If the law forbade using open mail relays or anything that can be considered an "attack" I'd have no problem. But it seems to be forbidding the messages themselves.
I don't read it that way. I see nothing in the law that says anything about the content of the messages. Content, after all, is what we're talking about in freedom of speech and censorship cases. The law prohibits a method of distribution. It is entirely neutral to the contents. If it had prohibited the sending of (for example) anti-Catholic email, then you would have a freedom of speech case on your hands. As it stands, nothing in this law prevents you from taking the exact same piece of mail that you would have attacked people with and putting it on a Web page instead, and nothing prevents you from offering to email it to people who specifically request it from you.
This doesn't mention attacks or open relays or anything of the sort.
Not in so many words, but how can you spam without stealing somebody else's resources? You can't (by definition!)
It says you can't send unsolicited messages. That is the problem.
I really don't see why this is such a problem. There is a long tradition in this country of prohibiting people from being "held hostage", as it were, by unsolicited materials. This tradition has been reflected in other laws (such as existing laws banning fax spamming) and in court rulings, up to and including the United States Supreme Court. Nobody's freedom of speech is being violated here. Instead, the freedom of individuals to not be forced to pay for garbage that they don't want is being affirmed. That's a Good Thing (TM). The fact that it takes aim at the subhuman scum who bombard my mailbox day in and day out is icing on the cake.
If I want to set up a stand on my front lawn and tell everybody about how great my penis enlargement system works, I can.. because I have free speech. If I want to promote my penis enlargement system on my Web page, I can.. because I have free speech. If I want to rent a hotel convention center and hold a series of meetings raving about the effectiveness of my penis enlargement system, I can.. because, well, you get the idea. Spammers have, and always have had the right to free speech. You are going one step further by claiming that massive (and often distributed) attacks on open relays and ill-prepared ISPs constitutes "speech." I must admit that this is one of the more puzzling arguments I've heard in favor of spammers.
I realize that the days of the "Mom and Pop" ISP have pretty much gone the way of the dodo, but back in the mid-1990s there were quite a few of them. Unfortunately, many of these ISPs (which were pretty bandwidth limited and served a relatively small amount of users) were put out of business because of the overhead effects of spammers.. not just from a bandwidth perspective, but from the perspective of computational resources as well. Back then, stories about these ISPs closing up shop were a dime a dozen.
This isn't to say I don't like spam, but if fucking C++ source code can be considered speech, why isn't "Do you want a longer penis?"
I'm starting to suspect that I've been trolled here, but assuming you're serious.. when was the last time that you took a piece of "fucking C++ source code", purchased a list of 20 million email addresses from some promoter, sniffed out an open mail relay on some poor boob's network, and unleashed a bulk mailer bot to share your "speech" with the world? You're missing the point. Nobody is saying "MAKE MONEY FAST!!" isn't speech that is subject to First Amendment protection. What is being said is that the method of delivery is illegal. A spammer has no more right to steal the resources of others to mailbomb millions of people than I have to break into your house while you're sleeping and try to sell you a can of oven cleaner.
Maybe the guy selling penis enlargment sauce really feels deeply about it and wants the world to know how truly great his product is.
Great! Then he can set up a stand on his lawn, put up an advertisement on his Web page, or put on a convention at his local Holiday Inn. Nobody is saying he doesn't have a right to promote his product. What people are saying is that there are some methods that cannot be used to do so. This has been true in the past, and it is true today.
.. does the "dot-com crash" have to do with Linux? Only a small fraction of the poorly-run and financed "dot-com" companies that went bust were in any way related to Linux. When I think of the failed "dot-coms", I think of silly sock puppets and Internet grocery delivery services. I think of all those ridiculous television commercials we used to see for (insert now-defunct online vendor here.) None of these are even remotely related to Linux. You may as well ask how Linux is going to survive the September 11th attacks.. as a question, it makes an equal amount of sense.
We lose 6 a day, we don't see new species being created, we see statistical laws in action everywhere we look, with increaing entropy being of great interest. What makes evolution feasible?
Do you honestly believe that biological evolution, a slow and meticulous process that takes millions of years to produce real results, can possibly compete with the destructive power of mankind, which can wipe out a species in a few short years? I've heard some pretty weak arguments against evolution, but I have to admit that this is one of the more desparate attempts at straw-grabbing that I've come across.
.. having a creator who intelligently designed the basic species and allowed them to adapt from there seems to me to fit the evidence more accurately... PS - God loves you and longs for relationship with you..
I've never completely understood why some of the Christian creationist folks automatically assume that people who don't have any problems with modern biology's conception of evolution must be atheists, agnostics, pagans, etc. I would submit that the vast majority of Christians on this planet have no argument with the fact that the universe is a tad older than 6,000 years and that evolutionary common descent is a perfectly sensible way for God to create the kind of biodiversity that we see on Earth today.
Personally, I'm an apathetic agnostic (I care so little about religion that I can't be bothered to call myself an atheist;-)) but it seems to me that if there was a God that created all of the life on Earth, He would be akin to the "ultimate engineer." Evolution, from an engineering standpoint, makes a heck of a lot of sense. There's no reason to believe that a perfect God would design a single species "from scratch", as it were, and then wipe the drawing board completely clean and start over from nothing to design a species that is 95% similar to the one He just got done with.
Really, the fact that we see so many similarities between different creatures on Earth is one of the strongest pieces of evidence in favor of evolutionary common descent. Now, granted, this fact is certainly not evidence against creation ex nihilo. But if God was creating everything ex nihilo He could have made a diverse array of creatures with completely different internal systems specifically engineered for optimal operation in the creature's native environment. Evolution, by and large, has done a pretty good job. Sure, it's not perfect; there are some flaws in the human body that I'd just as soon not be burdened with, but hey.. we play what we're dealt.:-)
At any rate, I just don't understand how people who believe in an all-powerful God could possibly suggest that He could not, and did not, create the biodiversity on Earth via the simple and elegant processes of evolution. Biology is in the business of answering the "how" questions. It is not in the business of answering the "why" questions, and has never claimed to be. Those who claim otherwise are "putting words in science's mouth", so to speak.
No offense intended, but if you think that Citizen Kane was "a movie about a sled", my advice to you would be to stick to Chris Farley/David Spade movies; they're probably more your style. Dismissing Welles' cinematic genius because it was only impressive because it was "original at the time the movie was made" is ignoring the fact that the film has influenced, either directly or indirectly, the vast majority of films that came after it.
"Birth of a Nation" and "Gone With The Wind" were only original at the time that they were made, as well. By your logic, we should dismiss them in favor of "Pearl Harbor" and "Armageddon."
My opinion (and I stress that this is my opinion.. if you annoy particularly sensitive FF fanboys you run the risk of having them come after you with machettes) is that Final Fantasy VII is the best of the bunch, but I haven't played FFX yet.
My allegiance to FFVII is probably because it was the first FF game for the Playstation platform, and it represented a quantum leap forward in terms of technology. I remember playing through this game for the first time, watching wide-eyed in near-disbelief as the "camera" panned over such surreal sights as the floating city of Midgar, Rufus' airship, the mountains near Nibelheim, and the missile launch at Rocket Town. Sure, we take intricate FMV sequences like this for granted now, but this was 1997 and nobody had seen anything quite like it before.
I really liked the magic system (materia) in FFVII. It wasn't all that complicated, and it allowed you to experiment with spells and abilities and elementals and combine them in all sorts of fun and interesting ways. It is far superior to the absolutely dreadful "junctioning" system of FFVIII. Thankfully, Square went away from that and back to a more traditional system for FFIX. The combat system in FFVII is simple enough to get a handle on it quickly, and it works well enough to carry itself through the rest of the game (as long as you're prepared for a lot of combat!)
FFVII also has (again, IMHO) among the best music in the series. (Sound of machettes being unsheathed.) This is a subjective observation, of course.. excellent music has always been a hallmark of the FF series, and pretty much all of the games have their share of it. The melodies from FF7 just happen to have stuck with me longer. The haunting theme from Cloud's dream sequences, the throbbing drumbeats at Cosmo Canyon, the whimsical tropical theme at Costa del Sol, the grandiose rendition of the theme music that is played on the World Map.. all are far above par for video games of this type.
I think that FFVII's biggest selling point, however, is its replay value. All of the games (particularly the later ones) have a certain amount of "side quests" that are not necessary to complete in order to win the game, but FFVII has a lot more than any of the others. There are two completely optional characters that you can get in your party and develop (with storylines and quests of their own.) There are lots of "in-game games" that you can play, such as the attractions at the Gold Saucer. You can embark on a career of Chocobo raising with the eventual goal of raising a Gold Chocobo that will allow you to visit every corner of the planet and unearth some magic materia of unspeakable power (Knights of the Round, anyone?) You can take some time at the end of the game to try and defeat the all-powerful Ruby and Emerald Weapons. And that's just scratching the surface.
FFVII is also not without its weak points. The storyline, while easy to follow on a broad scale, is often confusing and muddled when the details are revealed. The story is not as good as the one in, say, Final Fantasy IV, but it definitely holds its own. The main character, Cloud, is maddeningly obstinate and at times you wish you could reach through the television and give him a good clean punch to the gut. In many places, the combat is far too frequent (though this is not just a complaint about FFVII!)
At any rate, that's my take; I like FFVII the best because of the nostalgia and the fond memories of how much it captivated me the first time I played through it. To a large degree, it continues to do so. The bottom line is that all of the games in this series have something to recommend them; this one just happens to be my favorite. Your mileage may vary. Please put your machettes away. Thank you.
I don't care about being "inconvenienced." What I do care about is that this is causing huge problems for operations all across the DOI. In particular, there are plenty of customers who have ordered hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars worth of digital data from our facility, which is well-protected by a uber-paranoid firewall. This is data that they now cannot access, and will most likely have to be re-processed. Critical systems have been rendered unable to talk to each other, ordering systems are down, and data dissemination has been rendered impossible. When things come back up, a lot of people are going to spend a lot of time picking up the pieces. The price tag will run into the millions of dollars.
And guess who gets to foot that bill? If you're a U.S. taxpayer, you guessed right.. you do! If this doesn't bother you, then that's fine.. but it bothers the hell out of me because this didn't have to happen.
Folks, this is not rocket science. The easiest way to determine if the DOI is on the net or not is to try to connect to the DOI homepage itself. As of this moment (1:00 AM Central time), the entire DOI is off the net. It's not just the BIA or the agencies and sites directly related to it. It's the entire DOI. I am a DOI contractor and I can assure you that our facility (which has nothing to do with the Bureau of Indian Affairs) was most certainly yanked off the net this afternoon, and it remains off the net.
This is really causing pandemonium at our workplace. We cannot access our electronic timesheets because the server is external to our network, and as a result, I've just finished filling out my timesheet from home (because otherwise, it's not going to get done.) The silly part of it is that the facility that I work at has quite robust security, and yet we were still forced offline. This is not an "intelligent decision." This is a knee-jerk reaction that is going to end up inconveniencing a lot of people that have paid a lot of money for Earth science data. It's going to cost the government (and, as a result, you, the taxpayer) a lot of money.
By the time you read this comment, the whole issue may have been rendered moot; there was some hope that the court order might be rescinded overnight. If the order was rescinded and you are able to connect to the above links, then I'm glad (because I'll be able to do my job tomorrow.) But rest assured that the entire DOI lost network connectivity this afternoon. This is judicial idiocy, plain and simple; there is no more diplomatic way to put it.
If the article says one thing and reality reflects another, then the article is wrong. I am a USGS contractor (the USGS is part of the DOI) and we were forced to cut our Internet connection at approximately 2:30 this afternoon. We have nothing to do with the BIA. Furthermore, our operations rely very heavily on Internet connectivity (customers order products online and can retrieve them via FTP.) This is going to have a huge negative impact on our facility and our customers, and we are not even remotely related to the BIA (not to mention the fact that we have a very secure and robust firewall.)
Trust me on this one. But if you don't, try to connect to the DOI homepage if you don't believe me. By the time you read this, connectivity may be restored; we were hoping that the court order might be rescinded overnight. But rest assured that as of right now (12:56 AM Central Time) the entire Department of Interior is offline, regardless of what some article says.
Wow, you're pretty much a complete and total idiot for posting that.
I couldn't disagree more. One of the biggest problems leading up to the 9/11 attacks was failure of the imagination. Nobody had really toyed with the scenario of passenger airliners being used as missiles. Nobody had really stopped to consider that extremists could be that insane. As a result, nobody was prepared for the events of that day, and the toll (in terms of human life and monetary damages) was catastrophic.
So here we've got some people mulling over potential terrorist attacks involving biological agents. When you play these scenarios out, you have to consider the worst case, and it just so happens that the worst case would include the targeting of our nation's leaders. It isn't pleasant to think about, but if the events of 9/11 showed us anything, it's that we have to start thinking about this stuff. In short, the Secret Service cracked down on this poster because he was doing exactly the thing that the government should have been doing before 9/11. (If they had, perhaps the attacks wouldn't have happened.)
So now, even after the horrific events of September, the apparent stance of the Secret Service is that people should not be speculating on these types of things. If that is their policy, and if they are willing to stand behind it, then fine. But if something like 9/11 happens again, and if it's something that could have been prevented if we had engaged in exercises like the one in the Kuro5hin article, then the blood of the innocent will be on their hands.
You have a pointer to you-don't-know-what in your language, and you're asking me what's unsafe about it?
This is tenuous at best. Under very few circumstances will you be passed a void * and have "no idea" what it's pointing to. I can write a function that (for example) retrieves parameters of various type from a configuration file, and set up the function such that the first argument is a void * and the second argument is an enumeration that specifies the type of the argument to be retrieved. On the basis of that argument, I can write the retrieved value through the pointer using an appropriate cast, knowing perfectly well what the pointer is pointing to.
Now, this can obviously be abused and misused. I could accidentally specify the wrong argument type when calling this function, at which all hell could break loose. But this would be my fault, not the language's fault.. and furthermore, it would be quickly detected. Other memory errors are not as quickly detected, but tools such as Purify go a long way in fighting these battles for you.
You're confusing theory, where every programmer is perfect, with practice, where most programmers don't even know that undefined behaviour is a technical term, never mind its implications, and everyone makes mistakes (if they're allowed to).
No, I think my exact words were "nobody writes correct code the first time through, or any iteration thereafter."
Just looking at the use of arrays, pointers and strings in C, there are dozens of ways in which the language's method of doing things almost requires the programmer to do something potentially unsafe. There is no built-in string type, so every time someone wants to use a string, they have to mess around with low-level details like adding '\0' (and allowing space for it in the first place). How many times have you seen someone try to compare two strings in C using == instead of strcmp()?
The string handling facilities in C are well-documented and if somebody tries to compare strings with ==, it indicates that the developer has virtually no understanding of the language. This is not the kind of "oops" error that even seasoned veterans let slip by on a Monday morning. This is the kind of error that would be made by somebody who really needs to learn the language that he or she is going to be using, or perhaps choose a different career.
You're right.. the string-handling facilities in C are dreadful compared to those offered by other languages, particularly those that have a built-in string type. But your claim that the language requires developers to write unsafe code is completely without basis in fact.
I've got to run off.. I don't have a lot to add to the rest of your post (I think we know where we agree and where we disagree.) It is possible to write safe code in C, and it's actually quite easy if you know what you're doing. It's possible to completely screw the pooch in C, as well. But as I noted earlier, code safety is not violated exclusively by bad pointer arithmetic and the other observations that you've made about C. No amount of built-in safety is going to prevent you from implementing a shoddy algorithm or slipping in an undocumented back door. These are important issues as well.. at least as important as the tomfoolery that the underlying language allows you to get away with.
With that, I've only one thing to add:
That's absolutely well-defined behaviour. "Undefined behaviour" is a technical term in the C standard, and means your program is allowed to do anything at that point.
No, the inclusion of a header that is not specifically addressed by the C standard most certainly does invoke undefined behavior (at least, it did in ISO 9899:1990, though I'm not sure if C99 says anything different.) I'm not sure what else the standard could reasonably do with this situation other than leaving the behavior undefined. The net effect is that it is not possible to write a strictly-conforming C program that uses nonstandard facilities, which is perfectly reasonable.
It provides potentially unsafe language features (void*, unchecked pointer arithmetic, etc.).
What's unsafe about void pointers? You can do potentially perform bogus pointer arithmetic and dereferences with any pointer type. void pointers provide a much-needed generic pointer type that vastly simplifies the interfaces to facilities such as malloc(). It's true that the automatic type conversion between void pointers and pointers to other object types can be problematic if abused, but an explicit cast can be used to do the same thing to any two pointer-to-object types, and that is just as easily abused.
It actively encourages the use of unsafe programming practices.
I'm not sure what you mean here. C is a language, not a person. It doesn't encourage anything. C gives you the capability to shoot yourself in the foot, but it also tells you (in very specific terms) how to avoid doing so.
A language that leads to undefined behaviour if you forget to append '\0' to the end of some data you just read, or that lets you forget to leave space for the '\0' at the end of your string, is dangerous.
Languages don't lead to undefined behavior. Code does. Properly-written code doesn't invoke undefined behavior. Actually, I take that back.. there are plenty of examples of acceptable undefined behavior, such as #including a header that is not specifically addressed by the C standard. Let me rephrase: Properly-written code does not invoke unwanted undefined behavior.
Ultimately, a lot of code written in C is broken, and a lot of it demonstrably wouldn't have been if it had been written in a safer language, QED.
I would submit that there is a lot of code that you wouldn't want to have written in a safer language. You wouldn't argue (at least I hope you wouldn't) that Linux or OpenBSD (again, a shining example of an extremely secure collection of C code) be rewritten in Ada. People are not going to be impressed when their already-secure operating system loses 35% of its runtime efficiency to become "super-duper" secure. You (correctly) point out that a lot of the pitfalls that await bad C code can be avoided with more authoritarian languages, but all of that safety comes at a price. You cannot implement run-time array bounds checking without negatively affecting run-time performance; this is perfectly obvious.
I would rephrase your above-quoted statement thusly: "Ultimately, a lot of code written in C is broken, and a lot of it demonstrably wouldn't have been if it had been written correctly." Now, it is a fact of life that nobody writes correct code the first time through, or any iteration thereafter. This applies to newbies as well as seasoned veterans. It is also true that bad C code can manifest itself in far worse ways than bad Ada code can. But good C code is just as safe as good Ada code. And, let's face it.. when you look at the current crop of high-level languages (if you consider C to be a HLL, which many do not), it is nearly impossible to beat a typical C implementation in terms of speed and compactness.
Now, in this era of big RAM and big clock speeds, maybe this is less important than it used to be.. but I wouldn't bet on it. C, if used improperly, allows programmers to do some really stupid things.. but using this to label the language as wholesale "unsafe" is like calling a sports car unsafe because it allows a reckless driver to accelerate from 0 to 60 MPH in 4.5 seconds and slam into a streetlight pole doing 150. There's a huge difference between what a facility allows to be done with it and what a responsible user actually does with it.
Nonsense. It's more appropriate to say "there's a lot of poorly-written C code that is fundamentally unsafe." It's true that C has some lower-level capabilities that can potentially be used in an unsafe manner. That doesn't mean that they have to be used in an unsafe manner. A well-written C program can be just as "safe" as its Ada counterpart in terms of array bounds checking and exception handling and things of that nature.. it'll be a bit more work, of course, but blaming the C language for the incompetency of some of the people that use it seems a tad unfair. It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to innoculate C code from the type of buffer overrun attacks and memory errors that have been seen in the past. Unfortunately, a lot of people learned this lesson about 10 years too late.
Furthermore, a flawed and insecure algorithm is going to be flawed and insecure regardless of what language is used to implement it. A "safe" language like Ada might prevent you from trashing the stack and/or writing to arbitrary regions of memory, but it's not going to prevent you from implementing a mathematically weak encryption scheme, and it won't warn you if a programmer forgets to take out a debugging back door before a piece of code is released to production. You can write poor code in any language. You can write great code in any language.
Application code, and certainly high-level code where security is essential, just aren't C's strong suits.
And yet C works well enough to implement what is perhaps the world's most secure operating system (OpenBSD.) I'm not sure what you mean by "application code" (that's an awfully wide brush you're using there.) If I wanted to write, for example, a GUI application for Unix with database access, I'd most likely use C++ and Qt. However, this choice would be based on the fact that it's a lot less work to use C++ and Qt than it would be to use something like C and GTK+. Security and safety have nothing to do with it.
I can't see how even the geniuses we're talking about can start from such a broken language..
C is not a broken language. A lot of code written in C is broken. When you make this distinction, you are on the road to understanding why this bias against C is completely unjustified.
Re:A crutch for the weak-minded?
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God's Debris
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As others have already pointed out, Einstein most certainly did not believe in God (particularly, not in a personal god that concerns itself with the day-to-day operation of the universe and the inhabitants thereof.) I wonder.. decades after you die, would it please you to know that people were going around intentionally spreading lies about you? If not, how do you justify doing this to Mr. Einstein? Einstein's refutation of these statements about his religious views is well known; one can only assume that those who continue to spread these falsehoods are doing so purposefully and with malicious intent.
This is a common phrase, but in reality there is no "dark side" of the moon. There is a side that is always facing the Earth, and there is a side that is always facing away from the Earth. The side that is facing away from the Earth gets just as much sunlight as the side that is facing us (we just don't see it.) What people really should say is "the far side of the moon", since it is more factually accurate.
And "None" is just, well. . , nice life. Hope Hollywood and Sony Entertainment are able to fill all the gaps in your heart; the things of man get pretty dry after a while.
Wait a minute there, boyo. You open up your post by complaining (quite reasonably, I should say) about how Christ-centric religious people tend to be, but then you conclude it by asserting that all people who hold no supernatural views have "gaps in their heart" (whatever that means.) This is a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black. While I have no problem with people who hold on to one religious view or another to placate themselves, it is a mistake for you to assume that your spiritual neediness is a common malady that affects all Mankind (it doesn't.)
Linksys wireless access point with card is great. Tested and loved...
I agree about the Linksys access point (WAP11 in my case), but from my experience I would steer clear of the Linksys PC card. It works all right, but the range of the thing is not even close to what is advertised. I have a Linksys access point and an Orinoco (the old Lucent WaveLAN) Silver PC card, and it wirelessly networks my Linux laptop great. I started out with the Linksys card and ended up doubling my range when I moved to the Orinoco.
The front page of the donation site specified that the maximum was $50, but when I went to the actual page where you entered the dollar amount, it specified that the maximum was $100. (I was able to give $100 with no problems.) Maybe there was an earlier limit of $50 that was later increased to $100, and the first page hasn't been updated yet.
Loki's whole goal is very laudable (making Windows games available natively for Linux.) However, as experience has shown, it isn't the most profitable venture in the world. Linux users are accustomed to getting their software for free, not paying for it. It therefore stands to reason that you cannot expect to make pots of money by taking software from a group of people who are used to paying for it (Windows users) and re-releasing it for those who are accustomed to downloading source tarballs (Linux users.)
It seems to me that wealth creation could be maximized by doing the exact opposite thing: taking free games for Linux, packaging them, and then selling then to Windows users. What Windows user wouldn't purchase a copy of TuxRacer if he saw it on sale at Best Buy? XBill 2 would likely be a big hit. And think about it: the initial capital outlay is minimal (after all, the games are all free.) I'm willing to bet that we could sell/bin/ls to Windows users if we put it in a slick enough package and bought up enough ad space ("The Ultimate File Listing Tool for Windows!")
Loki's heart is in the right place, but if they want to dig themselves out of the hole that they have found themselves in, the best thing that they could possibly do is reverse their name to Ikol and start doing the exact opposite of what they're doing now.
A clonebot uses no more resources than a single legitimate client.
Legitimate clients don't change their nicks ten times a second, nor do they use TextBox/PhoEniX-style tsunamis (large amounts of text) against users and channels. Unless your clonebots joined the target channel and said "hehehe" and "LOL" every ten seconds or so, I think it's a safe assumption that they used well more than their fair share of resources. I can certainly say that in my years as an oper, I never encountered such benign clonebots.
I disagree strongly. They were more difficult, available to a smaller group of people.
Well, certainly the ability to do a distributed flood existed, but nowhere near to the extent that it exists today. The IRC "floodnets" that were the precursor to the modern DDoS didn't appear until a few years later. The modern DDoS would be an impossibility were it not for the large number of unprotected cable modem/DSL users and wide-open corporate networks, most of which didn't exist at that time.
I never did anything to harm an IRC server. Nobody did. #warez learned to fear my army of clonebots, and in fact clonebots were the only thing I ever did that upset IRCops.
You "never did anything to harm an IRC server", yet you had an "army of clonebots?" Were these magical clonebots? You know, the kind that can connect to the network without using up connections that would have otherwise been used by legitimate clients? Were they the kind of clonebots that could send nickfloods and tsunamis to #warez directly, without interacting with (or consuming the resources of) the servers?
IMHO, the DDoSers of today are the clonebotters of 6 years ago. The technology is different, but the mentality is the same. 6 years ago, people didn't have the big, fat network pipes that they've got today, and there weren't as many fools running networked, compromised boxes 24/7. 6 years ago, the DDoS attacks of today weren't technically possible. If they were possible, they would have been used.
You sound like you've outgrown the phase, which is good, but I suspect that if you were six years younger, you would be right alongside of the group that is responsible for this.
.. that global warming predictions might be correct?
Let's look at this from a practical standpoint. You say there is nothing to global warming. I say there is. Let's say that we sit back and do absolutely nothing about it. If you are right and I am wrong, then we will have lost nothing. On the other hand, if I am right and you are wrong, we will have lost everything and will endure an eternity of torture and suffering, followed by probable extinction.
It seems to me that even if it is ultimately shown that global warming is a ridiculous liberal myth, it still is in our best interests to take steps to advance our skillset and develop new technologies that allow us to build cleaner factories, renewable energy sources, etc. We need to do away with the internal combustion engine.. call me an extremist, but I tend to think that the IC engine is (gasp!) not the pinnacle of Personkind's engineering prowess! We can (and will) do far better.
I realize that many of the opponents of global warming are conservative and old and not long for this world, and therefore not particularly concerned about it since they will not have to suffer the effects. But why do we need the threat of global warming (whether it is real or not) to "frighten" us into straightening up our act and investing in newer, more efficient, more eco-friendly technology? It seems to me that we should be doing this anyway. If everybody had the same attitude that some people display here, we'd still have coal trains belching black clouds of smoke into the air.
You've got taxpayer dollars being spent to study cow farts.
You've got industrial defense contractors in key Congressional districts being given billions of dollars to build aircraft carriers that the Navy doesn't even want.
And then you've got NASA, whose budget is a fraction of one percent of the total federal outlay, and that's what these "waste-watchers" complain about.
Slashdot Mirror
If the law forbade using open mail relays or anything that can be considered an "attack" I'd have no problem. But it seems to be forbidding the messages themselves.
I don't read it that way. I see nothing in the law that says anything about the content of the messages. Content, after all, is what we're talking about in freedom of speech and censorship cases. The law prohibits a method of distribution. It is entirely neutral to the contents. If it had prohibited the sending of (for example) anti-Catholic email, then you would have a freedom of speech case on your hands. As it stands, nothing in this law prevents you from taking the exact same piece of mail that you would have attacked people with and putting it on a Web page instead, and nothing prevents you from offering to email it to people who specifically request it from you.
This doesn't mention attacks or open relays or anything of the sort.
Not in so many words, but how can you spam without stealing somebody else's resources? You can't (by definition!)
It says you can't send unsolicited messages. That is the problem.
I really don't see why this is such a problem. There is a long tradition in this country of prohibiting people from being "held hostage", as it were, by unsolicited materials. This tradition has been reflected in other laws (such as existing laws banning fax spamming) and in court rulings, up to and including the United States Supreme Court. Nobody's freedom of speech is being violated here. Instead, the freedom of individuals to not be forced to pay for garbage that they don't want is being affirmed. That's a Good Thing (TM). The fact that it takes aim at the subhuman scum who bombard my mailbox day in and day out is icing on the cake.
If I want to set up a stand on my front lawn and tell everybody about how great my penis enlargement system works, I can .. because I have free speech. If I want to promote my penis enlargement system on my Web page, I can .. because I have free speech. If I want to rent a hotel convention center and hold a series of meetings raving about the effectiveness of my penis enlargement system, I can .. because, well, you get the idea. Spammers have, and always have had the right to free speech. You are going one step further by claiming that massive (and often distributed) attacks on open relays and ill-prepared ISPs constitutes "speech." I must admit that this is one of the more puzzling arguments I've heard in favor of spammers.
.. not just from a bandwidth perspective, but from the perspective of computational resources as well. Back then, stories about these ISPs closing up shop were a dime a dozen.
.. when was the last time that you took a piece of "fucking C++ source code", purchased a list of 20 million email addresses from some promoter, sniffed out an open mail relay on some poor boob's network, and unleashed a bulk mailer bot to share your "speech" with the world? You're missing the point. Nobody is saying "MAKE MONEY FAST!!" isn't speech that is subject to First Amendment protection. What is being said is that the method of delivery is illegal. A spammer has no more right to steal the resources of others to mailbomb millions of people than I have to break into your house while you're sleeping and try to sell you a can of oven cleaner.
I realize that the days of the "Mom and Pop" ISP have pretty much gone the way of the dodo, but back in the mid-1990s there were quite a few of them. Unfortunately, many of these ISPs (which were pretty bandwidth limited and served a relatively small amount of users) were put out of business because of the overhead effects of spammers
This isn't to say I don't like spam, but if fucking C++ source code can be considered speech, why isn't "Do you want a longer penis?"
I'm starting to suspect that I've been trolled here, but assuming you're serious
Maybe the guy selling penis enlargment sauce really feels deeply about it and wants the world to know how truly great his product is.
Great! Then he can set up a stand on his lawn, put up an advertisement on his Web page, or put on a convention at his local Holiday Inn. Nobody is saying he doesn't have a right to promote his product. What people are saying is that there are some methods that cannot be used to do so. This has been true in the past, and it is true today.
.. does the "dot-com crash" have to do with Linux? Only a small fraction of the poorly-run and financed "dot-com" companies that went bust were in any way related to Linux. When I think of the failed "dot-coms", I think of silly sock puppets and Internet grocery delivery services. I think of all those ridiculous television commercials we used to see for (insert now-defunct online vendor here.) None of these are even remotely related to Linux. You may as well ask how Linux is going to survive the September 11th attacks .. as a question, it makes an equal amount of sense.
We lose 6 a day, we don't see new species being created, we see statistical laws in action everywhere we look, with increaing entropy being of great interest. What makes evolution feasible?
Do you honestly believe that biological evolution, a slow and meticulous process that takes millions of years to produce real results, can possibly compete with the destructive power of mankind, which can wipe out a species in a few short years? I've heard some pretty weak arguments against evolution, but I have to admit that this is one of the more desparate attempts at straw-grabbing that I've come across.
.. having a creator who intelligently designed the basic species and allowed them to adapt from there seems to me to fit the evidence more accurately. .. PS - God loves you and longs for relationship with you ..
;-)) but it seems to me that if there was a God that created all of the life on Earth, He would be akin to the "ultimate engineer." Evolution, from an engineering standpoint, makes a heck of a lot of sense. There's no reason to believe that a perfect God would design a single species "from scratch", as it were, and then wipe the drawing board completely clean and start over from nothing to design a species that is 95% similar to the one He just got done with.
.. we play what we're dealt. :-)
I've never completely understood why some of the Christian creationist folks automatically assume that people who don't have any problems with modern biology's conception of evolution must be atheists, agnostics, pagans, etc. I would submit that the vast majority of Christians on this planet have no argument with the fact that the universe is a tad older than 6,000 years and that evolutionary common descent is a perfectly sensible way for God to create the kind of biodiversity that we see on Earth today.
Personally, I'm an apathetic agnostic (I care so little about religion that I can't be bothered to call myself an atheist
Really, the fact that we see so many similarities between different creatures on Earth is one of the strongest pieces of evidence in favor of evolutionary common descent. Now, granted, this fact is certainly not evidence against creation ex nihilo. But if God was creating everything ex nihilo He could have made a diverse array of creatures with completely different internal systems specifically engineered for optimal operation in the creature's native environment. Evolution, by and large, has done a pretty good job. Sure, it's not perfect; there are some flaws in the human body that I'd just as soon not be burdened with, but hey
At any rate, I just don't understand how people who believe in an all-powerful God could possibly suggest that He could not, and did not, create the biodiversity on Earth via the simple and elegant processes of evolution. Biology is in the business of answering the "how" questions. It is not in the business of answering the "why" questions, and has never claimed to be. Those who claim otherwise are "putting words in science's mouth", so to speak.
No offense intended, but if you think that Citizen Kane was "a movie about a sled", my advice to you would be to stick to Chris Farley/David Spade movies; they're probably more your style. Dismissing Welles' cinematic genius because it was only impressive because it was "original at the time the movie was made" is ignoring the fact that the film has influenced, either directly or indirectly, the vast majority of films that came after it.
"Birth of a Nation" and "Gone With The Wind" were only original at the time that they were made, as well. By your logic, we should dismiss them in favor of "Pearl Harbor" and "Armageddon."
Mr. Valenti is calling you.
Maybe (relatively) few Chinese speak English ..
.. :-)
Actually, there are more English-speaking people in China than there are in the United States!
Of course, China has a bit of a population advantage
My opinion (and I stress that this is my opinion .. if you annoy particularly sensitive FF fanboys you run the risk of having them come after you with machettes) is that Final Fantasy VII is the best of the bunch, but I haven't played FFX yet.
.. excellent music has always been a hallmark of the FF series, and pretty much all of the games have their share of it. The melodies from FF7 just happen to have stuck with me longer. The haunting theme from Cloud's dream sequences, the throbbing drumbeats at Cosmo Canyon, the whimsical tropical theme at Costa del Sol, the grandiose rendition of the theme music that is played on the World Map .. all are far above par for video games of this type.
My allegiance to FFVII is probably because it was the first FF game for the Playstation platform, and it represented a quantum leap forward in terms of technology. I remember playing through this game for the first time, watching wide-eyed in near-disbelief as the "camera" panned over such surreal sights as the floating city of Midgar, Rufus' airship, the mountains near Nibelheim, and the missile launch at Rocket Town. Sure, we take intricate FMV sequences like this for granted now, but this was 1997 and nobody had seen anything quite like it before.
I really liked the magic system (materia) in FFVII. It wasn't all that complicated, and it allowed you to experiment with spells and abilities and elementals and combine them in all sorts of fun and interesting ways. It is far superior to the absolutely dreadful "junctioning" system of FFVIII. Thankfully, Square went away from that and back to a more traditional system for FFIX. The combat system in FFVII is simple enough to get a handle on it quickly, and it works well enough to carry itself through the rest of the game (as long as you're prepared for a lot of combat!)
FFVII also has (again, IMHO) among the best music in the series. (Sound of machettes being unsheathed.) This is a subjective observation, of course
I think that FFVII's biggest selling point, however, is its replay value. All of the games (particularly the later ones) have a certain amount of "side quests" that are not necessary to complete in order to win the game, but FFVII has a lot more than any of the others. There are two completely optional characters that you can get in your party and develop (with storylines and quests of their own.) There are lots of "in-game games" that you can play, such as the attractions at the Gold Saucer. You can embark on a career of Chocobo raising with the eventual goal of raising a Gold Chocobo that will allow you to visit every corner of the planet and unearth some magic materia of unspeakable power (Knights of the Round, anyone?) You can take some time at the end of the game to try and defeat the all-powerful Ruby and Emerald Weapons. And that's just scratching the surface.
FFVII is also not without its weak points. The storyline, while easy to follow on a broad scale, is often confusing and muddled when the details are revealed. The story is not as good as the one in, say, Final Fantasy IV, but it definitely holds its own. The main character, Cloud, is maddeningly obstinate and at times you wish you could reach through the television and give him a good clean punch to the gut. In many places, the combat is far too frequent (though this is not just a complaint about FFVII!)
At any rate, that's my take; I like FFVII the best because of the nostalgia and the fond memories of how much it captivated me the first time I played through it. To a large degree, it continues to do so. The bottom line is that all of the games in this series have something to recommend them; this one just happens to be my favorite. Your mileage may vary. Please put your machettes away. Thank you.
I don't care about being "inconvenienced." What I do care about is that this is causing huge problems for operations all across the DOI. In particular, there are plenty of customers who have ordered hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars worth of digital data from our facility, which is well-protected by a uber-paranoid firewall. This is data that they now cannot access, and will most likely have to be re-processed. Critical systems have been rendered unable to talk to each other, ordering systems are down, and data dissemination has been rendered impossible. When things come back up, a lot of people are going to spend a lot of time picking up the pieces. The price tag will run into the millions of dollars.
.. you do! If this doesn't bother you, then that's fine .. but it bothers the hell out of me because this didn't have to happen.
And guess who gets to foot that bill? If you're a U.S. taxpayer, you guessed right
Folks, this is not rocket science. The easiest way to determine if the DOI is on the net or not is to try to connect to the DOI homepage itself. As of this moment (1:00 AM Central time), the entire DOI is off the net. It's not just the BIA or the agencies and sites directly related to it. It's the entire DOI. I am a DOI contractor and I can assure you that our facility (which has nothing to do with the Bureau of Indian Affairs) was most certainly yanked off the net this afternoon, and it remains off the net.
This is really causing pandemonium at our workplace. We cannot access our electronic timesheets because the server is external to our network, and as a result, I've just finished filling out my timesheet from home (because otherwise, it's not going to get done.) The silly part of it is that the facility that I work at has quite robust security, and yet we were still forced offline. This is not an "intelligent decision." This is a knee-jerk reaction that is going to end up inconveniencing a lot of people that have paid a lot of money for Earth science data. It's going to cost the government (and, as a result, you, the taxpayer) a lot of money.
By the time you read this comment, the whole issue may have been rendered moot; there was some hope that the court order might be rescinded overnight. If the order was rescinded and you are able to connect to the above links, then I'm glad (because I'll be able to do my job tomorrow.) But rest assured that the entire DOI lost network connectivity this afternoon. This is judicial idiocy, plain and simple; there is no more diplomatic way to put it.
If the article says one thing and reality reflects another, then the article is wrong. I am a USGS contractor (the USGS is part of the DOI) and we were forced to cut our Internet connection at approximately 2:30 this afternoon. We have nothing to do with the BIA. Furthermore, our operations rely very heavily on Internet connectivity (customers order products online and can retrieve them via FTP.) This is going to have a huge negative impact on our facility and our customers, and we are not even remotely related to the BIA (not to mention the fact that we have a very secure and robust firewall.)
Trust me on this one. But if you don't, try to connect to the DOI homepage if you don't believe me. By the time you read this, connectivity may be restored; we were hoping that the court order might be rescinded overnight. But rest assured that as of right now (12:56 AM Central Time) the entire Department of Interior is offline, regardless of what some article says.
Wow, you're pretty much a complete and total idiot for posting that.
I couldn't disagree more. One of the biggest problems leading up to the 9/11 attacks was failure of the imagination. Nobody had really toyed with the scenario of passenger airliners being used as missiles. Nobody had really stopped to consider that extremists could be that insane. As a result, nobody was prepared for the events of that day, and the toll (in terms of human life and monetary damages) was catastrophic.
So here we've got some people mulling over potential terrorist attacks involving biological agents. When you play these scenarios out, you have to consider the worst case, and it just so happens that the worst case would include the targeting of our nation's leaders. It isn't pleasant to think about, but if the events of 9/11 showed us anything, it's that we have to start thinking about this stuff. In short, the Secret Service cracked down on this poster because he was doing exactly the thing that the government should have been doing before 9/11. (If they had, perhaps the attacks wouldn't have happened.)
So now, even after the horrific events of September, the apparent stance of the Secret Service is that people should not be speculating on these types of things. If that is their policy, and if they are willing to stand behind it, then fine. But if something like 9/11 happens again, and if it's something that could have been prevented if we had engaged in exercises like the one in the Kuro5hin article, then the blood of the innocent will be on their hands.
You have a pointer to you-don't-know-what in your language, and you're asking me what's unsafe about it?
.. and furthermore, it would be quickly detected. Other memory errors are not as quickly detected, but tools such as Purify go a long way in fighting these battles for you.
.. the string-handling facilities in C are dreadful compared to those offered by other languages, particularly those that have a built-in string type. But your claim that the language requires developers to write unsafe code is completely without basis in fact.
.. I don't have a lot to add to the rest of your post (I think we know where we agree and where we disagree.) It is possible to write safe code in C, and it's actually quite easy if you know what you're doing. It's possible to completely screw the pooch in C, as well. But as I noted earlier, code safety is not violated exclusively by bad pointer arithmetic and the other observations that you've made about C. No amount of built-in safety is going to prevent you from implementing a shoddy algorithm or slipping in an undocumented back door. These are important issues as well .. at least as important as the tomfoolery that the underlying language allows you to get away with.
This is tenuous at best. Under very few circumstances will you be passed a void * and have "no idea" what it's pointing to. I can write a function that (for example) retrieves parameters of various type from a configuration file, and set up the function such that the first argument is a void * and the second argument is an enumeration that specifies the type of the argument to be retrieved. On the basis of that argument, I can write the retrieved value through the pointer using an appropriate cast, knowing perfectly well what the pointer is pointing to.
Now, this can obviously be abused and misused. I could accidentally specify the wrong argument type when calling this function, at which all hell could break loose. But this would be my fault, not the language's fault
You're confusing theory, where every programmer is perfect, with practice, where most programmers don't even know that undefined behaviour is a technical term, never mind its implications, and everyone makes mistakes (if they're allowed to).
No, I think my exact words were "nobody writes correct code the first time through, or any iteration thereafter."
Just looking at the use of arrays, pointers and strings in C, there are dozens of ways in which the language's method of doing things almost requires the programmer to do something potentially unsafe. There is no built-in string type, so every time someone wants to use a string, they have to mess around with low-level details like adding '\0' (and allowing space for it in the first place). How many times have you seen someone try to compare two strings in C using == instead of strcmp()?
The string handling facilities in C are well-documented and if somebody tries to compare strings with ==, it indicates that the developer has virtually no understanding of the language. This is not the kind of "oops" error that even seasoned veterans let slip by on a Monday morning. This is the kind of error that would be made by somebody who really needs to learn the language that he or she is going to be using, or perhaps choose a different career.
You're right
I've got to run off
With that, I've only one thing to add:
That's absolutely well-defined behaviour. "Undefined behaviour" is a technical term in the C standard, and means your program is allowed to do anything at that point.
No, the inclusion of a header that is not specifically addressed by the C standard most certainly does invoke undefined behavior (at least, it did in ISO 9899:1990, though I'm not sure if C99 says anything different.) I'm not sure what else the standard could reasonably do with this situation other than leaving the behavior undefined. The net effect is that it is not possible to write a strictly-conforming C program that uses nonstandard facilities, which is perfectly reasonable.
It provides potentially unsafe language features (void*, unchecked pointer arithmetic, etc.).
.. there are plenty of examples of acceptable undefined behavior, such as #including a header that is not specifically addressed by the C standard. Let me rephrase: Properly-written code does not invoke unwanted undefined behavior.
.. when you look at the current crop of high-level languages (if you consider C to be a HLL, which many do not), it is nearly impossible to beat a typical C implementation in terms of speed and compactness.
.. but I wouldn't bet on it. C, if used improperly, allows programmers to do some really stupid things .. but using this to label the language as wholesale "unsafe" is like calling a sports car unsafe because it allows a reckless driver to accelerate from 0 to 60 MPH in 4.5 seconds and slam into a streetlight pole doing 150. There's a huge difference between what a facility allows to be done with it and what a responsible user actually does with it.
What's unsafe about void pointers? You can do potentially perform bogus pointer arithmetic and dereferences with any pointer type. void pointers provide a much-needed generic pointer type that vastly simplifies the interfaces to facilities such as malloc(). It's true that the automatic type conversion between void pointers and pointers to other object types can be problematic if abused, but an explicit cast can be used to do the same thing to any two pointer-to-object types, and that is just as easily abused.
It actively encourages the use of unsafe programming practices.
I'm not sure what you mean here. C is a language, not a person. It doesn't encourage anything. C gives you the capability to shoot yourself in the foot, but it also tells you (in very specific terms) how to avoid doing so.
A language that leads to undefined behaviour if you forget to append '\0' to the end of some data you just read, or that lets you forget to leave space for the '\0' at the end of your string, is dangerous.
Languages don't lead to undefined behavior. Code does. Properly-written code doesn't invoke undefined behavior. Actually, I take that back
Ultimately, a lot of code written in C is broken, and a lot of it demonstrably wouldn't have been if it had been written in a safer language, QED.
I would submit that there is a lot of code that you wouldn't want to have written in a safer language. You wouldn't argue (at least I hope you wouldn't) that Linux or OpenBSD (again, a shining example of an extremely secure collection of C code) be rewritten in Ada. People are not going to be impressed when their already-secure operating system loses 35% of its runtime efficiency to become "super-duper" secure. You (correctly) point out that a lot of the pitfalls that await bad C code can be avoided with more authoritarian languages, but all of that safety comes at a price. You cannot implement run-time array bounds checking without negatively affecting run-time performance; this is perfectly obvious.
I would rephrase your above-quoted statement thusly: "Ultimately, a lot of code written in C is broken, and a lot of it demonstrably wouldn't have been if it had been written correctly." Now, it is a fact of life that nobody writes correct code the first time through, or any iteration thereafter. This applies to newbies as well as seasoned veterans. It is also true that bad C code can manifest itself in far worse ways than bad Ada code can. But good C code is just as safe as good Ada code. And, let's face it
Now, in this era of big RAM and big clock speeds, maybe this is less important than it used to be
C is a fundamentally unsafe language.
.. it'll be a bit more work, of course, but blaming the C language for the incompetency of some of the people that use it seems a tad unfair. It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to innoculate C code from the type of buffer overrun attacks and memory errors that have been seen in the past. Unfortunately, a lot of people learned this lesson about 10 years too late.
..
Nonsense. It's more appropriate to say "there's a lot of poorly-written C code that is fundamentally unsafe." It's true that C has some lower-level capabilities that can potentially be used in an unsafe manner. That doesn't mean that they have to be used in an unsafe manner. A well-written C program can be just as "safe" as its Ada counterpart in terms of array bounds checking and exception handling and things of that nature
Furthermore, a flawed and insecure algorithm is going to be flawed and insecure regardless of what language is used to implement it. A "safe" language like Ada might prevent you from trashing the stack and/or writing to arbitrary regions of memory, but it's not going to prevent you from implementing a mathematically weak encryption scheme, and it won't warn you if a programmer forgets to take out a debugging back door before a piece of code is released to production. You can write poor code in any language. You can write great code in any language.
Application code, and certainly high-level code where security is essential, just aren't C's strong suits.
And yet C works well enough to implement what is perhaps the world's most secure operating system (OpenBSD.) I'm not sure what you mean by "application code" (that's an awfully wide brush you're using there.) If I wanted to write, for example, a GUI application for Unix with database access, I'd most likely use C++ and Qt. However, this choice would be based on the fact that it's a lot less work to use C++ and Qt than it would be to use something like C and GTK+. Security and safety have nothing to do with it.
I can't see how even the geniuses we're talking about can start from such a broken language
C is not a broken language. A lot of code written in C is broken. When you make this distinction, you are on the road to understanding why this bias against C is completely unjustified.
As others have already pointed out, Einstein most certainly did not believe in God (particularly, not in a personal god that concerns itself with the day-to-day operation of the universe and the inhabitants thereof.) I wonder .. decades after you die, would it please you to know that people were going around intentionally spreading lies about you? If not, how do you justify doing this to Mr. Einstein? Einstein's refutation of these statements about his religious views is well known; one can only assume that those who continue to spread these falsehoods are doing so purposefully and with malicious intent.
This is a common phrase, but in reality there is no "dark side" of the moon. There is a side that is always facing the Earth, and there is a side that is always facing away from the Earth. The side that is facing away from the Earth gets just as much sunlight as the side that is facing us (we just don't see it.) What people really should say is "the far side of the moon", since it is more factually accurate.
And "None" is just, well. . , nice life. Hope Hollywood and Sony Entertainment are able to fill all the gaps in your heart; the things of man get pretty dry after a while.
Wait a minute there, boyo. You open up your post by complaining (quite reasonably, I should say) about how Christ-centric religious people tend to be, but then you conclude it by asserting that all people who hold no supernatural views have "gaps in their heart" (whatever that means.) This is a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black. While I have no problem with people who hold on to one religious view or another to placate themselves, it is a mistake for you to assume that your spiritual neediness is a common malady that affects all Mankind (it doesn't.)
Linksys wireless access point with card is great. Tested and loved...
I agree about the Linksys access point (WAP11 in my case), but from my experience I would steer clear of the Linksys PC card. It works all right, but the range of the thing is not even close to what is advertised. I have a Linksys access point and an Orinoco (the old Lucent WaveLAN) Silver PC card, and it wirelessly networks my Linux laptop great. I started out with the Linksys card and ended up doubling my range when I moved to the Orinoco.
The front page of the donation site specified that the maximum was $50, but when I went to the actual page where you entered the dollar amount, it specified that the maximum was $100. (I was able to give $100 with no problems.) Maybe there was an earlier limit of $50 that was later increased to $100, and the first page hasn't been updated yet.
Loki's whole goal is very laudable (making Windows games available natively for Linux.) However, as experience has shown, it isn't the most profitable venture in the world. Linux users are accustomed to getting their software for free, not paying for it. It therefore stands to reason that you cannot expect to make pots of money by taking software from a group of people who are used to paying for it (Windows users) and re-releasing it for those who are accustomed to downloading source tarballs (Linux users.)
/bin/ls to Windows users if we put it in a slick enough package and bought up enough ad space ("The Ultimate File Listing Tool for Windows!")
It seems to me that wealth creation could be maximized by doing the exact opposite thing: taking free games for Linux, packaging them, and then selling then to Windows users. What Windows user wouldn't purchase a copy of TuxRacer if he saw it on sale at Best Buy? XBill 2 would likely be a big hit. And think about it: the initial capital outlay is minimal (after all, the games are all free.) I'm willing to bet that we could sell
Loki's heart is in the right place, but if they want to dig themselves out of the hole that they have found themselves in, the best thing that they could possibly do is reverse their name to Ikol and start doing the exact opposite of what they're doing now.
A clonebot uses no more resources than a single legitimate client.
Legitimate clients don't change their nicks ten times a second, nor do they use TextBox/PhoEniX-style tsunamis (large amounts of text) against users and channels. Unless your clonebots joined the target channel and said "hehehe" and "LOL" every ten seconds or so, I think it's a safe assumption that they used well more than their fair share of resources. I can certainly say that in my years as an oper, I never encountered such benign clonebots.
I disagree strongly. They were more difficult, available to a smaller group of people.
Well, certainly the ability to do a distributed flood existed, but nowhere near to the extent that it exists today. The IRC "floodnets" that were the precursor to the modern DDoS didn't appear until a few years later. The modern DDoS would be an impossibility were it not for the large number of unprotected cable modem/DSL users and wide-open corporate networks, most of which didn't exist at that time.
I never did anything to harm an IRC server. Nobody did. #warez learned to fear my army of clonebots, and in fact clonebots were the only thing I ever did that upset IRCops.
You "never did anything to harm an IRC server", yet you had an "army of clonebots?" Were these magical clonebots? You know, the kind that can connect to the network without using up connections that would have otherwise been used by legitimate clients? Were they the kind of clonebots that could send nickfloods and tsunamis to #warez directly, without interacting with (or consuming the resources of) the servers?
IMHO, the DDoSers of today are the clonebotters of 6 years ago. The technology is different, but the mentality is the same. 6 years ago, people didn't have the big, fat network pipes that they've got today, and there weren't as many fools running networked, compromised boxes 24/7. 6 years ago, the DDoS attacks of today weren't technically possible. If they were possible, they would have been used.
You sound like you've outgrown the phase, which is good, but I suspect that if you were six years younger, you would be right alongside of the group that is responsible for this.
.. that global warming predictions might be correct?
.. call me an extremist, but I tend to think that the IC engine is (gasp!) not the pinnacle of Personkind's engineering prowess! We can (and will) do far better.
Let's look at this from a practical standpoint. You say there is nothing to global warming. I say there is. Let's say that we sit back and do absolutely nothing about it. If you are right and I am wrong, then we will have lost nothing. On the other hand, if I am right and you are wrong, we will have lost everything and will endure an eternity of torture and suffering, followed by probable extinction.
It seems to me that even if it is ultimately shown that global warming is a ridiculous liberal myth, it still is in our best interests to take steps to advance our skillset and develop new technologies that allow us to build cleaner factories, renewable energy sources, etc. We need to do away with the internal combustion engine
I realize that many of the opponents of global warming are conservative and old and not long for this world, and therefore not particularly concerned about it since they will not have to suffer the effects. But why do we need the threat of global warming (whether it is real or not) to "frighten" us into straightening up our act and investing in newer, more efficient, more eco-friendly technology? It seems to me that we should be doing this anyway. If everybody had the same attitude that some people display here, we'd still have coal trains belching black clouds of smoke into the air.
Try thinking outside the box for a change!
You've got taxpayer dollars being spent to study cow farts.
You've got industrial defense contractors in key Congressional districts being given billions of dollars to build aircraft carriers that the Navy doesn't even want.
And then you've got NASA, whose budget is a fraction of one percent of the total federal outlay, and that's what these "waste-watchers" complain about.
Jesus suffering fuck. Sometimes people baffle me.