Whether or not MS believes SCO has a truely credible case goes without knowing. However, MS has already funneled a fair amount of money into SCO to help fuel their lawyers with cash like a wind-up toy to fight the case against IBM and Linux under the guise of "license fees."
My intuition suggests that MS has helped SCO to finance the battle because they're curious to see if SCO can pull it off. If they can, it's a win for Microsoft because now the GPL is beatable and Linux has a major strike against it in the courts. If SCO loses, MS can simply wipe the dirt off their hands (from handing SCO the cash) and claim that the GPL is more dangerous now than ever and SCO has only proven how damaging it can be! In either case, Microsoft wins and doesn't worry about losing any significant amounts of money on SCO (such as buying them out now would prove).
Is the 1.5% difference worth you paying for the bandwidth and CPU cycles it takes to identify those spam emails on your client, or would you rather make the spammer waste hours/days trying to get a single piece of email to you without costing you much more than a "Try again later" message?
I don't recall if in the paper it mentioned whether or not the lifetime of the sending address was refreshed with each mail, or if the lifetime simply starts on the first email and after that time the sender must hit the delay again.
One enhancement may be to update the lifetime start point to the last email sent from an accepted email address. If somehow an address became 'contaminated' by a spammer, the mail administrator could simply blacklist that address or expire the lifetime.
Realize that the article doesn't claim that Greylisting alone will stop all spam, but Greylisting in conjunction with blacklisting and other anti-spam techniques can make open relays less of a problem.
Let's just take the scenario where a major spammer has decided to route his spam through an open relay in the UK. The network admin in charge of email security at BigSoftware Corp. has implemented Greylisting in addition to all his anti-spam measures previously existing including blacklisting. According to the article it is possible to delay incoming mail from that relay long enough to set up a blacklist for that entire domain or perhaps a subnet of that domain depending on where the flood of mail is coming from. If the UK relay has a complaint about mail not making it to BigSoftare Corp., the admin can politely tell him he's got a spammer molesting his relay and will gladly remove his domain from the blacklist once the relay is closed.
The temporary time limit could be 5 hours and Tom Dialup wouldn't notice any difference. The only time this would be noticable by legitimate email senders is if Tom was talking to Jane Email on the phone and said, "Here, let me send this to you." 5 hours later she would receive it.
Tom's dialup connection will have a dynamic IP that will change the next time he logs in, but his SMTP server most likely has a consistent IP which is the address the Greylisting server will get. After Tom's SMTP server has retried for 5 hours, the temporary block will be removed and on the next try the email is delivered.
Whitelisting is more or less pointless for Tom's purposes.
And even more to the point -- how would anyone prove you didn't already own the material? In this case I'm thinking mostly about CDs and MP3s of songs you own, but are too lazy or ignorant to burn your own MP3s off of the CDs you have so you can use them in portable MP3 players, minidisc players, or just burn them onto other CDs for party music and mixes.
He's trying to tell me that I should have my computer melted into a pile of liquid silicon because I decided to grab an MP3 of a song I already own instead of burning it, for my convenience? That's like saying my television should be broken if I watch the news because I'm simply getting the stories from someone else instead of going out and getting them myself. The difference being information is free of course, but both scenarios are ludicrous and unjustifiable.
You raise two questions that remind me of similar cliche questions:
You said,
Does the fact that we can say anything mean that we should say everything?
For speech to be useful, doesn't it need to have an audience?
To the first, I am reminded of, "[scientists] are so concerned about whether or not they can do it, they don't stop to think whether or not they should."
And to the second, "If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?"
My point being: there's certainly times when causing a commotion for the sake of getting attention only and standing behind free speech when it's probably better for one to keep his/her mouth shut, but more often there's good reason to raise a voice (or written word) in protest to protect rights or freedoms even when infringed only slightly -- think about what precidents small amounts of rights-stomping set.
I also agree with another poster that freedom of speech doesn't speak at all to the utility of that speech. Just because no one's listening doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to speak your mind. The freedom is useful, not necessarily the words spoken.
I agree that a CS degree does not translate directly to "good programmer". In my program certain basics were covered (objects, linked lists, b-trees, database design fundamentals, data communications, professional communications, CS theory, discrete mathematics, calculus, and so on...), but after the first two years we were given the freedom to explore specific areas of computer science such as cryptography, graphics, networking, distributed computing, etc. It is policy at my college to not teach languages, rather they teach concepts and only use a language as a tool to convey that concepts.
And so my language exposure at college ended up looking like: Eiffel, C++, J, Lisp, VAX assembly, Snobol, Perl, Java, and shell scripting. From there I added more detailed knowledge of Java, C, C++, Perl, Python.
It's all up to the individual -- a good CS course will get you started.
Hormel Foods (makes of Spam - Spiced Ham) tried to sue many years ago for defamation of their product by the use of the word 'spam' to connote unsolicited commercial email.
The court held that there wasn't really a problem because people wouldn't confuse Spam (the food) with spam (the unwanted email). Additionally, Hormel's product was spelled with a capital 'S' whereas the email blight was spelled with a lowercase 's'.
They used to have a disclaimer on their site stating something to the effect that they do not endorse unsolicited commercial email and have nothing to do with 'spam' or 'spammers'.
However, they do have a nice Spam town festival every year at the company headquarters in Austin, Minnesota.
There was a Discover article a couple months back that talked about a theory of black holes suggesting they are not really holes at all, nor are they singularities. The theory roughly states that black holes may really be a large spherical area inside of which time comes to a halt. It's still a massive body so there is gravity, but the reason light doesn't escape is because it stops moving.
It was a very interesting article and a very interesting theory...riding on the tails of an issue a couple months prior to that featuring Alan Guth and his theories of the first instants of the Big Bang -- also interesting but contradictory in some respect to the theories posed in the "black ball" article.
My guess is the Slashdot eds thought it would thoroughly stump everyone expecting an entire day of joke articles to throw in a real one.
I happen to have this issue of Discover, but haven't read the article yet. Discover strikes me as not the type of magazine to publish a fake story and mention it on the cover as one of the feature articles when the rest of the entire magazine is not a joke.
It's clear to me that people simply cannot enjoy a movie for what it's worth and leave it at that.
This review (and many of its replies) show that either: 1) you (will) hate the movie because it's not the usual Hollywood tripe or 2) you (will) love the movie because it's the usual Hollywood tripe. Why does every movie have to be one or the other? While I agree that there are some films that do make me question the quality control coming out of California (Not Another Teen Movie, The Animal), I don't see that there's much of a point getting your knickers in a twist over a film that may be thought-provoking but not viscerally stimulating.
Having seen Solaris I was teetered between intrigue and boredom. The shots of the "planet" were pretty to look at but didn't add much to the film and certainly didn't advance the story or really give me a sense of being out-of-place. I kept waiting for one of the tendrils to engulf the station or something. The movie starts very abruptly and left me quite confused about what was going on, who people were, and why things were happening. The begining of the film seemed to rush through just to get him on the station (which I can understand), but it felt too forced and impatient.
Not having seen 2001 completely, I'd place this movie somewhere in between 2001: A Space Odessey and Bladerunner: The Director's Cut if you take all the dialog out of Bladerunner. The concepts are interesting, but a little bit of soundtrack probably wouldn't hurt (at least 2001 and Bladerunner had that).
In all, I'll probably rent it one more time in the future, but it's also probably not a movie I'm going to buy for it's replay value.
P.S. I enjoy the Harry Potter movies and the Tom Clancy-based films as well as a myriad of other types of films including comedy, drama, and science fiction.
I've got a few computers at home, one runs linux and the other two run Windows 2000. In my opinion, if you have multiple computers, let the kids explore with both and choose the one they like to use the best. Chances are it will be the Windows box, but don't go forcing them to use something that's hard for you to get working exactly the way you want it.
People tend to reject ideas and beliefs forced upon them by authority figures. If you want your kids to make informed decisions about Windows and linux, let them discover the pitfalls of Windows themselves while you play away with your linux box in the den. If you've only got one computer to use, maybe you can scrounge up the cash for a simple machine that can run their games and browse nick.com while you transform your main machine into whatever you want it to be.
Offer guidance and choices, not mandates (Mandrakes?) on which OS they have to use and like.
I enjoy the Harry Potter books and films. While I'm not much of a reader, the Harry Potter book series held my attention quite well. Having said that I'm not entirely sure why this movie is being beaten so badly by people's reviews - fan and non-fan alike!
The first movie was entertaining because we got to see Harry Potter and Hogwarts on the big screen. The story itself was nothing special. Harry didn't know much if any magic, they beat a troll by dumb luck, and nabbed the Sorcerrer Stone from Voldemort by Dumbledore's clever charm on the mirror. The first movie, like the first book, was designed to introduce the main characters and display some of the fantastic world of the magical. The Sorcerrer Stone was telegraphed from the moment Hagrid told Harry he probably shouldn't tell anyone at Hogwarts about the small package in the you-know-where vault.
The second movie, by contrast, was able to gloss over nearly all the character introductions and get to a storyline which was much more mysterious and suspensful (at least in the book) than anything the first movie/book could muster. Granted the location doesn't change, but it's hard for me to believe we've explored all the rooms and grounds of Hogwarts in the first movie!
While I do not think the second book or movie is as good as the stories to come, I think it has a much more interesting story than the first film. Unfortunately, due to time constraints (don't want to keep those kids immobile for more than 2h45m), there was a lot of material left out of the second movie that was in the second book. Particularly the fear and suspicion surrounding Harry after he speaks Parseltongue to the snake during the duel, and a fair amount of hilarity from Ron's broken wand that just didn't make it to the final film.
While reading the second book, it almost made you doubt whether or not Harry was the heir of Slytherin, but that was not brought out in the movie much at all.
Perhaps part of the reason people think the first movie is so much better is because more of the book was able to be shown in the film. Even though parts did get cut out (like the entire Norbert story and the whole reason why it was important that Neville stood up to Harry, Ron, and Hermione), the book was shorter and more easily compressed without losing substance. I think one of the downfalls of every book after the first (getting worse as you progress) is that there is more book and more story to fit into the same amount of space.
I'm looking forward to the next movie, but I'm afraid it may get hacked up even more than this one did simply to keep the film under 3 hours long.
Apparently, if you have a four-letter acronym with at least one pair of double vowels and a prevalence of I's and A's, you are required by the universe to try and stomp out personal rights in lieu of corporate profit.
Slashdot Mirror
My intuition suggests that MS has helped SCO to finance the battle because they're curious to see if SCO can pull it off. If they can, it's a win for Microsoft because now the GPL is beatable and Linux has a major strike against it in the courts. If SCO loses, MS can simply wipe the dirt off their hands (from handing SCO the cash) and claim that the GPL is more dangerous now than ever and SCO has only proven how damaging it can be! In either case, Microsoft wins and doesn't worry about losing any significant amounts of money on SCO (such as buying them out now would prove).
Is the 1.5% difference worth you paying for the bandwidth and CPU cycles it takes to identify those spam emails on your client, or would you rather make the spammer waste hours/days trying to get a single piece of email to you without costing you much more than a "Try again later" message?
One enhancement may be to update the lifetime start point to the last email sent from an accepted email address. If somehow an address became 'contaminated' by a spammer, the mail administrator could simply blacklist that address or expire the lifetime.
Let's just take the scenario where a major spammer has decided to route his spam through an open relay in the UK. The network admin in charge of email security at BigSoftware Corp. has implemented Greylisting in addition to all his anti-spam measures previously existing including blacklisting. According to the article it is possible to delay incoming mail from that relay long enough to set up a blacklist for that entire domain or perhaps a subnet of that domain depending on where the flood of mail is coming from. If the UK relay has a complaint about mail not making it to BigSoftare Corp., the admin can politely tell him he's got a spammer molesting his relay and will gladly remove his domain from the blacklist once the relay is closed.
Tom's dialup connection will have a dynamic IP that will change the next time he logs in, but his SMTP server most likely has a consistent IP which is the address the Greylisting server will get. After Tom's SMTP server has retried for 5 hours, the temporary block will be removed and on the next try the email is delivered.
Whitelisting is more or less pointless for Tom's purposes.
He's trying to tell me that I should have my computer melted into a pile of liquid silicon because I decided to grab an MP3 of a song I already own instead of burning it, for my convenience? That's like saying my television should be broken if I watch the news because I'm simply getting the stories from someone else instead of going out and getting them myself. The difference being information is free of course, but both scenarios are ludicrous and unjustifiable.
You said,
-
-
To the first, I am reminded of, "[scientists] are so concerned about whether or not they can do it, they don't stop to think whether or not they should."And to the second, "If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?"
My point being: there's certainly times when causing a commotion for the sake of getting attention only and standing behind free speech when it's probably better for one to keep his/her mouth shut, but more often there's good reason to raise a voice (or written word) in protest to protect rights or freedoms even when infringed only slightly -- think about what precidents small amounts of rights-stomping set.
I also agree with another poster that freedom of speech doesn't speak at all to the utility of that speech. Just because no one's listening doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to speak your mind. The freedom is useful, not necessarily the words spoken.
...fire up your favorite file-sharing program, grab the songs you like, and send $10 per album directly to the band in a check.
And so my language exposure at college ended up looking like: Eiffel, C++, J, Lisp, VAX assembly, Snobol, Perl, Java, and shell scripting. From there I added more detailed knowledge of Java, C, C++, Perl, Python. It's all up to the individual -- a good CS course will get you started.
(week's compilation link)
http://www.spam.com/ci/ci_in.htm
The court held that there wasn't really a problem because people wouldn't confuse Spam (the food) with spam (the unwanted email). Additionally, Hormel's product was spelled with a capital 'S' whereas the email blight was spelled with a lowercase 's'.
They used to have a disclaimer on their site stating something to the effect that they do not endorse unsolicited commercial email and have nothing to do with 'spam' or 'spammers'.
However, they do have a nice Spam town festival every year at the company headquarters in Austin, Minnesota.
It was a very interesting article and a very interesting theory...riding on the tails of an issue a couple months prior to that featuring Alan Guth and his theories of the first instants of the Big Bang -- also interesting but contradictory in some respect to the theories posed in the "black ball" article.
I happen to have this issue of Discover, but haven't read the article yet. Discover strikes me as not the type of magazine to publish a fake story and mention it on the cover as one of the feature articles when the rest of the entire magazine is not a joke.
How do I know it's not both?
The article it was clearly based on wasn't four topic below this.
...we need Ludicrous Speed - NOW!
"Give me 1.21 jiggawatts ... if you want to live."
...Now I feel old. My first porn required the use of a 2400bps modem, a local BBS, and a pilfered (or fraudulent) login and password.
This review (and many of its replies) show that either: 1) you (will) hate the movie because it's not the usual Hollywood tripe or 2) you (will) love the movie because it's the usual Hollywood tripe. Why does every movie have to be one or the other? While I agree that there are some films that do make me question the quality control coming out of California (Not Another Teen Movie, The Animal), I don't see that there's much of a point getting your knickers in a twist over a film that may be thought-provoking but not viscerally stimulating.
Having seen Solaris I was teetered between intrigue and boredom. The shots of the "planet" were pretty to look at but didn't add much to the film and certainly didn't advance the story or really give me a sense of being out-of-place. I kept waiting for one of the tendrils to engulf the station or something. The movie starts very abruptly and left me quite confused about what was going on, who people were, and why things were happening. The begining of the film seemed to rush through just to get him on the station (which I can understand), but it felt too forced and impatient.
Not having seen 2001 completely, I'd place this movie somewhere in between 2001: A Space Odessey and Bladerunner: The Director's Cut if you take all the dialog out of Bladerunner. The concepts are interesting, but a little bit of soundtrack probably wouldn't hurt (at least 2001 and Bladerunner had that).
In all, I'll probably rent it one more time in the future, but it's also probably not a movie I'm going to buy for it's replay value.
P.S. I enjoy the Harry Potter movies and the Tom Clancy-based films as well as a myriad of other types of films including comedy, drama, and science fiction.
...and the third arm really comes in handy when carrying all that fresh-cut wood back home to the fireplace.
People tend to reject ideas and beliefs forced upon them by authority figures. If you want your kids to make informed decisions about Windows and linux, let them discover the pitfalls of Windows themselves while you play away with your linux box in the den. If you've only got one computer to use, maybe you can scrounge up the cash for a simple machine that can run their games and browse nick.com while you transform your main machine into whatever you want it to be.
Offer guidance and choices, not mandates (Mandrakes?) on which OS they have to use and like.
The first movie was entertaining because we got to see Harry Potter and Hogwarts on the big screen. The story itself was nothing special. Harry didn't know much if any magic, they beat a troll by dumb luck, and nabbed the Sorcerrer Stone from Voldemort by Dumbledore's clever charm on the mirror. The first movie, like the first book, was designed to introduce the main characters and display some of the fantastic world of the magical. The Sorcerrer Stone was telegraphed from the moment Hagrid told Harry he probably shouldn't tell anyone at Hogwarts about the small package in the you-know-where vault.
The second movie, by contrast, was able to gloss over nearly all the character introductions and get to a storyline which was much more mysterious and suspensful (at least in the book) than anything the first movie/book could muster. Granted the location doesn't change, but it's hard for me to believe we've explored all the rooms and grounds of Hogwarts in the first movie!
While I do not think the second book or movie is as good as the stories to come, I think it has a much more interesting story than the first film. Unfortunately, due to time constraints (don't want to keep those kids immobile for more than 2h45m), there was a lot of material left out of the second movie that was in the second book. Particularly the fear and suspicion surrounding Harry after he speaks Parseltongue to the snake during the duel, and a fair amount of hilarity from Ron's broken wand that just didn't make it to the final film. While reading the second book, it almost made you doubt whether or not Harry was the heir of Slytherin, but that was not brought out in the movie much at all.
Perhaps part of the reason people think the first movie is so much better is because more of the book was able to be shown in the film. Even though parts did get cut out (like the entire Norbert story and the whole reason why it was important that Neville stood up to Harry, Ron, and Hermione), the book was shorter and more easily compressed without losing substance. I think one of the downfalls of every book after the first (getting worse as you progress) is that there is more book and more story to fit into the same amount of space.
I'm looking forward to the next movie, but I'm afraid it may get hacked up even more than this one did simply to keep the film under 3 hours long.
Cheers!
Apparently, if you have a four-letter acronym with at least one pair of double vowels and a prevalence of I's and A's, you are required by the universe to try and stomp out personal rights in lieu of corporate profit.
smile, it's funny
Guard: That's the kind of a password an idiot has on his luggage!
Saddam: Remind me to change the password on my luggage.