I didn't see in the whole Bible any anti-spam advises.
However, there are principles in the Bible - the Golden Rule, the emphasis on honesty and justice in business dealings - that would seem to oppose spam.
Even more, the whole history of cristian missioneering reminds me a big spam compain to distribute the Bible around the world.
Spam is generally done to generate profit for its practitioner, often by intentionally ripping off the recipients. Christian missions is generally done with the intent to help its recipients. (Whether or not it does so would be a completely off-topic and probably fruitless discussion here.)
Spammers generally lead financially rewarding jobs with little in the way of occupational hazards - lawsuits are becoming more of a threat, but otherwise, the worst you probably have to worry about is having your street address posted on Slashdot. Christian missionaries, historically, have faced financial hardship, worse living conditions, sometimes loss of social standing, illness, and death.
Spammers, according to the article, may get a response rate of one quarter of 1 percent. Christian missions has historically gotten a much higher response rate; otherwise, we probably wouldn't be reading about a Christian spammer in Louisiana. Spam is unsoliticed by definition. Christian missions is sometimes solicited.
And, of course, there's the whole question of method. Spam, by definition, is different from other forms of unsolicited advertising - billboards, TV, radio, direct mailings - because it's a different method. Society has decided that certain methods of advertising are okay, and certain methods of adveritising are not. This is what makes spam spam. (Christian missions, obviously, generally uses other methods.)
So, different motives, different outcomes on the practitioners, different methods, different effectiveness... What was it in the history of Christian missions that reminded you of spam? Most people neither solicit nor want spam; many people neither solicit nor want Christian missions. Is that all that you had in mind? Surely you can do better than to say without justification or elaboration "This complex two thousand year socio-religious phenomenon reminds me of a completely different 20th/21st century technological issue because some people don't want either one?"
That last paragraph in question 10b looks to me like it was supposed to be Szulik's response to 10a and 10b. If so, then it seems to me that that's a decent job of addressing the issue and a decent attempt to accomodate educational facilities. The wording of the paragraph ("will begin to address a void") implies to me that RedHat is working on doing more to accommodate educational facilities.
Is it really so bad that Szulik asked painehope to send him an email? It seems that I've seen a number of companies that require you to talk to a salesperson to get a quote...
(I'm still pissed that the SOBs reordered the Narnia books in current collections. How can you possibly appreciate The Magician's Nephew without having read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? Stupidheads.)
The reordering was done in an attempt to honor C.S. Lewis's wishes. A couple of quotes, for more information:
HarperCollins and the C.S. Lewis companiy "renumbered the entire Chronicles of Narnia on the basis of a letter Lewis wrote to a child suggesting that he preferred to read them in Narnian chronology rather than the order in which they were written." (source)
"It must be conceded that in a letter written in 1957 (published in 'Letters to Children'), Lewis did appear to state a mild preference for the chronological order. But in that same letter Lewis concluded: 'So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read them.'" (source)
With that said, I prefer the original ordering. Oh well.
And, in all fairness, the letter from the.NAME registry recognizes this. They state that the BIND patch has a "destabilizing effect" because of the root-delegation-only option, but they don't express any complaints about declaring a zone delegation-only if appropriate. (In other words, the article submission is a tad misleading.)
Why are the dorms not firewalled? I understand that professors may need unfettered Internet access for projects, but that doesn't seem like a valid reason not to have the resnet systems behind a firewall and an IDS/IPS.
Sometimes firewalls don't help. At our college, at least, the resnet systems are behind a (somewhat minimal, admittedly) firewall. The firewall happily blocked Blaster and Nachi and all their variants, right up until the point where students returning for the summer plugged in already-infected computers inside our firewall and hosed our network.
(The Linux box that does our routing couldn't handle the sudden jump in traffic. I find it ironic that Nachi, a "good" worm that's supposed to stop Blaster, did far more damage to our network with its massive ping sweeps than Blaster did.)
One of my clients is an ISP - and they *want* the bounces to go out for the simple reason that it broadcasts to the world that "your mail is safe with us".
Messages like that have the opposite effect on me. They broadcast, "We don't understand the concept of mass-mailing viruses that forge their sender addresses, so here's some junk mail for you."
Of course, I'm also of the opinion that virus scanning ought to be a standard feature offered by ISPs (especially with excellent free software like MIMEDefang available to help), so advertisements of an ISP's virus scanning aren't going to impress me whole lot.
Microsoft uses a thin local Terminal Server that's running in the background to achieve this. Quite elegant actually. The only problem with this is that it adds another layer between user & hardware, so there's a performance hit.
I was really impressed with how WinXP handled itself in a little test I devised: Start installing MS Office in 1 account, switch to user2 and start surfing the web, fetching e-mail, etc. Switch back and hey presto! office was installed. I say: sweet. that's a good implementation. I don't know anyone who would want to do that on a daily basis, but hey, it's proof of concept.
Except that Microsoft's fast user switching doesn't work if your computer is joined to a Windows domain. Which makes it pretty useless for a lot of settings. Example: Fast user switching would be very convenient for my wife and I, but since my home PC is joined our the campus domain, it's disabled.
The article you referenced goes on to quote SCO's VP, who notes that the contract in question goes on to say, "Notwithstanding the above, the irrevocable nature of the above rights will in no way be construed to limit...SCO's rights to enjoin or otherwise prohibit IBM from violating...SCO's rights under this amendment."
So, SCO can still "enjoin or otherwise prohibit" IBM in some fashion, I guess, even if they can't revoke the license, although I don't know how exactly they would do the enjoinging or otherwise prohibiting, and I'm not convinced they have a case to begin with. I don't know. IANAL. Etc.
As you said, the Open Group owns the Unix trademark and permits products to be called "Unix." See
their page for details on their ownership of the trademark and the Single UNIX Specification. The Open Group (then the X/Open Company) got the UNIX trademark and specification from Novell in 1994.
However, the UNIX code and implementation was sold by Novell to SCO. IBM entered into a contract with AT&T way back in 1985 to produce AIX, its own version of UNIX, and SCO ended up with AT&T's interest in that contract (see here for details). IBM isn't the only licensee of UNIX from SCO; Sun and HP, for example, both have licenses from SCO for their own versions of UNIX, as do "several thousand" others.
60% isn't too high... When I first started looking into P2P usage on our campus, maybe a year and a half ago, it was using around 95% of our bandwidth during the day. I was amazed. We restricted some P2P just so we could have a usable Internet connection, but P2P still took up somewhere around 2/3 of our outgoing bandwidth. So finally we implemented bandwidth caps - 750MB per user per day, which I think is fairly generous, but it's enough to usually prevent one user from killing everyone else's network performance.
P.S. Where you work, does your HR insist on some level of computer experience before hiring? We just hired a data-entry person who had NEVER used a PC on her 55+ years on the planet: "Press the Tab key to enter your password." "The what key? Enter?" Aaargh!
Ouch... Actually, the place where I work is small enough (a small college, ~150 employees) that we don't have a proper HR department. The staff are mostly clueful, though, and the students aren't technically inclined enough to be too demanding.
What probably helps me most, though, is that one of the other guys in the computer department usually ends up handling users. I keep the servers happy and do programming (both of which involve some dealing with users), while he does PC troubleshooting and helpdesk (which involves most of the dealing with users). I must say that I don't envy him.
I must admit that I don't really grasp the BOFH perspective. I figure that as a sysadmin, my job is to serve users; torturing them really doesn't seem to be part of the job description. Yeah, they can be pretty annoying at times, but I figure that's partly because being a computer expert isn't necessarily part of their jobs - any more than it's my job to know the ins and outs of accounting or financial aid or anything else that my users do.
And yes, I should probably just learn to take a joke. I was a bit curious, though, to learn if anyone else felt the same way...
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However, there are principles in the Bible - the Golden Rule, the emphasis on honesty and justice in business dealings - that would seem to oppose spam.
Spam is generally done to generate profit for its practitioner, often by intentionally ripping off the recipients. Christian missions is generally done with the intent to help its recipients. (Whether or not it does so would be a completely off-topic and probably fruitless discussion here.)
Spammers generally lead financially rewarding jobs with little in the way of occupational hazards - lawsuits are becoming more of a threat, but otherwise, the worst you probably have to worry about is having your street address posted on Slashdot. Christian missionaries, historically, have faced financial hardship, worse living conditions, sometimes loss of social standing, illness, and death.
Spammers, according to the article, may get a response rate of one quarter of 1 percent. Christian missions has historically gotten a much higher response rate; otherwise, we probably wouldn't be reading about a Christian spammer in Louisiana. Spam is unsoliticed by definition. Christian missions is sometimes solicited.
And, of course, there's the whole question of method. Spam, by definition, is different from other forms of unsolicited advertising - billboards, TV, radio, direct mailings - because it's a different method. Society has decided that certain methods of advertising are okay, and certain methods of adveritising are not. This is what makes spam spam. (Christian missions, obviously, generally uses other methods.)
So, different motives, different outcomes on the practitioners, different methods, different effectiveness... What was it in the history of Christian missions that reminded you of spam? Most people neither solicit nor want spam; many people neither solicit nor want Christian missions. Is that all that you had in mind? Surely you can do better than to say without justification or elaboration "This complex two thousand year socio-religious phenomenon reminds me of a completely different 20th/21st century technological issue because some people don't want either one?"
That last paragraph in question 10b looks to me like it was supposed to be Szulik's response to 10a and 10b. If so, then it seems to me that that's a decent job of addressing the issue and a decent attempt to accomodate educational facilities. The wording of the paragraph ("will begin to address a void") implies to me that RedHat is working on doing more to accommodate educational facilities.
Is it really so bad that Szulik asked painehope to send him an email? It seems that I've seen a number of companies that require you to talk to a salesperson to get a quote...
The reordering was done in an attempt to honor C.S. Lewis's wishes. A couple of quotes, for more information:
HarperCollins and the C.S. Lewis companiy "renumbered the entire Chronicles of Narnia on the basis of a letter Lewis wrote to a child suggesting that he preferred to read them in Narnian chronology rather than the order in which they were written." (source)
"It must be conceded that in a letter written in 1957 (published in 'Letters to Children'), Lewis did appear to state a mild preference for the chronological order. But in that same letter Lewis concluded: 'So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read them.'" (source)
With that said, I prefer the original ordering. Oh well.
Agreed.
And, in all fairness, the letter from the .NAME registry recognizes this. They state that the BIND patch has a "destabilizing effect" because of the root-delegation-only option, but they don't express any complaints about declaring a zone delegation-only if appropriate. (In other words, the article submission is a tad misleading.)
Sometimes firewalls don't help. At our college, at least, the resnet systems are behind a (somewhat minimal, admittedly) firewall. The firewall happily blocked Blaster and Nachi and all their variants, right up until the point where students returning for the summer plugged in already-infected computers inside our firewall and hosed our network.
(The Linux box that does our routing couldn't handle the sudden jump in traffic. I find it ironic that Nachi, a "good" worm that's supposed to stop Blaster, did far more damage to our network with its massive ping sweeps than Blaster did.)
Messages like that have the opposite effect on me. They broadcast, "We don't understand the concept of mass-mailing viruses that forge their sender addresses, so here's some junk mail for you."
Of course, I'm also of the opinion that virus scanning ought to be a standard feature offered by ISPs (especially with excellent free software like MIMEDefang available to help), so advertisements of an ISP's virus scanning aren't going to impress me whole lot.
Except that Microsoft's fast user switching doesn't work if your computer is joined to a Windows domain. Which makes it pretty useless for a lot of settings. Example: Fast user switching would be very convenient for my wife and I, but since my home PC is joined our the campus domain, it's disabled.
The article you referenced goes on to quote SCO's VP, who notes that the contract in question goes on to say, "Notwithstanding the above, the irrevocable nature of the above rights will in no way be construed to limit...SCO's rights to enjoin or otherwise prohibit IBM from violating...SCO's rights under this amendment."
So, SCO can still "enjoin or otherwise prohibit" IBM in some fashion, I guess, even if they can't revoke the license, although I don't know how exactly they would do the enjoinging or otherwise prohibiting, and I'm not convinced they have a case to begin with. I don't know. IANAL. Etc.
Here's my understanding:
As you said, the Open Group owns the Unix trademark and permits products to be called "Unix." See their page for details on their ownership of the trademark and the Single UNIX Specification. The Open Group (then the X/Open Company) got the UNIX trademark and specification from Novell in 1994.
However, the UNIX code and implementation was sold by Novell to SCO. IBM entered into a contract with AT&T way back in 1985 to produce AIX, its own version of UNIX, and SCO ended up with AT&T's interest in that contract (see here for details). IBM isn't the only licensee of UNIX from SCO; Sun and HP, for example, both have licenses from SCO for their own versions of UNIX, as do "several thousand" others.
60% isn't too high... When I first started looking into P2P usage on our campus, maybe a year and a half ago, it was using around 95% of our bandwidth during the day. I was amazed. We restricted some P2P just so we could have a usable Internet connection, but P2P still took up somewhere around 2/3 of our outgoing bandwidth. So finally we implemented bandwidth caps - 750MB per user per day, which I think is fairly generous, but it's enough to usually prevent one user from killing everyone else's network performance.
P.S. Where you work, does your HR insist on some level of computer experience before hiring? We just hired a data-entry person who had NEVER used a PC on her 55+ years on the planet: "Press the Tab key to enter your password." "The what key? Enter?" Aaargh!
Ouch... Actually, the place where I work is small enough (a small college, ~150 employees) that we don't have a proper HR department. The staff are mostly clueful, though, and the students aren't technically inclined enough to be too demanding.
What probably helps me most, though, is that one of the other guys in the computer department usually ends up handling users. I keep the servers happy and do programming (both of which involve some dealing with users), while he does PC troubleshooting and helpdesk (which involves most of the dealing with users). I must say that I don't envy him.
I must admit that I don't really grasp the BOFH perspective. I figure that as a sysadmin, my job is to serve users; torturing them really doesn't seem to be part of the job description. Yeah, they can be pretty annoying at times, but I figure that's partly because being a computer expert isn't necessarily part of their jobs - any more than it's my job to know the ins and outs of accounting or financial aid or anything else that my users do.
And yes, I should probably just learn to take a joke. I was a bit curious, though, to learn if anyone else felt the same way...