"Arguably, modern medicine is to blame as well. By curing the sick and the weak, modern medicine has prolonged the lives of people who would have otherwise died (including me). Don't get me wrong, I'm not against treating sick people but it's an inescapable fact that by allowing the weak to live you're weakening the gene pool."
Does that mean you don't have the right to live? If so, perhaps you can deal with the situation directly.
This "illness" reminds me a bit too much of the condition footsie as described in the Judge Dredd comic books. It's labled as "future shock," wherein the sufferer can't deal with living in the necessarily confined spaces with large groups of individuals for long periods of time without it taking a physical and mental toll on the body--result being eventual madness and death. Of course the best idea is for this guy to (a) see a shrink, and (b) get out of NJ.
Perhaps you didn't read the post where it said: "agrees not to renew any contract and to buy no products or services (either directly or through an intermediary like Gateway) from Microsoft."
See that part about not buying any MS stuff?... And no, I'm not a Philosophy student.
From the post: "...I'm told that the board will look at the decision in terms of cost, not for benefit to the students."
So, this is not about what's good for the students? Ok, so this is partisan, anti-Micrsoftism, at it's best then, yes? Looking at base of cost alone might be ok but perhaps they're not aware that MS does provide huge discounts to educational institutions (educational institutions get special pricing from MS.) If a University is so hell-bent to not assist their students, to not do that which is in the best interest of the students, then clearly this is a University I'm glad I did not choose to attend.
Uhhh. Pardon me, but I think that 2.5 yrs ago, when MS bought it's $135M share in Corel, Corel wasn't in the Linux business. That was a later concern after they had money. Plus, MS bought 1/4 of Corel, not all of it, so they didn't "purchase Corel." And thirdly, MS didn't kill Corel, Corel's crappy management did it to themselves.
nobody will participate. If I *knew* I visisted a pr0n site, would I willingly let someone else see my web use log knowing that they'd be displeased? That's mental! I call this idea fux0r3d.
My opinion of the car analogy is well documented, so I'll just skip repeating what I've already said. But you ask a valid question, namely: "Who is "the admin" for all of those people who are just regular home users/gamers/students (with no real interest in computers, or anyone for that matter for whom the computer is just another tool?"
You answered MS, but I disagree. MS is not the admin of my systems at home, I am. The car dealership is not responsible for the general mainetence and upkeep (and cleaning) of my car, I am. At some point, a home user must become the admin, take responisbility for not securing their computer, and learn something in the process. The Internet is a dangerous place, filled with scum and villany, and to leave your computer unprotected is just as silly as not having doors on your house--any moron with bad intent can walk right in and take your stuff.
Users, casual, home, grandpa-type users need--nay, must--get a clue that although computers are indeed getting more "user friendly" they're still not something to be taken lightly. And with broadband coming to more and more homes, this is something that needs to be addressed. Microsoft makes their OSes cater to the masses. It's like they took the idea of "all things to everyone" and went nuts with it. That's great, make the OS be able to do it all, wonderful; but what about it leaving open all those holes?
Ask MS and they'll tell you the same thing that I will here: at some point the user has to take control and learn how to protect himself by closing the ports and patching the system when exploits are discovered.
It seems strange to me that when MS does exactly that, by enabling automatic updating, people go crazy about privacy violations! You cannot have it both ways, wanting MS to do it for you and not having to be bothered, or not have someone "else" poke around in your business. By doing a brief nmap scan on a newly installed, but not yet comfigured Linux box, I find that there are a lot of open ports on that one as well. So this is not a MS only problem.
I totally disagree with the idea that a user cannot be empowered. I equally disagree with the notion that people, themselves, aren't to be blamed; that it's someone elses fault. This mentality has to stop! "Don't blame me my kid can't read, it's the school's fault!" (nevermind the fact that the parent was nowhere to be found and didn't spend enough time with the kid); or "Don't blame me that my system wasn't behind a firewall, it's Microsoft's fault!" (nevermind the fact that ICF has been available since Windows XP and can be turned on with a single checkmark) are equally pathetic. Just as parents need to take control of their kids' activities, monitor, guide, and assist--be a part of the learning experience for the child--people need to learn that computers are the same deal: you have to learn, adapt, understand, and protect your systems. That means patches, upgrades, more RAM, security checks, defraging, scandisking, etc.
It's a jungle out there, and just as it takes responsibility to rear a child; it takes just as much responsibility to engage (correctly) in the electronic neighborhood of the Internet.
See those "and" and "or" statements in my original post? Those are Boolean and important to understanding what I wrote. While I would agree that 3/5ths is "most" it doesn't meet the "and" requirements, therefore fails. My "wholly-invented" criteria is right. If again, you read what I wrote it was called "What I'd use" that means it's not accepted, but it is what I would use. What part of that didn't you get? I also mention that the Earth and the moon orbit together around the sun. Apparently you missed that as well, orbital perturbations asside. Now as for your final statement that the moon is a planet because it's bigger than my 800KM limit: go back and read my final point...the one about "historically accepted as such." Tell me, when has the moon ever been accepted, historically, as a planet? Never.
Next time it would be wise to read what is written and understand it fully before commenting.
From the story: "for once a security problem that isn't really Microsoft's fault."
I find it to be that most Windows security problems stem from it not being MS' fault but rather the lazy-ass Admins not patching, changing passwords, having sufficient info., etc. Of course the easy answer is for people to stop writing malware, then that would be great, but people being people like to fuck with things.
Re:Luna fulfills most of these...
on
Defining "Planet"
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The moon fits point 'a', point 'b' and point c, but does not fit point 'd' or point 'e'; therefore is not a planet. The moon orbits the Earth (a planet.) The Earth-Moon unit (no relation to the Zappa's) orbit the sun (which is a star.) The moon itself doesn't orbit the sun, rather it orbits the sun along with us. Ergo, it's a satellite (and not the Toshiba kind, either.)
(a) does not emit light; and,
(b) has a spherical or roughly spherical shape; and, (c) has a diameter greater than 800km; and, (d) orbits a star; or, (e) is historically accepted as such.
"It's censorship if the *GOVERNMENT* or other entity causes you to not be able to espouse your ideas at all."
No, actually censoring is "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable." The fallacy that "only the government can censor" is bullshit of the highest order. Why don't you go learn something.
"Censorship is an action by government to prevent the dissemination of information."
No, actually censoring is "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable." The fallacy that "only the government can censor" is bullshit of the highest order.
"UDP is a collective decision to not accept traffic from a particular server or provider."
Ideally, yes, but in reality what they will do is issue cancel messages for all outgoing posts from the domain being targetted. This isn't just "hey, let's ignore Bigpond!" it's "hey, let's kill Bigpond's usenet connections!" It's a DoS.
"A UDP is backbones and the like agreeing that the UDPed provider is behaving obnoxiously and refusing to listen to him..."
Again, that would be ideal, but that's not what happens in reality. They are a handful of people deciding that nobody from Bigpond has the right to be heard via usenet. In addition to being censorship it is also discrimination. And, although I enjoy Heinlein, he's not a founding father and his views posted in a book (albeit a good one) are not law and shouldn't be taken as such.
Been using Usenet since 1984, thank you. Regular? Yup.
You asked: "BTW: I block entire subnets from my mailserver because I get incoming spam from certain addresses in those blocks. Am I "censoring" people, or am I staging a "coup" if I do that?"
No, because it's your system you're controlling. The key difference here is that they're not just killing posts from propogating to their servers, but to all of the NNTP servers in the world. You're not couping, but they are. That's the difference. They will use 'cancelmoose' or 'cancelbunny' or some other shit to kill all, and I want to repeat that, all, messages from an entire domain! What you're comparing is apples to oranges.
Yes I've read it. And it's still shit. Look, they're playing semantics with definitions. And that's fine if they want to be asses about it (which they are), and it's also fine if they want to justify their actions (which they do). This is 'Net terrorism. It is censorship. Their definition is flawed. It's not only the government that can censor, but newspapers, media, companies, and people. But that doesn't change the fact what they are doing is Wrong and Bad. Additionally, one of the most important statements about the First Amendment ever made was something to the effct of "if nobody can hear you, you don't have free speech." So, in the USA (at least) they're on really iffy territory.
I love their last line there "Remember, the UDP is a near-last-resort measure." Riiiight. Ok, what then would they do next after killing all posts from the UDPed domain?
They don't know, nobody knows. They haven't a clue. They're just being powermongers. Here's a question they never answer sufficiently "Who put you in charge?" Their answer is always the same "We did."
If this were a diplomatic situation, that would be called a coup.
Ya know, the Christian Right is neither Christian nor right, what they are is just a bunch of religious dictators who'd like to enforce their narrow view upon the world in the name of God. Sort of like New World Mullah's. I think it interesting that the idea of teaching their kids evolution invokes such anger when if you take the Bible away and ask them "find proof of God" in any source outside of the Bible or in any way that doesn't self reference they can't. Yet there are oodles (there's a technical term for you!) of studies and tests that come close to damn near certain that evolution is the exact thing that happened. Nevermind the fact that, really, evolution and creationism can be combined...they don't want to even consider that! 1000 years ago, they would be burning people at the stake for claiming we came from apes. It's the same mentality all over again. As knowledge increases and the realm and understanding of Science grows the realm and power of the idea that creationism is correct shortens. Out of the dark one comes into the light...if you catch my meaning.
Look, I hate spam (probably just as much as any of you), but this is censorship any way you look at it. If you have a message, no matter how shitty and spammy it might be and if an unaffiliated third-party choses to eliminate that message from being heard then that's censorship, plain and simple. In addition to that you're harming a whole group over the actions of a few, which is discriminatory.
In short, the UDP is a bad idea, badly planned, and badly executed (no pun intended) by a bunch of crybabies who get their jollies by being the top dog.
Remember a while ago when @Home was under the gun as well? There were quite a few @Home people who went onto the net abuse groups and said (paraphrasing) "if you cancel even one message from the 'home.com' domain, we'll cancel all the messages coming from your domains as well..." You can imagine how pissed off the self styled usenet cops got on that one. There were a handful of people willing to cancel the @Home messages, and over 30 that were willing to cancel the cancelers domains messages--and with dedicated bandwidth and easy access to the same message cancelling software it was a threat worth looking at seriously. Personally, I thought it was a fucking joke. The usenet cops could (and still can) kiss my white, anglo, ass.
In the end, the whole problem was from less than 20 people at @Home, who were notified by @Home to knock off the shit, and they did. So nothing happened.
The whole idea of a UDP is bad, and the 'Net cops are fucking losers who don't know shit.
Screw that. Mine the asteroids, there's more and better mineral wealth in asteroids than there is on the moon. Last I heard there was like a trillion dollars in nickel (alone) on Eros. I figure the moon is just not worth it (or NASA and some other yahoos would have mentioned it before.)
Re:From the Windows Update website privacy stateme
on
Examining Microsoft Update
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Tell that to the Melissa author, and some number of other people who's GUID was used to identify them. Even if you aren't a criminal, this could be misused in so many ways."
Found on the 'Net: "David L. Smith was not caught on the basis of the GUID, he was caught
because the feds were able to trace the point of insertion of the virus into alt.sex from the ISP he used, then from the connection logs down to the
phone number used to connect to the service. The GUID had nothing to do
with it. There was also no indication that he used pirated software, just
that he or someone had used a previously written virus and modified it into
Melissa, passing on the unique GUID of the original document/macro author."
Slashdot Mirror
Requirement: MCSE, CCIE, MA in MIS/CS, VB programming (at least 3 years).
Payscale: $20,000/year.
Bet that job never got filled. That payscale had to be a typo...Add ran for at least 2 weeks.
"...I did at one point find something resembling a truffle growing in a dark closet corner..."
;)
That was no truffle, but a Fungi from Yuggoth! H.P. Lovecraft was right!
"Arguably, modern medicine is to blame as well. By curing the sick and the weak, modern medicine has prolonged the lives of people who would have otherwise died (including me). Don't get me wrong, I'm not against treating sick people but it's an inescapable fact that by allowing the weak to live you're weakening the gene pool."
Does that mean you don't have the right to live? If so, perhaps you can deal with the situation directly.
the above statement is sarcasm...don't freak, yo.
This "illness" reminds me a bit too much of the condition footsie as described in the Judge Dredd comic books. It's labled as "future shock," wherein the sufferer can't deal with living in the necessarily confined spaces with large groups of individuals for long periods of time without it taking a physical and mental toll on the body--result being eventual madness and death. Of course the best idea is for this guy to (a) see a shrink, and (b) get out of NJ.
Perhaps you didn't read the post where it said: "agrees not to renew any contract and to buy no products or services (either directly or through an intermediary like Gateway) from Microsoft."
See that part about not buying any MS stuff?... And no, I'm not a Philosophy student.
From the post: "...I'm told that the board will look at the decision in terms of cost, not for benefit to the students."
So, this is not about what's good for the students? Ok, so this is partisan, anti-Micrsoftism, at it's best then, yes? Looking at base of cost alone might be ok but perhaps they're not aware that MS does provide huge discounts to educational institutions (educational institutions get special pricing from MS.) If a University is so hell-bent to not assist their students, to not do that which is in the best interest of the students, then clearly this is a University I'm glad I did not choose to attend.
Uhhh. Pardon me, but I think that 2.5 yrs ago, when MS bought it's $135M share in Corel, Corel wasn't in the Linux business. That was a later concern after they had money. Plus, MS bought 1/4 of Corel, not all of it, so they didn't "purchase Corel." And thirdly, MS didn't kill Corel, Corel's crappy management did it to themselves.
If they had a genuine desire to not visit these sites, why do they need peer pressure to assist them?
nobody will participate. If I *knew* I visisted a pr0n site, would I willingly let someone else see my web use log knowing that they'd be displeased? That's mental! I call this idea fux0r3d.
My opinion of the car analogy is well documented, so I'll just skip repeating what I've already said. But you ask a valid question, namely: "Who is "the admin" for all of those people who are just regular home users/gamers/students (with no real interest in computers, or anyone for that matter for whom the computer is just another tool?"
You answered MS, but I disagree. MS is not the admin of my systems at home, I am. The car dealership is not responsible for the general mainetence and upkeep (and cleaning) of my car, I am. At some point, a home user must become the admin, take responisbility for not securing their computer, and learn something in the process. The Internet is a dangerous place, filled with scum and villany, and to leave your computer unprotected is just as silly as not having doors on your house--any moron with bad intent can walk right in and take your stuff.
Users, casual, home, grandpa-type users need--nay, must--get a clue that although computers are indeed getting more "user friendly" they're still not something to be taken lightly. And with broadband coming to more and more homes, this is something that needs to be addressed. Microsoft makes their OSes cater to the masses. It's like they took the idea of "all things to everyone" and went nuts with it. That's great, make the OS be able to do it all, wonderful; but what about it leaving open all those holes?
Ask MS and they'll tell you the same thing that I will here: at some point the user has to take control and learn how to protect himself by closing the ports and patching the system when exploits are discovered.
It seems strange to me that when MS does exactly that, by enabling automatic updating, people go crazy about privacy violations! You cannot have it both ways, wanting MS to do it for you and not having to be bothered, or not have someone "else" poke around in your business. By doing a brief nmap scan on a newly installed, but not yet comfigured Linux box, I find that there are a lot of open ports on that one as well. So this is not a MS only problem.
I totally disagree with the idea that a user cannot be empowered. I equally disagree with the notion that people, themselves, aren't to be blamed; that it's someone elses fault. This mentality has to stop! "Don't blame me my kid can't read, it's the school's fault!" (nevermind the fact that the parent was nowhere to be found and didn't spend enough time with the kid); or "Don't blame me that my system wasn't behind a firewall, it's Microsoft's fault!" (nevermind the fact that ICF has been available since Windows XP and can be turned on with a single checkmark) are equally pathetic. Just as parents need to take control of their kids' activities, monitor, guide, and assist--be a part of the learning experience for the child--people need to learn that computers are the same deal: you have to learn, adapt, understand, and protect your systems. That means patches, upgrades, more RAM, security checks, defraging, scandisking, etc.
It's a jungle out there, and just as it takes responsibility to rear a child; it takes just as much responsibility to engage (correctly) in the electronic neighborhood of the Internet.
See those "and" and "or" statements in my original post? Those are Boolean and important to understanding what I wrote. While I would agree that 3/5ths is "most" it doesn't meet the "and" requirements, therefore fails. My "wholly-invented" criteria is right. If again, you read what I wrote it was called "What I'd use" that means it's not accepted, but it is what I would use. What part of that didn't you get? I also mention that the Earth and the moon orbit together around the sun. Apparently you missed that as well, orbital perturbations asside. Now as for your final statement that the moon is a planet because it's bigger than my 800KM limit: go back and read my final point...the one about "historically accepted as such." Tell me, when has the moon ever been accepted, historically, as a planet? Never.
Next time it would be wise to read what is written and understand it fully before commenting.
From the story: "for once a security problem that isn't really Microsoft's fault."
I find it to be that most Windows security problems stem from it not being MS' fault but rather the lazy-ass Admins not patching, changing passwords, having sufficient info., etc. Of course the easy answer is for people to stop writing malware, then that would be great, but people being people like to fuck with things.
The moon fits point 'a', point 'b' and point c, but does not fit point 'd' or point 'e'; therefore is not a planet. The moon orbits the Earth (a planet.) The Earth-Moon unit (no relation to the Zappa's) orbit the sun (which is a star.) The moon itself doesn't orbit the sun, rather it orbits the sun along with us. Ergo, it's a satellite (and not the Toshiba kind, either.)
way too much of the Khan episode (and movie) from Star Trek? We ought not to poke around in there, methinks.
"It's censorship if the *GOVERNMENT* or other entity causes you to not be able to espouse your ideas at all."
No, actually censoring is "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable." The fallacy that "only the government can censor" is bullshit of the highest order. Why don't you go learn something.
"Censorship is an action by government to prevent the dissemination of information."
No, actually censoring is "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable." The fallacy that "only the government can censor" is bullshit of the highest order.
"UDP is a collective decision to not accept traffic from a particular server or provider."
Ideally, yes, but in reality what they will do is issue cancel messages for all outgoing posts from the domain being targetted. This isn't just "hey, let's ignore Bigpond!" it's "hey, let's kill Bigpond's usenet connections!" It's a DoS.
"A UDP is backbones and the like agreeing that the UDPed provider is behaving obnoxiously and refusing to listen to him..."
Again, that would be ideal, but that's not what happens in reality. They are a handful of people deciding that nobody from Bigpond has the right to be heard via usenet. In addition to being censorship it is also discrimination. And, although I enjoy Heinlein, he's not a founding father and his views posted in a book (albeit a good one) are not law and shouldn't be taken as such.
The problem is that the UDPers aren't "the majority," they're a handful of over zealous control-freaks.
I'll answer your questions in order:
Been using Usenet since 1984, thank you. Regular? Yup.
You asked: "BTW: I block entire subnets from my mailserver because I get incoming spam from certain addresses in those blocks. Am I "censoring" people, or am I staging a "coup" if I do that?"
No, because it's your system you're controlling. The key difference here is that they're not just killing posts from propogating to their servers, but to all of the NNTP servers in the world. You're not couping, but they are. That's the difference. They will use 'cancelmoose' or 'cancelbunny' or some other shit to kill all, and I want to repeat that, all, messages from an entire domain! What you're comparing is apples to oranges.
Yes I've read it. And it's still shit. Look, they're playing semantics with definitions. And that's fine if they want to be asses about it (which they are), and it's also fine if they want to justify their actions (which they do). This is 'Net terrorism. It is censorship. Their definition is flawed. It's not only the government that can censor, but newspapers, media, companies, and people. But that doesn't change the fact what they are doing is Wrong and Bad. Additionally, one of the most important statements about the First Amendment ever made was something to the effct of "if nobody can hear you, you don't have free speech." So, in the USA (at least) they're on really iffy territory.
I love their last line there "Remember, the UDP is a near-last-resort measure." Riiiight. Ok, what then would they do next after killing all posts from the UDPed domain?
They don't know, nobody knows. They haven't a clue. They're just being powermongers. Here's a question they never answer sufficiently "Who put you in charge?" Their answer is always the same "We did."
If this were a diplomatic situation, that would be called a coup.
All in all, I give them the finger.
Ya know, the Christian Right is neither Christian nor right, what they are is just a bunch of religious dictators who'd like to enforce their narrow view upon the world in the name of God. Sort of like New World Mullah's. I think it interesting that the idea of teaching their kids evolution invokes such anger when if you take the Bible away and ask them "find proof of God" in any source outside of the Bible or in any way that doesn't self reference they can't. Yet there are oodles (there's a technical term for you!) of studies and tests that come close to damn near certain that evolution is the exact thing that happened. Nevermind the fact that, really, evolution and creationism can be combined...they don't want to even consider that! 1000 years ago, they would be burning people at the stake for claiming we came from apes. It's the same mentality all over again. As knowledge increases and the realm and understanding of Science grows the realm and power of the idea that creationism is correct shortens. Out of the dark one comes into the light...if you catch my meaning.
Look, I hate spam (probably just as much as any of you), but this is censorship any way you look at it. If you have a message, no matter how shitty and spammy it might be and if an unaffiliated third-party choses to eliminate that message from being heard then that's censorship, plain and simple. In addition to that you're harming a whole group over the actions of a few, which is discriminatory.
In short, the UDP is a bad idea, badly planned, and badly executed (no pun intended) by a bunch of crybabies who get their jollies by being the top dog.
Remember a while ago when @Home was under the gun as well? There were quite a few @Home people who went onto the net abuse groups and said (paraphrasing) "if you cancel even one message from the 'home.com' domain, we'll cancel all the messages coming from your domains as well..." You can imagine how pissed off the self styled usenet cops got on that one. There were a handful of people willing to cancel the @Home messages, and over 30 that were willing to cancel the cancelers domains messages--and with dedicated bandwidth and easy access to the same message cancelling software it was a threat worth looking at seriously. Personally, I thought it was a fucking joke. The usenet cops could (and still can) kiss my white, anglo, ass.
In the end, the whole problem was from less than 20 people at @Home, who were notified by @Home to knock off the shit, and they did. So nothing happened.
The whole idea of a UDP is bad, and the 'Net cops are fucking losers who don't know shit.
"And no, it's not for beginners, but it is great for someone who'd like to learn more about Linux."
But Gentoo also has the BEST documentation I've ever seen, which is a Damn Good Thing (tm).
Screw that. Mine the asteroids, there's more and better mineral wealth in asteroids than there is on the moon. Last I heard there was like a trillion dollars in nickel (alone) on Eros. I figure the moon is just not worth it (or NASA and some other yahoos would have mentioned it before.)
"Tell that to the Melissa author, and some number of other people who's GUID was used to identify them. Even if you aren't a criminal, this could be misused in so many ways."
Found on the 'Net: "David L. Smith was not caught on the basis of the GUID, he was caught because the feds were able to trace the point of insertion of the virus into alt.sex from the ISP he used, then from the connection logs down to the phone number used to connect to the service. The GUID had nothing to do with it. There was also no indication that he used pirated software, just that he or someone had used a previously written virus and modified it into Melissa, passing on the unique GUID of the original document/macro author."
Just wanted to set that straight.