The twitchy point with that idea is what if you did't mean to throw it out.
What if you or your SO took something to a second-hand shop and sold it, then later decided you didn't mean to (took the wrong box to the shop, for example and accidentally sold the CD's you wanted to keep..)
About 15 years ago when I had only recently been thrown out of university, my flatmate found a largish number (40-50) of unsold textbooks in a dumpster behind the on-campus bookshop. He managed to sell at least 30 through the university's own second-hand bookstore before they became aware of the situation, and I think he sold a few more via noticeboard adverts.
More recently, me and a friend found well over 200 Windows manuals with licences for windows98 in a paper-recycling bin, and sold most of them through an auction site with no hassles whatsoever.
So what exactly is the difference between dumpster-diving an unsold sewing pattern, magazine or software licence, and dumpster-diving a slightly damaged but easily repaired "probably returned-under-warrantee" monitor?
Copyright expires after a certain time (depending on your country). Does this mean that fifty years (or whatever) after the death of Linus, the GPL on the kernel will be violatable? I'll be able to take kernel code, put it in my app, and release it without releasing the source, because it's no longer copyrighted?
That would be true for the earliest kernel versions only; the onces that were written entirely BY Linus. Later versions are a derivative work, and the copyright is owned by a vast assortment of individual contributors.
Also, if my country only upholds copyright for ten years (full stop), would I be able to violate the GPL in my own country?
I guess for any GPL'd code more than 10 years old, yes. However each revision is a new derivative work. linux-1.0.9 may well be out of copyright in some countries, but I'm not sure you would want to base a commercial product around it. Patches for more recent exploits and drivers for any hardware less than ten years old will all be still under copyright and therefore still under the GPL's terms.
I think you totally missed the sarcasim in that last posting.. Some crusty old document mentions "congress shall have the power to promote the sciences and useful arts, by securing for a limited time to authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their inventions and discoveries" which is where copyright started to grow as a way of rewarding authors (A form of copyright existed before this, but mostly only as a way for governments to censor the press)
At the time, the people writing this document were apparently thinking somewhere in the region of 14 years, perhaps renewable for another 14 if the Author felt it was worth the effort to renew, but they didn't want to set this in concrete so they left some wriggle room. "To promote.." was the entire point of the excercise so they put that first, and "for a limited time" would suggest that it wasn't supposed to be perpetually extended.
I have no idea where the concept of "Intellectual Property" came from. It sure wasn't what these guys were thinking of..
Compare this to the fact that the "normal" data they use is from a insignificant, tiny telescope.
Uhhhh no. The data they get is ALL from Arecibo, but most of the time it's just 'wherever it happens to be pointing for someone else's research'. The only difference is that for 24 hours they got to decide what it's pointed at.
I keep submitting this link as a slashdot story. It keeps getting rejected. FFS guys, stop hassling one spammer at a time when they happen to make the news. Let's put pressure on the whole bunch. Start now, and keep it up until they stop spamming.
My blind friend uses RedHat. I set up getty on a serial port for him and he logs in using his 'companion' voice-synthesiser laptop. For surfing (links) reading email (pine) and playing mp3's (mpg123), this works out pretty well.
I'm trying to set up another box for him using Debian and festival, but I haven't had much luck so far.
What techinical support? I do not even know anybody that ever phoned MS for technical support, yet everybody pays them for it?
I know a company that pays for MS technical support; $30/mo and afaik they can phone up anytime. Most of the time they've done something stupid I guess, because they seem to think they're getting good value for it.
Here's how it worked out when I got involved. The company is fairly small and doesn't do that much on the computer. They have WinXP and use Outlook Express for their mail.
One day they go to start OE and as soon as the program starts they get the "This program died" dialog box. They call Microsoft, who advise them to do various stupid stuff like try the application again, reboot the box, etc. After about 45 minutes the MS tech support people eventually refer them to a knowledgebase article which involves messing with the registry and reinstalling parts of the OS. They get nervous and call me.
So I get the machine. First a virus and AdAware scan of course. They mention their Microsoft contract and previous call. I Start OE, type the error message into google and in 5 seconds I've found the knowledgebase article that took Tech Support 45 minutes to get to.
I followed the instructions provided; "Ask windows to repair itself", "Reinstall the faulty app", and "reinstall most of Windows" (what they call an in-place upgrade.) None of that made any difference so I hit Google again with the error message and got some more steps to try (See if it's in the config by creating a new user) which also didn't solve the problem. I also asked on several IRC channels and got a few other ideas, but none of those worked either.
Eventually, after about 10 hours of banging my head on the keyboard we backed up the My Documents folder to a CDR and did a CLEAN reinstall of Windows and all the Apps.
If I'd called MS Tech Support, I'm fairly sure that whould have been the next step anyway.
SMTP isn't intrinsically flawed, and more than the phone or FAX are intrinsically flawed.
In the case of the phone or fax, LAWS were necessary to stop sociopaths from setting up automatic diallers that ran 24/7, and from sending millions of junk faxes.
In the case of mail; laws have been proposed. However, what might be more effective is that most ISP's decide SPAM is unacceptable and change their ToS to disallow it. Something like "If you spam, we will disconnect you, add your name to a nationwide ISP blacklist, and charge you a $10-per-email-sent cleanup fee"
And then once most ISP's have this, users have the option of simply blackholing the remaining 'spam-friendly' ISP's.
I set up email for my 8yo daughter. The address has only ever appeared on kid-oriented websites. Here's some of the subject lines from messages spamassassin has caught recently;
Subject: RE: About your request of No.1 Teen Hardcore Site
Subject: Chick love with beast 0464jjIM9--9
Subject: she wanted to do it
Subject: SHEMIKA'S pics
Subject: Information Requested Please
Subject: Improve your Sex Appeal!
Subject: Wife wants you to have this Bigger Erection
Subject: Make her scream use this
Subject: DVD-Teens_About 15 GIGs of BEST Hardcore sex!
Subject: See Results Immediately! Enlarge your Penis Today!
Subject: Women: Revolutionary Climax Product Will Astonish You..........qzyrkvv
Subject: Women: Revolutionary Climax Product Will Astonish You.......qzyrkvv
Subject: Private-Viewer Pro provides secure Password Protection for all of your Adult Content.
Subject: A New Stimulating Sensual Lubricant For Women (Discount Code #7181835)
Subject: CHAROLETTE'S pics 0123IjOv9-354-12
Subject: How to Boost Your Penis Size & Confidence username@ourISP.co.nz lpx
Subject: [Men Only]
Subject: username@ourISP.co.nz Valiumm-Viagraa-Xanaxx No Exam Needed!Simple
Online Form hj:uqlm;ndiure;c cf;ikjc:
Problem; Both finger and ident rely on the server returning a truthful response. If it's under control of a spammer it won't be. "1) Spammers Lie"
Spamming is not a technical problem, it's a social problem.
Here's my suggestion; Most ISP's need to add a clause in their ToS that CLEARLY defines spamming (Bulk unsolicited email, commercial or not) as unacceptable, that violaters WILL be blacklisted and that they will be charged a suitable 'cleanup' fee.
First Amendment; doesn't apply, this is a private company and not the government Privacy Act, etc; Also doesn't apply, the spammer agreed to the terms when they signed up.
No new laws are required; nobody's 'rights' get violated. Spam filter writers can whitelist all the spammer-hostile ISP's and/or blacklist the remaining 'spam-friendly' ISP's, and everyone will be much happier.
I vaguely recall reading of someone referring to Nelson Mandela as "African-American", but I can't remember the exact context and I can't find it through Google so perhaps it was someone else.
Well, just to be sure I went and asked my wife (lifetime God-botherer, failed high school maths) if the number 3.14 meant anything to her.
She replied 'pi' without even thinking about it.
So I think most people will recognise 3.14 seconds as being a reference to pi, if they notice it at all. I'll also comment that a 'second' is a unit of angle; 1/3600 of a degree. I suspect hints of a "Foundation" style ending. Perhaps Zion is the birthplace of the AI.:)
There's perhaps a few DOZEN sql servers that actually are supposed to be open and accessable to the public. I'm guessing here because personally I don't know of a single one and I can't think of a single reason why you'd want to set one up that way, so perhaps I've overestimated.
The rest are BACKEND servers, which should have been accessable ONLY by the host that uses them. If they'd all been properly firewalled the slammer worm would have never happened.
If you want to stop this kind of shit from happening, two things need to change;
All OS's should be firewalled by default, and need to have a tool that makes it easy to open up individual services with minimal access; It won't make everything secure overnight, but it will greatly reduce the number of 'vulnerable hosts' a worm can use. XP is marginally on the right track; except that it's still easier to switch off all firwalling than to just open one port..
The OS Monoculture has GOT to go. Not just because MICROS~1 are an abusive monopoly, but because having multiple vendors with more equal market share would spread the 'risk'.
There was a whole bunch of games for the early Macs that had a boss menu and/or boss key. Most of the produced a blank spreadsheet. I think one of our Apple//c games did it as well. And I'm fairly certain I've seen at least one game for the Amiga that had this feature.
More to the point; GoToMyPC.com at $19 per month?!! Get real!! VNC is free, multiplatform, and there's a Java applet so you can even use it from libraries and kiosks.
Slashdot Mirror
The twitchy point with that idea is what if you did't mean to throw it out.
What if you or your SO took something to a second-hand shop and sold it, then later decided you didn't mean to (took the wrong box to the shop, for example and accidentally sold the CD's you wanted to keep..)
Is that theft too?
About 15 years ago when I had only recently been thrown out of university, my flatmate found a largish number (40-50) of unsold textbooks in a dumpster behind the on-campus bookshop. He managed to sell at least 30 through the university's own second-hand bookstore before they became aware of the situation, and I think he sold a few more via noticeboard adverts.
More recently, me and a friend found well over 200 Windows manuals with licences for windows98 in a paper-recycling bin, and sold most of them through an auction site with no hassles whatsoever.
So what exactly is the difference between dumpster-diving an unsold sewing pattern, magazine or software licence, and dumpster-diving a slightly damaged but easily repaired "probably returned-under-warrantee" monitor?
Or is that 'piracy' too?
Copyright expires after a certain time (depending on your country). Does this mean that fifty years (or whatever) after the death of Linus, the GPL on the kernel will be violatable? I'll be able to take kernel code, put it in my app, and release it without releasing the source, because it's no longer copyrighted?
That would be true for the earliest kernel versions only; the onces that were written entirely BY Linus. Later versions are a derivative work, and the copyright is owned by a vast assortment of individual contributors.
Also, if my country only upholds copyright for ten years (full stop), would I be able to violate the GPL in my own country?
I guess for any GPL'd code more than 10 years old, yes. However each revision is a new derivative work. linux-1.0.9 may well be out of copyright in some countries, but I'm not sure you would want to base a commercial product around it. Patches for more recent exploits and drivers for any hardware less than ten years old will all be still under copyright and therefore still under the GPL's terms.
I think you totally missed the sarcasim in that last posting.. Some crusty old document mentions "congress shall have the power to promote the sciences and useful arts, by securing for a limited time to authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their inventions and discoveries" which is where copyright started to grow as a way of rewarding authors (A form of copyright existed before this, but mostly only as a way for governments to censor the press)
At the time, the people writing this document were apparently thinking somewhere in the region of 14 years, perhaps renewable for another 14 if the Author felt it was worth the effort to renew, but they didn't want to set this in concrete so they left some wriggle room. "To promote.." was the entire point of the excercise so they put that first, and "for a limited time" would suggest that it wasn't supposed to be perpetually extended.
I have no idea where the concept of "Intellectual Property" came from. It sure wasn't what these guys were thinking of..
What is does is;
Record a whole side at a time
Apply some filtering to remove clicks and pops
Find the gaps between tracks for you, and split the final tracks into individual files.
Not sure why you can't just go read the article; It loaded fine for me just now.
28% Slashdot Maths. It doesn't always add up.
Compare this to the fact that the "normal" data they use is from a insignificant, tiny telescope.
Uhhhh no. The data they get is ALL from Arecibo, but most of the time it's just 'wherever it happens to be pointing for someone else's research'. The only difference is that for 24 hours they got to decide what it's pointed at.
I rank them about equal with "child molesters"
Google sells Search Engine technology to businesses. They also sell keyword advertising
Observe that this page isn't the first hit for either of those searches.
.. and if the connection's not clear enough for them already, perhaps it'd help if a few geeks go nuts and kill a few
hardcore spammers.
Face it, the only difference between a religion and a cult is the amount of followers
Religion; A large, popular cult.
Cult; A small, unpopular religion.
We already know who some of the spammers are. Heck, some of them have admitted it!
I keep submitting this link as a slashdot story. It keeps getting rejected. FFS guys, stop hassling one spammer at a time when they happen to make the news. Let's put pressure on the whole bunch. Start now, and keep it up until they stop spamming.
My blind friend uses RedHat. I set up getty on a serial port for him and he logs in using his 'companion' voice-synthesiser laptop. For surfing (links) reading email (pine) and playing mp3's (mpg123), this works out pretty well.
I'm trying to set up another box for him using Debian and festival, but I haven't had much luck so far.
What techinical support? I do not even know anybody that ever phoned MS for technical support, yet everybody pays them for it?
I know a company that pays for MS technical support; $30/mo and afaik they can phone up anytime. Most of the time they've done something stupid I guess, because they seem to think they're getting good value for it.
Here's how it worked out when I got involved. The company is fairly small and doesn't do that much on the computer. They have WinXP and use Outlook Express for their mail.
One day they go to start OE and as soon as the program starts they get the "This program died" dialog box. They call Microsoft, who advise them to do various stupid stuff like try the application again, reboot the box, etc. After about 45 minutes the MS tech support people eventually refer them to a knowledgebase article which involves messing with the registry and reinstalling parts of the OS. They get nervous and call me.
So I get the machine. First a virus and AdAware scan of course. They mention their Microsoft contract and previous call. I Start OE, type the error message into google and in 5 seconds I've found the knowledgebase article that took Tech Support 45 minutes to get to.
I followed the instructions provided; "Ask windows to repair itself", "Reinstall the faulty app", and "reinstall most of Windows" (what they call
an in-place upgrade.) None of that made any difference so I hit Google again with the error message and got some more steps to try (See if it's in the config by creating a new user) which also didn't solve the problem. I also asked on several IRC channels and got a few other ideas, but none of those worked either.
Eventually, after about 10 hours of banging my head on the keyboard we backed up the My Documents folder to a CDR and did a CLEAN reinstall of Windows and all the Apps.
If I'd called MS Tech Support, I'm fairly sure that whould have been the next step anyway.
Yeah, yeah.
So find me an example of a square that's not a regtangle already..
SMTP isn't intrinsically flawed, and more than the phone or FAX are intrinsically flawed.
In the case of the phone or fax, LAWS were necessary to stop sociopaths from setting up automatic diallers that ran 24/7, and from sending millions of junk faxes.
In the case of mail; laws have been proposed. However, what might be more effective is that most ISP's decide SPAM is unacceptable and change their ToS to disallow it. Something like "If you spam, we will disconnect you, add your name to a nationwide ISP blacklist, and charge you a $10-per-email-sent cleanup fee"
And then once most ISP's have this, users have the option of simply blackholing the remaining 'spam-friendly' ISP's.
A .kids domain?
Did i forget to mention the address has only ever appeared on kid-oriented sites?
Oh yeah, I did mention that..
Thanks for playing.
I set up email for my 8yo daughter. The address has only ever appeared on kid-oriented websites. Here's some of the subject lines from messages spamassassin has caught recently;
Online Form hj:uqlm;ndiure;c cf;ikjc:
Problem; Both finger and ident rely on the server returning a truthful response. If it's under control of a spammer it won't be. "1) Spammers Lie"
Spamming is not a technical problem, it's a social problem.
Here's my suggestion; Most ISP's need to add a clause in their ToS that CLEARLY defines spamming (Bulk unsolicited email, commercial or not) as unacceptable, that violaters WILL be blacklisted and that they will be charged a suitable 'cleanup' fee.
First Amendment; doesn't apply, this is a private company and not the government
Privacy Act, etc; Also doesn't apply, the spammer agreed to the terms when they signed up.
No new laws are required; nobody's 'rights' get violated. Spam filter writers can whitelist all the spammer-hostile ISP's and/or blacklist the remaining 'spam-friendly' ISP's, and everyone will be much happier.
Why is this so hard?
I vaguely recall reading of someone referring to Nelson Mandela as "African-American", but I can't remember the exact context and I can't find it through Google so perhaps it was someone else.
Well, just to be sure I went and asked my wife (lifetime God-botherer, failed high school maths) if the number 3.14 meant anything to her.
:)
She replied 'pi' without even thinking about it.
So I think most people will recognise 3.14 seconds as being a reference to pi, if they notice it at all. I'll also comment that a 'second' is a unit of angle; 1/3600 of a degree. I suspect hints of a "Foundation" style ending. Perhaps Zion is the birthplace of the AI.
314 seconds. Right?
John 3:14 - And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up
In your dreams, God-boy.. It's the start of 'pi'.
There's perhaps a few DOZEN sql servers that actually are supposed to be open and accessable to the public. I'm guessing here because personally I don't know of a single one and I can't think of a single reason why you'd want to set one up that way, so perhaps I've overestimated.
The rest are BACKEND servers, which should have been accessable ONLY by the host that uses them. If they'd all been properly firewalled the slammer worm would have never happened.
If you want to stop this kind of shit from happening, two things need to change;
There was a whole bunch of games for the early Macs that had a boss menu and/or boss key. Most of the produced a blank spreadsheet. I think one of our Apple//c games did it as well. And I'm fairly certain I've seen at least one game for the Amiga that had this feature.
More to the point; GoToMyPC.com at $19 per month?!! Get real!! VNC is free, multiplatform, and there's a Java applet so you can even use it from libraries and kiosks.