> > Where does 95% of spam come from? > > The USA. Well, maybe not exactly 95%, but certainly the vast majority is > sent by people in the USA, plugging "products" targeted at US citizens.
You're smoking crack. A good 40% of the world's spam is written in ideographic character sets (gb2312, big5,...). Another 25% is written in Hangul or the Japanese Syllabary. About 25% is in English, and yes, most of *that* involves a US citizen or company in some way. The other 10% is an assortment of European and Slavic languages, Tagalog, or no language at all (messages with no body or only a URI, markov chains, viruses, random strings of digits, random octet streams, and so forth; most of these are not sales pitches and so are not covered under this bill).
Interestingly, I have never received spam in an African or Hindustani language, as far as I am aware. The former makes sense, because no single African language is common enough, and anybody in Africa with access to a computer knows a little French or English, probably some of both. The latter I find a bit surprising. I would expect, all factors being equal, to receive some spam in Hindi, Urdu, or other Hindustani languages. There are trainloads of people who speak these languages, and I would think they'd be on average at least as likely to have access to email as a random person who speaks Spanish or Portuguese, yet I get plenty of spam in those languages. Maybe I'm not recognising it because of a lack of handling for those character sets on my system? That seems unlikely; I get the Asian $#@! just "fine". But I suppose it's possible. (It's not pure ignorance on my part; I know what Devanagari looks like -- not well enough to read it, but certainly plenty well enough that I'd know it if I saw it. Same goes for Arabic.)
> How is this not an international > please-spam-me,-here's-my-favorite-and-most-privat e-email-address list?
Yeah, but they already have my address. That battle has been lost. I can't keep my address away from the spammers and still let people have it who have a legitimate need to contact me.
Get a new address? Yeah, I could, but if I want it to actually be useful, I have to make it public, which means the spammers will get it. Quickly.
Sure, if you only exchange email with a closed set of friends and family, you might not want to give out your address to the list, but if you only exchange email with a closed set of people, you don't have a big spam problem. Many of us for one reason or another (or several, in my case) *have* to make our addresses public. I maintain a usenet FAQ. news.answers moderator policy requires that my address be publically disclosed in the From field. I have content on my website that people need to be able to easily contact me about. I have to make the address public there. At work, patrons need to be able to easily contact me about technical issues.
In short, a secret email address is no good to me. I need a public one.
> This has been a long time coming, I hope we're actually able to enforce it.
Some parts of it are unenforceable, and most of the rest will be difficult to enforce on spammers who operate entirely outside the US, but nevertheless this seems like a useful bill to me. Some particulars...
> It permits, but does not require, the Federal Trade Commission to establish > a "do not spam" registry
The FTC has to know this would be a very popular thing for them to do. They won't do it right away, because they'll want to get some data on how well the DNC registry is working, how it impacts the ecconomy (my guess: not at all), and so forth first. But having a law that specifically permits them to set up a national do-not-spam registry is a potentially very meaningful thing.
> overrides many state law
The state laws in question were in practice going to be virtually impossible to enforce in any meaningful way, IMO. Not that they were bad, but because they were *state* laws, there are too many ways to get around them. A federal law, even if it's technically weaker, is preferable, because you only have to determine that anyone in the US is involved with sending the spam in question and you know you have something actionable. Also, the provision that allows a national do-not-spam registry will (if such a registry is in fact eventually established) take the teeth out of opt-out. The main reason opt-out is bad is because if you have to opt out from each spammer's list, you never get done opting out. If you can opt out once and have done, it's very nearly as good as an opt-in setup.
> The final bill says spammers may send as many "commercial electronic mail > messages" as they like--as long as the messages are obviously advertisements > with a valid U.S. postal address or P.O. box and an unsubscribe link at the > bottom. Junk e-mail essentially would be treated like junk postal mail, > with nonfraudulent e-mail legalized until the recipient chooses to > unsubscribe.
This is mostly useless. (A valid unsubscribe link is no good if one in five hundred of them gets you on the "we know this address is read by a human" list.) However, the valid US address requirement is a good thing. That'll make 'em easier to track, not to mention easier to filter.
Things it prohibits: > Falsifying e-mail header information
This, assuming it's done right (in terms of the wording being such that it really prohibits falsification without preventing, say, using your home email address in From when sending from work), is priceless. Just prohibiting the forging of Received: headers would be a major step forward. Yes, you'll still get mail from Asia with all the headers forged six ways, but if you can tie it to a US company, you can go after them. Well, not individually, probably, but in class action. Anyway, A US company will have a hard time justifying the risk. That's a good thing.
> using either a mail server or open relay to "deceive or mislead > recipients" about the origin of a commercial e-mail message
This provision betrays at least some technical knowledge. Somebody involved with the formation of this bill knows more about the issue than would normally be expected of a politician. It's a good provision. I hope this becomes law.
> Also outlawed is registering for "5 or more" e-mail accounts or "2 or more > domain names" with false information and using them to send commercial > e-mail messages
This won't be directly useful for individual consumers, but I think it might make it easier for ISPs who aren't spam-friendly to keep the spammers out. It certainly doesn't *hurt* anything. Nobody has a legitimate privacy need for more than five addresses with falsified credentials. A coherent argument could be made for one such address (I'm not saying I'd agree, only that the
If I were to compile a list of the top ten most overused trademarks, words used more times for more products and services in more industries than could possibly be considered reasonable, Phoenix would be probably second on the list, after "Zip". "Zip", of course, is the ultimate indefensible trademark, having been used dozens of times in the software industry alone, for everything from virtual machines to compression and archival to modem software. Of course it's also been used for cleaning products, shoes, food and drink,... I honestly believe "The" is at least as defensible a trademark at this point as "Zip" (assuming you only try to protect "The" used as the product name, not every use of the word in product descriptions). Phoenix is not far behind.
> The example I've always seen is that you cannot trademark the word "orange"
There is a qualitative difference in frequency of use between "orange" and "fedora". "orange" is a third-tier word (first-tier words being the three articles and one or two coordinating conjunctions, and second-tier words being ones it's hard to write a chapter without using, such as "this" and "see"). "hat" is probably fourth-tier (someone studying English as a foreign language might get weeks into the course before learning it; "orange" is a first-week word almost for sure), and "fedora" a good-sized step beyond that.
Trademarking "orange" in pretty much any industry is fairly unreasonable. "hat" would be borderline; you surely couldn't get away with it in any industry related in even the most tangential way to clothing or other accessories, but you conceivably might be able to trademark "Hat" as a brand of gasoline or software, perhaps. Maybe. (Red Hat, of course, combines two words, and so is more defensible than merely "Hat" would be, to say nothing of "Red" by itself, which obviously wouldn't fly.)
"fedora" you couldn't trademark as a brand of hat, and probably not as a line of clothing or personal accessory either, but in an unrelated field such as cuisine (*that* could make an interesting ad campaign) or software it's almost certainly a fairly trademarkeable word, with the obvious limitation that you can't take over the word entirely for uses outside the industry in question (i.e., Red Hat can certainly not go after people selling hats with the word fedora on the label, and they'd be on pretty shaky ground going after someone selling cuisine or toothpaste, but software is another matter).
All of this sidesteps the question of *which* entity has the right to use the "Fedora" trademark in the realm of software. It looks as if the universities have reason to believe they have a case, but I don't have enough solid and verifiable information to know for certain.
For the record, I have a lot more sympathy for this Fedora project than for the Firebird DB people, on the grounds that "Fedora" is a much less common trademark than "Firebird". "Firebird" has been used, used again, used to death, and then used some more in roughly every single industry known to man, often by several companies in the same industry. Except *maybe* in the automobile industry, I seriously doubt that any company can make a trademark on the word "Firebird" stick. (Though, if there's a word that's been used *more* often as a product name in *more* industries, Phoenix is it.) OTOH, "Fedora" seems unusual enough to be defensible, for a software product.
> [how many PHB's or joe-sixpacks or even college students do you really > expect know what the hell a Fedora is anyway]
Most of them. After the stocking cap and the baseball cap, it's probably the third most common and well-known variety of hat. Well, maybe fourth after the cowboy hat.
Articles of clothing tend to be on the whole fairly well understood by most folks. People who have trouble with the concept that Mexico isn't one of the United States can nevertheless tell you what a sombrero is, no problem. People who don't know exactly what cargo is still know what cargo pants are. I think most people know what a fedora or a stetson is, too.
Yes, but SCO *has* to attack that verdict and get it turned over. I made the prediction weeks ago that they'd have to try to get it overturned. That was before I knew they intended to go after BSD directly. The whole AT&T/BSD settlement is seriously harmful to their case in the IBM suit, because the bulk of their case rests on "Intellectual Property" that they ostensibly obtained from Novell who ostensibly bought it from AT&T but which AT&T had previously *lost* in court. Yeah, yeah, there's the contract angle, but their claims are too grandiose for that. They need those IP rights that AT&T lost to UC Berkeley. Without them, the whole thing is (eventually) going nowhere for them. So, yeah, of *course* they're going to try to get the AT&T/BSD decision changed. I'm not sure *how* they're planning to do that, and I suspect they're still trying to figure that out themselves, but it's something they've got to try, unless they want to put their tail between their legs and go back to the obscurity from whence they came.
> Because some authors are familiar with a certain programming environment, > and lack the time / skill to learn a new one?
This is a FAQ. The short answer is, it would take more than 50 times as long (that's a conservative estimate) to write a moderatley decent parser (in *any* language, even Perl) as it would take to learn e.g. Inform, which is quite easy and has the additional benefit of coming with a more than merely moderately decent parser. (The Inform standard library parser is the best natural language parser I have ever seen, by a significant margin.)
The only real reason to write IF in a general-purpose language is if you specifically want to spend most of your effort writing the parser, as an exercise. Yes, there are people who do it for this reason.
Every year there's somebody who enters the competition who wrote in a non-IF language for some *other* reason (usually, the one you gave). Every time the reviews of that game concentrate on how the parser sucked so badly that the game was basically unplayable; seldom is very much said about the story or the characters or the atmosphere of such a game, and what is said about the puzzles is generally dominated by parser issues, of the "I knew what I had to do, but I couldn't figure out the $@#! syntax" sort.
You can read the DM and teach yourself Inform in a week. If you write a decent natural-language parser in less than a year, you need to win a much larger prize than the IF competition is giving out.
First off, the *good* solution for this problem is to put the internet in the living room or family room or someplace like that. This then applies equally to everyone (parents, teens, younger kids) and so while they can complain about wanting it in their room, they can't produce a coherent argument to the effect that you're being tyrannical by keeping it in a "public" area, as long as it's a consistent policy. Note that this does not preclude having more than one computer, so that more than one person can use it at a time -- in the same room together. (This is great for network games...)
Failing that, however, he who controls the connectivity controls all. If all the computers go through one connection, whoever controls the router can as necessary (or as desired, for that matter) log and monitor anything. If it's only the web you are concerned about (which would be a bit naive, frankly), you could block outgoing port 80 to force all the browsers through a proxy that logs everything. For that matter, the router itself, assuming it's a PC (with BSD or whatever) functioning as a router, can just log all the traffic that goes through; even with pretty small logsize limits, you have a few minutes to check anything. (Except encrypted traffic, but the only thing they're *likely* to be doing that would be encrypted, unless they're computer geeks, is https. I'm not certain, but I *think* you can put https traffic through a proxy.) One note about this: you do NOT want to keep the logging a secret. If you want them to be open about their use of the internet, you MUST be open about your use and monitoring of it. Openness goes both ways. "Do as I say, not as I do" doesn't work.
As for the people saying "trust them", that may be the right approach with some kids, but others will require you to take a more active approach. It sort of depends on the kid. Some kids by age 10 have matured enough to have the discernment to use the internet in a responsible fashion; others you'll have to watch closely until they hit 18 and move out. This partly depends on how they've been raised up to that point, but it also partly just depends on the kid's personality. Note also that sometimes you'll have to monitor a kid you otherwise wouldn't have to, in order to avoid favoritism when a sibling needs to be watched. Fortunately, the kids who don't need to be watched will generally not chaffe under being watched. It's the ones you *need* to watch who don't *want* to be watched. (And, turning that around, if the kid really hates for you to know what he's doing, you've got a problem on your hands. Except in the bathroom, of course; very few kids want to be watched in the bathroom, and if they *did*, well, that would actually be scary.)
Also you should be aware that they *will* be using the internet outside the home, in friends' homes, the public library, or wherever else they find it. But you knew that already.
> Maybe before developing for Linux, IBM should develop an alternative > to Powerpoint
What for? Wouldn't it be better to develop something that's actually useful? Sure, in 1990, using the computer to present a glorified slideshow with cheesy transitional effects and swooshing sounds as the bullet points slide in was all modern and hip, but now that every eight-year-old and his dog has done it, the novelty has worn off, and it looks like what it is: chintzy. Power Pointless is passe. If the presentation is related to software, you do a live demo. If not, you print your visual aids on posterboard and/or distribute handouts. Much classier, assuming you do a decent job of it.
If you write your own major mode for Emacs, all these issues just go away.
However, if you are lacking lisp-fu and absolutely must have a GUI-based WYSIWYG editor, OpenOffice may be a possible solution. You'll have to avoid workflows that result in creating styles with meaningless names. (For example, you can't just highlight some random text and start formatting it in various arbitrary ways. Instead, define your styles properly with names using the style catalog, and then apply your named styles to blocks of text. The styles you define should represent things that have meaning independent of the format, so that you can sensibly convert them into the various target formats.)
Getting the XML out of an OO document is a simple matter of renaming it from foo.sxw to foo.zip and unzipping it. You can then use any XML parser you like (e.g., one of the XML modules off of CPAN) to transform it into DocBook or whatever. All of this can be automated.
> That's a huge difference in line count between the two versions.
Huge? Hardly. Statistically speaking, it's barely significant. It's within one order of magnitude, for crying out loud.
If they'd written it in Perl, it'd be three hundred lines including comments and some clown over at perlmonks.org would be trying to golf it down small enough to fit into a signature.
> a computer device should not expose an user to nastiness and it should not > be possible to use it to launch attacks
Umm, actually, *nix is better able to be used to launch attacks than Windows. Once you get control of it. The inherent network transparency and the more potent OOTB toolset make it far more dangerous in the wrong hands. *nix admins have to rely on their ability to make it hard for an attacker to get control of the system in the first place.
> (except *maybe* the bible but I think he beat that too?)
No, not even close. LOTR is a massively major piece of literature, formitive for an entire genre, on par with Hamlet, the Illiad, and a very small handful of other major works -- but it does not approach the Bible, not in terms of the number of copies printed, not in terms of the number of people who have read it, not in terms of the number of times it has been translated, not in terms of the number of hours people spend studying it, and not in terms of the influence it has had on other literature. In my house we have two complete copies of LOTR, plus an extra copy of FOTR. We also have two of The Hobbit, one Silmarillion, a Smith of Wotten Major and Farmer Giles of Ham, and a Tolkein Reader. Care to guess how many copies of the Bible we've got sitting around? (Hint: more than all those put together, easily.) Care to guess which sees more use?
This is not to demean LOTR. It's one of perhaps three or four works in the English language that people who don't speak English natively might seriously want to learn English in order to study (international trade language issues aside). That's a big deal. There are three or four such works in Greek (the New Testament, the Illiad, and Socrates' Dialogues (I don't consider Elements to be literature per se)), several in Sanskrit, a couple in Latin, some poetry in French, and a small handful of other works in assorted languages. Pretty elite company. (Then there's Klingon... but Trekkies are fanatics.) Nobody's learning English so they can better understand the Matrix. But *lots* of people learn *two* languages -- both of them *dead* languages -- for the sole purpose of studying the Bible. A few of people even learn a third one (Aramaic) for studying just a few passages (mainly, the middle part of Daniel). Then they spend decades of their lives, double-digit hours per week, studying it. Thousands of people do this. LOTR gets pretty good devotion, but not like that.
Not by half. The movies don't *tell* the story. They sort of expose you to bits and *pieces* of the story. Entire major action scenes are ommitted, to say *nothing* of important subplots, major characters, huge amounts of dialog and character development,... in short, most of the story is left out, in order to somehow *squeeze* the thing into nine measley hours.
It's a fourty-hour story, at least, if you read it. It could probably have been squeezed into eighteen hours (six three-hour installments) for movie purposes and would have been excellent and not felt slow at all. That's leaving out the entire wealth of information in the appendix, almost all of the information from the other books (including Bilbo's There and Back Again), and some of the less essential details from the main body of LOTR, as well as reducing the descriptive passages to quick camera shots and other usual types of movie-adaptation-shortening, and condensing a lot of the dialog to the minimum amount that would convey the most interesting and vital information.
If you doubt this, you need to read the books. There's a LOT more stuff in there than the movies portrayed. Six books, actually -- bundled as two books per volume, traditionally, with the appendix added to the last volume. There ought to have been six movies: "Flight to Rivendell", "The Nine Walkers", "Isengard", "Road to Mordor", "Gondor's Defense", "Mount Doom". Only the last might reasonably have been shorter than three hours, without leaving out very much important stuff. (The ending of the book has a lot of long, anticlimactic partings, which could have been greatly abbreviated for the movies, without losing a great deal, though they are included in the books for good reasons.)
> "Hamlet" didn't provoke any life-altering questions about the state > of reality... it's still a pretty darn good story.
Hamlet may not discuss the nature of reality, but it does discuss some equally interesting questions, most notably the nature of sanity. IMO, it is Shakespeare's best work.
There's one thing you may have missed: it's a little bit on the subtle side (particularly compared to the Matrix, which is about as subtle as water is dry), but LOTR is intended to be viewed initially as a story, but, once you get into it and develop mimesis, you are intended to think of it as history, or, perhaps, something out of prehistory, of our own Earth.
LOTR does also have philosophical elements to it, but they aren't the point. The philosophical questions (e.g., regarding the role of fate) are approached in the normal, everyday sort of way as the characters wrestle with the events of their lives.
Indeed. Samwise carried the thing once, for less than a day, yet even after the ring and its master were destroyed, he was never the same and ultimitely left Middle Earth and went west over the sea, like the immortal elves, after Rose died.
> To call the ending "luck" is simply not fair to Tolkien
No, it doesn't. I'm not sure there's any luck there at all, but it's certainly not pure luck. It is Frodo's mercy (which he acquires after Gandalf speaks to him about Bilbo's pity), in combination with a certain minimum of shrewdness (in forcing the oath) that results in, err, the result. Fate, perhaps, but there are definitely more causes than blind luck. You could as well say that Bilbo found the ring by blind luck, but we know better: the ring chose to leave with him, rather than remain in the cave, because its master was gaining power (and, in fact, was about to be driven out of Dul Guldir by the White Council and return to Mordor). Further, Bilbo didn't end up in that part of the cave where the ring was by blind luck, either. He was only present on the journey at all because of who he was (a relative of the Old Took), and the party went down that tunnel because Gandalf led them there (which he was able to do only because Bilbo's scream warned him), and Bilbo was separated from the party because he was being carried -- again, because of who he was, a hobbit. Note that: it was because he was a hobbit that he was the member of the party who found the ring. It comes out in the LOTR, later, that hobbits of all the races are least corrupted by the ring and best able to endure its influence. Fate? Yes, there's a heavy dose of fate in LOTR.
It is also interesting that Smeagol (Gollum before he found the ring) was a Stor, and the Tooks of all Hobbit families have the largest amount of Stor blood in them. (You have to read the appendix of LOTR to get some of this.) So the story of the One Ring is very much a story of Stors, and of how they differ from the other races generally and men particularly. Bonus points if you pick up the implication that the English are (quite remotely) descended at least partly from Hobbits. (This last point requires reading between the lines somewhat, but I'm almost certain Tolkein intended this conclusion.)
> I don't think you can compare it to LOTR in it's depth. Maybe it's because > I've read the books...
It's because you've read the books, defnitely. The LOTR movies are so abbreviated, they leave out too much for you to pick up on the depth, unless you have also read the books. The first movie is like a race, and the second is like an action adventure. Neither contains much of the lore that makes the books so interesting.
> Why do people lash out viciously at movies that actually make an attempt a > real depth (Matrix), while simultaneously holding up the LotR as the > cinematic "Gold Standard?"
Okay, it may be a bit hard to tell from just the movies, but if you read the books, LOTR has a good deal more depth than the Matrix. If they hadn't had to shorten the movies so much, they might have done a little better. (When I first heard they were going to do the LOTR in three movies, I was disgusted. There's enough materiel in them for at *least* five movies, and that's if you cut everything you can cut, cut some more, and make the movies 3 hours long. The movies as they stand don't do much more than give you a small taste; they certainly don't have the rich epic historical "lore" flavour of the books.)
> But there's really nothing cool to discuss about them, is there?
If you want to know enough to discuss them, you need to read the books. The movies are just showing you snapshots; they don't *explain* anything. They don't even include all the major *action* scenes, much less the things worth discussing.
Does the Matrix have depth? A little. It goes into the nature of reality, the basic epistemological question, and has a little time left for the characters to disagree about the role of fate. The LOTR (books) also discuss all of these things, and a great many more things as well. The discerning reader will discover (among other things) that Tolkein intended for you to realise that these events are deep in the past of our Earth, a part of our own prehistory. You can see it in the etymology of words, in bits and pieces of lore that we've inherited as small sayings and nursery rhymes that don't make complete sense until you read LOTR, and in the small bits of information that come out in the interactions between the characters, which require reading the whole work for you to piece them together and get the whole picture.
If you haven't read the LOTR books, you should. They're easily the single most significant work in the fantasy genre, and formitive for almost all other works in the genre; that in itself is good enough reason to read them. The movies don't begin to do them justice.
First off, the average includes females (who have a couple of extra organs crowding the bladder), children (who just have a smaller capacity generally), and the elderly (ditto). I suspect 32oz capacity is common for an adult male. Second, I think you'd be surprised at how much perspiration is normal; I doubt half of what you drink ends up in your bladder, on average, though of course it varies from person to person and from day to day based on an assortment of factors.
Is 64oz capacity extra-large? Probably, but the other poster seemed to be claiming that 32oz was more than twice the maximum anyone can handle, which seems absurd to me.
Slashdot Mirror
> > Where does 95% of spam come from?
...). Another 25% is written in Hangul or the
>
> The USA. Well, maybe not exactly 95%, but certainly the vast majority is
> sent by people in the USA, plugging "products" targeted at US citizens.
You're smoking crack. A good 40% of the world's spam is written in ideographic
character sets (gb2312, big5,
Japanese Syllabary. About 25% is in English, and yes, most of *that* involves
a US citizen or company in some way. The other 10% is an assortment of
European and Slavic languages, Tagalog, or no language at all (messages with
no body or only a URI, markov chains, viruses, random strings of digits,
random octet streams, and so forth; most of these are not sales pitches and so
are not covered under this bill).
Interestingly, I have never received spam in an African or Hindustani language,
as far as I am aware. The former makes sense, because no single African
language is common enough, and anybody in Africa with access to a computer
knows a little French or English, probably some of both. The latter I find
a bit surprising. I would expect, all factors being equal, to receive some
spam in Hindi, Urdu, or other Hindustani languages. There are trainloads of
people who speak these languages, and I would think they'd be on average at
least as likely to have access to email as a random person who speaks Spanish
or Portuguese, yet I get plenty of spam in those languages. Maybe I'm not
recognising it because of a lack of handling for those character sets on
my system? That seems unlikely; I get the Asian $#@! just "fine". But I
suppose it's possible. (It's not pure ignorance on my part; I know what
Devanagari looks like -- not well enough to read it, but certainly plenty
well enough that I'd know it if I saw it. Same goes for Arabic.)
> How is this not an internationalt e-email-address list?
> please-spam-me,-here's-my-favorite-and-most-priva
Yeah, but they already have my address. That battle has been lost. I can't
keep my address away from the spammers and still let people have it who have
a legitimate need to contact me.
Get a new address? Yeah, I could, but if I want it to actually be useful,
I have to make it public, which means the spammers will get it. Quickly.
Sure, if you only exchange email with a closed set of friends and family, you
might not want to give out your address to the list, but if you only exchange
email with a closed set of people, you don't have a big spam problem. Many
of us for one reason or another (or several, in my case) *have* to make our
addresses public. I maintain a usenet FAQ. news.answers moderator policy
requires that my address be publically disclosed in the From field. I have
content on my website that people need to be able to easily contact me about.
I have to make the address public there. At work, patrons need to be able to
easily contact me about technical issues.
In short, a secret email address is no good to me. I need a public one.
> This has been a long time coming, I hope we're actually able to enforce it.
Some parts of it are unenforceable, and most of the rest will be difficult
to enforce on spammers who operate entirely outside the US, but nevertheless
this seems like a useful bill to me. Some particulars...
> It permits, but does not require, the Federal Trade Commission to establish
> a "do not spam" registry
The FTC has to know this would be a very popular thing for them to do. They
won't do it right away, because they'll want to get some data on how well the
DNC registry is working, how it impacts the ecconomy (my guess: not at all),
and so forth first. But having a law that specifically permits them to set
up a national do-not-spam registry is a potentially very meaningful thing.
> overrides many state law
The state laws in question were in practice going to be virtually impossible
to enforce in any meaningful way, IMO. Not that they were bad, but because
they were *state* laws, there are too many ways to get around them. A
federal law, even if it's technically weaker, is preferable, because you
only have to determine that anyone in the US is involved with sending the
spam in question and you know you have something actionable. Also, the
provision that allows a national do-not-spam registry will (if such a
registry is in fact eventually established) take the teeth out of opt-out.
The main reason opt-out is bad is because if you have to opt out from each
spammer's list, you never get done opting out. If you can opt out once and
have done, it's very nearly as good as an opt-in setup.
> The final bill says spammers may send as many "commercial electronic mail
> messages" as they like--as long as the messages are obviously advertisements
> with a valid U.S. postal address or P.O. box and an unsubscribe link at the
> bottom. Junk e-mail essentially would be treated like junk postal mail,
> with nonfraudulent e-mail legalized until the recipient chooses to
> unsubscribe.
This is mostly useless. (A valid unsubscribe link is no good if one in
five hundred of them gets you on the "we know this address is read by a
human" list.) However, the valid US address requirement is a good thing.
That'll make 'em easier to track, not to mention easier to filter.
Things it prohibits:
> Falsifying e-mail header information
This, assuming it's done right (in terms of the wording being such that
it really prohibits falsification without preventing, say, using your
home email address in From when sending from work), is priceless. Just
prohibiting the forging of Received: headers would be a major step forward.
Yes, you'll still get mail from Asia with all the headers forged six ways,
but if you can tie it to a US company, you can go after them. Well, not
individually, probably, but in class action. Anyway, A US company will
have a hard time justifying the risk. That's a good thing.
> using either a mail server or open relay to "deceive or mislead
> recipients" about the origin of a commercial e-mail message
This provision betrays at least some technical knowledge. Somebody involved
with the formation of this bill knows more about the issue than would normally
be expected of a politician. It's a good provision. I hope this becomes law.
> Also outlawed is registering for "5 or more" e-mail accounts or "2 or more
> domain names" with false information and using them to send commercial
> e-mail messages
This won't be directly useful for individual consumers, but I think it might
make it easier for ISPs who aren't spam-friendly to keep the spammers out.
It certainly doesn't *hurt* anything. Nobody has a legitimate privacy need
for more than five addresses with falsified credentials. A coherent argument
could be made for one such address (I'm not saying I'd agree, only that the
If I were to compile a list of the top ten most overused trademarks, words used ... I
more times for more products and services in more industries than could possibly
be considered reasonable, Phoenix would be probably second on the list, after
"Zip". "Zip", of course, is the ultimate indefensible trademark, having been
used dozens of times in the software industry alone, for everything from
virtual machines to compression and archival to modem software. Of course
it's also been used for cleaning products, shoes, food and drink,
honestly believe "The" is at least as defensible a trademark at this point as
"Zip" (assuming you only try to protect "The" used as the product name, not
every use of the word in product descriptions). Phoenix is not far behind.
> The example I've always seen is that you cannot trademark the word "orange"
There is a qualitative difference in frequency of use between "orange" and
"fedora". "orange" is a third-tier word (first-tier words being the three
articles and one or two coordinating conjunctions, and second-tier words
being ones it's hard to write a chapter without using, such as "this" and
"see"). "hat" is probably fourth-tier (someone studying English as a foreign
language might get weeks into the course before learning it; "orange" is a
first-week word almost for sure), and "fedora" a good-sized step beyond that.
Trademarking "orange" in pretty much any industry is fairly unreasonable.
"hat" would be borderline; you surely couldn't get away with it in any industry
related in even the most tangential way to clothing or other accessories, but
you conceivably might be able to trademark "Hat" as a brand of gasoline or
software, perhaps. Maybe. (Red Hat, of course, combines two words, and so
is more defensible than merely "Hat" would be, to say nothing of "Red" by
itself, which obviously wouldn't fly.)
"fedora" you couldn't trademark as a brand of hat, and probably not as a line
of clothing or personal accessory either, but in an unrelated field such as
cuisine (*that* could make an interesting ad campaign) or software it's almost
certainly a fairly trademarkeable word, with the obvious limitation that you
can't take over the word entirely for uses outside the industry in question
(i.e., Red Hat can certainly not go after people selling hats with the word
fedora on the label, and they'd be on pretty shaky ground going after someone
selling cuisine or toothpaste, but software is another matter).
All of this sidesteps the question of *which* entity has the right to use
the "Fedora" trademark in the realm of software. It looks as if the
universities have reason to believe they have a case, but I don't have
enough solid and verifiable information to know for certain.
For the record, I have a lot more sympathy for this Fedora project than for
the Firebird DB people, on the grounds that "Fedora" is a much less common
trademark than "Firebird". "Firebird" has been used, used again, used to
death, and then used some more in roughly every single industry known to man,
often by several companies in the same industry. Except *maybe* in the
automobile industry, I seriously doubt that any company can make a trademark
on the word "Firebird" stick. (Though, if there's a word that's been used
*more* often as a product name in *more* industries, Phoenix is it.) OTOH,
"Fedora" seems unusual enough to be defensible, for a software product.
> [how many PHB's or joe-sixpacks or even college students do you really
> expect know what the hell a Fedora is anyway]
Most of them. After the stocking cap and the baseball cap, it's probably the
third most common and well-known variety of hat. Well, maybe fourth after
the cowboy hat.
Articles of clothing tend to be on the whole fairly well understood by most
folks. People who have trouble with the concept that Mexico isn't one of the
United States can nevertheless tell you what a sombrero is, no problem.
People who don't know exactly what cargo is still know what cargo pants are.
I think most people know what a fedora or a stetson is, too.
> AT&T tried. They lost their case
Yes, but SCO *has* to attack that verdict and get it turned over. I made the
prediction weeks ago that they'd have to try to get it overturned. That was
before I knew they intended to go after BSD directly. The whole AT&T/BSD
settlement is seriously harmful to their case in the IBM suit, because the bulk
of their case rests on "Intellectual Property" that they ostensibly obtained
from Novell who ostensibly bought it from AT&T but which AT&T had previously
*lost* in court. Yeah, yeah, there's the contract angle, but their claims are
too grandiose for that. They need those IP rights that AT&T lost to UC
Berkeley. Without them, the whole thing is (eventually) going nowhere for
them. So, yeah, of *course* they're going to try to get the AT&T/BSD
decision changed. I'm not sure *how* they're planning to do that, and I
suspect they're still trying to figure that out themselves, but it's something
they've got to try, unless they want to put their tail between their legs and
go back to the obscurity from whence they came.
> Because some authors are familiar with a certain programming environment,
> and lack the time / skill to learn a new one?
This is a FAQ. The short answer is, it would take more than 50 times as long
(that's a conservative estimate) to write a moderatley decent parser (in *any*
language, even Perl) as it would take to learn e.g. Inform, which is quite
easy and has the additional benefit of coming with a more than merely
moderately decent parser. (The Inform standard library parser is the best
natural language parser I have ever seen, by a significant margin.)
The only real reason to write IF in a general-purpose language is if you
specifically want to spend most of your effort writing the parser, as an
exercise. Yes, there are people who do it for this reason.
Every year there's somebody who enters the competition who wrote in a non-IF
language for some *other* reason (usually, the one you gave). Every time the
reviews of that game concentrate on how the parser sucked so badly that the
game was basically unplayable; seldom is very much said about the story or
the characters or the atmosphere of such a game, and what is said about the
puzzles is generally dominated by parser issues, of the "I knew what I had
to do, but I couldn't figure out the $@#! syntax" sort.
You can read the DM and teach yourself Inform in a week. If you write a
decent natural-language parser in less than a year, you need to win a much
larger prize than the IF competition is giving out.
First off, the *good* solution for this problem is to put the internet in the
living room or family room or someplace like that. This then applies equally
to everyone (parents, teens, younger kids) and so while they can complain about
wanting it in their room, they can't produce a coherent argument to the effect
that you're being tyrannical by keeping it in a "public" area, as long as it's
a consistent policy. Note that this does not preclude having more than one
computer, so that more than one person can use it at a time -- in the same
room together. (This is great for network games...)
Failing that, however, he who controls the connectivity controls all. If all
the computers go through one connection, whoever controls the router can as
necessary (or as desired, for that matter) log and monitor anything. If it's
only the web you are concerned about (which would be a bit naive, frankly),
you could block outgoing port 80 to force all the browsers through a proxy
that logs everything. For that matter, the router itself, assuming it's a
PC (with BSD or whatever) functioning as a router, can just log all the
traffic that goes through; even with pretty small logsize limits, you have
a few minutes to check anything. (Except encrypted traffic, but the only
thing they're *likely* to be doing that would be encrypted, unless they're
computer geeks, is https. I'm not certain, but I *think* you can put https
traffic through a proxy.) One note about this: you do NOT want to keep
the logging a secret. If you want them to be open about their use of the
internet, you MUST be open about your use and monitoring of it. Openness
goes both ways. "Do as I say, not as I do" doesn't work.
As for the people saying "trust them", that may be the right approach with
some kids, but others will require you to take a more active approach. It
sort of depends on the kid. Some kids by age 10 have matured enough to have
the discernment to use the internet in a responsible fashion; others you'll
have to watch closely until they hit 18 and move out. This partly depends on
how they've been raised up to that point, but it also partly just depends on
the kid's personality. Note also that sometimes you'll have to monitor a
kid you otherwise wouldn't have to, in order to avoid favoritism when a
sibling needs to be watched. Fortunately, the kids who don't need to be
watched will generally not chaffe under being watched. It's the ones you
*need* to watch who don't *want* to be watched. (And, turning that around,
if the kid really hates for you to know what he's doing, you've got a
problem on your hands. Except in the bathroom, of course; very few kids
want to be watched in the bathroom, and if they *did*, well, that would
actually be scary.)
Also you should be aware that they *will* be using the internet outside the
home, in friends' homes, the public library, or wherever else they find it.
But you knew that already.
Well, IBM was one of the early pioneers in popularising FUD campaigns. That
could be construed as evil. Okay, so that's a few years in the past now.
> Maybe before developing for Linux, IBM should develop an alternative
> to Powerpoint
What for? Wouldn't it be better to develop something that's actually useful?
Sure, in 1990, using the computer to present a glorified slideshow with
cheesy transitional effects and swooshing sounds as the bullet points slide
in was all modern and hip, but now that every eight-year-old and his dog has
done it, the novelty has worn off, and it looks like what it is: chintzy.
Power Pointless is passe. If the presentation is related to software, you
do a live demo. If not, you print your visual aids on posterboard and/or
distribute handouts. Much classier, assuming you do a decent job of it.
If you write your own major mode for Emacs, all these issues just go away.
However, if you are lacking lisp-fu and absolutely must have a GUI-based
WYSIWYG editor, OpenOffice may be a possible solution. You'll have to avoid
workflows that result in creating styles with meaningless names. (For example,
you can't just highlight some random text and start formatting it in various
arbitrary ways. Instead, define your styles properly with names using the
style catalog, and then apply your named styles to blocks of text. The styles
you define should represent things that have meaning independent of the format,
so that you can sensibly convert them into the various target formats.)
Getting the XML out of an OO document is a simple matter of renaming it from
foo.sxw to foo.zip and unzipping it. You can then use any XML parser you
like (e.g., one of the XML modules off of CPAN) to transform it into DocBook
or whatever. All of this can be automated.
> That's a huge difference in line count between the two versions.
Huge? Hardly. Statistically speaking, it's barely significant. It's
within one order of magnitude, for crying out loud.
If they'd written it in Perl, it'd be three hundred lines including comments
and some clown over at perlmonks.org would be trying to golf it down small
enough to fit into a signature.
> a computer device should not expose an user to nastiness and it should not
> be possible to use it to launch attacks
Umm, actually, *nix is better able to be used to launch attacks than Windows.
Once you get control of it. The inherent network transparency and the more
potent OOTB toolset make it far more dangerous in the wrong hands. *nix admins
have to rely on their ability to make it hard for an attacker to get control of
the system in the first place.
Also, LOTR does not inspire stuff like this.
> (except *maybe* the bible but I think he beat that too?)
No, not even close. LOTR is a massively major piece of literature, formitive
for an entire genre, on par with Hamlet, the Illiad, and a very small handful
of other major works -- but it does not approach the Bible, not in terms of
the number of copies printed, not in terms of the number of people who have
read it, not in terms of the number of times it has been translated, not in
terms of the number of hours people spend studying it, and not in terms of
the influence it has had on other literature. In my house we have two
complete copies of LOTR, plus an extra copy of FOTR. We also have two of
The Hobbit, one Silmarillion, a Smith of Wotten Major and Farmer Giles of
Ham, and a Tolkein Reader. Care to guess how many copies of the Bible we've
got sitting around? (Hint: more than all those put together, easily.)
Care to guess which sees more use?
This is not to demean LOTR. It's one of perhaps three or four works in the
English language that people who don't speak English natively might seriously
want to learn English in order to study (international trade language issues
aside). That's a big deal. There are three or four such works in Greek
(the New Testament, the Illiad, and Socrates' Dialogues (I don't consider
Elements to be literature per se)), several in Sanskrit, a couple in Latin,
some poetry in French, and a small handful of other works in assorted
languages. Pretty elite company. (Then there's Klingon... but Trekkies
are fanatics.) Nobody's learning English so they can better understand the
Matrix. But *lots* of people learn *two* languages -- both of them *dead*
languages -- for the sole purpose of studying the Bible. A few of people
even learn a third one (Aramaic) for studying just a few passages (mainly,
the middle part of Daniel). Then they spend decades of their lives,
double-digit hours per week, studying it. Thousands of people do this.
LOTR gets pretty good devotion, but not like that.
> Even 9+ hours isn't enough.
... in short, most of the story is left out, in
Not by half. The movies don't *tell* the story. They sort of expose you to
bits and *pieces* of the story. Entire major action scenes are ommitted, to
say *nothing* of important subplots, major characters, huge amounts of dialog
and character development,
order to somehow *squeeze* the thing into nine measley hours.
It's a fourty-hour story, at least, if you read it. It could probably have
been squeezed into eighteen hours (six three-hour installments) for movie
purposes and would have been excellent and not felt slow at all. That's
leaving out the entire wealth of information in the appendix, almost all of
the information from the other books (including Bilbo's There and Back Again),
and some of the less essential details from the main body of LOTR, as well as
reducing the descriptive passages to quick camera shots and other usual types
of movie-adaptation-shortening, and condensing a lot of the dialog to the
minimum amount that would convey the most interesting and vital information.
If you doubt this, you need to read the books. There's a LOT more stuff in
there than the movies portrayed. Six books, actually -- bundled as two books
per volume, traditionally, with the appendix added to the last volume. There
ought to have been six movies: "Flight to Rivendell", "The Nine Walkers",
"Isengard", "Road to Mordor", "Gondor's Defense", "Mount Doom". Only the
last might reasonably have been shorter than three hours, without leaving
out very much important stuff. (The ending of the book has a lot of long,
anticlimactic partings, which could have been greatly abbreviated for the
movies, without losing a great deal, though they are included in the books
for good reasons.)
> "Hamlet" didn't provoke any life-altering questions about the state
> of reality... it's still a pretty darn good story.
Hamlet may not discuss the nature of reality, but it does discuss some
equally interesting questions, most notably the nature of sanity. IMO,
it is Shakespeare's best work.
> IT'S JUST A GREAT STORY
There's one thing you may have missed: it's a little bit on the subtle side
(particularly compared to the Matrix, which is about as subtle as water is
dry), but LOTR is intended to be viewed initially as a story, but, once you
get into it and develop mimesis, you are intended to think of it as history,
or, perhaps, something out of prehistory, of our own Earth.
LOTR does also have philosophical elements to it, but they aren't the point.
The philosophical questions (e.g., regarding the role of fate) are approached
in the normal, everyday sort of way as the characters wrestle with the events
of their lives.
> So yeah, it was rather powerful.
Indeed. Samwise carried the thing once, for less than a day, yet even after
the ring and its master were destroyed, he was never the same and ultimitely
left Middle Earth and went west over the sea, like the immortal elves, after
Rose died.
> To call the ending "luck" is simply not fair to Tolkien
No, it doesn't. I'm not sure there's any luck there at all, but it's
certainly not pure luck. It is Frodo's mercy (which he acquires after Gandalf
speaks to him about Bilbo's pity), in combination with a certain minimum of
shrewdness (in forcing the oath) that results in, err, the result. Fate,
perhaps, but there are definitely more causes than blind luck. You could as
well say that Bilbo found the ring by blind luck, but we know better: the
ring chose to leave with him, rather than remain in the cave, because its
master was gaining power (and, in fact, was about to be driven out of Dul
Guldir by the White Council and return to Mordor). Further, Bilbo didn't
end up in that part of the cave where the ring was by blind luck, either. He
was only present on the journey at all because of who he was (a relative of
the Old Took), and the party went down that tunnel because Gandalf led them
there (which he was able to do only because Bilbo's scream warned him), and
Bilbo was separated from the party because he was being carried -- again,
because of who he was, a hobbit. Note that: it was because he was a hobbit
that he was the member of the party who found the ring. It comes out in the
LOTR, later, that hobbits of all the races are least corrupted by the ring
and best able to endure its influence. Fate? Yes, there's a heavy dose of
fate in LOTR.
It is also interesting that Smeagol (Gollum before he found the ring) was
a Stor, and the Tooks of all Hobbit families have the largest amount of Stor
blood in them. (You have to read the appendix of LOTR to get some of this.)
So the story of the One Ring is very much a story of Stors, and of how they
differ from the other races generally and men particularly. Bonus points if
you pick up the implication that the English are (quite remotely) descended
at least partly from Hobbits. (This last point requires reading between
the lines somewhat, but I'm almost certain Tolkein intended this conclusion.)
> I don't think you can compare it to LOTR in it's depth. Maybe it's because
> I've read the books...
It's because you've read the books, defnitely. The LOTR movies are so
abbreviated, they leave out too much for you to pick up on the depth, unless
you have also read the books. The first movie is like a race, and the second
is like an action adventure. Neither contains much of the lore that makes
the books so interesting.
> In the movie (and the book), Gandalf told a moth to fetch Gwaihir.
Moth? No, it was Radaghast in the book.
> Why do people lash out viciously at movies that actually make an attempt a
> real depth (Matrix), while simultaneously holding up the LotR as the
> cinematic "Gold Standard?"
Okay, it may be a bit hard to tell from just the movies, but if you read the
books, LOTR has a good deal more depth than the Matrix. If they hadn't had to
shorten the movies so much, they might have done a little better. (When I
first heard they were going to do the LOTR in three movies, I was disgusted.
There's enough materiel in them for at *least* five movies, and that's if you
cut everything you can cut, cut some more, and make the movies 3 hours long.
The movies as they stand don't do much more than give you a small taste; they
certainly don't have the rich epic historical "lore" flavour of the books.)
> But there's really nothing cool to discuss about them, is there?
If you want to know enough to discuss them, you need to read the books. The
movies are just showing you snapshots; they don't *explain* anything. They
don't even include all the major *action* scenes, much less the things worth
discussing.
Does the Matrix have depth? A little. It goes into the nature of reality,
the basic epistemological question, and has a little time left for the
characters to disagree about the role of fate. The LOTR (books) also
discuss all of these things, and a great many more things as well. The
discerning reader will discover (among other things) that Tolkein intended
for you to realise that these events are deep in the past of our Earth, a
part of our own prehistory. You can see it in the etymology of words, in
bits and pieces of lore that we've inherited as small sayings and nursery
rhymes that don't make complete sense until you read LOTR, and in the small
bits of information that come out in the interactions between the characters,
which require reading the whole work for you to piece them together and get
the whole picture.
If you haven't read the LOTR books, you should. They're easily the single
most significant work in the fantasy genre, and formitive for almost all
other works in the genre; that in itself is good enough reason to read them.
The movies don't begin to do them justice.
First off, the average includes females (who have a couple of extra organs
crowding the bladder), children (who just have a smaller capacity generally),
and the elderly (ditto). I suspect 32oz capacity is common for an adult male.
Second, I think you'd be surprised at how much perspiration is normal; I
doubt half of what you drink ends up in your bladder, on average, though of
course it varies from person to person and from day to day based on an
assortment of factors.
Is 64oz capacity extra-large? Probably, but the other poster seemed to be
claiming that 32oz was more than twice the maximum anyone can handle, which
seems absurd to me.