The US won't be able to stop it for two reasons: 1) you can't stop shit like that, and 2) the US will be too busy taking 50,000 casualties in North Korea after Bush gets the war going there..
If the US gets into a war with North Korea it's unlikely to be started by the US. Whatever your opinion of the current US administration they arn't stupid enough to attack a country which can fight back.
Speaking of which, doesn't establishing a Bill of Rights seem like a little more pressing of an issue in a recently-toppled government than copyright protections?
The only rights the Iraqis are likely to be getting are those the occupying forces and their approved "Iraqi leaders" want them to have.
There is - it's called PGP. SMTP is only intended to transport mail, not to authenticate it. It's the client's job to determine if it should be accepted.
Mass use of such encryption would certainly make things harder for spammers. Since it would stop them being able to easily send one message to lots of recipients. Which is really what is at the heart of the problem.
The basic problem is that many SMTP implimentations supported third party relaying. If would be a lot more difficult for send spam if the only way of doing it was to perform DNS lookups and make a TCP connection for every recipient. As opposed to being able to send a list of recipients and the body of a message to someone elses relay. However what really makes things bad is the amount of software now out there which requires a third party relay to work at all. Combined some anti-spam schemes to force use of third party relays, even on people running software which dosn't need them. The biggest irony is that there is no requirement to support third party relaying at all in any of the relevent RFCs.
Sending email through my ISPs relay has several important disadvantages. First and foremost, I cannot see whether the mail was already delivered to the recipient's SMTP server or whether it still is rotting in my ISP's queue. Also, my ISP might have a disk crash and lose my mail in his queue.
You also have no idea how big a queue your ISP's third party relay or if someone has just uploaded some spam to that relay. Even if an ISP restricts their relay to the IPs of their customers this isn't much good unless they only allow access after verifying the identity of every customer
This danger is completely eliminated if I send my emails directly. And why wouldn't I? It is faster and my ISP has less cost to burden and consequently less money to charge me.
The only situation where using a third party relay does help is sending the same email to lots of people... The really interesting thing is that the SMTP spec dosn't require any support for third party relays.
Surprisingly, companies don't want you using freeware, whose 'EULA's' usually consist of 'we are not responsible blah blah blah' because if said freeware were to fuck up and cause the company problems they would have no comeback against anyone.
Exactly like very-expensive-ware... Thus this argument dosn't appear to hold water.
I think having to give away your software for free would appear pretty malicious to businesses.
Only if the business is proprietary software. The vast majority of businesses are involved in completly different things.
From their point of view, the virus analogy is a good one: don't touch GPL code if you want to keep your software proprietary.
The most common use of software in business is as a tool, even part of the infrastructure required to operate business. Here proprietary software is a positive menace to your business. Not infrequently a business, which can afford to, will ensure that they have multiple suppliers, power and communication supplied by more than one utility. To avoid the risk of disruption due to the failure of an outside party. Using proprietary software is the complete opposite of this.
I.E. -> You are buying it from $retailer, which technically is a transfer of license. So you actually can not transfer the license to anyone else after you purchase the software.
This still dosn't work, unless the retailer bought directly from Microsoft. If they sell "name-brands" then this self evidently isn't the case.
No, it says if you modify, copy, or distribute it you must follow these rules. I'd like to see you run software without modifying or copying it.
Because the GPL is only concerned with distributing it to a third party. Which is an unambiguious definition of "distribute". Unlike the proprietary software industry which has tried, succesfully, to redefine "copy" to include using it. Anyone who tried to argue that you needed permission to read a book, because your eyes created copies or infomation might be transfered between nurones would be laughed at. There is no way a book publisher could get away with attaching a per reader fee, together with a per listener fee, to a book. But try the same thing with software suddenly judges and legislators think the argument makes some sort of sense. Effectivly an EULA is an attempt by one legal entity to regulate the internal opertations of another legal entity.
The GPL says "do what you want - BUT if you decide to distribute it, you must follow these rules...."
More accuratly copyright law says "you cannot distribute a copyright work without permission from the copyright holder". The GPL says "you have permission to distribute this copyrighted work subject to the following conditions".
Ok, its one thing to have a EULA that tries to prevent piracy and the like. To be quite honest, I have no problems with MS or any other company using a EULA to try and enforce that.
An EULA is entirely redundent here. Since it would simply duplicate copyright law. You might just as well sticker every physical object you own with "you may not take this without permission"....
Maybe the fact that the ISP owns that network you are using gives them the right.
They don't own your network. With other utilities supplying private buildings there is a clear demarkation line to indicate where the resonsibility for pipes/cables/etc changes.
9/11 showed us that we were vulnerable to small, well-organized groups with no direct support from any particular state (unless you call the Talibans a state... in any event they are gone for the time being). The reponse to this newly discovered vulnerability was to attack a traditional nation-state, run by a ruthless tyrant (agreed), but with no visible link to anti-US terr'rist activity.
The other response was to pass a bundle of freedom restricting legislation. Much of which, had it been in force on September the 10th 2001, wouldn't have done anything at all to prevent. Also managing in the process to avoid asking why the US was incapable of defending itself even after spending billions of dollers on both intelligence and military.
I don't support the actions of the US government, and I don't support the actions of the terrorists. They are both evil as far as I am concerned, because they both kill innocent people. (Yes, the US government knew damn well that innocent people would be killed in Iraq, just like they know damn well that innocent people are killed nearly every time they invoke military force.)
They are still likely to be getting killed in Iraq. No drinking water (in a hot climate), no sanitation and no policing (but plenty of well armed criminal gangs) tends to equal dead people.
I think the best ways of combating (used loosely here, not preemptively) terrorism, is to loosen the constraints of the peoples out there. This allows bullys to bully, but also for the bullied to fight back. Primitive? Well, yes, actually, it is. But do you really think that human beings have truly evolved in the past few 1000 years? But currently, the bullys can bully, but those bullied cannot fight back.
There is also a stereotype, quite possibly with some truth to it, that bullies tend to be cowards. If the potentially bullied (be they individuals, groups or nations) have they ability to fight back maybe they won't even have to do so anyway.
So they resort to other tactics.
Tactics which may enable the bully to "play victim".
The real problem is how the G.W. Administration and the Military defines Terrorist States. It's a dangerous us-and-them attitude that is completely out of date and distorts our relative weaknesses/advantages dealing with "them". If a whole nation-state and most of its people support terrorists and other questionable policy, like nuclear proliferation, then we should take a defensive posture against them.
The US also tends to apply a metric of "it's ok if they are friendly with us" and "it's ok if they are against our enemy" (a variation of "the enemy of my enemy is your friend"). Long term this is a bad idea.
Poor arab states are populated with people who have not learned concepts like "rule-of-law" and "sanctity of human life" and "people have inalienable rights". The poor, uneducated arab hoi-polloi doesn't recognise those particular carrots dangling in front of them.
Who's dangling them? It certainly dosn't appear to be the US. What rule of law is currently operating in Iraq? Do the lives of Israelis and Arabs living under Israeli occupation appear to have equal value? What about the right of Arabs to freely chose their own leaders? Not only might the poor Arabs have problems recognising these concepts many in the "First world" have difficulties applying these kind of concepts to Arabs.
The argument of increasing the education of the general populous would help prevent this. Those "best educated" but "most terrible" people were unchallenged because the general populous didn't know any better.
But expect those currently in positions of power to fight this...
You seem it's better than fundamentalist mythology, and I tend to agree with you -- but only so far as I feel people are willing to give up superstition when it's wrong -- eg, not reproducable and not needed to explain the results of an observation.
In practice scientific research often has faith based assumptions and even taboos associated with it. Sometimes huge effort is wasted until a "heretic" comes along. e.g. the cause of stomach ulcers.
What is objectively true when youre talking about beliefs? To a fundamentalist christian, the salvation of jesus christ is objectively true, and he cant understand why you cant see that. For a muslim fundamentalist, jihad against infidels is objectively true to them. Its naieve to think that you can argue either side out of their beliefs simply by exposing them to the "truth" Absolute truth does not exist in religion. Is jesus the son of god? if you believe he is. Is mohammed the son of god? if you believe he is. Is zeus real? if you believe he is. Do spirits of nature exist? if you believe they do. If somone is convinced the earth is flat [talkorigins.org] Then to them, thats the absolute truth.
Not only is it the absolute truth to them they also cannot be swayed by any argument, rational or otherwise. Indeed a rational argument against their position is likely to attract strawmen and ad-hominum attacks. To a "believer" the "truth" can include such aspects as why X happened, what Y happening means. Even to the point that groups of "believers" end up killing each other over the most trivial of details. But wow betide the "outsider" who might say something to the effect of "hold on arn't all of you claiming to worship the same God?"
There are a variety of solutions. The one John Ashcroft supports is a reversal of the current process, turning innocent until proven guilty inverted, imprisoning innocents as a side effect of relaxing the burden of proof to ensure the net casts on the guilty.
Probably also with mechanisms to protect the high status. Since it's kind of hard to run a government from insided a jail cell.
And empowerment of all will begin to attack the real roots of terrorism: Ignorance, poverty, extremisim,...
In many cases the actual root might be a powerful government, even corporation, wanting to keep a people ignorant, poor and shooting each other. That way it's easier to make off with their natural resources.
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The US won't be able to stop it for two reasons: 1) you can't stop shit like that, and 2) the US will be too busy taking 50,000 casualties in North Korea after Bush gets the war going there..
If the US gets into a war with North Korea it's unlikely to be started by the US. Whatever your opinion of the current US administration they arn't stupid enough to attack a country which can fight back.
Speaking of which, doesn't establishing a Bill of Rights seem like a little more pressing of an issue in a recently-toppled government than copyright protections?
The only rights the Iraqis are likely to be getting are those the occupying forces and their approved "Iraqi leaders" want them to have.
There is - it's called PGP. SMTP is only intended to transport mail, not to authenticate it. It's the client's job to determine if it should be accepted.
Mass use of such encryption would certainly make things harder for spammers. Since it would stop them being able to easily send one message to lots of recipients. Which is really what is at the heart of the problem.
There's nothing wrong with SMTP.
The basic problem is that many SMTP implimentations supported third party relaying. If would be a lot more difficult for send spam if the only way of doing it was to perform DNS lookups and make a TCP connection for every recipient. As opposed to being able to send a list of recipients and the body of a message to someone elses relay. However what really makes things bad is the amount of software now out there which requires a third party relay to work at all. Combined some anti-spam schemes to force use of third party relays, even on people running software which dosn't need them.
The biggest irony is that there is no requirement to support third party relaying at all in any of the relevent RFCs.
Sending email through my ISPs relay has several important disadvantages. First and foremost, I cannot see whether the mail was already delivered to the recipient's SMTP server or whether it still is rotting in my ISP's queue. Also, my ISP might have a disk crash and lose my mail in his queue.
You also have no idea how big a queue your ISP's third party relay or if someone has just uploaded some spam to that relay. Even if an ISP restricts their relay to the IPs of their customers this isn't much good unless they only allow access after verifying the identity of every customer
This danger is completely eliminated if I send my emails directly. And why wouldn't I? It is faster and my ISP has less cost to burden and consequently less money to charge me.
The only situation where using a third party relay does help is sending the same email to lots of people... The really interesting thing is that the SMTP spec dosn't require any support for third party relays.
The difference is the fact that we're not planning on firing them from the moon at a target on earth. Big difference.
What about factoring the US military's well known level of accuracy in the targeting of weapons...
what're the aliens on the far side of the moon gonna think? how about the germans that live on that 1940's base?
The latter only had to worry about a Lancaster bomber up until now.
Surprisingly, companies don't want you using freeware, whose 'EULA's' usually consist of 'we are not responsible blah blah blah' because if said freeware were to fuck up and cause the company problems they would have no comeback against anyone.
Exactly like very-expensive-ware... Thus this argument dosn't appear to hold water.
I think having to give away your software for free would appear pretty malicious to businesses.
Only if the business is proprietary software. The vast majority of businesses are involved in completly different things.
From their point of view, the virus analogy is a good one: don't touch GPL code if you want to keep your software proprietary.
The most common use of software in business is as a tool, even part of the infrastructure required to operate business.
Here proprietary software is a positive menace to your business. Not infrequently a business, which can afford to, will ensure that they have multiple suppliers, power and communication supplied by more than one utility. To avoid the risk of disruption due to the failure of an outside party. Using proprietary software is the complete opposite of this.
You can't "accidentally" include GPLed code in your programs, nor will GPLed programs intentionally write GPLed code into your programs.
Or even into your data. Some proprietary applications claim to apply an EULA to the data you use them with.
I.E. -> You are buying it from $retailer, which technically is a transfer of license. So you actually can not transfer the license to anyone else after you purchase the software.
This still dosn't work, unless the retailer bought directly from Microsoft. If they sell "name-brands" then this self evidently isn't the case.
No, it says if you modify, copy, or distribute it you must follow these rules. I'd like to see you run software without modifying or copying it.
Because the GPL is only concerned with distributing it to a third party. Which is an unambiguious definition of "distribute".
Unlike the proprietary software industry which has tried, succesfully, to redefine "copy" to include using it. Anyone who tried to argue that you needed permission to read a book, because your eyes created copies or infomation might be transfered between nurones would be laughed at. There is no way a book publisher could get away with attaching a per reader fee, together with a per listener fee, to a book. But try the same thing with software suddenly judges and legislators think the argument makes some sort of sense.
Effectivly an EULA is an attempt by one legal entity to regulate the internal opertations of another legal entity.
The GPL says "do what you want - BUT if you decide to distribute it, you must follow these rules...."
More accuratly copyright law says "you cannot distribute a copyright work without permission from the copyright holder". The GPL says "you have permission to distribute this copyrighted work subject to the following conditions".
Ok, its one thing to have a EULA that tries to prevent piracy and the like. To be quite honest, I have no problems with MS or any other company using a EULA to try and enforce that.
An EULA is entirely redundent here. Since it would simply duplicate copyright law. You might just as well sticker every physical object you own with "you may not take this without permission"....
Maybe the fact that the ISP owns that network you are using gives them the right.
They don't own your network. With other utilities supplying private buildings there is a clear demarkation line to indicate where the resonsibility for pipes/cables/etc changes.
9/11 showed us that we were vulnerable to small, well-organized groups with no direct support from any particular state (unless you call the Talibans a state... in any event they are gone for the time being). The reponse to this newly discovered vulnerability was to attack a traditional nation-state, run by a ruthless tyrant (agreed), but with no visible link to anti-US terr'rist activity.
The other response was to pass a bundle of freedom restricting legislation. Much of which, had it been in force on September the 10th 2001, wouldn't have done anything at all to prevent. Also managing in the process to avoid asking why the US was incapable of defending itself even after spending billions of dollers on both intelligence and military.
I hate what the US has become (I love what it is supposed to be and still claims to be).
Which are more or less complete opposites.
We need to learn from Israel. Every time they "take out a terrorist threat" more Israelis die in a suicide bombing.
Dosn't sound like the Israelis have learned this lesson...
I don't support the actions of the US government, and I don't support the actions of the terrorists. They are both evil as far as I am concerned, because they both kill innocent people. (Yes, the US government knew damn well that innocent people would be killed in Iraq, just like they know damn well that innocent people are killed nearly every time they invoke military force.)
They are still likely to be getting killed in Iraq. No drinking water (in a hot climate), no sanitation and no policing (but plenty of well armed criminal gangs) tends to equal dead people.
I think the best ways of combating (used loosely here, not preemptively) terrorism, is to loosen the constraints of the peoples out there. This allows bullys to bully, but also for the bullied to fight back. Primitive? Well, yes, actually, it is. But do you really think that human beings have truly evolved in the past few 1000 years? But currently, the bullys can bully, but those bullied cannot fight back.
There is also a stereotype, quite possibly with some truth to it, that bullies tend to be cowards. If the potentially bullied (be they individuals, groups or nations) have they ability to fight back maybe they won't even have to do so anyway.
So they resort to other tactics.
Tactics which may enable the bully to "play victim".
The real problem is how the G.W. Administration and the Military defines Terrorist States. It's a dangerous us-and-them attitude that is completely out of date and distorts our relative weaknesses/advantages dealing with "them". If a whole nation-state and most of its people support terrorists and other questionable policy, like nuclear proliferation, then we should take a defensive posture against them.
The US also tends to apply a metric of "it's ok if they are friendly with us" and "it's ok if they are against our enemy" (a variation of "the enemy of my enemy is your friend"). Long term this is a bad idea.
Poor arab states are populated with people who have not learned concepts like "rule-of-law" and "sanctity of human life" and "people have inalienable rights". The poor, uneducated arab hoi-polloi doesn't recognise those particular carrots dangling in front of them.
Who's dangling them? It certainly dosn't appear to be the US. What rule of law is currently operating in Iraq? Do the lives of Israelis and Arabs living under Israeli occupation appear to have equal value? What about the right of Arabs to freely chose their own leaders?
Not only might the poor Arabs have problems recognising these concepts many in the "First world" have difficulties applying these kind of concepts to Arabs.
The argument of increasing the education of the general populous would help prevent this. Those "best educated" but "most terrible" people were unchallenged because the general populous didn't know any better.
But expect those currently in positions of power to fight this...
You seem it's better than fundamentalist mythology, and I tend to agree with you -- but only so far as I feel people are willing to give up superstition when it's wrong -- eg, not reproducable and not needed to explain the results of an observation.
In practice scientific research often has faith based assumptions and even taboos associated with it. Sometimes huge effort is wasted until a "heretic" comes along. e.g. the cause of stomach ulcers.
What is objectively true when youre talking about beliefs? To a fundamentalist christian, the salvation of jesus christ is objectively true, and he cant understand why you cant see that. For a muslim fundamentalist, jihad against infidels is objectively true to them. Its naieve to think that you can argue either side out of their beliefs simply by exposing them to the "truth" Absolute truth does not exist in religion. Is jesus the son of god? if you believe he is. Is mohammed the son of god? if you believe he is. Is zeus real? if you believe he is. Do spirits of nature exist? if you believe they do. If somone is convinced the earth is flat [talkorigins.org] Then to them, thats the absolute truth.
Not only is it the absolute truth to them they also cannot be swayed by any argument, rational or otherwise. Indeed a rational argument against their position is likely to attract strawmen and ad-hominum attacks.
To a "believer" the "truth" can include such aspects as why X happened, what Y happening means. Even to the point that groups of "believers" end up killing each other over the most trivial of details.
But wow betide the "outsider" who might say something to the effect of "hold on arn't all of you claiming to worship the same God?"
There are a variety of solutions. The one John Ashcroft supports is a reversal of the current process, turning innocent until proven guilty inverted, imprisoning innocents as a side effect of relaxing the burden of proof to ensure the net casts on the guilty.
Probably also with mechanisms to protect the high status. Since it's kind of hard to run a government from insided a jail cell.
And empowerment of all will begin to attack the real roots of terrorism: Ignorance, poverty, extremisim, ...
In many cases the actual root might be a powerful government, even corporation, wanting to keep a people ignorant, poor and shooting each other. That way it's easier to make off with their natural resources.