Many users are just burnt out on ads. It's been said time and time again. When every show, every channel, every magazine, every newspaper, every website, every shopping cart, every building, every movie, every music CD, every box of cereal, basically every horizontal and vertical surface that a person sees is covered with an ad you get burn out.
Right on! At what point in time did the notion that public space had to be covered with ads? I heard that at one point, movie studios had to beg for the right to use certain products in films, and now companies pay premiums for "product placement". Do you know that most young children today can identify dozens of corporate logos, but they cannot identify many plants, birds, and leaves purely on sight? At one point, the most popular tattoo design was the Nike swoosh! Apparently there are no limitations to what constitutes a forum for advertisments!
Well, depending upon your geographic location, there generally is an option. You can contract with a telco for a router and a pipe that connects to their Internet backbone and they will provision as much bandwidth as you can afford. Cheap? Certainly not. But it is an option.
I am fortuate enough to have a cable modem through TimeWarner. Do I want a cable modem? No. Do I want TimeWarner? No. Do I have a choice? No.
Err, yes you do have a choice actually. Apart from what I mentioned above, I do not believe that you are in any way required to purchase any services from TimeWarner or any other ISP for that mattter. I suspect that is something you choose to do.
What I want is broadband. Just a pipe and no screwing around with ports. Oh, and I don't want to pay hundreds of dallars.
Aha! We are getting to the crux of the issue now. It simply may not be feasible for an ISP to provide the level of service you want at the price you are willing to pay. So, there is a trade-off: they meet your price, but there are restrictions on what you get. Perhaps you pay tiered pricing for the amount of bandwidth you consume above a certain threshold, or some ports are blocked, or your model is throttled. Hey, I would like to have a Corvette, but all I can afford is a Grand Prix. Life is still good though.
Now, I realize I could move. I realize I don't have a divine right to broadband in my house at a decent price. At the same time, I would really love to be able to do something other than whine about it.
I hear you, but I am not sure what can be done. In my area, the cable companies do not compete head-to-head with each other. They traded service areas around so that each has a virtual monopoly in a given area instead. My broadband options boil down to a cable modem from the cable company, or a DSL modem from the telephone company. Both charge the same monthly rates and offer equivalent terms of service. I'm not complaining though. I live in Canada and broadband only costs me CDN$40 / month.
I bet Socrates would have something to add to this discussion.
Perhaps, but Socrates claimed that he did not know anything, and he spent his time humiliating people who had what he considered to be incorrect opinions. He would probably get modded down as a troll or flamebait.
The Washington Post is reporting on an apparently credible project to create a simple life form in a petri dish. The goal is two-fold: 1) to actually create a unique life form essentially from scratch and (more importantly) 2) to extensively analyze and model the entire biology of this critter.
Just great - I wonder how long it will be before this:
3) Patent the life form
If corporations can apply for and get patents on human genes (in stark denial of a few million years worth of prior art), why wouldn't the patent office grant this one. Harvard has already got a patent on a mouse after all...
Any student in the bios or any command line without prior permission is automatically in trouble.
That makes sense if they are running an operating system where the only userid is root. If there were multiple userids, and the userids had different permissions...
I was a TA in university in the CS department - and we had a variety of Sun and IBM UNIX workstations. I can't imagine that K-12 students being potentially more dangerous in a multi-user environment than some inquisitive CS students trying to get root...
plus, it would expose the kiddies to something other than the windows that 98 % of people have at their house. back in school i was always excited to use macs, just for a change of pace.
I agree with that thought. However, I know a few non-technical people who would argue the opposite:
"What's the point of learning X when we use Y at home?"
I am sure these same people would think it was a good idea that the kids learn to use m$ office because that's what everyone else uses.
The problem is that this infomation isn't available right now by walking into the store in question, visiting its website, or calling and asking. This is infomation about a future sale price that has not yet been offered to the public.
I understand that part. I do not understand how copyright law enters into this equation though.
Unless of course it happens to be the best (!) tool to achieve the desired ends of Wal-Mart, BestBuy et.al.
The prices that were leaked were *future* prices not yet in effect - so No, you couldn't find out about them by just walking into the store and looking.
What the companies suing are concerned about is consumers finding out what the deals will be before the companies wanted them to. If you know the new computer you wanted will be 15% cheaper in a couple of weeks, you'll probably delay your purchase until then.
Fair enough - but why use the DMCA? If their confidential information was leaked and published, surely there are other measures available. I very much doubt that prior to the enactment of the DMCA, Wal-Mart would have done nothing if this is such a big deal to them.
Perhaps, as others have already stated in this dicussion, this is yet more evidence that the DMCA can be applied in ways that go far beyond the intended mandate of the law.
I must be missing something here - how can prices be copyrighted? If BestBuy can claim a copyright to the price $199.99, and some other business advertises some other item for sale at the same price, that the BestBuy copyright has been violated?
By re-printing information that is freely available to anyone who walks into a Wal-Mart, these folks are committing some sort of offense?
Prices charged to the public at large are not trade secrets, nor are they be covered by copyright.
The brain's morphology (structure) has nothing to do with psychology classes.
True. However, along the same line of reasoning, the brain's morphology has nothing to do with anything else we are likely to encounter in this life!
The reason I mentioned it was that I minored in Cognitive Pshchology (thus I am not an expert, but not a neophyte either), and that branch of psychology is quite interested in how the brain operates and which parts of the brain perform particular functions. I am unfamiliar with the term "reptilian" when applied to the human brain. What you refer to as reptilian, I would understand to mean primitive.
I do stand by my claim that calculations do not take place in the primitive parts of the brain - such higher-level functions occur in the cortex.
I see from the second part of your post that you are an Asimov fan
Actually, the "Deep Thought" reference comes from Douglas Adams' Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I am not sure how Asmiov fits in there...
The human brain does more than simple processing. Think about it, the ability to do calculations, etc., is tied into the most ancient (reptilian) part of the brain.
Umm reptilian? I don't recall anything about a reptilian part from my cognitive psychology courses. I do not think that calculations are handled by the primitive portion of the brain either.
In very brief: the most primitive part of the brain is the midbrain and the cerebellum which control autonomic functions. Despite being the "primitive" part of the brain, the least bit of damage to this area of the brain could leave you dead or a vegetable. The limbic system is in the middle of the brain and controls hormone production, emotion, and memory. The cerebrum and the cortex is the part of the brain where "thinking" takes place.
Now, if they could make a computer that could experience emotions (or could explain what women really want:-)), that would be a true accomplishment.
Look, it took Deep Thought millions of years to figure out what the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything was. Your question (what women really want) is several times more complex in magnitude!
The food and pharmaceutical companies aren't afraid of the choice a well-informed public will make, they're afraid of the choice the actual public will make, which would likely cost them billions of dollars in research over what amounts to bad PR
It is true that the "average" person is uninformed about a great many things. Does that mean the solution is to not provide the great unwashed with any details that might cause confusion or offense? That hardly fills me with trust and reassurance. The question I wonder about is: which is greater - the short and medium-term financial gains for the corporations who want to sell this stuff or the long-term potential negative impact of GM foods? Who do you trust when almost everyone involved has a potential conflict of interet?
The real research, done at universities by people with somewhat less of an axe to grind,
Unfortunately, the universities are not as unsullied as we would prefer. Check out the recently settled issue between Dr. Nancy Oliveri and Apotex with respect to Deferiprone. Corporate interests and academic freedom are simply not compatible. This time, Apotex lost, but it took years and lawsuits to get it settled.
Nobody eats normal corn these days. The original corn plant actually looked a lot like wheat. Tiny kernels. No supersweet peaches and cream. Corn has been bred and tweaked for centuries to give the product we describe in so cavalier a manner as 'corn'.
When the discussion refers to GM corn, people are *not* talking about sweet corn.
If you think that scientists are just randomly changing genes in foods intended to be sold, you've lost your grip on reality. Experimentation happens, but no sane food/drug company would risk the impact of such a level of carelessness/unconcern.
While I tend to agree with that assessment, I am still troubled by the amount of resources these same food/drug companies spent in order to defeat bills that would have required mandatory labelling of any products containing GM products.
If GM foods are *so* safe, why do they not want us to know when they are being consumed? It's sad that the last line of defense is the threat of massive class-action lawsuits in the event that GM foods are not quite as safe as their purveyors would have us believe!
If you contracted a pipe that has been blocked by a great number of sources because of your ISP's tolerance of spammers, then you could make an argument that they knowingly have hampered your services through their inaction
The pipe isn't blocked! There are a finite number of hosts that will not accept SMTP connections from certain subnets, but that's all. It is not as if the backbone routers blackhole all packets from that source or other ISPs will not exchange routes with that AS.
Your ISP sold you connectivity with a reasonable expectation of functionality. If half of the internet is blocking that connectivity and it can be demonstrated that the blocking is being done because of your ISP's tolerance of criminals, blame your ISP.
Give me a break! First off, sending spam is not a crime, although it should be, but I cannot imagine how it could be made so unless there were some trans-national body that could enforce such a law. Spammers are all liars and thieves, but no government seem to be able to make if a crime for them to steal my bandwidth. As for the rest of your rant, the number of mail servers who use any blackhole list (least of all SPEWS) is remarkably small and my original point still stands in that the ISP has not failed to provide what they were contracted to provide. Stop being a SPEWS apologist. If SPEWS would only put IP addresses in their list where SPAM originated from, or only had dial subnets in their list, it would be a good list. Instead, blackhole the entire ISP regardless of whether the ISP took any action to halt the Spammer's access - and the list admins won't remove an ISP from the list once it gets added. So spare me the sound and the fury and instead let us focus on a reasonable solution.
ISPs know about SPEWS and they know the potential consequences of tolerating spammers. If they host spammers and their IP blocks get blacklisted, then any IP block that they sell to you is damaged goods.
I hate spam as much as anyone else here on slashdot. That said, I think you are really grasping at straws here. The SPEWS folks are doing more harm than good in their indiscriminate blocking. Hey - if they only blocked known dial subnets, that would be fine, but they don't do that - they block all known subnets registered to that ISP and there is no means to be removed from the list. I'm sorry, but that does not seem like an appropriate measure and I no longer use their list. It is wrong to assume that every ISP is a spamhaus.
Again, your dispute is with your ISP, and I'd consider consulting a lawyer regarding your ISP's breach of contract.
How does that make any sense? Due to the actions taken by some anonymous third party, I should sue my ISP for breach of contract? ISPs are just a conduit. I contracted for a pipe to the Internet, and my provider has given me that. I fail to see how they have breached that contract by giving me exactly what I paid for.
Please explain to me how a spurious lawsuit that is doomed to fail will fix anything?
Hadly directed attacks towards military installations. If that wasn't using terror to make Japan surrender, I don't know. Yet I haven't seen Truman (or the generals, or Congress / Senate) on trial for it. Now why doesn't that surprise me?
There are a number of people who argue that "Bomber" Harris should be considered a war criminal because he ordered the fire-bombing of Dresden at a point in WWII when Germany's defeat was all but certain. That absolutely pales in comparison to the nuclear attacks against Japan of course, but some might say that Japan was all but defeated prior to the nuclear attacks as well...
* blowing up the Pentagon - legit.
* dropping a 2000 pound bomb on a wedding party - a regretable accident.
Based on your taxonomy, how would you classify the act in which a US pilot dropped a bomb on a bunch of Canadian soldiers who were engaged in some night-time training activities?
No, ISPs should NOT be blocking ANY ports. I pay them for a connection. Perhaps email, news, etc. Securing my machine is my responsibility. If there is a machine on their net causing a problem, then yes, they should kill THAT machine's connection. Filtering anything is not the right thing for them to be doing.
You pay for a connection, but the ISP owns the infrastructure, and it's their network you are connecting to. While it would be nice if they did not block any ports, they have every right to do so on their own network. If you don't like that, you are always free to take your business elsewhere.
What the fuck are you playing your vendor for if they won't provide fixes for known, proven, and public vulnerabilites? If thats your quality of service, are you really losing anything by giving up thier support and installing your own apps?
IBM, Sun and HP *do* provide fixes for vulnerabilities, but only for specific versions of supported applications. So, in this particular instance, they will provide me with a fix for the versions of BIND4 and BIND8 they currently support. If I run something older or newer, they will not support me. I don't have a problem with that either for the most part. There is no reason for them to support really old code, and they may not have had the chance to examine the newer stuff to be able to support that properly.
My only complaint is that what they do support is not quite as current as I might like. I don't expect them to support the bleeding edge stuff, and if you had SLA's to uphold, you wouldn't want to run the absolute newest code either...
For me, it is not really an option to use a tinydns or any other DNS solution other than BIND. Upgrading to BIND9 is not really an option for me either. I work for a large multinational, and we have a lot of UNIX servers (Sun, IBM, and HP in terms of numbers). I get hardware and software support direct from the manufacturer, and if I install an application, or a version of an application that my vendor does not support, I am on my own. These 24-7 support contracts are important to us in being able to sell our services and maintaining our SLA's and availability targets. Those issues aside, I do not want to have to explain to the PHBs that we cannot get support on a particular problem because the application in question is not supported by Sun, or that IBM only supports version 3.4 and we run version 4.0.
So, it is all well and good if someone out there has the choice to install some other software, but keep in mind that it is not necessarily an option for everyone...
a) What amazing abilities does Microsoft Office derive via these secret covert hooks that the source to the OS will reveal?
Naturally the APIs do not add more or better features to the application. However, the m$-proprietary APIs are probably more efficient and easier to implement than the stuff they tell the competition about...
b) While this might be hard for the kids to believe, Microsoft Office earned the position that it's in right now.
That's funny, I thought that m$ was found guilty of a number of anti-trust violations and abuse of their monopoly power. Silly me...
c) This same thing can be said about virtually any other MS program.
Ever hear of a product Scott McNealy refers to as lookOut? Outlook is a bloated piece of crap. Lotus Notes may have one of the worst user interfaces ever created, but the underlying features and functionality of Notes make it far superior to Outlook in virtually every aspect. The biggest thing that Notes users miss out on are the plethora of trojans that exploit Outlook...
On a side note, their are so many Office Space jokes running through my head right now that they're getting stuck, like two fat guys trying to go through an open door at the same time.
A minimum secrutiy prision is no picnic. I have a client in there right now. He says the trick is, kick someone's ass the first day or become someone's bitch. Then everything will be alright.
HOWEVER... before the factory came in, these people were doing something that they enjoyed even less. That is, subsistence farming, starving, or some even lower-paying job.
I agree. However, I do not agree that this in any way justifies the exploitation. We cannot claim the moral high ground that even though their existence is really crappy now, they were worse off before.
So they pay $1 per day... do you have any idea how much $1 US buys in (wherever)? Until you do, it makes no sense to complain about how low the wages are.
Go ahead - try to find a place where I can live the good life for US$1/day. Just don't try too hard because there is no such place. Nobody is going to suggest that these workers should receive the same pay and benefits that we in the first world receive. But they are certainly entitled to a living wage that permits them to feed, house, and clothe their families. I very much doubt that it would bankrupt Nike if they had to pat US$2/day instead of US$1/day to the people who make those shoes that cost in excess of US$100.00.
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Many users are just burnt out on ads. It's been said time and time again. When every show, every channel, every magazine, every newspaper, every website, every shopping cart, every building, every movie, every music CD, every box of cereal, basically every horizontal and vertical surface that a person sees is covered with an ad you get burn out.
Right on! At what point in time did the notion that public space had to be covered with ads? I heard that at one point, movie studios had to beg for the right to use certain products in films, and now companies pay premiums for "product placement". Do you know that most young children today can identify dozens of corporate logos, but they cannot identify many plants, birds, and leaves purely on sight? At one point, the most popular tattoo design was the Nike swoosh! Apparently there are no limitations to what constitutes a forum for advertisments!
I wish I had mod points today...
What if there is no "elsewhere"?
Well, depending upon your geographic location, there generally is an option. You can contract with a telco for a router and a pipe that connects to their Internet backbone and they will provision as much bandwidth as you can afford. Cheap? Certainly not. But it is an option.
I am fortuate enough to have a cable modem through TimeWarner. Do I want a cable modem? No. Do I want TimeWarner? No. Do I have a choice? No.
Err, yes you do have a choice actually. Apart from what I mentioned above, I do not believe that you are in any way required to purchase any services from TimeWarner or any other ISP for that mattter. I suspect that is something you choose to do.
What I want is broadband. Just a pipe and no screwing around with ports. Oh, and I don't want to pay hundreds of dallars.
Aha! We are getting to the crux of the issue now. It simply may not be feasible for an ISP to provide the level of service you want at the price you are willing to pay. So, there is a trade-off: they meet your price, but there are restrictions on what you get. Perhaps you pay tiered pricing for the amount of bandwidth you consume above a certain threshold, or some ports are blocked, or your model is throttled. Hey, I would like to have a Corvette, but all I can afford is a Grand Prix. Life is still good though.
Now, I realize I could move. I realize I don't have a divine right to broadband in my house at a decent price. At the same time, I would really love to be able to do something other than whine about it.
I hear you, but I am not sure what can be done. In my area, the cable companies do not compete head-to-head with each other. They traded service areas around so that each has a virtual monopoly in a given area instead. My broadband options boil down to a cable modem from the cable company, or a DSL modem from the telephone company. Both charge the same monthly rates and offer equivalent terms of service. I'm not complaining though. I live in Canada and broadband only costs me CDN$40 / month.
I bet Socrates would have something to add to this discussion.
Perhaps, but Socrates claimed that he did not know anything, and he spent his time humiliating people who had what he considered to be incorrect opinions. He would probably get modded down as a troll or flamebait.
The Washington Post is reporting on an apparently credible project to create a simple life form in a petri dish. The goal is two-fold: 1) to actually create a unique life form essentially from scratch and (more importantly) 2) to extensively analyze and model the entire biology of this critter.
Just great - I wonder how long it will be before this:
3) Patent the life form
If corporations can apply for and get patents on human genes (in stark denial of a few million years worth of prior art), why wouldn't the patent office grant this one. Harvard has already got a patent on a mouse after all...
Oops! I almost forgot the obligatory reference:
4) ???
5) Profit
Any student in the bios or any command line without prior permission is automatically in trouble.
That makes sense if they are running an operating system where the only userid is root. If there were multiple userids, and the userids had different permissions...
I was a TA in university in the CS department - and we had a variety of Sun and IBM UNIX workstations. I can't imagine that K-12 students being potentially more dangerous in a multi-user environment than some inquisitive CS students trying to get root...
I agree with that thought. However, I know a few non-technical people who would argue the opposite:
I am sure these same people would think it was a good idea that the kids learn to use m$ office because that's what everyone else uses.
My kids are going to learn on UNIX!
The problem is that this infomation isn't available right now by walking into the store in question, visiting its website, or calling and asking. This is infomation about a future sale price that has not yet been offered to the public.
I understand that part. I do not understand how copyright law enters into this equation though. Unless of course it happens to be the best (!) tool to achieve the desired ends of Wal-Mart, BestBuy et.al.
The prices that were leaked were *future* prices not yet in effect - so No, you couldn't find out about them by just walking into the store and looking. What the companies suing are concerned about is consumers finding out what the deals will be before the companies wanted them to. If you know the new computer you wanted will be 15% cheaper in a couple of weeks, you'll probably delay your purchase until then.
Fair enough - but why use the DMCA? If their confidential information was leaked and published, surely there are other measures available. I very much doubt that prior to the enactment of the DMCA, Wal-Mart would have done nothing if this is such a big deal to them.
Perhaps, as others have already stated in this dicussion, this is yet more evidence that the DMCA can be applied in ways that go far beyond the intended mandate of the law.
I must be missing something here - how can prices be copyrighted? If BestBuy can claim a copyright to the price $199.99, and some other business advertises some other item for sale at the same price, that the BestBuy copyright has been violated?
By re-printing information that is freely available to anyone who walks into a Wal-Mart, these folks are committing some sort of offense?
Prices charged to the public at large are not trade secrets, nor are they be covered by copyright.
This is absurd.
The brain's morphology (structure) has nothing to do with psychology classes.
True. However, along the same line of reasoning, the brain's morphology has nothing to do with anything else we are likely to encounter in this life!
The reason I mentioned it was that I minored in Cognitive Pshchology (thus I am not an expert, but not a neophyte either), and that branch of psychology is quite interested in how the brain operates and which parts of the brain perform particular functions. I am unfamiliar with the term "reptilian" when applied to the human brain. What you refer to as reptilian, I would understand to mean primitive.
I do stand by my claim that calculations do not take place in the primitive parts of the brain - such higher-level functions occur in the cortex.
I see from the second part of your post that you are an Asimov fan
Actually, the "Deep Thought" reference comes from Douglas Adams' Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I am not sure how Asmiov fits in there...
The human brain does more than simple processing. Think about it, the ability to do calculations, etc., is tied into the most ancient (reptilian) part of the brain.
:-)), that would be a true accomplishment.
Umm reptilian? I don't recall anything about a reptilian part from my cognitive psychology courses. I do not think that calculations are handled by the primitive portion of the brain either.
In very brief: the most primitive part of the brain is the midbrain and the cerebellum which control autonomic functions. Despite being the "primitive" part of the brain, the least bit of damage to this area of the brain could leave you dead or a vegetable. The limbic system is in the middle of the brain and controls hormone production, emotion, and memory. The cerebrum and the cortex is the part of the brain where "thinking" takes place.
Now, if they could make a computer that could experience emotions (or could explain what women really want
Look, it took Deep Thought millions of years to figure out what the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything was. Your question (what women really want) is several times more complex in magnitude!
The food and pharmaceutical companies aren't afraid of the choice a well-informed public will make, they're afraid of the choice the actual public will make, which would likely cost them billions of dollars in research over what amounts to bad PR
It is true that the "average" person is uninformed about a great many things. Does that mean the solution is to not provide the great unwashed with any details that might cause confusion or offense? That hardly fills me with trust and reassurance. The question I wonder about is: which is greater - the short and medium-term financial gains for the corporations who want to sell this stuff or the long-term potential negative impact of GM foods? Who do you trust when almost everyone involved has a potential conflict of interet?
The real research, done at universities by people with somewhat less of an axe to grind,
Unfortunately, the universities are not as unsullied as we would prefer. Check out the recently settled issue between Dr. Nancy Oliveri and Apotex with respect to Deferiprone. Corporate interests and academic freedom are simply not compatible. This time, Apotex lost, but it took years and lawsuits to get it settled.
Nobody eats normal corn these days. The original corn plant actually looked a lot like wheat. Tiny kernels. No supersweet peaches and cream. Corn has been bred and tweaked for centuries to give the product we describe in so cavalier a manner as 'corn'.
When the discussion refers to GM corn, people are *not* talking about sweet corn.
If you think that scientists are just randomly changing genes in foods intended to be sold, you've lost your grip on reality. Experimentation happens, but no sane food/drug company would risk the impact of such a level of carelessness/unconcern.
While I tend to agree with that assessment, I am still troubled by the amount of resources these same food/drug companies spent in order to defeat bills that would have required mandatory labelling of any products containing GM products.
If GM foods are *so* safe, why do they not want us to know when they are being consumed? It's sad that the last line of defense is the threat of massive class-action lawsuits in the event that GM foods are not quite as safe as their purveyors would have us believe!
It did go into production, they just didn't finish filming it.
It is unfinished, but it was released on video. If you have read the Dirk Gently novels, you will see more than a couple of plot similarities.
If you contracted a pipe that has been blocked by a great number of sources because of your ISP's tolerance of spammers, then you could make an argument that they knowingly have hampered your services through their inaction
The pipe isn't blocked! There are a finite number of hosts that will not accept SMTP connections from certain subnets, but that's all. It is not as if the backbone routers blackhole all packets from that source or other ISPs will not exchange routes with that AS.
Your ISP sold you connectivity with a reasonable expectation of functionality. If half of the internet is blocking that connectivity and it can be demonstrated that the blocking is being done because of your ISP's tolerance of criminals, blame your ISP.
Give me a break! First off, sending spam is not a crime, although it should be, but I cannot imagine how it could be made so unless there were some trans-national body that could enforce such a law. Spammers are all liars and thieves, but no government seem to be able to make if a crime for them to steal my bandwidth. As for the rest of your rant, the number of mail servers who use any blackhole list (least of all SPEWS) is remarkably small and my original point still stands in that the ISP has not failed to provide what they were contracted to provide. Stop being a SPEWS apologist. If SPEWS would only put IP addresses in their list where SPAM originated from, or only had dial subnets in their list, it would be a good list. Instead, blackhole the entire ISP regardless of whether the ISP took any action to halt the Spammer's access - and the list admins won't remove an ISP from the list once it gets added. So spare me the sound and the fury and instead let us focus on a reasonable solution.
ISPs know about SPEWS and they know the potential consequences of tolerating spammers. If they host spammers and their IP blocks get blacklisted, then any IP block that they sell to you is damaged goods.
I hate spam as much as anyone else here on slashdot. That said, I think you are really grasping at straws here. The SPEWS folks are doing more harm than good in their indiscriminate blocking. Hey - if they only blocked known dial subnets, that would be fine, but they don't do that - they block all known subnets registered to that ISP and there is no means to be removed from the list. I'm sorry, but that does not seem like an appropriate measure and I no longer use their list. It is wrong to assume that every ISP is a spamhaus.
Again, your dispute is with your ISP, and I'd consider consulting a lawyer regarding your ISP's breach of contract.
How does that make any sense? Due to the actions taken by some anonymous third party, I should sue my ISP for breach of contract? ISPs are just a conduit. I contracted for a pipe to the Internet, and my provider has given me that. I fail to see how they have breached that contract by giving me exactly what I paid for.
Please explain to me how a spurious lawsuit that is doomed to fail will fix anything?
Hadly directed attacks towards military installations. If that wasn't using terror to make Japan surrender, I don't know. Yet I haven't seen Truman (or the generals, or Congress / Senate) on trial for it. Now why doesn't that surprise me?
There are a number of people who argue that "Bomber" Harris should be considered a war criminal because he ordered the fire-bombing of Dresden at a point in WWII when Germany's defeat was all but certain. That absolutely pales in comparison to the nuclear attacks against Japan of course, but some might say that Japan was all but defeated prior to the nuclear attacks as well...
* blowing up the Pentagon - legit.
* dropping a 2000 pound bomb on a wedding party - a regretable accident.
Based on your taxonomy, how would you classify the act in which a US pilot dropped a bomb on a bunch of Canadian soldiers who were engaged in some night-time training activities?
No, ISPs should NOT be blocking ANY ports. I pay them for a connection. Perhaps email, news, etc. Securing my machine is my responsibility. If there is a machine on their net causing a problem, then yes, they should kill THAT machine's connection. Filtering anything is not the right thing for them to be doing.
You pay for a connection, but the ISP owns the infrastructure, and it's their network you are connecting to. While it would be nice if they did not block any ports, they have every right to do so on their own network. If you don't like that, you are always free to take your business elsewhere.
What the fuck are you playing your vendor for if they won't provide fixes for known, proven, and public vulnerabilites? If thats your quality of service, are you really losing anything by giving up thier support and installing your own apps?
IBM, Sun and HP *do* provide fixes for vulnerabilities, but only for specific versions of supported applications. So, in this particular instance, they will provide me with a fix for the versions of BIND4 and BIND8 they currently support. If I run something older or newer, they will not support me. I don't have a problem with that either for the most part. There is no reason for them to support really old code, and they may not have had the chance to examine the newer stuff to be able to support that properly.
My only complaint is that what they do support is not quite as current as I might like. I don't expect them to support the bleeding edge stuff, and if you had SLA's to uphold, you wouldn't want to run the absolute newest code either...
For me, it is not really an option to use a tinydns or any other DNS solution other than BIND. Upgrading to BIND9 is not really an option for me either. I work for a large multinational, and we have a lot of UNIX servers (Sun, IBM, and HP in terms of numbers). I get hardware and software support direct from the manufacturer, and if I install an application, or a version of an application that my vendor does not support, I am on my own. These 24-7 support contracts are important to us in being able to sell our services and maintaining our SLA's and availability targets. Those issues aside, I do not want to have to explain to the PHBs that we cannot get support on a particular problem because the application in question is not supported by Sun, or that IBM only supports version 3.4 and we run version 4.0.
So, it is all well and good if someone out there has the choice to install some other software, but keep in mind that it is not necessarily an option for everyone...
a) What amazing abilities does Microsoft Office derive via these secret covert hooks that the source to the OS will reveal?
Naturally the APIs do not add more or better features to the application. However, the m$-proprietary APIs are probably more efficient and easier to implement than the stuff they tell the competition about...
b) While this might be hard for the kids to believe, Microsoft Office earned the position that it's in right now.
That's funny, I thought that m$ was found guilty of a number of anti-trust violations and abuse of their monopoly power. Silly me...
c) This same thing can be said about virtually any other MS program.
Ever hear of a product Scott McNealy refers to as lookOut? Outlook is a bloated piece of crap. Lotus Notes may have one of the worst user interfaces ever created, but the underlying features and functionality of Notes make it far superior to Outlook in virtually every aspect. The biggest thing that Notes users miss out on are the plethora of trojans that exploit Outlook...
HOWEVER... before the factory came in, these people were doing something that they enjoyed even less. That is, subsistence farming, starving, or some even lower-paying job.
... do you have any idea how much $1 US buys in (wherever)? Until you do, it makes no sense to complain about how low the wages are.
I agree. However, I do not agree that this in any way justifies the exploitation. We cannot claim the moral high ground that even though their existence is really crappy now, they were worse off before.
So they pay $1 per day
Go ahead - try to find a place where I can live the good life for US$1/day. Just don't try too hard because there is no such place. Nobody is going to suggest that these workers should receive the same pay and benefits that we in the first world receive. But they are certainly entitled to a living wage that permits them to feed, house, and clothe their families. I very much doubt that it would bankrupt Nike if they had to pat US$2/day instead of US$1/day to the people who make those shoes that cost in excess of US$100.00.