Road rage is becoming more common. Why not spam rage?
Why not indeed. How about because you don't know where they are, and by the time you track them down, if you can, you will have cooled off slightly? Road rage would happen alot less if the people involved were 100 kilometres (or miles, if you prefer) apart.
I don't think spammers are going to be murdered on a very frequent basis. Mailbombed? Possibly. ISP cracked? Maybe. But murdered? It is an idea simply lacking in practicality.
I'll admit it seems like a fun thought, but I would hope it never really happens.
They were SPAMMERS so 'human' is a debatable term. Additionally, there are now over 6 BILLION people on this planet. It's not as though human life (or spammer life for that matter) is exactly a scarce commodity.
But seriously does anyone really deserve to die in such a brutal mannar for sending stock/security spam
But they also played games with investment advice for penny stocks, and investors lost ~$10M. Murder is still undeserved, but it is significantly different to just sending spam...
I think half the reason for posting the story was to keep people up to date with where the version numbers are now... I know I had to re-read the paragraph to make sure I read it right. I even blinked a few times:)
"Version 7?? Say *what*?"
Ah well. If you're going to accelerate your version numbering, do it properly:)
I'm sysadmin at a residential college in Australia, and we've got a couple of low-end pentiums set up as thin X-terminals. They work quite well. The performance is perfectly usable.
Basically all you need to do is a minimal install of your favourite distro (we use Slackware). Make sure you've got X and networking, and that's all you need. You don't even need any X apps... so it doesn't take very much space on a disk.
Then just configure it to use runlevel 4. A line like this in your rc.4 file works nicely: exec/usr/X11R6/bin/X -query myserver.mydomain
A quick peek at one of our boxes revealed it only uses 60Mb of disk space... and we haven't gone to any effort at all to trim it. Of course, it helps to use Slackware and not Redhat;)
If you really want to save on client disk space, you can always install a kernel that mounts its root fs over NFS. You still need a little bit of disk space though, for swap - unless your 486s have plenty of RAM. X tends to be a little RAM hungry, as we all know.
And seeing as the CPU is going to be idle a lot of the time, you can always install an RC5 cracker or Seti@Home if you like:) Andrew.
Yes... that struck me as a bit rough too - considering they simply broadcast the news bulletin just like they have every other week day for the past few years. Just because another countries news suddenly doesn't agree with ours, SBS is to blame? *sigh*
If I recall correctly, there is no problem with having patented code GPLed - so long as the license to use the patent is free. To quote the GPL's Preamble (from Version 2):
any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all
Also, the if you GPL your code, it is still copyrighted - you wrote the code, no-one can take that credit away from you (legally). What "copyleft" actually means is a clever use of copyright laws to allow everyone to use the code for free, and keep it free, as opposed to the traditional restrictions usually applied.
I recommend reading the GPL, or at least the Preamble, anyway. You could also read the GNU Manifesto. They explain these issues much more clearly than I do.
I'd never heard of DNA computing before, so I followed the link and took a look.
I'm certainly not qualified to know how much of it is really feasible, but it is quite interesting. However I'm not convinced that this technique would really solve the problem in linear time.
My reason for this is just a hunch, but it seems intuitive. They assume that the process of taking n DNA strands, chucking them into a bucket (so to speak), and mixing, will only have a linear cost. I'm not convinced this would be the case.
Visualise n to be fairly big, and each DNA strand to be fairly long. Now picture n strands of this length put into a mixing process. Now I'm not a chemist, but wouldn't tangles and other geometric issues, if not sheer weight of numbers, render the cost of adequate mixing worse than linear?
Put simply, if it takes, say, 10 milliseconds to adequately mix 10 strands, do you think it would really take just 1000 milliseconds for 1000 strands? Or 1000000 for a 1000000? Maybe it would, but I'm unconvinced. If nothing else, I doubt that a linear relationship for this is proven.
Or maybe I just misunderstood the whole thing. Please tell me where I've screwed up:)
Wordperfect sucked. Crashed all the time when I used it. Nothing like spending 3 hours writing a paper and having it crash and hoping the.tmp file has part of it.
Here I must disagree. I've rarely had a problem with WordPerfect (I've used versions from 5.1 to 8.0 on various platforms). It certainly crashes less than any version of Word I've used, and I find it alot less annoying.
The fact that Rob & Hemos continue to foist this knothead's opinions on us as 'features' might be a sign that Slashdot isn't about community discussion but is becoming increasingly about a codified agenda.
What? Are you really that paranoid? Everyone has a secret agenda, oh no, they can't just be trying to be friendly in providing a useful service? I don't know why, but I try to err on the side of trust most of the time. It pays off - it turns out everyone isn't out to get you.
Fair enough, you don't agree with Katz. That's your decision. Perhaps you should volunteer your opinions to be posted as features and see if the community warms to your ideas more.
And finally, if you want my opinion on why moderation seems biased against those who dislike Katz: I find that a large proportion of posts which dislike Katz to be poorly written and excessively angry. I know it bugs me that so many people feel they must vehemently proclaim their feelings about his writings - is he really that bad? So of course, when the odd post gets moderated down, or worse - a pro-Katz post is moderated up - those who are anti-Katz start turning on the real flamage and concocting conspiracy theories. Some of those posts definitely qualify for moderating down - but no, if you moderate down a post exposing the evils of Katz, you are part of the conspiracy.
Basically, I think that some people need to learn to relax a little more.
Yes - I got that feeling too - I kept thinking "They're stating alot of things as facts here without any evidence".
It struck me as a fairly inflammatory piece, but without quite justifying itself being that way.
I guess that's just my opinion, but then again, that's all that page really was too - it's even labelled as such. I wouldn't mind hearing SETI@Home's side of the story... I somehow feel it would paint a slightly different picture.
Do you really think things are BETTER in this nation, thanks to movies like South Park and American Pie? And don't give me that "porn helps children" garbage... nobody in his right mind believes that.
South Park isn't exactly what I'd call porn... it's a cartoon. And, more importantly, it has a different purpose to porn - porn is created so people can get off on looking at it, but South Park is created for entertainment (of a different kind), and it also has a hefty dose of social commentary - don't see much of that in porn, I believe.
Sure, South Park has a lot of indecent language and a few "adult concepts", but it's there for satire. It's making a point about society.
I agree 13 year olds shouldn't be able to see hardcore porn, but I don't think South Park causes much damage - it's main effect on society is that alot of prudish types and fundamentalist christians get offended, because they are unable to see past the language and hear what the movie is actually saying.
On the other hand, I can't comment other movies like American Pie, not having seen them, and being in Australia, not even having heard very much about them.
Of course there are movies kids shouldn't be able to see - what I think the really disturbing part of Katz is trying to highlight is the ridiculousness of knee-jerk reactions people have, and their consequences. All of a sudden there's a blind rush to protect kids, but there's always been movies like this around - South Park and Eyes Wide Shut and whatever just happen to be currently being shown in cinemas, and well publicised, that's all.
I do agree though that Katz is a bit extreme in his suggestion in this feature, but I do still enjoy reading his stuff.
Anyway, I've gone on for a bit long so I'll stop rambling now.
I'm really surprised by the number of people who keep advocating having guns "just in case" the government needs overthrowing! I'm going to probably get flamed to death for saying this, but:
Get a grip!
Yes, guns are useful. And, in fact, still legal here in Australia (despite what some are implying) - some types, for licenced owners. After all, you don't need a semi-automatic shotgun to be able to kill fly-blown sheep...
As for self-protection, that's a whole other messy issue that's sure to stir a few people up even if I don't try, so I won't go there.
But is half the US seriously living in constant paranoia that their government is about to go Nazi on them or something? Learn to relax a little people... not to mention read a little about the concept of "peaceful protest" - you might want to look at the life of Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, for instance.
This isn't to say governments don't get corrupt, or that we should walk around in blissful ignorance of anything that could possibly ever go wrong... but several people have suggested keeping a gun handy as a result of this legislation, and I can't help but think that's a slightly off-balance way to view the world.
But anyhow, I think I've said enough that I think I might go and put on my asbestos suit now..
IANAL, but yes, a law here in Australia can be thrown out in court, if it is unconstutional for instance.
But we don't have a Bill of Rights or anything similar - so I don't know that there is much grounds for this law to be thrown out. Maybe there is some obscure privacy legislation or something, but I doubt it.
I hope it is stopped somehow, though. I feel ill whenever I read quotes from Senator Alston congratulating himself on what a good job he's done...
Actually, you get to put in two email addresses - the one that your password is mailed to, and one that is publicly viewable on all your comments. The first email address is never publicly viewable - ever noticed the number of xyz@NOSPAM.fred.com addresses?
I can't remember where I learnt these, I think I probably just guessed from context. I suppose they might be found in the Jargon File, though that's not really meant for that sort of thing.
as for the open-source community taking the development efforts of $20 million in gpl'ed code... well gee, let's give that tough problem a long think. have to get back to that one.
Of course the answer to this seems obvious to us - but this shows a worrying problem: the open-source community is perceived in the media as some kind of stubborn, obsessive, pedantic group of people spoiling for arguments.
I'm not saying that the open-source community (or whatever else you want to label it) is those things, and I'm not trying to attract flames. My point is that there is a damaging perception out there, and whatever the cause, it is an issue we will need to face if we want to give the corporate world a positive impression of the work the open-source community does.
What about if everyone had encrypted connections - i.e. every http request, every email, every packet of traffic between a server and a surfer was encrypted? Then it would no longer be even remotely feasible to filter traffic. The sooner that everyone can have their online privacy guaranteed, the better. It seems we not only need privacy from malicious parties watching what we do online - we now need privacy from our own government's protection!
The problem is what protocol(s) to use to do all this, I'm not sure what existing protocols, if any, could be used?
The other major impediment to this idea is the US encryption export law. But I don't think I need to explain all that to slashdot readers:)
Of course, packets coming from domains such as Hustler could still be blocked simply on the basis of IP address - but if another site is mirroring (e.g. something along the lines of anonymizer), and traffic from the mirror is encrypted, then who could say if it had porn or not?
In the meantime, I can only hope enough of an outcry can be raised to convince the Australian Government that this was a bad idea. After all, I have a strong suspicion that Senator Brian Harradine (who's independent vote was crucial to the passing of this Bill) has never really used the internet, let alone has any real understanding of what it actually is, and has the potential to be.
I know that the intent of this regulation isn't to ban sites like slashdot, but the fact that it becomes even a remote possibility is a very disturbing thought indeed.
No, http isn't the internet. And I think you're right - the government doesn't realise that the net is so much more than just the web.
Maybe that's a reason for hope though - if cryptography became more widely used, then even ISPs won't know what's in their traffic, and filtering changes from being highly impractical to absolutely impossible.
Two things leap to mind; the first is that the government has no idea what the internet is or how it works, (in which case they shouldn't be making laws about it.)
The Government actually formed a Senate committee, getting advice from organisations such as the CSIRO about the feasibility of blocking undesirable content. And they got back a resounding answer that it was completely unworkable. This is worse than ignorance - to do the research, get an answer, and still make a contrary decision, presumably for political reasons.
I just hope this law can be repealed quickly, but I simply cannot see it happening. I don't think there's much in the way of constitutional rights on free speech here in Australia, like was used to defeat the CDA in the US. The only hope I guess is that the government realises how stupid they've been - but when was the last time you saw a politican admit to being wrong?
Slashdot Mirror
Why not indeed. How about because you don't know where they are, and by the time you track them down, if you can, you will have cooled off slightly? Road rage would happen alot less if the people involved were 100 kilometres (or miles, if you prefer) apart.
I don't think spammers are going to be murdered on a very frequent basis. Mailbombed? Possibly. ISP cracked? Maybe. But murdered? It is an idea simply lacking in practicality.
I'll admit it seems like a fun thought, but I would hope it never really happens.
I take it that means you are also expendable ;)
I heartily agree... there is no suggestion in the article that they were killed because they spammed someone.
Still, makes it obvious who actually reads the articles, and who just posts whatever pops into their head when they see the headline.
But they also played games with investment advice for penny stocks, and investors lost ~$10M. Murder is still undeserved, but it is significantly different to just sending spam...
I think half the reason for posting the story was to keep people up to date with where the version numbers are now... I know I had to re-read the paragraph to make sure I read it right. I even blinked a few times :)
"Version 7?? Say *what*?"
Ah well. If you're going to accelerate your version numbering, do it properly :)
Try rpm -qa | grep libc , and look at the version numbers on the packages it reports... I'm guessing you'll have about glibc 2.06 or so..
I'm sysadmin at a residential college in Australia, and we've got a couple of low-end pentiums set up as thin X-terminals. They work quite well. The performance is perfectly usable.
Basically all you need to do is a minimal install of your favourite distro (we use Slackware). Make sure you've got X and networking, and that's all you need. You don't even need any X apps... so it doesn't take very much space on a disk.
Then just configure it to use runlevel 4. A line like this in your rc.4 file works nicely: exec /usr/X11R6/bin/X -query myserver.mydomain
A quick peek at one of our boxes revealed it only uses 60Mb of disk space... and we haven't gone to any effort at all to trim it. Of course, it helps to use Slackware and not Redhat ;)
If you really want to save on client disk space, you can always install a kernel that mounts its root fs over NFS. You still need a little bit of disk space though, for swap - unless your 486s have plenty of RAM. X tends to be a little RAM hungry, as we all know.
And seeing as the CPU is going to be idle a lot of the time, you can always install an RC5 cracker or Seti@Home if you like :) Andrew.
Yes... that struck me as a bit rough too - considering they simply broadcast the news bulletin just like they have every other week day for the past few years. Just because another countries news suddenly doesn't agree with ours, SBS is to blame? *sigh*
If I recall correctly, there is no problem with having patented code GPLed - so long as the license to use the patent is free. To quote the GPL's Preamble (from Version 2):
Also, the if you GPL your code, it is still copyrighted - you wrote the code, no-one can take that credit away from you (legally). What "copyleft" actually means is a clever use of copyright laws to allow everyone to use the code for free, and keep it free, as opposed to the traditional restrictions usually applied.
I recommend reading the GPL, or at least the Preamble, anyway. You could also read the GNU Manifesto. They explain these issues much more clearly than I do.
I'd say this ought to go into the 2.3 development tree now
Except that DNS isn't done with the kernel, just as HTTP and SMTP aren't either.
I'd never heard of DNA computing before, so I followed the link and took a look.
I'm certainly not qualified to know how much of it is really feasible, but it is quite interesting. However I'm not convinced that this technique would really solve the problem in linear time.
My reason for this is just a hunch, but it seems intuitive. They assume that the process of taking n DNA strands, chucking them into a bucket (so to speak), and mixing, will only have a linear cost. I'm not convinced this would be the case.
Visualise n to be fairly big, and each DNA strand to be fairly long. Now picture n strands of this length put into a mixing process. Now I'm not a chemist, but wouldn't tangles and other geometric issues, if not sheer weight of numbers, render the cost of adequate mixing worse than linear?
Put simply, if it takes, say, 10 milliseconds to adequately mix 10 strands, do you think it would really take just 1000 milliseconds for 1000 strands? Or 1000000 for a 1000000? Maybe it would, but I'm unconvinced. If nothing else, I doubt that a linear relationship for this is proven.
Or maybe I just misunderstood the whole thing. Please tell me where I've screwed up :)
Nup... that's not working for me either. Dang - maybe I'll have to actually register now. Hmm... billg@microsoft.com.... ;)
I just ran ispell... it says "weird".
Wordperfect sucked. Crashed all the time when I used it. Nothing like spending 3 hours writing a paper and having it crash and hoping the .tmp file has part of it.
Here I must disagree. I've rarely had a problem with WordPerfect (I've used versions from 5.1 to 8.0 on various platforms). It certainly crashes less than any version of Word I've used, and I find it alot less annoying.
Give me WP5.1 over Word97 anyday.
The fact that Rob & Hemos continue to foist this knothead's opinions on us as 'features' might be a sign that Slashdot isn't about community discussion but is becoming increasingly about a codified agenda.
What? Are you really that paranoid? Everyone has a secret agenda, oh no, they can't just be trying to be friendly in providing a useful service? I don't know why, but I try to err on the side of trust most of the time. It pays off - it turns out everyone isn't out to get you.
Fair enough, you don't agree with Katz. That's your decision. Perhaps you should volunteer your opinions to be posted as features and see if the community warms to your ideas more.
And finally, if you want my opinion on why moderation seems biased against those who dislike Katz: I find that a large proportion of posts which dislike Katz to be poorly written and excessively angry. I know it bugs me that so many people feel they must vehemently proclaim their feelings about his writings - is he really that bad? So of course, when the odd post gets moderated down, or worse - a pro-Katz post is moderated up - those who are anti-Katz start turning on the real flamage and concocting conspiracy theories. Some of those posts definitely qualify for moderating down - but no, if you moderate down a post exposing the evils of Katz, you are part of the conspiracy.
Basically, I think that some people need to learn to relax a little more.
Yes - I got that feeling too - I kept thinking "They're stating alot of things as facts here without any evidence".
It struck me as a fairly inflammatory piece, but without quite justifying itself being that way.
I guess that's just my opinion, but then again, that's all that page really was too - it's even labelled as such. I wouldn't mind hearing SETI@Home's side of the story... I somehow feel it would paint a slightly different picture.
Do you really think things are BETTER in this nation, thanks to movies like South Park and American Pie? And don't give me that "porn helps children" garbage... nobody in his right mind believes that.
South Park isn't exactly what I'd call porn... it's a cartoon. And, more importantly, it has a different purpose to porn - porn is created so people can get off on looking at it, but South Park is created for entertainment (of a different kind), and it also has a hefty dose of social commentary - don't see much of that in porn, I believe.
Sure, South Park has a lot of indecent language and a few "adult concepts", but it's there for satire. It's making a point about society.
I agree 13 year olds shouldn't be able to see hardcore porn, but I don't think South Park causes much damage - it's main effect on society is that alot of prudish types and fundamentalist christians get offended, because they are unable to see past the language and hear what the movie is actually saying.
On the other hand, I can't comment other movies like American Pie, not having seen them, and being in Australia, not even having heard very much about them.
Of course there are movies kids shouldn't be able to see - what I think the really disturbing part of Katz is trying to highlight is the ridiculousness of knee-jerk reactions people have, and their consequences. All of a sudden there's a blind rush to protect kids, but there's always been movies like this around - South Park and Eyes Wide Shut and whatever just happen to be currently being shown in cinemas, and well publicised, that's all.
I do agree though that Katz is a bit extreme in his suggestion in this feature, but I do still enjoy reading his stuff.
Anyway, I've gone on for a bit long so I'll stop rambling now.
I'm really surprised by the number of people who keep advocating having guns "just in case" the government needs overthrowing! I'm going to probably get flamed to death for saying this, but:
Get a grip!
Yes, guns are useful. And, in fact, still legal here in Australia (despite what some are implying) - some types, for licenced owners. After all, you don't need a semi-automatic shotgun to be able to kill fly-blown sheep...
As for self-protection, that's a whole other messy issue that's sure to stir a few people up even if I don't try, so I won't go there.
But is half the US seriously living in constant paranoia that their government is about to go Nazi on them or something? Learn to relax a little people... not to mention read a little about the concept of "peaceful protest" - you might want to look at the life of Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, for instance.
This isn't to say governments don't get corrupt, or that we should walk around in blissful ignorance of anything that could possibly ever go wrong... but several people have suggested keeping a gun handy as a result of this legislation, and I can't help but think that's a slightly off-balance way to view the world.
But anyhow, I think I've said enough that I think I might go and put on my asbestos suit now..
Spiv.
IANAL, but yes, a law here in Australia can be thrown out in court, if it is unconstutional for instance.
But we don't have a Bill of Rights or anything similar - so I don't know that there is much grounds for this law to be thrown out. Maybe there is some obscure privacy legislation or something, but I doubt it.
I hope it is stopped somehow, though. I feel ill whenever I read quotes from Senator Alston congratulating himself on what a good job he's done...
Actually, you get to put in two email addresses - the one that your password is mailed to, and one that is publicly viewable on all your comments. The first email address is never publicly viewable - ever noticed the number of xyz@NOSPAM.fred.com addresses?
AFAIK = As Far As I Know
IIRC = If I Remember Correctly
I can't remember where I learnt these, I think I probably just guessed from context. I suppose they might be found in the Jargon File, though that's not really meant for that sort of thing.
Andrew.
as for the open-source community taking the development efforts of $20 million in gpl'ed code... well gee, let's give that tough problem a long think. have to get back to that one.
Of course the answer to this seems obvious to us - but this shows a worrying problem: the open-source community is perceived in the media as some kind of stubborn, obsessive, pedantic group of people spoiling for arguments.
I'm not saying that the open-source community (or whatever else you want to label it) is those things, and I'm not trying to attract flames. My point is that there is a damaging perception out there, and whatever the cause, it is an issue we will need to face if we want to give the corporate world a positive impression of the work the open-source community does.
Andrew.
What about if everyone had encrypted connections - i.e. every http request, every email, every packet of traffic between a server and a surfer was encrypted? Then it would no longer be even remotely feasible to filter traffic. The sooner that everyone can have their online privacy guaranteed, the better. It seems we not only need privacy from malicious parties watching what we do online - we now need privacy from our own government's protection!
The problem is what protocol(s) to use to do all this, I'm not sure what existing protocols, if any, could be used?
The other major impediment to this idea is the US encryption export law. But I don't think I need to explain all that to slashdot readers :)
Of course, packets coming from domains such as Hustler could still be blocked simply on the basis of IP address - but if another site is mirroring (e.g. something along the lines of anonymizer), and traffic from the mirror is encrypted, then who could say if it had porn or not?
In the meantime, I can only hope enough of an outcry can be raised to convince the Australian Government that this was a bad idea. After all, I have a strong suspicion that Senator Brian Harradine (who's independent vote was crucial to the passing of this Bill) has never really used the internet, let alone has any real understanding of what it actually is, and has the potential to be.
I know that the intent of this regulation isn't to ban sites like slashdot, but the fact that it becomes even a remote possibility is a very disturbing thought indeed.
No, http isn't the internet. And I think you're right - the government doesn't realise that the net is so much more than just the web.
Maybe that's a reason for hope though - if cryptography became more widely used, then even ISPs won't know what's in their traffic, and filtering changes from being highly impractical to absolutely impossible.
The Government actually formed a Senate committee, getting advice from organisations such as the CSIRO about the feasibility of blocking undesirable content. And they got back a resounding answer that it was completely unworkable. This is worse than ignorance - to do the research, get an answer, and still make a contrary decision, presumably for political reasons.
I just hope this law can be repealed quickly, but I simply cannot see it happening. I don't think there's much in the way of constitutional rights on free speech here in Australia, like was used to defeat the CDA in the US. The only hope I guess is that the government realises how stupid they've been - but when was the last time you saw a politican admit to being wrong?