War
profiteer? Who doesn't make money in times of war? Look at
Boeing, the maker of many of the vehicles being driven. Or,
perhaps the troops that have taken up war as an occupation? Where
do you draw the line? Haliburton didn't just sell oil to the
government. They provided insurance of high availability of oil
any time any place at any cost.
Let's put this into slashdot context....
Why does Redhat Advanced Server cost so much money when it is
essentially free software? Why do people spend so much money on
redundant DS3 lines in their companies when they are only really using
the bandwidth of one line? Simply because these companies require
high availability, which is not easy.
Another example:
The 386 chips designed to run the computers (control systems) on the
International Space Station cost thousands of dollars each because they
are water cooled and have special shielding to protect them from alpha
particles that our atmosphere would normally have blocked had the chip
not been in space.
By your assumption, is intel, or the fabricator of these specialized
chips, a "space profiteer"? How about all of those companies
providing redundant DS3 lines? Internet outage profiteers?
Perhaps.
It's called insurance. Haliburton was providing insurance to the
Federal Government. There was nobody else, not even the
government themselves, that had the resources to get the oil anywhere,
anytime like Haliburton promised.
I noticed that my last post got modded "troll" and "overrated" by
50%. Could it be because the viewpoint isn't in sync with the
readers of slashdot? Other posts on this off-topic thread are
"insightful" while offering a much more flame-bait style factless and
baseless response. Please, instead of moderating me down, offer
some evidence that Haliburton actually screwed the government other
than pointing out the numbers (remember, insurance, not Oil) and the
coincidental link between them and the vice president.
I know that this is a joke, but many people actually believe that Haliburton ripped of the government. Many people don't understand that the contract involved risk that Haliburton needed to absorb in case massive oil needs were necessary. They've lost money on these kinds of deals before, and they happened to make money this time. There wasn't anybody available who could take that risk cheaper.
This kind of mis-information just bothers me. Sorry for being off-topic.
Odd that, that on a community website, people don't have a problem with attacking those known to be actively hostile to the general public, yet they seem to stick up for projects which consist of lots of normal people giving their time freely for the benefit of society.
I believe that the majority of the people who work for Disney and Microsoft are normal people who just want to make a living working for a stable company with relatively good benifits. If you break their copyright, you upset their legally valid business model and indirectly cause them to loose money. When so many here are so angry at the slightest GPL violation and so many of the same people are so willing to share the MS source code, one can't help but to agree that this site isn't the most "fair and balanced". I must add, though, that I am one of these don't-screw-with-the-GPL-but-share-windows-source- all-you-want people. I am not against sharing this code for purposes of study and interoperability, and I don't claim to be unbiased.
It is "kludgy", but not too bad. Check out this page for how to easily get alpha transparancies in your pages. Check out Dredg's Online Store for a real world example.
I
think that this is bad. There are people who like to work more
than this. They want to get paid more and vacation less. In
a perfect world, people should be smart enough to take perks like
health care and vacation time in to account instead of raw
salary. I know I do, and I don't want the government running
around forcing my employer to force me to work less which in turn makes
me less efficient, which in turn makes the company less money, which in
turn earns me less pay.
I'm in competition with other workers sharing my skills and companies
are in competition to pay me enough (money, free vacation time, health
care) to justify my not leaving to work somewhere else. That
should be enough supply and demand to keep wages high ENOUGH and
vacation time high ENOUGH. If enough seems too low to the workers
in my field, it just means that there are too many workers in my field
and the market is saturated which breaks down the curve. Too many
people have these skills, and I need to go earn different skills.
As a worker, I should do what the companies do and strive to hold a
monopoly on my skills. To do that, I need to do something
somebody else can't do as fast, or as well, and then I will get high
wages and lots of time off.
The right to work isn't a god given right until we have acquired the
talent and skill to compete, and I don't want the government to tell my
employer otherwise or else my employer will move somewhere else.
This is EXACTLY why I'm not afraid of jobs moving to India. I
have better training, more experience, and can do better work. If
somebody in India can do this, then they deserve my job, and I need to
seek a new skill.
By the way, to keep it on topic, I love my job. I am an IT
director for a rock band merchandising company. I meet the bands,
get free passes, and cheap merch. The owner is relatively honest,
and I get paid pretty well. The people are cool, and I don't get
many paid vacations (major holidays and 1-2 sick/holiday freebies a
month), because I don't need them. The worst part is that HR is
constantly hounding me to take my break every 2 hours because under
California/US law, I must break 10-15 minutes paid every 2 hours and 30
minutes unpaid within 6 of every 8. It takes me 5-10 minutes to
get into full speed-high focus programming or designing, and a break
every 2 hours is NOT efficient for me. I'd rather take a full 30
minutes paid in the middle of the day instead. Once again, the
law is stepping on the toes of my relationship with my employer.
I does to an extent. I mean, do you think that Exxon suddenly became the most popular place to get fuel because they slashed prices following the disaster in Alaska? Nope, I remember a lot of people staying away from Exxon for a while after that. They have since been FORCED (perhaps by capitalism) to donate a lot of money to helping conserve the environment.
I'm not sure they they are outdated. I personally don't like SCO. We can't possibly believe that there isn't a single Linux user who hasn't thought of DDOSing SCO. Sure, the vast majority of Linux users don't think this way, and IBM is throwing out Super Bowl commercials that help enforce the image of coporate Linux usage (not a bunch of "dirty hackers" using it), but the benifit of Linux is that it works for so many people... even the evil myDoom virus writer. Let them speculate. It's not really that big of a deal.
Don't forget that it should be commercial. If they aren't out to make a buck, then they aren't going to spend the time to hide this crap. For instance, the Linux kernel doesn't say anywhere that "no spyware is present" but it's a safe bet that there isn't any.
If it's commercial and free, then it's too good to be true is my philosophy.
I'm
a programmer, not a legal scholar. I still don't understand how
that effects me. Is the GPL going to stop RedHat, Suse, or
Mandrake from distributing XFree86 packages in their free download
versions? I mean, if everything is binary, then we simply have
two separate programs with two separate licenses being installed
separately from the same CD. Couldn't they even distribute the
code to both, right?
What if this happens:
Microsoft ships windows with a GPL program written by somebody
else. They give the source code of the program with the changes
they made out with their non-GPL compliant windows. The program
is simply a program that only makes calls on the operating system, not
the other way around? This is legal right?
OK, so now Fedora is shipped with a GPL Linux kernel, a bunch of gnu
tools which are GPL compatible, and then XFree86 on top which isn't
GPL. Is the question over the tools that rely on XFree86
libraries such as Gnome and KDE? I don't get it.
You are correct. The original e-mail was to the owners of the domain name of a spam company that bouced back a slew of them all over my company. I was interrupted with phone calls yesterday morning every 3-10 minutes. Do you think that the non-technical contacts that receive a message should be threatened a little to get their attention so that they can get on lazy/uninformed tech's case? Perhaps I need two seperate messages?
This is really weird. I've been on a campaign for the past day or so to the big myDoom "spammers". I've been sending out the following e-mail:
As
a mail administrator or antivirus company, you are probably well aware
of the current trend in viruses to forge the senders address.
Your system has been caught by our system, replying to these forged
addresses to notify them that they sent a message containing a
virus. This has been causing undue hysteria within my
organization, and must stop immediately. In addition, this
message was sent unsolicited and without prior business ties, and may
be a violation of federal and/org state anti spam laws. Further
messages will result in a permanent block on your SMTP server's ability
to send mail to ours, and a submittal of your "replies" to several major spam
blocking services and black hole lists.
If enough of us do this, maybe these guys will get a clue to turn off the reply feature.
Re:How to filter the worm:
on
More MyDoom Gloom
·
· Score: 2, Informative
In the last myDoom article I posted this,
but it seems relevant in this thread too. Here is a procmail
recipe that will work on any Linux Mail server that uses procmail,
including postfix sendmail etc. Just add it to your/etc/procmailrc file (may be a different folder, but this is pretty
standard). It seems to have stopped all of the myDoom messages
from coming in:
:0 B
* ^UEsDBAoAAAAAA...OzDKJx\+eAFgAAABYAA /dev/null
I
would have moderated this as informative, but I'm going to reply
instead. We're going to take your idea and change it in two
ways. First, it appears that the virus is forging the senders
address, so we shouldn't reply to the message because it causes undue
hysteria. Instead, we're going to simply send the virus to/dev/null with a procmail script after postfix gets the message:
:0 B
* ^UEsDBAoAAAAAA...OzDKJx\+eAFgAAABYAA /dev/null
Does this work for everybody? We haven't gotten another e-mail since implimenting it.
About small claims court:
It's a big misnomer that companies rarely show up and you'll win your
$5000. Every first semester law class (well, the two 100
level classes I took did) will teach you that, except in traffic court,
every civil lawsuit is guaranteed at least one appeal. Small
claims court doesn't allow for lawyers, and so corporations will
no-show to small claims court, and then appeal with their army of
attorneys. Sometimes there will be a settlement that involves a
non disclosure which is why we don't here about it on Slashdot.
Don't forget the most "capitalistic" of them all:
I need a feature, so I'll pay
somebody to do it (or if I can code do it myself).
In the long run, I can see this being the most popular way new featured
are added. It's almost as if we cut out the middle man (sales,
marketing, useless features to make a 2004 version of the 2003 version
for extra cash flow, lawyers, CEOs) and software is directly created by
companies and users, or people paid directly by them.
An additional side effect will be small consulting firms for companies
to get specialized software. These firms will be local and supply
only domestic work.
I'm
probably going to modded down for this, but it's important that SOME
adds make it through. This thread is becoming a "how to block
adds" thread, but we need to remember that these adds are keeping our
sites free. I, for one, actually click on adds some times and
have been known to purchase goods through the less intrusive adds both
because the stuff looked good and I wanted to help that site out with
it's free content.
Sure, I have a popup blocker because they are opening up unrequested
windows, but I still allow the flashy ugly adds to be shown on my
pages. It's not illegal, but it seems like the least we can do
for all the free content these sites give us, even if they do get
annoying sometimes.
That's one machine. What about those of us with 10+ machines we need to keep patched, and not enough time to read bug announcements? I barely have time to read Slashdot, and I really don't want to depend on you guys for my redhat 7.x security announcements. You are a better person than I (if not a richer person with lots of free time) for manually patching your server packages.
Perhaps
I'm also off topic. Right now the only Distribution that I am
considering using for my servers is Debian, and here's why. What
I need more than anything is to manage a few mega-servers. My
parents, and some friends all asked me to set up routers for them so
that they can have e-mail (IMAP, POP, SMTP), web space, a firewall,
SQL, and of course I need to shell in to upgrade things
occasionally. That's a ton of open services. They need
security patches on average of once every few months. I want to
log in every week or so and run a script to patch each of the 5-10
machines I am in charge of and not waste time looking for the patches
to the packages I need to update. Red Hat did that for me through
YUM, synaptic/apt-rpm, up2date, or red-carpet. Debian does this
through apt/synaptic out of the box.
Is there a single command I can type as root that will grab all of the
security patches, regardless of how often I read up on necessary
patches in slack? How about under free/open BSD or gentoo?
I believe that portage and ports can do some of it, but can they
auto-update? I don't trust fedora yet - bad taste from Red Hat
and no real track record of timely updates, so that's out.
To me, this is far more important than a 2.6 kernel, or a good desktop
(I use Mandrake for the Desktop, and it even has urpmi to
update). Having an easy way to brainlessly update my servers for
security is the most important feature. What other distributions
of Linux OR BSD do that for me? Which ones do it best?
Actually, I believe you can still do it as long as you simply make the foreground png a transparent gif and then make the background your alpha chanel png.
You CAN do the transparent png stuff with IE, you just neet to add a simple js file to your html file. Check out this page: http://www.skyzyx.com/scripts/sleight.php
Did you do a custom knoppix compile to 2.6 and get partimage working? If so, can you torrent the iso? I would LOVE to have NTFS write knoppix and partimage, but I'm to lame to compile my own, especially if somebody did it already. Or, can I e-mail you an ftp server (1.5 Mbit of corse) to send it so I can torrent it for everybody?
Slashdot Mirror
Having a slant at all is, in my opinion, crappy journalism. Comments are the place to put opinion. The headlines should be the place to put fact.
Have you ever heard a journalist say, "I just want to make a difference"? Who's difference?
War profiteer? Who doesn't make money in times of war? Look at Boeing, the maker of many of the vehicles being driven. Or, perhaps the troops that have taken up war as an occupation? Where do you draw the line? Haliburton didn't just sell oil to the government. They provided insurance of high availability of oil any time any place at any cost.
Let's put this into slashdot context....
Why does Redhat Advanced Server cost so much money when it is essentially free software? Why do people spend so much money on redundant DS3 lines in their companies when they are only really using the bandwidth of one line? Simply because these companies require high availability, which is not easy.
Another example:
The 386 chips designed to run the computers (control systems) on the International Space Station cost thousands of dollars each because they are water cooled and have special shielding to protect them from alpha particles that our atmosphere would normally have blocked had the chip not been in space.
By your assumption, is intel, or the fabricator of these specialized chips, a "space profiteer"? How about all of those companies providing redundant DS3 lines? Internet outage profiteers? Perhaps.
It's called insurance. Haliburton was providing insurance to the Federal Government. There was nobody else, not even the government themselves, that had the resources to get the oil anywhere, anytime like Haliburton promised.
I noticed that my last post got modded "troll" and "overrated" by 50%. Could it be because the viewpoint isn't in sync with the readers of slashdot? Other posts on this off-topic thread are "insightful" while offering a much more flame-bait style factless and baseless response. Please, instead of moderating me down, offer some evidence that Haliburton actually screwed the government other than pointing out the numbers (remember, insurance, not Oil) and the coincidental link between them and the vice president.
I know that this is a joke, but many people actually believe that Haliburton ripped of the government. Many people don't understand that the contract involved risk that Haliburton needed to absorb in case massive oil needs were necessary. They've lost money on these kinds of deals before, and they happened to make money this time. There wasn't anybody available who could take that risk cheaper.
This kind of mis-information just bothers me. Sorry for being off-topic.
Odd that, that on a community website, people don't have a problem with attacking those known to be actively hostile to the general public, yet they seem to stick up for projects which consist of lots of normal people giving their time freely for the benefit of society.
- all-you-want people. I am not against sharing this code for purposes of study and interoperability, and I don't claim to be unbiased.
I believe that the majority of the people who work for Disney and Microsoft are normal people who just want to make a living working for a stable company with relatively good benifits. If you break their copyright, you upset their legally valid business model and indirectly cause them to loose money. When so many here are so angry at the slightest GPL violation and so many of the same people are so willing to share the MS source code, one can't help but to agree that this site isn't the most "fair and balanced". I must add, though, that I am one of these don't-screw-with-the-GPL-but-share-windows-source
It is "kludgy", but not too bad. Check out this page for how to easily get alpha transparancies in your pages. Check out Dredg's Online Store for a real world example.
If that's true, then why aren't we able to do similar stem cell research for humans using sheep or fish instead of dead human embryos?
This is most eloquently put. I wish that this had been modded up more.
I think that this is bad. There are people who like to work more than this. They want to get paid more and vacation less. In a perfect world, people should be smart enough to take perks like health care and vacation time in to account instead of raw salary. I know I do, and I don't want the government running around forcing my employer to force me to work less which in turn makes me less efficient, which in turn makes the company less money, which in turn earns me less pay.
I'm in competition with other workers sharing my skills and companies are in competition to pay me enough (money, free vacation time, health care) to justify my not leaving to work somewhere else. That should be enough supply and demand to keep wages high ENOUGH and vacation time high ENOUGH. If enough seems too low to the workers in my field, it just means that there are too many workers in my field and the market is saturated which breaks down the curve. Too many people have these skills, and I need to go earn different skills. As a worker, I should do what the companies do and strive to hold a monopoly on my skills. To do that, I need to do something somebody else can't do as fast, or as well, and then I will get high wages and lots of time off.
The right to work isn't a god given right until we have acquired the talent and skill to compete, and I don't want the government to tell my employer otherwise or else my employer will move somewhere else. This is EXACTLY why I'm not afraid of jobs moving to India. I have better training, more experience, and can do better work. If somebody in India can do this, then they deserve my job, and I need to seek a new skill.
By the way, to keep it on topic, I love my job. I am an IT director for a rock band merchandising company. I meet the bands, get free passes, and cheap merch. The owner is relatively honest, and I get paid pretty well. The people are cool, and I don't get many paid vacations (major holidays and 1-2 sick/holiday freebies a month), because I don't need them. The worst part is that HR is constantly hounding me to take my break every 2 hours because under California/US law, I must break 10-15 minutes paid every 2 hours and 30 minutes unpaid within 6 of every 8. It takes me 5-10 minutes to get into full speed-high focus programming or designing, and a break every 2 hours is NOT efficient for me. I'd rather take a full 30 minutes paid in the middle of the day instead. Once again, the law is stepping on the toes of my relationship with my employer.
I does to an extent. I mean, do you think that Exxon suddenly became the most popular place to get fuel because they slashed prices following the disaster in Alaska? Nope, I remember a lot of people staying away from Exxon for a while after that. They have since been FORCED (perhaps by capitalism) to donate a lot of money to helping conserve the environment.
I'm not sure they they are outdated. I personally don't like SCO. We can't possibly believe that there isn't a single Linux user who hasn't thought of DDOSing SCO. Sure, the vast majority of Linux users don't think this way, and IBM is throwing out Super Bowl commercials that help enforce the image of coporate Linux usage (not a bunch of "dirty hackers" using it), but the benifit of Linux is that it works for so many people... even the evil myDoom virus writer. Let them speculate. It's not really that big of a deal.
Don't forget that it should be commercial. If they aren't out to make a buck, then they aren't going to spend the time to hide this crap. For instance, the Linux kernel doesn't say anywhere that "no spyware is present" but it's a safe bet that there isn't any.
If it's commercial and free, then it's too good to be true is my philosophy.
I'm a programmer, not a legal scholar. I still don't understand how that effects me. Is the GPL going to stop RedHat, Suse, or Mandrake from distributing XFree86 packages in their free download versions? I mean, if everything is binary, then we simply have two separate programs with two separate licenses being installed separately from the same CD. Couldn't they even distribute the code to both, right?
What if this happens:
Microsoft ships windows with a GPL program written by somebody else. They give the source code of the program with the changes they made out with their non-GPL compliant windows. The program is simply a program that only makes calls on the operating system, not the other way around? This is legal right?
OK, so now Fedora is shipped with a GPL Linux kernel, a bunch of gnu tools which are GPL compatible, and then XFree86 on top which isn't GPL. Is the question over the tools that rely on XFree86 libraries such as Gnome and KDE? I don't get it.
You are correct. The original e-mail was to the owners of the domain name of a spam company that bouced back a slew of them all over my company. I was interrupted with phone calls yesterday morning every 3-10 minutes. Do you think that the non-technical contacts that receive a message should be threatened a little to get their attention so that they can get on lazy/uninformed tech's case? Perhaps I need two seperate messages?
This is really weird. I've been on a campaign for the past day or so to the big myDoom "spammers". I've been sending out the following e-mail:
As a mail administrator or antivirus company, you are probably well aware of the current trend in viruses to forge the senders address. Your system has been caught by our system, replying to these forged addresses to notify them that they sent a message containing a virus. This has been causing undue hysteria within my organization, and must stop immediately. In addition, this message was sent unsolicited and without prior business ties, and may be a violation of federal and/org state anti spam laws. Further messages will result in a permanent block on your SMTP server's ability to send mail to ours, and a submittal of your "replies" to several major spam blocking services and black hole lists.
If enough of us do this, maybe these guys will get a clue to turn off the reply feature.
In the last myDoom article I posted this, but it seems relevant in this thread too. Here is a procmail recipe that will work on any Linux Mail server that uses procmail, including postfix sendmail etc. Just add it to your /etc/procmailrc file (may be a different folder, but this is pretty
standard). It seems to have stopped all of the myDoom messages
from coming in:
:0 B
/dev/null
* ^UEsDBAoAAAAAA...OzDKJx\+eAFgAAABYAA
I would have moderated this as informative, but I'm going to reply instead. We're going to take your idea and change it in two ways. First, it appears that the virus is forging the senders address, so we shouldn't reply to the message because it causes undue hysteria. Instead, we're going to simply send the virus to /dev/null with a procmail script after postfix gets the message:
:0 B
/dev/null
* ^UEsDBAoAAAAAA...OzDKJx\+eAFgAAABYAA
Does this work for everybody? We haven't gotten another e-mail since implimenting it.
That's interesting. In California small claims, lawyers are not allowed, and The defendant may always appeal.
About small claims court:
It's a big misnomer that companies rarely show up and you'll win your $5000. Every first semester law class (well, the two 100 level classes I took did) will teach you that, except in traffic court, every civil lawsuit is guaranteed at least one appeal. Small claims court doesn't allow for lawyers, and so corporations will no-show to small claims court, and then appeal with their army of attorneys. Sometimes there will be a settlement that involves a non disclosure which is why we don't here about it on Slashdot.
Don't forget the most "capitalistic" of them all:
I need a feature, so I'll pay somebody to do it (or if I can code do it myself).
In the long run, I can see this being the most popular way new featured are added. It's almost as if we cut out the middle man (sales, marketing, useless features to make a 2004 version of the 2003 version for extra cash flow, lawyers, CEOs) and software is directly created by companies and users, or people paid directly by them.
An additional side effect will be small consulting firms for companies to get specialized software. These firms will be local and supply only domestic work.
I'm probably going to modded down for this, but it's important that SOME adds make it through. This thread is becoming a "how to block adds" thread, but we need to remember that these adds are keeping our sites free. I, for one, actually click on adds some times and have been known to purchase goods through the less intrusive adds both because the stuff looked good and I wanted to help that site out with it's free content.
Sure, I have a popup blocker because they are opening up unrequested windows, but I still allow the flashy ugly adds to be shown on my pages. It's not illegal, but it seems like the least we can do for all the free content these sites give us, even if they do get annoying sometimes.
That's one machine. What about those of us with 10+ machines we need to keep patched, and not enough time to read bug announcements? I barely have time to read Slashdot, and I really don't want to depend on you guys for my redhat 7.x security announcements. You are a better person than I (if not a richer person with lots of free time) for manually patching your server packages.
Perhaps I'm also off topic. Right now the only Distribution that I am considering using for my servers is Debian, and here's why. What I need more than anything is to manage a few mega-servers. My parents, and some friends all asked me to set up routers for them so that they can have e-mail (IMAP, POP, SMTP), web space, a firewall, SQL, and of course I need to shell in to upgrade things occasionally. That's a ton of open services. They need security patches on average of once every few months. I want to log in every week or so and run a script to patch each of the 5-10 machines I am in charge of and not waste time looking for the patches to the packages I need to update. Red Hat did that for me through YUM, synaptic/apt-rpm, up2date, or red-carpet. Debian does this through apt/synaptic out of the box.
Is there a single command I can type as root that will grab all of the security patches, regardless of how often I read up on necessary patches in slack? How about under free/open BSD or gentoo? I believe that portage and ports can do some of it, but can they auto-update? I don't trust fedora yet - bad taste from Red Hat and no real track record of timely updates, so that's out.
To me, this is far more important than a 2.6 kernel, or a good desktop (I use Mandrake for the Desktop, and it even has urpmi to update). Having an easy way to brainlessly update my servers for security is the most important feature. What other distributions of Linux OR BSD do that for me? Which ones do it best?
Actually, I believe you can still do it as long as you simply make the foreground png a transparent gif and then make the background your alpha chanel png.
You CAN do the transparent png stuff with IE, you just neet to add a simple js file to your html file. Check out this page:
http://www.skyzyx.com/scripts/sleight.php
Did you do a custom knoppix compile to 2.6 and get partimage working? If so, can you torrent the iso? I would LOVE to have NTFS write knoppix and partimage, but I'm to lame to compile my own, especially if somebody did it already. Or, can I e-mail you an ftp server (1.5 Mbit of corse) to send it so I can torrent it for everybody?