Do I think I'm unethical? I'm willing to bet 90%+ of the people who actually saw the technique and applied to HBS in Round 2 (the round currently awaiting decisions) tried it.
You don't get it, do you? I'd be willing to bet that a few Enron ex-executives tried to use the "everybody else is doing it..." non-justification, too. Although I don't think peeking at one's admission status is a huge sin, the fact is that you knowingly broke the rules to take advantage of a technical error for personal gain. That's pretty much a textbook example of an ethics violation.
Personally, if I were you I'd be hoping that HBS doesn't quietly send a list of the offenders around to other schools' admission offices to let them know what they may be getting.
I'm going to turn lemons into lemonade, though. I'll be selling t-shirts to commemorate the saga of the HBS 119. Buy one, and put me through b-school.
No thanks, but I'd be likely to chip in for a philosophy and ethics class or two.
Hint: if your bank is using $7.95-per-month virtual hosting, then 1) they aren't really a bank, and 2) Vinnie isn't going to give your money back. Oh, and your "debit card" that only works at Wal-Mart ain't exactly the exclusive offer he made it out to be.
If you can't use your own address then your spam filters suck. I will not let spammers decide where and with whom I share my address. It is mine, and I'll do what it takes to defend it.
I just wrote an article for this month's issue of Free Software Magazine on building spam filters. The long and short of it is that Spam Assassin is a very, very good last line of defense. However, there's a lot you can do to limit the amount of junk that even makes it that far into your system:
Filter the HELO messages. If the sender says "HELO yourownname.example.com", then it's lying and you can safely reject the connection.
Don't be overly picky about reverse DNS lookups, but do check that the domain of the From: address is resolvable. After all, what's the point of getting mail from "spew@nonexistentdomain.com" if you can't reply to them?
Selective DNS blacklists. Do your homework and find a couple that are picky about what they add. Remember: false negatives are much better than false positives!
SPF. It's not a cure all, but it works and it's available today.
Greylisting. Oh, how I love thee!
Finally, Spam Assassin, ClamAV, and other "expensive" defenses.
Since I implemented the above as a Postfix ruleset, I don't get spam anymore, and it's not exactly like I've actually kept my primary address secret. No, I'm not kidding or exaggerating - basically, my mailbox is my own once again. Viva Postfix! Viva greylisting!
You can halve the MTBF on your hard drive just by spinning it down at night and on weekends.
I think you meant "double". I hope.
As long as that's the only time you spin it down, sure. But note that most drives have a finite (and quite small) rated number of powercycles; I think a Maxtor I had recently was rated for around 10,000. Say you set aggressive PM on a machine that's actually used fairly frequently, and it ends up cycling 20 times per day. Great - now you have an estimated life of about 500 days. I'm reasonably sure (although I haven't done the math) that just leaving the drive running will actually save money on the replacement cost versus electrical savings, and I'm certain it'll save environmental costs.
Anyway, I'm not harshin' on ya. It was a rant directed at stupid behavior I see at the office everyday.:)
Oh, I know, but understand that I've seen long, well-argued flame wars on this exact subject and both sides made pretty strong cases for their points of view. Just sayin' it's not completely straightforward, that's all.:-)
BTW, my next acquisition is going to be a Soekris board to replace the Alpha I've been using as a firewall/router. Again, I haven't done the math, but I'm almost positive that will pay for itself in less than a year.
In nearly every conceivable circumstance, you will find that adjusting your velocity by means of the steering wheel and the brake will take you out of danger much faster than the accelerator.
...we can all agree on the facts: there are many, many instances where increasing your forward velocity rapidly is the only safe course of action. The most common is the case where you find yourself merging onto a busy highway from an on-ramp or other start-from-a-standstill position. You need to be ably to quickly match your speed to that of the empty spot you're driving next to. If you can't, you'll probably find yourself choosing between 1) driving past the end of the merge lane in a frantic attempt to accelerate, or 2) slamming on your brakes when you realize it isn't going to happen.
Gentle acceleration and slow stops are worthy ideals to shoot for, but if you think that crippling a car's ability to interact with its environment is a good idea, then you need to get out of the Traffic Theory classroom and onto the road. Just don't do it near where I live, OK?
I can't think of a reasonable mechanism that can make you see optical interference between a CRT and a fluorescent tube.
Someone below used "hysteresis", but I'm not sure if that's the right word. Basically, I noticed a regular intense flickering. It's very fast, to the point of being nearly unnoticeable unless I'm looking for it, but it's a real killer when it's happening.
So you are saying that you don't notice the 120 Hz from the f.t. by itself, nor the refresh rate of your CRT, but you do when both are switched on?
That is correct, although fluorescents annoy me slightly even without a CRT around to accentuate the problem.
You have to understand, though, that I'm one of those hyper-picky people who's bothered by digital cable or satellite because I can't not see the JPEG artifacting. Other people think the picture looks great, but I can't avoid noticing the banding and square color regions. I think I've been around video systems too long.:-/
The landlord pays the heat & A/C for my modest 1-bedroom apartment.
Don't they teach economics in high school anymore? No, 0x69, you pay all of your utilities - your landlord just does you the "favor" of lumping your bills in with everyone else's, dividing by the number of renters, and incorporating that into your rent.
See that jackass across the hall who leaves his windows open because the A/C and heat is "free"? Guess what: you are paying his bills, while he gets a discount because you're using less than your "quota". You're a heckuva guy, because you're probably getting ripped off without even realizing it.
I don't know if a 400% jump in energy prices would bother me that much.
...until your lease expires and your new one is $100 a month higher.
If the rest of America lived like I do, our country would probably have lots of surplus oil, natural gas, etc. to export.
Even more important, if the rest of your neighbors lived like you do, your rent would go down, or at least wouldn't go up as much at renewal time. That is, if you have a nice landlord. Since you opted to bundle your A/C and heating bill into your rent, you'll never know.
I'm trying my best to find a dealer that would sell me a 35w version of mobile athlon64 and a desktop motherboard that would work with it. Kinda difficult around here.
I hear tell that people will sell you stuff over that new-fangled Internet thing if you know who to ask...
Dang! I can't believe I forgot to mention that earlier. I have a Kenmore HE3 washer/dryer set and they rock like no appliances I've ever bought. First, it barely sips water - the advertising is completely accurate. Second, the spin cycle is awesome. The radial velocity of the edge of the barrel on the "high" setting is something like 170 miles per hour. Third, my wife, three small children, and I use almost exactly one 5-gallon tub of soap every six months. At $10 per tub (we buy them once a year when you can get them 2/$20), that's about $1.70 per month in consumables. Fourth, they're huge. A big washer means fewer loads of laundry, which means that you don't have to spend a whole weekend washing your stuff. Finally, this giant graphite washer and dryer pair looks like it came straight out of Darth Vader's laundry room. It frightens small children and impresses the heck out of other geeks.
They're still really expensive, but if you can at all afford them, you have to get these.
install low flow toilets or those kits that limit the amount of water per toilet flush.
Yeah, because 4 1.5 gallon flushes to get rid of Taco Bell is much more efficient than 1 2.5 gallon flush. I'll stick with the "stand up first or take your chances" model I currently have, thanks.
Secondly, don't just use DPMS. If it's not a server, turn off the computer.
There are sound arguments on either side of that one (largely regarding component life, thermal issues, etc.). On a newer computer with on-demand CPU throttling, I don't see a clear advantage to shutting them down completely.
At any rate, all of my computers are either servers or iMacs, so leaving them on isn't that big of a deal. FWIW, I used to have a FreeBSD server sitting next to my Debian desktop at home. Since I didn't really use the desktop much anymore (I have Internet access at work, and wife/kids preclude me from having all-night hacking sessions at home), I recently combined the two into a FreeBSD server with a KDE desktop and decommissioned the dedicated-desktop machine altogether. That's one less system eating electricity, and I still have a comfortable system for the small amount of computing I do at home these days.
die-hard incandescent hater
My biggest use of incandescents is currently at my office. I keep the overhead flurescents turned off, and a 40W lamp turned on for a little bit of light. Thanks to some of the suggestions above, I'll probably look into replacing that little lamp with a compact flurescent sometime soon.
One thing that somewhat limits my flexibility is the model of fixture used in my basement. The guy who finished out our basement used lamp with a built-in ballast that can't be changed (AFAIK) without replacing the entire unit. Even worse, I'm sure that a few of them are going bad, so I expect to be in for a mandatory upgrade in the near future anyway.
A fluorescent tube should flicker at 120 Hz since it emits light both during the positive half and negative half of the cycle. If you can see it flicker, it is probably broken.
I particularly notice it when I'm looking at a CRT. The two flickers combined, but just slightly out of sync, absolutely kill me eyes. Since I spent a good part of my life doing so, it's a problem for me.
Thanks for the other information. I'll have to check it out and see if I can find an acceptable alternative.
Is it so inconceivable that some people want to save energy regardless of how much it costs to do so?
Sure. Did it occur to you that some people go about it in really stupid ways that cause more problems than they solve? For example, you just trashed the environment to get your photovoltaics so that you could feel good about self-powering your computer. Your pollution-per-watt is much, much higher than the equivalent coming out of your wall.
I want to live on a nice planet, too, but realistically speaking that means centralizing production to a few good, clean resources (read: nuke) than building hundreds of millions of dirty plants across the country. Short-term "solutions" that make us feel proud of ourselves without actually helping the overall situation are wasteful and not something to aspire to.
If you're trying to live off the grid to see if you can or as a personal challenge: good for you, and I wish you the best of luck! If you're trying to do it because you think it's making the world a cleaner place, then you've wasted your time, money, and our natural resources.
Unless you're significantly shortening that drive, the upfront costs of relocation will burn through years' worth of fuel savings.
possibly putting a throttle restrictor plate in my car
Are you insane?!? If you want to drive slower, then drive slower. That's a good thing. Do not make your car drastically more unsafe by removing its ability to accelerate quickly when the need arises. When an out-of-control semi is bearing down on me, I'd rather lose an ounce of gas to my foot on the floorboard than a gallon of blood to my face on his grill.
buying fluorescent lights
I'd do this if I could find a nice brand that didn't flicker and had a spectrum reasonably close to an incandescent (or better, the sun). I can't stand that 60Hz strobe or the washed-out colors. Any suggestions?
I'm always amazed at how many plastic (or paper) bags the grocer insists on giving me
OK, I'm with you there. Basically, I'm one of those greedy, selfish jerks who refuses to compromise his lifestyle. However, I was also raised with "waste not, want not" and I hate the gratuitous use of resources. If I'm only buying one or two things at a store, I tell the cashier that I don't want a bag. I turn the lights off when I leave a room. I use DPMS on my monitors so that they're not painting a picture while I'm asleep. I keep my tires properly inflated. I have an electronic thermostat that's set to 68F during the day (in winter) and cooler at night. In short, I've configured my environment so that it doesn't try to make me comfortable when I'm not around to enjoy it. If everyone took those simple steps, I think we'd save a lot without sacrificing a bit of the creature comforts.
Oh, and if you're one of those "free heat because I'm on Welfare" people who leaves the heat cranked and the windows open, I hope you catch pneumonia and die.
Say what you will, but ol' Helen is probably the epitome of optimizing interpersonal communication. I can hardly tell a joke on Jabber without using a smiley, but she used her hands to read lips. That's like the speech equivalent of writing a graphics card driver in microcode.
I'm not saying I'm a big fan of her message, but I'm definitely impressed with her ability to deliver it, all things considered.
How would you feel if they designed bridges like that?
I demand that my personal bridge engineers personally hand-select the grains of steel that they'll use to custom-design my unique bridge that won't use any of the last 5,000 years of bridge engineering experience. That's the only path to quality, you know. And back away from the libc, fella! If you won't hand-roll open(), then I don't want you writing my web browser.
By the way, what crack-smokers took you seriously enough to give you +5? Seriously, man, good job! That's one of the more successful trolls I've seen in a while.
I know this is gonna hurt some folks sense of what the internet is
Particularly those of us who do know what the Internet is: a giant WAN of computers speaking IP. Full stop. That's it. You're describing a particular set of services, but those are just applications running on top of the network.
Yes, it really is that simple. HTTP, FTP, SMTP, etc. are not the Internet - a bunch of servers, routers, and pipes are.
You nailed it perfectly. In politics.slashdot.org, there's a near-constant cry for "campaign finance reform" to save us from evil businesses and their attempts to sway public opinion. Now that such a rule is being applied equally, I suspect we'll hear the exact same people crying that they shouldn't be subject to the same laws.
Congratulations, folks - you got what you were begging for. Some of us tried to tell you this was a bad idea, but you didn't listen because we were Evil Conservatives who only care about the rich getting richer. Let this be a lesson to all of us; some ideas are just plain bad regardless of whether it's a Liberal or a Conservative fighting them. Don't automatically assume the other guy is wrong just because you disagree on other nonrelated topics.
Both. I'm sure that's what happened - or perhaps they did investigate but forgot to tell me the outcome - but that didn't make me feel a lot better about the situation.
I was an on-again-off-again member until somewhat recently. My state government (Nebraska) proposed an "anti-spam" law that would make it illegal to create or distribute software that's designed to hide the identity of the sender. I happened to be the author of a program expressly designed for this purpose, and under the definitions in the proposed law, I would be guilty of a low-level felony.
Never mind that my program would be completely, utterly useless as a spam tool. It acts as an interface to the anonymous remailer network, with is only somewhat reliable at best, and could not possibly support the high volume of messages a spammer would want to broadcast. Nonetheless, I have a wife and kids and didn't feel like being the poster boy in the fight against a stupid law.
So, I wrote an explanatory letter to the EFF to ask for their advice (and possibly their assistance) in killing the proposition before it became law. To this day, I've never received so much as an email in response. I know that my message was delivered (maillog said so), but when it was my back against the wall, the organization I've donated to for years (to the point of buying memberships as birthday presents for geeky friends) was nowhere to be found.
I still like and respect the EFF - they do good things and I support their goals - but I'm no longer under the illusion that I can count on them when things go bad. Don't let my story stop you from donating to them, but neither should you go ahead and write that law- or patent-violating program with the expectation that you have friends who will step up to the plate for you.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't get it, do you? I'd be willing to bet that a few Enron ex-executives tried to use the "everybody else is doing it..." non-justification, too. Although I don't think peeking at one's admission status is a huge sin, the fact is that you knowingly broke the rules to take advantage of a technical error for personal gain. That's pretty much a textbook example of an ethics violation.
Personally, if I were you I'd be hoping that HBS doesn't quietly send a list of the offenders around to other schools' admission offices to let them know what they may be getting.
I'm going to turn lemons into lemonade, though. I'll be selling t-shirts to commemorate the saga of the HBS 119. Buy one, and put me through b-school.
No thanks, but I'd be likely to chip in for a philosophy and ethics class or two.
You mean this one (Google cache copy for the slow clickers)?
Hint: if your bank is using $7.95-per-month virtual hosting, then 1) they aren't really a bank, and 2) Vinnie isn't going to give your money back. Oh, and your "debit card" that only works at Wal-Mart ain't exactly the exclusive offer he made it out to be.
Open letter to the person who was looking for information on my wiki: it's at http://subwiki.honeypot.net/cgi-bin/view/Freebsd/F ilterMailWithPostFix, but the article I linked in the parent post is more recent and more closely proofread.
If you can't use your own address then your spam filters suck. I will not let spammers decide where and with whom I share my address. It is mine, and I'll do what it takes to defend it.
Since I implemented the above as a Postfix ruleset, I don't get spam anymore, and it's not exactly like I've actually kept my primary address secret. No, I'm not kidding or exaggerating - basically, my mailbox is my own once again. Viva Postfix! Viva greylisting!
I think you meant "double". I hope.
As long as that's the only time you spin it down, sure. But note that most drives have a finite (and quite small) rated number of powercycles; I think a Maxtor I had recently was rated for around 10,000. Say you set aggressive PM on a machine that's actually used fairly frequently, and it ends up cycling 20 times per day. Great - now you have an estimated life of about 500 days. I'm reasonably sure (although I haven't done the math) that just leaving the drive running will actually save money on the replacement cost versus electrical savings, and I'm certain it'll save environmental costs.
Anyway, I'm not harshin' on ya. It was a rant directed at stupid behavior I see at the office everyday. :)
Oh, I know, but understand that I've seen long, well-argued flame wars on this exact subject and both sides made pretty strong cases for their points of view. Just sayin' it's not completely straightforward, that's all. :-)
BTW, my next acquisition is going to be a Soekris board to replace the Alpha I've been using as a firewall/router. Again, I haven't done the math, but I'm almost positive that will pay for itself in less than a year.
In nearly every conceivable circumstance, you will find that adjusting your velocity by means of the steering wheel and the brake will take you out of danger much faster than the accelerator.
...we can all agree on the facts: there are many, many instances where increasing your forward velocity rapidly is the only safe course of action. The most common is the case where you find yourself merging onto a busy highway from an on-ramp or other start-from-a-standstill position. You need to be ably to quickly match your speed to that of the empty spot you're driving next to. If you can't, you'll probably find yourself choosing between 1) driving past the end of the merge lane in a frantic attempt to accelerate, or 2) slamming on your brakes when you realize it isn't going to happen.
Gentle acceleration and slow stops are worthy ideals to shoot for, but if you think that crippling a car's ability to interact with its environment is a good idea, then you need to get out of the Traffic Theory classroom and onto the road. Just don't do it near where I live, OK?
Someone below used "hysteresis", but I'm not sure if that's the right word. Basically, I noticed a regular intense flickering. It's very fast, to the point of being nearly unnoticeable unless I'm looking for it, but it's a real killer when it's happening.
So you are saying that you don't notice the 120 Hz from the f.t. by itself, nor the refresh rate of your CRT, but you do when both are switched on?
That is correct, although fluorescents annoy me slightly even without a CRT around to accentuate the problem.
You have to understand, though, that I'm one of those hyper-picky people who's bothered by digital cable or satellite because I can't not see the JPEG artifacting. Other people think the picture looks great, but I can't avoid noticing the banding and square color regions. I think I've been around video systems too long. :-/
Don't they teach economics in high school anymore? No, 0x69, you pay all of your utilities - your landlord just does you the "favor" of lumping your bills in with everyone else's, dividing by the number of renters, and incorporating that into your rent.
See that jackass across the hall who leaves his windows open because the A/C and heat is "free"? Guess what: you are paying his bills, while he gets a discount because you're using less than your "quota". You're a heckuva guy, because you're probably getting ripped off without even realizing it.
I don't know if a 400% jump in energy prices would bother me that much.
...until your lease expires and your new one is $100 a month higher.
If the rest of America lived like I do, our country would probably have lots of surplus oil, natural gas, etc. to export.
Even more important, if the rest of your neighbors lived like you do, your rent would go down, or at least wouldn't go up as much at renewal time. That is, if you have a nice landlord. Since you opted to bundle your A/C and heating bill into your rent, you'll never know.
I hear tell that people will sell you stuff over that new-fangled Internet thing if you know who to ask...
Dang! I can't believe I forgot to mention that earlier. I have a Kenmore HE3 washer/dryer set and they rock like no appliances I've ever bought. First, it barely sips water - the advertising is completely accurate. Second, the spin cycle is awesome. The radial velocity of the edge of the barrel on the "high" setting is something like 170 miles per hour. Third, my wife, three small children, and I use almost exactly one 5-gallon tub of soap every six months. At $10 per tub (we buy them once a year when you can get them 2/$20), that's about $1.70 per month in consumables. Fourth, they're huge. A big washer means fewer loads of laundry, which means that you don't have to spend a whole weekend washing your stuff. Finally, this giant graphite washer and dryer pair looks like it came straight out of Darth Vader's laundry room. It frightens small children and impresses the heck out of other geeks.
They're still really expensive, but if you can at all afford them, you have to get these.
install low flow toilets or those kits that limit the amount of water per toilet flush.
Yeah, because 4 1.5 gallon flushes to get rid of Taco Bell is much more efficient than 1 2.5 gallon flush. I'll stick with the "stand up first or take your chances" model I currently have, thanks.
There are sound arguments on either side of that one (largely regarding component life, thermal issues, etc.). On a newer computer with on-demand CPU throttling, I don't see a clear advantage to shutting them down completely.
At any rate, all of my computers are either servers or iMacs, so leaving them on isn't that big of a deal. FWIW, I used to have a FreeBSD server sitting next to my Debian desktop at home. Since I didn't really use the desktop much anymore (I have Internet access at work, and wife/kids preclude me from having all-night hacking sessions at home), I recently combined the two into a FreeBSD server with a KDE desktop and decommissioned the dedicated-desktop machine altogether. That's one less system eating electricity, and I still have a comfortable system for the small amount of computing I do at home these days.
die-hard incandescent hater
My biggest use of incandescents is currently at my office. I keep the overhead flurescents turned off, and a 40W lamp turned on for a little bit of light. Thanks to some of the suggestions above, I'll probably look into replacing that little lamp with a compact flurescent sometime soon.
One thing that somewhat limits my flexibility is the model of fixture used in my basement. The guy who finished out our basement used lamp with a built-in ballast that can't be changed (AFAIK) without replacing the entire unit. Even worse, I'm sure that a few of them are going bad, so I expect to be in for a mandatory upgrade in the near future anyway.
I particularly notice it when I'm looking at a CRT. The two flickers combined, but just slightly out of sync, absolutely kill me eyes. Since I spent a good part of my life doing so, it's a problem for me.
Thanks for the other information. I'll have to check it out and see if I can find an acceptable alternative.
Sure. Did it occur to you that some people go about it in really stupid ways that cause more problems than they solve? For example, you just trashed the environment to get your photovoltaics so that you could feel good about self-powering your computer. Your pollution-per-watt is much, much higher than the equivalent coming out of your wall.
I want to live on a nice planet, too, but realistically speaking that means centralizing production to a few good, clean resources (read: nuke) than building hundreds of millions of dirty plants across the country. Short-term "solutions" that make us feel proud of ourselves without actually helping the overall situation are wasteful and not something to aspire to.
If you're trying to live off the grid to see if you can or as a personal challenge: good for you, and I wish you the best of luck! If you're trying to do it because you think it's making the world a cleaner place, then you've wasted your time, money, and our natural resources.
Unless you're significantly shortening that drive, the upfront costs of relocation will burn through years' worth of fuel savings.
possibly putting a throttle restrictor plate in my car
Are you insane?!? If you want to drive slower, then drive slower. That's a good thing. Do not make your car drastically more unsafe by removing its ability to accelerate quickly when the need arises. When an out-of-control semi is bearing down on me, I'd rather lose an ounce of gas to my foot on the floorboard than a gallon of blood to my face on his grill.
buying fluorescent lights
I'd do this if I could find a nice brand that didn't flicker and had a spectrum reasonably close to an incandescent (or better, the sun). I can't stand that 60Hz strobe or the washed-out colors. Any suggestions?
I'm always amazed at how many plastic (or paper) bags the grocer insists on giving me
OK, I'm with you there. Basically, I'm one of those greedy, selfish jerks who refuses to compromise his lifestyle. However, I was also raised with "waste not, want not" and I hate the gratuitous use of resources. If I'm only buying one or two things at a store, I tell the cashier that I don't want a bag. I turn the lights off when I leave a room. I use DPMS on my monitors so that they're not painting a picture while I'm asleep. I keep my tires properly inflated. I have an electronic thermostat that's set to 68F during the day (in winter) and cooler at night. In short, I've configured my environment so that it doesn't try to make me comfortable when I'm not around to enjoy it. If everyone took those simple steps, I think we'd save a lot without sacrificing a bit of the creature comforts.
Oh, and if you're one of those "free heat because I'm on Welfare" people who leaves the heat cranked and the windows open, I hope you catch pneumonia and die.
Say what you will, but ol' Helen is probably the epitome of optimizing interpersonal communication. I can hardly tell a joke on Jabber without using a smiley, but she used her hands to read lips. That's like the speech equivalent of writing a graphics card driver in microcode.
I'm not saying I'm a big fan of her message, but I'm definitely impressed with her ability to deliver it, all things considered.
I demand that my personal bridge engineers personally hand-select the grains of steel that they'll use to custom-design my unique bridge that won't use any of the last 5,000 years of bridge engineering experience. That's the only path to quality, you know. And back away from the libc, fella! If you won't hand-roll open(), then I don't want you writing my web browser.
By the way, what crack-smokers took you seriously enough to give you +5? Seriously, man, good job! That's one of the more successful trolls I've seen in a while.
Particularly those of us who do know what the Internet is: a giant WAN of computers speaking IP. Full stop. That's it. You're describing a particular set of services, but those are just applications running on top of the network.
Yes, it really is that simple. HTTP, FTP, SMTP, etc. are not the Internet - a bunch of servers, routers, and pipes are.
Congratulations, folks - you got what you were begging for. Some of us tried to tell you this was a bad idea, but you didn't listen because we were Evil Conservatives who only care about the rich getting richer. Let this be a lesson to all of us; some ideas are just plain bad regardless of whether it's a Liberal or a Conservative fighting them. Don't automatically assume the other guy is wrong just because you disagree on other nonrelated topics.
This isn't Fark. If you randomly click on Slashdot links, you'll probably see a lot worse.
Both. I'm sure that's what happened - or perhaps they did investigate but forgot to tell me the outcome - but that didn't make me feel a lot better about the situation.
Never mind that my program would be completely, utterly useless as a spam tool. It acts as an interface to the anonymous remailer network, with is only somewhat reliable at best, and could not possibly support the high volume of messages a spammer would want to broadcast. Nonetheless, I have a wife and kids and didn't feel like being the poster boy in the fight against a stupid law.
So, I wrote an explanatory letter to the EFF to ask for their advice (and possibly their assistance) in killing the proposition before it became law. To this day, I've never received so much as an email in response. I know that my message was delivered (maillog said so), but when it was my back against the wall, the organization I've donated to for years (to the point of buying memberships as birthday presents for geeky friends) was nowhere to be found.
I still like and respect the EFF - they do good things and I support their goals - but I'm no longer under the illusion that I can count on them when things go bad. Don't let my story stop you from donating to them, but neither should you go ahead and write that law- or patent-violating program with the expectation that you have friends who will step up to the plate for you.
Lucky you. I tried the same thing and it installed SP2 on my Debian box. That's the last time I run code found on Slashdot.