> How long will it take until Mozilla and other open-source browsers have automatic filtering built in? > >
I want at least >
A way to disable animations, >
A way to disable resizing, and >
A way to disable pop-up windows >
A way to disable any script when I exit the page
Based on how long it took Mozilla to add enough chrome to sink the Bismarck, and still managed not to include these, probably at least another three years, if ever.:-(
All I want from a browser is something that renders as fast as Netscape 3.01 did, and which allows has the four features the previous poster cited. Nuke "My Netscape", gimme "Toggle Javashit on/off". And gimme back the rendering engine from 3.01, 'cuz it's 10 times faster than the one from 4.x.
Re:it's fine and all..
on
Deja.com Vu!
·
· Score: 3
> i use Usenet searches as a second source for more reviews of products. i certainly never
thought of [the precision buying part] as "cruft" or "bloat" like some people here.
I think most of the people who use Deja to get product information used the USENET stuff to get the info, and that the "precision buying" stuff was what Deja tried to create when it realized that a lot of folks were typing in product names in an effort to get de facto reviews from USENET users.
I'm one of the ones who says that's bloat/crap, because the USENET portion was where I got the useful info on products when making buying decisions.
> i find the
ratings and comments from owners to be very valuable in making a choice.
I'll take this in two parts: Ratings and comments. (Don't take these remarks personally - they're basically a thrashing out of how I believe most Deja users cruised USENET to get product evaluations).
Ratings:
To me, useless. (1) "Internet polls" aren't valid and are easily stacked, and (2) a list of integers on some arbitrary array of categories doesn't tell me bugger all, which I'll get to in the "Comments" section.
Comments:
Useful - but what does this provide that USENET doesn't?
When I buy, I tend to have both general questions (I wanna read lots of comments and see if people are consistently reporting problems of which I was unaware), or extremely specific questions. Usually both.
The USENET search engine helps me with the specific stuff - what's the horizontal output transistor on a FooBar 17XYZ monitor I'm trying to fix? Does the new FooBar 21XYZ fail the same way as the 17XYZ always seems to?
And the general stuff -- like realizing that there are a whole lot of dead 17XYZs out there when I search for the thing in sci.electronics.repair and find dozens of threads and the word "crap".
The ability to search - not just for "product reviews" (from typical users who say "Yeah, it rawkz", or "ug, it sux"), but for typical failure modes (sci.electronics.repair), company-related production delays (anyone try to get an ATI All-In-Wonder 128 with 32M in mid-1999?), and what-not - by segregating by newsgroup and keyword, and with contributors from all USENET users - beats the hell out of any "product review" site whose participants are limited to those who actually decide to work within the Deja system.
And that gets to the last point - interoperability. The ability to cram two keywords into a USENET search gives me the ability to isolate likely hardware conflicts. Product reviews can't, unless you're very lucky that the reviewer had the same configuration you did.
In a nutshell - most of the time, the I don't want a product review. I just wanna see what people are doing with the widget, and if they're being successful or not, and if not, what the workarounds are.
No product review will ever tell you that you can solve Creative Labs SBLive! PCI / ATI AIW128-32 conflicts on a BX6 motherboard by making sure that the sound card is in the proper PCI slot, because there's a shared IRQ between one of the PCI and AGP slots, and you can really screw yourself up unless you put the damn card in the right slot.
Nobody at Creative could really be expected to know this, nor anyone at ATI, nor anyone at ABit. But lots of people had the problem, someone solved it by swapping cards, and posted the solution to USENET, and voila - I can now buy all three products at once, knowing that any other threads (that say they don't interoperate) are bogus.
Now... if only they'd get the old archives back. I've got a hunk of circuit board labeled "Jovian Logic", and "ViewMagic", made in 1995, that has lots of video-like connectors on it. I'm guessing it's a VGANTSC converter with S-Video capability, but I can't tell which ports are inputs and which ports are outputs, or what the DIP switches on it are for.
If Deja's old archives were up, I could probably type in a few keywords from the board's silkscreening, find it, and figure out what the hell this thing really is, and make myself a nice toy for Christmas.
> Well Earth managed to keep
life "alive" because it already had lots of water back then.
Yeah, nobody's asked about something that's pretty unique to Earth, namely: "has to get whacked by a Mars-sized impactor real early in its development".
Any ideas if that impactor was ice-rich and if any water vapor from impact could have hung around as the resulting mess cooled (and produced the Moon)?
Seems to me the "big whack" comes in handy for:
The moon - nice tidal energy pumps to stir the oceans
The water (maybe, as I'm wild-assed-guessing in my first paragraph)
The seasons - the 23-degree axial tilt that lets the sun drive energy back and forth across the surface of the planet
I'll accept that big whacks are pretty common (Uranus' axial tilt, etc.)
This doesn't cut down on the number of habitable planets from the point of view of a colonist from a technologically-advanced civilization.
But if it's a major factor (or an essential), it may cut down significantly (like, say, eliminate 2/3 of the planets - asusming Earth, Whatever-Got-Mushed-And-Made-The-Asteroids, and Uranus - 3 of 9 whacked planets) on the number of habitable worlds on which life actually evolves.
(Yeah, the only way to find out is to do lots more planet-hunting, huge-ass interferometry, attempt to get spectra and what-not... the nice thing is that younger/. readers may actually see the results of the research in their lifetimes...)
Chattel refers to personal property such as a car, pet or jewelry. Trespass to chattel is basically theft, but can also be the temporary "borrowing" of an item. A wrongdoer commits trespass to chattel if he or she intentionally possesses someone else's property without their consent--even if only for a brief period of time. Most courts require that some sort of actual harm result from the trespass to chattel.
Example: If you take your friend's new convertible for a joy ride without his or her authorization and during the course of your ride you scratch the new paint and dent the back fender, you have committed a trespass to chattel
So - if I dump three million spams through your mail server without your authorization, and during the course of that, I saturate your outbound link and/or fill up/var/spool/mail with bounces, you've (a) been harmed by having your bandwidth eaten by me, and (b) been harmed by having real mail dropped on the floor from the full mail spool. To say nothing of (c) the time it takes to clean up the mess.
It's an open-and-shut case, and if your relay has been compromised in this manner, regardless of your moral responsibility to secure the relay in the first place, you can sue the spammer for the damages.
> Unlike forging a signature on a cheque, or an official document, there is nothing in the RFC822 headers of an email that
was ever designed to act as proof of a message's origin.
Crap, that's an excellent point. Moderators? Mod this guy up!
I'd have to look at the forgery statute to see if forging a HELO really oughtabe "forgery" in the criminal sense.
It's certainly a false representation, and it's certainly intended to deceive people as to the message's origins in order to perpetrate fraud.
But I think I may be mixing up my (meager) understanding of law with respect to forgery and fraud. (That is, it's OK to send a funny email on April Fool's Day as alan_greenspan@really.really.big.bank.gov, since it's clear to a reasonable person that you're not Greenspan. Doing the same thing, but sending economic statistics portending the interest rate bias for the upcoming fed meeting, to a bunch of Wall Street analysts, wouldn't be.)
The interesting thing if I take that "reasonable person" standard - is HELO ibm.net - believable to a reasonable person?
When I see Recieved: from ibm.net (luser.dialup.uu.net [63.whatever]), whether as a relay rape or direct-to-MX, I know it's a forgery. I wouldn't reasonably believe it came from IBM. I would believe that the spammer is trying to fool others less knowledgeable into thinking that it was.
I think it's more fraud than forgery, but the distinction's probably too subtle to really be captured in the law as it's currently written.
> If someone stole my car and ran someone over with it, is that my responsibility too? What if I left the doors unlocked
and the keys in the ignition? Have I committed a crime? I think not.
s/car/gun/g
s/ran someone over/drove away with the child I was babysitting but left in the back seat when I went to the store/g
People have been charged for precisely those kinds of irresponsibility.
(I'm not advocating criminal charges against admins of open relays - just pointing out that there's plenty of legal precedent for the moral tenet that one should take responsibility to see that one's property is not abused to the detriment of third parties.)
I don't know much about the PopLaunch saga, but if you're serious, I'd encourage you to check up on some pseudonymizing options and get involved on news.admin.net-abuse.email. There are people there that are probably well-situated to help you help them out.
> An open mail server is likewise a nice thing to provide for those people who have unreliable internet connections. [... ] Trust for your fellow man should be the normal way of dealing with things.
5-6 years ago, it was. That's why so many servers are still open - they're run by lazy admins, or come configured with relay turned on by default (Sendmail 8.6 on SUN, anyone?)
Today, it's not. The 'net changes. Deal.
> Locks should be to prevent kids from
playing with balsting caps, not to keep theives out.
Today, an open relay is an "attractive nuisance" - that is, it's analagous to leaving your garage, full of blasting caps, wide open, and hanging a sign on the door saying "Hey kids, don't come in here and play with the blasting caps!"
I think you're actually trolling, but I'll take you seriously for one more moment.
> An open mail server is likewise a nice thing to provide for those people who have unreliable internet connections.
If you're operating such a relay as a favor to a friend in such a situation, it's your responsibility to make sure it's not abused.
By way of constructive suggestions, you can require that users of your relay authenticate before using it, or you can restrict use of that relay to a specific IP address.
> The phone spammers have to take you off their list if you ask;
One minor, but important, nit to pick:
You don't ask to be taken off their phone list - you ask to be put on their do-not-call list.
It's a subtle distinction between the letter of the law (they have to maintain a do-not-call list and not-call the numbers on it) and the spirit of the law (which you describe).
Phone spammers are almost as scummy as email spammers. Unless your request ("Place this number on your do-not-call list") conforms with the letter of the law, they can (and most likely will) ignore it.
> Why does everyone get so damn pissed off at spam?
Because it's theft. I don't like being stolen from.
But not just because it's theft. The real fight is how we preserve email as a useful communications medium.
> Add to that the fact that I can block senders,[... ]
And how much of your time do you spend doing this, when you could be doing other things? You say you've never had more than 10 a week. Before I started reading headers, I was up to 10 a day. And I'm on the light side. Others I know were in the hundreds per day.
Consider this - if we give Jay Garon net.access in prison, and only 1% of legitimate small businesses (ignoring the MMFools and pr0n-hawkers and snake-oil "pharmacists") in the US spam Jay Garon once a year. Jay will have to "just hit delete" 240,000 times a year. That's 657 a day.
As punishment, I think Jay Garon should have to reply to an email from the warden, three times a day, to get his meals served. Failure to answer the mail within an hour results in no meal service.
Now how long do you think it would be before Jay starved to death, "just hitting delete"?
> Now I
just delete and forget.
I used to delete spam. Now I delete spammers.
Speaking of whom... hey Garon, seen any sexy babes lately? How's Premier Financial?
The wheels of justice grind slowly - Garon's spamhaus dates back to early 1999 - but they grind extremely fine. I'm gonna eat an 8-oz filet mignon tonight. I'm sure Jay will be eating meat soon too, but of a different sort.
Buh-bye, Jay. You might as well let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. A little tenderizing might make it easier on ya when Bubba comes a knockin'.
>I mean, a civil action would be merited, and perhaps some monetary penalty, but JAIL??? I don't know,
this worries me. It is a dangerous precedent.
What part of "denial of service attack" do you not understand? (Ever seen an open relay try to process 500,000 bounces?)
What part of "theft by trespass to chattel" do you not understand?
What part of "unauthorized access to a computer system" do you not understand?
But honestly, I'm glad they got him on the forgery charge instead of all of the above charges (i.e. forging a bogus return address) - because it's a very real attack (via 50,000 flames!) on a victim whose systems were completely unrelated to the damn open relay in the first place.
And it's a hell of a lot easier to say to the owner of a forged domain "consider suing the spammer for trademark infringement for forging your domain name into the spam" (civil suit launched at the victim's expense) to "Please contact the district attorney in (spammer's dialup's general area) and ask him to place criminal fraud charges upon the spammer" (a criminal suit).
> but JAIL???
I've found that a pretty good way of not going to jail is not to commit crimes like theft or forgery. Works for me.
> why don't they release them under a
license so that the general public can use them without fear of breaking EULAs or
copywrite law?
For that matter, rather than tweaking the copyright law (not bloody likely), why not just have software companies license the abandonware sites to re-release them under a different EULA?
Something like "We, MegaCorp license you, Joe Abandonware D00d, to distribute ReallyOldGame on our behalf. In exchange for this license, you agree to pay us $1.00 and require your users to click through on an EULA that says as a condition of download they won't sell it commercially, develop other games based on it, etc. etc. etc."
If I were a MegaCorp CEO, I'd request that my landshark draw up such a contract and "make it known" through back channels that the option was available.
Voila - my trademarks (the potentially-valuable intellectual property, namely my characters, storylines, and package design) are still protected, and Joe Abandonware D00d is no different than any other software retailer who buys my software for to sell. (It's just that unlike most retailers, Joe only gets to distribute the stuff that's so old no paying customer wants to touch it, and he doesn't get to profit from it.) My assets are protected, Joe isn't taking anything from my retail sales channel, everybody breaks even, except the users win.
> BTW, why do they usually put V----- in the email instead of the word? Do some mail servers
filter email like browser censorware filters web pages?
Because Viagra is a trademark of Pfizer, and they don't wanna get nailed for infringement.
Because Viagra is a prescription drug, and they don't wanna get nailed for practicing medicine without a license.
Each of these excuses is about as good as the nonexistent "S.1618" law spammers like to cite. (Rule #1: Spammers lie.)
Feel free to forward all such spam to the FDA. The reporting address is available a few pages into http://www.fda.gov
(And is it just me, or is about half the spam I get from Florida, and about half of that from dialups in Pompano Beach? Judging from the spam I get from Florida, I'm really not surprised at how many Floridans are too dumb to figure out how to punch a hole in a card...)
> Giving up one's privacy to let light stream into your house through the window;
How do you see the screen with all that light coming in from the big blue room? Eeeewww, gross! (sorry, couldn't resist;-)
> yet I rarely (if ever) hear you [Taco] weigh the success of Slashdot
against the loss of privacy it has caused you.
Actually, I think that'd be a damn good/. article. Not just to make your point that absolute privacy is a myth, but because I think Taco's take on the effects/. has had on his life would be a damn good read.
Taco, you reading? How 'bout doing this as an "anniversary" article or to commemorate some sort of turning point in Slashdot's history on a slow news day?
But now that they've sold out to privacy invaders, I no longer trust either the "free" or "ad-sponsored" binary.
Pity. The reason I liked Opera so much was because (image autoload toggle, java/javashit toggle, no "My Nutscrape" or "Shopping" portal icons eating toolbar space) it took pains to avoid the smeggin' ads.
> [an analyst writes that] Red Hat "has
$320 million in cash on hand, that it consistently meets quarterly revenue expectations, and that its gross margins are
improving."
All of which are true. But until RHAT starts making money, it's still not necessarily a good investment.
It's a better buy at $6.50 than at $150. But that doesn't make it a good buy.
With $42M in revenue, you're still paying about 25 years' worth of revenue for every dollar's worth of stock you buy.
The comparables for the rest of the sector are 12 years, and for the rest of the market, two years.
Just 'cuz a stock is inexpensive doesn't mean it's cheap. Don't confuse your feel for the future of the technology (Linux) with the future of the stock price (RHAT). The market's littered with the corpses of people who've made that mistake.
The stock market's about making money, not about boosting technology. It's neither good nor bad - it just is.
> At work, lots of "Internal web applications"
can be coded in XUL instead, and the business will want to switch back to Netscape.
...and the people at work will put in the time and effort to do this because... why?
> they'll say "ReallyCoolDistributedNetworkGame 1.0 (Needs Netscape 6.x to run)"
But there are already really cool distributed network games that don't need Netscape to run.
Yes, X$alloftheaboveL allows for an interesting development platform. But just as Beta vs. VHS, better doesn't mean you win. 90% of the installed base is Windoze. Before people keep it on their hard drives for more than five minutes after install, it has to be a better web browser than IE5 on 'doze. Not just NS4 on $FOOnix.
> It's slow (very very
slow), it does a lousy job of displaying HTML (well, what do you want from a browser for
Christ's sake?)
Obviously you're one of those stupid users who Just Doesn't Get It. Don't you know that you didn't want to display HTML, but that you really wanted an XML, XUL, XSL, and otherwise buzzword-compliant development platform?
It's more than a browser! If you can't see that, you're obviously too dumb to appreciate just how awesomely k00l the Netscape engineers are. Serves you right.
(Before you moderate me as Flamebait -- look up "satire". I'm merely paraphrasing the arguments that every pro-Netscape poster has made in this thread when confronted with the reality that the thing they produced, however cool, sucks donkey ass as a web browser.)
> Mozilla is MORE then just a browser. I'm sure there are a lot of people who kept crying out that
that's ALL it should have been, but that's their typical small-minded thinking,
Yeah. Lookit all those stupid users who wanna surf the web. Don't realise how boring that would have been to code, and how non-'leet and non-resume-building it would have been to write a web browser?
Just 'cuz it's an XUL, XML, XSL-based development platform or whatever the fuck you wanna call it today, doesn't mean it's any use if it doesn't do what the user wants.
I know you're gonna mod me for flamebait for saying that. But I'm gonna keep on saying it until the Netscrape engineers wake up and get the point, which is this:
Stop thinking about what you think is fun to code and start thinking about what the user thinks will be fun to use.
> I don't think you can write a completely cross-platform XUL application using
Internet Explorer technology
No, but you can sure as hell write a web browser for 90% of the installed base of PCs.
When I can walk down the street and hand out CDs labelled "Cross-platform XUL application!" and people rush up to me saying "Wow, that's what I need instead of a web browser", I'll concede the point that Netscape's a Good Thing.
As long as they say "Yeah, but can I use it to view web pages", I'll keep flaming.
I have no opinion one way or the other as to the thermal characteristics of isotopically-pure Si.
I am concerned about the origins of the technology and the ability of any process to generate it "scaling up" to the kinds of quantities required for a chip fab.
I'm also highly skeptical that a firm in the former USSR will be able to pull it off - from an investment standpoint, it's a quagmire of accounting practices that border on the fraudulent, and the rule of law has yet to be established.
Given the other uses for isotope-refining techniques, I'd expect some concerns from a proliferation standpoint. Yes, Si ought be a helluvalot easier to separate than the heavy elements, but any technology that can produce large quantities of isotopically-pure Si could likewise be adapted to produce large quantities of isotopically-pure lighter elements.
Finally, as much as we hate IP lawyers around here, there's the matter of patents. Who holds the patent on the gadget? What's to prevent others from using it? (This matters because the spin of the story is that this technology will benefit AMD more than INTC within the next year or two, arguably with an eye to predicting stock prices of both, or with regards to the stock of the Si-producing company.)
So some scientists have a neat gadget, likely a spinoff of former USSR nuke work. Cool, and it may spur interesting further research. But I don't see it having a major impact in chipmaking technology in the immediate future.
It'd be great if it's (a) true, (b) scales up, and (c) presents no proliferation risk. But all three of those things have to be true for it to matter. Put me in the "wait and see" category.
Brian Kalt, an assistant professor of law at Michigan State University,
has closely followed Miami-Dade's recount. He notes that by beginning
in numerical order, it proceeded first through heavily Democratic
precincts, many of which had gone for Gore by as much as 9 to 1.
The 135 recounted precincts as a whole gave Mr. Gore 74% of the
vote, compared with only 53% countywide. That means that the
remaining precincts as a whole went for Mr. Bush, and would have
delivered far fewer additional votes for Mr. Gore.
"The count was just about to move into heavily Republican and
Cuban areas," says Mr. Kalt. "Given how the rest of the precincts
would have voted, I don't see how Gore would have picked up votes.
If the trend had continued, an admitted if, Bush would actually
have gained 400 votes countywide."
Meanwhile, as to your original point of "don't use punch cards anymore". Amen to that. One voting mechanism and one set of standards for what constitutes a vote. Each set of machines/standards to be agreed upon by each state. And no futzing around with 'em after the election.
I just finished writing post 832 to this thread. Basically, I don't think we'll ever know who "won". The "winner", whomever it is, will have been determined by some Clintonesque redefinition of the term "got the most votes". (Or most accurately, by a Clintonesque "it depends on what the definition of the word 'vote' is";-)
To make a long story short - thanks for calling me on those points. I'll clarify a few things too.
1) Yep, the machine recounts were automatic. Fair deal. I should have made it clear that I believed that recount was perfectly within everyone's right, and that it was non-partisan.
2) Yep, Gore's four counties were his to choose. And thanks for clearing me up on Volusia.
3) Yeah, the new certification date was what I was raising as "court making new law". I thought the point of the old certification date - in the original law - was to allow for a contest. Why have a deadline if the FSSC's only gonna extend it?
IMHO, the right thing to do would have been to allow to certify on the original date, then have Gore contest it the day after. It would have saved us a week, and Palm Beach would have been able to complete its manual recount as part of Gore's contest. Hell, Miami-Dade might have had time to finish its recount.
4) Bonus. Absolutely, Harris used her discretion. Whether it's "use" or "abuse" depends on who you want to win. It really is (IMHO) unclear; if it's intended that there's a limit on that discretion, then it's a poorly-written law. At any rate, it's moot, given the FSSC decision and it should have been moot, given my point above;)
5) Yeah. Both parties (meaning both Bush and Gore, and the political parties they repreasent) have acted like total jackasses since November 7th. (Er... and heaps of elephant dung.)
Slashdot Mirror
>
> I want at least
> A way to disable animations,
> A way to disable resizing, and
> A way to disable pop-up windows
> A way to disable any script when I exit the page
Based on how long it took Mozilla to add enough chrome to sink the Bismarck, and still managed not to include these, probably at least another three years, if ever. :-(
All I want from a browser is something that renders as fast as Netscape 3.01 did, and which allows has the four features the previous poster cited. Nuke "My Netscape", gimme "Toggle Javashit on/off". And gimme back the rendering engine from 3.01, 'cuz it's 10 times faster than the one from 4.x.
I think most of the people who use Deja to get product information used the USENET stuff to get the info, and that the "precision buying" stuff was what Deja tried to create when it realized that a lot of folks were typing in product names in an effort to get de facto reviews from USENET users.
I'm one of the ones who says that's bloat/crap, because the USENET portion was where I got the useful info on products when making buying decisions.
> i find the ratings and comments from owners to be very valuable in making a choice.
I'll take this in two parts: Ratings and comments. (Don't take these remarks personally - they're basically a thrashing out of how I believe most Deja users cruised USENET to get product evaluations).
- Ratings:
- Comments:
In a nutshell - most of the time, the I don't want a product review. I just wanna see what people are doing with the widget, and if they're being successful or not, and if not, what the workarounds are.To me, useless. (1) "Internet polls" aren't valid and are easily stacked, and (2) a list of integers on some arbitrary array of categories doesn't tell me bugger all, which I'll get to in the "Comments" section.
Useful - but what does this provide that USENET doesn't?
When I buy, I tend to have both general questions (I wanna read lots of comments and see if people are consistently reporting problems of which I was unaware), or extremely specific questions. Usually both.
The USENET search engine helps me with the specific stuff - what's the horizontal output transistor on a FooBar 17XYZ monitor I'm trying to fix? Does the new FooBar 21XYZ fail the same way as the 17XYZ always seems to?
And the general stuff -- like realizing that there are a whole lot of dead 17XYZs out there when I search for the thing in sci.electronics.repair and find dozens of threads and the word "crap".
The ability to search - not just for "product reviews" (from typical users who say "Yeah, it rawkz", or "ug, it sux"), but for typical failure modes (sci.electronics.repair), company-related production delays (anyone try to get an ATI All-In-Wonder 128 with 32M in mid-1999?), and what-not - by segregating by newsgroup and keyword, and with contributors from all USENET users - beats the hell out of any "product review" site whose participants are limited to those who actually decide to work within the Deja system.
And that gets to the last point - interoperability. The ability to cram two keywords into a USENET search gives me the ability to isolate likely hardware conflicts. Product reviews can't, unless you're very lucky that the reviewer had the same configuration you did.
No product review will ever tell you that you can solve Creative Labs SBLive! PCI / ATI AIW128-32 conflicts on a BX6 motherboard by making sure that the sound card is in the proper PCI slot, because there's a shared IRQ between one of the PCI and AGP slots, and you can really screw yourself up unless you put the damn card in the right slot.
Nobody at Creative could really be expected to know this, nor anyone at ATI, nor anyone at ABit. But lots of people had the problem, someone solved it by swapping cards, and posted the solution to USENET, and voila - I can now buy all three products at once, knowing that any other threads (that say they don't interoperate) are bogus.
Now... if only they'd get the old archives back. I've got a hunk of circuit board labeled "Jovian Logic", and "ViewMagic", made in 1995, that has lots of video-like connectors on it. I'm guessing it's a VGANTSC converter with S-Video capability, but I can't tell which ports are inputs and which ports are outputs, or what the DIP switches on it are for.
If Deja's old archives were up, I could probably type in a few keywords from the board's silkscreening, find it, and figure out what the hell this thing really is, and make myself a nice toy for Christmas.
Yeah, nobody's asked about something that's pretty unique to Earth, namely: "has to get whacked by a Mars-sized impactor real early in its development".
Any ideas if that impactor was ice-rich and if any water vapor from impact could have hung around as the resulting mess cooled (and produced the Moon)?
Seems to me the "big whack" comes in handy for:
The moon - nice tidal energy pumps to stir the oceans
The water (maybe, as I'm wild-assed-guessing in my first paragraph)
The seasons - the 23-degree axial tilt that lets the sun drive energy back and forth across the surface of the planet I'll accept that big whacks are pretty common (Uranus' axial tilt, etc.)
This doesn't cut down on the number of habitable planets from the point of view of a colonist from a technologically-advanced civilization.
But if it's a major factor (or an essential), it may cut down significantly (like, say, eliminate 2/3 of the planets - asusming Earth, Whatever-Got-Mushed-And-Made-The-Asteroids, and Uranus - 3 of 9 whacked planets) on the number of habitable worlds on which life actually evolves.
(Yeah, the only way to find out is to do lots more planet-hunting, huge-ass interferometry, attempt to get spectra and what-not... the nice thing is that younger /. readers may actually see the results of the research in their lifetimes...)
>
> The chattel part.
Chattel: Lawyerspeak for "stuff".
From mycounsel.com
So - if I dump three million spams through your mail server without your authorization, and during the course of that, I saturate your outbound link and/or fill up /var/spool/mail with bounces, you've (a) been harmed by having your bandwidth eaten by me, and (b) been harmed by having real mail dropped on the floor from the full mail spool. To say nothing of (c) the time it takes to clean up the mess.
It's an open-and-shut case, and if your relay has been compromised in this manner, regardless of your moral responsibility to secure the relay in the first place, you can sue the spammer for the damages.
Crap, that's an excellent point. Moderators? Mod this guy up!
I'd have to look at the forgery statute to see if forging a HELO really oughtabe "forgery" in the criminal sense.
It's certainly a false representation, and it's certainly intended to deceive people as to the message's origins in order to perpetrate fraud.
But I think I may be mixing up my (meager) understanding of law with respect to forgery and fraud. (That is, it's OK to send a funny email on April Fool's Day as alan_greenspan@really.really.big.bank.gov, since it's clear to a reasonable person that you're not Greenspan. Doing the same thing, but sending economic statistics portending the interest rate bias for the upcoming fed meeting, to a bunch of Wall Street analysts, wouldn't be.)
The interesting thing if I take that "reasonable person" standard - is HELO ibm.net - believable to a reasonable person?
When I see Recieved: from ibm.net (luser.dialup.uu.net [63.whatever]), whether as a relay rape or direct-to-MX, I know it's a forgery. I wouldn't reasonably believe it came from IBM. I would believe that the spammer is trying to fool others less knowledgeable into thinking that it was.
I think it's more fraud than forgery, but the distinction's probably too subtle to really be captured in the law as it's currently written.
Like I said - a damn good point you made.
s/car/gun/g
s/ran someone over/drove away with the child I was babysitting but left in the back seat when I went to the store/g
People have been charged for precisely those kinds of irresponsibility.
(I'm not advocating criminal charges against admins of open relays - just pointing out that there's plenty of legal precedent for the moral tenet that one should take responsibility to see that one's property is not abused to the detriment of third parties.)
I don't know much about the PopLaunch saga, but if you're serious, I'd encourage you to check up on some pseudonymizing options and get involved on news.admin.net-abuse.email. There are people there that are probably well-situated to help you help them out.
5-6 years ago, it was. That's why so many servers are still open - they're run by lazy admins, or come configured with relay turned on by default (Sendmail 8.6 on SUN, anyone?)
Today, it's not. The 'net changes. Deal.
> Locks should be to prevent kids from playing with balsting caps, not to keep theives out.
Today, an open relay is an "attractive nuisance" - that is, it's analagous to leaving your garage, full of blasting caps, wide open, and hanging a sign on the door saying "Hey kids, don't come in here and play with the blasting caps!"
I think you're actually trolling, but I'll take you seriously for one more moment.
> An open mail server is likewise a nice thing to provide for those people who have unreliable internet connections.
If you're operating such a relay as a favor to a friend in such a situation, it's your responsibility to make sure it's not abused.
By way of constructive suggestions, you can require that users of your relay authenticate before using it, or you can restrict use of that relay to a specific IP address.
One minor, but important, nit to pick:
You don't ask to be taken off their phone list - you ask to be put on their do-not-call list.
It's a subtle distinction between the letter of the law (they have to maintain a do-not-call list and not-call the numbers on it) and the spirit of the law (which you describe).
Phone spammers are almost as scummy as email spammers. Unless your request ("Place this number on your do-not-call list") conforms with the letter of the law, they can (and most likely will) ignore it.
Stop insulting prison bitches. Spammer ass is worth maybe one drag on a cigarette. Barely a full cig. Sure as hell not a pack :-)
Because it's theft. I don't like being stolen from.
But not just because it's theft. The real fight is how we preserve email as a useful communications medium.
> Add to that the fact that I can block senders,[ ... ]
And how much of your time do you spend doing this, when you could be doing other things? You say you've never had more than 10 a week. Before I started reading headers, I was up to 10 a day. And I'm on the light side. Others I know were in the hundreds per day.
Consider this - if we give Jay Garon net.access in prison, and only 1% of legitimate small businesses (ignoring the MMFools and pr0n-hawkers and snake-oil "pharmacists") in the US spam Jay Garon once a year. Jay will have to "just hit delete" 240,000 times a year. That's 657 a day.
As punishment, I think Jay Garon should have to reply to an email from the warden, three times a day, to get his meals served. Failure to answer the mail within an hour results in no meal service.
Now how long do you think it would be before Jay starved to death, "just hitting delete"?
> Now I just delete and forget.
I used to delete spam. Now I delete spammers.
Speaking of whom... hey Garon, seen any sexy babes lately? How's Premier Financial?
The wheels of justice grind slowly - Garon's spamhaus dates back to early 1999 - but they grind extremely fine. I'm gonna eat an 8-oz filet mignon tonight. I'm sure Jay will be eating meat soon too, but of a different sort.
Buh-bye, Jay. You might as well let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. A little tenderizing might make it easier on ya when Bubba comes a knockin'.
What part of "denial of service attack" do you not understand? (Ever seen an open relay try to process 500,000 bounces?)
What part of "theft by trespass to chattel" do you not understand?
What part of "unauthorized access to a computer system" do you not understand?
But honestly, I'm glad they got him on the forgery charge instead of all of the above charges (i.e. forging a bogus return address) - because it's a very real attack (via 50,000 flames!) on a victim whose systems were completely unrelated to the damn open relay in the first place.
And it's a hell of a lot easier to say to the owner of a forged domain "consider suing the spammer for trademark infringement for forging your domain name into the spam" (civil suit launched at the victim's expense) to "Please contact the district attorney in (spammer's dialup's general area) and ask him to place criminal fraud charges upon the spammer" (a criminal suit).
> but JAIL???
I've found that a pretty good way of not going to jail is not to commit crimes like theft or forgery. Works for me.
For that matter, rather than tweaking the copyright law (not bloody likely), why not just have software companies license the abandonware sites to re-release them under a different EULA?
Something like "We, MegaCorp license you, Joe Abandonware D00d, to distribute ReallyOldGame on our behalf. In exchange for this license, you agree to pay us $1.00 and require your users to click through on an EULA that says as a condition of download they won't sell it commercially, develop other games based on it, etc. etc. etc."
If I were a MegaCorp CEO, I'd request that my landshark draw up such a contract and "make it known" through back channels that the option was available.
Voila - my trademarks (the potentially-valuable intellectual property, namely my characters, storylines, and package design) are still protected, and Joe Abandonware D00d is no different than any other software retailer who buys my software for to sell. (It's just that unlike most retailers, Joe only gets to distribute the stuff that's so old no paying customer wants to touch it, and he doesn't get to profit from it.) My assets are protected, Joe isn't taking anything from my retail sales channel, everybody breaks even, except the users win.
Because Viagra is a trademark of Pfizer, and they don't wanna get nailed for infringement.
Because Viagra is a prescription drug, and they don't wanna get nailed for practicing medicine without a license.
Each of these excuses is about as good as the nonexistent "S.1618" law spammers like to cite. (Rule #1: Spammers lie.)
Feel free to forward all such spam to the FDA. The reporting address is available a few pages into http://www.fda.gov
(And is it just me, or is about half the spam I get from Florida, and about half of that from dialups in Pompano Beach? Judging from the spam I get from Florida, I'm really not surprised at how many Floridans are too dumb to figure out how to punch a hole in a card...)
If that comment was addressed to me, I concede the point and thank whomever downmodded my post. Good call.
How do you see the screen with all that light coming in from the big blue room? Eeeewww, gross! (sorry, couldn't resist ;-)
> yet I rarely (if ever) hear you [Taco] weigh the success of Slashdot against the loss of privacy it has caused you.
Actually, I think that'd be a damn good /. article. Not just to make your point that absolute privacy is a myth, but because I think Taco's take on the effects /. has had on his life would be a damn good read.
Taco, you reading? How 'bout doing this as an "anniversary" article or to commemorate some sort of turning point in Slashdot's history on a slow news day?
But now that they've sold out to privacy invaders, I no longer trust either the "free" or "ad-sponsored" binary.
Pity. The reason I liked Opera so much was because (image autoload toggle, java/javashit toggle, no "My Nutscrape" or "Shopping" portal icons eating toolbar space) it took pains to avoid the smeggin' ads.
Now they're spyware. Fuck 'em.
All of which are true. But until RHAT starts making money, it's still not necessarily a good investment.
It's a better buy at $6.50 than at $150. But that doesn't make it a good buy.
With $42M in revenue, you're still paying about 25 years' worth of revenue for every dollar's worth of stock you buy.
The comparables for the rest of the sector are 12 years, and for the rest of the market, two years.
Just 'cuz a stock is inexpensive doesn't mean it's cheap. Don't confuse your feel for the future of the technology (Linux) with the future of the stock price (RHAT). The market's littered with the corpses of people who've made that mistake.
The stock market's about making money, not about boosting technology. It's neither good nor bad - it just is.
I just wanted to be sure the authorities know I was sick, but I'm better now. Righthought is doubleplushappythought.
> they'll say "ReallyCoolDistributedNetworkGame 1.0 (Needs Netscape 6.x to run)"
But there are already really cool distributed network games that don't need Netscape to run.
Yes, X$alloftheaboveL allows for an interesting development platform. But just as Beta vs. VHS, better doesn't mean you win. 90% of the installed base is Windoze. Before people keep it on their hard drives for more than five minutes after install, it has to be a better web browser than IE5 on 'doze. Not just NS4 on $FOOnix.
Start with user requirements. Grow it from there.
Obviously you're one of those stupid users who Just Doesn't Get It. Don't you know that you didn't want to display HTML, but that you really wanted an XML, XUL, XSL, and otherwise buzzword-compliant development platform?
It's more than a browser! If you can't see that, you're obviously too dumb to appreciate just how awesomely k00l the Netscape engineers are. Serves you right.
(Before you moderate me as Flamebait -- look up "satire". I'm merely paraphrasing the arguments that every pro-Netscape poster has made in this thread when confronted with the reality that the thing they produced, however cool, sucks donkey ass as a web browser.)
Yeah. Lookit all those stupid users who wanna surf the web. Don't realise how boring that would have been to code, and how non-'leet and non-resume-building it would have been to write a web browser?
Just 'cuz it's an XUL, XML, XSL-based development platform or whatever the fuck you wanna call it today, doesn't mean it's any use if it doesn't do what the user wants.
I know you're gonna mod me for flamebait for saying that. But I'm gonna keep on saying it until the Netscrape engineers wake up and get the point, which is this:
Stop thinking about what you think is fun to code and start thinking about what the user thinks will be fun to use.
> I don't think you can write a completely cross-platform XUL application using Internet Explorer technology
No, but you can sure as hell write a web browser for 90% of the installed base of PCs.
When I can walk down the street and hand out CDs labelled "Cross-platform XUL application!" and people rush up to me saying "Wow, that's what I need instead of a web browser", I'll concede the point that Netscape's a Good Thing.
As long as they say "Yeah, but can I use it to view web pages", I'll keep flaming.
I am concerned about the origins of the technology and the ability of any process to generate it "scaling up" to the kinds of quantities required for a chip fab.
I'm also highly skeptical that a firm in the former USSR will be able to pull it off - from an investment standpoint, it's a quagmire of accounting practices that border on the fraudulent, and the rule of law has yet to be established.
Given the other uses for isotope-refining techniques, I'd expect some concerns from a proliferation standpoint. Yes, Si ought be a helluvalot easier to separate than the heavy elements, but any technology that can produce large quantities of isotopically-pure Si could likewise be adapted to produce large quantities of isotopically-pure lighter elements.
Finally, as much as we hate IP lawyers around here, there's the matter of patents. Who holds the patent on the gadget? What's to prevent others from using it? (This matters because the spin of the story is that this technology will benefit AMD more than INTC within the next year or two, arguably with an eye to predicting stock prices of both, or with regards to the stock of the Si-producing company.)
So some scientists have a neat gadget, likely a spinoff of former USSR nuke work. Cool, and it may spur interesting further research. But I don't see it having a major impact in chipmaking technology in the immediate future.
It'd be great if it's (a) true, (b) scales up, and (c) presents no proliferation risk. But all three of those things have to be true for it to matter. Put me in the "wait and see" category.
To make a long story short - thanks for calling me on those points. I'll clarify a few things too.
1) Yep, the machine recounts were automatic. Fair deal. I should have made it clear that I believed that recount was perfectly within everyone's right, and that it was non-partisan.
2) Yep, Gore's four counties were his to choose. And thanks for clearing me up on Volusia.
3) Yeah, the new certification date was what I was raising as "court making new law". I thought the point of the old certification date - in the original law - was to allow for a contest. Why have a deadline if the FSSC's only gonna extend it?
IMHO, the right thing to do would have been to allow to certify on the original date, then have Gore contest it the day after. It would have saved us a week, and Palm Beach would have been able to complete its manual recount as part of Gore's contest. Hell, Miami-Dade might have had time to finish its recount.
4) Bonus. Absolutely, Harris used her discretion. Whether it's "use" or "abuse" depends on who you want to win. It really is (IMHO) unclear; if it's intended that there's a limit on that discretion, then it's a poorly-written law. At any rate, it's moot, given the FSSC decision and it should have been moot, given my point above ;)
5) Yeah. Both parties (meaning both Bush and Gore, and the political parties they repreasent) have acted like total jackasses since November 7th. (Er... and heaps of elephant dung.)