Spot-on. My niece is old enough at four that she could have blundered into such a site. At least my brother doesn't use IE, which provides some protection. My oldest will soon be using a computer (Linux, of course, for even more protection), and at least during the next three years, that scum won't be putting up any sites to try and trap them or others.
To all of the bleeding hearts whining about this three-year sentence, please get a clue. What he did was illegal, I'm certain he knew it was illegal when he did it, and he knew the risks. If he didn't want to go to prison, the time to think about that was *before* he did the crime, not after. It's like parenthood: the time to think about whether you want a kid is when your clothes are still on. If you don't, then keep 'em on.
My only problem with his sentence is the cost. His million dollars should be confiscated to pay for it. Otherwise, well, three years in prison are pretty expensive, and there are much cheaper alternatives: a rope, a single.40 S&W bullet, a jolt of high-voltage electricity...
One of my uncles (by marriage) was a Viet Cong too. He's a great guy, one of my favorites among my in-laws. Ironically, my father-in-law (other side of the family) was an ARVN draftee. He got out of the army after he was wounded. I'm glad they both survived.
Fifteen months ago my wife had our first baby. Three months ago she had our second one (yeah, we worked fast). Right now, today, she's a good bit thinner than Ceren and she has lost only five pounds from her weight when she came home from the hospital.
Ceren may not be terribly fat by American standards, but that is only because such a large percentage of our population is clinically obese. However, if she is fatter than a woman who just had two babies back to back, she's, well, fat.
If you work on any Open Source project, DO NOT LOOK!
This is extremely good advice. I would go even further and say that if you would ever like to work on an open source project, don't look. The presence on a project of a person who had seen the Windows source could put the entire project at risk.
For a very practical example, consider Samba. If a person who had seen the Windows source were to contribute to Samba and it were later to come to light that the contributor had seen the Windows source, in the name of safety every piece of code that person contributed would have to be ripped out and replaced. Worse, to guarantee that there was no trace of taint, it would probably have to be replaced by people who had not only never been exposed to the Windows source, but who had also not seen the contributor's tainted code. In short, it would require the recruitment of people who had never worked on the project before, or even read the source. Finding those people would not be easy, to say nothing of the time and credibility that would be lost.
For that matter, even if you have legally seen the Windows source because Microsoft has provided it to your employer under their shared source program, the same taint would follow you. If your employer has access to Windows source and your job does not require you to see that source, do yourself a favor: don't look.
If you look at the Windows source, you at the least taint yourself WRT working on any project aimed at interoperability with Windows, and quite possibly on a much wider variety of projects than that.
If you go to Viet Nam, you'll find a lot of people who believe that:
1) The Soviets landed people on the moon;
2) The US moon landings were faked.
They learned it in school. I've even heard that from some of my in-laws there, and I'm far from sure I've convinced them it isn't true. Heck, some Americans even believe 2.
Yes, that is the big news, someone please mod that Insightful. IBM, in not filing for summary judgement against SCO, seems to be saying that they want case law on this one. A dismissal means anyone, even SCO (unless it is dismissed with prejudice) if they are sufficiently imbalanced (and I believe they may well be) can come along and try the same thing again in the future, either with Linux or some other piece of FOSS to which IBM has contributed.
If IBM goes to trial and wins a crushing victory over SCO in court, then countersues for damages and bankrupts SCO (although simply losing this case will probably do that on its own) and then buys them up for pennies on the dollar out of bankruptcy and fires all of senior management, no one will dare try something like this again, even if they think they might have a case. The price to be paid for failure will scare them off. Put more simply, IBM will probably seek not only case law, but to make an example of Darl and friends.
And how would you like to be Darl, looking for your next job when this is all over, with the most prominent entry on your resume being something like "Embarked on frivolous and ill-fated lawsuit against IBM, sent my then-employer into bankruptcy as a result, seeking challenging position at tech company." He'd be lucky to get a challenging position emptying the wastebaskets. Of course, he's made millions selling SCO stock since this fiasco began, he'll never need to work again. These executive types seem addicted to work, so he'll probably try, but I bet that will be one long, hard job search.
I think IBM recognizes this situation exactly as the shakedown that it is, and sees perfectly well that if they give in it in any way, even taking a summary judgement and getting no case law, that anyone else thinking about shaking down IBM would be tempted to try it. They also know, as the oldest practioner of FUD in the computer business (heck, they invented it; every old mainframer like me knows the saying "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"), that they dare not give quarter. As with any shakedown, giving in or giving quarter will only incite others to go after you. If you bust up the one who's trying to shake you down and make an example of him, nobody will dare. That, I think, is what IBM has in mind for SCO.
Not all Utah(a)?ns. A close friend of mine lives in Payson and works in SLC and has to drive past SCO headquarters every day on his way to work. Every day, he flips the bird to SCO headquarters.
A friend of his, in turn, works at SCO. Poor guy. He says the customers (yeah, I guess they still have a few) really beat him up on the phone over SCO's actions.
SCO's enemies (that's almost everyone) hate them, their own customers seem to hate them (that's hardly anyone), and I bet most of their own staff probably hate them, too. Does anyone like them? Oh yeah, I guess their lawyers like them. Their names will be mud when this is over, but it will be rich mud, b/c they make money win or lose and have already been paid millions of dollars.
This is no defense of Hussein, we're well rid of him, but Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot were all far greater butchers than Hussein, and all three of them did most (Mao and Stalin) or all (Pol Pot) of their butchery after the Holocaust. Hard data on Kim Il Sung is hard come by, but I'd bet he's ahead of Hussein on the butcher's list, too. No doubt there are others, but those are the first few who come to mind.
Why do I bring this up? Because I dislike gratuitous comparisons to the Holocaust. That was a mass murder and genocide surpassed only by Stalin (about whom very little is said, for some reason). To put Hussein at the same level as Hitler and Stalin, in my opinion, denigrates the victims and detracts from the impact of the enormously monstrous actions of the traitors.
Saddam Hussein is an evil man, to be sure - not a mad man, as some paint him - and we and the Iraqis are both better of with him in prison cell than in power, and eventually he'll probably be at the end of a rope and we'll be better of yet. But please, let's not put him in the same company as Hitler and Stalin, lest we tend to lose sight of how truly horrible those two greatest mass murderers of all time truly were.
I think you've missed the point s/he was making, although you raise some valid additional points of your own.
The point was not "Why do alternative(s) to the GPL exist?" but "Why do people see the need to come up with so many new FOSS licenses so often"?
There is the Apache licene, several BSD-style variants, Mozilla, X11 (old and soon-to-be new), and many more variants, ad nauseum. The point of the question was that everytime someone forks a license, it makes interoperability (meaning here code use between them, not compatibility with a standard) between FOSS projects more difficult.
I find that to be a very valid point. When we are moving toward greater interoperability between major FOSS projects such as GNOME and KDE, it doesn't strike me as productive to be moving farther apart on licensing. I would like to see FOSS projects that do not use the GPL try to move toward the most unified licensing possible. Perhaps it might be achievable to get down to three (at most) non-GPL licenses used by all the major projects, with small variations between them to cover any concerns that just can't be worked into a single unified non-GPL free license.
I am in full agreement with the idea that having a huge number of FOSS licenses is not in the best interests of the advancement of FOSS. I would encourage anyone writing a project and seeking a license to choose an already existing GPL-compatible license rather than take one and modify it.
Heck, being a college grad doesn't mean people aren't morons. I run across morons and near-morons with college degrees (not ordered over the Internet, either; real ones) all the time.
A college degree doesn't mean you're not a moron; it just means you may be a better-educated moron. If you go to the level of Oxford or Harvard or MIT, OK, maybe a degree means you aren't a moron. But even in the case of those illustrious schools, I want proof of non-moronhood:-)
That's not even close to the cost, even if you work very, very cheaply.
The cost of anti-virus and related is the least part of the equation, even factoring in the admin's time, and I don't care *how* cheaply you work. Not even if you're a volunteer.
The real cost is factored more like this:
- Staff hours that are lost looking at false bounces (or worse, getting infected, something which is very common) and having to correct that
- Helpdesk hours that are lost answering questions from people with a mailbox full of bounces for stuff they didn't send (or we hope not);
- Helpdesk hours that are lost disinfecting the machines of all those who clicked the attachment. Mostly, the same ones who fell for it last time, too.
- Sysadmin hours that may be spent on watching over stressed mail queues to make sure they don't get full, and dealing with potential mail backlogs.
Those are three broad areas, I'm sure the accounting department could tell me a bunch more of their favorites.
Let's say you make $20 per hour at your job. The cost of your benefits is probably also about $20 hour, assuming health insurance, etc. Heck, it could be more. But lets go with $40/hour as the total cost of your compensation for this example.
Now, let's say you lost 30 minutes of productivity to a worm. OK, $20 bucks that your company spent on having you do something other than your job function. But, you're way smarter than most of your colleagues. You didn't click it. You've just wasted 30 minutes initially looking at what it was, deleting more copies that came in, and deleting bounces, and you ever even called the help desk. Most people are probably at one hour, maybe more. Lots more, if they got infected.
If by some chance it works out that the average cost of compensation (salary + benefits) in your company is $40/hour, and you have 100 employees and on average each person lost 30 minutes to the worm (again, I bet it's hard to get the number that low in most companies when a big wrom like this appears), that's $2000 right there. Antivirus software is not even factored in because you either had it already or not, but either way, it's not a directly related expense.
OK, that was the first day. People will deal with more crap in their mailboxes tomorrow, and the day after and quite a few days after. At least for a week, you might expect to have a company-wide average of 30 minutes per person, per day, spent on things related to the worm. Now we're at $10,000.
This all assumes that no data was damaged or destroyed (if it was, the monetary value of that data, if irreplaceable, is charged. For replaceable data, the cost of an admin restoring it is charged).
And don't think your average will probably be that low. If a lot of people get infected, your helpdesk staff and sysadmin staff will probably be spending the majority of their time on this problem for at least a week. In a typical 100-person company with a Windows machine on every desk, you may be really lucky to get away with $10,000 chargeable to the worm.
I work for a well-known mail filtering company, and I'm getting a front-row seat for the impact this is having. It's large, even for companies that have our services. If you have tens of thousands of employeeds, you're going to see a lot of bounces coming in, and those divert staff time to deal with them.
Now, imagine you have tens of thousands of employees and you're not using a service like ours. You're going it alone. Your admins. Your equipment. Your anti-virus software which you hope gets the new signatures before the worm gets to you. Your admins and helpdesk staff are working their butts off for at least a week, probably more (not that they weren't already busy). You might have hundreds or even thousands of infected machines to deal with. Countless bounces. Suddenly, you find yourself looking at a cost reaching into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not a pretty sight.
Not that I really expected better than the way this thread has gone since my last post, but no one has mentioned at all the point that comes out in my description of how the owners of goatse.cx might pursue their appeal: that under the terms of service that are in effect now and were presumably in effect at the time they registered the domain, a clear violation of the terms of service appears to have occurred. Under those terms of service - which constitute a contract into which the registrants entered, the site may be taken down for violation. Therefore, their only shot at a defense is the Bart Simpson defense: "I didn't do it!" The clear implication of this is that whether you like goatse or hate goatse, from a TOS point of view, the registrants of goatse.cx were in violation and are merely being held accountable according to the TOS.
In other words, whether you support goatse or wish it would disappear up its own truly huge and grotesque anus, this is not really a censorship issue when you come down to it. It's a contract enforcement issue, and the registrants of goatse.cx have the short end of the stick because the onus is on them to argue that whatever link Rhonda followed to the image, they didn't post it and had no control over the person who did.
Someone will probably argue that I'm wrong and it is a censorship/free speech issue, and they would have me except for one thing: if I enter into a contract that says I may host/register a web site with registrar/hosting provider X, but that I may not violate a certain list of terms of service, I have to follow it. Let's say that one of the terms of service is that I may not post the goatse image or any variation thereof, and that doing so is grounds for termination of service. However, as soon as my site is up, I post the goatse image, the goatse Darl image, and any other goatse image I can get my hands on. In doing so, I am in breach of contract. A week later they catch me with the goatse images and pull the plug. Not because they are censors - they might even be goatse fans themselves - but because I violated my contract.
Some of you reading this think the departure of goatse is a good thing, and many others do not. I am taking no stand on the issue, but (perhaps futiley) trying to frame rational debate (yeah, yeah, I know, it's/. and I'm nuts:-).
However, let me show a very similar case, on which many of you might take the opposite stance. For a number of years, I was a sysadmin at an ISP. One of the hats I wore there was postmaster. Like most ISPs, we had a Terms of Service document and an Abuse Policy, that described in sufficient detail our terms of service, what we considered to be abuse of those terms, and what actions we reserved to resolve them.
Again, like most ISPs, one of the things we held to be a violation of our terms of service, punishable by termination of your service, was spamming. Whether you spammed through our outbound SMTP, whether you spammed through someone else's to which you had authorized access, whether you used an open relay elsewhere, or whether you used an entirely different network to spamvertise a site we hosted didn't matter. Spamming was a violation of our terms of service, and we could and would pull the plug if you were caught. And yes, we did once cancel the service of a long-time customer whose website was hosted with us and who spamvertised through other networks. The first time they were caught, they were given a clear "never again" order. The second time they were caught, they were told their business was no longer welcome, and their service was terminated. There were also a few (very few; our reputation went before us) spammers who would try it through dialup or DSL. Their accounts were terminated without notice as soon as we discovered them. If they had an active connection at the time, we dropped it with a sense of enjoyment.
Now, it is certainly an argument of spammers that those who cut them off are censors, and that
Well, actually, s/he never claimed to be in charge of what's on the Internet, but merely expressed an opinion on the value and propriety of goatse.
There hasn't been much calm rhetoric over the suspension of goatse.cx, but (fool that I am), I'll try to create some here.
While goatse.cx was probably not in violation of the law (IANAL, of course), we all know that a major hobby of some people on some forums is to post links, often deliberately disguised, to goatse.cx so as to trick the uninitiated (or even the initiated) into clicking it. Probably most every one of us on/. who has seen goatse.cx didn't know, before clicking, what it was. And of course, if you don't check all URLs before clicking, you may see it again. Even if you check, it might be a redirect.
Clearly, then, they had grounds under Item 5 to suspend goatse.cx once they had a complaint. Tht is what their rules say, and they do have to go by them. Certainly, these rules were not created with the intent of destroying goatse.cx, although they do neatly fit that purpose.
The issue the registrant(s) of goatse.cx can use in their defense is that while people often post links to goatse.cx and they typically do not identify them as such, on what basis should the registrant(s) of goatse.cx be held accountable for the unauthorized actions of third parties who are not under the control of, or even known to, the registrant(s) of goatse.cx? Similarly, if someone should post a link to a porno site in a children's forum, it is not the site operator who is liable for that, it is the poster. If the site operator himself promotes a porn site to kids, that is actionable and the site should rightly be shutdown and the operator arrested. However, the operator is not responsible under the law for (potentially malicious) actions of others who post links to his site in an inappropriate forum.
Take that line of defense in trying to get goatse.cx reinstated.
On a side note, I'd like to know exactly where she clicked such a link, if in fact she did. The native range of goatse links is/. and K5, and she just doesn't seem like the type you'd find in either of those places. And of course, if you go to those places, you have to expect goatse:-)
I passed the CCNA exam in 2000, after narrowly failing it on my first try. At the time, I was a *nix admin and also lead network engineer at medium-sized regional ISP. Certainly, I knew how to configure Cisco routers, switches, and RASes, since I was doing that work every day. This included configuring authenticated OSPF and maintaining a whole bunch of access lists.
However, I had, with the help of others, taught myself my craft over several years and had never taken any certification exam. So, while I knew how to do the work, I didn't know how to take the test. I had to go study. After doing so, I came back and passed. However, it was not a cake walk.
Unless Cisco has watered down the CCNA since then (I don't know; I didn't bother renewing it because I'm an analyst now and don't do networking anymore), it shouldn't be taken so lightly. The CCNA is, IMO, the most challenging of the first-level certs. Now, it may be that memorizing really well is more valuable than knowing how to do the work in the real world, but the CCNA is still not bad.
Think about it, what does this speed up? What part of the process is facilitated? Them getting the money out of your pocket. Let's them get your money faster at less cost with less man-power.
Since it requires no manpower (or womanpower) on the part of the oil company now, I'm not sure where you see a labor savings in this. How does it save labor for the gas station to have me swipe a speedpass over a reader Vs. having me put my credit card through a reader and, in some places, enter my zip code on the keypad? It doesn't. It saves some labor for me, though.
What you describe as them "getting the money out of your pocket" faster, I look at as my being able to pay faster and get done faster and get back on the road. You sound like you think you're out something if you can pay faster. Your're not. They get the money anyway, regardless of speed. I see no benefit to me in having to take longer to pay, so give me better speed, thanks.
WRT auto-shutoff, I don't know how things are where you live, but the only time they removed auto-shutoff anywhere in the western United States was when the first-generation vapor recovery systems came out, and they were clunky and just not compatible with auto-shutoff, and there may even have been some regulation against it. However, it's been more than 20 years since I've seen a gas pump without auto-shutoff. I haven't done any long-distance driving in a while, but I remember in the 1980s and probably into the early 1990s that in some rural locations you could even find gas pumps with no vapor recovery system, because they weren't required to have one. No air pollution problem out there. Things may have changed by now, though.
I remember that case, and I'm sad to see how it turned out. The court sure goatsed him. The commercial use to which he was previously putting that domain name was his small business, a computer shop, IIRC. Nothing whatsoever to do with cars, and he'd been in business for years under his name, since the days when Nissan still called itself Datsun in North America.
Poor guy. He really got shafted. Guess which Japanese auto maker will have a zero percent chance of selling me my next car?
A nineteen month old boy is orphaned and severely injured, found under his mother's body where she'd shielded him from the waves that destroyed their house, and all you care about is a bunch of psychic hotline numbers?
That's very true. DSL is very distance-sensitive. When they came out with 8 megabit DSL, most people could never really realize that speed, either. A lot of customers would inquire/complain about speed, and we'd have to explain that 8 megabits is the maximum possible wire speed, and that the farther you live from the telco CO, the less speed you will get.
Among ourselves, we would say that if you can't open your window and urinate on the side of the NTT building, you won't get 8 megabits:-)
Wearing a portable computer to a high school dance is not just geeky, it's fucking weird. I'm the same as Mann, so I can tell you what a freak people would have considered anybody who showed up at a high school dance wearing a portable computer. He's lucky he didn't get beat up. But then, we don't know that he didn't.
Like many of us here on/. I was a computer nerd in school too, and I can tell you that it wasn't exactly a chick magnet:-) One of the things that distinguished the school computer club is that all of the members were guys. Girls were allowed - heck, they would have been really, really welcome! - but they just weren't interested. Things are better now, and that's good, but even know most of the IT department where I work is male.
I thought marrying a geek girl would be great, but there are so few out there that I eventually didn't. My wife is terrific, and has a higher IQ than mine easily, but she neither knows nor cares much about computers. She just wants them to work.
I thought I'd already covered that in my original post, but I'll revisit it in case of lack of clarity. It's a three-part answer (part three may be semi-new):
Part One: In the real world, you may have a 40 megabit local loop, but as I explained, nowhere are you going to get 40 megabits down of transfer, and if you do, it'll be a very short burst. You could slurp a whole ISO in about 2 minutes.
Part Two: I was also referring to the telco's cost. The local loop they run your DSL connection over is the same one whether it's 1.5 megabit or 40 megabit. That leaves them with no significant cost difference, and it's not their pipe out.
Part Three: the fact that the ISP pricing is the same means that they obviously think it's not going to cost them anymore. Having seen the numbers when 8 megabit DSL became available in Japan, and how it had no significant effect bandwidth requirements as compared to when it was all 1.5 megabit, I think they are right in believing that.
Slashdot Mirror
Spot-on. My niece is old enough at four that she could have blundered into such a site. At least my brother doesn't use IE, which provides some protection. My oldest will soon be using a computer (Linux, of course, for even more protection), and at least during the next three years, that scum won't be putting up any sites to try and trap them or others.
.40 S&W bullet, a jolt of high-voltage electricity...
To all of the bleeding hearts whining about this three-year sentence, please get a clue. What he did was illegal, I'm certain he knew it was illegal when he did it, and he knew the risks. If he didn't want to go to prison, the time to think about that was *before* he did the crime, not after. It's like parenthood: the time to think about whether you want a kid is when your clothes are still on. If you don't, then keep 'em on.
My only problem with his sentence is the cost. His million dollars should be confiscated to pay for it. Otherwise, well, three years in prison are pretty expensive, and there are much cheaper alternatives: a rope, a single
AND - they all have a recidivism rate of zero.
I write spam filters for a living, and I promise you that they can eliminate many of the spams just by looking at the subject too.
Of course, so can I. Now, since I write the filter based on my human judgement of what constitutes spam, which is more accurate?
Almost screwed your education??
:-)
Umm, that's "organ" and "shoddy." I don't think there's any "almost" about it
The majority of *rich* Singaporeans are Chinese, but the majority of Singaporeans are Malays, and the great majority of them are Muslims.
But no worries, the ones you'll get laid by are Chinese, and they're hot.
One of my uncles (by marriage) was a Viet Cong too. He's a great guy, one of my favorites among my in-laws. Ironically, my father-in-law (other side of the family) was an ARVN draftee. He got out of the army after he was wounded. I'm glad they both survived.
Let me put it in perspective.
Fifteen months ago my wife had our first baby. Three months ago she had our second one (yeah, we worked fast). Right now, today, she's a good bit thinner than Ceren and she has lost only five pounds from her weight when she came home from the hospital.
Ceren may not be terribly fat by American standards, but that is only because such a large percentage of our population is clinically obese. However, if she is fatter than a woman who just had two babies back to back, she's, well, fat.
This is extremely good advice. I would go even further and say that if you would ever like to work on an open source project, don't look. The presence on a project of a person who had seen the Windows source could put the entire project at risk.
For a very practical example, consider Samba. If a person who had seen the Windows source were to contribute to Samba and it were later to come to light that the contributor had seen the Windows source, in the name of safety every piece of code that person contributed would have to be ripped out and replaced. Worse, to guarantee that there was no trace of taint, it would probably have to be replaced by people who had not only never been exposed to the Windows source, but who had also not seen the contributor's tainted code. In short, it would require the recruitment of people who had never worked on the project before, or even read the source. Finding those people would not be easy, to say nothing of the time and credibility that would be lost.
For that matter, even if you have legally seen the Windows source because Microsoft has provided it to your employer under their shared source program, the same taint would follow you. If your employer has access to Windows source and your job does not require you to see that source, do yourself a favor: don't look.
If you look at the Windows source, you at the least taint yourself WRT working on any project aimed at interoperability with Windows, and quite possibly on a much wider variety of projects than that.
In short, JUST SAY NO.
If you go to Viet Nam, you'll find a lot of people who believe that:
1) The Soviets landed people on the moon;
2) The US moon landings were faked.
They learned it in school. I've even heard that from some of my in-laws there, and I'm far from sure I've convinced them it isn't true. Heck, some Americans even believe 2.
Yes, that is the big news, someone please mod that Insightful. IBM, in not filing for summary judgement against SCO, seems to be saying that they want case law on this one. A dismissal means anyone, even SCO (unless it is dismissed with prejudice) if they are sufficiently imbalanced (and I believe they may well be) can come along and try the same thing again in the future, either with Linux or some other piece of FOSS to which IBM has contributed.
If IBM goes to trial and wins a crushing victory over SCO in court, then countersues for damages and bankrupts SCO (although simply losing this case will probably do that on its own) and then buys them up for pennies on the dollar out of bankruptcy and fires all of senior management, no one will dare try something like this again, even if they think they might have a case. The price to be paid for failure will scare them off. Put more simply, IBM will probably seek not only case law, but to make an example of Darl and friends.
And how would you like to be Darl, looking for your next job when this is all over, with the most prominent entry on your resume being something like "Embarked on frivolous and ill-fated lawsuit against IBM, sent my then-employer into bankruptcy as a result, seeking challenging position at tech company." He'd be lucky to get a challenging position emptying the wastebaskets. Of course, he's made millions selling SCO stock since this fiasco began, he'll never need to work again. These executive types seem addicted to work, so he'll probably try, but I bet that will be one long, hard job search.
I think IBM recognizes this situation exactly as the shakedown that it is, and sees perfectly well that if they give in it in any way, even taking a summary judgement and getting no case law, that anyone else thinking about shaking down IBM would be tempted to try it. They also know, as the oldest practioner of FUD in the computer business (heck, they invented it; every old mainframer like me knows the saying "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"), that they dare not give quarter. As with any shakedown, giving in or giving quarter will only incite others to go after you. If you bust up the one who's trying to shake you down and make an example of him, nobody will dare. That, I think, is what IBM has in mind for SCO.
Not all Utah(a)?ns. A close friend of mine lives in Payson and works in SLC and has to drive past SCO headquarters every day on his way to work. Every day, he flips the bird to SCO headquarters.
A friend of his, in turn, works at SCO. Poor guy. He says the customers (yeah, I guess they still have a few) really beat him up on the phone over SCO's actions.
SCO's enemies (that's almost everyone) hate them, their own customers seem to hate them (that's hardly anyone), and I bet most of their own staff probably hate them, too. Does anyone like them? Oh yeah, I guess their lawyers like them. Their names will be mud when this is over, but it will be rich mud, b/c they make money win or lose and have already been paid millions of dollars.
Sorry, that should have read "the enormously monstrous actions of the perpetrators (of these great genocides)."
:-p
That'll teach me to post without previewing. OK, no it won't. I do it all the time
Not seen since the Holocaust?
Ahem.
This is no defense of Hussein, we're well rid of him, but Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot were all far greater butchers than Hussein, and all three of them did most (Mao and Stalin) or all (Pol Pot) of their butchery after the Holocaust. Hard data on Kim Il Sung is hard come by, but I'd bet he's ahead of Hussein on the butcher's list, too. No doubt there are others, but those are the first few who come to mind.
Why do I bring this up? Because I dislike gratuitous comparisons to the Holocaust. That was a mass murder and genocide surpassed only by Stalin (about whom very little is said, for some reason). To put Hussein at the same level as Hitler and Stalin, in my opinion, denigrates the victims and detracts from the impact of the enormously monstrous actions of the traitors.
Saddam Hussein is an evil man, to be sure - not a mad man, as some paint him - and we and the Iraqis are both better of with him in prison cell than in power, and eventually he'll probably be at the end of a rope and we'll be better of yet. But please, let's not put him in the same company as Hitler and Stalin, lest we tend to lose sight of how truly horrible those two greatest mass murderers of all time truly were.
I think you've missed the point s/he was making, although you raise some valid additional points of your own.
The point was not "Why do alternative(s) to the GPL exist?" but "Why do people see the need to come up with so many new FOSS licenses so often"?
There is the Apache licene, several BSD-style variants, Mozilla, X11 (old and soon-to-be new), and many more variants, ad nauseum. The point of the question was that everytime someone forks a license, it makes interoperability (meaning here code use between them, not compatibility with a standard) between FOSS projects more difficult.
I find that to be a very valid point. When we are moving toward greater interoperability between major FOSS projects such as GNOME and KDE, it doesn't strike me as productive to be moving farther apart on licensing. I would like to see FOSS projects that do not use the GPL try to move toward the most unified licensing possible. Perhaps it might be achievable to get down to three (at most) non-GPL licenses used by all the major projects, with small variations between them to cover any concerns that just can't be worked into a single unified non-GPL free license.
I am in full agreement with the idea that having a huge number of FOSS licenses is not in the best interests of the advancement of FOSS. I would encourage anyone writing a project and seeking a license to choose an already existing GPL-compatible license rather than take one and modify it.
Heck, being a college grad doesn't mean people aren't morons. I run across morons and near-morons with college degrees (not ordered over the Internet, either; real ones) all the time.
:-)
A college degree doesn't mean you're not a moron; it just means you may be a better-educated moron. If you go to the level of Oxford or Harvard or MIT, OK, maybe a degree means you aren't a moron. But even in the case of those illustrious schools, I want proof of non-moronhood
That's not even close to the cost, even if you work very, very cheaply.
The cost of anti-virus and related is the least part of the equation, even factoring in the admin's time, and I don't care *how* cheaply you work. Not even if you're a volunteer.
The real cost is factored more like this:
- Staff hours that are lost looking at false bounces (or worse, getting infected, something which is very common) and having to correct that
- Helpdesk hours that are lost answering questions from people with a mailbox full of bounces for stuff they didn't send (or we hope not);
- Helpdesk hours that are lost disinfecting the
machines of all those who clicked the attachment. Mostly, the same ones who fell for it last time, too.
- Sysadmin hours that may be spent on watching over stressed mail queues to make sure they don't get full, and dealing with potential mail backlogs.
Those are three broad areas, I'm sure the accounting department could tell me a bunch more of their favorites.
Let's say you make $20 per hour at your job. The cost of your benefits is probably also about $20 hour, assuming health insurance, etc. Heck, it could be more. But lets go with $40/hour as the total cost of your compensation for this example.
Now, let's say you lost 30 minutes of productivity to a worm. OK, $20 bucks that your company spent on having you do something other than your job function. But, you're way smarter than most of your colleagues. You didn't click it. You've just wasted 30 minutes initially looking at what it was, deleting more copies that came in, and deleting bounces, and you ever even called the help desk. Most people are probably at one hour, maybe more. Lots more, if they got
infected.
If by some chance it works out that the average cost of compensation (salary + benefits) in your company is $40/hour, and you have 100 employees and on average each person lost 30 minutes to the worm (again, I bet it's hard to get the number that low in most companies when a big wrom like this appears), that's $2000 right there. Antivirus software is not even factored in because you either had it already or not, but either way, it's not a directly related expense.
OK, that was the first day. People will deal with more crap in their mailboxes tomorrow, and the day after and quite a few days after. At least for a week, you might expect to have a company-wide average of 30 minutes per person, per day, spent on things related to the worm.
Now we're at $10,000.
This all assumes that no data was damaged or destroyed (if it was, the monetary value of that data, if irreplaceable, is charged. For replaceable data, the cost of an admin restoring it is charged).
And don't think your average will probably be that low. If a lot of people get infected, your helpdesk staff and sysadmin staff will probably be spending the majority of their time on this problem for at least a week. In a typical 100-person company with a Windows machine on every desk, you may be really lucky to get away with $10,000 chargeable to the worm.
I work for a well-known mail filtering company, and I'm getting a front-row seat for the impact this is having. It's large, even for companies that have our services. If you have tens of thousands of employeeds, you're going to see a lot of bounces coming in, and those divert staff time to deal with them.
Now, imagine you have tens of thousands of employees and you're not using a service like ours. You're going it alone. Your admins. Your equipment. Your anti-virus software which you hope gets the new signatures before the worm gets to you. Your admins and helpdesk staff are working their butts off for at least a week, probably more (not that they weren't already busy). You might have hundreds or even thousands of infected machines to deal with. Countless bounces. Suddenly, you find yourself looking at a cost reaching into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not a pretty sight.
While
Not that I really expected better than the way this thread has gone since my last post, but no one has mentioned at all the point that comes out in my description of how the owners of goatse.cx might pursue their appeal: that under the terms of service that are in effect now and were presumably in effect at the time they registered the domain, a clear violation of the terms of service appears to have occurred. Under those terms of service - which constitute a contract into which the registrants entered, the site may be taken down for violation. Therefore, their only shot at a defense is the Bart Simpson defense: "I didn't do it!" The clear implication of this is that whether you like goatse or hate goatse, from a TOS point of view, the registrants of goatse.cx were in violation and are merely being held accountable according to the TOS.
/. and I'm nuts :-).
In other words, whether you support goatse or wish it would disappear up its own truly huge and grotesque anus, this is not really a censorship issue when you come down to it. It's a contract enforcement issue, and the registrants of goatse.cx have the short end of the stick because the onus is on them to argue that whatever link Rhonda followed to the image, they didn't post it and had no control over the person who did.
Someone will probably argue that I'm wrong and it is a censorship/free speech issue, and they would have me except for one thing: if I enter into a contract that says I may host/register a web site with registrar/hosting provider X, but that I may not violate a certain list of terms of service, I have to follow it. Let's say that one of the terms of service is that I may not post the goatse image or any variation thereof, and that doing so is grounds for termination of service. However, as soon as my site is up, I post the goatse image, the goatse Darl image, and any other goatse image I can get my hands on. In doing so, I am in breach of contract. A week later they catch me with the goatse images and pull the plug. Not because they are censors - they might even be goatse fans themselves - but because I violated my contract.
Some of you reading this think the departure of goatse is a good thing, and many others do not. I am taking no stand on the issue, but (perhaps futiley) trying to frame rational debate (yeah, yeah, I know, it's
However, let me show a very similar case, on which many of you might take the opposite stance. For a number of years, I was a sysadmin at an ISP. One of the hats I wore there was postmaster. Like most ISPs, we had a Terms of Service document and an Abuse Policy, that described in sufficient detail our terms of service, what we considered to be abuse of those terms, and what actions we reserved to resolve them.
Again, like most ISPs, one of the things we held to be a violation of our terms of service, punishable by termination of your service, was spamming. Whether you spammed through our outbound SMTP, whether you spammed through someone else's to which you had authorized access, whether you used an open relay elsewhere, or whether you used an entirely different network to spamvertise a site we hosted didn't matter. Spamming was a violation of our terms of service, and we could and would pull the plug if you were caught. And yes, we did once cancel the service of a long-time customer whose website was hosted with us and who spamvertised through other networks. The first time they were caught, they were given a clear "never again" order. The second time they were caught, they were told their business was no longer welcome, and their service was terminated. There were also a few (very few; our reputation went before us) spammers who would try it through dialup or DSL. Their accounts were terminated without notice as soon as we discovered them. If they had an active connection at the time, we dropped it with a sense of enjoyment.
Now, it is certainly an argument of spammers that those who cut them off are censors, and that
Well, actually, s/he never claimed to be in charge of what's on the Internet, but merely expressed an opinion on the value and propriety of goatse.
/. who has seen goatse.cx didn't know, before clicking, what it was. And of course, if you don't check all URLs before clicking, you may see it again. Even if you check, it might be a redirect.
/. and K5, and she just doesn't seem like the type you'd find in either of those places. And of course, if you go to those places, you have to expect goatse :-)
There hasn't been much calm rhetoric over the suspension of goatse.cx, but (fool that I am), I'll try to create some here.
While goatse.cx was probably not in violation of the law (IANAL, of course), we all know that a major hobby of some people on some forums is to post links, often deliberately disguised, to goatse.cx so as to trick the uninitiated (or even the initiated) into clicking it. Probably most every one of us on
Clearly, then, they had grounds under Item 5 to suspend goatse.cx once they had a complaint. Tht is what their rules say, and they do have to go by them. Certainly, these rules were not created with the intent of destroying goatse.cx, although they do neatly fit that purpose.
The issue the registrant(s) of goatse.cx can use in their defense is that while people often post links to goatse.cx and they typically do not identify them as such, on what basis should the registrant(s) of goatse.cx be held accountable for the unauthorized actions of third parties who are not under the control of, or even known to, the registrant(s) of goatse.cx? Similarly, if someone should post a link to a porno site in a children's forum, it is not the site operator who is liable for that, it is the poster. If the site operator himself promotes a porn site to kids, that is actionable and the site should rightly be shutdown and the operator arrested. However, the operator is not responsible under the law for (potentially malicious) actions of others who post links to his site in an inappropriate forum.
Take that line of defense in trying to get goatse.cx reinstated.
On a side note, I'd like to know exactly where she clicked such a link, if in fact she did. The native range of goatse links is
My experience was also much like yours.
I passed the CCNA exam in 2000, after narrowly failing it on my first try. At the time, I was a *nix admin and also lead network engineer at medium-sized regional ISP. Certainly, I knew how to configure Cisco routers, switches, and RASes, since I was doing that work every day. This included configuring authenticated OSPF and maintaining a whole bunch of access lists.
However, I had, with the help of others, taught myself my craft over several years and had never taken any certification exam. So, while I knew how to do the work, I didn't know how to take the test. I had to go study. After doing so, I came back and passed. However, it was not a cake walk.
Unless Cisco has watered down the CCNA since then (I don't know; I didn't bother renewing it because I'm an analyst now and don't do networking anymore), it shouldn't be taken so lightly. The CCNA is, IMO, the most challenging of the first-level certs. Now, it may be that memorizing really well is more valuable than knowing how to do the work in the real world, but the CCNA is still not bad.
Since it requires no manpower (or womanpower) on the part of the oil company now, I'm not sure where you see a labor savings in this. How does it save labor for the gas station to have me swipe a speedpass over a reader Vs. having me put my credit card through a reader and, in some places, enter my zip code on the keypad? It doesn't. It saves some labor for me, though.
What you describe as them "getting the money out of your pocket" faster, I look at as my being able to pay faster and get done faster and get back on the road. You sound like you think you're out something if you can pay faster. Your're not. They get the money anyway, regardless of speed. I see no benefit to me in having to take longer to pay, so give me better speed, thanks.
WRT auto-shutoff, I don't know how things are where you live, but the only time they removed auto-shutoff anywhere in the western United States was when the first-generation vapor recovery systems came out, and they were clunky and just not compatible with auto-shutoff, and there may even have been some regulation against it. However, it's been more than 20 years since I've seen a gas pump without auto-shutoff. I haven't done any long-distance driving in a while, but I remember in the 1980s and probably into the early 1990s that in some rural locations you could even find gas pumps with no vapor recovery system, because they weren't required to have one. No air pollution problem out there. Things may have changed by now, though.
I remember that case, and I'm sad to see how it turned out. The court sure goatsed him. The commercial use to which he was previously putting that domain name was his small business, a computer shop, IIRC. Nothing whatsoever to do with cars, and he'd been in business for years under his name, since the days when Nissan still called itself Datsun in North America.
Poor guy. He really got shafted. Guess which Japanese auto maker will have a zero percent chance of selling me my next car?
A nineteen month old boy is orphaned and severely injured, found under his mother's body where she'd shielded him from the waves that destroyed their house, and all you care about is a bunch of psychic hotline numbers?
You suck.
And I thought goatse was disgusting...
That's very true. DSL is very distance-sensitive. When they came out with 8 megabit DSL, most people could never really realize that speed, either. A lot of customers would inquire/complain about speed, and we'd have to explain that 8 megabits is the maximum possible wire speed, and that the farther you live from the telco CO, the less speed you will get.
:-)
Among ourselves, we would say that if you can't open your window and urinate on the side of the NTT building, you won't get 8 megabits
Wearing a portable computer to a high school dance is not just geeky, it's fucking weird. I'm the same as Mann, so I can tell you what a freak people would have considered anybody who showed up at a high school dance wearing a portable computer. He's lucky he didn't get beat up. But then, we don't know that he didn't.
/. I was a computer nerd in school too, and I can tell you that it wasn't exactly a chick magnet :-) One of the things that distinguished the school computer club is that all of the members were guys. Girls were allowed - heck, they would have been really, really welcome! - but they just weren't interested. Things are better now, and that's good, but even know most of the IT department where I work is male.
Like many of us here on
I thought marrying a geek girl would be great, but there are so few out there that I eventually didn't. My wife is terrific, and has a higher IQ than mine easily, but she neither knows nor cares much about computers. She just wants them to work.
I thought I'd already covered that in my original post, but I'll revisit it in case of lack of clarity. It's a three-part answer (part three may be semi-new):
Part One: In the real world, you may have a 40 megabit local loop, but as I explained, nowhere are you going to get 40 megabits down of transfer, and if you do, it'll be a very short burst. You could slurp a whole ISO in about 2 minutes.
Part Two: I was also referring to the telco's cost. The local loop they run your DSL connection over is the same one whether it's
1.5 megabit or 40 megabit. That leaves them with no significant cost difference, and it's not their pipe out.
Part Three: the fact that the ISP pricing is the same means that they obviously think it's not going to cost them anymore. Having seen the numbers when 8 megabit DSL became available in Japan, and how it had no significant effect bandwidth requirements as compared to when it was all 1.5 megabit, I think they are right in believing that.