between tapes and DVD, and if polishing made a difference. He got a disgusted look on his face, said some nasty things about the cheaper plastic being used DVD's, and that he'd pay the extra buck for the original materials. Then he held up a (already scratched) Sleeping Beauty that someone had bought today and already needed polishing, saying "Disney's policy is that the market lifespan of these discs is 15 playings. Hell, my kids watch it that many times the first week I get a new movie."
My take: they're back-dooring the slimy old limited-life divx marketing scheme.
Yes, yes we do think heirarchically. Most of the history of human thought has been fitting everything we can lay our filthy little brain cells on into heirarcheis, whether they wish to fit into them or not. It's intuitive.
...
I think this makes just about as much sense as using a document preperation language (XML) as the basis of a database.
Which is to say, none.
Therefore, we shouldn't try to stretch?!
1 - I remember reading of certain south-pacific islanders that had incredible navigational skills for island hopping, but that couldn't recognize 2-d representations of 3-d objects. A picture of a cube is baffling to them. Similarly, Object-orientedness is something I have to teach people via analogy. Once taught, people see object classes everywhere.
2 - Everything I learned in physics seems to have focussed around unlearning common misconceptions and overly vague and innacurate common-man understandings. Once I treated physics like semantics, forcing myself to learn the one-true-definition for things rather than assuming I knew it, classes were a breeze.
3 - Mimsy were the Borogroves. Henry Kuttner (1943 as L. Padgett). Argument via sci-fi is a lame thing, but as world knowledge advances, even the dumbest among us learns stuff that *nobody* knew just decades before. As a teacher, I use analogies (like trees) to help people learn. But it is easy to create an analogy for an object oriented dataspace (Imagine a jumble of little chunks of stuff and tools that let you pick out JUST THE STUFF YOU WANT). In fact, google pretty much removed my need to have the internet behave as a giant set of tree structures. Libraries have been quite successful for a long time on a cross-index mechanism (and reference librarians!). I absolutely LOVE wiki-webs, because they let data morph and cross-link itself as users see fit.
Face it: data doesn't like to be in trees. We like to try to shoe-horn it into trees. Then we end up with overlapping trees because of multiple interpretations of data organization. Hell, my email doesn't even fit nicely into trees. In an object-oriented world, I'd enjoy mailspaces that I share with others in my project.
Recast your conversation: Damn, I left that on my PC.
Well, give me your IP and I'll download it.
Well, just IM your roommate and we'll work out how to get it.
Check the signup sheet and see if anyone else is coming from there.
Next time, use Freenet. Then we could just grab it off there.
Anyone in your dorm got a scanner?
What's the GPS coordinates?
Man, I can't even find Stanford, and then I'll need a map to find your dorm, and without a student ID and your key I'll never get to your desk.
As much as I hate the idea of being sucked into XP or 2003, let alone Office getting DRM built-in,
1 - The rights-management stuff is off by default, says the article. 2 - I do infosec work regularly and I can't get people to use good passwords, and the further from geekdom they get, the faster they forget or circumvent password mechanisms. That's something easy. Key management and other DRM aspects are complex enough to get wrong any one of a dozen ways (either too tight or too loose). 3 - Imagine a pointy-hair reacting to you telling him that he just DRM'd his ass out of his own spreadsheet... forever.
I predict this 'great idea' will be rarely used since 99% of people can't be bothered to do much easier and less dangerous security tasks. Further, some companies will probably just ban it's use (since an employee can lock the boss out or stuff could accidentally get wrongly locked). It will inspire fear when people get burned. And a fair number of 'forced adopters' will go to gray market earlier versions and stop the upgrade treadmill completely, or jump to alternatives.
Oh, and imagine the fun if it does get put in: the boss makes you work overtime to get a report in by Friday night (Monday won't cut it!), so you stick in DRM to expire it at 9am Monday, so he has to call for a resend. Send inflamatory messages with a one-read, no-print, expires-forever rule so your flamage has a chance of evaporating after impact. And the geek-chic power of being able to screenshot someone that does the same thing back at you and get their ass fired.
A last comment: if you want to help the undoing of the MSOffice stranglehold, take stock of your own personal and business relationships and pressure anyone you can (not customers, not the boss or people who will hurt you for doing so) to use non-office methods. Politely ask sales drones to resend stuff in a non-Doc/Excel/Powerpoint/Viso format. When asked, spread FUD!: blame microsoft-laden viruses and them being less-trusted. But start the revolution by inconveniencing them. The monopoly is due to habits.
heh-heh, heh-heh. You said Ashcroft, Oral and Cocksucker.</beavis>
<butthead> Hhhn-Hnnh, in the same sentence!</butthead>
I've got a kid. I don't want to give my young child a doll that says profanities . But I want one that sounds hip enough not to get the shit pounded out of it. Face it: kids destroy uncool toys. By the time I was 12, I had started to customize toys that were undesirably unhip. If the customization failed, the toy was tossed (a small victory). If the customization was cool, the hacked toy became a trophy (bigger victory). Either way, it was Death To The Lame Toys.
Personality transplants are doubly cool in my book: clever kids get to show off a funny 'better' vocabulary and it is technical enough to require some serious learning. And any lessons that don't involve rote memorization, be they from reprogramming chatty cindy here or playing Civ and hex-editing game-save data, get my vote!
Incidentally, the text-command adventure games of the early PC era hit this problem. Poor games ignored you or had pathetic, lame responses to profanity. Funny, clever games responded in a way that kept the gameplayer's respect. A good toy designer could do worse than to take a page from those early interactive game designers' lessons.
(glances conspiratorially around the room)... that's one reason why I haven't bought the DVD's yet. I saw the shows in the theater, friends have 'em on DVD, and I just *know* a really cool 'Master' boxed set will come in about a year or so after RofTK is out of theaters.
There was this guy at my university who had a website where you could book flights on his virtual airline. He'd designed the livery of this airline and had made skins for his fleet of planes. If you booked a ticket (don't know if anyone did) he would fly the route and, if you wanted, give you a VHS tape of the view from the seat, to prove that he'd done it. He was one of the scariest people I'd ever met.
Post this pAirline's URL... let's see how he handles being slashdotted. Nothin' like 20,000 requests for flights and videotapes to force him back to reality. Or postal.
Um, I have always had trouble wrappin' my brain around issues as simple as full-metal-jacket ammunition being more ethical than other ammo, I've also seen what an apache's gun does at 100 rounds/sec, and so I would appreciate it if you could tell me,
(pierces can... mmm, smell them nightcrawlers!)
How exactly does one prioritize ethical levels in war? I mean, I understand that a dirty bomb is more lethal and less swift in killing. Are there other nuances? Because to me, blasting a nuke would be pretty much an act of terror no matter how clean or how 'deserved'.
(... opens, then dumps can of worms all over desk)
I'm not trying to troll. I didn't take the bonuses, I'm not AC'ing. I mean, the closest I come to understanding is a hunting lesson my dad taught me: 'once you decide to kill, do it as swiftly and mercifully as possible'. You're apparently not a diplomat (the other area I'd expect to have expertise here), but you seem to be thinking this thru after having had a military education so I thought you'd maybe have some insights. Really: what nuances matter in wartime? Phosphorus, depleted-uranium, chem/bio agents, dum-dums, mines, napalm, and deceptive acts all come to mind as I run into this and my nonmilitary education didn't give me the tools.
A 2nd question I have: how do these ethical equations fit into a battle between a superpower (a dozen safe/remote attack mechanisms available) and an ill-armed 3rd world combatant?
I'm in the midst of cowriting a report today, and one of the other authors tweaked that nerve by misusing 'Hacker'. My first thought (find & give author my 'come-to-jesus' speech) evaporated quickly because I know he knows the proper meaning. Fact is, he used it because it's what lay people perceive as the word's meaning. I almost never follow up on improper use of the term any more.
But my second thought was that we're in part to blame. No doctor, lawyer, engineer, dentist, vet, activist, politician, soldier, plumber, electrician, or telephone-handset-sanitizer in the world would let lay people corrupt their jargon. My dentist still calls that shit on my teeth calculus, despite my knowing he had to take a couple semesters of that math subject to get into grad school to become a dentist. My lawyer doesn't refer to his peers as sharks and money-grubbin' ambulance chasers. He says "Counsellor". So, I'm officially going to go back to tilting at windmills. A cracker, an intruder, an assailant of networks... but never a Hacker. I'm a Hacker. A damn good one. Don't use the term unless you know what it means!
Oh, and I'm puttin' my white hat away. Never liked the damn thing...
ob-sig: yeah yeah yeah, Off-topic, but at least I knew enough to click the 'no bonus' boxes.
I barely consider NOT as a logic function...more like half a function.
But the article said:
And electrons trapped in the middle layer were excited by light to create a quantum logical gate with four states.
Like the infamous amplifier in This is Spinal Tap, This is a 4-state Not gate! That's at least as good as two half-nots, and like a double negative, that should make a half a not not a not. Got it?
I swear, the first one to start into the woodchuck tongue twister...
Nope. Buying a share of microsoft at $25 doesn't get you free Windows, either. On the other hand, going to a shareholder's meeting has sometimes been more profitable than any good year at Comdex.
Put another way, a majority of the partners in a store have to agree to have a policy where the owners never pay for their groceries. Nobody'd ever do that because it'd be the kiss of death to the store, since just one greedy owner could literally eat the store's entire profit margin.
Which brings me back to shareholder meetings. Freebies at a shareholder meeting act as good advertising, can make a financial relationship an emotional one, and are limited to a predictable dollar amount. That's akin to owners agreeing that each partner can take $10 in snacks per month out of the store, which just disappears into the company overhead. To be honest, the accounting on that gets so ugly that a smart company says: you get $10 a month bonus for snacks on your paycheck. Spend it here, spend it wherever... just don't steal food. Man, how'd I get clear off in the weeds like this. And when did it get daylight outside... I need some sleep. And snacks. Pizza... no, Donuts! Mmmm... donuts.
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And regardless of 'cracker's acceptance, 'Hacker' is not a new term. We own the definition first, last and always. Even if it's never adopted, I'm not relenquishing the proper use of the term. And I often mock anyone that misuses the term. It's fun for me and reinforces their desire to properly use a few fundamental technical terms: cracker, wankin' virus-writer, dirtbag spammer, and piece-of-shit OS.
Wow, 'The perfect weapon kills all of your enemies' reads like the logic of an 18-year-old. Since I turned 18, I've learned:
Injuries are preferred in combat: Kill an opposing combatant, and you take one enemy out of combat; wound him and you take out two or three people (to carry him, provide medical support, etc.). Plus, screaming comrades are a lot more demoralizing and distracting than dead ones.
Most combatants are not eager and hateful. They're conscripts or patriotic supporters of their government. When governments say the fighting should stop, they're happier alive than dead, and within decades most citizens can reconcile the deepest of rifts with former enemies, if their leadership doesn't continue to incite animosity.
In that vein, a man wounded in combat will reconcile, generally. His kids will, too. Kill him, and they'll never forget and are somewhat less likely to forgive.
Most importantly, your argument is hugely simplistic. Ignoring the lack of a pure litmus test that allows you tell the difference between friendlies and enemies, you can't kill *EVERYONE*. There's always a compassionate bystander. Kill a man, his family resents you. Kill a town, and you piss off a lot of friends and relatives. Kill all Iraqis and you just piss off all of the other arab nations. Kill off all the arabs, and muslims worldwide will hold a deep grudge. Once the damage exceeds the personal level, the circle of influence grows.
Sorry for the ad-homenim about you sounding like an 18-yr-old, but you got rated as insightful. Nothing could be further from the truth.
<sarcasm>
You're so right. Don't bother examining things in balance. It isn't a question of how many features can be crammed into a device while still attaining the typically-needed battery life. Balance is irrelevant! JUST... SAVE... POWER!
One question: can I at least keep the AC and passenger seats in my car? I realize they're power-hungry features, but I've grown fond of having them there the 20% of the time I use them.
</sarcasm>
Oh, and I think you meant 20 gigs is excessive on an mp3 player. 20 megs is just absurd...
Oh, and I'm not so sure about the cheaper part: virtually every calling plan I look at has some absurd gotchas: 5 cents a minute unless you need a calling card. $40 a month for unlimited long distance as long as you're talking to people on the same calling plan, otherwise it's 23 cents a minute daytime, 17 cents a minute evenings. Collect calls at a buck a minute. Direct-dial in-state for seven times the price of interstate calls.
* or whatever protocol. Point being, call bandwidth/quality has been squeezed downward faster than the rates being charged.
Public use of private property is where I'm thinkin'.
In most of the USA, there are two liability standards:
- One for the free use of private property
- One for the paid use of private property
Did I mention IANAL? Good. Keep that in mind. Also, what I'm talking about may vary state-to-state, or in various nations, but any state I've lived in has had this sort of law:If I have a big chunk of land that has a sledding hill on it, and I don't chase people off when they use it, don't post "no-sledding no-trespassing" signs, don't ... well, if I just let people use the land... I'm protected by law from being held liable when someone gets hurt. I can even pave a parking lot and make minor improvements geared toward that use. As long as I'm not in it for profit, I'm specifically protected from liability.
On the other hand, if I start making any restrictions, charging fees, or otherwise actively managing the use, I become responsible and liable.
Because the first category of use LITERALLY has a law on the book stating this liability protection (the protection isn't presumed constitutionally or the likes), I'm quite sure that open source code isn't sheltered from liability, even if it is free. But the world is pretty used to the idea that you shouldn't let lawsuit-happy trolls punish someone for being charitable. We could get such a law put in place. I recommend getting a liability loophole here while making shall-remain-nameless big companies spend some of their 97% profit margin on security and be held legally liable for crap code.
Why do I care? Because in the last decade, I'm starting to get consumer electronics devices that lock up and require a power-off reboot. Stuff like my boombox and DVD player should NOT be complicated to the point of crashing due to flawed internal code. This is incredibly unacceptable, but you think my only recourse should be market forces?! Bah. If someone sells me crap, I reserve my "god-given right" to a jury and a lawsuit (not arbitration, but that's another can of worms)! And I say this even though I am a charter member of the we-sue-too-much club of America. I hate lawsuits and am not too fond of lawyers. But I think I'll suck up and hire me a nice vicious one if the crapflood of buggy 5-button devices persists.
The company or the software?
Not that I want either of 'em.
Sendmail is incredibly:
By comparison, the others are a walk in the park. But they won't handle all the legacy or rewriting capability sometimes needed in large-sphere enterprise email. And many don't scale for shit. Exim for my laptop or home net, exchange for small turnkey shops, and know enough sendmail to survive...
One of my favorite early usenet sigs went along the line of "Sendmail Administration is not black magic-- there are legitimate technical reasons why it requires the sacrificing of a live chicken." (I've googled for 5 mins and can't find exact quote or origin... .anyone?)
Next, did you check the narrowness of this bug? It's a problem in a fairly uncommon non-default sendmail configuration only:
But, it was found and promptly fixed. Slow news day or obscurity is the only reason it got posted here.Sendmail, arcane as it is, is the big bad voodoo daddy of mail. I use it, I fear it, and I deeply respect the sendmail development team. Feel free to check my posting history and you'll see I've never wasted keystrokes like this before. Fact is, you've just accomplished a mod-4 troll and I'd say bravo if it wasn't against this particular target.
Now, on to StupidTrollTalkIndicators (to train the untrainable slashdot moderation mindset):
Ediron's Law: Good engineers make modules, not suites. Microsoft's greatest liability is omnibus code. I dislike that more than antitrust tactics. They refuse to modularize and we're screwed as a result. Sendmail, alas, isn't very modularizable: it still accepts goop from a mainframe that resorts to %-escaping to allow passthru to a legitimate mail relay, because that used to be (and may still be) needed somewhere.
Troll troll troll troll troll. Even a 4-digit id. Sigh... Rob/Taco/etc, gimme the ability to spend my subscription money on mod points for numb-nutz responses like this and other techno-sounding wrongness. I'll start spending like mad! --
You're using wikipedia as a reference in a
I mean, you do understand how wiki's are written...
Wow.
Wow. I'm not sure if you're a troll, a genius, a lunatic, or what. Quotin' a wiki to win a debate on computer history trivia. Them's some huge, cast-iron ones you're totin, Mr. Earp. And no, I don't mean the revolvers.
Wow.
Two cases of sticker shock: first cross-country trip I swerved north to go thru Toronto. Paid $2.50 US a gallon when gas was $1.50 in the US. Luckily, I was back in the car and driving before I did the math to convert $CDN per Liter to $US per gallon, or my screams and cursing might have disturbed the gas station attendant.
Then, Oct of '01, a company trip to Venezuela... $0.68 US a gallon. It's good to be in OPEC, I guess. Gas here was at $1.70 US at the time.
There's another posting that is GREAT for info and links, so I'll stick to side stuff I don't see there. I've looked at hybrids a few times and will buy as soon as one doesn't hurt too much. I don't need a car yet, so I've happily procrastinated 18 months on getting a new car just hoping something better would come out.
Honda had a 2-seater (Insight) that I imagine would be cool for commuters. 2 seats, room for a suitcase, but no room for a family-sized grocery run or backseat for kids. Scratched off my list as a result. Sad to cross it off my list... I've heard people exceeding 70 mpg on this puppy. In fact, I read one hilarious article about people that so obsess the mpg's that they drive in their socks to better finesse the gas peddle. I love it.
Honda's Civic hybrid: cool in a sensible-shoes sort of way. Might buy. Dealbreaker last year was that it sounded too much like henry ford's old rules on paint for cars (any color as long as it's black): The car didn't have options like keyless entry, keyless trunk, came in 2 colors outside and one color inside. For the same money, I could buy a better-equipped Accord. For a non-hybrid civic, there was $2000 price difference, and before the proposed tax incentives for hybrids I calculated out the 15 mpg I'd save would take me over a decade to recoup my savings:
Shifting 30 to 45 mpg priced at $1.60 per gallon, 10k miles per year (Hey, my 93 car is at 106k and I used to cross the country twice a year for grad school!): $178 per year savings (1.60 / 45 * 10000 vs 1.60 / 30 * 10000).
With tax incentives that are now in place, those almost are a free car payment each year. Yumm.
Toyota's Prius: no absolute reason against it comes to mind. It had some of the same numbers above on the price premium vs. a non-HEV. Oh, and rereading other posts I do remember the funky dash constellation (if you haven't seen it, think Jeep CJ goes digital... everything in center of dash, way out of your usual line-of-sight). Perhaps the dash needs to be identical to a regular car. Or not. Maybe we're due for a change, eh? I was fine with it; the car ran fine before I understood the dash, but it'd baffle the shit out of my grandma if I handed her the keys without instructions.
The new Ford SUV: was supposed to come out in '03, now I've read recently it's been pushed back to '04. Given the number of major design oopsies I've encountered in each of these, I can't say it's wise to change buying plans on a 'maybe next year's model' sort of deal. If I get annoyed with my car this winter, I'll buy my favorite non-hybrid and wait for the next car purchase to re-evaluate things.
Early adopter risk: most carry a 10-year electrical system waranty, so the waranty is enough to soothe worries I have of having to eat a few thousand bucks in new-battery costs if they fail after a few years.
First-owner sales have been weak, according to people that sell 'em that I've talked to (but I'm in a VERY rural, non-commuter, redneck sort of area).
I checked resale on eBay: depreciation on older models seemed minor enough to bolster my confidence that they'll hold value.
Right now, my wife has a Durango to handle all them soccer-mom details. We'll buy a hybrid SUV to replace it, if one's out by then and it isn't glaringly flawed.
Oh, and I saw something that said that some vendor (Audi?) was looking to put limited hybrid capability (the electromechanical mechanism at the wheel, I suspect) into a car of theirs to give it all-wheel-drive in a pinch... cooo-ool. If that pans out, I think you'll see hybrid become like Antilock Brakes Systems: a detail that just trickles down from luxury cars to lower-priced models until everything has a handful of the features.
Of course, my crystal ball reading on the average American's love affair with SUV's and Pickups says in the same timeframe we'll all be driving solo in the HOV lane in our HEV-exempted 5-ton humvee-3's that have been miraculously improved through the
I know you come around in later paragraphs to a stance I largely agree with, but about your paragraph 1, I gotta scream: Bullshit, and bite me.
You've bought into the big lie of Intellectual Property.Outside of codification in very wrong laws, IP doesn't exist.
It is a legal fiction.
Maybe I'm crazy, but Natural Law HAS to have this as an unarguable base tenet: I don't owe anyone for my thoughts, my lessons learned, things I overheard, and songs I hum or sing. Yet under law, I'm supposed to pay a royalty for singing happy birthday... that's all the proof I need the law is an ass here.
As A FREAKIN' GIFT, my forefathers passed laws to let people have temporary reign over the dissemination of information, called copyright.
IT HAS GOTTEN OUT OF CONTROL. IT BEARS NO RESEMBLANCE TO CONSTITUTIONAL INTENT!
One only has to read court transcripts and the Eldred decision, or congressional quotes, or do any detailed amount of research to see that we're all getting screwed here.
Anticorporatists (is that even a word?) are all worried that we keep becoming less a legal entity than corporations. I'm not paranoid, but I certainly can see as I research the subject and try to talk to family and peers where this sort of doublespeak has led to way too many people believing the law is good and right and life-plus-85 is an OK tradeoff. My question is: tradeoff to WHO!? All I see is a one-way gift for sanctioned monopolists.
Ironically, the world would run just fine with short (15 yr., nonrenewable) copyright law. Every time Disney wants to wake up the cash cow, they just add or edit or do new releases. Look how software is done, do the same with content: This year it's Harry Potter '03 on DVD, next year it's '04, with 5 extra minutes of commentary... I might not buy the new one each year, but large improvements or every decade I'll revisit old purchases. By the time the original content is 15, we're all free to see some true competition and we get our personal thoughts and icons back. Equally good for me is Compulsory Licensing. Look it up yourself, I'm on a rant here, babe...
Last irony: if that dim Bono widow ever got her way and had all copyright extended perpetually, her husband's music would largely fall unusable due to untraceable copyright since he sang freakin' folk song adaptations. Disney would lose 3/4 of their shelf until they managed to negotiate with any/all Grimm heirs, plus whoever else sourced any story similar throughout all of time. Check out the lineage for Snow White. Figure out all the heirs who'd deserve compensation for the use of their ancestors' personal story for the Robin Hood story. See... it's absurd. Disney carefully adds just enough time to not even have to pay up to precopyright stories dating from the 19th century, for this very reason. This is a can of worms they don't want, since it'd make fractionation of Native American lands look simple (Again, look it up: a big US-ian lawsuit against the US Department of the Interior because of how screwed up land ownership in tribal reservations has gotten).
We're getting robbed. Disney's got the gun. I'll obey the law but I won't speak kindly of it .
Flame Off.
ps: I'm a writer. My own argument is against my best financial interests. Reconcile THAT before you dismiss me.
Top 100 non-riaa albums.
No disclaimer needed; I have no affiliation with the site. I just like tools that let me find good music while boycotting RIAA. Also, check out CDBaby and Michael Crawford's recent kuro5hin article.
On a side note, I struck up a conversation this evening with the local mom-n-pop video rental guy. He has a tool to polish scratched discs (CD's, DVD's) and I asked how rental lifespan varied between tapes and DVD, and if polishing made a difference. He got a disgusted look on his face, said some nasty things about the cheaper plastic being used DVD's, and that he'd pay the extra buck for the original materials. Then he held up a (already scratched) Sleeping Beauty that someone had bought today and already needed polishing, saying "Disney's policy is that the market lifespan of these discs is 15 playings. Hell, my kids watch it that many times the first week I get a new movie."
My take: they're back-dooring the slimy old limited-life divx marketing scheme.
Therefore, we shouldn't try to stretch?!
1 - I remember reading of certain south-pacific islanders that had incredible navigational skills for island hopping, but that couldn't recognize 2-d representations of 3-d objects. A picture of a cube is baffling to them. Similarly, Object-orientedness is something I have to teach people via analogy. Once taught, people see object classes everywhere.
2 - Everything I learned in physics seems to have focussed around unlearning common misconceptions and overly vague and innacurate common-man understandings. Once I treated physics like semantics, forcing myself to learn the one-true-definition for things rather than assuming I knew it, classes were a breeze.
3 - Mimsy were the Borogroves. Henry Kuttner (1943 as L. Padgett). Argument via sci-fi is a lame thing, but as world knowledge advances, even the dumbest among us learns stuff that *nobody* knew just decades before. As a teacher, I use analogies (like trees) to help people learn. But it is easy to create an analogy for an object oriented dataspace (Imagine a jumble of little chunks of stuff and tools that let you pick out JUST THE STUFF YOU WANT). In fact, google pretty much removed my need to have the internet behave as a giant set of tree structures. Libraries have been quite successful for a long time on a cross-index mechanism (and reference librarians!). I absolutely LOVE wiki-webs, because they let data morph and cross-link itself as users see fit.
Face it: data doesn't like to be in trees. We like to try to shoe-horn it into trees. Then we end up with overlapping trees because of multiple interpretations of data organization. Hell, my email doesn't even fit nicely into trees. In an object-oriented world, I'd enjoy mailspaces that I share with others in my project.
Recast your conversation: Damn, I left that on my PC.
As much as I hate the idea of being sucked into XP or 2003, let alone Office getting DRM built-in,
1 - The rights-management stuff is off by default, says the article.
2 - I do infosec work regularly and I can't get people to use good passwords, and the further from geekdom they get, the faster they forget or circumvent password mechanisms. That's something easy. Key management and other DRM aspects are complex enough to get wrong any one of a dozen ways (either too tight or too loose).
3 - Imagine a pointy-hair reacting to you telling him that he just DRM'd his ass out of his own spreadsheet... forever.
I predict this 'great idea' will be rarely used since 99% of people can't be bothered to do much easier and less dangerous security tasks. Further, some companies will probably just ban it's use (since an employee can lock the boss out or stuff could accidentally get wrongly locked). It will inspire fear when people get burned. And a fair number of 'forced adopters' will go to gray market earlier versions and stop the upgrade treadmill completely, or jump to alternatives.
Oh, and imagine the fun if it does get put in: the boss makes you work overtime to get a report in by Friday night (Monday won't cut it!), so you stick in DRM to expire it at 9am Monday, so he has to call for a resend. Send inflamatory messages with a one-read, no-print, expires-forever rule so your flamage has a chance of evaporating after impact. And the geek-chic power of being able to screenshot someone that does the same thing back at you and get their ass fired.
A last comment: if you want to help the undoing of the MSOffice stranglehold, take stock of your own personal and business relationships and pressure anyone you can (not customers, not the boss or people who will hurt you for doing so) to use non-office methods. Politely ask sales drones to resend stuff in a non-Doc/Excel/Powerpoint/Viso format. When asked, spread FUD!: blame microsoft-laden viruses and them being less-trusted. But start the revolution by inconveniencing them. The monopoly is due to habits.
heh-heh, heh-heh. You said Ashcroft, Oral and Cocksucker.</beavis>
<butthead>
Hhhn-Hnnh, in the same sentence!</butthead>
I've got a kid. I don't want to give my young child a doll that says profanities . But I want one that sounds hip enough not to get the shit pounded out of it.
Face it: kids destroy uncool toys. By the time I was 12, I had started to customize toys that were undesirably unhip. If the customization failed, the toy was tossed (a small victory). If the customization was cool, the hacked toy became a trophy (bigger victory). Either way, it was Death To The Lame Toys.
Personality transplants are doubly cool in my book: clever kids get to show off a funny 'better' vocabulary and it is technical enough to require some serious learning. And any lessons that don't involve rote memorization, be they from reprogramming chatty cindy here or playing Civ and hex-editing game-save data, get my vote!
Incidentally, the text-command adventure games of the early PC era hit this problem. Poor games ignored you or had pathetic, lame responses to profanity. Funny, clever games responded in a way that kept the gameplayer's respect. A good toy designer could do worse than to take a page from those early interactive game designers' lessons.
(glances conspiratorially around the room)... that's one reason why I haven't bought the DVD's yet. I saw the shows in the theater, friends have 'em on DVD, and I just *know* a really cool 'Master' boxed set will come in about a year or so after RofTK is out of theaters.
{gets can opener out...)
Um, I have always had trouble wrappin' my brain around issues as simple as full-metal-jacket ammunition being more ethical than other ammo, I've also seen what an apache's gun does at 100 rounds/sec, and so I would appreciate it if you could tell me,
(pierces can... mmm, smell them nightcrawlers!)
How exactly does one prioritize ethical levels in war? I mean, I understand that a dirty bomb is more lethal and less swift in killing. Are there other nuances? Because to me, blasting a nuke would be pretty much an act of terror no matter how clean or how 'deserved'.
(... opens, then dumps can of worms all over desk)
I'm not trying to troll. I didn't take the bonuses, I'm not AC'ing. I mean, the closest I come to understanding is a hunting lesson my dad taught me: 'once you decide to kill, do it as swiftly and mercifully as possible'. You're apparently not a diplomat (the other area I'd expect to have expertise here), but you seem to be thinking this thru after having had a military education so I thought you'd maybe have some insights. Really: what nuances matter in wartime? Phosphorus, depleted-uranium, chem/bio agents, dum-dums, mines, napalm, and deceptive acts all come to mind as I run into this and my nonmilitary education didn't give me the tools.
A 2nd question I have: how do these ethical equations fit into a battle between a superpower (a dozen safe/remote attack mechanisms available) and an ill-armed 3rd world combatant?
But my second thought was that we're in part to blame. No doctor, lawyer, engineer, dentist, vet, activist, politician, soldier, plumber, electrician, or telephone-handset-sanitizer in the world would let lay people corrupt their jargon. My dentist still calls that shit on my teeth calculus, despite my knowing he had to take a couple semesters of that math subject to get into grad school to become a dentist. My lawyer doesn't refer to his peers as sharks and money-grubbin' ambulance chasers. He says "Counsellor". So, I'm officially going to go back to tilting at windmills. A cracker, an intruder, an assailant of networks... but never a Hacker. I'm a Hacker. A damn good one. Don't use the term unless you know what it means!
Oh, and I'm puttin' my white hat away. Never liked the damn thing...
ob-sig: yeah yeah yeah, Off-topic, but at least I knew enough to click the 'no bonus' boxes.
So, if I contacted them and still haven't heard back, is that one of the 300 or not... the SCO/Heisenberg principle at work.
I swear, the first one to start into the woodchuck tongue twister...
Nope. Buying a share of microsoft at $25 doesn't get you free Windows, either. On the other hand, going to a shareholder's meeting has sometimes been more profitable than any good year at Comdex. Put another way, a majority of the partners in a store have to agree to have a policy where the owners never pay for their groceries. Nobody'd ever do that because it'd be the kiss of death to the store, since just one greedy owner could literally eat the store's entire profit margin. Which brings me back to shareholder meetings. Freebies at a shareholder meeting act as good advertising, can make a financial relationship an emotional one, and are limited to a predictable dollar amount. That's akin to owners agreeing that each partner can take $10 in snacks per month out of the store, which just disappears into the company overhead. To be honest, the accounting on that gets so ugly that a smart company says: you get $10 a month bonus for snacks on your paycheck. Spend it here, spend it wherever... just don't steal food. Man, how'd I get clear off in the weeds like this. And when did it get daylight outside... I need some sleep. And snacks. Pizza... no, Donuts! Mmmm... donuts.