Hilarious that Americans are offended now that Canada is holding them to the same standard that American Boarder Services holds people wanting to enter the States. The difference is that even if you get an official Pardon in Canada -- Boarder Services doesn't recognize it! At least Americans have the potential to wipe the slate clean.
Environmentalists: isn't that solution a LOT better than setting up millions of pages of regulations for how big a house you can have, how fuel-efficient your car can be, who needs to get a prescription for a light bulb, etc?
Why no, no it isn't any good at all. See if you build price-based dis-incentives into the input materials (raise taxes on gasoline, for example, to discourage Johnny Humvee from driving so much) environmentalists get hit with a proportional penalty as well (ie Sally Prius still has to pay more and somehow that just isn't fair because she's already doing what she considers to be "the right thing").
These crazy regulations and rules are not only about penalizing over-emitters, they are being carefully weighted to minimize (or eliminate) penalties on those who are politically correct.
Greylisting is quite effective as well; partially because it pushes the economics of spamming back on the spammers.
Greylisting works in the large end of the small market; it doesn't work elsewhere.
In order for greylisting to work:
you have to have control over your own domain and operate all the systems which are listed as MX'ers for that domain. Why? Because if you have a secondary or tertiary MX system hosted by a different ISP, then all your spam is going to get relayed in via that system. Which, because it contacts you, is trusted by the greylisting service.
you have to have a situation where people will tolerate the delays in incoming mail. A delay is fine for my personal email, since I look at it, what, twice a day? However my CEO and CTO and Director of Marketing will get pissed off because the message that this potential business partner or customer or suppler or whatever said they sent right now while on the phone didn't get to him.
So that makes it perfect for us smart folks who own our own domain and handle practically nothing except personal messages, and for small companies who are big enough to have handed over their email to smart folks like us but are naive enough to trust/believe/accept us when we say that's just the way it is.
My momma? She's stuck with her ISP. Who is probably using all the blacklists they can lay their grubbies on (including those f*ckwads at secureserver.net, may they BUUUUURN) and which probably cuts the incoming spamload by 80 to 90%.
Bigger companies believe that email should be here NOW, and for the most part they ain't gonna play the greylisting game.
I know. I admin several domains, and spam has sucked all the fun out of email administration. We used to greylist, but it just wasn't worth the hassle from higher-ups. So now the secondary MXs all use a few select black hole lists, and all the surviving email goes through a barracuda before being delivered on to the end-user's mailbox. Works well enough for now, and cuts out easilly 99% of the incoming blizzard with an acceptably low false-positive rate.
And you know what? Good for you. I hope your autism never gets fixed, if that's what floats your boat.
I think it sad that many people cling to these challenges as their entire definition of self: if "I am autistic", and then they cure autism, then what am I? What makes me special?
I don't necessarily want my son "fixed", but I do want him to experience the best of life, and his ASD condition is standing squarely between him and that. I do not want him to suffer through some of the things I suffered through. Some of these treatments and therapies give me hope that maybe my son's life will be much better than mine was, and maybe my grandchildren won't have these challenges to their existence at all.
I think most of the problem is that they hired geeks who never got laid in college, who suddenly found themselves in a position of power over something and then took out all their frustration and anger on the world by being purposely incompatable and refusing to read any references.
Yeah! Because that's somehow different than when Linux developers re-invent wheels (Gnome, KDE...)
Ah, but it's far more convoluted than that. This is something I ripped out of an online journal written by an (uninvolved) lawyer years and years ago which sums up the action:
I'd like you to imagine, if you will, the
following scenario.
You are being sued for sexual harassment.
During a deposition, you are surprised to be
asked a question about an unrelated affair.
Your spouse doesn't know a thing about this
affair, and you can't imagine what it has to do
with the matter at hand.
So when you're asked, "Did you sleep with
Susan Jones?" you freak out. You lie. You say
no.
A week or so later, someone comes up with
some pictures of you and Susan Jones in, shall
we say, a compromising position. The pictures
are forwarded to the District Attorney, who
realizes that you have just lied under oath. He
files perjury charges.
At your perjury trial, you are again asked if
you ever slept with Ms. Jones. You are an
idiot, so you say no.
In the meantime, an appellate judge in the
(unrelated) sexual harassment civil suit has
decided that the evidence regarding Ms. Jones
is completely irrelevant to the question of
whether you sexually harassed the other
person, and tosses the evidence.
Ah-hah, you think to yourself. Perjury is lying
under oath about a material fact. If your affair
with Ms. Jones wasn't material, well, then,
you didn't commit perjury, did you?
Well, says the district attorney, maybe not
that first time around. But whether or not you
slept with her was certainly material in your
perjury trial, since the whole question there
was whether or not you lied about it.
So now, even though the first perjury charge
might be bullshit, you find yourself facing a
second charge of perjury, this time for perjury
committed during your first (bullshit) perjury
trial.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how they
just impeached our president. Not for lying
during the Paula Jones lawsuit, but for lying
about whether he lied in the Paula Jones
lawsuit.
I don't know exactly why - are manual cars still in fact more fuel efficient?
The deal with manual transmissions is that they are potentially more efficient, but the average driver usually lacks an appropriate driving style and discipline (ie driving around all day in third gear), and therefore doesn't see any significant (if any!) advantage.
This, of course, applies to everyone except you. YOUR driving style is OBVIOUSLY flawless.
Mine sucks.
Basically the resulting efficiencies for tools designed for efficiency depends entirely on how you use them. (This is obvious, but needs to be stated because otherwise you get Toyota Prius owners who live in the mountains complaining that their car isn't delivering the advertised million miles to the gallon or whatever.) I remember an article in a F1 magazine at the height of the Bionic Car years (1992? 1993?) where a test driver said that if he turned off all the driver-assist pieces (TC, ABS, AS, etc), he could possibly be 1/10 to 1/2 a second faster over a single optimum lap around Silverstone than the computer-assised pieces could. However, the difference was that the computer-assist made the "slower" optimum lap easier to achieve, and so over a race distance the car ended up faster with the computer-assist than without because the computer-assist made fewer mistakes than an unassisted driver would.
Sun Rays. You can configure them so that instead of getting a unix login screen, when the user puts in a smartcard they get greeted by a login for a Windows Terminal Server (either through the Windows Connector that now comes with the Sun Ray Server Software, or though RDesktop and some tedious hacking).
Users login once. When they pull their cards, their sessions detach from the Sun Rays, but keep running on the terminal server. When they put their cards back in, they get their Windows desktops again, with everything still running.
Presto, you get session portability, password-free (after the first time) login, centralized hardware, and no vunerable data on the desktop.
That said, as a sysadmin I'd kill kittens if they told me that my users were going to just plug in a smartcard to get access. Passwords are tedious, but they keep the lucky moron who finds a lost smartcard out of the system.
This is precisely the same problem with Star Wars: Episode One. It is impossible to live up to the memory of seeing Star Wars for the first time, especially when the first time you saw it you were seven.
People like you are part of the reason why software sucks so badly: you simply don't understand real-world tradeoffs. People like you design systems like Mach or Windows, systems that try to be everything to everybody;
I think that Windows and Hurd lie on different ends of one possible OS spectrum. Windows is something that has grown in an uncontrolled way while trying to remain as backwards-compatible as possible; ie trying (and failing) to be everything to everybody. Hurd, on the other hand, has been carefully designed and thoughtfully implemented so that it can successfully be everything to nobody.
So, my answer is, of course you should be able to 'marry' any consenting adult, but you should not be able to force me to recognise your relationship as marriage.
The problem is not so much that you are being forced to recognize the relationship as a marriage; the problem is that the state is doling out (or preventing doling out) benefits based on this concept of a marriage, and therefore the question as to whether or not the state recognizes this relationship as a marriage has profound effects on the people in the relationship in question.
The easy answer is to get the state out of the marriage business and have everyone currently married into a civil union (and making benefit decisions based on that union) leaving "marriage" a religious issue, but of course the religious wackos will never go for that.
I resent the implication that Windows isn't scary and a pain in the ass to use. It's just what everyone's accustomed to.
I tell you, I came from Linux to Windows XP, and Windows is just as Strange, Scary, and Wrong as Linux was. However I keep using it because my laptop works better this way.
I'm taken a 'screw you' policy -- if I've booked vacation (because they made me) and they won't allow me to carry it over, their deadlines are their problems.
Companies will almost always blink if enough pressure is applied to them. In our case every October the Accounting department would announce a use-it-by-Jan-1-or-lose-it policy. And because our engineers never took any time out, the entire department would book all of December off, which screwed deliverables which were always due mid January. Accounting always blinked, and repeated the same dance the next year.
In my case, my company announced a non-voluntary vacation week to force the burning off of accrued vacation time to make the financials look better; the options given were "use vacation, or be unpaid." This screwed me on a holiday I was planning to take at a later time. So I started metering every minute I spent working for the company, accounting for sick leave, lunch, even checking email from home and taking after-hours support calls. We figured that by my doing this the company screwed itself out of five 40-hour weeks of my time that I was just giving them.
My attitude has always been "If the company isn't anal about my hours, I won't be either." My current employer is like this, and I dare say it has worked out better for them than for me (I bill customers for more time than I get paid for).
Let's say I handed you an entire crate of auto parts, and told you that some of them may be genuine parts, while others might be knockoffs. I give you a whole binder, filled with instructions on how to differentiate between all the different "good" and "bad" parts. Some of these knockoffs are obvious fakes; others are quite cleverly done, requiring you to check for minute details such as whether or not inner surfaces are well-polished, or subtle discrepancies in serial number schemes and product logos.
Know what? If I'm in the grocery business, all those alternators are fakes!
Get yourself a Barracuda. It is an appliance, is easy to configure and use, is updated regularly over the internet by the vendor, works with active directory, has plug-in for outlook users, and best of all will continue to work after you throw exchange away and get a real mail system.
We buy them for our customers and have one ourselves, exchange or unix-based email.
I see the first few comments suggesting a switch to Linux or Macintosh. At least where I work, in the educational sector, that's impossible. The time spent retraining faculty and staff alone would outweigh the security benefits, especially when you consider all the specialized software floating around that hasn't been ported (curse you, Department of Education).
Nothing is impossible.
It's a gamble. Building the new system represents a cost (in time and labor if nothing else). Retraining staff is a cost. Finding new apps, or secure work-arounds for existing apps, represents another cost. Dealing with the transition (helpdesk, troubleshooting, whining users, fixing incompletely transitioned apps) represents yet another cost.
On the balance side is the cost of a security breech which (insert your company's worst nightmare here). Or the cost of denying all your users all your computers for a period of time while things are all rebuilt. Of course it isn't guaranteed that either doomsday scenario is going to happen; simultaneously, it isn't guaranteed that either doomsday scenario is going to be limited to a single incident.
It's called risk management.
Put another way: is it worth taking a known, calculable, solid kick in the nuts to mitigate the risk that you might be repeatedly shot in the arm, chest, or head?
And here's the kicker: within two months, step-by-step instructions will appear on the forums and wikis of the major distros. Within six months, most distros will automatically support that machine out-of-the-box.
Here's a kick back for your teeth: when I'm buying computers for my engineers, I need my engineers to work with them today, not in two or six months. I definitely can't afford to pay my IT staff for two to six months to hack all this support in. And in six months when the distros support the machine and all the wikis positively ooze useful information -- well, you can't buy that exact same machine any more because some component has been "upgraded".
Having wikis and distro support after-the-fact works great for the hobbyist market which ends up buying the systems for cheap when I'm done with them, but it does nothing for me.
Strip out the hard disks and what you have described is an ISP-model Sun Ray configuration. The "computer" becomes a cellphone-like appliance that can be swapped in or out; everything runs on the ISP's computer.
Of course, people won't go for it when money becomes an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, well that's what I get for trusting my open-sourced spell-checker. I may be an illiterate, but I am correct in the specifics of this topic.
Hah!
These crazy regulations and rules are not only about penalizing over-emitters, they are being carefully weighted to minimize (or eliminate) penalties on those who are politically correct.
In order for greylisting to work:
- you have to have control over your own domain and operate all the systems which are listed as MX'ers for that domain. Why? Because if you have a secondary or tertiary MX system hosted by a different ISP, then all your spam is going to get relayed in via that system. Which, because it contacts you, is trusted by the greylisting service.
- you have to have a situation where people will tolerate the delays in incoming mail. A delay is fine for my personal email, since I look at it, what, twice a day? However my CEO and CTO and Director of Marketing will get pissed off because the message that this potential business partner or customer or suppler or whatever said they sent right now while on the phone didn't get to him.
So that makes it perfect for us smart folks who own our own domain and handle practically nothing except personal messages, and for small companies who are big enough to have handed over their email to smart folks like us but are naive enough to trust/believe/accept us when we say that's just the way it is.My momma? She's stuck with her ISP. Who is probably using all the blacklists they can lay their grubbies on (including those f*ckwads at secureserver.net, may they BUUUUURN) and which probably cuts the incoming spamload by 80 to 90%.
Bigger companies believe that email should be here NOW, and for the most part they ain't gonna play the greylisting game.
I know. I admin several domains, and spam has sucked all the fun out of email administration. We used to greylist, but it just wasn't worth the hassle from higher-ups. So now the secondary MXs all use a few select black hole lists, and all the surviving email goes through a barracuda before being delivered on to the end-user's mailbox. Works well enough for now, and cuts out easilly 99% of the incoming blizzard with an acceptably low false-positive rate.
I think it sad that many people cling to these challenges as their entire definition of self: if "I am autistic", and then they cure autism, then what am I? What makes me special?
I don't necessarily want my son "fixed", but I do want him to experience the best of life, and his ASD condition is standing squarely between him and that. I do not want him to suffer through some of the things I suffered through. Some of these treatments and therapies give me hope that maybe my son's life will be much better than mine was, and maybe my grandchildren won't have these challenges to their existence at all.
Isn't it just as plausible that the temperature lock of a gigantic, miles-thick chunck of ice will resist the jet stream's ability to go places?
This should be reasonably testable -- how often does the jet stream cross Greenland?
Yeah! Because that's somehow different than when Linux developers re-invent wheels (Gnome, KDE...)
This, of course, applies to everyone except you. YOUR driving style is OBVIOUSLY flawless.
Mine sucks.
Basically the resulting efficiencies for tools designed for efficiency depends entirely on how you use them. (This is obvious, but needs to be stated because otherwise you get Toyota Prius owners who live in the mountains complaining that their car isn't delivering the advertised million miles to the gallon or whatever.) I remember an article in a F1 magazine at the height of the Bionic Car years (1992? 1993?) where a test driver said that if he turned off all the driver-assist pieces (TC, ABS, AS, etc), he could possibly be 1/10 to 1/2 a second faster over a single optimum lap around Silverstone than the computer-assised pieces could. However, the difference was that the computer-assist made the "slower" optimum lap easier to achieve, and so over a race distance the car ended up faster with the computer-assist than without because the computer-assist made fewer mistakes than an unassisted driver would.
Users login once. When they pull their cards, their sessions detach from the Sun Rays, but keep running on the terminal server. When they put their cards back in, they get their Windows desktops again, with everything still running.
Presto, you get session portability, password-free (after the first time) login, centralized hardware, and no vunerable data on the desktop.
That said, as a sysadmin I'd kill kittens if they told me that my users were going to just plug in a smartcard to get access. Passwords are tedious, but they keep the lucky moron who finds a lost smartcard out of the system.
Because that's who watches TV.
This is precisely the same problem with Star Wars: Episode One. It is impossible to live up to the memory of seeing Star Wars for the first time, especially when the first time you saw it you were seven.
As in, all the tools I need. Not some, not most, all.
As in, the vendors who only reluctantly permitted me to move to RHEL 3 from RedHat 8.0 last fucking year.
I strongly suspect that no one is holding their breath on any of this.
The easy answer is to get the state out of the marriage business and have everyone currently married into a civil union (and making benefit decisions based on that union) leaving "marriage" a religious issue, but of course the religious wackos will never go for that.
I tell you, I came from Linux to Windows XP, and Windows is just as Strange, Scary, and Wrong as Linux was. However I keep using it because my laptop works better this way.
Get yourself a Barracuda. It is an appliance, is easy to configure and use, is updated regularly over the internet by the vendor, works with active directory, has plug-in for outlook users, and best of all will continue to work after you throw exchange away and get a real mail system. We buy them for our customers and have one ourselves, exchange or unix-based email.
Do try to keep up.
It's a gamble. Building the new system represents a cost (in time and labor if nothing else). Retraining staff is a cost. Finding new apps, or secure work-arounds for existing apps, represents another cost. Dealing with the transition (helpdesk, troubleshooting, whining users, fixing incompletely transitioned apps) represents yet another cost.
On the balance side is the cost of a security breech which (insert your company's worst nightmare here). Or the cost of denying all your users all your computers for a period of time while things are all rebuilt. Of course it isn't guaranteed that either doomsday scenario is going to happen; simultaneously, it isn't guaranteed that either doomsday scenario is going to be limited to a single incident.
It's called risk management.
Put another way: is it worth taking a known, calculable, solid kick in the nuts to mitigate the risk that you might be repeatedly shot in the arm, chest, or head?
What is your business worth?
Having wikis and distro support after-the-fact works great for the hobbyist market which ends up buying the systems for cheap when I'm done with them, but it does nothing for me.
Of course, people won't go for it when money becomes an issue.