make sure they understand that free speech is fine and all that, but theft to accomplish it is still a crime.
I tried telling him something along those lines as well. His response to that attempt at reasoning was:
"I appreciate your concern for the taxpayers of this state. I am also a
taxpayer of this state. Because my tax dollars have helped purchase your
computer system, I think I should be allowed to use that state funded
infrastructure, much as other candidates use state funded roadways for their
political signs."
I guess, using that logic, I should be able to check out a state car from our fleet services and use it to spread my own political message, since it was paid for with state taxes and I helped pay for it.
His argument is weak in my opinion, because much of the computing infrastructure we have was paid for out of private grant money from businesses in the state and not taxpayer money. Other portions was purchased via tuition money and technology fees from students. Yes, some was paid for out of state general funds, but certainly not 100% of it. And even if it was, I, as a citizen of this state, can't just walk into a state building and start using things, like copier machines and computer equipment, for my own political speech.
But IANAL and he is, so obviously his interpretation must be the correct one.
I recently had some Steve Biener guy spam me with his election pitch. I wrote back to him telling him what a horrible idea it was and he'd just get himself lumped in with scammers and pornographers. He wrote back saying that if I didn't like it, I could unsubscribe.
Later, I started getting compaints from several at the college I work at. He was spamming all employees. I sent him another e-mail asking him to voluntarily stop sending the messages to everyone in the college. I told him if he continued, I'd be forced to esclate the issue to my superiors for action and that would make this a real political mess.
So he writes back to me and the college's attorney and threatens us with legal action. I never threatened to block his e-mails, yet he felt a need to send the following:
"I must say, I am concerned about the threat contained in your e-mail. I am not
sure what type of action you are threatening, but you should be aware that,
under Title 42, Section 1983 of the United States Code, any person in a
position such as yours who deprives a citizen of the United States of any right
secured by the United States Constitution is subject to liability in legal
actions. Before you take any action that interferes with my First Amendment
rights, please consult with counsel for the college."
I was basically told to back off by our legal council, and I did, despite my personal feelings about the issue. Some other techs that report to me got his spam and tried to educate him how to use the Internet as an effective communication vehicle for his campaign, one which wouldn't piss off everyone. He refused to listen to them. So right away, before he's even near being elected, he refuses to listen to his potential constituency and rejects expert advice. Just what we need, another narrow-minded lawyer in the U.S. Congress. His e-mail also stated:
"Mr. Weaverling, I know you disagree with my approach. I encourage you to
exercise your First Amendment rights in speaking out against my e-mails. Write
letters to your newspaper, send an e-mail to your colleagues, but do not try to
act as a censor for the entire college community. It is violative of my First
Amendment rights. It is also a disservice to those in the college community
who do not object to receiving my e-mails and who want to participate in the
marketplace of ideas."
Thank you so much for the valuable advice. Every chance I get, I'm doing just that. Now I get to post to slashdot about it -- and even remain on topic!
So, if you live in Delaware and are a Democrat, I encourage you to go to the state primaries on September 7. I'm going to cast my vote to hopefully help ensure that he doesn't get past the primary. If you'd like to hear his side of the story, his website address is bienerforcongress.com and his e-mail address is stevebiener@aol.com.
I paid for my two.org domains through to 2010, so they better not screw up the record transfer and honor prepaid accounts...:(
(I paniced when I first heard talk about making.org registered non-profits only, so I prepaid for as long as I could, hoping I'd get grandfathered in if it came to that...)
He said he spent two days on the set doing his scene, but it was cut. I always wondered, would he (or another actor) get paid (something) for the work they did, or do they only get paid if it hits the screen?
Yeah, I'm torn on this topic (and if you look at my posting history, you can see I'm no microsoft flunky).
It's really nice, for example, to be able to just open up a COM object of InternetExplorer.Application from something as simple as a VBscript and send HTML to it and have it render for you...
But I also see the danger in having one company control the defacto web display technology. The web is supposed to be device independent and we're moving away from that.
"SecurityFocus.com, which is in the process of being acquired by Symantec, said it had already deleted a copy of the C source code from its Web site at the request of SnoSoft."
I knew I wasn't smoking crack yesterday. However, they allegedly pulled it at the request of snosoft, not HP.
The post is there. Now I gotta go find the message I read yesterday where they pulled it so I don't look like a complete assshat. Either that or they put it back up...
Sigh, moderate parent down, although the influence concern is still valid, the claim may not be.
The thing about this entire affair that upset me the most was that SecurityFocus.com, operators of Bugtraq, quickly buckled under and removed the Snosoft guy's posting from their archive as requested by HP.
A lot of people are worried that Symantec will influence how Bugtraq is moderated and operated, and here we have a case where the deal isn't even closed yet, and already "things are different" down at ole Bugtraq...
Boston's biggest problem is that it closes down at 1:00 AM and it's transit system closes right before that.
Well that's bloody stupid. People like to drink, and transit provides a way to get home safely without having to drive home DUI. Now, I admit, riding the bus makes it a bit harder to pick up a babe and bring her home. "Yeah baby, we just have to stand out here on the corner and wait for the next 32 to come along...."
It has holes in it. We once ran a medical package 10 years ago that did this on purpose. A 40 gig file took about 4 megs on disk.
This is easy to simulate by writing a small program that scribbes a few bytes to offset zero, then does an fseek out to some insane high offset, then scribble a few bytes there. Close, do an ls, see the huge file, but then note it only takes the space of two blocks on your file system. Imagine the fun you can have with this trick at parties!
Every UNIX file system I've ever dealt with handles this the same way.
tar and other programs should have switches to deal with sparse files correctly.
If you're concerned about what's in it, cat it to od. I believe od is smart enough to collapse zero blocks in its display. That way you can see if there is any real data at some pointer far into the file.
If this is a commercial closed-source package where you can't verify what it's doing, I'd strongly suggest leaving it alone and contacting vendor to see if this behavior is normal.
I assume it'd be presented as two different devices. OK, so you mount one as r/o and the other as r/w but the r/o mount wouldn't be expecting nor appreciating changes to what's on the disk being done by another system.
It's the same deal with a SAN (Storage Area Network). I could easily zone two physical servers into the same LUN on the SAN and make one mount r/o and the other r/w, but unless the OS has some sort of understanding that this kind of thing is going to happen (like a clustering system), I would expect some problems on the r/o mounted system.
p.s. I'm no expert, I'm just wondering logistically how this is all going to work. It doesn't make sense to me...
p.p.s. I know there is no real security in mounting a disk r/o because someone could just remount r/w, unlike the physical solution this product provides. But in either case, I would think the issues with two boxes mounting the same file system without clustering would be a problem. If it isn't, I'd love to do something similar with my SAN just for performance and load balancing purposes...
Thanks for the news and confirmation that there will at least be a software update for the ipod in August. It does make me wonder how they will implement the clock feature. I guess it sets its time from the host mac, but how does it keep running after power is turned off of ipod? Do the ipods have a clock in their circuitry?!
Re:Robert Steel- A Great Speaker?
on
H2K2 Wrapup
·
· Score: 2
I enjoyed his presentation. Doesn't mean I agreed with it all. His little weird deal where he'd give 2600 a free copy of every book bought on amazon until wednesday so you could get a buy-one-get-one-free deal was pretty farking weird. Like, I'm supposed to write 2600 and say "I bought this book, send me the other as promised for free?"
His handing out little earth stickers was weird too, what was that about? His graphics with nonsensical arrows that didn't really represent anything coherent were whacked too...
But his speech wasn't boring and the points he raised were usually interesting. But that doesn't mean I agree with it all. Like, I didn't like his idea that every neighborhood should have their own spies (although it sounds like Bush loves a similar idea) either.
Re:Robert Steel- A Great Speaker?
on
H2K2 Wrapup
·
· Score: 2
There was supposed to be a debate between Jello and Steele after Jello spoke, but since Jello's verbal diarrhea went untreated for hours, I bet it never happened... (it reminded me of a recent southpark episode where people reverse the food intake/outake direction...)
Since itunes 3 is out and a lot of its new features depends on new software on the ipod (like the play count feature), it's not a reach to assume that both updates (itunes and ipod) would come out at same time.
Not only did I get screwed by buying a 10GB iPod two weeks ago for $499, it looks like I can't upgrade the software on it to include all those neat new features announced.
The ipod software download is still at the older version 1.1....
Beyond the obvious, it throws out certain difficulties, like a multinational company, but its "invention" doesn't address how to determine where that person is.
And how could it? If a company has its own international private net with one gateway to the internet behind a proxy, then any user, no matter what their location, would appear to come from the internic record location of the registrant or, if they did a traceroute (which they said they don't cause it's too time consuming) you might be able to determine where the proxy is located.
Nero *was* coming out with a mac version of their cd/dvd burning software for Mac, but all mention of it has disappeared from their web site.
Have a look at the google cache of their home page for proof.:-(
I want a hyped story about corporate theft next...
on
NYTimes Looks at Warez
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Another one of those wild claims where these naughty boys are depriving certain industries of billions of dollars of theoretical money.
Now when will we read more about the CEOs and other corporate executes who have deprived the good citizens of this country of billions of REAL dollars through their skimming and shady accounting practicies? Can we give this corporate rape a nickname? Can we make comparisons like "The CEO of suchandsuch is kind of like the guy who robs the 7-11 except he hit 10 million of them and left behind several million victims. Their sentences should be served concurently."
Yeah, piracy is illegal, but I'm not seeing it at risk of pushing the world into a recession or worse depression, as investors and fund administrators move their money out of corporate stocks faster than they did in 1929...
An electric car is not an alternative fuel unless all of the power from your grid is via solar or wind
A valid concern, although I do believe it's been shown that the emisions out of a tightly regulated electric generating plant emit less overall polutants than parking the power plant inside each vehicle, as in, it's possible to produce the energy cleaner by specializing and doing it in one location than having millions of little inefficient power plants running all over the place....
However, in all of these analysis I've seen, the portion usually not considered is the production and later disposal of the batteries. I suspect that when that is factored in, the environmental benefits go down to zero or may even be worse...:(
Nice, but unfortunately it makes it look like even more people use IE than really do, which to them justifies it even more.
Want to help screw stats? Set your company or home proxy server to rewrite the user agent to something other than IE... (disclaimer, this will break some sites that browser id sniff (instead of do capability checking) unfortunately... maybe better just do it on your home proxy server:)
Slashdot Mirror
Check out the Corbin Sparrow. They are selling them as fast as they can make them.
I tried telling him something along those lines as well. His response to that attempt at reasoning was:
I guess, using that logic, I should be able to check out a state car from our fleet services and use it to spread my own political message, since it was paid for with state taxes and I helped pay for it.
His argument is weak in my opinion, because much of the computing infrastructure we have was paid for out of private grant money from businesses in the state and not taxpayer money. Other portions was purchased via tuition money and technology fees from students. Yes, some was paid for out of state general funds, but certainly not 100% of it. And even if it was, I, as a citizen of this state, can't just walk into a state building and start using things, like copier machines and computer equipment, for my own political speech.
But IANAL and he is, so obviously his interpretation must be the correct one.
Later, I started getting compaints from several at the college I work at. He was spamming all employees. I sent him another e-mail asking him to voluntarily stop sending the messages to everyone in the college. I told him if he continued, I'd be forced to esclate the issue to my superiors for action and that would make this a real political mess.
So he writes back to me and the college's attorney and threatens us with legal action. I never threatened to block his e-mails, yet he felt a need to send the following:
I was basically told to back off by our legal council, and I did, despite my personal feelings about the issue. Some other techs that report to me got his spam and tried to educate him how to use the Internet as an effective communication vehicle for his campaign, one which wouldn't piss off everyone. He refused to listen to them. So right away, before he's even near being elected, he refuses to listen to his potential constituency and rejects expert advice. Just what we need, another narrow-minded lawyer in the U.S. Congress. His e-mail also stated:
Thank you so much for the valuable advice. Every chance I get, I'm doing just that. Now I get to post to slashdot about it -- and even remain on topic!
So, if you live in Delaware and are a Democrat, I encourage you to go to the state primaries on September 7. I'm going to cast my vote to hopefully help ensure that he doesn't get past the primary. If you'd like to hear his side of the story, his website address is bienerforcongress.com and his e-mail address is stevebiener@aol.com.
(I paniced when I first heard talk about making .org registered non-profits only, so I prepaid for as long as I could, hoping I'd get grandfathered in if it came to that...)
He said he spent two days on the set doing his scene, but it was cut. I always wondered, would he (or another actor) get paid (something) for the work they did, or do they only get paid if it hits the screen?
It's really nice, for example, to be able to just open up a COM object of InternetExplorer.Application from something as simple as a VBscript and send HTML to it and have it render for you...
But I also see the danger in having one company control the defacto web display technology. The web is supposed to be device independent and we're moving away from that.
"SecurityFocus.com, which is in the process of being acquired by Symantec, said it had already deleted a copy of the C source code from its Web site at the request of SnoSoft."
I knew I wasn't smoking crack yesterday. However, they allegedly pulled it at the request of snosoft, not HP.
Sigh, moderate parent down, although the influence concern is still valid, the claim may not be.
A lot of people are worried that Symantec will influence how Bugtraq is moderated and operated, and here we have a case where the deal isn't even closed yet, and already "things are different" down at ole Bugtraq...
Coincidence? Methinks not.
Well that's bloody stupid. People like to drink, and transit provides a way to get home safely without having to drive home DUI. Now, I admit, riding the bus makes it a bit harder to pick up a babe and bring her home. "Yeah baby, we just have to stand out here on the corner and wait for the next 32 to come along...."
Reminds me of a story...
This is easy to simulate by writing a small program that scribbes a few bytes to offset zero, then does an fseek out to some insane high offset, then scribble a few bytes there. Close, do an ls, see the huge file, but then note it only takes the space of two blocks on your file system. Imagine the fun you can have with this trick at parties!
Every UNIX file system I've ever dealt with handles this the same way.
tar and other programs should have switches to deal with sparse files correctly.
If you're concerned about what's in it, cat it to od. I believe od is smart enough to collapse zero blocks in its display. That way you can see if there is any real data at some pointer far into the file.
If this is a commercial closed-source package where you can't verify what it's doing, I'd strongly suggest leaving it alone and contacting vendor to see if this behavior is normal.
It's the same deal with a SAN (Storage Area Network). I could easily zone two physical servers into the same LUN on the SAN and make one mount r/o and the other r/w, but unless the OS has some sort of understanding that this kind of thing is going to happen (like a clustering system), I would expect some problems on the r/o mounted system.
p.s. I'm no expert, I'm just wondering logistically how this is all going to work. It doesn't make sense to me...
p.p.s. I know there is no real security in mounting a disk r/o because someone could just remount r/w, unlike the physical solution this product provides. But in either case, I would think the issues with two boxes mounting the same file system without clustering would be a problem. If it isn't, I'd love to do something similar with my SAN just for performance and load balancing purposes...
Oh sorry, that was Bush circa 2001.
Thanks for the news and confirmation that there will at least be a software update for the ipod in August. It does make me wonder how they will implement the clock feature. I guess it sets its time from the host mac, but how does it keep running after power is turned off of ipod? Do the ipods have a clock in their circuitry?!
His handing out little earth stickers was weird too, what was that about? His graphics with nonsensical arrows that didn't really represent anything coherent were whacked too...
But his speech wasn't boring and the points he raised were usually interesting. But that doesn't mean I agree with it all. Like, I didn't like his idea that every neighborhood should have their own spies (although it sounds like Bush loves a similar idea) either.
There was supposed to be a debate between Jello and Steele after Jello spoke, but since Jello's verbal diarrhea went untreated for hours, I bet it never happened... (it reminded me of a recent southpark episode where people reverse the food intake/outake direction...)
Since itunes 3 is out and a lot of its new features depends on new software on the ipod (like the play count feature), it's not a reach to assume that both updates (itunes and ipod) would come out at same time.
The ipod software download is still at the older version 1.1....
Grrr...
And how could it? If a company has its own international private net with one gateway to the internet behind a proxy, then any user, no matter what their location, would appear to come from the internic record location of the registrant or, if they did a traceroute (which they said they don't cause it's too time consuming) you might be able to determine where the proxy is located.
Such utter bullshit.
Still can't import an mpeg-2 video. My capture card has a hardware mpeg-2 encoder. Figures... :-(
Have a look at the google cache of their home page for proof. :-(
Now when will we read more about the CEOs and other corporate executes who have deprived the good citizens of this country of billions of REAL dollars through their skimming and shady accounting practicies? Can we give this corporate rape a nickname? Can we make comparisons like "The CEO of suchandsuch is kind of like the guy who robs the 7-11 except he hit 10 million of them and left behind several million victims. Their sentences should be served concurently."
Yeah, piracy is illegal, but I'm not seeing it at risk of pushing the world into a recession or worse depression, as investors and fund administrators move their money out of corporate stocks faster than they did in 1929...
A: As tightly regulated as the refineries that produce gasoline from crude oil. :-)
A valid concern, although I do believe it's been shown that the emisions out of a tightly regulated electric generating plant emit less overall polutants than parking the power plant inside each vehicle, as in, it's possible to produce the energy cleaner by specializing and doing it in one location than having millions of little inefficient power plants running all over the place....
However, in all of these analysis I've seen, the portion usually not considered is the production and later disposal of the batteries. I suspect that when that is factored in, the environmental benefits go down to zero or may even be worse... :(
Nice, but unfortunately it makes it look like even more people use IE than really do, which to them justifies it even more.
Want to help screw stats? Set your company or home proxy server to rewrite the user agent to something other than IE... (disclaimer, this will break some sites that browser id sniff (instead of do capability checking) unfortunately... maybe better just do it on your home proxy server :)
Stats suck...