Re:I'm continually amazed at
on
Treating the Dead
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I've put a similar principle in practice with yeast cultures (I am a homebrewer). I don't recall the exact ratio off the top of my head, but if you replace some of the water in a yeast slurry with glycerin, you can safely freeze yeast cultures for a long time. This is very useful to me, since certain beers are seasonal (like Belgian Wit), and in order to maintain the yeast's viability, I would otherwise have to brew this beer regularly, or buy the yeast from a store, which can get expensive (~$7 a vial). The glycerin prevents the yeast's cell walls from bursting due to the crystallization of the freezing water. I am not a chemist, so I have no idea how this actually works, I just know it does.
Unfortunately, my girlfriend doesn't share my enthusiasm for frozen fungus, so our freezer has more room devoted to more mundane things, like frozen vegetables and animals.
I would do the same, but we are affected by some of OpenBSD's recent patches. While it's true that there are only 2 remote holes in the default install in 10 years, there are other bugs like denial of service, database corruption, and local privilege escalation that would have affected us. I've backported a few easy patches to some of the machines that are difficult to take down for maintenance, but in general we make the effort to upgrade every other release.
OpenBSD is great because maintenance is much easier. I don't have to worry, for example, about a broken libc after an 'emerge world' like I do on my linux boxen at home. That's an extremely painful lesson to learn.
BTW, if you love the OS as much as you say you do, shell out the 50 clams to buy a CD set. If donating doesn't give you that warm, fuzzy feeling, at least the cool stickers will. The latest set comes with a wireframe Puffy. Awesome.
The author apparently forgot one important point: you also don't need to pay for antivirus/antispyware tools on Ubuntu. IMHO, that serves as a tiebreaker for Ubuntu.
Let's also not forget what you can do now with Parallels and VMWare while happily running Ubuntu as your main OS.
People need to stop repeating this shit. It's not true. The MacOS kernel is a Mach/4.3BSD hybrid kernel, that's been injected with some FreeBSD stuff, called XNU. It has much more in common with NeXTSTEP than it does with FreeBSD. The system doesn't even use the BSD driver model-- it uses I/OKit, which is totally different.
Our Win:Mac ratio is about 8:1 here. In my experience, Mac users are definitely more whiney. But after I installed radmind, and set up the Macs to restore themselves to a known good state every night, I realized that that's all it was: whining. No real tech problems. This allowed me to indulge myself in ignoring their complaints, BOFH-style.
If you're a brave schema-forging soul, you can also push out policy for Macs via Active Directory. More information at AFP548, and at other places around the net.
Your "90%" figure reeks of "90% of statistics are made up on the spot", but OK, I'll buy your number. 90% of the workforce uses Windows because most of the workforce is computer-illiterate. I am not. Windows is techinically capable of doing a lot of things with great effort and large sums of money that are trivial to do with Linux. My only point above was-- Linux is the right tool for the job, for me. Windows is not. Therefore, I will expend zero effort removing features that I need just to accomodate people who barely need to solve computational tasks to begin with.
Seriously, who cares if the guy down the street doesn't use Linux because there are "too many choices"? Linux and its ecosystem of tools were written by people who needed to get things done. If the guy down the street just wants to play computer games, or write Word docs, and he doesn't want to bother with "too many choices", then good for him, he'll use Windows. And that will be fine for him. For me, at work, and in my personal life, Windows is a major fucking impediment to getting things done, and so I prefer Linux. The only thing that Linux is not suited for, in my opinion, is managing Windows (like maintaining your AD), and thank God for Parallels. But seriously, too many choices? Why should I bend over backward because some dolt (who doesn't seem to understand that in life, there is more than one way to solve a problem) can't grok Linux? Fuck that.
I'm happy with my tools. Sure, it's a psychological tenet that people are overwhelmed by too many choices. My personal tenet says that most people are dumbasses.
I don't disagree with you on your analysis that war reporting is inaccurate, however you are either mistaken or being disingenuous on the following:
The unemployment rate is below 5%. It doesn't get much better without forced labor!
While 5% unemployment is generally regarded as very good, the economist's term "unemployed" does not accurately capture the number of people not working in the country. The term "unemployment" is actually the number of people who have recently applied for unemployment benefits, or who are temporarily unemployed but still seeking work. This number is reported to the government, which explains the problem right there-- there are lots of people who do not work for one reason or another, and either they don't tell anyone, or those responsible for collecting the figures disqualify them from that category. I think it is fair to say that the actual population of people who are eligible to be working, which is probably what most people think of when they hear the term "unemployed", is in dispute, but probably higher than the unemployment figure that you quote.
The stock market is at near record highs. It has never passed 13000. Right now the Dow is at 12,983.19. The stock market has never been better!
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is the figure you are quoting, is merely an indicator of the performance of the 30 companies which comprise the DJIA. In some sense, the DJIA is a good indicator-- it quickly and intuitively tells you how the "top" 30 companies are doing. These companies certainly have some bearing on the stock market, but as you can see, it glosses over some important component markets, like housing, which is (comparitively) in trouble. Now the DJIA's selection of companies is chosen by the editors of the Wall St. Journal. It's not too hard to see some potential conflicts of interest there, but the really interesting thing is that since the list of companies changes over time, it's not particularly useful to compare current DJIA figures with past ones, since it's not really measuring the same thing. We also need to take into account that the stock market is a world phenomenon, and there is currently tremendous growth in China, so the performance of the stock market as a whole should not be taken to apply to any one particular trade or state of any particular country's economy, ours included.
Also, gas is cheaper today than it was in 1979...
You're right here. We are, unfortunately, accustomed to the extremely low oil prices of the 1990's. Oil is a hot-button issue for many reasons which I do not care to enumerate, none of which drilling in Alaska will even begin to address (except, of course, those people who directly benefit from drilling in Alaska).
I beg to differ on the "losing" portion of your propaganda.
I beg to differ with the "kicking ass" portion of your propaganda. Look, folks-- you can't "win" a "war on terrorism" by combat alone. Let me ask you this-- are we killing more "terrorists" than we're creating? Is it even fair to say that the militiamen that we're killing are "terrorists"? Sure, the people we are fighting are frequently savage, and hardly conform to the Western idea of "just", but let's put this in perspective: nearly all of the people we are fighting had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, the U.S.S. Cole, Madrid train bombings, UK bus bombings, Oklahoma City, or any other act of terrorism that has affected the West. Furthermore, many of these fighters were essentially kids when 9/11 happened, as are many of our own military forces. Where did they come from? Is there a big "terrorist" factory out there, or is it the fact that, to them, we are foreign invaders, combined with decades (to put it mildly) of ethnic and religious hatred that is creating a bad and worsening situation over there. Go ahead, try to answer me simply. You
Why? That observation seems spot-on to me. I recently bought an AMD system instead of an Intel one due to price. I've been primarily a Mac user for the past 18 years, and I needed to replace my aging G4, so I had no opinion either way as far as brand went. I chose my performance level based on benchmarks at Tom's Hardware and other places, and then I sought out to build a machine that met those minimum specs. While it looked like I could get a faster Intel machine if money were no object, the AMD's price point at my desired performance level won by a landslide. This is taking into consideration CPU, motherboard, and RAM cost. The AMD RAM/motherboard/CPU combo costed less than just the comparable Intel CPU.
Of course, if you're after pure performance, then Intel wins, and if you're after that then money is probably no object to you. I think I'm probably indicative of your typical home-machine builder in that I have a budget. Performance per dollar really was the most important thing.
Municipal WiFi was and remains a profoundly stupid idea, because it effectively blocks the competition through government subsidy. At least, with roads and other infrastructure it could be argued, that we can't have competing ones simply due to the lack of space (although Tokyo manages to have competing subway lines, somehow). But WiFi networks? Please -- can put 10 different access point on the same pole... But the fact is, we don't. In Boston, you have essentially two choices for your ISP: Verizon and Comcast. All other ISPs run on top of lines provided by these two (like Speakeasy), and you essentially are still paying for one or the other. If you want to be pedantic, you could say that, sure, we could bring in a Cogent line which is neither Verizon nor Comcast, but is that within the reach of your average citizen?
And that's the heart of the matter: access. Many people cannot afford Verizon or Comcast. With more governmental services moving toward being electronic (e.g., n MA, I can and have renewed my driver's license via the web), access for those who cannot afford it becomes a problem. The people behind muni wi-fi in Boston saw this, and easy access to information in general, a major cause of the rift that is the "digital divide".
The major ISPs, and Verizon in particular, have been extremely reluctant to extend their services to everybody, because of cost. Muni wifi attempts to fill in those gaps, because profit is not the incentive. Access is. Sure, it steps on the ISPs' feet a little, but seriously, what's more important to us? Verizon's bottom line or equal opportunity for our citizens? Teh interweb ain't some nerd's hobby anymore, it's a necessity for participation in democracy.
That's fine if you hate muni wifi-- maybe we should call the ISPs to task for utterly wasting the billions we poured into them in fiber-laying subsidies in the 1990's? Sounds only fair.
IMAP is still incredibly useful. While webmail is definitely growing in sophistication, it is still nowhere near as sophisticated as a standalone email client. Consider, for instance, the act of composing email when you don't have an internet connection. Sure, you can write your GMail in Notepad, but come on...
Considering the fact that there are probably more IMAP users now than when the protocol was invented (yes, this fits the "90% of statistics are made up on the spot" meme), I think that standalone e-mail client can still justify their existence. Thunderbird is one of the better ones, even though it still lacks some of the speed and robustness of Eudora c. 1997. That said, I can't run Eudora on weird platforms like OpenBSD/Sparc.
Thanks for the link. I knew that in my state (MA) all parties to a phone call needed to be aware of the recording, but I wonder-- does this apply to transcripts of the phone call? Can I, for instance, hire a stenographer to type it all down, or does this apply to any record of the conversation and not just audio recordings?
With only these animal tests, no clinical trial plans, and no scientific rationale, Grünenthal began distributing free samples of thalidomide to doctors in Switzerland and West Germany in 1955. It was first recommended for the prevention of seizures in patients with epilepsy; although no anticonvulsant effect was found, patients reported experiencing a deep sleep. Other patients said they felt calming and soothing effects. Some reported side effects, but they were not believed to be serious.[3] One author later said that "Thalidomide was introduced by the method of Russian Roulette. Practically nothing was known about the drug at the time of its marketing."[4]
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The company began selling the drug over the counter in Germany in October 1957, under the brand name Contergan. The company claimed that "Even a determined suicide could not take enough Contergan to cause death" and "accidental overdoses by children would be unheard of with this drug." Not one of those statements turned out to be true. Soon the drug was being sold in 46 countries under "at least 37 names,"[3] without any additional independent testing, and was the drug of choice for pregnant women with morning sickness.[5]
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Kelsey refused to clear Kevadon for sale in the United States until she could review satisfactory studies. She later said that the reports submitted by Grünenthal and Richardson-Merrell were more like testimonials than results of well-designed, controlled studies.[1] (One possible reason for the lack of data could be that Richardson-Merrell's "investigation" of thalidomide for its FDA application was organized and implemented not by scientists, but by the company's sales and marketing division.)[3] It wasn't enough to know how the drug acted in animals - she wanted to know how it worked in humans, and the data was not forthcoming. Kelsey had also heard anecdotal reports of peripheral neuropathy as a side effect of thalidomide, which only made her think more about the possible effects on a fetus. She continued to reject the Kevadon application. In total, the company resubmitted its Kevadon application to the FDA six times, but no new evidence was given in those applications and Kelsey refused to budge.
Grünenthal knew that Thalidomide was potentially harmful before they even started selling it, and yet they didn't even do the bare minimum to assure themselves that it was not harmful (like provide data to back up their claims about overdoses). Yes, it is impossible to prove that something is 'safe', but they didn't even make the effort do to a proper human study.
I'd go on, but I'm not going to bother. You've made up your mind and clearly aren't going to bother reading things that are a matter of public record. You rather be some kind of industry fanboy instead of a rational human.
Look you stupid ass, since you're going to resort to name-calling, I am too. People like me don't care about what goes into the food chain because we're paranoid schizophrenics with anti-capitalistic conspiracy theories-- we care because toxic chemicals are toxic. In case you're too stupid to know what that means-- it means that when you come into contact with them, you can get sick and die.
I'm not claiming that corporations want to kill us. That's idiocy. Even the tobacco companies, whose products undeniably kill people, want their customers to keep coming back. What I'm saying, though, is that many industrial manufacturers do not practice due diligence. There are a variety of excuses for this. Some people think it's a conspiracy. Some people think it's laziness. Some people think it is stupidity. I think that it's a combination of stupidity, lazniess, and greed. Fact is, it is not being done.
Now here's the part that kills me-- all those things you mention: Love Canal, Rachel Carson, Thalidomide-- they are examples of the 'responsible' people not practicing due diligence. So what you take away from those 'lessons' you cite? My guess is that you think that 'people who care about public health are wackjobs'. What I take away from it is this: we can't trust the people who stand to gain when our health is at stake. They will make the same mistakes, and when you catch them with their pants down, they will deny it.
Maybe YOU need to brush up on your history. Did you know that when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring the chemical industry universally called her a lunatic? From Time Magazine (courtesy of Wikipedia):
Carson was violently assailed by threats of lawsuits and derision, including suggestions that this meticulous scientist was a "hysterical woman" unqualified to write such a book. A huge counterattack was organized and led by Monsanto, Velsicol, American Cyanamid - indeed, the whole chemical industry - duly supported by the Agriculture Department as well as the more cautious in the media.
Yes, mistakes happen. But they happen over and over again. But why not be better prepared? Look, I live in the 20th century. In the morning, I put contact lenses in my eyes, I use my microwave oven to make breakfast, and I sit in front of a computer all day. I take ibuprofen when I have a headache. These things are products of modern chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineering. OBVIOUSLY I am not 'ignoring the positive contributions'; what I'm saying is that if you think these modern conveniences are as safe as they can or should be, because all of the folks making chemicals have 'learned' from their mistakes, then you are living in a fucking bubble.
The reason why people (us, the so called consumers) need to make a stink about industrial pollutants are for two reasons: 1) the status quo in the U.S. is "it's not toxic until proven toxic", and 2) industrial manufacturers have proven that they will fight tooth and nail to continue to produce chemicals that are known to be harmful. So the only strategies that have worked are the ones that involve massive PR campaigns against these chemical industries; this is because they will quickly work to "contain" you, by launching their own PR campaigns at the first hint of trouble. Government (either due to incompetence or nepotism, or simply corruption) seems content to just stand aside and let the American public be the great testing ground for product safety.
Obviously, there really has been a lot of "better living through chemistry" in the 20th and 21st centuries. Corporations, however, simply cannot be trusted with the well-being of the population. For that reason, we have to assume that the chemical industry is out to kill us.
For an example of what corporations are capable of, look at Enron: these guys were so driven by the profit motive, that they couldn't even plan for the future of their own company! People were standing up at shareholder meetings and disputing the books well before the company collapsed, and after a few consoling words from the CEO, the shareholders were willing to put the whole trouble out of their minds and fixate on getting rich again. You want these people to make decisions about your health? No fucking way!
I highly recommend you read Trust Us, We're Experts. I think the authors make the case rather convincingly that the despicable public health practices of the few widely known examples of corruption within the chemical industry is the norm, and not the exception.
Often young bright people question their teachers. They do this out of curiosity, but I've seen many teachers interpret this as a student being an antagonist. Seeing this happen again and again to my peers in high school (who sometimes shocked me with their insights) lead me to have an antiauthoritarian streak, which got me into some trouble myself.
The fact is, good teachers are few and far between. Most teachers teach the same lesson for decades. They simply do not want to be bothered with an intelligent conversaion. Now that you've been exposed to students' lines of questioning, which may be unpredictable, and which you may not be able to answer, you'll be better prepared. I have the utmost respect for someone who says "You know, that's a really good question, and I don't have an answer for you." Those questions are the BEST ones, because you can turn them around and say, "Well, I don't know, but why do YOU think that is?"
One of my favorite quotes is by Whitehead: "It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious." The thing is, teachers generally hate unusual minds. Unusual minds make their jobs harder. The best teachers are the ones who rise to the occasion of a bright student, but most teachers adhere to the mistaken belief that students are a tabula rasa, which is simply naive.
You're absolutely right. I'm running Tiger on a year-2000 Sawtooth G4, and am still quite happy with it. Every release really did get faster. I wouldn't have spent the dough otherwise.
Of course, I do have a pile of those software "upgrade coupons" that I've gotten in every Mac OS box release since Mac OS 8.5. And I still haven't been able to do anything with them.
OK, so for the purposes of this contest, which does not model the real world, greylisting does not work. So what's the purpose of the contest, then?
Here's why greylisting will continue to work in the real world:
1. If a spammer adopts RFC-compliant mailers, greylisting will prevent them from pumping out huge numbers of mails. They will have to burn CPU cycles on their end in order to push mail through. This increases the cost of sending mail, and reduces their margins since they will be hitting fewer hosts with the same resources.
2. If a spammer stays with RFC-defying mailers, hosts with greylisting won't get the spammer's mail. The strategy here would be for a spammer to adopt mailers that detect greylisting early, get out, and move on in order to keep successful mail delivery high.
Obviously, we try to practice defense-in-depth. We use greylisting, Bayesian filtering, heuristic filtering, distributed checksum clearinghouses, and probably something else I'm forgetting about. Greylisting makes the biggest impact for us.
To answer my own question above, if the purpose of the contest is to find new approaches, then great. But I think greylisting will continue to work as long as the good guys stick to the RFCs.
It doesn't work? Maybe you should tell that to my 300-strong userbase!
I'm certain that there are differences in implementation between different greylisters. I've never tried Postfix's, for example, because OpenBSD's works fine for me. A small point wrt to OpenBSD's spamd: you actually need to try thrice. The first time you're rejected. The second time you're marked as OK, but still rejected. The third time you get through. Maybe it's the third time, or some of the time limits, or some other things that spamd is doing (BTW, we do not use *any* blacklists), but it works great. I probably see a spam in my inbox once a month, maybe. The rest of my users who complain about the "spam" they're still getting are really getting email they've signed up for (listservs aren't spam, people!), in which case, it's usually just a simple matter of education.
I don't know where your greylisting system failed, but it works wonders for us. When I implemented it, I was a sysadmin rock star for a week. Who knew there were anti-spam groupies? Now it's back to picking the crud out of the VP's keybord;^)
(You're spot-on about one thing though: defense in depth. That principle is in effect for EVERYTHING, which is why I want to administer electric shocks to our Mac users when they try to call the Help Desk.)
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I've put a similar principle in practice with yeast cultures (I am a homebrewer). I don't recall the exact ratio off the top of my head, but if you replace some of the water in a yeast slurry with glycerin, you can safely freeze yeast cultures for a long time. This is very useful to me, since certain beers are seasonal (like Belgian Wit), and in order to maintain the yeast's viability, I would otherwise have to brew this beer regularly, or buy the yeast from a store, which can get expensive (~$7 a vial). The glycerin prevents the yeast's cell walls from bursting due to the crystallization of the freezing water. I am not a chemist, so I have no idea how this actually works, I just know it does.
Unfortunately, my girlfriend doesn't share my enthusiasm for frozen fungus, so our freezer has more room devoted to more mundane things, like frozen vegetables and animals.
I would do the same, but we are affected by some of OpenBSD's recent patches. While it's true that there are only 2 remote holes in the default install in 10 years, there are other bugs like denial of service, database corruption, and local privilege escalation that would have affected us. I've backported a few easy patches to some of the machines that are difficult to take down for maintenance, but in general we make the effort to upgrade every other release.
OpenBSD is great because maintenance is much easier. I don't have to worry, for example, about a broken libc after an 'emerge world' like I do on my linux boxen at home. That's an extremely painful lesson to learn.
BTW, if you love the OS as much as you say you do, shell out the 50 clams to buy a CD set. If donating doesn't give you that warm, fuzzy feeling, at least the cool stickers will. The latest set comes with a wireframe Puffy. Awesome.
The author apparently forgot one important point: you also don't need to pay for antivirus/antispyware tools on Ubuntu. IMHO, that serves as a tiebreaker for Ubuntu.
Let's also not forget what you can do now with Parallels and VMWare while happily running Ubuntu as your main OS.
People need to stop repeating this shit. It's not true. The MacOS kernel is a Mach/4.3BSD hybrid kernel, that's been injected with some FreeBSD stuff, called XNU. It has much more in common with NeXTSTEP than it does with FreeBSD. The system doesn't even use the BSD driver model-- it uses I/OKit, which is totally different.
Our Win:Mac ratio is about 8:1 here. In my experience, Mac users are definitely more whiney. But after I installed radmind, and set up the Macs to restore themselves to a known good state every night, I realized that that's all it was: whining. No real tech problems. This allowed me to indulge myself in ignoring their complaints, BOFH-style.
If you're a brave schema-forging soul, you can also push out policy for Macs via Active Directory. More information at AFP548, and at other places around the net.
Yes, but how on earth can you surf an "information superhighway"? Is it made out of water? I'm so confused.
Your "90%" figure reeks of "90% of statistics are made up on the spot", but OK, I'll buy your number. 90% of the workforce uses Windows because most of the workforce is computer-illiterate. I am not. Windows is techinically capable of doing a lot of things with great effort and large sums of money that are trivial to do with Linux. My only point above was-- Linux is the right tool for the job, for me. Windows is not. Therefore, I will expend zero effort removing features that I need just to accomodate people who barely need to solve computational tasks to begin with.
Lame? Dogcow was proof to the 14-year-old-me that Apple was the coolest software company out there.
Seriously, who cares if the guy down the street doesn't use Linux because there are "too many choices"? Linux and its ecosystem of tools were written by people who needed to get things done. If the guy down the street just wants to play computer games, or write Word docs, and he doesn't want to bother with "too many choices", then good for him, he'll use Windows. And that will be fine for him. For me, at work, and in my personal life, Windows is a major fucking impediment to getting things done, and so I prefer Linux. The only thing that Linux is not suited for, in my opinion, is managing Windows (like maintaining your AD), and thank God for Parallels. But seriously, too many choices? Why should I bend over backward because some dolt (who doesn't seem to understand that in life, there is more than one way to solve a problem) can't grok Linux? Fuck that.
I'm happy with my tools. Sure, it's a psychological tenet that people are overwhelmed by too many choices. My personal tenet says that most people are dumbasses.
The unemployment rate is below 5%. It doesn't get much better without forced labor!
While 5% unemployment is generally regarded as very good, the economist's term "unemployed" does not accurately capture the number of people not working in the country. The term "unemployment" is actually the number of people who have recently applied for unemployment benefits, or who are temporarily unemployed but still seeking work. This number is reported to the government, which explains the problem right there-- there are lots of people who do not work for one reason or another, and either they don't tell anyone, or those responsible for collecting the figures disqualify them from that category. I think it is fair to say that the actual population of people who are eligible to be working, which is probably what most people think of when they hear the term "unemployed", is in dispute, but probably higher than the unemployment figure that you quote.
The stock market is at near record highs. It has never passed 13000. Right now the Dow is at 12,983.19. The stock market has never been better!
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is the figure you are quoting, is merely an indicator of the performance of the 30 companies which comprise the DJIA. In some sense, the DJIA is a good indicator-- it quickly and intuitively tells you how the "top" 30 companies are doing. These companies certainly have some bearing on the stock market, but as you can see, it glosses over some important component markets, like housing, which is (comparitively) in trouble. Now the DJIA's selection of companies is chosen by the editors of the Wall St. Journal. It's not too hard to see some potential conflicts of interest there, but the really interesting thing is that since the list of companies changes over time, it's not particularly useful to compare current DJIA figures with past ones, since it's not really measuring the same thing. We also need to take into account that the stock market is a world phenomenon, and there is currently tremendous growth in China, so the performance of the stock market as a whole should not be taken to apply to any one particular trade or state of any particular country's economy, ours included.
Also, gas is cheaper today than it was in 1979...
You're right here. We are, unfortunately, accustomed to the extremely low oil prices of the 1990's. Oil is a hot-button issue for many reasons which I do not care to enumerate, none of which drilling in Alaska will even begin to address (except, of course, those people who directly benefit from drilling in Alaska).
I beg to differ on the "losing" portion of your propaganda.
I beg to differ with the "kicking ass" portion of your propaganda. Look, folks-- you can't "win" a "war on terrorism" by combat alone. Let me ask you this-- are we killing more "terrorists" than we're creating? Is it even fair to say that the militiamen that we're killing are "terrorists"? Sure, the people we are fighting are frequently savage, and hardly conform to the Western idea of "just", but let's put this in perspective: nearly all of the people we are fighting had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, the U.S.S. Cole, Madrid train bombings, UK bus bombings, Oklahoma City, or any other act of terrorism that has affected the West. Furthermore, many of these fighters were essentially kids when 9/11 happened, as are many of our own military forces. Where did they come from? Is there a big "terrorist" factory out there, or is it the fact that, to them, we are foreign invaders, combined with decades (to put it mildly) of ethnic and religious hatred that is creating a bad and worsening situation over there. Go ahead, try to answer me simply. You
I can't tell if you're psychotic or just joking. Please advise.
Well, in that case, he really is off by a great deal, depending on how important that number is to you :^) Didn't even notice the sig.
Why? That observation seems spot-on to me. I recently bought an AMD system instead of an Intel one due to price. I've been primarily a Mac user for the past 18 years, and I needed to replace my aging G4, so I had no opinion either way as far as brand went. I chose my performance level based on benchmarks at Tom's Hardware and other places, and then I sought out to build a machine that met those minimum specs. While it looked like I could get a faster Intel machine if money were no object, the AMD's price point at my desired performance level won by a landslide. This is taking into consideration CPU, motherboard, and RAM cost. The AMD RAM/motherboard/CPU combo costed less than just the comparable Intel CPU.
Of course, if you're after pure performance, then Intel wins, and if you're after that then money is probably no object to you. I think I'm probably indicative of your typical home-machine builder in that I have a budget. Performance per dollar really was the most important thing.
And that's the heart of the matter: access. Many people cannot afford Verizon or Comcast. With more governmental services moving toward being electronic (e.g., n MA, I can and have renewed my driver's license via the web), access for those who cannot afford it becomes a problem. The people behind muni wi-fi in Boston saw this, and easy access to information in general, a major cause of the rift that is the "digital divide".
The major ISPs, and Verizon in particular, have been extremely reluctant to extend their services to everybody, because of cost. Muni wifi attempts to fill in those gaps, because profit is not the incentive. Access is. Sure, it steps on the ISPs' feet a little, but seriously, what's more important to us? Verizon's bottom line or equal opportunity for our citizens? Teh interweb ain't some nerd's hobby anymore, it's a necessity for participation in democracy.
That's fine if you hate muni wifi-- maybe we should call the ISPs to task for utterly wasting the billions we poured into them in fiber-laying subsidies in the 1990's? Sounds only fair.
IMAP is still incredibly useful. While webmail is definitely growing in sophistication, it is still nowhere near as sophisticated as a standalone email client. Consider, for instance, the act of composing email when you don't have an internet connection. Sure, you can write your GMail in Notepad, but come on...
Considering the fact that there are probably more IMAP users now than when the protocol was invented (yes, this fits the "90% of statistics are made up on the spot" meme), I think that standalone e-mail client can still justify their existence. Thunderbird is one of the better ones, even though it still lacks some of the speed and robustness of Eudora c. 1997. That said, I can't run Eudora on weird platforms like OpenBSD/Sparc.
Thanks for the link. I knew that in my state (MA) all parties to a phone call needed to be aware of the recording, but I wonder-- does this apply to transcripts of the phone call? Can I, for instance, hire a stenographer to type it all down, or does this apply to any record of the conversation and not just audio recordings?
On Thalidomide, from Wikipedia:
I'd go on, but I'm not going to bother. You've made up your mind and clearly aren't going to bother reading things that are a matter of public record. You rather be some kind of industry fanboy instead of a rational human.
I'm not claiming that corporations want to kill us. That's idiocy. Even the tobacco companies, whose products undeniably kill people, want their customers to keep coming back. What I'm saying, though, is that many industrial manufacturers do not practice due diligence. There are a variety of excuses for this. Some people think it's a conspiracy. Some people think it's laziness. Some people think it is stupidity. I think that it's a combination of stupidity, lazniess, and greed. Fact is, it is not being done.
Now here's the part that kills me-- all those things you mention: Love Canal, Rachel Carson, Thalidomide-- they are examples of the 'responsible' people not practicing due diligence. So what you take away from those 'lessons' you cite? My guess is that you think that 'people who care about public health are wackjobs'. What I take away from it is this: we can't trust the people who stand to gain when our health is at stake. They will make the same mistakes, and when you catch them with their pants down, they will deny it.
Maybe YOU need to brush up on your history. Did you know that when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring the chemical industry universally called her a lunatic? From Time Magazine (courtesy of Wikipedia): Yes, mistakes happen. But they happen over and over again. But why not be better prepared? Look, I live in the 20th century. In the morning, I put contact lenses in my eyes, I use my microwave oven to make breakfast, and I sit in front of a computer all day. I take ibuprofen when I have a headache. These things are products of modern chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineering. OBVIOUSLY I am not 'ignoring the positive contributions'; what I'm saying is that if you think these modern conveniences are as safe as they can or should be, because all of the folks making chemicals have 'learned' from their mistakes, then you are living in a fucking bubble.
You mean Florida's legislation was swayed by a lobbyist? Color me surprised.
The reason why people (us, the so called consumers) need to make a stink about industrial pollutants are for two reasons: 1) the status quo in the U.S. is "it's not toxic until proven toxic", and 2) industrial manufacturers have proven that they will fight tooth and nail to continue to produce chemicals that are known to be harmful. So the only strategies that have worked are the ones that involve massive PR campaigns against these chemical industries; this is because they will quickly work to "contain" you, by launching their own PR campaigns at the first hint of trouble. Government (either due to incompetence or nepotism, or simply corruption) seems content to just stand aside and let the American public be the great testing ground for product safety.
Obviously, there really has been a lot of "better living through chemistry" in the 20th and 21st centuries. Corporations, however, simply cannot be trusted with the well-being of the population. For that reason, we have to assume that the chemical industry is out to kill us.
For an example of what corporations are capable of, look at Enron: these guys were so driven by the profit motive, that they couldn't even plan for the future of their own company! People were standing up at shareholder meetings and disputing the books well before the company collapsed, and after a few consoling words from the CEO, the shareholders were willing to put the whole trouble out of their minds and fixate on getting rich again. You want these people to make decisions about your health? No fucking way!
I highly recommend you read Trust Us, We're Experts. I think the authors make the case rather convincingly that the despicable public health practices of the few widely known examples of corruption within the chemical industry is the norm, and not the exception.
Often young bright people question their teachers. They do this out of curiosity, but I've seen many teachers interpret this as a student being an antagonist. Seeing this happen again and again to my peers in high school (who sometimes shocked me with their insights) lead me to have an antiauthoritarian streak, which got me into some trouble myself.
The fact is, good teachers are few and far between. Most teachers teach the same lesson for decades. They simply do not want to be bothered with an intelligent conversaion. Now that you've been exposed to students' lines of questioning, which may be unpredictable, and which you may not be able to answer, you'll be better prepared. I have the utmost respect for someone who says "You know, that's a really good question, and I don't have an answer for you." Those questions are the BEST ones, because you can turn them around and say, "Well, I don't know, but why do YOU think that is?"
One of my favorite quotes is by Whitehead: "It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious." The thing is, teachers generally hate unusual minds. Unusual minds make their jobs harder. The best teachers are the ones who rise to the occasion of a bright student, but most teachers adhere to the mistaken belief that students are a tabula rasa, which is simply naive.
You're absolutely right. I'm running Tiger on a year-2000 Sawtooth G4, and am still quite happy with it. Every release really did get faster. I wouldn't have spent the dough otherwise.
Of course, I do have a pile of those software "upgrade coupons" that I've gotten in every Mac OS box release since Mac OS 8.5. And I still haven't been able to do anything with them.
OK, so for the purposes of this contest, which does not model the real world, greylisting does not work. So what's the purpose of the contest, then?
Here's why greylisting will continue to work in the real world:
1. If a spammer adopts RFC-compliant mailers, greylisting will prevent them from pumping out huge numbers of mails. They will have to burn CPU cycles on their end in order to push mail through. This increases the cost of sending mail, and reduces their margins since they will be hitting fewer hosts with the same resources.
2. If a spammer stays with RFC-defying mailers, hosts with greylisting won't get the spammer's mail. The strategy here would be for a spammer to adopt mailers that detect greylisting early, get out, and move on in order to keep successful mail delivery high.
Obviously, we try to practice defense-in-depth. We use greylisting, Bayesian filtering, heuristic filtering, distributed checksum clearinghouses, and probably something else I'm forgetting about. Greylisting makes the biggest impact for us.
To answer my own question above, if the purpose of the contest is to find new approaches, then great. But I think greylisting will continue to work as long as the good guys stick to the RFCs.
It doesn't work? Maybe you should tell that to my 300-strong userbase!
;^)
I'm certain that there are differences in implementation between different greylisters. I've never tried Postfix's, for example, because OpenBSD's works fine for me. A small point wrt to OpenBSD's spamd: you actually need to try thrice. The first time you're rejected. The second time you're marked as OK, but still rejected. The third time you get through. Maybe it's the third time, or some of the time limits, or some other things that spamd is doing (BTW, we do not use *any* blacklists), but it works great. I probably see a spam in my inbox once a month, maybe. The rest of my users who complain about the "spam" they're still getting are really getting email they've signed up for (listservs aren't spam, people!), in which case, it's usually just a simple matter of education.
I don't know where your greylisting system failed, but it works wonders for us. When I implemented it, I was a sysadmin rock star for a week. Who knew there were anti-spam groupies? Now it's back to picking the crud out of the VP's keybord
(You're spot-on about one thing though: defense in depth. That principle is in effect for EVERYTHING, which is why I want to administer electric shocks to our Mac users when they try to call the Help Desk.)