I'm not sure how this is related to the prior comment....
Anyway, blocking outgoing port 25 is a stupid idea. Many of us work from home and have our own domains, and we legitimately want to have our outgoing mail show our own domains, not @attbi.com or @rr.com or whatever.
There are also some practical problems:
Can we even connect to outgoing mail filters? Some ISPs are switching to web interfaces (think Hotmail or Yahoo mail) and don't accept outgoing SMTP traffic.
If we can connect, do we get mandatory advertising copy inserted? Nothing makes a contract bid look professional like a footer encouraging the recipient to sign up for some cheap ISP. (Even if this isn't common, yet, there can be some weird stuff added or changed in the headers.)
Some misguided sites are now cross-referencing header and DNS information, with the result that anyone using their own domain but their ISP's mail gateway will be blocked as spam. Direct connections stil get through.
Finally, there's the basic concern that the ISP could be logging email sent through their system. Yes I know about encryption, but I also know how incredibly hard it is to get people to use it. With my own mail server I can set up my system to use STARTTLS, but with an ISP mail server I may not have encryption on either leg.
First, that's a ridiculous strawman argument. Email corresponds to letters, not parcels possibly containing dangerous materials. Once the Post Office accepts a letter for delivery (read: doesn't return it to sender for lack of sufficient postage, illegible address, etc.), they will deliver it to recipient unless it is physically impossible because the address does not exist. (Cyberspace: user doesn't exist.) Ditto packages accepted for delivery which show no indication of containing proscribed materials.
Every so often some postal carrier doesn't deliver all of his mail. And once this is detected he is fired, prosecuted, and sent to prison.
Is mail sometimes lost or misdirected? Of course. But it is never opened without a warrant (although it may be photographed under strong light:-), and it is <b>never</b> returned to the sender because the carrier doesn't like anyone named "Simpson" or anyone at all in Springfield.
So yeah, let's use the Post Office as an analogy. Some RR sysadmins should be fired and prosecuted!
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As for the argument in general, have you ever read a synopsis of the ECPA?
Your employer can read your email queue at work because you're acting as an agent of the company - mail sent to your work account is legally sent to your employer, and you are just an agent for your employer.
But your personal email account is YOURS. Your ISP has no right to read your messages other than the absolute minimum required to resolve delivery problems. It's akin to the laws saying that your telco can't listen to your phone calls except for the absolute minimum required to ensure line quality. (There are exceptions in both cases for duly authorized court cases, but that's beside the point here.)
Your ISP does have the right to reject mail based on gross attributes, e.g., restrictions based on size, or (excessive) number of recipients, etc. This is roughly equivalent to the Post Office telling you that it can't accept a postcard written on a 3'x5' sheet of plywood, or a 1" square piece of cardboard. But once you start looking at the message in any detail, it gets very murky.
If it's totally automated and serves a legitimate purpose acceptable to most users, e.g., checking a sender against a RBL, it will probably be permitted. But if it requires human intervention or is "capricious" -- and a limit on the number of 'q's or time the message was received is certainly capricious -- the ISP may find itself in serious legal trouble.
When I step back, this is actually somewhat ironic because after the ECPA was passed a lot of people thought it applied to their workplace e-mail. It doesn't, and a lot of court precedents drove home this point. But now most people think that their personal ISP has the same rights as their employer, and it doesn't.
I think this is actually a grey area. The mail is not sent to the ISP, it's sent to the customer. The ISP is nothing but an agent acting on behalf of that customer, and can be expected to act with the customer's interest foremost in mind. In fact, the ECPA codifies this relationship, although I don't recall if it explicitly addresses whether an ISP can arbitrarily block mail from some sites.
This doesn't mean that the ISP has to totally roll over. It can limit the size of the customer's message queue, and it can refuse messages so large that their acceptance would cause problems.
RBLs are a grey area, but because of their very real risk of spammers flooding mailboxes it's a defendable practice.
But blocking mail forwarded from another account owned by the customer seems very iffy. It's not in the customer's interest, and it's not necessary to protect the integrity of their own mail servers. So why are they doing it?
First, if these people have accounts on your system and have.forwarding or a similar mechanism set up, RR isn't blocking mail from you, they're blocking mail from their own users. (Think about it.) These users should be screaming bloody murder. RR may still blow them off, but if a few decide to close their accounts they may suddenly see the light.
Even if RR claims that this somehow violates a vague "no commercial use" clause, IMHO that's when you tell them to close the account immediately because you refuse to deal with morons. It's one thing to say residential service can't get guaranteed uptime or run servers, but deciding who you can get mail from is totally unacceptable.
Second, why are these people having to forward their mail at all? If you are providing MX domain hosting, you should also be providing secure ways of getting that mail. IMAP+SSL is best, but even a shell account and SSH tunnels will work. (Even Windows machines can use that, if there's also a Linux system to act as a proxy.)
I've had @Home/AT&T cable modem service for several years, and I've never used their mail servers. I never will. Even if they block outgoing port 25, I will establish a SSH tunnel to my external web hosting ISP instead of dealing with this nonsense.
But I'm sure the Nevada SGC is careful to define exactly what it wants certified.
"Software used by bingo parlors" includes Windows itself. It includes the Office applications. Do you think they meant the regulations to include these products in the "$10k + license" requirements?
In the case of a spreadsheet, I suspect (but don't know) that the standard is that the person who signs the forms s responsible for the accuracy of the reports. They can use whatever tools they want to generate the numbers, but if they're wrong they're going to jail.
As for auditing triggers, all you need is the right set of numbers in the reports. How many people played? How many games were played? What were expenses? What were payoffs? Cross-reference that to other information a state is able to acquire, and there shouldn't be any problem identifying questionable players.
Get a local lawyer with some knowledge about the field. This is one of those questions where what we think doesn't matter - it will all down to local statutory and case law.
That said, two questions stand out to me:
Is "software" even legally defined in the State of Mississippi? It's possible that "software" is either undefined, or it's defined in some archaic fashion. E.g., are you providing your spreadsheet via a stack of EBCDIC encoded punch cards containing Fortran or COBOL source code?
On the flip side, it's possible that you're dead in the water because the good people of the great state of Mississippi have already decided that Excel spreadsheets shall be considered software, not data.
Has Microsoft paid the $10,000 fee for their license? Or $100,000, if you treat the OS, browser and Office components as separate programs? What about the other utility software? If they haven't, and the statute or regulations don't provide for exceptions, then this is preferential enforcement and that should raise some eyebrows. But then again, you're trying to sell something that's specific to Bingo halls operating in Mississippi, not a general tool.
In the US, the First Amendment protects freedom of speech but most jurisdictions have restrictions based on "time, manner and place" without conflict. As long as meaningful speech is still permitted, these restrictions are usually upheld.
Two examples: Boulder, Colorado bans large outdoor billboards. (It also bans new construction taller than a "mature cottonwood tree" - 55 ft - and has other non-speech related restrictions.) The purpose is to protect the mountain view. It's been challenged, e.g., by the "National Debt Clock," but since smaller signs are still legal and legible at normal city highway speeds, the ban was upheld.
Second example: after people picked an abortion doctor's home residence in unincorporated Littleton, Colorado (IIRC) for years, the county agreed to restrictions at the request of neighbors. Pickets are still permitted, but the total area of the signs must be modest (under 3 square feet?) and they must walk at least 100 years before turning around. This was challenged, but since picketing was still permitted and the restrictions served a legitimate need (the pickets had become traffic hazards by clustering with large signs) the restrictions were upheld.
The DCMA does not directly prevent criticism, but it makes the shrink-wrapped licenses that gag you enforceable. So it's a difference of no significance.
As for your First Amendment argument - your Constitutional protections apply <b>only</b> when dealing with the government. Pre-civil war, only when dealing with the Federal government, although it's now interpreted as applying to state and local governments and even organizations that either operate as a government (e.g., your HOA) or a business acting on behalf of a government (e.g., a private jail holding state prisonsers).
It's completely legal for a company to require you to submit anything that refers to their product's functionality prior to publication. It even has a legitimate purpose - to make sure you don't slam the product because of an easily fixed misconfiguration, etc., - although most of us still hate these clauses because of the potential for abuse.
The beowulf-specific libraries may be OS-agnostic, but that doesn't mean that all OSes are equal.
How's the networking support? What about system services in general? How much overhead from the OS and mandatoy applications and services? What about libraries for the specific task at hand?
Linux/Unix can be stripped down to almost nothing. But can you kill the GUI of a clustered Windows system?
This isn't a trivial issue - I remember reports of some NT servers that were running near 100% capacity with minimal loads. The problem was traced to a screen saver! Once you know this you can disable screen savers, but what about other unneeded services?
Unfortunately, the Royal Observatory has gone a little soft in the science in the attempt to attract tourists. It's not quite as bad as Disney, but it's definitely enough that people who actually care about this stuff will go quietly mad. (Disclaimer: the following comments are based on reports I've seen in various locations over the past few years - it's possible they finally got their act together.)
The most obvious to most people is the fact that a GPS shows that the PM is marked by an unlabeled garbage can (read: ignored) while the PM marker is a substantial distance off - as much as 100m?.
There's actually an easy and fascinating explanation. Geographical positions were originally determined by astronomy, and this implicitly took into account the actual complex shape of the earth. Most slashdot readers know about the equatorial bulge, but there are other bumps and valleys as well. But modern positioning uses GPS and a simplified model of the earth's shape, and the coordinates do not match exactly. Minimizing the differences worldwide required a sizeable jump in the London area.
This then brings up the difference between astronomical time and atomic time, how GMT tracks the former and UTC tracks the latter, and the need for leap seasons.
I think it's reasonable to expect anyone who knows enough science to visit the RO would find this interesting, but the RO apparently doesn't. Most people think the positioning of a garbage can on the true PM was an accident, I'm not so sure.
Even more bizarre was their behavior around January 1st, 2000. It wasn't Y2K until it was Y2K in London. Except it was. Except it wasn't. I don't think anyone ever figured out what their position was, except that all celebrations should somehow refer to them. (It got so bad I half expected to see a claim that the RO patented Y2K.)
Ironically, I never heard of any reference to the reason why this time zone was first among equals - the fact that UTC is widely used in computers, telecommunications, etc. Half of the world (by definitition!) may have been in 2000 by the time it hit midnight in London, but much of the technology of the world would turn over at that time. That's why I was glued to the TV at 5 pm local time, with CNN on one TV and BBC America on another.
If you have a chance to visit the RO, take it. But think of it as "Royal Observatory World," the theme park.
If the judge isn't aware of the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), some of the people involved in this case are incompetent. That federal explicitly gives email communications strong privacy protection, and an explicit on-point law trumps an analogy every time. (Unless you're talking about an appeals court overturning the law on constitutional grounds, but we aren't.)
I don't think IM was covered by the ECPA - it wasn't common in the early 90s - but it may still be on-point.
As for logging into an answering machine, he's undoubtably refering to the access codes used for remote access. However it's again a lame analogy since the default access codes are well-known and often either unchanged or impossible to change. (If you're curious, most default passwords are straight sequences on the keypad, e.g., 789.)
If you are a (non-military) pilot, you are *required* to have a minimal working knowledge of English. All radio communications are required to use English, by international treaty. In many other fields, English is used by convention, not explicit treaty. But it's still the most common shared language.
This isn't cultural imperialism, it's a recognition of the fact that we need a shared language - *any* shared language - and English is a good choice for it. It uses a simple alphabet, has simple conjugation rules, and a well-known "international English" subset that's sufficient for most routine interactions.
It's also important to remember the flip side of this - native English speakers need to be able to understand the heavily accented and mangled English of non-native speakers. In some ways this is harder than learning Int'l English - the non-native speakers only need to learn one language, we have to learn dozens of varients.
Bottom line: any ISP larger than a 2-person shop should have employees able to understand the gist of these complaints and to respond. Their English may be broken, but that's sufficient for communications to occur.
You scare me. More precisely, your attitude scares me.
If you really value free speech, you *must* accept restrictions based on time, manner and place. The alternative is to allow some bad players to use their speech to effectively suppress others.
In meatspace, a classic example of this is using a bullhorn to heckle a speaker using his own voice. An unaided voice gets the message across without making it impossible to hear the speaker, an aided voice makes it impossible to hear anyone else.
In cyberspace, a classic example are the 'bots that flood newsgroups with irrelevant messages so that the legitimate messages are lost in the volume.
As for spam, most of the messages are either illegal or for some highly questionable product or service, yet the sheer volume of it often causes legitimate messages to be overlooked.
You may evaluate the proper balance differently than me, but I have no more qualms suppressing a spammer than I do the guy disrupting a public meeting with a bullhorn.
There needs to be some balance here. Copyrights are not granted for the benefit of the owners of IP, they're granted for the benefit of society as a whole. History clearly shows a curve where no IP rights harm society (since few people are motivated to create new IP), as does excessive IP rights (since the IP holders ruthlessly suppress any competitors and progress stagnates). In contrast, society benefits when people have enough rights to get a good return on their effort, but can't suppress others for long.
14 or 28 years after publication is good - the new book that had a profound influence on you as a teenager can be the basis of your own book in middle age. But with the current rules, it's pretty much guaranteed that nobody will live long enough to respond in the same way to anything published once they were old enough to understand it.
On the commercial side, look at Dover Books. The original publisher has usually failed to publish the book for years because of limited sales... often because they're continuing to publish the work in hardcover editions, legal expenses in determining who would get residuals, etc. These expenses are so great that most books are unpublished and unpublishable.
Once it enters the public domain, Dover can publish the book in cheap paperback editions. The book is available, the book is affordable, Dover makes enough profit to make the effort worthwhile. Everyone benefits.
Is the original IP owner out of money? Not really - you can't make any profit if you don't make any sales. In the worst cases, the original IP owner may actually make more money once the material enters the public domain since it frees the IP from other legal encumberances.
Of course, that raises the question of the residuals paid to the original author. Again, there's not much of a difference between no money because the IP wasn't sold and no money because the material is now in the public domain. And even if there were sales, it's hard to justify people getting money for something their great-great-great-grandfather wrote 120 years ago (assuming he lived another 45 years and the 75-year rule was in affect). That's uncomfortably close to the classes of nobility that the US Constitution explicitly forbids.
When you only get 10 pieces of spam per day, you have options.
I've gotten over 15 MEGABYTES of spam in about an hour from a misconfigured spammer. That's enough traffic that it would have totally wiped out any prior mail in a free email service, and if I didn't have a cable modem I would have been unable to do anything for a few hours while the mail queue cleared over a modem connection.
That's a worst case scenario, but I've missed legitimate important messages in all the crap the spammers sent. Filtering helps, but messages get misdirected and sometimes they're a bit silly. (E.g., right now I've black-listed the entire country of (South) Korea because of the volume of spam coming from their domains.)
This points to the only long-term solution to spam - take out the profit motive.
But this is tied to the question of strong authentication of the sender (at least at the ISP level), and all of the privacy concerns that raises. E.g., a good way to kill spam is to require each message provide non-trivial e-postage. Perhaps USD0.25 per 20kb block. (After getting over 15MB in less than our from a misconfigured spambot with a huge payload, I am *not* willing to accept "one price for all" scheme!)
If the recipient found the message worthwhile, they could send an ack to their ISP and release the money back to the sender. Or they could let a reaonable time elapse, say 2 weeks, and the money would be released back to the sender. This could probably even be automated for explicitly named friends and mailing lists.
But if the recipient said it was spam, they keep the postage.
At USD0.25 per message, there's no profit motive in me lying whether a message is spam. But at USD0.25 per message, it's a safe bet that few businesses will send out 10,000 messages (USD2500) to snare a single response.
Everyone has jumped on the causality bandwagon, and not taken the next step.
If this correlation is true, what controllable factors cause a person to sleep longer each night?
Some of the answers are well known:
lack of exercise
caffeine consumption
stress
All interfere with your body's ability to reach the deepest levels of sleep, so it takes longer to have the same amount of rest. At least two of the three factors are also associated with shortened lifespan.
Is the study totally worthless? No. It proves that you don't need to subject yourself to a dozen separate tests to determine how well you are managing these long-term risks - keeping track of the number of hours you sleep is sufficient.
First, your statement is factually incorrect. Relativity only specifies that a massive object can't travel than the local speed of light. If you distort the space-time continuum via some exotic method (e.g., there are some theoretical approaches involving large amounts of negative energy) then you can travel arbitrarily fast while never locally exceeding the speed of light.
But more generally, relativity is just a model. A damn good model, but it's just a model that's known to be inconsistent with quantum mechanics at a theoretical level. ("Quantum gravity" attempts to combine the two theories.)
On the experimental front, the "spooky action at a distance" experiments have consistently shown that information can and does travel faster than the speed of light.
Right now, what we have is roughly equivalent to the rocks that fog film left near them (spooky!), or a spark jumping between a gap in one ring when a spark is made to jump between a nearby gap (spooky!). But it took less than 50 years for both to completely change society (nuclear weapons, world-wide radio transmissions), so it's not unrealistic to assume that the current quantum entanglement experiments could lead to something besides cryptographic systems within 100 years.
The bottom line is that we don't know that FTL is impossible. Even the theoretical objections (e.g., causality) are falling as we refine QM.
I'm not booking a flight to Alpha Centari yet, but I'm no longer willing to make a blanket statement that FTL travel is impossible.
The point isn't to catch runtime errors, it's to catch improper usage or coding errors. If your function should never be passed a NULL pointer, you don't want to raise an exception that the caller may catch, you want to bring the program to an immediate halt so you can figure out why the caller passed a NULL pointer. Didn't it check for that? Did it somehow get bad data?
(This use is why many of us define our own assert macros in C/C++. The standard assert() calls exit(), but that doesn't give you any information about the state of the calling procedure from within a debugger. An attempt to divide by zero, on the other hand....)
Another standard use of assertions is to check for coding errors. This is especially useful with loops - if you can identify a loop invariant, you can specify it in an assertion and catch most coding errors immediately.
A related use is to identify class invariants, and to always check the class invariants before you leave any class method. You can quickly identify any code that creates broken objects.
If you're also doing unit tests, you shouldn't need your loop and class invariant checks in production code. However you'll always need to do runtime sanity checks on your parameters, with well defined behavior for what the procedure will do when passed null pointers, negative values, etc.
People are qualified to address what affects them. E.g., the settlement says Microsoft can keep authentication protocols and algorithms secret, but you've replaced your flaky Windows file servers with Samba, then you're going to have a well-informed opinion on the settlement. Even if you aren't a developer, you can read the position paper by the Samba team and reasonably interpret how their problems will limit your ability to use Samba instead of Windows in the future.
If a modem is also out, you may be still be able to use this by setting up a special-purpose system that has a modem, but all network services are disabled except NTP. Delete the binaries for all other network services, seal it in a plywood box, and it will be hard to distinguish from one of the GPS or wireless time servers.
As a worst case scenario, once a week call 303 449 7111 (NIST phone service for WWV), set your watch, then walk into the computer room to set the time server's time.
If your application gets labeled a "public nuisance," it doesn't matter how much the users like those features. Not if they want to interoperate with others.
This may seem like a harsh judgement, but the cost of Outlook and IIS bugs is rapidly getting to the point where a lot of admins are ready to take drastic measures to protect their own networks. That's why many sites are stripping executable attachments - and the crap like that "begin" bug discussed a few weeks ago are pushing some sites to outright Outlook bans because it's proving too costly to try to work around Microsoft's ongoing indifference to security.
Do you have any idea how many "Jim Smith" or "Bob Jones" there are in New York or California? Including middle names doesn't eliminate the name collisions, but makes the system much less useful since most people don't routinely use their middle names and acquaintances are unlikely to know them.
Even in Iowa you'll see a lot of collisions.
A while back a friend and I did web searches for our "friends." We all have relatively uncommon names, both family and given. Yet all of us had "twins" listed on the net, sometimes "twins" near our own age and in our own profession. Some of us had multiple hits - back in 1995 a coworker found 4 other men with the same name. Today the same search would probably yield a dozen or more matches.
This search was at the national level, not state level, but that's arguably a moot point since our population is so mobile that it's common for people to live in several states during their lifetime.
Taking a step back from the problem, a few years ago comp.risks mentioned an Australian plan (population 20 million) to uniquely identify citizens by full name and date of birth. They discovered that THREE women had the same name and birthday after the state detected "fraud" in the student loan program - the same "person" was simultaneously enrolled in college and earning a paycheck 1000 km away. (I don't remember what the third woman was doing.)
Now try that again counting how many conspiracy episodes occured in each season. I know that some of these characters first appeared in the first season, but what was once a rare appearance is now fairly common.
A more subtle point, count the number of episodes that involved cooperation and finding "positive sum" solutions. Now count the number of episodes that involved conspiracy subplots where humans can't trust their allies. The former were common in the first few years, but now the latter are common. During the first half of the fifth season you have the lying Tollan (Between Two Fires), the lying Russians (The Tomb), the lying Achen (2001), etc. Hell, even Jake had to dress down Jack for his attitude in the season opener.
When you put it all together, it's hard to find a recent episode that doesn't seem like it there was an angry teenager on the writing staff.
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Anyway, blocking outgoing port 25 is a stupid idea. Many of us work from home and have our own domains, and we legitimately want to have our outgoing mail show our own domains, not @attbi.com or @rr.com or whatever.
There are also some practical problems:
First, that's a ridiculous strawman argument. Email corresponds to letters, not parcels possibly containing dangerous materials. Once the Post Office accepts a letter for delivery (read: doesn't return it to sender for lack of sufficient postage, illegible address, etc.), they will deliver it to recipient unless it is physically impossible because the address does not exist. (Cyberspace: user doesn't exist.) Ditto packages accepted for delivery which show no indication of containing proscribed materials.
:-), and it is <b>never</b> returned to the sender because the carrier doesn't like anyone named "Simpson" or anyone at all in Springfield.
Every so often some postal carrier doesn't deliver all of his mail. And once this is detected he is fired, prosecuted, and sent to prison.
Is mail sometimes lost or misdirected? Of course. But it is never opened without a warrant (although it may be photographed under strong light
So yeah, let's use the Post Office as an analogy. Some RR sysadmins should be fired and prosecuted!
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As for the argument in general, have you ever read a synopsis of the ECPA?
Your employer can read your email queue at work because you're acting as an agent of the company - mail sent to your work account is legally sent to your employer, and you are just an agent for your employer.
But your personal email account is YOURS. Your ISP has no right to read your messages other than the absolute minimum required to resolve delivery problems. It's akin to the laws saying that your telco can't listen to your phone calls except for the absolute minimum required to ensure line quality. (There are exceptions in both cases for duly authorized court cases, but that's beside the point here.)
Your ISP does have the right to reject mail based on gross attributes, e.g., restrictions based on size, or (excessive) number of recipients, etc. This is roughly equivalent to the Post Office telling you that it can't accept a postcard written on a 3'x5' sheet of plywood, or a 1" square piece of cardboard. But once you start looking at the message in any detail, it gets very murky.
If it's totally automated and serves a legitimate purpose acceptable to most users, e.g., checking a sender against a RBL, it will probably be permitted. But if it requires human intervention or is "capricious" -- and a limit on the number of 'q's or time the message was received is certainly capricious -- the ISP may find itself in serious legal trouble.
When I step back, this is actually somewhat ironic because after the ECPA was passed a lot of people thought it applied to their workplace e-mail. It doesn't, and a lot of court precedents drove home this point. But now most people think that their personal ISP has the same rights as their employer, and it doesn't.
Do they really have the right to block email?
I think this is actually a grey area. The mail is not sent to the ISP, it's sent to the customer. The ISP is nothing but an agent acting on behalf of that customer, and can be expected to act with the customer's interest foremost in mind. In fact, the ECPA codifies this relationship, although I don't recall if it explicitly addresses whether an ISP can arbitrarily block mail from some sites.
This doesn't mean that the ISP has to totally roll over. It can limit the size of the customer's message queue, and it can refuse messages so large that their acceptance would cause problems.
RBLs are a grey area, but because of their very real risk of spammers flooding mailboxes it's a defendable practice.
But blocking mail forwarded from another account owned by the customer seems very iffy. It's not in the customer's interest, and it's not necessary to protect the integrity of their own mail servers. So why are they doing it?
None of this makes sense to me.
.forwarding or a similar mechanism set up, RR isn't blocking mail from you, they're blocking mail from their own users. (Think about it.) These users should be screaming bloody murder. RR may still blow them off, but if a few decide to close their accounts they may suddenly see the light.
First, if these people have accounts on your system and have
Even if RR claims that this somehow violates a vague "no commercial use" clause, IMHO that's when you tell them to close the account immediately because you refuse to deal with morons. It's one thing to say residential service can't get guaranteed uptime or run servers, but deciding who you can get mail from is totally unacceptable.
Second, why are these people having to forward their mail at all? If you are providing MX domain hosting, you should also be providing secure ways of getting that mail. IMAP+SSL is best, but even a shell account and SSH tunnels will work. (Even Windows machines can use that, if there's also a Linux system to act as a proxy.)
I've had @Home/AT&T cable modem service for several years, and I've never used their mail servers. I never will. Even if they block outgoing port 25, I will establish a SSH tunnel to my external web hosting ISP instead of dealing with this nonsense.
But I'm sure the Nevada SGC is careful to define exactly what it wants certified.
"Software used by bingo parlors" includes Windows itself. It includes the Office applications. Do you think they meant the regulations to include these products in the "$10k + license" requirements?
In the case of a spreadsheet, I suspect (but don't know) that the standard is that the person who signs the forms s responsible for the accuracy of the reports. They can use whatever tools they want to generate the numbers, but if they're wrong they're going to jail.
As for auditing triggers, all you need is the right set of numbers in the reports. How many people played? How many games were played? What were expenses? What were payoffs? Cross-reference that to other information a state is able to acquire, and there shouldn't be any problem identifying questionable players.
That said, two questions stand out to me:
On the flip side, it's possible that you're dead in the water because the good people of the great state of Mississippi have already decided that Excel spreadsheets shall be considered software, not data.
Sorry, that's what some of the neighbors wanted. Obviously I meant to write "yards."
In the US, the First Amendment protects freedom of speech but most jurisdictions have restrictions based on "time, manner and place" without conflict. As long as meaningful speech is still permitted, these restrictions are usually upheld.
Two examples: Boulder, Colorado bans large outdoor billboards. (It also bans new construction taller than a "mature cottonwood tree" - 55 ft - and has other non-speech related restrictions.) The purpose is to protect the mountain view. It's been challenged, e.g., by the "National Debt Clock," but since smaller signs are still legal and legible at normal city highway speeds, the ban was upheld.
Second example: after people picked an abortion doctor's home residence in unincorporated Littleton, Colorado (IIRC) for years, the county agreed to restrictions at the request of neighbors. Pickets are still permitted, but the total area of the signs must be modest (under 3 square feet?) and they must walk at least 100 years before turning around. This was challenged, but since picketing was still permitted and the restrictions served a legitimate need (the pickets had become traffic hazards by clustering with large signs) the restrictions were upheld.
The DCMA does not directly prevent criticism, but it makes the shrink-wrapped licenses that gag you enforceable. So it's a difference of no significance.
As for your First Amendment argument - your Constitutional protections apply <b>only</b> when dealing with the government. Pre-civil war, only when dealing with the Federal government, although it's now interpreted as applying to state and local governments and even organizations that either operate as a government (e.g., your HOA) or a business acting on behalf of a government (e.g., a private jail holding state prisonsers).
It's completely legal for a company to require you to submit anything that refers to their product's functionality prior to publication. It even has a legitimate purpose - to make sure you don't slam the product because of an easily fixed misconfiguration, etc., - although most of us still hate these clauses because of the potential for abuse.
The beowulf-specific libraries may be OS-agnostic, but that doesn't mean that all OSes are equal.
How's the networking support? What about system services in general? How much overhead from the OS and mandatoy applications and services? What about libraries for the specific task at hand?
Linux/Unix can be stripped down to almost nothing. But can you kill the GUI of a clustered Windows system?
This isn't a trivial issue - I remember reports of some NT servers that were running near 100% capacity with minimal loads. The problem was traced to a screen saver! Once you know this you can disable screen savers, but what about other unneeded services?
Unfortunately, the Royal Observatory has gone a little soft in the science in the attempt to attract tourists. It's not quite as bad as Disney, but it's definitely enough that people who actually care about this stuff will go quietly mad. (Disclaimer: the following comments are based on reports I've seen in various locations over the past few years - it's possible they finally got their act together.)
The most obvious to most people is the fact that a GPS shows that the PM is marked by an unlabeled garbage can (read: ignored) while the PM marker is a substantial distance off - as much as 100m?.
There's actually an easy and fascinating explanation. Geographical positions were originally determined by astronomy, and this implicitly took into account the actual complex shape of the earth. Most slashdot readers know about the equatorial bulge, but there are other bumps and valleys as well. But modern positioning uses GPS and a simplified model of the earth's shape, and the coordinates do not match exactly. Minimizing the differences worldwide required a sizeable jump in the London area.
This then brings up the difference between astronomical time and atomic time, how GMT tracks the former and UTC tracks the latter, and the need for leap seasons.
I think it's reasonable to expect anyone who knows enough science to visit the RO would find this interesting, but the RO apparently doesn't. Most people think the positioning of a garbage can on the true PM was an accident, I'm not so sure.
Even more bizarre was their behavior around January 1st, 2000. It wasn't Y2K until it was Y2K in London. Except it was. Except it wasn't. I don't think anyone ever figured out what their position was, except that all celebrations should somehow refer to them. (It got so bad I half expected to see a claim that the RO patented Y2K.)
Ironically, I never heard of any reference to the reason why this time zone was first among equals - the fact that UTC is widely used in computers, telecommunications, etc. Half of the world (by definitition!) may have been in 2000 by the time it hit midnight in London, but much of the technology of the world would turn over at that time. That's why I was glued to the TV at 5 pm local time, with CNN on one TV and BBC America on another.
If you have a chance to visit the RO, take it. But think of it as "Royal Observatory World," the theme park.
If the judge isn't aware of the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), some of the people involved in this case are incompetent. That federal explicitly gives email communications strong privacy protection, and an explicit on-point law trumps an analogy every time. (Unless you're talking about an appeals court overturning the law on constitutional grounds, but we aren't.)
I don't think IM was covered by the ECPA - it wasn't common in the early 90s - but it may still be on-point.
As for logging into an answering machine, he's undoubtably refering to the access codes used for remote access. However it's again a lame analogy since the default access codes are well-known and often either unchanged or impossible to change. (If you're curious, most default passwords are straight sequences on the keypad, e.g., 789.)
If you are a (non-military) pilot, you are *required* to have a minimal working knowledge of English. All radio communications are required to use English, by international treaty. In many other fields, English is used by convention, not explicit treaty. But it's still the most common shared language.
This isn't cultural imperialism, it's a recognition of the fact that we need a shared language - *any* shared language - and English is a good choice for it. It uses a simple alphabet, has simple conjugation rules, and a well-known "international English" subset that's sufficient for most routine interactions.
It's also important to remember the flip side of this - native English speakers need to be able to understand the heavily accented and mangled English of non-native speakers. In some ways this is harder than learning Int'l English - the non-native speakers only need to learn one language, we have to learn dozens of varients.
Bottom line: any ISP larger than a 2-person shop should have employees able to understand the gist of these complaints and to respond. Their English may be broken, but that's sufficient for communications to occur.
You scare me. More precisely, your attitude scares me.
If you really value free speech, you *must* accept restrictions based on time, manner and place. The alternative is to allow some bad players to use their speech to effectively suppress others.
In meatspace, a classic example of this is using a bullhorn to heckle a speaker using his own voice. An unaided voice gets the message across without making it impossible to hear the speaker, an aided voice makes it impossible to hear anyone else.
In cyberspace, a classic example are the 'bots that flood newsgroups with irrelevant messages so that the legitimate messages are lost in the volume.
As for spam, most of the messages are either illegal or for some highly questionable product or service, yet the sheer volume of it often causes legitimate messages to be overlooked.
You may evaluate the proper balance differently than me, but I have no more qualms suppressing a spammer than I do the guy disrupting a public meeting with a bullhorn.
There needs to be some balance here. Copyrights are not granted for the benefit of the owners of IP, they're granted for the benefit of society as a whole. History clearly shows a curve where no IP rights harm society (since few people are motivated to create new IP), as does excessive IP rights (since the IP holders ruthlessly suppress any competitors and progress stagnates). In contrast, society benefits when people have enough rights to get a good return on their effort, but can't suppress others for long.
14 or 28 years after publication is good - the new book that had a profound influence on you as a teenager can be the basis of your own book in middle age. But with the current rules, it's pretty much guaranteed that nobody will live long enough to respond in the same way to anything published once they were old enough to understand it.
On the commercial side, look at Dover Books. The original publisher has usually failed to publish the book for years because of limited sales... often because they're continuing to publish the work in hardcover editions, legal expenses in determining who would get residuals, etc. These expenses are so great that most books are unpublished and unpublishable.
Once it enters the public domain, Dover can publish the book in cheap paperback editions. The book is available, the book is affordable, Dover makes enough profit to make the effort worthwhile. Everyone benefits.
Is the original IP owner out of money? Not really - you can't make any profit if you don't make any sales. In the worst cases, the original IP owner may actually make more money once the material enters the public domain since it frees the IP from other legal encumberances.
Of course, that raises the question of the residuals paid to the original author. Again, there's not much of a difference between no money because the IP wasn't sold and no money because the material is now in the public domain. And even if there were sales, it's hard to justify people getting money for something their great-great-great-grandfather wrote 120 years ago (assuming he lived another 45 years and the 75-year rule was in affect). That's uncomfortably close to the classes of nobility that the US Constitution explicitly forbids.
When you only get 10 pieces of spam per day, you have options.
I've gotten over 15 MEGABYTES of spam in about an hour from a misconfigured spammer. That's enough traffic that it would have totally wiped out any prior mail in a free email service, and if I didn't have a cable modem I would have been unable to do anything for a few hours while the mail queue cleared over a modem connection.
That's a worst case scenario, but I've missed legitimate important messages in all the crap the spammers sent. Filtering helps, but messages get misdirected and sometimes they're a bit silly. (E.g., right now I've black-listed the entire country of (South) Korea because of the volume of spam coming from their domains.)
This points to the only long-term solution to spam - take out the profit motive.
But this is tied to the question of strong authentication of the sender (at least at the ISP level), and all of the privacy concerns that raises. E.g., a good way to kill spam is to require each message provide non-trivial e-postage. Perhaps USD0.25 per 20kb block. (After getting over 15MB in less than our from a misconfigured spambot with a huge payload, I am *not* willing to accept "one price for all" scheme!)
If the recipient found the message worthwhile, they could send an ack to their ISP and release the money back to the sender. Or they could let a reaonable time elapse, say 2 weeks, and the money would be released back to the sender. This could probably even be automated for explicitly named friends and mailing lists.
But if the recipient said it was spam, they keep the postage.
At USD0.25 per message, there's no profit motive in me lying whether a message is spam. But at USD0.25 per message, it's a safe bet that few businesses will send out 10,000 messages (USD2500) to snare a single response.
If this correlation is true, what controllable factors cause a person to sleep longer each night?
Some of the answers are well known:
All interfere with your body's ability to reach the deepest levels of sleep, so it takes longer to have the same amount of rest. At least two of the three factors are also associated with shortened lifespan.
Is the study totally worthless? No. It proves that you don't need to subject yourself to a dozen separate tests to determine how well you are managing these long-term risks - keeping track of the number of hours you sleep is sufficient.
First, your statement is factually incorrect. Relativity only specifies that a massive object can't travel than the local speed of light. If you distort the space-time continuum via some exotic method (e.g., there are some theoretical approaches involving large amounts of negative energy) then you can travel arbitrarily fast while never locally exceeding the speed of light.
But more generally, relativity is just a model. A damn good model, but it's just a model that's known to be inconsistent with quantum mechanics at a theoretical level. ("Quantum gravity" attempts to combine the two theories.)
On the experimental front, the "spooky action at a distance" experiments have consistently shown that information can and does travel faster than the speed of light.
Right now, what we have is roughly equivalent to the rocks that fog film left near them (spooky!), or a spark jumping between a gap in one ring when a spark is made to jump between a nearby gap (spooky!). But it took less than 50 years for both to completely change society (nuclear weapons, world-wide radio transmissions), so it's not unrealistic to assume that the current quantum entanglement experiments could lead to something besides cryptographic systems within 100 years.
The bottom line is that we don't know that FTL is impossible. Even the theoretical objections (e.g., causality) are falling as we refine QM.
I'm not booking a flight to Alpha Centari yet, but I'm no longer willing to make a blanket statement that FTL travel is impossible.
You've missed the point of assertions.
The point isn't to catch runtime errors, it's to catch improper usage or coding errors. If your function should never be passed a NULL pointer, you don't want to raise an exception that the caller may catch, you want to bring the program to an immediate halt so you can figure out why the caller passed a NULL pointer. Didn't it check for that? Did it somehow get bad data?
(This use is why many of us define our own assert macros in C/C++. The standard assert() calls exit(), but that doesn't give you any information about the state of the calling procedure from within a debugger. An attempt to divide by zero, on the other hand....)
Another standard use of assertions is to check for coding errors. This is especially useful with loops - if you can identify a loop invariant, you can specify it in an assertion and catch most coding errors immediately.
A related use is to identify class invariants, and to always check the class invariants before you leave any class method. You can quickly identify any code that creates broken objects.
If you're also doing unit tests, you shouldn't need your loop and class invariant checks in production code. However you'll always need to do runtime sanity checks on your parameters, with well defined behavior for what the procedure will do when passed null pointers, negative values, etc.
People are qualified to address what affects them. E.g., the settlement says Microsoft can keep authentication protocols and algorithms secret, but you've replaced your flaky Windows file servers with Samba, then you're going to have a well-informed opinion on the settlement. Even if you aren't a developer, you can read the position paper by the Samba team and reasonably interpret how their problems will limit your ability to use Samba instead of Windows in the future.
You might not be able to have internet access, but what about a standard voice line?
NIST has an Acutomated Computer Time Service (ACTS) that you can call with a 300-9600 baud modem. (The full data is only available at 1200B or higher.)
If a modem is also out, you may be still be able to use this by setting up a special-purpose system that has a modem, but all network services are disabled except NTP. Delete the binaries for all other network services, seal it in a plywood box, and it will be hard to distinguish from one of the GPS or wireless time servers.
As a worst case scenario, once a week call 303 449 7111 (NIST phone service for WWV), set your watch, then walk into the computer room to set the time server's time.
If your application gets labeled a "public nuisance," it doesn't matter how much the users like those features. Not if they want to interoperate with others.
This may seem like a harsh judgement, but the cost of Outlook and IIS bugs is rapidly getting to the point where a lot of admins are ready to take drastic measures to protect their own networks. That's why many sites are stripping executable attachments - and the crap like that "begin" bug discussed a few weeks ago are pushing some sites to outright Outlook bans because it's proving too costly to try to work around Microsoft's ongoing indifference to security.
Where do you live, North Dakota?
Do you have any idea how many "Jim Smith" or "Bob Jones" there are in New York or California? Including middle names doesn't eliminate the name collisions, but makes the system much less useful since most people don't routinely use their middle names and acquaintances are unlikely to know them.
Even in Iowa you'll see a lot of collisions.
A while back a friend and I did web searches for our "friends." We all have relatively uncommon names, both family and given. Yet all of us had "twins" listed on the net, sometimes "twins" near our own age and in our own profession. Some of us had multiple hits - back in 1995 a coworker found 4 other men with the same name. Today the same search would probably yield a dozen or more matches.
This search was at the national level, not state level, but that's arguably a moot point since our population is so mobile that it's common for people to live in several states during their lifetime.
Taking a step back from the problem, a few years ago comp.risks mentioned an Australian plan (population 20 million) to uniquely identify citizens by full name and date of birth. They discovered that THREE women had the same name and birthday after the state detected "fraud" in the student loan program - the same "person" was simultaneously enrolled in college and earning a paycheck 1000 km away. (I don't remember what the third woman was doing.)
Now try that again counting how many conspiracy episodes occured in each season. I know that some of these characters first appeared in the first season, but what was once a rare appearance is now fairly common.
A more subtle point, count the number of episodes that involved cooperation and finding "positive sum" solutions. Now count the number of episodes that involved conspiracy subplots where humans can't trust their allies. The former were common in the first few years, but now the latter are common. During the first half of the fifth season you have the lying Tollan (Between Two Fires), the lying Russians (The Tomb), the lying Achen (2001), etc. Hell, even Jake had to dress down Jack for his attitude in the season opener.
When you put it all together, it's hard to find a recent episode that doesn't seem like it there was an angry teenager on the writing staff.