Slashdot is really making me sick lately as it has become home to Anti-American/Bush trolls... who get modded UP!
Brother, I'm by no means anti-American.
I've been an American patriot for as long as I can remember. I grew up reading stories of our Revolution against British tyranny, and memorizing -- just for my own edification -- the opening paragraphs of Mr. Jefferson's Declaration, and Patrick Henry's "if this be treason."
I've always been proud of my country's liberties, and my countrymen's willingness to defend that liberty.
And I'm no typical "liberal": I still cringe when I see Hanoi Jane Fonda, and I still wish Clinton had been impeached.
It is precisely because I'm a patriot that I miss no opportunity to point out how the current administration threatens to erode our liberties and our love for those liberties.
As a patriot, -- as someone who loves my country -- I consider it my duty to recall not only America's great ideals, but also those times we've fallen short of those ideals. To recall the acceptance of slavery written into our greatest documents, to recall the Alien and Sedition Acts, Mitchell Palmer, the internment of Japanese citizens, Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar's COINTELPRO.
Wake up and smell the jack-boots. It's happened before -- it's happened here -- and it's my duty as a patriot to point out "designated free speech zones", police investigation and intimidation of peaceful protestors, the indefinite imprisonment of U.S. citizens without judicial review, American government complicity in torture by foreign governments, warrantless searches, and the desire of John Ashcroft to have the power to revoke the citizenship of any American he distrusts.
If I really were anti-American, if I really wanted to see the American way of life and liberty banished from the earth, I'd be sitting back and cheering on the current administration.
As placing microphones on every building in London or Paris to measure noise was not practical
The Bush administration today announced strong support for the reduction of noise pollution in America. Environmental organizations, keenly aware of the administration's poor record on pollution, expressed shock at this surprise move.
Making the announcement for the administration were Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and (retired) Admiral John Poindexter. Attorney General Ashcroft explained that the Justice Department would generously fund a pilot project to monitor noise pollution in major urban areas known to harbor dissidents and Democrats. Ashcroft proclaimed that "Everyone, and especially the less-loyal elements in America, have a right to be free of the noise pollution caused by anti-war and anti-World Bank protestors, non-Christians, and really, anyone else who questions authority."
Imagine John Ashcroft, Admiral Poindexter, and the National Security Agency using a Beowulf cluster of these to scan everybody's email.
I wonder if there's a Bayesian filter that picks out athiests, free-thinkers, commies, anti-war activists, and Democrats.
Pass that list through a geo-locator, and the thought police can be at your door by midnight. (According to Solzhenitsyn, they always knock on your door at midnight.)
Reichsminister John Ashcroft will not neglect to secure full funding for his SS.
Of course, to do this, some luxuries will have to be dispensed with, just for the duration of the war. Luxuries like that pesky 4th Amendment. And like "designated free speech zones" for demonstrators. After all, anyone who criticizes the government is supporting terrorism.
But be confident, Citizen! We're doing all of this to keep you safe during the Permanent Crisis. We'll even tell you know what opinions are safe for you to believe!
And of course, if you disagree, we'll be happy to record your objections. Just let us see your papers, Citizen!
If the moon flew planes into our skyscrapers, we would have people on it inside of a week.:)
If current events are any guide, we'd have troops bogged down in a quagmire, looking for non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, in a Middle Eastern country with no relation to the moon beyond its dominant religion using the crescent moon as a symbol of their faith.
And regardless of whether or not the job was done, we would leave the moon just in time for our President to use the "victory" footage in his re-election campaign.
In the meantime, the Justice Department would use the threat of moon-men to justify warrantless searches of your library borrowing, while granting even more power to the very intelligence agencies that failed to predict the attack in the first place.
I hope the quality of the photos improves before they get there
It doesn't even look like Mars. There's no John Carter fighting a four-armed green Thark for the hand of Dejah Thoris, no Michael Valentine Smith being taught by The Old Ones, no "Reds" disputing "Greens" over terraforming.
The only suspense left is wondering if NASA will confuse English and metric measurements again.
We got to the moon, and then we pissed it all away with the "space truck" -- and we don't even maintain those well enough to keep them from blowing up.
Taking advantage of the popular conception that commercial softare is somehow more reliable or more completley audited than free/shareware (in my experience, there's no particular correlation) means that McBride is the one who's playing semantic games.
You're right about McBride playing semantic games, but it's a different game than you -- and Groklaw -- think.
When the SCO letter says (emphasis mine) that
Commercial software is built by carefully selected and screened teams of programmers working to build proprietary, secure software. This process is designed to monitor
the security and ownership of intellectual property rights associated with the code.
McBride doesn't mean the security of the executable, in terms of exploiting its bad code to crack the machine that code is running on.
McBride is talking about the security of the source and the commerical software company's rights to any "Intellectual Property" and any financial gain arising from that source. He's not talking about the end-user's or purchaser's security, he's talking about the proprietary trade secrets, copyrights, and patents of the owner of the source code.
It's the same semantic shift used by advocates of Digital Rights Management -- the rights being managed and secured are those of the producer/owner, not those of the consumer/purchaser. which is why it's often more honest to call it Digital Restrictions Management.
When SCO writes about "carefully selected and screened teams of programmers", that doesn't mean screened to exclude bad coders who make the software vulnerable to viruses; it means screened to exclude programmers who might reveal company "secrets", or "pollute" the company with "viral licensing", i.e. any GPL'd code.
Now, of course, SCO is half right. Hang on, before you decide to smite me. SCO is right: by definition Open Source software does not try to protect proprietary rights; it does attempt to protect copyright, but under the GPL allows the copyright to be licensed under extremly generous terms, terms that also make it impossible to keep the source code secret. So 2 out of 3 for SCO on this point.
The other side of SCO's contention is that Open Source software creation doesn't have mechanisms in place to prevent the incorporation of unlicensed code in OSS code. Here SCO's argument stumbles: OSS may implement as many or as few "Intellectual Property" safeguards on incorporated code as any commerical software creator. A commerical house might, wittingly or nor, plagiarize code; we've certainly seen commerical appropriations of GPL'd code. What SCO wants to imply is that commercial software houses have a greater interest in these safeguards, because they don't want their copyrights to be challenged; but as I mentioned above, GPL'd software is copyrighted too, and OSS software creators have a real and non-trivial interest in retaining their copyrights. So on this half of the argument, SCO is dead wrong.
So all SCO is doing in this letter is saying that commercial software creators try harder to keep their source code secret, because they want to make money selling executables (except that since it's his secret he wants to keep from you, McBride spells "secret" "s-e-c-u-r-e") and that Open Source software creators don't keep source code secret. All they are doing is stating a tautology: surprise, surprise, Open Source software produces source that is -- wait for it -- open.
Now as to why this should matter to end users, it's all in OSS's favor: would you, end-user, prefer code "secured" so that you can't review the source, or "open" so that, if you need to, you can? Closed source software only benefits closed source crreators.
But Darl can't write a letter saying, "It's better for me and worse for you, Fortune 1500, for you to pay me for closed software you can't review or change, rather than using free software. Well, he could, but it wouldn't convice many people. So the need to employ the semantic shift from "secret" to "secured" to "secure".
To hell with estimating, I'd rather have a firm grasp on the number.
There's a reason I said estimate: it's more "hands on", and to ensure accuracy, I'd have to repeat the process many times.
Many, many times. All in the interest of science, of course. Hubba, hubba.
Yes to AOL, no to broadband?
on
Who Is An ISP?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...access to proprietary content, information, and other services as part of a package of services offered to consumers. Such term does not include telecommunications services.
As I (IANAL) read it, it seems narrowly tailored to include AOL ("proprietary content") and exclude DSL-providing Baby Bells and possibly cable companies ("not... telecommunications services") (I'm not sure whether cable companies are "telecommunications services".)
PA said this was inspired by this article. Why don't we all write angry letters to the editor and tell them just how wrong they are for publishing that kind of garbage?
Screw that.
If I can find the secret chamber behind the swastika banner where the mega-blaster-rifle and extra ammo are hidden, I'll take the concealed elevator to the hidden level where the hearaldnet.com's offices are, and blast away at them and their Nazi henchmen until my hit points are in the red 10% zone.
And those muggles say playing "Castle Wolfenstein" has warped my sense of reality.
For years, gamers have been looked down upon by the media. We are said to be crazy lunatics.... So if you feel like showing the world that gamers are compassionate people too, then head on over to the main Penny Arcade page, and scroll down for details.
As a gay black man born Jewish who converted to the Muslim faith, many people irrationally believe that I recruit young men into a homosexual lifestyle while raping white women and making matzos with the blood of murdered Christian children on my way to planning to blow up airplanes for Allah.
While these prejudices are incorrect, and in truth have been practiced by few or none of the people of my sexual orientation/race/gender/ethnicity/religion, I feel that rather than denouce those ignorant persons who accuse me of those crimes, it is better buy them off.
I hope that by bribing the world, I will gain the grudging acceptance of people who will still whisper behind my back and point accusing fingers at me when they think I'm not looking.
So if you're straight or white or female or Christian or any kind of non-Muslim, please leave me the name of your favorite charity, so that I may begin to pay you to hate me a little less. I hope that when I've contributed enough, you might even call me a compasionate fag coon penis-owning hebe raghead.
Most spammers can verify the validity of your email address because of those script images (ex ), right?
Not if your firewall prohibits your email client from connecting to port 80.
In my setup, my email client is only allowed to connect to ports 25 and 110, and those only at my host's mail server.
So all those web bugs and pictures come through as broken links. I can still click on URLs in an email, because clicking a link passes the address to my web browser, which is allowed out (not directly out, of course, but via two proxies that reformat HTML and remove cookies.)
So even though I'm running the notorious Microsoft Outlook in "show preview" mode, I have no problems.
No, according to your link, Out-Of-Warranty Pricing [...] - Battery Service: $99.00 USD: labor, parts, and a 90-day guarantee on materials and workmanship, plus $6.95 shipping. $105.95 USD total.
Hey, less than $106! Great price! And with a whole 90 days of warranty!
Slashdot Mirror
no, I'm a nineteen year old geek girl who wishes to god she'd started sooner
<Voice='Austin Powers'>Yeahh, baaby, let's get stahrted!</voice>
I don't guarantee that this would keep forensics guys from finding stuff
The forensics guys? Huh?
Hell, running strings on your files will find the stuff.
If I upload 500 photos a month to the net Each of them contain something in the photo
Makes you wonder about the crap floods on Slashdot. (Or, more realistically, on usenet.)
John Walker's eclectic site, fourmilab.org (fourmilab.ch) has a JavaScript (ECMAScript) stenography app.
He also offers a public domain stenography app in portable C.
Those looking for really random numbers, of course, will know about his HotBits.
Slashdot is really making me sick lately as it has become home to Anti-American/Bush trolls... who get modded UP!
Brother, I'm by no means anti-American.
I've been an American patriot for as long as I can remember. I grew up reading stories of our Revolution against British tyranny, and memorizing -- just for my own edification -- the opening paragraphs of Mr. Jefferson's Declaration, and Patrick Henry's "if this be treason."
I've always been proud of my country's liberties, and my countrymen's willingness to defend that liberty.
And I'm no typical "liberal": I still cringe when I see Hanoi Jane Fonda, and I still wish Clinton had been impeached.
It is precisely because I'm a patriot that I miss no opportunity to point out how the current administration threatens to erode our liberties and our love for those liberties.
As a patriot, -- as someone who loves my country -- I consider it my duty to recall not only America's great ideals, but also those times we've fallen short of those ideals. To recall the acceptance of slavery written into our greatest documents, to recall the Alien and Sedition Acts, Mitchell Palmer, the internment of Japanese citizens, Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar's COINTELPRO.
Wake up and smell the jack-boots. It's happened before -- it's happened here -- and it's my duty as a patriot to point out "designated free speech zones", police investigation and intimidation of peaceful protestors, the indefinite imprisonment of U.S. citizens without judicial review, American government complicity in torture by foreign governments, warrantless searches, and the desire of John Ashcroft to have the power to revoke the citizenship of any American he distrusts.
If I really were anti-American, if I really wanted to see the American way of life and liberty banished from the earth, I'd be sitting back and cheering on the current administration.
As placing microphones on every building in London or Paris to measure noise was not practical
The Bush administration today announced strong support for the reduction of noise pollution in America. Environmental organizations, keenly aware of the administration's poor record on pollution, expressed shock at this surprise move.
Making the announcement for the administration were Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and (retired) Admiral John Poindexter. Attorney General Ashcroft explained that the Justice Department would generously fund a pilot project to monitor noise pollution in major urban areas known to harbor dissidents and Democrats. Ashcroft proclaimed that "Everyone, and especially the less-loyal elements in America, have a right to be free of the noise pollution caused by anti-war and anti-World Bank protestors, non-Christians, and really, anyone else who questions authority."
Privacy issue my ass.
It's a contractual issue.
The employer (which happens to be the state) wants to know if the employee is really doing the work (or as much of the work as) the employee claims.
This is not about tracking where I go after work, or if I visit my mistress for an extra-martial screw.
It's all about ensuring the state gets what it pays for, and any tracking is done exclusively during the employee's work.
This is legal, and this is good.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of this
Imagine John Ashcroft, Admiral Poindexter, and the National Security Agency using a Beowulf cluster of these to scan everybody's email.
I wonder if there's a Bayesian filter that picks out athiests, free-thinkers, commies, anti-war activists, and Democrats.
Pass that list through a geo-locator, and the thought police can be at your door by midnight. (According to Solzhenitsyn, they always knock on your door at midnight.)
Domestic problems (healthcare, SS, etc . . .) remain neglected.
Now you're just wrong about that!
Reichsminister John Ashcroft will not neglect to secure full funding for his SS.
Of course, to do this, some luxuries will have to be dispensed with, just for the duration of the war. Luxuries like that pesky 4th Amendment. And like "designated free speech zones" for demonstrators. After all, anyone who criticizes the government is supporting terrorism.
But be confident, Citizen! We're doing all of this to keep you safe during the Permanent Crisis. We'll even tell you know what opinions are safe for you to believe!
And of course, if you disagree, we'll be happy to record your objections. Just let us see your papers, Citizen!
If the moon flew planes into our skyscrapers, we would have people on it inside of a week. :)
If current events are any guide, we'd have troops bogged down in a quagmire, looking for non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, in a Middle Eastern country with no relation to the moon beyond its dominant religion using the crescent moon as a symbol of their faith.
And regardless of whether or not the job was done, we would leave the moon just in time for our President to use the "victory" footage in his re-election campaign.
In the meantime, the Justice Department would use the threat of moon-men to justify warrantless searches of your library borrowing, while granting even more power to the very intelligence agencies that failed to predict the attack in the first place.
I hope the quality of the photos improves before they get there
It doesn't even look like Mars. There's no John Carter fighting a four-armed green Thark for the hand of Dejah Thoris, no Michael Valentine Smith being taught by The Old Ones, no "Reds" disputing "Greens" over terraforming.
The only suspense left is wondering if NASA will confuse English and metric measurements again.
We got to the moon, and then we pissed it all away with the "space truck" -- and we don't even maintain those well enough to keep them from blowing up.
Growing up sucks.
You're right about McBride playing semantic games, but it's a different game than you -- and Groklaw -- think.
When the SCO letter says (emphasis mine) that
McBride doesn't mean the security of the executable, in terms of exploiting its bad code to crack the machine that code is running on.
McBride is talking about the security of the source and the commerical software company's rights to any "Intellectual Property" and any financial gain arising from that source. He's not talking about the end-user's or purchaser's security, he's talking about the proprietary trade secrets, copyrights, and patents of the owner of the source code.
It's the same semantic shift used by advocates of Digital Rights Management -- the rights being managed and secured are those of the producer/owner, not those of the consumer/purchaser. which is why it's often more honest to call it Digital Restrictions Management.
When SCO writes about "carefully selected and screened teams of programmers", that doesn't mean screened to exclude bad coders who make the software vulnerable to viruses; it means screened to exclude programmers who might reveal company "secrets", or "pollute" the company with "viral licensing", i.e. any GPL'd code.
Now, of course, SCO is half right. Hang on, before you decide to smite me. SCO is right: by definition Open Source software does not try to protect proprietary rights; it does attempt to protect copyright, but under the GPL allows the copyright to be licensed under extremly generous terms, terms that also make it impossible to keep the source code secret. So 2 out of 3 for SCO on this point.
The other side of SCO's contention is that Open Source software creation doesn't have mechanisms in place to prevent the incorporation of unlicensed code in OSS code. Here SCO's argument stumbles: OSS may implement as many or as few "Intellectual Property" safeguards on incorporated code as any commerical software creator. A commerical house might, wittingly or nor, plagiarize code; we've certainly seen commerical appropriations of GPL'd code. What SCO wants to imply is that commercial software houses have a greater interest in these safeguards, because they don't want their copyrights to be challenged; but as I mentioned above, GPL'd software is copyrighted too, and OSS software creators have a real and non-trivial interest in retaining their copyrights. So on this half of the argument, SCO is dead wrong.
So all SCO is doing in this letter is saying that commercial software creators try harder to keep their source code secret, because they want to make money selling executables (except that since it's his secret he wants to keep from you, McBride spells "secret" "s-e-c-u-r-e") and that Open Source software creators don't keep source code secret. All they are doing is stating a tautology: surprise, surprise, Open Source software produces source that is -- wait for it -- open.
Now as to why this should matter to end users, it's all in OSS's favor: would you, end-user, prefer code "secured" so that you can't review the source, or "open" so that, if you need to, you can? Closed source software only benefits closed source crreators.
But Darl can't write a letter saying, "It's better for me and worse for you, Fortune 1500, for you to pay me for closed software you can't review or change, rather than using free software. Well, he could, but it wouldn't convice many people. So the need to employ the semantic shift from "secret" to "secured" to "secure".
For Umberto's third record form -- organic memory -- I live in BC
Yeah, yeah, most people in BC had to rely on organic memory -- papyrus and vellum were for the rich only.
Stop living in the past, Homer!
So.... If you are running MS IIS your best security measure is to pretend to be running Apache?
No. It's to wave your hands and intone "These are not the servers you're looking for."
It requires the Obi Wan Server Mask, however.
To hell with estimating, I'd rather have a firm grasp on the number.
There's a reason I said estimate: it's more "hands on", and to ensure accuracy, I'd have to repeat the process many times.
Many, many times. All in the interest of science, of course. Hubba, hubba.
...access to proprietary content, information, and other services as part of a package of services offered to consumers. Such term does not include telecommunications services.
As I (IANAL) read it, it seems narrowly tailored to include AOL ("proprietary content") and exclude DSL-providing Baby Bells and possibly cable companies ("not... telecommunications services") (I'm not sure whether cable companies are "telecommunications services".)
Personally, I prefer smaller asses and hard tits.
There's a name for those: they're called "boys".
It's a chick who solved it
Math chicks always get me hot. And she is one hot math chick.
I'd love to estimate the area under her curves.
PA said this was inspired by this article. Why don't we all write angry letters to the editor and tell them just how wrong they are for publishing that kind of garbage?
Screw that.
If I can find the secret chamber behind the swastika banner where the mega-blaster-rifle and extra ammo are hidden, I'll take the concealed elevator to the hidden level where the hearaldnet.com's offices are, and blast away at them and their Nazi henchmen until my hit points are in the red 10% zone.
And those muggles say playing "Castle Wolfenstein" has warped my sense of reality.
For years, gamers have been looked down upon by the media. We are said to be crazy lunatics.... So if you feel like showing the world that gamers are compassionate people too, then head on over to the main Penny Arcade page, and scroll down for details.
As a gay black man born Jewish who converted to the Muslim faith, many people irrationally believe that I recruit young men into a homosexual lifestyle while raping white women and making matzos with the blood of murdered Christian children on my way to planning to blow up airplanes for Allah.
While these prejudices are incorrect, and in truth have been practiced by few or none of the people of my sexual orientation/race/gender/ethnicity/religion, I feel that rather than denouce those ignorant persons who accuse me of those crimes, it is better buy them off.
I hope that by bribing the world, I will gain the grudging acceptance of people who will still whisper behind my back and point accusing fingers at me when they think I'm not looking.
So if you're straight or white or female or Christian or any kind of non-Muslim, please leave me the name of your favorite charity, so that I may begin to pay you to hate me a little less. I hope that when I've contributed enough, you might even call me a compasionate fag coon penis-owning hebe raghead.
Most spammers can verify the validity of your email address because of those script images (ex ), right?
Not if your firewall prohibits your email client from connecting to port 80.
In my setup, my email client is only allowed to connect to ports 25 and 110, and those only at my host's mail server.
So all those web bugs and pictures come through as broken links. I can still click on URLs in an email, because clicking a link passes the address to my web browser, which is allowed out (not directly out, of course, but via two proxies that reformat HTML and remove cookies.)
So even though I'm running the notorious Microsoft Outlook in "show preview" mode, I have no problems.
Precisely. Mod parent up, mod grandparent down.
Given what I'm seeing in the spam I'm currently getting, the advert label will probably look like this:
4dv3r7153m3n7
(or be composed of European characters which Slashcode won't properly show)
or for the really upscale spammers with thesaureses:
Neither do iPod batteries [cost $255]
No, according to your link,
Out-Of-Warranty Pricing
[...]
- Battery Service: $99.00 USD: labor, parts, and a 90-day guarantee on materials and workmanship, plus $6.95 shipping. $105.95 USD total.
Hey, less than $106! Great price! And with a whole 90 days of warranty!
LA County has banned the use of the terms 'Master/Slave'
Is this the same LA County that has rampant police corruption and brutality problems?
The one in the state, California, that is facing a massive deficit?
Glad to know they have their priorities right.
wow! i wonder how they'll use that old meow mix commercial...
Ok, first edit out the cat, and photoshop in the penguin, and we have it sing,
"li li, li li, liNUX!"