Uppage there are a few of the expected calls for government regulation of email that we see every time there is a story about spam, and there are the obligitory anecdotes about the hundreds of spam emails that some poor souls find every day in thier inbox.
So here is my usual post about how asking the government to regulate everything is a bad idea, and how I have little sympathy for the poor saps who are getting flooded with thousands of spam emails a day that makes it difficult for them to see the one or two legitimate emails that thier friends might send them each year.
First law. Bad idea because it won't work. As long as there are different countries with seperate governments that have differing attitudes towards the internet, commerce, and law it will be impossible to legislate spam out of existance. That is not to say that I am supporting the idea of one government rulling all peoples or that I am advocating any sort if international treaty on regulating email and the internet.
Far from it.
What I am saying is there are good methods of reducing the flow of spam to your in-box to a trickle, possibly blocking the spam flow completely.
Use a provider that is as concerned about stopping the spam as you are. That means no AOL, no MSN, no Hotmail, etc. These companies are notorious for not only allowing you to get spam flooded, but for allowing thier customers to send spam and not discontiuing accounts that are being used as fake "reply to" and "from" addresses. There are other companies that are just as irresponsible as the ones I mentioned, so you should not think that I am saying that these companies are the only ones that should be avoided.
If you like using the same email and access provider (I've been hijacking friends access accounts for years now), then you should know that smaller access providers often are more responsive to user's (knowlegable and legitimate) complaints than large companies. As an added bonus, thier access rates tend to be low, and they are as if not more reliable than thier corporate competitors.
If you like using a separate provider for email, ask around, do some searches, and choose one that has effective filtering/blocking of spam included in thier basic package.
You can filter the mail yourself with one of the many spam blocking services or filters that are readily available on the internet. Here are some links to some of the blacklists and filters that I know about:
There are others, some services are free, some charge money. If you are going to use a filter on your own machine that is not part of a service, I highly reccomend that you stick with Free Software so you can learn something about how it works.
You should learn as much about the problem and potential solutions as possible by reading articles about spam that may be not quite as sensational as the currently popular "spammer hunting" genre, but are a little richer in detail and technique. Here is a good primer including some good links, and there's lots of good info on dealing with spam around the web.
You should attempt to encourage your provider to take an active role in helping users avoid spam troubles, either by providing information on how users can filter spam on thier own machines, by providing spam blocking/filtering service, or by allowing users to install thier own.procmailrc in thier shell account (if they provide thier subscribers with a shell acc
The guy signing the paycheck? F*ck him, otherwise we are all just sniveling toadies.
I agree that in this case, the guy was stupid, but it should not be a punishable offense to tell a companies customers how thier data is being intentionally left at risk even if the motive is to screw the company, and it should be socially unacceptable for that company to continue to allow the customers data to remain at risk.
Sure if the guy had told the customers while he was working there, then I can see the company firing him, but as he had already been fired, the jerk was just delivering what he had alread paid for with his job.
Well maybe it is in Iowa and Minnesota, but it has proven to be both efficient and profitable for small scale producers, as discussed here back in March.
The systems described in the main article do not sound very practical to me (800 degrees F. takes a lot of energy to maintain), but they are not the only example of biomass energy being put into practise, and they might be the right choice if you already have a lot of sawdust on hand (like in a lumberyard or a furniture fab).
Anything that reduces the dependency on foreign oil is good for the economy, and less dependency on large energy companies is good for the consumer. That these technologies allow small business to reduce thier cost of operation (or increase thier income) and are environmentally sound is good for everyone.
Well it's actually Cowshit, but close enough. Biomass is efficient, cheap, and practical as has been proven at this farm, and this one (which was discussed here back in March.)
The man who says "I understand every aspect of every approach to the problem and anybody who disagrees with my hypothesis is wrong, case closed." would clearly be the more arrogant.
The Linex distribution does nothing to prevent you from installing a non-free or propietary application if you wish to. It simply does not package and distribute non-free software.
If non-free for Linex is an issue of serious enough concern for you, perhaps you should consider creating a distribution of non-free software that would be compatible with Linex. If you think that it would be foolish to put your unpaid time and energy into promoting and distributing somebody else's comercial product, then you perhaps can understand why it would be foolish for Linex to do the same.
A better example of how closed source softwarereeks of Stalinism would be to point out that you, as a customer, is not permitted to purchase (under Stalinism, there is no ownership of physical goods) a copy of software, but is only "licensed" (permission granted by an authority) to use the software as the provider (under Stalinism, the provider is the government, in closed source, the provider is the publisher) sees fit.
The parrallels are simple and obvious, yet many ignore them, ether because they are ignorant of how the Stalinist system functioned to enforce it's oppressive control of the soviet citizenryand how these techniques and ideas are being applied today by people who call themselves capitalists, or because they imagine that they will benefit from such a system.
Re:I like the wooden better
on
Mirror, Mirror
·
· Score: 1
so do I, the softer coloring and the irregularities of the grain give Wooden Mirror a much more welcoming feeling that disguises the electromechanical nature of the machinery.
Your idea of an artpiece using smaller blocks to achieve a smoother appearance could be enhanced by using woods of differing shades or hues on different sides of the blocks to allow finer control of the rendered image or, in the case of hues, allow the mood of the image to change as well as the pattern and contrast.
As the web images cannot possibly do the originals justice, does anyone know if Rozin's show is still up?
when you set up the rules that will create a market, you shouldn't let the groups that could be the biggest beneficiary of those rules write them
Agreed. Power generation is an area that I believe a competative market would be beneficial as long as it is truly competative, but I doubt that competition can be fair when the last mile is still a privatized monopoly, especially if the last mile carrier is also competing in the power generation market.
As for my politics, I'm not really all that dogmatic as far as the "free-market vs socialism" aguments go, as I don't believe that either ecconomic philosophy is superior in all cases. I do believe that certain services better serve the public if they are socialized (water, sewage, anything that is a "natural" monopoly that cannot be avoided).
You are still held subject to the transmission charges of the private monopoly that owns the lines between your home and the plant. Cost of electricity goes down, transmission costs go up. Everybody happy except for the customer.
In California, the supposedly competing power generation companies created a scarcity of power by bringing down one third of thier power plants for "maintenance" during peak season, the largest reseller (Enron) refused to increase supply to meet demand, and instead decreased supply and raised prices. The only municipalities that remained unaffected were the ones that held on to thier municipal (socialized) power companies.
Gray Davis was blamed for the mess, and the companies got off scott-free (thanks to deregulation).
As long as the power industry is dominated by the large investors who currently dominate the industry, there will never be a "natural" economy with a supply/demand that will adjust naturally. Despite deregulation, we are moving in a direction where consolidation of power suppliers and overly powerful electric resellers will be able to create a false scarcity of electrical power like we saw a few years ago in California
Micro suppliers could aleviate the conditions that led to the massive blackouts that we observed to day by placing cleaner, smaller, and more efficient power sources closer to where the electricity is being used. This would also make our national electric grid more resistant to terrorist attacks by distributing power generation, make localities less dependant on the owners of long distance transmission lines, allow homeowners the option of choosing power from the grid or from thier natural gas feul cells (in the basement) depending on which comodity has a more reasonable price, allow municipalities to reduce the cost of sewage treatment by turning sewage into natural gas or electric, and allow family owned farms to reduce costs and supplement thier agricultural incomes by selling electricity generated either by windmills or from natural gas from thier animal waste
Fuel cells are more efficient (85% of the energy contained in the natural gas converted to electric as opposed to 35% to 45%) and cleaner (natural gas fuel cells give off only water and CO2, no CO) than burning natural gas or oil for power generation.
A micro supplier market will decentralize the electrical generation market making power delivery more reliable and less vulnerable to outages, and will place natural, market based controls on energy costs by reducing the ability of large power companies and resellers (remember Enron?) to create a "false scarcity" in the market.
Get a new template, tis one is starting to wear rather thin.
Re:Why can't it be more like Linux?
on
Absolute OpenBSD
·
· Score: 1
Because it's not Linux. I'm sure that there are BSD'ers who have been saying "Why is Linux not more like BSD?" since Linux was first released.
Why can't we agree on one kind of a setup?
Because overly dogmatic and unecessary standards stifle innovation.
Open Source and Free Software is the primary defense against a monoculture in the operating system ecology. Standards are necessary for interoperability between different OSs and for reasonable levels of acceptability as far as programmability, security, and stability, are concerned, but there are areas that standards are uneccessary or intrusive, such as user interface.
The posix shell interface standard exists and is a good one, because it allows for cross platform scripting, but a desktop "standard" is uneccessary interference because there is no reason for every desktop to look and behave the same or have the same set of complicated dependancies.
The same applies for init methods and methods as each init scheme has it's own benefits and problems. If only one schema were used everywhere, then there'd be lttle to argue about and all of these brilliant system integrators and designers would get bored, and possibly log of of irc, leave thier mother's basements, and wreck havoc on the rest of civilization.
So, you see, it is these little differences that we depend on to keep the world safe for democracy.
Yep, in ten years I expect that all computers and media devices will have DRM systems installed, complete with regional encoding so the local governments can filter the content and ensure that your viewing pleasure is safe, and the news you are exposed to does not lead to any confusion.
That and more networked monitoring devices to ensure that we can live in a terrorism free society worldwide and enjoy the elimination of even the most petty crime.
Also we can look forward to that "paperless society" we've been promised, which will not only reduce the demands on our forests, but will eliminate the horrible firehazards known as libraries. Eliminating print media will do wonders for reducing littering, as well as ensuring that the news stories correspond well with the (electronically) published hiostory. Getting rid of all of those mouldy books will do wonders for public health and safety.
So all in all, it seems we've got much to look forward to, and as long as we leave the future of technology in the capable hands of our legislators and those corporations that have served our interests so well for so long, we just may get to see all of that come true!
as this post indicates, the condemnation was not due to the subject matter or position, it was due to Galileo's inability to stick to mathematics and astronomy in his publishing. The Rice UniversityGalileo Project has a brief biography that verifies Rostin's both of Rostin's assertions (first, that Galileo had good relations with the church through most of his career, and second that the condemnation was not due to his research). The page can be found here.
It seems that Galileo was condemned not for supporting the Copernican point of view, but for the very statement you quote in you post. If he had remained true to his agreement, and kept to the subjects of mathematics and astronomy instead of ridiculing the church, he would likely have never faced the inquisition.
I find it hard to believe that IBM would agree to a license that would prevent them from licensing thier own code or using it in another project. If SCOs license dictates this as you say it does, then IBM would be prevented from using anything they wrote for AIX in any other non-AIX implementation, including any of IBMs other OS. It would also mean that any AIX implementation would become SCOs "trade secret" property.
I seriously doubt that that is the case. IBM is known to be quite proficient at prtecting thier own interests.
Does anyone besides me read this as "F-ing Con"? Maybe my problem is that seems like a good description of Transmeta's current business model.
Incompetant at marketing, maybe. But that does not mean they are conning anyone. If you had tried a laptop that uses thier Crusoe chip, you would know that thier chips deliver exactly as promised: Extremely efficient use of power and extended battery life (eight plus hours in many models) with acceptable performance. The con game in laptops is convincing users that they need a P4.
Slashdot Mirror
Uppage there are a few of the expected calls for government regulation of email that we see every time there is a story about spam, and there are the obligitory anecdotes about the hundreds of spam emails that some poor souls find every day in thier inbox.
.procmailrc in thier shell account (if they provide thier subscribers with a shell acc
So here is my usual post about how asking the government to regulate everything is a bad idea, and how I have little sympathy for the poor saps who are getting flooded with thousands of spam emails a day that makes it difficult for them to see the one or two legitimate emails that thier friends might send them each year.
First law. Bad idea because it won't work. As long as there are different countries with seperate governments that have differing attitudes towards the internet, commerce, and law it will be impossible to legislate spam out of existance. That is not to say that I am supporting the idea of one government rulling all peoples or that I am advocating any sort if international treaty on regulating email and the internet.
Far from it.
What I am saying is there are good methods of reducing the flow of spam to your in-box to a trickle, possibly blocking the spam flow completely.
Use a provider that is as concerned about stopping the spam as you are. That means no AOL, no MSN, no Hotmail, etc. These companies are notorious for not only allowing you to get spam flooded, but for allowing thier customers to send spam and not discontiuing accounts that are being used as fake "reply to" and "from" addresses. There are other companies that are just as irresponsible as the ones I mentioned, so you should not think that I am saying that these companies are the only ones that should be avoided.
If you like using the same email and access provider (I've been hijacking friends access accounts for years now), then you should know that smaller access providers often are more responsive to user's (knowlegable and legitimate) complaints than large companies. As an added bonus, thier access rates tend to be low, and they are as if not more reliable than thier corporate competitors.
If you like using a separate provider for email, ask around, do some searches, and choose one that has effective filtering/blocking of spam included in thier basic package.
You can filter the mail yourself with one of the many spam blocking services or filters that are readily available on the internet. Here are some links to some of the blacklists and filters that I know about:
ORDB
MAPS
junkfilter
Bogofilter
SpamCop
SpamBouncer
There are others, some services are free, some charge money. If you are going to use a filter on your own machine that is not part of a service, I highly reccomend that you stick with Free Software so you can learn something about how it works.
You should learn as much about the problem and potential solutions as possible by reading articles about spam that may be not quite as sensational as the currently popular "spammer hunting" genre, but are a little richer in detail and technique. Here is a good primer including some good links, and there's lots of good info on dealing with spam around the web.
You should attempt to encourage your provider to take an active role in helping users avoid spam troubles, either by providing information on how users can filter spam on thier own machines, by providing spam blocking/filtering service, or by allowing users to install thier own
Who gets to decide what is "wrong, wrong, wrong"?
The guy signing the paycheck? F*ck him, otherwise we are all just sniveling toadies.
I agree that in this case, the guy was stupid, but it should not be a punishable offense to tell a companies customers how thier data is being intentionally left at risk even if the motive is to screw the company, and it should be socially unacceptable for that company to continue to allow the customers data to remain at risk.
Sure if the guy had told the customers while he was working there, then I can see the company firing him, but as he had already been fired, the jerk was just delivering what he had alread paid for with his job.
Well maybe it is in Iowa and Minnesota, but it has proven to be both efficient and profitable for small scale producers, as discussed here back in March.
The systems described in the main article do not sound very practical to me (800 degrees F. takes a lot of energy to maintain), but they are not the only example of biomass energy being put into practise, and they might be the right choice if you already have a lot of sawdust on hand (like in a lumberyard or a furniture fab).
Anything that reduces the dependency on foreign oil is good for the economy, and less dependency on large energy companies is good for the consumer. That these technologies allow small business to reduce thier cost of operation (or increase thier income) and are environmentally sound is good for everyone.
Well it's actually Cowshit, but close enough. Biomass is efficient, cheap, and practical as has been proven at this farm, and this one (which was discussed here back in March.)
Who is more arrogant
The man who says "I understand every aspect of every approach to the problem and anybody who disagrees with my hypothesis is wrong, case closed." would clearly be the more arrogant.
The Linex distribution does nothing to prevent you from installing a non-free or propietary application if you wish to. It simply does not package and distribute non-free software.
If non-free for Linex is an issue of serious enough concern for you, perhaps you should consider creating a distribution of non-free software that would be compatible with Linex. If you think that it would be foolish to put your unpaid time and energy into promoting and distributing somebody else's comercial product, then you perhaps can understand why it would be foolish for Linex to do the same.
A better example of how closed source softwarereeks of Stalinism would be to point out that you, as a customer, is not permitted to purchase (under Stalinism, there is no ownership of physical goods) a copy of software, but is only "licensed" (permission granted by an authority) to use the software as the provider (under Stalinism, the provider is the government, in closed source, the provider is the publisher) sees fit.
The parrallels are simple and obvious, yet many ignore them, ether because they are ignorant of how the Stalinist system functioned to enforce it's oppressive control of the soviet citizenryand how these techniques and ideas are being applied today by people who call themselves capitalists, or because they imagine that they will benefit from such a system.
so do I, the softer coloring and the irregularities of the grain give Wooden Mirror a much more welcoming feeling that disguises the electromechanical nature of the machinery.
Your idea of an artpiece using smaller blocks to achieve a smoother appearance could be enhanced by using woods of differing shades or hues on different sides of the blocks to allow finer control of the rendered image or, in the case of hues, allow the mood of the image to change as well as the pattern and contrast.
As the web images cannot possibly do the originals justice, does anyone know if Rozin's show is still up?
I'm laughing.
Whoever moderated your post as "flaimbait" probably could use some fibre in thier diet.
Switch everything over to Debian and spend the $350k on "training" and new laptops.
Better yet, spend $300k on training/laptops and get yourself a nice bonus for cutting $50k from the budget.
when you set up the rules that will create a market, you shouldn't let the groups that could be the biggest beneficiary of those rules write them
Agreed. Power generation is an area that I believe a competative market would be beneficial as long as it is truly competative, but I doubt that competition can be fair when the last mile is still a privatized monopoly, especially if the last mile carrier is also competing in the power generation market.
As for my politics, I'm not really all that dogmatic as far as the "free-market vs socialism" aguments go, as I don't believe that either ecconomic philosophy is superior in all cases. I do believe that certain services better serve the public if they are socialized (water, sewage, anything that is a "natural" monopoly that cannot be avoided).
You are still held subject to the transmission charges of the private monopoly that owns the lines between your home and the plant. Cost of electricity goes down, transmission costs go up. Everybody happy except for the customer.
In California, the supposedly competing power generation companies created a scarcity of power by bringing down one third of thier power plants for "maintenance" during peak season, the largest reseller (Enron) refused to increase supply to meet demand, and instead decreased supply and raised prices. The only municipalities that remained unaffected were the ones that held on to thier municipal (socialized) power companies.
Gray Davis was blamed for the mess, and the companies got off scott-free (thanks to deregulation).
As long as the power industry is dominated by the large investors who currently dominate the industry, there will never be a "natural" economy with a supply/demand that will adjust naturally. Despite deregulation, we are moving in a direction where consolidation of power suppliers and overly powerful electric resellers will be able to create a false scarcity of electrical power like we saw a few years ago in California
Micro suppliers could aleviate the conditions that led to the massive blackouts that we observed to day by placing cleaner, smaller, and more efficient power sources closer to where the electricity is being used. This would also make our national electric grid more resistant to terrorist attacks by distributing power generation, make localities less dependant on the owners of long distance transmission lines, allow homeowners the option of choosing power from the grid or from thier natural gas feul cells (in the basement) depending on which comodity has a more reasonable price, allow municipalities to reduce the cost of sewage treatment by turning sewage into natural gas or electric, and allow family owned farms to reduce costs and supplement thier agricultural incomes by selling electricity generated either by windmills or from natural gas from thier animal waste
Fuel cells are more efficient (85% of the energy contained in the natural gas converted to electric as opposed to 35% to 45%) and cleaner (natural gas fuel cells give off only water and CO2, no CO) than burning natural gas or oil for power generation.
A micro supplier market will decentralize the electrical generation market making power delivery more reliable and less vulnerable to outages, and will place natural, market based controls on energy costs by reducing the ability of large power companies and resellers (remember Enron?) to create a "false scarcity" in the market.
Get a new template, tis one is starting to wear rather thin.
Because it's not Linux. I'm sure that there are BSD'ers who have been saying "Why is Linux not more like BSD?" since Linux was first released.
Why can't we agree on one kind of a setup?
Because overly dogmatic and unecessary standards stifle innovation.
Open Source and Free Software is the primary defense against a monoculture in the operating system ecology. Standards are necessary for interoperability between different OSs and for reasonable levels of acceptability as far as programmability, security, and stability, are concerned, but there are areas that standards are uneccessary or intrusive, such as user interface.
The posix shell interface standard exists and is a good one, because it allows for cross platform scripting, but a desktop "standard" is uneccessary interference because there is no reason for every desktop to look and behave the same or have the same set of complicated dependancies.
The same applies for init methods and methods as each init scheme has it's own benefits and problems. If only one schema were used everywhere, then there'd be lttle to argue about and all of these brilliant system integrators and designers would get bored, and possibly log of of irc, leave thier mother's basements, and wreck havoc on the rest of civilization.
So, you see, it is these little differences that we depend on to keep the world safe for democracy.
Sun Spots, that's what I tell the users when I don't have a clue.
You mean like this?
Yep, in ten years I expect that all computers and media devices will have DRM systems installed, complete with regional encoding so the local governments can filter the content and ensure that your viewing pleasure is safe, and the news you are exposed to does not lead to any confusion.
That and more networked monitoring devices to ensure that we can live in a terrorism free society worldwide and enjoy the elimination of even the most petty crime.
Also we can look forward to that "paperless society" we've been promised, which will not only reduce the demands on our forests, but will eliminate the horrible firehazards known as libraries. Eliminating print media will do wonders for reducing littering, as well as ensuring that the news stories correspond well with the (electronically) published hiostory. Getting rid of all of those mouldy books will do wonders for public health and safety.
So all in all, it seems we've got much to look forward to, and as long as we leave the future of technology in the capable hands of our legislators and those corporations that have served our interests so well for so long, we just may get to see all of that come true!
as this post indicates, the condemnation was not due to the subject matter or position, it was due to Galileo's inability to stick to mathematics and astronomy in his publishing. The Rice University Galileo Project has a brief biography that verifies Rostin's both of Rostin's assertions (first, that Galileo had good relations with the church through most of his career, and second that the condemnation was not due to his research). The page can be found here.
It seems that Galileo was condemned not for supporting the Copernican point of view, but for the very statement you quote in you post. If he had remained true to his agreement, and kept to the subjects of mathematics and astronomy instead of ridiculing the church, he would likely have never faced the inquisition.
You mean like the moderators are going to do to the rest of your posts?
You're welcome.
Just trying to share the nightmare.
I find it hard to believe that IBM would agree to a license that would prevent them from licensing thier own code or using it in another project. If SCOs license dictates this as you say it does, then IBM would be prevented from using anything they wrote for AIX in any other non-AIX implementation, including any of IBMs other OS. It would also mean that any AIX implementation would become SCOs "trade secret" property.
I seriously doubt that that is the case. IBM is known to be quite proficient at prtecting thier own interests.
Perhaps from an activist's point of view, you are correct.
From a user's point of view, Debian's greatest achievement is having an "unstable" branch that is as stable as some other dist's releases.
From a CS student's point of view, Debian's great achievement may be the package creation and management tools.
For socioligists, it may be the democratic nature of the project.
From a project managers point of view, it may be the fine example of how to establish a development policy.
For me, it's simply that I get to use an OS that does not suck.
They should have kept the "Astro" moniker and licensed the cartoon for the marketing.
Oh, and fired thier lawyers. Trademark is difficult to enforce if the products are not in the same market or are marketed for unrelated usage.
Does anyone besides me read this as "F-ing Con"? Maybe my problem is that seems like a good description of Transmeta's current business model.
Incompetant at marketing, maybe. But that does not mean they are conning anyone. If you had tried a laptop that uses thier Crusoe chip, you would know that thier chips deliver exactly as promised: Extremely efficient use of power and extended battery life (eight plus hours in many models) with acceptable performance. The con game in laptops is convincing users that they need a P4.