Qmail, along with DJBDNS (and a lot of other DJB's software) has a copyright that restricts distribution of modified binaries. Which means, if DJB get's hit by a truck tomarrow and dies, Qmail's developement is legally frozen.
Only if the truck driver throws it into reverse and makes sure to run over every copy of diff and patch in existence.
I have to agree that a baseless assumption was made. It was the first thing that struck me as odd, assuming that all 250M CDR's (and let us not forget they said tapes as well) were used to record music. Well I have over 1000 of those CDR's and I can safely say I haven't recorded the first MP3 or copied a CD yet. DATA is what they are for and data is what I record. So make that 250M minus 1000 please!
You can subtract another stack of 'em. I have more CDRs around here than I can count, and not a single one of them has any music on it (or any video, or any pirated software). They're all full of photos, photocompositions, etc., that I've taken with my own damn camera.
It pisses me off no end that I'm treated like a criminal just because I need to store large amounts of data. There's no precedent for it (outside the media world), and people wouldn't have stood for it if there were. Are knives taxed to fund stab victims? Does a tax on nylons and dufflebags go to reimburse banks that get robbed?
So are the books they are digitizing all in the public domain? It doesn't seem like there would be that many books in the public domain that haven't already been made available on the net. Of course I could be wrong.
And you probably are. The best efforts of our duly elected Congressional representatives notwithstanding, copyright still does expire. After that, a work passes automatically into the public domain. That means there are hundreds of thousands of books available.
In fact, if you've previously seen the classics online, they probably came from this project, which has been around for almost as long as I can remember.
Re:Dell is protecting their reputation
on
Nosy Vendors?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
In this case, I think the Dell rep did the right thing. If this is the kind of thing that has happened to you often in the past, as you claim, then you're probably not very good at selecting the right tool for the job. The Dell rep probably sensed this, and (rightly) decided to call you on it.
The question you should be asking is why you're not willing to take the advice of your vendors, and work together with them find the best possible solution for your client's needs.
A far more likely scenario is that the poster has a lot of experience setting up and/or managing servers, while the Dell sales rep has a lot of experience using handsomely-printed charts from HQ in Austin to figure out which equipment to sell to which customers.
One of these people has the requisite experience to adapt appropriate tools to the job. Guess which one?
The state pays into, and the state gets paid out of, a federal fund.
The state can choose not to forward the monies.
This seems unlikely. Why would any state pay into the fund unless they're getting more out of it than they put in? They wouldn't; they'd pull out. This cascading withdrawal would bring down the average amount available until no state could receive more than they put in and there were no more participants.
Clearly it's more complex than what you've described.
I think that the key is that they can't do those things AND drink until they're 21.
I've always thought that at the age of 16, kids should get to choose whether they want a drinker's license OR a driver's license. Once they turn 21 or so they can have both.
That eliminates the concern about drunk driving, while at the same time allowing intelligent kids to get acquainted with alcohol under their parents' guidance rather than the first week they've moved away from home - hence, less alcoholism.
And fewer damn teenage drivers.
Re:Keeping .su as an area?
on
See Ya .su
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· Score: 1
Should India and the UK and the rest of the commonwealth states share a geographical.BE (british empire) domain?
Re:Keeping .su as an area?
on
See Ya .su
·
· Score: 1
If ICANN goes this road there is a major risk of fracturing the root. Nobody much gives a hang about.su but if this move succeeds it will be used as a precedent to remove.pl which given that ICANN is far from isolated from the pro-Likud US Congress means that pragmatism is unlikely to prevail.
.pl? You mean.ps? What did Poland do to piss off Congress?
I would say go back to school. There are programs at various schools, including but not limited to state and private universities, that offer study abroad. Pick your country. I went to Spain this past summer for 2 months on a program to learn Spanish. That was it. Cost was $3600 including room and board and school.
That's phenomenally expensive. Leaving aside the obvious economical alternative of Latin America, you can fly to Spain and back, live in a hotel for two months, and have daily private tutoring for less than that.
Avoid southern europe? Nothern Africa too? The middle east I can get into...but places like Spain, Italy, Greece, Marrocco, Algeria? Perfectly safe.
Foreigners are still targets in Algeria (though the killings have basically stopped, since the heyday a few years ago when they were murdered by the dozen).
Morocco, on the other hand, is completely safe. Just spent a month there recently. Nothing but friendly people.
Likewise, most of the middle east (Syria, Jordan, Egypt, UAE, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Iran, Turkey) is safe - some of these are among the planet's safest countries. Remember that most people are smart enough to separate the personal from the political. "Go native" (hang out in local restaurants/bars, avoid touristy gathering places), and you'll not only have a far better experience, but be 100% safe in almost any circumstance.
In case the OP is from the United States, he/she's already in one of the world's most dangerous countries. It can only get better (unless he/she goes to South Africa!).
There's something eerily "zombie-like" about some of these guys. They're suddenly almost "too polite" and dress a little "too sharp" at any semi-formal occasion. Many times, they suddenly get a strong urge to get married, have kids, and become a cookie-cutter image of the "family man". I know you can't really fault any of this. On the surface, it looks like the guys really "cleaned up their act" -- but it's a little unnatural. I don't think they came to these lifestyle conclusions and changes purely on their own...
I've seen the same thing - eerie politeness and rigid values.
Thing is, the people I've known seem to be genuinely happy. And I can thing of worse things than happy polite people. My thinking is that it just seems weird to the rest of us because it's so unlike the offhand rudeness of everyday life these days.
And they seem to have an easy time finding work, and do well at it.
Personally, I'd just as soon pull my brain out through my belly button as join the army, but I can't deny that it seems to do well by a lot of people. In particular, as others have said, people who otherwise suffer from a shortage of opportunities and positive role models.
something seems fishy here. the company sued that one guy cos he "black-listed" their firm. the article didn't go into much detail, but it sounds as if that one guy, Joey McNicol, has quite a bit of power. i mean, what if i am a competitor of some company and i can convince Joey McNicol that their IP needs to be banned. as long as Joey McNicol is a true-blue swell guy, there is no way that can happen, but what if he isn't?
I'm not aware of any vaguely popular blacklists that would add an IP/range on the strength of one random unknown person presenting what appeared to be a spam from that IP. That would obviously be ridiculous. Do you really think they would become as popular as they are if they were that stupid?
Either you have to be a known person with a known reputation, or you have to be one of many people presenting mutually corroborating evidence (some popular blacklists work on a voting or threshold system), or the blacklist operators have to have received the spam themselves.
It is quite possible that the vast majority of businesses have hired professionals who made radically wrong-headed decisions in this regard, and have been pissing away their shareholder's money for decades without complaint.
What, this would be the first time?
Let me make sure I get your sarcastic point right. You're saying that because some people do something, it must now and forevermore be the best thing to do?
And the BSA gives no problem, so far as I can tell (and I have a great deal of experience with defending BSA cases) to those who don't infringe.
How does that work? You mean sometimes the BSA shows up, asks the receptionist whether they have any pirated software, cheerfully accepts the "No" answer, and then writes a check for $10 to cover the receptionist's time?
Not in my world. Around here they rock up with a bunch of paperwork that takes up house counsel time or requires explicit expense for outside counsel, requires IT people to do take inventory by hand and/or install BSAware (a new genre of software with some fairly expensive members) to do it automatically, plus a whole lot of heartache for everyone involved. In an enterprise with 100 desktops, you're talking close to $20000 in direct costs, and that's assuming it goes smoothly.
Compare that to the purchase of, say, a laser printer. When's the last time HP showed up and demanded you prove, at your expense, that none of your laser printers were stolen from their factory?
The argument made in the article is illogical and plain silly.
Statistical software doesn't need to be open source for people to know whether it works right - the algorithms used are well-established and documented.
Best I can figure, the author's article simplified the point beyond optimal clarity, leaving an opening for this sort of inadvertent straw man.
I doubt anyone is seriously suggesting that Bill Gates has directed the Excel Black Ops team to insert code that looks for data matching projected fatality patterns for an upcoming death squad action in Nicaragua, and subtly alters the data so it looks like Greenpeace did it.
It is possible, however, that keywords found in data may trigger reporting to authorities. It's not that farfetched - only a step away from Carnivoire.
It's also possible that various closed-source add-ons meant for incident-analysis purposes may actually be less reliable or trustworthy than they seem.
None of these things are proven, but none are unproven either. Meanwhile an alternative exists that does plausibly allow them to be disproved.
While I do think this issue - at least in the statistical world where (A) it's basically impossible for nefarious developers to anticipate which data they might want to confound and (B) datasets are often made available for independent corrobration - is not the strongest argument for open source in human rights work (cost, the potential for piracy-charge harassment, and a general preference for NGO's to avoid unnecessarily diverting precious financial resources to large American corporations being more compelling to my mind), it's not as silly as it's being made out to be.
"On the other hand, Patrick does not anticipate that XML will make a big difference to the human rights community. This is because very few traits of their data are standardized, while the strength of XML lies in its facilitating the exchange of standardized data. Most of the time, the individual statistician imposes his or her own structure on the data gathered, and another statistician who starts another project will structure the data differently. "
Ok... so he throws out the idea that we can't trust closed source statistical software and yet defends non-standard (basically closed) approaches to statistical analysis. Where's the transparency there?
You're glossing over a whole lot with your "basically closed" quip.
XML is useful for something like exchanging purchase order data, because the transactions take a defined form that will remain relatively constant over the lifetime of the relationship between the entities trading data. You paid me $X for Y units of product Z. We set up a DTD, and presto, our computers are talking.
When you're doing statistical analysis of human rights data, you have to quantify data that few if any information-rich parties have an interest in exchanging. The secret police are not going to write an output handler that conforms to your DTD. Therefore you have to adapt your strategy to the information that's available. Hospital records? Interviews with witnesses? Army documents? The form is different every time, as are the specific types of data and their mapping to the phenomena you're actually trying to analyze. That's why it's tough to have a standard data definition.
Leaping from that to an insinuation that the data format is somehow then "closed" is absurd. Any statistician who wants to be taken seriously will publish as much detail as possible about the methods used for data collection and coding.
Hell, can you imagine if you were, say, a plumber, and all of a sudden these people with extra time and money on their hands decided to open a plumbing business that charged $0? That's *exactly* what's happening in tech, and I don't understand why people are putting up with this.
Let me know when you'll be picketing Home Depot and all those stores selling Do-It-Yourself books. I'll bring you some coffee.
I have been thinking, and talking with my co-workers about this: I wonder how many jobs have been lost in the "tech downturn" because of companies using Free/Open software instead of developing things themselves. This came to mind after hearing 2 suits sitting at a table next to me at lunch (who worked for a large insurance company) talking about how they reduced headcount in the database division.
A similar outrage occurred at our office the other day: Someone made a long-distance phone call!
Now, not long ago, he would have had to hire someone who knew how to write, have them buy paper, ink, and a quill and write a letter, give it to a horse courier, have them ride across the country, stopping at several general stores for oats and saddlesore ointment, patronize the occasional saloon, and deliver the letter, whereupon the same process would be repeated for the response.
But now, just because some unthinking bastard came up with a more efficient and less resource-intensive way of getting the same thing done, all those people are out of work.
Something is seriously wrong in our society, and free software is clearly at the heart of it. Just imagine, people building on what others have done so they don't have to waste time re-inventing the wheel with each new project. What ever happened to morality?
So Stanley is facing life in jail because this guy Barker (a murder suspect) testified that Stanley kidnapped him? I wouldn't take Barker at his word.
Fascinating. I'd be grateful if you can post a little bit more of your comprehensive review of the testimony and physical evidence presented at the trial.
Perhaps they'll serve as inspiration to other countries.
There are a whole lot places that lose out on this - places that don't have giant entertainment industries with 100-year back catalogs to recycle endlessly.
Can anyone explain further how the harmonization treaties work, and whether everyone is for some reason actually bound to follow the US' lead?
Iteresting theory, but I doubt the $0.25 an hour makes up for the cost of the internet bandwidth the phone company must pay for. At $0.25, you need to be online over 40 hours a month to break the $10 barrier, which is the cheapest an ISP charges in the US. Maybe, Egpyt's getting a great deal on internet bandwidth, but it's more likely other phone users are ultimately paying the internet expenses incurred by the phione company, especially if the number of internet users is small.
You sound like someone who's never used the internet from Egypt.
The country shares about as much bandwidth as you could squeeze through a 2400bps modem.
Internet undercapacity manifests itself with a more graceful degradation than POTS undercapacity. So while it would be politically damaging for the PTT minister to consistently fail to provide dial tone, it's less so to provide slow IP throughput.
And in any case, apply a little slice of Occam's Razor here. There's no rational reason to believe the PTT would deliberately throw away rare and precious money by subsidizing dialup internet, just so they could get a mention on Slashdot.
So basically in Egypt, the majority of people, who do not have computers, pay for the internet through normal phone usage, assuming they have phones. This must be true if there is no difference in the phone rate whether you're making a local call or using the internet. Why should people not using the internet provide cheap access for the minority who do?
You've got it backward.
Peak dialup internet usage comes about 4 hours later in the day than peak phone usage.
So the Egyptian phone company has found a way to make use of excess phone network capacity that is required to accommodate daytime usage but which goes underutilized in the evenings.
This would theoretically make it possible for phone rates to go down.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding. That's a pretty big month for DC. Lemme guess, the Capitol Steps?
Well, smoking crack is illegal and you're obviously doing a lot of that.
The article explains how to customize Apple's backup software, included in OSX for which you paid over $100, to backup to a different server.
That's about as unethical as using a Mister Microphone rather than listening to commercial radio.
Only if the truck driver throws it into reverse and makes sure to run over every copy of diff and patch in existence.
Not if you hurry. They want to take a tax on those and give it to the RIAA too.
Sort of like requiring you to write a check to GM for 10% of the price when you buy a used car.
You can subtract another stack of 'em. I have more CDRs around here than I can count, and not a single one of them has any music on it (or any video, or any pirated software). They're all full of photos, photocompositions, etc., that I've taken with my own damn camera.
It pisses me off no end that I'm treated like a criminal just because I need to store large amounts of data. There's no precedent for it (outside the media world), and people wouldn't have stood for it if there were. Are knives taxed to fund stab victims? Does a tax on nylons and dufflebags go to reimburse banks that get robbed?
And you probably are. The best efforts of our duly elected Congressional representatives notwithstanding, copyright still does expire. After that, a work passes automatically into the public domain. That means there are hundreds of thousands of books available.
In fact, if you've previously seen the classics online, they probably came from this project, which has been around for almost as long as I can remember.
A far more likely scenario is that the poster has a lot of experience setting up and/or managing servers, while the Dell sales rep has a lot of experience using handsomely-printed charts from HQ in Austin to figure out which equipment to sell to which customers.
One of these people has the requisite experience to adapt appropriate tools to the job. Guess which one?
This seems unlikely. Why would any state pay into the fund unless they're getting more out of it than they put in? They wouldn't; they'd pull out. This cascading withdrawal would bring down the average amount available until no state could receive more than they put in and there were no more participants.
Clearly it's more complex than what you've described.
I've always thought that at the age of 16, kids should get to choose whether they want a drinker's license OR a driver's license. Once they turn 21 or so they can have both.
That eliminates the concern about drunk driving, while at the same time allowing intelligent kids to get acquainted with alcohol under their parents' guidance rather than the first week they've moved away from home - hence, less alcoholism.
And fewer damn teenage drivers.
You mean like commonwealth.int?
.pl? You mean .ps? What did Poland do to piss off Congress?
That's phenomenally expensive. Leaving aside the obvious economical alternative of Latin America, you can fly to Spain and back, live in a hotel for two months, and have daily private tutoring for less than that.
Foreigners are still targets in Algeria (though the killings have basically stopped, since the heyday a few years ago when they were murdered by the dozen).
Morocco, on the other hand, is completely safe. Just spent a month there recently. Nothing but friendly people.
Likewise, most of the middle east (Syria, Jordan, Egypt, UAE, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Iran, Turkey) is safe - some of these are among the planet's safest countries. Remember that most people are smart enough to separate the personal from the political. "Go native" (hang out in local restaurants/bars, avoid touristy gathering places), and you'll not only have a far better experience, but be 100% safe in almost any circumstance.
In case the OP is from the United States, he/she's already in one of the world's most dangerous countries. It can only get better (unless he/she goes to South Africa!).
I've seen the same thing - eerie politeness and rigid values.
Thing is, the people I've known seem to be genuinely happy. And I can thing of worse things than happy polite people. My thinking is that it just seems weird to the rest of us because it's so unlike the offhand rudeness of everyday life these days.
And they seem to have an easy time finding work, and do well at it.
Personally, I'd just as soon pull my brain out through my belly button as join the army, but I can't deny that it seems to do well by a lot of people. In particular, as others have said, people who otherwise suffer from a shortage of opportunities and positive role models.
The second one is much better than the first.
I'm not aware of any vaguely popular blacklists that would add an IP/range on the strength of one random unknown person presenting what appeared to be a spam from that IP. That would obviously be ridiculous. Do you really think they would become as popular as they are if they were that stupid?
Either you have to be a known person with a known reputation, or you have to be one of many people presenting mutually corroborating evidence (some popular blacklists work on a voting or threshold system), or the blacklist operators have to have received the spam themselves.
What, this would be the first time?
Let me make sure I get your sarcastic point right. You're saying that because some people do something, it must now and forevermore be the best thing to do?
How does that work? You mean sometimes the BSA shows up, asks the receptionist whether they have any pirated software, cheerfully accepts the "No" answer, and then writes a check for $10 to cover the receptionist's time?
Not in my world. Around here they rock up with a bunch of paperwork that takes up house counsel time or requires explicit expense for outside counsel, requires IT people to do take inventory by hand and/or install BSAware (a new genre of software with some fairly expensive members) to do it automatically, plus a whole lot of heartache for everyone involved. In an enterprise with 100 desktops, you're talking close to $20000 in direct costs, and that's assuming it goes smoothly.
Compare that to the purchase of, say, a laser printer. When's the last time HP showed up and demanded you prove, at your expense, that none of your laser printers were stolen from their factory?
Best I can figure, the author's article simplified the point beyond optimal clarity, leaving an opening for this sort of inadvertent straw man.
I doubt anyone is seriously suggesting that Bill Gates has directed the Excel Black Ops team to insert code that looks for data matching projected fatality patterns for an upcoming death squad action in Nicaragua, and subtly alters the data so it looks like Greenpeace did it.
It is possible, however, that keywords found in data may trigger reporting to authorities. It's not that farfetched - only a step away from Carnivoire.
It's also possible that various closed-source add-ons meant for incident-analysis purposes may actually be less reliable or trustworthy than they seem.
None of these things are proven, but none are unproven either. Meanwhile an alternative exists that does plausibly allow them to be disproved.
While I do think this issue - at least in the statistical world where (A) it's basically impossible for nefarious developers to anticipate which data they might want to confound and (B) datasets are often made available for independent corrobration - is not the strongest argument for open source in human rights work (cost, the potential for piracy-charge harassment, and a general preference for NGO's to avoid unnecessarily diverting precious financial resources to large American corporations being more compelling to my mind), it's not as silly as it's being made out to be.
You're glossing over a whole lot with your "basically closed" quip.
XML is useful for something like exchanging purchase order data, because the transactions take a defined form that will remain relatively constant over the lifetime of the relationship between the entities trading data. You paid me $X for Y units of product Z. We set up a DTD, and presto, our computers are talking.
When you're doing statistical analysis of human rights data, you have to quantify data that few if any information-rich parties have an interest in exchanging. The secret police are not going to write an output handler that conforms to your DTD. Therefore you have to adapt your strategy to the information that's available. Hospital records? Interviews with witnesses? Army documents? The form is different every time, as are the specific types of data and their mapping to the phenomena you're actually trying to analyze. That's why it's tough to have a standard data definition.
Leaping from that to an insinuation that the data format is somehow then "closed" is absurd. Any statistician who wants to be taken seriously will publish as much detail as possible about the methods used for data collection and coding.
Let me know when you'll be picketing Home Depot and all those stores selling Do-It-Yourself books. I'll bring you some coffee.
A similar outrage occurred at our office the other day: Someone made a long-distance phone call!
Now, not long ago, he would have had to hire someone who knew how to write, have them buy paper, ink, and a quill and write a letter, give it to a horse courier, have them ride across the country, stopping at several general stores for oats and saddlesore ointment, patronize the occasional saloon, and deliver the letter, whereupon the same process would be repeated for the response.
But now, just because some unthinking bastard came up with a more efficient and less resource-intensive way of getting the same thing done, all those people are out of work.
Something is seriously wrong in our society, and free software is clearly at the heart of it. Just imagine, people building on what others have done so they don't have to waste time re-inventing the wheel with each new project. What ever happened to morality?
Fascinating. I'd be grateful if you can post a little bit more of your comprehensive review of the testimony and physical evidence presented at the trial.
Perhaps they'll serve as inspiration to other countries.
There are a whole lot places that lose out on this - places that don't have giant entertainment industries with 100-year back catalogs to recycle endlessly.
Can anyone explain further how the harmonization treaties work, and whether everyone is for some reason actually bound to follow the US' lead?
You sound like someone who's never used the internet from Egypt.
The country shares about as much bandwidth as you could squeeze through a 2400bps modem.
Internet undercapacity manifests itself with a more graceful degradation than POTS undercapacity. So while it would be politically damaging for the PTT minister to consistently fail to provide dial tone, it's less so to provide slow IP throughput.
And in any case, apply a little slice of Occam's Razor here. There's no rational reason to believe the PTT would deliberately throw away rare and precious money by subsidizing dialup internet, just so they could get a mention on Slashdot.
You've got it backward.
Peak dialup internet usage comes about 4 hours later in the day than peak phone usage.
So the Egyptian phone company has found a way to make use of excess phone network capacity that is required to accommodate daytime usage but which goes underutilized in the evenings.
This would theoretically make it possible for phone rates to go down.