I do. If they put up an unprotected database, or IRC server, or open mail relay, or unsecured HTTP proxy, then people would use it to do bad stuff. When you design an Internet-facing application of any kind, you have to assume people will try to break it. Always. There are no exceptions.
Slashdot goes through great pains to keep idjits from gumming up the works. Wikipedia has people who monitor it 24/7 to fix mischief as quickly as possible. I have to watch my own little TWiki site like a hawk to keep link farmers off of it. What hopelessly naive sysadmin at the Times thought "it couldn't happen here"?
I'm not saying that it's right or OK for people to try to ruin the digital commons, but I have little sympathy for people who run such a public resource and expect it to take care of itself. That's not the real world, and I don't know why the Times thought it would be different for them.
I've heard a story that may be just an Urban legand
According to one source, 280,000 people of Hiroshima's 350,000 population survived the initial blast. In Nagasaki, 200,000 of 270,000 were alive at least one year afterward (I didn't search too hard to find initial casualties).
So, the story is that one person out of the 280,000 who lived through something bad went someplace and was part of the 75% that survived something else bad there. Frankly, I'd be surprised if there weren't hundreds of such stories.
Your ISP would not have been listed if he had read his ABUSE mailbox
You wouldn't have bothered to answer if you'd read my message. My ISP has never hosted a spammer, as far as I know (and I did my homework). Their upstream provider isn't directly blacklisted, either. However, their upstream ISP did provide service to another ISP that hosted a spammer.
I'm at least 4 degrees removed from the spammer, but I'm still on the stupid blacklist. Care to explain how that makes sense, or what possible influence I could exert on my ISP?
The key difference, as I see it, is that none of spam lists are a reaction to a type of email that burdens the global email system. None of the other things you mentioned directly affect that system.
It's not that I don't agree with you about blacklists (I do), but I don't think this is necessarily a reason you'd want to use in a debate.
Don't do it, man. Really, don't do it. On several occasions, a non-subscriber has posted an urgent question to a mailing list I'm on. When others and I try to respond, we've been hit with challenge-response messages. There is no quicker way to get someone not to help you than by deliberately making yourself inaccessible.
I have never, ever replied to a whitelist invitation, nor do I expect to. Based on conversations I've had, I don't think I'm in the minority.
Harsh as it may seem, it also seems to be just about the only affective way to pressure ISP to cut the spam from where it originates.
Harsh, stupid, and ineffective. My IP is in a couple of blacklists because my ISP's ISP's ISP has a customer who has a customer that used to send spam, so some ridiculously huge netblock (/16?) is listed because of them.
I cannot switch ISPs. They're the only one in my small city that provides the hosting-friendly services I need. My ISP probably can't switch to a wholly different upstream, either, since connectivity to my city is somewhat limited.
SPEWS and their ilk taught me a lesson, alright: they're a bunch of power freaks who truly don't care about any of the damage they do.
That comes with its own set of problems. First and foremost is that people don't want their taxes to pay for the campaign of the guy they don't like. Second, the first amendment issues really are pretty significant. Why can't I spend every penny of my life savings to advertise for the guy I want to win? Isn't that part of my constitutionally protected right to free speech?
Don't take me wrong. Although I'm against campaign finance limitations, I do understand the reasoning of its supporters. I just don't think it's possible to reconcile those goals with the political and legal environment we live in.
Oh, is that all? I thought you were going to ask for something difficult.
I hate to burst your bubble, but this will never (and can't) happen. Money is basically a proxy for power. Rephrased, then, you're suggest that "we take all power out of politics". You might as well take all the vacuum out of space, since that's pretty much how both are defined.
Your ideas about eliminating campaign abuse are sweetly naive, but you're a minnow playing among sharks. Know what happens if you make it illegal for anyone to buy advertising but mandate that candidates get it for free? You'll have 50 members of each party running for office: 1 to win, and 49 on the "other party's candidate eats babies" platform.
Don't ever assume that you can put a simple limit on the actions of a politician. These guys are way better at the game than you and I could ever hope to be.
It tends to reflect a lot of white light. When you're standing right on its surface, that light drowns out the stars.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you could block the light from the ground (eg by arranging it so that no nearby terrain was higher than the opening of the telescope, perhaps by building a small wall around it), then the reflected light would be a non-issue since there's no atmosphere to disperse it into the enclosure. Wouldn't that be the case?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you could block the light from the ground (eg by arranging it so that no nearby terrain was higher than the opening of the telescope, perhaps by building a small wall around it), then the reflected light would be a non-issue since there's no atmosphere to disperse it into the enclosure. Wouldn't that be the case?
Re:I'm all for science/technology/astronomy but...
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
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· Score: 1
The gravity well on the moon makes regular launches much less cost prohibitive.
Not only that, but you get a lot of angular velocity for free. The moon orbits Earth roughly every 28 days, so you get an extra 384000km*3.14*2/28/24 = 3600km/h just by launching at the right time. Compare with the 1600km/h boost you get from an equatorial launch on Earth.
What, besides headlines, is left to be gained from going back?
Everything:
Technology. Since our current abilities are presumably not at their inherent limits, a challenge is very likely to develop the areas where we're lacking.
Resources. There's a lot of stuff in the universe outside our little corner of it.
Survival. We're one meteor away from the end of life in the known universe. The only long-term strategy that can reasonably expect to succeed is dragging it along with us to other worlds.
There's so much to gain that I can't understand why space isn't our #1 national priority.
He has already done enough bad to completely bury any good deed as far as I'm concerned.
While I disagree, I can accept that you dislike enough of his actions to find the man basically irredeemable. OK. But can't his individual actions be good, even if even they don't average out positively? As an example of the opposite, I like Bush but don't approve of every single action he's taken. I try to weigh each new decision on its own basis, not how I feel about him on that particular day.
If you accept that, isn't it at least remotely possible that this one of the good things, even if it's not enough to balance out that bad you think he's done.
Even then, though, do his motives really matter in this case? If the worst case scenarios are true, and he's only proposing this to draw attention from some scandal or another, then we're still on the moon.
I mean, if the revealed intent were to develop space-based genocide weapons, then I could honestly see the concern, but I haven't heard anybody credibly attributing this to anything nearly so sinister.
I believe (and hope) that he's proposing this plan for the betterment of our nation and the world. Even if he's not, we'll all still be better off, though, so I guess I just don't see the problem.
Re:why not use the $ for universal healthcare?
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
We did last November. The majority of the population seems to agree with me. As you've chosen to degrade the conversation to name-calling, that's the last I have to say on the matter.
Re:why not use the $ for universal healthcare?
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
·
· Score: 1
Because many of us have zero interest in nationalized medicine. Don't assume that your pet project is inherently more worthy than my pet project.
I ask this seriously: is there any set of circumstances in which Bush could propose something you'd like and you'd be happy he did it? From my position, it looks like it is literally impossible for him to please some people:
Headline: "Bush Invents Cure For Cancer". Reaction: "Nice way to make us forget the people he killed in Iraq."
Headline: "Bush Finds Way To Rebuild WTC For Free". Reaction: "Good, because he knocked them down in the first place."
Headline: "Bush Dissolves Army, Discovers Unlimited Energy, and Unveils Free Health Care With Raising Taxes Plan". Reaction: "Bet Halliburton will make money off this!"
We've been begging to go back to space, Bush announces that we'll go back to space, and everyone complains. What would it take for you to support him on this one? I apologize if this whole post sounds like flamebait, but I sincerely mean all of it and would really like to hear some responses.
From what I've read, the lunar dust is incredibly hard on mechanical things (gears, seals, etc)...
Yes, and the fine-grained Martian dust will probably be as bad. Working out the details and unexpected snags on a small planetoid three days' flight from Earth might be easier than flying for several months, landing on Mars, and discovering that your hatch won't open because of some stupid condition we might've discovered on Luna.
The moon itself may not be a huge scientific playground (although it might be a great platform for giant telescopes), but it should be a great place to practice extraterrestrial engineering without straying too far from home.
We're nerds, and this is news. Condition one met. This probably matters to a lot of people. Condition two met. Slashdot has never been limited to technology news (see also: politics.slashdot.org).
Slashdot had, bar none, the best 9/11 coverage in the world. Seriously. I learned far more from eyewitnesses who posted to the site than I ever did from corporate news sources. If there had really been a tsunami, you'd probably be reading the best newsfeed around.
"News for nerds" doesn't have to mean "nerd news".
And honestly, they hold up quite a bit better with a 5 year old than DVDs and CDs do.
My kids can't tell the difference between video CDs and DVDs, so I give them cheap copies of those oh-so-precious Disney movies (I'd love to smack the guy who came up with the ideal of "opening the vault every seven years"). Let them snap "Bambi" into a million pieces if they want -- I'll just burn another.
With any luck, they'll be old enough to properly handle a DVD by the time they notice that video CDs look lousy.
No one can reasonably hold the belief that VHS is of higher quality than DVD.
Logic never stopped anyone. Having said that, I have seen VHS movies that looked much better than over-compressed DVDs; at least analog doesn't get you that awful banding. I can honestly say that I prefer analog cable to the horrible picture quality of some of the digital offerings in my area.
Slashdot Mirror
I do. If they put up an unprotected database, or IRC server, or open mail relay, or unsecured HTTP proxy, then people would use it to do bad stuff. When you design an Internet-facing application of any kind, you have to assume people will try to break it. Always. There are no exceptions.
Slashdot goes through great pains to keep idjits from gumming up the works. Wikipedia has people who monitor it 24/7 to fix mischief as quickly as possible. I have to watch my own little TWiki site like a hawk to keep link farmers off of it. What hopelessly naive sysadmin at the Times thought "it couldn't happen here"?
I'm not saying that it's right or OK for people to try to ruin the digital commons, but I have little sympathy for people who run such a public resource and expect it to take care of itself. That's not the real world, and I don't know why the Times thought it would be different for them.
According to one source, 280,000 people of Hiroshima's 350,000 population survived the initial blast. In Nagasaki, 200,000 of 270,000 were alive at least one year afterward (I didn't search too hard to find initial casualties).
So, the story is that one person out of the 280,000 who lived through something bad went someplace and was part of the 75% that survived something else bad there. Frankly, I'd be surprised if there weren't hundreds of such stories.
You wouldn't have bothered to answer if you'd read my message. My ISP has never hosted a spammer, as far as I know (and I did my homework). Their upstream provider isn't directly blacklisted, either. However, their upstream ISP did provide service to another ISP that hosted a spammer.
I'm at least 4 degrees removed from the spammer, but I'm still on the stupid blacklist. Care to explain how that makes sense, or what possible influence I could exert on my ISP?
It's not that I don't agree with you about blacklists (I do), but I don't think this is necessarily a reason you'd want to use in a debate.
I have never, ever replied to a whitelist invitation, nor do I expect to. Based on conversations I've had, I don't think I'm in the minority.
Harsh, stupid, and ineffective. My IP is in a couple of blacklists because my ISP's ISP's ISP has a customer who has a customer that used to send spam, so some ridiculously huge netblock (/16?) is listed because of them.
I cannot switch ISPs. They're the only one in my small city that provides the hosting-friendly services I need. My ISP probably can't switch to a wholly different upstream, either, since connectivity to my city is somewhat limited.
SPEWS and their ilk taught me a lesson, alright: they're a bunch of power freaks who truly don't care about any of the damage they do.
Gotta love them audiophiles. :-)
Don't take me wrong. Although I'm against campaign finance limitations, I do understand the reasoning of its supporters. I just don't think it's possible to reconcile those goals with the political and legal environment we live in.
Oh, is that all? I thought you were going to ask for something difficult.
I hate to burst your bubble, but this will never (and can't) happen. Money is basically a proxy for power. Rephrased, then, you're suggest that "we take all power out of politics". You might as well take all the vacuum out of space, since that's pretty much how both are defined.
Your ideas about eliminating campaign abuse are sweetly naive, but you're a minnow playing among sharks. Know what happens if you make it illegal for anyone to buy advertising but mandate that candidates get it for free? You'll have 50 members of each party running for office: 1 to win, and 49 on the "other party's candidate eats babies" platform.
Don't ever assume that you can put a simple limit on the actions of a politician. These guys are way better at the game than you and I could ever hope to be.
iFriend? Is that a Mac thing?
Once again, but without mangled tags:
It tends to reflect a lot of white light. When you're standing right on its surface, that light drowns out the stars.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you could block the light from the ground (eg by arranging it so that no nearby terrain was higher than the opening of the telescope, perhaps by building a small wall around it), then the reflected light would be a non-issue since there's no atmosphere to disperse it into the enclosure. Wouldn't that be the case?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you could block the light from the ground (eg by arranging it so that no nearby terrain was higher than the opening of the telescope, perhaps by building a small wall around it), then the reflected light would be a non-issue since there's no atmosphere to disperse it into the enclosure. Wouldn't that be the case?
Not only that, but you get a lot of angular velocity for free. The moon orbits Earth roughly every 28 days, so you get an extra 384000km*3.14*2/28/24 = 3600km/h just by launching at the right time. Compare with the 1600km/h boost you get from an equatorial launch on Earth.
Everything:
There's so much to gain that I can't understand why space isn't our #1 national priority.
While I disagree, I can accept that you dislike enough of his actions to find the man basically irredeemable. OK. But can't his individual actions be good, even if even they don't average out positively? As an example of the opposite, I like Bush but don't approve of every single action he's taken. I try to weigh each new decision on its own basis, not how I feel about him on that particular day.
If you accept that, isn't it at least remotely possible that this one of the good things, even if it's not enough to balance out that bad you think he's done.
You were so close - so very, very close...
Even then, though, do his motives really matter in this case? If the worst case scenarios are true, and he's only proposing this to draw attention from some scandal or another, then we're still on the moon.
I mean, if the revealed intent were to develop space-based genocide weapons, then I could honestly see the concern, but I haven't heard anybody credibly attributing this to anything nearly so sinister.
I believe (and hope) that he's proposing this plan for the betterment of our nation and the world. Even if he's not, we'll all still be better off, though, so I guess I just don't see the problem.
We did last November. The majority of the population seems to agree with me. As you've chosen to degrade the conversation to name-calling, that's the last I have to say on the matter.
Because many of us have zero interest in nationalized medicine. Don't assume that your pet project is inherently more worthy than my pet project.
Headline: "Bush Invents Cure For Cancer". Reaction: "Nice way to make us forget the people he killed in Iraq."
Headline: "Bush Finds Way To Rebuild WTC For Free". Reaction: "Good, because he knocked them down in the first place."
Headline: "Bush Dissolves Army, Discovers Unlimited Energy, and Unveils Free Health Care With Raising Taxes Plan". Reaction: "Bet Halliburton will make money off this!"
We've been begging to go back to space, Bush announces that we'll go back to space, and everyone complains. What would it take for you to support him on this one? I apologize if this whole post sounds like flamebait, but I sincerely mean all of it and would really like to hear some responses.
Yes, and the fine-grained Martian dust will probably be as bad. Working out the details and unexpected snags on a small planetoid three days' flight from Earth might be easier than flying for several months, landing on Mars, and discovering that your hatch won't open because of some stupid condition we might've discovered on Luna.
The moon itself may not be a huge scientific playground (although it might be a great platform for giant telescopes), but it should be a great place to practice extraterrestrial engineering without straying too far from home.
We're nerds, and this is news. Condition one met. This probably matters to a lot of people. Condition two met. Slashdot has never been limited to technology news (see also: politics.slashdot.org).
Slashdot had, bar none, the best 9/11 coverage in the world. Seriously. I learned far more from eyewitnesses who posted to the site than I ever did from corporate news sources. If there had really been a tsunami, you'd probably be reading the best newsfeed around.
"News for nerds" doesn't have to mean "nerd news".
I remember (not so long ago) shopping around for DVDs under $5 each. This is indeed a convenient time in history.
My kids can't tell the difference between video CDs and DVDs, so I give them cheap copies of those oh-so-precious Disney movies (I'd love to smack the guy who came up with the ideal of "opening the vault every seven years"). Let them snap "Bambi" into a million pieces if they want -- I'll just burn another.
With any luck, they'll be old enough to properly handle a DVD by the time they notice that video CDs look lousy.
Logic never stopped anyone. Having said that, I have seen VHS movies that looked much better than over-compressed DVDs; at least analog doesn't get you that awful banding. I can honestly say that I prefer analog cable to the horrible picture quality of some of the digital offerings in my area.