It's worse. Here are the ways that I know AOL is violating RFCs for valid mail traffic:
1. Mail bound for postmaster@aol.com is not accepted.
2. They issue a 550 response before the client has a chance to issue a greeting. There are two allowed responses at that point: 554 and 220. 550 is right out.
3. They disconnect before the client issues a "QUIT" command or times out. Also bogus.
AOL is playing a game of chicken here to see how much of the net will blacklist them for breaking the RFCs. Once they smell blood in the water because not enough sites care, they can pretty much start writing their own book....
A 70% false negative rate is pretty meaningless without knowing the false positive rate as well. What percentage of your non-spam email comes from dsl ip's?
It's actually a pretty high rate of ham (as the SpamAssassin project folks call it) that comes from such addresses. My mail all originates from such an address, and I know several others for whom this is true. The flawed logic of "source x produces much spam, thus eliminating source x will make my life better" has many logical holes in it, as you point out, but that's not stopping AOL:-(
If you are dial up or home dsl you should not be talking diectly to smtp servers anyway you should be sending mail through your provider.
Sounds like a load of claptrap to me. Care to cite an RFC that suggests such a thing? How about a good network reason why email should be relayed instead of sent directly?
It's not just (as you rightly point out) not in the RFCs, it's about as far as you can get from the intent of them.
The idea behind SMTP is to make every node on the Net the master of its own communications. You can create a relay and go through it, but that's not required because such a requirement would mean that you're going to have to create a beauracracy around the designation of valid and invalid relays.
The correct way to deal with the problem is to have an identity that earns or loses respect in the global community. By default your identity is your IP address. Clearly if you have an IP that used to belong to someone else (because you got it via DHCP, your ISP handed you a CIDR block that just freed up because a spammer went out of business, or any other reason) you are going to inherit their rep, so little weight can be put on that. You can then add new layers of identity. For example, digital key verification in the SMTP protocol via TLS (I do this now).
Once your site has an identity, you can begin to earn or lose the trust of those in the community. Blacklists become trust databases were your IP or key map to 127.0.0.1-255 (a trust value) or 0 for no-match.
This would be an easy enough thing to develop, and could really help make filtering mail much easier and yet everyone who wants to can maintain a trust database, and anyone who wants to use your trust database can.
Been doing low-carb diets (two of them, one twice and one once) for over 3 years now, and I can give folks some useful facts without all of the confusing opinion that everyone wants to throw in:
1. If you simply eliminate 80-90% of the rice, other grains (and products made from them like bread), starchy roots, and sugars from your diet, you will lose weight.
2. Cheating is good. Simply put, if you do the above you pretty much need to cheat in order to maintain some balance in your diet. I recommend a glass of OJ or V8 at least once a week and a bowl of high-fiber cereal once a week (Fiber One has a good fiber/carb ratio).
3. Losing is easy, so is gaining. The problem is that you have to have an exit-plan because after a year of this diet, you may have lost 50 lbs like I did, but you're going to be sick of not eating sandwiches.;-) When you go back to a "normal" diet, you'll find you can gain the weight back very fast (I gained about 90% back)
4. The Carbohydrate Addicts diet is somewhat less effective, but does give you a major win: dinner. I started my original diet again and a doctor suggested, for reasons unrelated to weight, that I switch to the CA diet (you can find the book just about anywere, but you don't need it). The diet is simple: even more strict carb reduction with no snacks coupled with a one-hour dinner of whatever the heck you want. The book has some maintenance plans that basically leave you on the diet permanently in a way that is not very difficult live with. The way this diet works is by tricking the body's insulin-release process. By eating low carbs for 2 meals and then limiting yourself to one hour for your "reward dinner", you end up processing that dinner pretty much the same way as you would a low-carb meal.
5. The cold hard truth is that while a low-carb diet will work, excersise still can't be beat. If you get 20 contiguous, minutes or more of sweat-inducing activity in per day, at least 3 days per week, the aerobic benefit is gigantic.
I'm not one to get excited over email, but when I got a message from the EFF asking if I was "the Aaron Sherman named in an RIAA suit", I nearly dropped out of my chair.
It seemed beyond possibility that there was another Aaron Sherman who would be a target of the RIAA.
Nope, that on's a college student it turns out... heh, who knew?!
I had assumed that my trivial amount of playing around with being a caching gnutella node back in the day combined with my rants against the RIAA on Slashdot and elsewhere had lead to my being one of a list of hundreds on an RIAA reverse-class-action, but this guy seems to have been a major source of file sharing.
Personally, I don't think the case can be made that you owe the RIAA a CD for every member-copyrighted song you've ever shared times the number of people who might have had access to it (which is basically the logic of the suit as I understand it).
However, the idea that you owe the RIAA the cost of one CD for every member-copyrighted song you shared would be very defensible, even if you assert that sharing your CDs with your 100 million closest friends is legit. If you have the CD in evidence, then I'd buy that as a get-out-of-jail free (the RIAA will *not* of course, but then there's a reason that their members are dying and indies are growing), but if you borrowed from me, and then shared with someone else, that's a clear, and indefensible copyright violation.
There are a number of lists that these sites use, and gettting a complete list of those lists can be annoying. What I usually do is turn on all the options for network testing in SpamAssassin and then pump a dummy message through it with a "Received" header that shows the IP address in question as the relay. SA knows all.;-)
An interesting take on TOS agreements is AOL's new policy of imposing one on the rest of the Net by rejecting any connection to their MX servers on port 25 (incoming mail) before even negotiating far enough for the client to issue a greeting IF you are coming from an IP address that AOL considers to to be "dynamically assigned" (I have no idea how they define this, since my host is not in the MAPS DUL or any other blacklist I can find, and AOL's "tester" page refuses to tell me what they think is the problem because they want to reverse-map my IP and send a report to that domain, rather than by connecting to the IP itself or showing me the results on a Web page).
This effectively means that no broadband, dialup or other ISP customers who get an IP address when they connect will be able to send mail directly to AOL, you wil instead be forced to use your ISPs or some other willing SMTP relay which AOL considers to be worthy of peering with. No more end-to-end TLS encryption and/or verification; no more routing around overburdoned ISP mail hubs.
There is as yet no indication that I've seen one way or the other on what they're doing about DELIVERING mail to such addresses, but if you run your own mail server, be prepared to find that AOL.com no longer exists (which you may not consider "bad", exactly, and in fact I currenly have no plans to route around this particular damage other than to get my relatives to find new ISPs, even if that means going to MSN... *shudder*).
Many have made the argument that this is reasonable for AOL to do because many ISPs have TOSes that ban servers. So far, the standard retort has been 1) no ISP bans direct-to-MX transmission of mail except where it is spam 2) most ISPs don't enforce said rule (and tacitly encourage users to roll their own) 3) not ALL ISPs have such restrictive TOSes, and of course 4) that's none of AOL's business when receiving an incoming message.
For those who are interested in details, here's the almost useless blurb I get when telneting to port 25 on any random AOL MX host:
550-The IP address you are using to connect to AOL is either open to 550-the free relaying of e-mail, is serving as an open proxy, or is a 550-dynamic (residential) IP address. AOL cannot accept further e-mail 550-transactions from your server until either your server is closed to 550-free relaying/proxy, or your ISP removes your IP address from their 550-list of dynamic IP addresses. For additional information, 550-please visit http://postmaster.info.aol.com. 550 Goodbye
Yep, and what's more that redirects to "new.search.yahoo.com".
They're moving forward, but they have one hurdle to cross that will be very hard for them to get past: trust.
When I see the new Yahoo! search interface, I see the images and think, "just a few more images and slightly more complex than google's page... how long will it last?" Every time Yahoo has done ANYTHING like this, it's always mushroomed out according to the needs of marketting withing a fairly short span of time.
They'll have to convince the avergage user that bad-old-marketting-Yahoo! is gone for good before the people who use Google for that reason switch. How many people use Google for that? Dunno. Me, certainly.
If this person does infact have some relation to terrorists somewhere, which the Wired article implied, you can't expect the government to just publicly display all their evidence (while other possible guilty parties could be covering up evidence after seeing this)
Why yes, yes I can, and so should you.
The double-edged sword of the spy-game is that you can't always act on the information you have without showing your hand. That hurts, and it can be a painful decision to make (Winston Churchill once made a descision to let a town be bombed instead of letting the Germans know that we had broken their code... that must have been terribly painful, but he HAD to make that call). What you're asking for is, given that reality of espionage, we should make an exception to our Constitution.
Problem is, that that's the keystone of this particular little document. Without due process, the rule of law is the rule of whoever locks up their opponents fast enough.
This is not just one man. This is PRECIDENT. How would you like to set it, given that one day, YOU might have to deal with the result?
However, also consider that while a developer might consider a certain function to be unfinished, the project as a whole will make a call about when to release based on testing and qualitative judgement about the readiness of the software.
The exact same is true for an operating system. Solaris ships with programs that could perhaps have used more work. Obviously this is the same for Microsoft and it's true for Linux and BSD as well. When a particular distribution decides to include a program or project, it's because they feel that it has reached a point where they can support it sufficiently. You then have to decide how much you feel that vendor can support what they've released, and your judgement shouldn't really have anything to do with how "finished" you think any one piece is.
I don't think any of us were behind Kevin because he was an American per se. I was behind Kevin because he was being treated unfairly in a way that I could see myself being treated one day.
This guy is even easier to identify with because there isn't even any presented evidence of his (lack of) guilt. He might well be Bin Laden's mole inside Intel, making 387 co-processors for embedded systems that round wrong to thwart US technology, but we'd never know, because we're not allowed to know.
This idea that authorities can throw you in lockup forever, simply on the basis of a suspicion (with no evidence) of guilt is so blatently unconstitutional that I would be stunned if the ACLU does not sue on his behalf.
This is exactly the kind of case that they have been waiting for since the PATRIOT act was passed.
Every time open source software gains new ground (first as toolsets for proprietary OSes, then as geek-toy-desktop, then as hidden services servers, then as public services servers now on the desktop) I keep hearing people say that the number of applications and the number of choices are bad things.
This is hooey.
It will continue to be hooey as open source software continues to gain ground in every sector of software usage.
The useless assertion that there's somehow a need to consolidate because Microsoft is coming up behind us with the Palladium-bat is even more silly than most arguments I hear.
The correct response to Paladium is to give large gobs of money to the EFF and then get active to make sure that no matter how hard MS and various other parties push DRM, it's never required by law.
Laws can kill OSS (well, at least commercial OSS), and if that happens, it will have nothing to do with Microsoft's assertion that forking is "unhealthy".
I really expect to see an article like this coming out of Microsoft, not Freshmeat. For shame.
Don't assume you're safe in 2004. If they can demonstrate that they were doing research into infringement since before the patent expired, I suspect they can press a case against anyone who did not pay them for back royaltees up to when it expired.
This means that you shoudl not be USING the patented technology UNTIL the patent expires.
Does anyone know EXACTLY what's covered? JPEG is huge and has many optional peices. If someone tells me what bits are patented I will start looking at public code to see what can be changed to preserve functionality while still providing JPEG access.
I just want to give a shout out (look at the older geek trying out the lingo...) to FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, Linux, and all of the other free OSen of lesser popularity and even completion (yay GNU/Hurd)!
It's not said often enough (and certainly not by OS bigots like me) that this phenomenon of open source / free software is one of the brigtest examples of the human drive to form communities based on respect and contribution.
I wrote a couple articles for Dæmon News a while back on the topic of BSD and Linux, and they've grown dated. Perhaps it's time to write a Linux-free article about BSD. There's some interesting stuff that I see going on from angles like Perl and GNOME where these projects have become far more *BSD-aware in recent years (more so than just having a stable port to the platform), and I'm wondering if the future of free operating systems is beginning to shift back to the BSDs (as it was when I first started using UNIX and UNIX-like systems in the late 80s).
Good job on the release, folks!. May your bugs be few and your releases often.
PS: Hmmm, as I just said on the SpamAssassin mailing list, perhaps it's time I stop posting *right* after my first coffee of the morning;-)
Why not go after the ones distributing the illegal media, instead of someone who just made a tool inteded for legal use
Because piracy doesn't scare Hollywood/the record industry. Piracy is a known quantity, and is figured in as a business risk.
The prospect of legitimate users circumventing every new scheme for boosting revenue through restricted use of media is terrifying to these people! The idea that a new technology offers the chance to essentially print money, and then some f'r'ner comes by and makes it possible for the marks to take back control.... That's worthy of massive action, because the rewards if they win are far more massive than stopping piracy (which is not a barrier to *any* business model, just a small drain on revenue which would probably never have been realized anyway).
Pretty much, yes. There are some finer points you're not summing up, but yes, you've got it.
What that ammounts to is the damand that in order to manage a Microsoft server, you must employ a Microsoft client. This is a clear case of a product in two wildly different market segments (desktop and server) which is forcing adoption of one (actually forcing you not to swtich off of one) in order to use the other.
Why pay extra $$$ for a disc with a bunch of demo software?
You don't. From the Red Hat Site:
Comes with everything in Red Hat Linux 9 plus extended documentation, multimedia applications CD, 60 days phone and web support, and a 2 month Basic Subscription to Red Hat Network. Ideal for first time Linux users and experts who want to expand their Linux knowledge.
So you're paying for extra support really. The extra dead trees and the demo CD are fluff that you can get if you have a printer and a CD burner anyway.
True, this is an exception. However, while I was wrong, my response was not in that the original poster was.... head... spinning.
What I meant to say is that the orignal claim that you could not go copying Red Hat 9 CDs because all of the software was not of the sort that you could just go copying around is simply not true. Red Hat 9 is free in that sense. It's not free in the sense that OSI requires.
Interesting that Red Hat is not exactly open source (when installed in full) because of software I've been building from freely downloaded source for years.... heh.
But you are probably thinking of the Office and Multimedia Applications CD which is not part of Red Hat Linux 9, but rather an add-on 7th or 8th disk included with Red hat Linux 9 Professional and you will find that the licensing on all of that software includes specific language that allows for duplication of the Red Hat Linux 9 Professional ISOs. These packages are also not required (in fact, I don't even think they're referenced) by the base installation of the software.
What I don't understand is how there can be such wild misinformation as there has been about Red Hat.
This move has the obvious intent of invoking one of the more useful properties of the Internet: it interprets restraint (I'm generalizing the concept of censorship, which is usually what is cited in this particular quote) as damage and routes around it. Red Hat was spending more and more money per release on providing ISO downloads. What to do? Stop providing a download for the ISOs and let the community create a better solution. If they didn't think the community would do so, they certainly would not be in the free software business (I say free software only because Red Hat as a company pre-dates other terms for this business model, not be cause "open source" would not have applied equally well).
You missed the point of using an OO design model entirely. In fact, if these are the reasons you're using OO methodologies (much less language tools), you should probably stop. You cite:
Portable code [...] reuse components -- Beyond the fact that the word "portable" is mis-used here, you're invoking the myth of OO reuse. Far better men (and women) than I have refuted this point, but I'll just summarize by saying that code reuse is not a feature of OO programming. It's a feature of modularity and quality of design. It's also very, very rare outside of library and toolkit design where it's always been, before and after the OO craze.
Once you've got your objects [...] plug em in -- That's called modularity. Not an OO feature, but a design feature.
Uhm, do I really have to explain the benefits of object oriented programming? -- No, they're well understood... er, or so I thought...
So what are they?
They're the building-blocks of OO, and the benefit is the flexibility that those building blocks give you. If you're a good programmer who writes procedural code, you'll usually find these features seeping into your programs anyway. Languages with OO features just make it easier to apply them. They are polymorphism (you know how to deal with a "car", so you don't have to read the manual to start up a "compact car"), inheritance (a "Pinto" is a "compact car" with some special differences like its own version of the "react to rear-impact" event) and encapsulation (a "car" has a "dashboard", a complex object with behaviors of its own). IMHO, polymorphism is the most powerful and valuable of these, though many will focus on inheritance, which is deeply tied to polymorphism anyway, so YMMV.
Why do you argue the futility that this is for you.
I do no such thing, thank you very much!
However, I take your point, and I'll stop. Thanks for having the discussion with me, and I hope that as you learn more about programming languages, you do in fact develop a compiler that can do what you say is possible.
If you're interested in learning more about this topic, I suggest that you look up regular expressions. Once you really understand REs and FAs in general, you will begin to see where the assertion that you can optimally (or even remotely near-optimally) translate a symbol set with high abstraction into a symbol set with low abstraction is without any sort of logical merit unless the symbol-set you are using is an FA.
Here are some books you might want to peruse while you're at it:
Hopcroft, J.E. & Ullman, J.D. (1979). Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation. Addison-Wesley. Hopcroft, J.E. & Ullman, J.D. (1974). The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms. Addison-Wesley. Conway, J.H. (1971). Regular Algebra and Finite Machines. Chapman and Hall. Sudkamp, T.A. (1988). Languages and Machines. Addison-Wesley.
Once you've got those under your belt, of course, you'll want to move on to the theory behind parsing, symbol-translation and optimization. Again, good luck and I hope that one day you prove me wrong. It would truly be a wonderful day for computer science!
I hear what you're saying. TRUST ME, I'VE BEEN THERE. IT SOUNDS STUPID. IT'S ALSO TRUE.
I would have said all the same things you're saying. The fact of the matter is that you actually cannot (reasonably) evaluate all possible paths of code execution. You can take a good running start at it, and you can come up with some very good estimations, but ultimately you have to trade time for generated code quality if you want to compile code in a reasonable period of time (FSVO reasonable). You'll find yourself pruning code-execution trees with extreme prejudice, and that's just the way that it goes.
Compiler writing is, perhaps the only area of CS left where absolutely everyone who does it gets exposed immediately to the rich complexity of CS. It's just the coolest thing ever, but at the same time one of the most frustratingly non-intuitive. Just getting your brain around LALR is pretty hard, and that's the easy stuff!
I wasn't kidding when I said, go write it. If you do manage to write a Java compiler which can compile down (even very close) to the equivalent C code, I will personally sing your praises. Java's a bad example actually, because it's so close to C. You will spend a fair while getting past the bits that are the same, and then you'll start to hit the places (like string handling and the OO model) where casual Java code and casual C code (e.g. not over-hand-optimized) will have radically different performance. That's the trade-off of convinience.
DO NOT TAKE MY WORD FOR THIS. TRY TO WRITE IT YOURSELF.
On to your specifics:
You say that you can see how a function will be called. Ok, so you start looking and you see someone calling sum in this perfectly reasonable, non-pathalogical way:
sub expenses {
return sum(vendor_costs(@_), license_fees(@_)); }
Hmm, ok so sum might take some simple parameters that will never have to be converted to numbers from strings. All you have to do is look at vendor_costs and license_fees and see what they can return. Sadly, they have a number of dependencies as well, and those dependancies can affect the types being moved around.
Now, here's the part that you miss in thinking about this as a simple problem: you're doing all of this chasing around of types just to figure out if you need to convert incoming parameters of one function from strings to numbers! What do you do when you're dealing with that problem repeated over and over for every line of input code and you don't just care about types, but what sort (if any) exception handling to apply, etc, etc. You're going to have to build a data-flow model internally (ah, graph theory!) and then you have to think very hard about what you are willing to chase down and what's too much work.
This doesn't sound right, of course, because there's only so much code for even the largest project, and in most cases, it's easy to fit it all in memory. It seems like you should be trivial to "understand" it. The problem is that it's not. Even a compiler that can translate it into another form or an interpreter or hardwre that can execute it doesn't "understand" it, because understanding it is hard (I mean that mathematically).
Good luck, and I hope you come up with the better Java compiler. I really do!
Feel free to go write a compiler that can compile any high-level language down to any lower level language (e.g. Python to assembly, Java to C, etc) with even the degree of performance that a moderately good programmer would have gotten out of said lower level language.
Hint: your next step is a patent, followed by making a metric ton of money followed by retirement.
Please, go try. I know it's not intuitively obvious. I know it seems wrong. Just go try to do it.
The really cool part of your compiler is that it will probably count as strong AI, so you'll have solved that problem while you're at it.
Here's an example in Perl:
sub sum {
my $total = 0;
foreach my $item (@_) {
$total += $item;
}
return $total; }
That's about as simple an example as you could ask for, but now you can begin to see the difficulty. Here's a version in C:
int sum(int *items, size_t len) {
int total = 0;
int i;
if (!items) return 0;
for(i=0;i<len;i++) {
total += items[i];
}
return total; }
Except that that doesn't do the same thing as the Perl code, it just does what *I intended* for the Perl code to do! The Perl code, for example, could have been called with an array of strings, which Perl would gladly turn into numbers for me. A C programmer never would have built that into a simple sum function, but it was the easiest and most obvious (arguably only) way to do it in Perl. So, now you see that it's not about compiling down to "optimized" code, but compiling down to code that does what you *would have done* in a lower level language. Think on that for a bit, and then come back and tell me that it's easy.
Better yet just show me the compiler, and I'll see what I can do about getting a million dollars to buy it from you.;-)
The problem with using VNC to access Windows is that it violates your EULA. That's right, Microsoft has denied access to the competion through their EULA. Go read it some time. It's like Anti-Trust Law 101.
Not to mention the fact that one cannot "own" stock options. One can own stock, and one can have the option to buy stock (and technically one can be "a party to" a stock option agreement). However, one cannot "own" an option except in the derivatives markets, and that's a whole other breed of beast.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worse. Here are the ways that I know AOL is violating RFCs for valid mail traffic:
1. Mail bound for postmaster@aol.com is not accepted.
2. They issue a 550 response before the client has a chance to issue a greeting. There are two allowed responses at that point: 554 and 220. 550 is right out.
3. They disconnect before the client issues a "QUIT" command or times out. Also bogus.
AOL is playing a game of chicken here to see how much of the net will blacklist them for breaking the RFCs. Once they smell blood in the water because not enough sites care, they can pretty much start writing their own book....
A 70% false negative rate is pretty meaningless without knowing the false positive rate as well.
:-(
What percentage of your non-spam email comes from dsl ip's?
It's actually a pretty high rate of ham (as the SpamAssassin project folks call it) that comes from such addresses. My mail all originates from such an address, and I know several others for whom this is true. The flawed logic of "source x produces much spam, thus eliminating source x will make my life better" has many logical holes in it, as you point out, but that's not stopping AOL
If you are dial up or home dsl you should not be talking diectly to smtp servers anyway you should be sending mail through your provider.
Sounds like a load of claptrap to me.
Care to cite an RFC that suggests such a thing?
How about a good network reason why email should be relayed instead of sent directly?
It's not just (as you rightly point out) not in the RFCs, it's about as far as you can get from the intent of them.
The idea behind SMTP is to make every node on the Net the master of its own communications. You can create a relay and go through it, but that's not required because such a requirement would mean that you're going to have to create a beauracracy around the designation of valid and invalid relays.
The correct way to deal with the problem is to have an identity that earns or loses respect in the global community. By default your identity is your IP address. Clearly if you have an IP that used to belong to someone else (because you got it via DHCP, your ISP handed you a CIDR block that just freed up because a spammer went out of business, or any other reason) you are going to inherit their rep, so little weight can be put on that. You can then add new layers of identity. For example, digital key verification in the SMTP protocol via TLS (I do this now).
Once your site has an identity, you can begin to earn or lose the trust of those in the community. Blacklists become trust databases were your IP or key map to 127.0.0.1-255 (a trust value) or 0 for no-match.
This would be an easy enough thing to develop, and could really help make filtering mail much easier and yet everyone who wants to can maintain a trust database, and anyone who wants to use your trust database can.
What could be better!
Been doing low-carb diets (two of them, one twice and one once) for over 3 years now, and I can give folks some useful facts without all of the confusing opinion that everyone wants to throw in:
;-) When you go back to a "normal" diet, you'll find you can gain the weight back very fast (I gained about 90% back)
1. If you simply eliminate 80-90% of the rice, other grains (and products made from them like bread), starchy roots, and sugars from your diet, you will lose weight.
2. Cheating is good. Simply put, if you do the above you pretty much need to cheat in order to maintain some balance in your diet. I recommend a glass of OJ or V8 at least once a week and a bowl of high-fiber cereal once a week (Fiber One has a good fiber/carb ratio).
3. Losing is easy, so is gaining. The problem is that you have to have an exit-plan because after a year of this diet, you may have lost 50 lbs like I did, but you're going to be sick of not eating sandwiches.
4. The Carbohydrate Addicts diet is somewhat less effective, but does give you a major win: dinner.
I started my original diet again and a doctor suggested, for reasons unrelated to weight, that I switch to the CA diet (you can find the book just about anywere, but you don't need it). The diet is simple: even more strict carb reduction with no snacks coupled with a one-hour dinner of whatever the heck you want. The book has some maintenance plans that basically leave you on the diet permanently in a way that is not very difficult live with. The way this diet works is by tricking the body's insulin-release process. By eating low carbs for 2 meals and then limiting yourself to one hour for your "reward dinner", you end up processing that dinner pretty much the same way as you would a low-carb meal.
5. The cold hard truth is that while a low-carb diet will work, excersise still can't be beat. If you get 20 contiguous, minutes or more of sweat-inducing activity in per day, at least 3 days per week, the aerobic benefit is gigantic.
Good luck all!
I'm not one to get excited over email, but when I got a message from the EFF asking if I was "the Aaron Sherman named in an RIAA suit", I nearly dropped out of my chair.
It seemed beyond possibility that there was another Aaron Sherman who would be a target of the RIAA.
Nope, that on's a college student it turns out... heh, who knew?!
I had assumed that my trivial amount of playing around with being a caching gnutella node back in the day combined with my rants against the RIAA on Slashdot and elsewhere had lead to my being one of a list of hundreds on an RIAA reverse-class-action, but this guy seems to have been a major source of file sharing.
Personally, I don't think the case can be made that you owe the RIAA a CD for every member-copyrighted song you've ever shared times the number of people who might have had access to it (which is basically the logic of the suit as I understand it).
However, the idea that you owe the RIAA the cost of one CD for every member-copyrighted song you shared would be very defensible, even if you assert that sharing your CDs with your 100 million closest friends is legit. If you have the CD in evidence, then I'd buy that as a get-out-of-jail free (the RIAA will *not* of course, but then there's a reason that their members are dying and indies are growing), but if you borrowed from me, and then shared with someone else, that's a clear, and indefensible copyright violation.
There are a number of lists that these sites use, and gettting a complete list of those lists can be annoying. What I usually do is turn on all the options for network testing in SpamAssassin and then pump a dummy message through it with a "Received" header that shows the IP address in question as the relay. SA knows all. ;-)
This effectively means that no broadband, dialup or other ISP customers who get an IP address when they connect will be able to send mail directly to AOL, you wil instead be forced to use your ISPs or some other willing SMTP relay which AOL considers to be worthy of peering with. No more end-to-end TLS encryption and/or verification; no more routing around overburdoned ISP mail hubs.
There is as yet no indication that I've seen one way or the other on what they're doing about DELIVERING mail to such addresses, but if you run your own mail server, be prepared to find that AOL.com no longer exists (which you may not consider "bad", exactly, and in fact I currenly have no plans to route around this particular damage other than to get my relatives to find new ISPs, even if that means going to MSN... *shudder*).
Many have made the argument that this is reasonable for AOL to do because many ISPs have TOSes that ban servers. So far, the standard retort has been 1) no ISP bans direct-to-MX transmission of mail except where it is spam 2) most ISPs don't enforce said rule (and tacitly encourage users to roll their own) 3) not ALL ISPs have such restrictive TOSes, and of course 4) that's none of AOL's business when receiving an incoming message.
For those who are interested in details, here's the almost useless blurb I get when telneting to port 25 on any random AOL MX host:Good luck!
Yep, and what's more that redirects to "new.search.yahoo.com".
They're moving forward, but they have one hurdle to cross that will be very hard for them to get past: trust.
When I see the new Yahoo! search interface, I see the images and think, "just a few more images and slightly more complex than google's page... how long will it last?" Every time Yahoo has done ANYTHING like this, it's always mushroomed out according to the needs of marketting withing a fairly short span of time.
They'll have to convince the avergage user that bad-old-marketting-Yahoo! is gone for good before the people who use Google for that reason switch. How many people use Google for that? Dunno. Me, certainly.
If this person does infact have some relation to terrorists somewhere, which the Wired article implied, you can't expect the government to just publicly display all their evidence (while other possible guilty parties could be covering up evidence after seeing this)
Why yes, yes I can, and so should you.
The double-edged sword of the spy-game is that you can't always act on the information you have without showing your hand. That hurts, and it can be a painful decision to make (Winston Churchill once made a descision to let a town be bombed instead of letting the Germans know that we had broken their code... that must have been terribly painful, but he HAD to make that call). What you're asking for is, given that reality of espionage, we should make an exception to our Constitution.
Problem is, that that's the keystone of this particular little document. Without due process, the rule of law is the rule of whoever locks up their opponents fast enough.
This is not just one man. This is PRECIDENT. How would you like to set it, given that one day, YOU might have to deal with the result?
Exectly.
However, also consider that while a developer might consider a certain function to be unfinished, the project as a whole will make a call about when to release based on testing and qualitative judgement about the readiness of the software.
The exact same is true for an operating system. Solaris ships with programs that could perhaps have used more work. Obviously this is the same for Microsoft and it's true for Linux and BSD as well. When a particular distribution decides to include a program or project, it's because they feel that it has reached a point where they can support it sufficiently. You then have to decide how much you feel that vendor can support what they've released, and your judgement shouldn't really have anything to do with how "finished" you think any one piece is.
I don't think any of us were behind Kevin because he was an American per se. I was behind Kevin because he was being treated unfairly in a way that I could see myself being treated one day.
This guy is even easier to identify with because there isn't even any presented evidence of his (lack of) guilt. He might well be Bin Laden's mole inside Intel, making 387 co-processors for embedded systems that round wrong to thwart US technology, but we'd never know, because we're not allowed to know.
This idea that authorities can throw you in lockup forever, simply on the basis of a suspicion (with no evidence) of guilt is so blatently unconstitutional that I would be stunned if the ACLU does not sue on his behalf.
This is exactly the kind of case that they have been waiting for since the PATRIOT act was passed.
Every time open source software gains new ground (first as toolsets for proprietary OSes, then as geek-toy-desktop, then as hidden services servers, then as public services servers now on the desktop) I keep hearing people say that the number of applications and the number of choices are bad things.
This is hooey.
It will continue to be hooey as open source software continues to gain ground in every sector of software usage.
The useless assertion that there's somehow a need to consolidate because Microsoft is coming up behind us with the Palladium-bat is even more silly than most arguments I hear.
The correct response to Paladium is to give large gobs of money to the EFF and then get active to make sure that no matter how hard MS and various other parties push DRM, it's never required by law.
Laws can kill OSS (well, at least commercial OSS), and if that happens, it will have nothing to do with Microsoft's assertion that forking is "unhealthy".
I really expect to see an article like this coming out of Microsoft, not Freshmeat. For shame.
Don't assume you're safe in 2004. If they can demonstrate that they were doing research into infringement since before the patent expired, I suspect they can press a case against anyone who did not pay them for back royaltees up to when it expired.
This means that you shoudl not be USING the patented technology UNTIL the patent expires.
Does anyone know EXACTLY what's covered? JPEG is huge and has many optional peices. If someone tells me what bits are patented I will start looking at public code to see what can be changed to preserve functionality while still providing JPEG access.
I just want to give a shout out (look at the older geek trying out the lingo...) to FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, Linux, and all of the other free OSen of lesser popularity and even completion (yay GNU/Hurd)!
;-)
It's not said often enough (and certainly not by OS bigots like me) that this phenomenon of open source / free software is one of the brigtest examples of the human drive to form communities based on respect and contribution.
I wrote a couple articles for Dæmon News a while back on the topic of BSD and Linux, and they've grown dated. Perhaps it's time to write a Linux-free article about BSD. There's some interesting stuff that I see going on from angles like Perl and GNOME where these projects have become far more *BSD-aware in recent years (more so than just having a stable port to the platform), and I'm wondering if the future of free operating systems is beginning to shift back to the BSDs (as it was when I first started using UNIX and UNIX-like systems in the late 80s).
Good job on the release, folks!. May your bugs be few and your releases often.
PS: Hmmm, as I just said on the SpamAssassin mailing list, perhaps it's time I stop posting *right* after my first coffee of the morning
Why not go after the ones distributing the illegal media, instead of someone who just made a tool inteded for legal use
Because piracy doesn't scare Hollywood/the record industry. Piracy is a known quantity, and is figured in as a business risk.
The prospect of legitimate users circumventing every new scheme for boosting revenue through restricted use of media is terrifying to these people! The idea that a new technology offers the chance to essentially print money, and then some f'r'ner comes by and makes it possible for the marks to take back control.... That's worthy of massive action, because the rewards if they win are far more massive than stopping piracy (which is not a barrier to *any* business model, just a small drain on revenue which would probably never have been realized anyway).
Pretty much, yes. There are some finer points you're not summing up, but yes, you've got it.
What that ammounts to is the damand that in order to manage a Microsoft server, you must employ a Microsoft client. This is a clear case of a product in two wildly different market segments (desktop and server) which is forcing adoption of one (actually forcing you not to swtich off of one) in order to use the other.
Bastards. Dirty, rat bastards.
You don't. From the Red Hat Site:So you're paying for extra support really. The extra dead trees and the demo CD are fluff that you can get if you have a printer and a CD burner anyway.
True, this is an exception. However, while I was wrong, my response was not in that the original poster was.... head ... spinning.
What I meant to say is that the orignal claim that you could not go copying Red Hat 9 CDs because all of the software was not of the sort that you could just go copying around is simply not true. Red Hat 9 is free in that sense. It's not free in the sense that OSI requires.
Interesting that Red Hat is not exactly open source (when installed in full) because of software I've been building from freely downloaded source for years.... heh.
Good catch.
Check out the list of packages included with Red Hat Linux 9. You'll find exactly zero non-free software. There is one file (the README, perhaps? It's been a while) that states that while you have the right to copy it (the file), you do not have the right to modify it (the file). If you have a problem with that, dump the GPL now, because the GPL (the document itself) has the same proviso as does the BSD license. FreeBSD even has a whole document devoted to how various degrees of restrictive licensing interact in the ports system.
But you are probably thinking of the Office and Multimedia Applications CD which is not part of Red Hat Linux 9, but rather an add-on 7th or 8th disk included with Red hat Linux 9 Professional and you will find that the licensing on all of that software includes specific language that allows for duplication of the Red Hat Linux 9 Professional ISOs. These packages are also not required (in fact, I don't even think they're referenced) by the base installation of the software.
What I don't understand is how there can be such wild misinformation as there has been about Red Hat.
This move has the obvious intent of invoking one of the more useful properties of the Internet: it interprets restraint (I'm generalizing the concept of censorship, which is usually what is cited in this particular quote) as damage and routes around it. Red Hat was spending more and more money per release on providing ISO downloads. What to do? Stop providing a download for the ISOs and let the community create a better solution. If they didn't think the community would do so, they certainly would not be in the free software business (I say free software only because Red Hat as a company pre-dates other terms for this business model, not be cause "open source" would not have applied equally well).
You cite:
- Portable code [...] reuse components -- Beyond the fact that the word "portable" is mis-used here, you're invoking the myth of OO reuse. Far better men (and women) than I have refuted this point, but I'll just summarize by saying that code reuse is not a feature of OO programming. It's a feature of modularity and quality of design. It's also very, very rare outside of library and toolkit design where it's always been, before and after the OO craze.
- Once you've got your objects [...] plug em in -- That's called modularity. Not an OO feature, but a design feature.
- Uhm, do I really have to explain the benefits of object oriented programming? -- No, they're well understood... er, or so I thought...
So what are they?They're the building-blocks of OO, and the benefit is the flexibility that those building blocks give you. If you're a good programmer who writes procedural code, you'll usually find these features seeping into your programs anyway. Languages with OO features just make it easier to apply them. They are polymorphism (you know how to deal with a "car", so you don't have to read the manual to start up a "compact car"), inheritance (a "Pinto" is a "compact car" with some special differences like its own version of the "react to rear-impact" event) and encapsulation (a "car" has a "dashboard", a complex object with behaviors of its own). IMHO, polymorphism is the most powerful and valuable of these, though many will focus on inheritance, which is deeply tied to polymorphism anyway, so YMMV.
I do no such thing, thank you very much!
However, I take your point, and I'll stop. Thanks for having the discussion with me, and I hope that as you learn more about programming languages, you do in fact develop a compiler that can do what you say is possible.
If you're interested in learning more about this topic, I suggest that you look up regular expressions. Once you really understand REs and FAs in general, you will begin to see where the assertion that you can optimally (or even remotely near-optimally) translate a symbol set with high abstraction into a symbol set with low abstraction is without any sort of logical merit unless the symbol-set you are using is an FA.
Here are some books you might want to peruse while you're at it:Once you've got those under your belt, of course, you'll want to move on to the theory behind parsing, symbol-translation and optimization. Again, good luck and I hope that one day you prove me wrong. It would truly be a wonderful day for computer science!
I would have said all the same things you're saying. The fact of the matter is that you actually cannot (reasonably) evaluate all possible paths of code execution. You can take a good running start at it, and you can come up with some very good estimations, but ultimately you have to trade time for generated code quality if you want to compile code in a reasonable period of time (FSVO reasonable). You'll find yourself pruning code-execution trees with extreme prejudice, and that's just the way that it goes.
Compiler writing is, perhaps the only area of CS left where absolutely everyone who does it gets exposed immediately to the rich complexity of CS. It's just the coolest thing ever, but at the same time one of the most frustratingly non-intuitive. Just getting your brain around LALR is pretty hard, and that's the easy stuff!
I wasn't kidding when I said, go write it. If you do manage to write a Java compiler which can compile down (even very close) to the equivalent C code, I will personally sing your praises. Java's a bad example actually, because it's so close to C. You will spend a fair while getting past the bits that are the same, and then you'll start to hit the places (like string handling and the OO model) where casual Java code and casual C code (e.g. not over-hand-optimized) will have radically different performance. That's the trade-off of convinience.
DO NOT TAKE MY WORD FOR THIS. TRY TO WRITE IT YOURSELF.
On to your specifics:
You say that you can see how a function will be called. Ok, so you start looking and you see someone calling sum in this perfectly reasonable, non-pathalogical way:Hmm, ok so sum might take some simple parameters that will never have to be converted to numbers from strings. All you have to do is look at vendor_costs and license_fees and see what they can return. Sadly, they have a number of dependencies as well, and those dependancies can affect the types being moved around.
Now, here's the part that you miss in thinking about this as a simple problem: you're doing all of this chasing around of types just to figure out if you need to convert incoming parameters of one function from strings to numbers! What do you do when you're dealing with that problem repeated over and over for every line of input code and you don't just care about types, but what sort (if any) exception handling to apply, etc, etc. You're going to have to build a data-flow model internally (ah, graph theory!) and then you have to think very hard about what you are willing to chase down and what's too much work.
This doesn't sound right, of course, because there's only so much code for even the largest project, and in most cases, it's easy to fit it all in memory. It seems like you should be trivial to "understand" it. The problem is that it's not. Even a compiler that can translate it into another form or an interpreter or hardwre that can execute it doesn't "understand" it, because understanding it is hard (I mean that mathematically).
Good luck, and I hope you come up with the better Java compiler. I really do!
And many of them now use SA. Q.E.D.
Hint: your next step is a patent, followed by making a metric ton of money followed by retirement.
Please, go try. I know it's not intuitively obvious. I know it seems wrong. Just go try to do it.
The really cool part of your compiler is that it will probably count as strong AI, so you'll have solved that problem while you're at it.
Here's an example in Perl:That's about as simple an example as you could ask for, but now you can begin to see the difficulty. Here's a version in C:Except that that doesn't do the same thing as the Perl code, it just does what *I intended* for the Perl code to do! The Perl code, for example, could have been called with an array of strings, which Perl would gladly turn into numbers for me. A C programmer never would have built that into a simple sum function, but it was the easiest and most obvious (arguably only) way to do it in Perl. So, now you see that it's not about compiling down to "optimized" code, but compiling down to code that does what you *would have done* in a lower level language. Think on that for a bit, and then come back and tell me that it's easy.
Better yet just show me the compiler, and I'll see what I can do about getting a million dollars to buy it from you.
The problem with using VNC to access Windows is that it violates your EULA. That's right, Microsoft has denied access to the competion through their EULA. Go read it some time. It's like Anti-Trust Law 101.
Not to mention the fact that one cannot "own" stock options. One can own stock, and one can have the option to buy stock (and technically one can be "a party to" a stock option agreement). However, one cannot "own" an option except in the derivatives markets, and that's a whole other breed of beast.