Our future is a positive future. We assume that things are basically going to get better, progress will continue,' Zuckerman says....
So the premise of ther show is that John Ashcroft, Jack Valenti, and RIAA President Cary Sherman are all abducted by aliens before they can repeal the 4th Amendment in favor of the "Copyright is a Boot in the Face Forever Act"?
I doubt anyone is surprised by Microsoft's, AOL's, etc, complaints, but Google and the like? That seems a bit odd.
Google's a great company for offering an unbiased search with small, tasteful text ads, and for sustaining the newsgroup archives many of us still call DejaGoogle.
So we tend to see Google as one of the "good guys". And to some extent, they are one of the good guys.
That said, Google also records the IP address and the search term of each Google search, potentially amassing a great deal of privacy threatening information about you, and it offers the Goggle tool-bar, which apparently "phones home" data about the sites a user visits.
And then Google gets a pass on this from too many of us, because of the good it does.
Any concentration of personal information in a single entity's hands is a threat, even if that entity is wholly benign, because the existence of this trove of information would at the very least tempt other unscrupulous entities to steal the information. And even if Google is wholly benign now, that's no guarantee that it always will be. And frankly, there's no proof that Google is wholly benign.
This is, incidentally, why we must also be wary of government programs like "Total Information Awareness" and MATRIX: even if they're used for wholly benign purposes, like counter-terrorism -- now, there's no guarantee they won't be subverted -- just as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover subverted the FBI -- for monitoring dissidents or for increasing the personal political power of the men who control these databases.
For Americans: you might be interested to know that, prior to the American Revolution, many convicts were 'transported' to serve out their sentences in Virginia.
Georgia (the U.S. state, not the country and former Soviet republic) was a penal colony at one point, but I've never heard that Virginia was.
Britain began sending transportees to Australia in part because the American Revolution meant that Britain no longer had colonies in America to send them to.
So how does this story affect 'My Rights Online'??
Damn slashdot editors think your rights are the same everywhere.
Because a precedent created anywhere -- but especially in Western democracies -- will be used as justification for the same legislation or rulings elsewhere.
It's a matter of record that on controversial issues, one nation's courts or legislatures will look to what is the prevailing opinion in other democracies -- witness some of the U.S. Supreme Court's various opinion on capital punishment, some of which make reference to the prevailing climate of opinion in Europe.
And it's not mere coincidence that the European Union and Australia is passing laws that look a lot like the DMCA; given world-wide trade, one nation will pressure another nation to bring its laws into conformance with the first's, or into conformance with some international treaty.
So wherever the bell tolls, whether in Canada or Germany or your own homeland, the bell tolls for you. It's in my direct interest to see that my neighbors' rights are secured in their countries, so as to provide a good example to the legislators and judges in my own country.
Re:Wow, they requested this?
on
Spam Bits
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· Score: 2, Informative
The only downside of course is that it takes a bit of time (10 ~ 20mins) before a new forwarding account is created and I am only limited to 99 aliases with my current domain name provider.
Get a domain host that provides a "catchall" account, that collects everything sent to your domain that isn't for an explicitly created address (account).
Collect messages for the catchall account with your email client. (Or forward them -- my deal with my host, hostica.com, provides a catchall but only one POP account, so by necessity, the catchall (and the explicit but non-POP accounts) all forward to the single POP account. But for only $12 a year, having to channel everything through a single POP account is a small annoyance.)
Filter the messages in your email client software (or in a proxy server like POPFile), to separate out addresses that hit the catchall that you care about (either care because you want to see them, or care because you've decided that address has been compromised).
The advantage to this is that I don't need to create an account, all I need to do is make up some-address@mydomain.tld. It's so easy that I do it all the time I'm asked for an email address. If that address begins to get a lot of mail, then and only then do I bother to make a filtering rule for it in my email client.
C is a pretty decent language to program in (in some ways better than Java --for example it has function pointers), however it has a few substantial short-comings:
It's funny, as I read this, I really thought it was a tongue-in-chhek post designed to advocate for C++, because almost all the shortcomings you identify in C are remedied by C++. I honestly thought your post would end with some variant on "and that's why I use C++".
As far as your issue zero, header files and linkage, isn't remedied by C++, but it's not a shortcoming of C, per se; it's an issue of the linker, which is a distinct piece of software that in many cases must also be backward compatible.
Issue 1, an "awful standard library" (and I'd take issue with this; the C standard library isn't awful, but of necessity it's the lowest common denominator library, in order to make C available across the greatest numbers of architectures and operating systems) is ver well supplemented by C++'s Standard Template Library (and by the Boost libraries).
Issue 2, that C arrays don't know their own extent, is remedied by using C++'s vectors (or one of several other aggregates).
Issue 3: inheritance; C++ of course has inheritance. You note that you "don't care to have real inheritance with methods and everything, just the ability to inherit from a structure and add more fields to it," plus some RTTI. Please realize that you can do this in C: you can "inherit" a structure, in the sense that you mean, by making the "inherited" structure the first element of the "derived" structure:
enum TYPE { UNKNOWN, BASE, DERIVED }; struct Base { int stuff; TYPE type ; }; struct Derived { struct Base base; int morestuff ; };
According to the C Standard (both C99 and the earlier ANSI Standard), casting a pointer to an aggregate type to pointer to the aggregate's first member is completely legal and defined. Therefore
void f( struct Base* b ) {
if( b->type == DERIVED ) {/* here's the RTTI you asked for, by the way */
Derived* d = (Derived*) b;
int ms = d->morestuff ;....
} } Is completely legal (and yes, under C99 so are the declarations not being at the top of the function.) Of course, C++ would use RTTI, it would use a v-table, and of course, you can build thatDesign & Evolution of C++ can tell you.
Issue 4: You also want structure exception handling, which C++ has.
You additionally mention the desirability of closures a multiple return values. C++ has both, more or less: closures are implemented by functors, classes impersonating function calls by means of operator(); multiple return vales by using classes implicitly, as with templated function makepair.
So you can understand why, on reading your post, I really thought you were making a sly argument for the use of C++. Instead, to me great bemusement, you end by saying you hate C++ for, of all things, references (which are just -- except for a few points -- syntactic sugar for pointers). Give C++ another try, and you may find that hate changing to love.
C is a language with the flexibility and speed of assembly combined with the ease of use of assembly.
Of course, that's tongue in cheek, and yes, C's concept of arrays is perhaps too tied to a specific kind of machine architecture (and to BCPL's concept of arrays),
but
while C is far more portable and easier to code in than assembly, one great feature of C is that, if you know a particular machine's assembly language, you can look at your C code and pretty easily guess what assembly instructions will be generated from it.
I recall when I was first learning C++ -- and no, I'm not a C++-hating C bigot -- one thing that annoyed me was the realization that what seemed a straightforward C++ function call -- or even more straightforward, an operation like i + j, when performed on class instances, could be much much more involved.
(Consider the example I just gave, i + j: in C++ this could easily be i.operator+( j ), which might involve an implicit converting function or constructor to make j into the right type for i's operator+, and operator plus could easily be a virtual function that did some work and then called a super-function to do the rest of the work, and it wouldn't be a good operator+ unless it returned by value, which would mean that there'd be a (probably implicit, in the code) call to the constructor for whatever class i was an instance of. And we haven't even mentioned Handle-Body Idiom or Template Method Pattern or Pimpl Idiom or exception handling yet.)
I soon got over my annoyance when I realized that it was precisely this ability to concentrate this much -- and much of it mostly automatic, as with converting functions of constructor calls -- into the semantics of addition, i + j, that makes C++ such a powerful tool in the hands of the right programmer.
The trade-off, of course, is not being able to see the assembly language instructions in your mind anymore. The good programmer chooses his tools and his trade-offs.
So to bring this back onto the topic of the post, I highly doubt C is dead or even dying or even a bit ruffled around the edges -- there are still, and for the foreseeable future, there will be, very very good reasons to use C -- it's the portable lingua franca of programming, and it's a remarkably clear language that allows one to concisely describe what otherwise would require lots more asembly instructions.
For reference port 113 is the 'ident' identification protocol.
For reference, it's used by sendmail.
Before learning this firewall users who read their logs (me!) will have a paranoia induced moment or two when they notice their host/ISP apparently scanning their ports, and will be even more bemused when they notice the scanning follows a regular period matching the period of their email client's polling.
It is important to note that we Ham Radio operators cannot make any money on this and any pecuniary gain would go to the production company.
Sure you can, see Sec. 97.113 (5)(c)
A control operator may accept compensation as an incident of a teaching position during periods of time when an amateur station is used
by that teacher as a part of classroom instruction at an educational institution.
Just make it a long-distance learning "teachable moment".
I'm not sure where you're thinking of moving to but Wisconsin -- all jokes aside -- is one of the more progressive states in the nation.
And Wisconsin has a long history as a seed-bed of progressivism: it elected and re-elected, to the U.S. House, the Governorship, and the U.S. Senate, progressive Republican Robert La Follette, Sr. from 1884 until his death in 1925.
Few remember Bob La Follette these days, but he's proof that Wisconsin, and Republicans, can be progressive.
But a more familiar Wisconsin name, unfortunately, is that of the man who defeated "Fightin' Bob" La Follette's son, then the incumbent U.S. Senator, in the Republican primary in 1946: "Tail Gunner Joe" McCarthy.
It's perhaps a cautionary tale for the people of Wisconsin, for the decent majority of the Republican Party that does believe in liberty and the Constitution -- and does not believe in trivially amending it --, and for Americans in general: it only takes a few men shouting lies about "Communists in the state Department" -- or about Terrorists -- to sell out the liberties so many Americans have sacrificed, fought, and died for.
Wisconsin's MATRIX is one step in the direction of -- to paraphrase the Book of Genesis, Chapter 25 -- buying a "mess of potage" of worthless security by selling the birthright of our liberties.
And as Joe McCarthy showed us, it only takes a few steps like this before Fightin' Bob La Follette's legacy is forgotten, and Wisconsin's progressivism is a dim memory.
Finally, I wonder whether I'm just being a bit over-stereotypical. I mean, there is a "British feel", sure. But how often does that come out in games
Yes, the fact that Grand Theft auto is British, but that's considered a dirty little secret to be suppressed, is telling.
British gaming needs to take inspiration from its love of its own culture, and not, as the Beatles sung, "hide that love away".
I suggest the following games:
Stiff Upper Lip the game of not showing emotion, set in the dehumanizing and homoerotic milieu of the British Public school;
Sounds Like Class in which the gamer determines the birthplace, social class, and future prospects of a series of avatars, based solely on their accents;
Fun with Football the irreverent, off-the-field game of being the most violent soccer hooligan you can be;
MotherF****r of Parliaments, in which the player competes to come up with the most inventive insults in a Parliamentary session, without going so far as to call down the wrath of the Speaker of the House;
Partition!, a strategy game in which the end of Empire gives the player, "Lord Mountbatten" the opportunity to create two countries and 60 years of enmity between them;
and Bad-Teeth!, the game of identifying British ex-pats all over the world.
"In a set back for the RIAA, last Friday a judge ruled that they have to file lawsuits individually. The judge's decision was that for each John Doe that the RIAA wanted identified they would have to file an individual lawsuit." [According to the article, filing fees, at $130 per case, could amount to over $30,000.]
Overheard in the RIAA boardroom:
But, but,....
When Hilary was running things here, we spent so much buying that legislation, I don't know if we can afford $30,000 -- and for crap like due process and the rule of law!
Let's see, to get back the $30,000 in filing fees, we'll have win suits against... 10 more twelve year-olds!
Did you get anywhere [complaining about spam filtering]? That happened to us at my old job, and the company just stubbornly said "we've had no complaints about it"... I tried pointing out that the person on the phone was complaining, since we'd lost e-mail from funders, but it didn't seem to work.
As far as I can tell, they promptly stopped filtering my email, per my request.
At least, I know I get a lot of spam, including stuff that ought to be obvious spam, like the virus generated "Microsoft Patches". (It's been rather light today, at only 23 spams, but we still have about a quarter of the day to go, only one is a "Microsoft Patch", of course followed by the fake bounce message in case anyone tries replying to it.)
I had to look up the emails about this -- this happened back in December of 2002. Basically, I stopped getting mail on a list -- my host had seen a "large" volume of mail on this list, and had blocked that from address. They let me know this when I asked why the list maintainer was getting 550s when the list tried to send to me. They promptly removed the block, and I assume haven't replaced it, as I get a lot of list mail to this day, in addition to the spam.
Anyway, my host does a pretty decent job for the $12 / year I pay them. So far, I've also had little downtime -- the longest I recall was perhaps six hours? annoying but not nuts, and that was over a holiday weekend iirc -- with them, and Tech Support has always been reasonably prompt -- returning email within several hours at most, and never being clueless -- (emails to billing are also followed up, a little more slowly, but correctly).
At $12/ year per domain, I consider that pretty good. In case you're interested, it's www.hostica.com. Mention "orthogonal", and they'll have no idea who you're talking about.;)
Each time, a few words in, a black bar appeared across the screen to block it out. [ from the article: "DishNetwork subscribers(me!) may have begun to see black bars cover the messages"]
Now, I seem to remember a fuss about how modifying web-proxies (like Proxomitron) which remove ads from web pages, and TIVO-like devices, which allow the editing out or skipping of broadcast ads, violated the creator's copyright.
My feeling is that editing out, as an end-user, is perfectly acceptable, equivalent to glancing away from a TV or scribbling over an ad in a magazine.
But that's because I got the content the creator wished me to get, and I made a decision to ignore it. And indeed, that's what a judge decided in the case of those browser add-ons that replace a site's ads with their own: since the end user (wittingly or nor!) installed it, it's ok.
But were my ISP to start modifying pages I received via my ISP's pipe, I'd be outraged: it's one thing for me to ignore whatever ad is showing on Slashdot today (yes, I use Proxomitron), it's quite another not to have the option to see that ad. Similarly, at one point, my hosting company (not my ISP) was filtering my email for spam. I promptly told them that wasn't what I wanted: I'm paranoid enough to about missing mail (you never know when an old ex-girlfriend is suddenly going to realize she's still in love with you -- and so far none of them have, but I live in hope;) ), and besides, I'm perfectly capable of filtering for spam on my end.
So how can it be legal for Dish to edit out content that's is efficiently advertisements on Viacom's stations?
And how can we let the precedent be set that a carrier, not a creator or an end-user, has any right to do this? Because while what's being edited out is effectively an advertisement by Viacom, it is also an editorial comment. which leads to a slippery slope: if Dish can censor this, can they also censor a story on "60 Minutes" critical of Dish? A new story about, or an advertisement by, a political candidate that Dish doesn't want you to see?
Just because you're the client of some carrier should not mean that that carrier has any right to regulate -- or, as in this case, change what you see. This is dangerous, and desires to be slapped down quickly and decisively.
Yeah... it's an f'en review of five calc books. The author should be committed and never allowed to enter society again.
Me too ! I agree! Me too!
God forbid that anyone -- much less the readers of a site "for nerds [about] stuff that matters' should deviate from a steady diet of Star Wars, Tentacle Anime, and MMORGS.
Because it's more important to know the exact blue-prints of the X-Wing, Y-Wing and Z-Wing fighters than to understand physics -- and that the laws of physics don't actually allow the aerobatic maneuvers these fictional starships are depicted as making.
God forbid that we should know the calculus! Better we should be techno-peasants, with metaphorical manure between our toes, unable to comprehend the technical wizardry we gawp at in the movie houses.
The only reason we all have comparatively cheap PCs on our desks -- or the special effects that makes movies like Star Wars so absorbing (if inaccurate), or the ability to download Anime film or play MMORGS -- is because someone, lots of someones, took the time to learn the calculus -- and metallurgy, and materials engineering, and chemical engineering, and electrical engineering, and even computer science.
So before you "ban" the reviewer from society, please understand that the reason your sole amusement isn't getting chased by a wild boar as each of you tries to make the other lunch, is because of "dweebs" like the reviewer who care about the science and technology that created the society that allows you to have it so good and so easy.
I know this is probably wrong but the Silmarillon is very much like reading The Bible.
Yes, both are
well written, absorbing, full of fantastic -- in the sense of "improbable" -- stories,
both feature scenes of great slaughters in the name of the conflict between good and evil, many predicatd in racial identity -- e.g., elves versus orcs, Israelites versus Canaanites --,
and both have attracted a following of dedicated, one might say fanatical, readers, some of whom shape their lives to fit the books;
and both books have only a tenuous grounding in reality, leading most adults to realize that both are interesting, perhaps comforting, in places insightful, certainly inspiring, but in the end, merely make-believe.
Uh, that is what you meant by the comparison, right?
Ah. So if I claim I got bad service from someone, and then produce some form of evidence to back it up (hello, Photoshop? Pictures of XY's company rep doing something awful, please), then I can set up a domain name and squat legally.
Well, if your claim is false, you can be easily sued for libel.
You see, there are existing remedies to protect against what you propose without resort to the "novel" -- read unprecedented and dangerous -- limitations on free speech that the plaintiff in this case, and too many corporations in general, advocate.
But like most attempted usurpers of freedom, they spread FUD first, claiming that unless freedom is throttled, all sorts of bad things will happen -- and so Draconian new laws and new legal interpretations are needed.
Much like what you're doing in your post -- or, may I be so bold, like the RIAA and its call for judge-less subpoenas, or advocates of the "War on Drugs" and the resulting erosion of 4th amendment rights, or the fear-mongering that brought about the so-called "Patriot Act".
It concerns me that this even got this far... are we going to be validated for everything we say or write - sound's Orwellian.
Dear Mr. Coward:
I represent the owners of the estate of Eric Blair, better known by his nom de plume, "George Orwell".
You may remember Mr. Blair for such tropes as "a boot heel stamping a human face-forever", "the Two-minute Hate", "newspeak", "Animal Farm" and of course, "Big Brother".
What know may not know, but I am now for the record informing you, is that Mr. Blair's Intellectual Property in these and other phrases, including the adjective "Orwellian" itself, has been acquired by The Mouse That Ate The Public Domain, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Corporatism Turns Individuals into ConsumerSheep, Ltd., a division of All Your Base Are Belong To A Few Rich Men and Their Lobbyists, LLC.
As representative of the afore-mentioned corporation, I am writing you to demand that you cease and desist from using the word "Orwellian", or any other Intellectual Property belonging to ny client, except with express written permission.
Should you wish to arrange a limited license to use the word Orwellian -- either on a per use basis, or for a set period --, please contact my office immediately for a rate sheet.
Thank you, A. Lackey
Law Offices of Plutocrat, Prevaricator and Politico, Attorneys at Law
The sincerest form of flattery....
on
Guilty By Association
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· Score: 4, Informative
Guilty By Association
dmf writes ".... With AOL Buddy Lists, Yahoo Messenger, Friendster, and other mappable relationship environments, is it possible the information will soon be used against you? Scenarios such as governments tracking private citizens, investigating terrorist links,...could open the doors for information abuse and misinterpretation of individual ties. What implications can it bring in the future of the personal life?"
Since the whole point of this is to build
social-connection-webs, it's ideal for government crackdown via the guilt by association angle: not only can you find everybody who is emailing to dump.ashcroft@new.american.revolution.org, you can also find -- and investigate -- all the friends of the dissenter, too.
And for anyone who isn't worried that the FBI occasionally oversteps it bounds in investigating dissent, just consider that the social affinity networks of p2p traders could also be subpoenaed: we know Joe uploads mp3s, let's subpoena his email "buddy list" and investigate all those people too.
Yeah, but I'd consider a high-level analysis of my email headers (either sent or received) to be a violation of my privacy. Whether or not I'm mailing to kinky@alterate.life.styles.com, fringe.politcal.groups.require@free.speech.too.org , unpopular.opinions@free.thinkers.net, or falun.gong@is.banned.by.my.dictator.org, it should be nobody's business but my own.
Someone will undoubtedly argue that since headers are sent in the clear anyway, it shouldn't matter, but keeping a database of who mails what to whom only makes abuse -- by freelance busybodies or government spies and censors -- that much the easier.
Having any central server aware of all file trading gives whoever controls -- or can subvert the security of -- that central server a far too broad window into the demographics, politics, proclivities, and beliefs of anyone trading files. While this would be a boon to marketeers, governments, and anyone else whose goal is manipulation and control, it must be anathema to anyone who values privacy and liberty -- from left wing "hippie" to right wing "gun-nut", from closted homosexual to crypto-Christian.
Narita airport can hire out PDAs capable of translating 50,000 Japanese and 25,000 English spoken words.
Great. We're only going to catch *half* of what they are saying...
Tell me about it. I was transiting Narita Airport -- running really late -- when I first encountered one of these "translating" robot/PDAs.
Anyway, it was getting late, and I was running later, and I was afraid I'd already missed my flight, because the airport was nearly deserted.
I turned to one of the ground attendants, to see if I could still catch my plane, and I asked, what happen?
This is how Japanese girl's little friendly-faced translating robot/PDA told me that all that evening's planes had already departed:
The robot/PDA's main screen turn on and it said:
How are you gentlemen !!
All your plane are belong to us !! You have no chance to survive. Make your time !! HA HA HA HA..... Already take off every 'Zig' You know what you doing! Move 'Zig' For Great Justice !!
Great post. In the spirit of "deadlock or consensus", though, wouldn't it make more sense to hold the presidential election separately from House + 1/3 of Senate?
Thanks for the compliment. I think you make a good point: having an year to evaluate a President might indeed give me more insight into my choice for Congressman, and would certainly allow for a more sober and rational evaluation.
But there are some practical downsides. First, recall that when the Founders set up the system, in the much more rural American of 1787, getting to a polling place, for many voters, might take the better part of the day. Having to do that three times every four years (Presidential, then two Congressional elections) might be significantly more onerous than just twice. On the other hand, the Commonwealth of Virginia does hold its elections for state legislature in odd years, pretty might for the reasons you've advanced. I don't know hoe long Virginia's done it this way, however.
The other considerations are that by far the great majority of Congressional seats are not seriously in contention; most incumbents, even more so thanks to modern, computer-aided Gerrymandering, have a stranglehold on their seats. Of the seats that are contested, much is made of the coattail effect of the Presidential candidate -- he'll get the party "base" out to vote, thus helping his party in close races.
On balance, I like your proposal, but given voter apathy -- even today, when it's relatively much easier to get to the polls -- I suspect you'd find little support for it, unfortunately.
Slashdot Mirror
Our future is a positive future. We assume that things are basically going to get better, progress will continue,' Zuckerman says....
So the premise of ther show is that John Ashcroft, Jack Valenti, and RIAA President Cary Sherman are all abducted by aliens before they can repeal the 4th Amendment in favor of the "Copyright is a Boot in the Face Forever Act"?
It had a speakerphone mode so you could stand there and talk into it like Capt. Kirk.
You...
mean you...
could... speak...
into... it like...
this?
And call green...
women to...
see if they... would beam...
up... for a...
date?
I doubt anyone is surprised by Microsoft's, AOL's, etc, complaints, but Google and the like? That seems a bit odd.
Google's a great company for offering an unbiased search with small, tasteful text ads, and for sustaining the newsgroup archives many of us still call DejaGoogle.
So we tend to see Google as one of the "good guys". And to some extent, they are one of the good guys.
That said, Google also records the IP address and the search term of each Google search, potentially amassing a great deal of privacy threatening information about you, and it offers the Goggle tool-bar, which apparently "phones home" data about the sites a user visits.
And then Google gets a pass on this from too many of us, because of the good it does.
Any concentration of personal information in a single entity's hands is a threat, even if that entity is wholly benign, because the existence of this trove of information would at the very least tempt other unscrupulous entities to steal the information. And even if Google is wholly benign now, that's no guarantee that it always will be. And frankly, there's no proof that Google is wholly benign.
This is, incidentally, why we must also be wary of government programs like "Total Information Awareness" and MATRIX: even if they're used for wholly benign purposes, like counter-terrorism -- now, there's no guarantee they won't be subverted -- just as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover subverted the FBI -- for monitoring dissidents or for increasing the personal political power of the men who control these databases.
For Americans: you might be interested to know that, prior to the American Revolution, many convicts were 'transported' to serve out their sentences in Virginia.
Georgia (the U.S. state, not the country and former Soviet republic) was a penal colony at one point, but I've never heard that Virginia was.
Britain began sending transportees to Australia in part because the American Revolution meant that Britain no longer had colonies in America to send them to.
So how does this story affect 'My Rights Online'??
Damn slashdot editors think your rights are the same everywhere.
Because a precedent created anywhere -- but especially in Western democracies -- will be used as justification for the same legislation or rulings elsewhere.
It's a matter of record that on controversial issues, one nation's courts or legislatures will look to what is the prevailing opinion in other democracies -- witness some of the U.S. Supreme Court's various opinion on capital punishment, some of which make reference to the prevailing climate of opinion in Europe.
And it's not mere coincidence that the European Union and Australia is passing laws that look a lot like the DMCA; given world-wide trade, one nation will pressure another nation to bring its laws into conformance with the first's, or into conformance with some international treaty.
So wherever the bell tolls, whether in Canada or Germany or your own homeland, the bell tolls for you. It's in my direct interest to see that my neighbors' rights are secured in their countries, so as to provide a good example to the legislators and judges in my own country.
The only downside of course is that it takes a bit of time (10 ~ 20mins) before a new forwarding account is created and I am only limited to 99 aliases with my current domain name provider.
Get a domain host that provides a "catchall" account, that collects everything sent to your domain that isn't for an explicitly created address (account).
Collect messages for the catchall account with your email client. (Or forward them -- my deal with my host, hostica.com, provides a catchall but only one POP account, so by necessity, the catchall (and the explicit but non-POP accounts) all forward to the single POP account. But for only $12 a year, having to channel everything through a single POP account is a small annoyance.)
Filter the messages in your email client software (or in a proxy server like POPFile), to separate out addresses that hit the catchall that you care about (either care because you want to see them, or care because you've decided that address has been compromised).
The advantage to this is that I don't need to create an account, all I need to do is make up some-address@mydomain.tld. It's so easy that I do it all the time I'm asked for an email address. If that address begins to get a lot of mail, then and only then do I bother to make a filtering rule for it in my email client.
C is a pretty decent language to program in (in some ways better than Java --for example it has function pointers), however it has a few substantial short-comings:
; ; ;
/* here's the RTTI you asked for, by the way */ ; ....
It's funny, as I read this, I really thought it was a tongue-in-chhek post designed to advocate for C++, because almost all the shortcomings you identify in C are remedied by C++. I honestly thought your post would end with some variant on "and that's why I use C++".
As far as your issue zero, header files and linkage, isn't remedied by C++, but it's not a shortcoming of C, per se; it's an issue of the linker, which is a distinct piece of software that in many cases must also be backward compatible.
Issue 1, an "awful standard library" (and I'd take issue with this; the C standard library isn't awful, but of necessity it's the lowest common denominator library, in order to make C available across the greatest numbers of architectures and operating systems) is ver well supplemented by C++'s Standard Template Library (and by the Boost libraries).
Issue 2, that C arrays don't know their own extent, is remedied by using C++'s vectors (or one of several other aggregates).
Issue 3: inheritance; C++ of course has inheritance. You note that you "don't care to have real inheritance with methods and everything, just the ability to inherit from a structure and add more fields to it," plus some RTTI. Please realize that you can do this in C: you can "inherit" a structure, in the sense that you mean, by making the "inherited" structure the first element of the "derived" structure:
enum TYPE { UNKNOWN, BASE, DERIVED }
struct Base { int stuff; TYPE type ; }
struct Derived { struct Base base; int morestuff ; }
According to the C Standard (both C99 and the earlier ANSI Standard), casting a pointer to an aggregate type to pointer to the aggregate's first member is completely legal and defined. Therefore
void f( struct Base* b ) {
if( b->type == DERIVED ) {
Derived* d = (Derived*) b
int ms = d->morestuff ;
}
}
Is completely legal (and yes, under C99 so are the declarations not being at the top of the function.) Of course, C++ would use RTTI, it would use a v-table, and of course, you can build thatDesign & Evolution of C++ can tell you.
Issue 4: You also want structure exception handling, which C++ has.
You additionally mention the desirability of closures a multiple return values. C++ has both, more or less: closures are implemented by functors, classes impersonating function calls by means of operator(); multiple return vales by using classes implicitly, as with templated function makepair.
So you can understand why, on reading your post, I really thought you were making a sly argument for the use of C++. Instead, to me great bemusement, you end by saying you hate C++ for, of all things, references (which are just -- except for a few points -- syntactic sugar for pointers). Give C++ another try, and you may find that hate changing to love.
C is a language with the flexibility and speed of assembly combined with the ease of use of assembly.
Of course, that's tongue in cheek, and yes, C's concept of arrays is perhaps too tied to a specific kind of machine architecture (and to BCPL's concept of arrays),
but
while C is far more portable and easier to code in than assembly, one great feature of C is that, if you know a particular machine's assembly language, you can look at your C code and pretty easily guess what assembly instructions will be generated from it.
I recall when I was first learning C++ -- and no, I'm not a C++-hating C bigot -- one thing that annoyed me was the realization that what seemed a straightforward C++ function call -- or even more straightforward, an operation like i + j, when performed on class instances, could be much much more involved.
(Consider the example I just gave, i + j: in C++ this could easily be i.operator+( j ), which might involve an implicit converting function or constructor to make j into the right type for i's operator+, and operator plus could easily be a virtual function that did some work and then called a super-function to do the rest of the work, and it wouldn't be a good operator+ unless it returned by value, which would mean that there'd be a (probably implicit, in the code) call to the constructor for whatever class i was an instance of. And we haven't even mentioned Handle-Body Idiom or Template Method Pattern or Pimpl Idiom or exception handling yet.)
I soon got over my annoyance when I realized that it was precisely this ability to concentrate this much -- and much of it mostly automatic, as with converting functions of constructor calls -- into the semantics of addition, i + j, that makes C++ such a powerful tool in the hands of the right programmer.
The trade-off, of course, is not being able to see the assembly language instructions in your mind anymore. The good programmer chooses his tools and his trade-offs.
So to bring this back onto the topic of the post, I highly doubt C is dead or even dying or even a bit ruffled around the edges -- there are still, and for the foreseeable future, there will be, very very good reasons to use C -- it's the portable lingua franca of programming, and it's a remarkably clear language that allows one to concisely describe what otherwise would require lots more asembly instructions.
For reference port 113 is the 'ident' identification protocol.
For reference, it's used by sendmail.
Before learning this firewall users who read their logs (me!) will have a paranoia induced moment or two when they notice their host/ISP apparently scanning their ports, and will be even more bemused when they notice the scanning follows a regular period matching the period of their email client's polling.
Fun stuff!
Sure you can, see Sec. 97.113 (5)(c)
Just make it a long-distance learning "teachable moment".
I saw this article in the school newspaper this morning stating that Wisconsin has backed out of the Matrix.
You mean the whole state took the red pill???
I'm not sure where you're thinking of moving to but Wisconsin -- all jokes aside -- is one of the more progressive states in the nation.
And Wisconsin has a long history as a seed-bed of progressivism: it elected and re-elected, to the U.S. House, the Governorship, and the U.S. Senate, progressive Republican Robert La Follette, Sr. from 1884 until his death in 1925.
Few remember Bob La Follette these days, but he's proof that Wisconsin, and Republicans, can be progressive.
But a more familiar Wisconsin name, unfortunately, is that of the man who defeated "Fightin' Bob" La Follette's son, then the incumbent U.S. Senator, in the Republican primary in 1946: "Tail Gunner Joe" McCarthy.
It's perhaps a cautionary tale for the people of Wisconsin, for the decent majority of the Republican Party that does believe in liberty and the Constitution -- and does not believe in trivially amending it --, and for Americans in general: it only takes a few men shouting lies about "Communists in the state Department" -- or about Terrorists -- to sell out the liberties so many Americans have sacrificed, fought, and died for.
Wisconsin's MATRIX is one step in the direction of -- to paraphrase the Book of Genesis, Chapter 25 -- buying a "mess of potage" of worthless security by selling the birthright of our liberties.
And as Joe McCarthy showed us, it only takes a few steps like this before Fightin' Bob La Follette's legacy is forgotten, and Wisconsin's progressivism is a dim memory.
Yes, the fact that Grand Theft auto is British, but that's considered a dirty little secret to be suppressed, is telling.
British gaming needs to take inspiration from its love of its own culture, and not, as the Beatles sung, "hide that love away".
I suggest the following games:
Overheard in the RIAA boardroom:
Did you get anywhere [complaining about spam filtering]? That happened to us at my old job, and the company just stubbornly said "we've had no complaints about it"... I tried pointing out that the person on the phone was complaining, since we'd lost e-mail from funders, but it didn't seem to work.
;)
As far as I can tell, they promptly stopped filtering my email, per my request.
At least, I know I get a lot of spam, including stuff that ought to be obvious spam, like the virus generated "Microsoft Patches". (It's been rather light today, at only 23 spams, but we still have about a quarter of the day to go, only one is a "Microsoft Patch", of course followed by the fake bounce message in case anyone tries replying to it.)
I had to look up the emails about this -- this happened back in December of 2002. Basically, I stopped getting mail on a list -- my host had seen a "large" volume of mail on this list, and had blocked that from address. They let me know this when I asked why the list maintainer was getting 550s when the list tried to send to me. They promptly removed the block, and I assume haven't replaced it, as I get a lot of list mail to this day, in addition to the spam.
Anyway, my host does a pretty decent job for the $12 / year I pay them. So far, I've also had little downtime -- the longest I recall was perhaps six hours? annoying but not nuts, and that was over a holiday weekend iirc -- with them, and Tech Support has always been reasonably prompt -- returning email within several hours at most, and never being clueless -- (emails to billing are also followed up, a little more slowly, but correctly).
At $12/ year per domain, I consider that pretty good. In case you're interested, it's www.hostica.com. Mention "orthogonal", and they'll have no idea who you're talking about.
If you really want a MeFi account, contact the owner via email with something post-worthy. It worked for me...
.sig when I saw MeFi had posted the Calculus Slashdot story.
You mean, something for their Front Page? I have to admit, I put up that
I've become a big MeFi reader, and sometimes I just itch to contribute my two-cents worth.
Do you think a snapshot of my Slashdot posting history would help (eleven +5s in my last 24)?
Each time, a few words in, a black bar appeared across the screen to block it out.
;) ), and besides, I'm perfectly capable of filtering for spam on my end.
[ from the article: "DishNetwork subscribers(me!) may have begun to see black bars cover the messages"]
Now, I seem to remember a fuss about how modifying web-proxies (like Proxomitron) which remove ads from web pages, and TIVO-like devices, which allow the editing out or skipping of broadcast ads, violated the creator's copyright.
My feeling is that editing out, as an end-user, is perfectly acceptable, equivalent to glancing away from a TV or scribbling over an ad in a magazine.
But that's because I got the content the creator wished me to get, and I made a decision to ignore it. And indeed, that's what a judge decided in the case of those browser add-ons that replace a site's ads with their own: since the end user (wittingly or nor!) installed it, it's ok.
But were my ISP to start modifying pages I received via my ISP's pipe, I'd be outraged: it's one thing for me to ignore whatever ad is showing on Slashdot today (yes, I use Proxomitron), it's quite another not to have the option to see that ad. Similarly, at one point, my hosting company (not my ISP) was filtering my email for spam. I promptly told them that wasn't what I wanted: I'm paranoid enough to about missing mail (you never know when an old ex-girlfriend is suddenly going to realize she's still in love with you -- and so far none of them have, but I live in hope
So how can it be legal for Dish to edit out content that's is efficiently advertisements on Viacom's stations?
And how can we let the precedent be set that a carrier, not a creator or an end-user, has any right to do this? Because while what's being edited out is effectively an advertisement by Viacom, it is also an editorial comment. which leads to a slippery slope: if Dish can censor this, can they also censor a story on "60 Minutes" critical of Dish? A new story about, or an advertisement by, a political candidate that Dish doesn't want you to see?
Just because you're the client of some carrier should not mean that that carrier has any right to regulate -- or, as in this case, change what you see. This is dangerous, and desires to be slapped down quickly and decisively.
BTW, does anyone else think the SCO logo there looks like a big red beachball with Mickey Mouse's head on the side???
Yeah, I just assumed it was an oblique reference to the popular Disney movie -- because, after all, Darl is the "Lyin' King".
Yeah... it's an f'en review of five calc books. The author should be committed and never allowed to enter society again.
Me too ! I agree! Me too!
God forbid that anyone -- much less the readers of a site "for nerds [about] stuff that matters' should deviate from a steady diet of Star Wars, Tentacle Anime, and MMORGS.
Because it's more important to know the exact blue-prints of the X-Wing, Y-Wing and Z-Wing fighters than to understand physics -- and that the laws of physics don't actually allow the aerobatic maneuvers these fictional starships are depicted as making.
God forbid that we should know the calculus! Better we should be techno-peasants, with metaphorical manure between our toes, unable to comprehend the technical wizardry we gawp at in the movie houses.
The only reason we all have comparatively cheap PCs on our desks -- or the special effects that makes movies like Star Wars so absorbing (if inaccurate), or the ability to download Anime film or play MMORGS -- is because someone, lots of someones, took the time to learn the calculus -- and metallurgy, and materials engineering, and chemical engineering, and electrical engineering, and even computer science.
So before you "ban" the reviewer from society, please understand that the reason your sole amusement isn't getting chased by a wild boar as each of you tries to make the other lunch, is because of "dweebs" like the reviewer who care about the science and technology that created the society that allows you to have it so good and so easy.
Yes, both are
Uh, that is what you meant by the comparison, right?
Ah. So if I claim I got bad service from someone, and then produce some form of evidence to back it up (hello, Photoshop? Pictures of XY's company rep doing something awful, please), then I can set up a domain name and squat legally.
Well, if your claim is false, you can be easily sued for libel.
You see, there are existing remedies to protect against what you propose without resort to the "novel" -- read unprecedented and dangerous -- limitations on free speech that the plaintiff in this case, and too many corporations in general, advocate.
But like most attempted usurpers of freedom, they spread FUD first, claiming that unless freedom is throttled, all sorts of bad things will happen -- and so Draconian new laws and new legal interpretations are needed.
Much like what you're doing in your post -- or, may I be so bold, like the RIAA and its call for judge-less subpoenas, or advocates of the "War on Drugs" and the resulting erosion of 4th amendment rights, or the fear-mongering that brought about the so-called "Patriot Act".
It concerns me that this even got this far ... are we going to be validated for everything we say or write - sound's Orwellian.
Dear Mr. Coward:
I represent the owners of the estate of Eric Blair, better known by his nom de plume, "George Orwell".
You may remember Mr. Blair for such tropes as "a boot heel stamping a human face-forever", "the Two-minute Hate", "newspeak", "Animal Farm" and of course, "Big Brother".
What know may not know, but I am now for the record informing you, is that Mr. Blair's Intellectual Property in these and other phrases, including the adjective "Orwellian" itself, has been acquired by The Mouse That Ate The Public Domain, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Corporatism Turns Individuals into ConsumerSheep, Ltd., a division of All Your Base Are Belong To A Few Rich Men and Their Lobbyists, LLC.
As representative of the afore-mentioned corporation, I am writing you to demand that you cease and desist from using the word "Orwellian", or any other Intellectual Property belonging to ny client, except with express written permission.
Should you wish to arrange a limited license to use the word Orwellian -- either on a per use basis, or for a set period --, please contact my office immediately for a rate sheet.
Thank you,
A. Lackey
Law Offices of
Plutocrat, Prevaricator and Politico,
Attorneys at Law
dmf writes ".... With AOL Buddy Lists, Yahoo Messenger, Friendster, and other mappable relationship environments, is it possible the information will soon be used against you? Scenarios such as governments tracking private citizens, investigating terrorist links,
Wasn't there a front page post about bloggers plaigarizing other bloggers today?
This sounds so familiar.
It reminds me of this post:
And this post
And this one too:
Tell me about it. I was transiting Narita Airport -- running really late -- when I first encountered one of these "translating" robot/PDAs.
Anyway, it was getting late, and I was running later, and I was afraid I'd already missed my flight, because the airport was nearly deserted.
I turned to one of the ground attendants, to see if I could still catch my plane, and I asked, what happen?
This is how Japanese girl's little friendly-faced translating robot/PDA told me that all that evening's planes had already departed:
The robot/PDA's main screen turn on and it said:
Great post. In the spirit of "deadlock or consensus", though, wouldn't it make more sense to hold the presidential election separately from House + 1/3 of Senate?
Thanks for the compliment. I think you make a good point: having an year to evaluate a President might indeed give me more insight into my choice for Congressman, and would certainly allow for a more sober and rational evaluation.
But there are some practical downsides. First, recall that when the Founders set up the system, in the much more rural American of 1787, getting to a polling place, for many voters, might take the better part of the day. Having to do that three times every four years (Presidential, then two Congressional elections) might be significantly more onerous than just twice. On the other hand, the Commonwealth of Virginia does hold its elections for state legislature in odd years, pretty might for the reasons you've advanced. I don't know hoe long Virginia's done it this way, however.
The other considerations are that by far the great majority of Congressional seats are not seriously in contention; most incumbents, even more so thanks to modern, computer-aided Gerrymandering, have a stranglehold on their seats. Of the seats that are contested, much is made of the coattail effect of the Presidential candidate -- he'll get the party "base" out to vote, thus helping his party in close races.
On balance, I like your proposal, but given voter apathy -- even today, when it's relatively much easier to get to the polls -- I suspect you'd find little support for it, unfortunately.