My first RMS memory
on
RMS Turns 50
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
When I was just a little kid, my father pointed at a picture in a magazine and said, "This man says that software should be free. He wrote an editor."
I didn't get it at the time. From my point of view, all software was free, and its normal mode of distribution was as source listings in magazines.
It was more than a decade later when I realized he must have been talking about RMS. And now I get the point, too. It's been ages since I saw a source listing in a magazine. Without free software, the next generation of hackers would have had nothing to tinker with.
I stopped buying CDs when they started hiding "copy-protected" ones among the real ones. But since then, I've probably given more money to artists than in my entire life before that, simply by giving to them directly and/or buying their promotional stuff. And those were the real struggling artists that the RIAA pretends to care about, not the toy artists they promote.
I think that all the figuring out that needs to be done is to support local artists instead of the ones on the radio.
The patch is right here, and it's definitely a patch to sendmail, not to exim or postfix or qmail or whatever. Where did you get the idea that it's a binary-only patch?
It's source code, and the patch shows exactly what the problem was.
When they talk about a "sendmail flaw", they are talking about sendmail versions 8.9 through 8.12, and perhaps older ones. They're not talking about mailers which are not sendmail, even if those mailers install a symlink called "sendmail".
By the way, does your perl script queue a mail for later retries if there's a temporary delivery failure? Or does it just throw the mail away?
It's the best reason not to go. Before we start populating the galaxy, I'd like to see some evidence that we won't destroy it. As things stand, we'll probably be remarkably like those aliens from Independence Day: spreading in all directions, eating up star systems as we go, until all the free mass in the galaxy has been converted to human habitat. And then, from the center out, we'll die from lack of resources -- unless something bigger exterminates us first.
The prospect of space travel does not fill me with happy visions of the future. Let's grow up a little first.
What will be the effect on Jon? Presumably this process will take a few years. Will he have to live with the possibility of a criminal sentence for all of that time?
Tracking down the real source of spam is difficult even for humans. A script is going to get it wrong, and will be easy to fool in any case. You're more likely to hit an open relay, which, if it can handle the load of a spam run in the first place, probably runs unix. And eventually someone is going to trick your script into attacking whitehouse.gov or www.navy.mil and then you're in trouble.
Pinpointing the address is actually pretty easy for a spammer. Suppose their machine crashes and all they know is that it was caused by an address somewhere in the last 100 000 they sent. Well, they have millions of addresses. They can just reorder their list so that the suspect addresses are distributed evenly. Then the next time it crashes, they can narrow it down to a few hundred suspects. The third run will probably nail it.
Remember that the CD had convenience benefits.
on
The Future of the CD
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If you want to listen to a CD, you just pop it into the CD player. If you wish, you can skip to a favourite track by pressing a single button. You can randomize the track sequence if you get bored with the default one. Remember that when the CD was introduced, all this was new. LPs had some of these features, but jumping to a specific track required some concentration and precision, and random play was out of the question. Cassettes were just hopeless.
It doesn't hold water. They only have to check for dupes just before they would have actually posted a story. There's no need to check for duplicates of a story you're going to reject. So the workload depends on the rate at which stories go up, which has remained fairly constant.
It's amazing that he was able to take that initiative more than ten years after the Internet was created. Obviously Al Gore has more superpowers than we suspect.
We'd have to make some radical changes:) But at the time scales involved, I don't think a bit of engineering is going to be a problem. If any kind of life is still possible, at any speed, then a way will be found. (Remember that in a low-energy universe, slow and "fragile" processes are much more reliable than they are now. Waiting 10^9 years for a signal to pass from one neuron to another will not be a big problem.)
The "heat death" won't be all at once. The usable energy will thin out further and further but will never quite reach zero. The practical effect will be that "interesting" processes go slower and slower, without ever quite stopping. If consciousness slows down as well, we can still have some fun and maybe not even notice the difference.
The store is selling boxes with stuff in them. Part of this stuff is a document written by the manufacturer which claims to override the transaction between the store and the customer. As far as I can tell, both the store and the customer can tell the manufacturer to go stuff itself.
I double-dog-dare you to show a court case that decided that opening a sealed package meant assenting to a license printed on it, in cases where the customer already bought the package and the license gives no extra rights.
First they figure that half of the installed copies won't be paid for, so they sell their $100 software for $200 instead to make up the difference. Then they say "Oh my god half of the installed copies aren't paid for!" and calculate a 'loss' of $200 for each such copy. That's how they get these ridiculous figures.
For some reason, the first level in most games I've bought recently seems to be "You're playing a contract lawyer and you have to get through this bunch of clauses". Then later on you get guns and things and it gets more fun. The first level is boring but really easy, there's usually only two or three buttons to try.
Every cool project should have a FAQ entry explaining its name. If the name is too easy, or has an obvious pronunciation, then it can't be a cool project. Ideally, there should be long-standing flamewars about it (i.e. is it "vee-eye" or "veye"?).
Someone else has already pointed out that RIAA is not a section of government. However, I'd like to add that the legislative branch of a government that truly represents the people should have such conflicting factions in it, unless the people are truly of one mind on an issue.
Presumably, in a perfect government the executive branch should act harmoniously to implement the decisions made by the lawmakers. That doesn't seem achievable, however, and I think it's healthy that there's some resistance to implementing controversial decisions. I don't think I would ever want to live under an efficient government:-)
There are probably many such stealth worms crawling around right now. We just don't notice them because they're, well, stealth worms. Loud worms probably end up helping us by rubbing our noses into vulnerabilities that are being exploited far more malevolently by other worms.
(On the other hand, writing a stealth worm is probably harder than it looks. Some sites carefully scrutinize their network traffic, and it only takes one of them to spot you. But would they tell anyone else?)
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't get it at the time. From my point of view, all software was free, and its normal mode of distribution was as source listings in magazines.
It was more than a decade later when I realized he must have been talking about RMS. And now I get the point, too. It's been ages since I saw a source listing in a magazine. Without free software, the next generation of hackers would have had nothing to tinker with.
For most people, the alternative to taking a mortage is to pay rent, which is an even worse deal.
Debian is Debian, united only with itself.
I think that all the figuring out that needs to be done is to support local artists instead of the ones on the radio.
I'll bet that the artists will see less than $0.02 of that dollar.
When they talk about a "sendmail flaw", they are talking about sendmail versions 8.9 through 8.12, and perhaps older ones. They're not talking about mailers which are not sendmail, even if those mailers install a symlink called "sendmail".
By the way, does your perl script queue a mail for later retries if there's a temporary delivery failure? Or does it just throw the mail away?
The prospect of space travel does not fill me with happy visions of the future. Let's grow up a little first.
What will be the effect on Jon? Presumably this process will take a few years. Will he have to live with the possibility of a criminal sentence for all of that time?
Pinpointing the address is actually pretty easy for a spammer. Suppose their machine crashes and all they know is that it was caused by an address somewhere in the last 100 000 they sent. Well, they have millions of addresses. They can just reorder their list so that the suspect addresses are distributed evenly. Then the next time it crashes, they can narrow it down to a few hundred suspects. The third run will probably nail it.
If you want to listen to a CD, you just pop it into the CD player. If you wish, you can skip to a favourite track by pressing a single button. You can randomize the track sequence if you get bored with the default one. Remember that when the CD was introduced, all this was new. LPs had some of these features, but jumping to a specific track required some concentration and precision, and random play was out of the question. Cassettes were just hopeless.
If the court decides that what you're distributing is not derived from a GPL'd work, then you're free to use whatever license you want.
It doesn't hold water. They only have to check for dupes just before they would have actually posted a story. There's no need to check for duplicates of a story you're going to reject. So the workload depends on the rate at which stories go up, which has remained fairly constant.
Douglas Hofstadter made a point about this with A Person Paper on Purity in Language. It was published in his book Metamagical Themas (which is mainly an annotated collection of his columns for Scientific American).
The picture of the hand, at least, was taken using just the rays the hand emits naturally.
It's amazing that he was able to take that initiative more than ten years after the Internet was created. Obviously Al Gore has more superpowers than we suspect.
We'd have to make some radical changes :) But at the time scales involved, I don't think a bit of engineering is going to be a problem. If any kind of life is still possible, at any speed, then a way will be found. (Remember that in a low-energy universe, slow and "fragile" processes are much more reliable than they are now. Waiting 10^9 years for a signal to pass from one neuron to another will not be a big problem.)
See The Five Ages of the Universe (review), by Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin.
The store is selling boxes with stuff in them. Part of this stuff is a document written by the manufacturer which claims to override the transaction between the store and the customer. As far as I can tell, both the store and the customer can tell the manufacturer to go stuff itself.
I double-dog-dare you to show a court case that decided that opening a sealed package meant assenting to a license printed on it, in cases where the customer already bought the package and the license gives no extra rights.
First they figure that half of the installed copies won't be paid for, so they sell their $100 software for $200 instead to make up the difference. Then they say "Oh my god half of the installed copies aren't paid for!" and calculate a 'loss' of $200 for each such copy. That's how they get these ridiculous figures.
For some reason, the first level in most games I've bought recently seems to be "You're playing a contract lawyer and you have to get through this bunch of clauses". Then later on you get guns and things and it gets more fun. The first level is boring but really easy, there's usually only two or three buttons to try.
Every cool project should have a FAQ entry explaining its name. If the name is too easy, or has an obvious pronunciation, then it can't be a cool project. Ideally, there should be long-standing flamewars about it (i.e. is it "vee-eye" or "veye"?).
Presumably, in a perfect government the executive branch should act harmoniously to implement the decisions made by the lawmakers. That doesn't seem achievable, however, and I think it's healthy that there's some resistance to implementing controversial decisions. I don't think I would ever want to live under an efficient government :-)
(On the other hand, writing a stealth worm is probably harder than it looks. Some sites carefully scrutinize their network traffic, and it only takes one of them to spot you. But would they tell anyone else?)