if you can't find a lawyer to represent you on contingency, it's crap.
Spoken like a true lawyer...
A lot of legally sound cases require more lawyer time to litigate than any contingency could pay for. For cases with total damages in the $10k area and/or where the most important part isn't monetary damages but injunctive relief, it is extremely hard to find a lawyer to take any but the simplest and surest of cases on contingency. In most places the Small Claims limit is so low (is is only $10k or higher in 6 states, and the median is $5k) that no lawyer who stands a chance of being worth having will bother.
Antibacterial soaps are a marketing ploy and nothing more...all soaps are antibacterial.
True, but the post you are responding to does have a valid point. The "antibacterial" soaps have ingredients other than soaps and synthetic detergents (primarily triclosan) which have specific antimicrobial properties. Soap and synthetic detergents (commonly Sodium laureth sulfate in hand soap) are antibacterial in rather gross and non-specific ways: they bind both water and lipids, and so disrupt cell structure physically by breaking down cellular membranes. The greater toxicity of soaps to bacteria than the people they are stuck to is largely due to the fact that the human cells involved have more complex membranes and are generally already dead and hardened with protein, and they provide an armor of sorts. Immerse any living human cell in soapy water that would kill a bacterium, and the human cell will die just the same.
Triclosan is believed to be more toxic to microbes than people because it disrupts critical bacterial enzymes that humans simply do not have. The flip side of that is ugly: mutations in the genes coding those enzymes can result in Triclosan-resistent bacteria. So we are awash in Triclosan-containing soaps and even toothpaste which may be killing off some small increment more bacteria than if we didn't use it in soap, and flushing the stuff down our drains, some getting there by way of our guts. Is it killing off bacteria we want to keep around? Maybe. Is it creating an environmental pressure for the evolution of Triclosan-resistant bacteria? Definitely. This is a particularl;y bad thing because Triclosan is used in stronger concentrations in medical disinfecting. Pervading the environment with the stuff means that we have this huge breeding reservoir for a resistant strain, and we'll know it exists when it makes its way into hospitals that rely on Triclosan...
And the stuff might not be as human-safe as once thought. Ignoring the issue of effects on symbiotic bacteria, Triclosan may well disrupt some human enzymes, just not the obviously critical one it hits in bacteria. Anyone who claims a solid answer to that mystery is probably selling some variety of snake oil (either "long-acting toothpaste" or "detoxifying herbaceuticals" or "cutting board disinfectant" or "colon cleansing")
Defense perhaps, but not against a perceived attack from the tester. That rate (even if it was once every 7.5 seconds) isn't significant for a high-volume mail server. It MAY however be catching the outward appearance of a more subtle defense against a real nuisance for mail systems: spam.
Well-behaved SMTP senders (i.e. outbound MTA's) will need exactly one of the 16 IP's obtained from a mail exchanger resolution of yahoo.com to be up and accepting mail in order to get a message handed off swiftly enough that most people sending them mail won't notice any delay. Many senders of spam optimize for getting through as many addresses as fast as they can, without really caring about any single address. With the bulk of addresses sitting behind mail systems that can accept messages for them in 5 seconds all told, spammers who are largely squatting on resources whose owners are likely to kick them off at any moment and who need to hit as many targets as possible will not spend the 20-300 seconds it might take to find a working mail server for Yahoo.
Faking poor availability for exterior mail exchangers is an interesting trick, particularly for a huge mail system where DNS-based load balancing is a natural choice and you have a lot of unused IP address space that you can throw into service as decoys. I'm unconvinced that it is really a worthwhile trick, but I know from firsthand experience that for some domains, growing the number of fully functional mail exchangers grows how much spam the domain as a whole is offered. If you knock one of a set of generally symmetric members of a set of mail servers offline, only some of the spam ends up coming thru the other machines while all of the legit mail makes it in just fine, as long as the remaining machines can handle the load.
You forgot to mention the awkward wording and unbroken stream of grammatical errors. My daughter is entering 9th grade, and I'd be really disappointed if she wrote anything for school like that.
The problem is that Apple repeatedly refused, over the years, to admit that trying to force a *one button* mouse on a populace that had become used to two button mice was a stupid idea.
I think that overstates the situation. Multi-button mice have been available for the Mac since the 80's. Kensington and Logitech owe their existence to Apple making that possible in the OS but staying out of that aftermarket. The effect of Apple only selling one-button mice was more significant on developers, because apps had to work with a one-button mouse. From the very first Apple apps, the modifier-key(s)+click trick was used as an alternative to having more buttons and that is what 3rd-party multi-button mice posted as events for their other buttons by default. For nearly a decade, Apple has directly supported multi-button mice in the OS and with HI guidelines but has stayed out of that market themselves.
This is really more about marketing and ending misperceptions more than it is a real novelty. Supporting multi-button mice is not new for Apple, selling one with their name on it is. It ends the negative myth around the one-button mouse and drops that learning curve for Windows switchers from the insurmountable "Control-click is right-click" to "Here's your multi-button mouse with an Apple logo."
I don't think it even speaks to my point. That Apple makes heavy use of contextual menus in a few niche products (all of which I believe originated as outside products bought by Apple, FWIW) does not conflict with anything I wrote. Contextual menus are not intrinsically poor UI design and don't depend on multi-button mice. Contextual menus on MacOS as a system UI element date to MacOS 8.0 and had previously been implemented since System 6 by various 3rd-party apps.
And besides that, I'm perfectly aware that Apple is wildly inconsistent, particularly when viewed over a multi-year time frame. There probably isn't a page in the HIG they have not at some point violated directly in some piece of software, but the G is for Guidelines after all, not Holy Writ. I don't use the apps you cite, so I can't say whether they make wise use of contextual menus or not, but even if they don't that would not invalidate the principles of what 'wise use' is.
Okay, so maybe 'abomination' was a bit strong... I had the 7-button wireless trackball and was completely unimpressed with its design for use as a 3-button trackball: the 2 extra pairs of buttons force unergonomic design on the rest of the device, and unless you are doing something rather specialized where you really want a remote for a particular device or application that you use all the time, the ergonomic compromises outweigh the convenience. For a large fraction of users who lack the digital (old meaning...) dexterity of a musician or touch-typist or the specialized need, 7 buttons plus a poorly-placed trackball add up to a nuisance more than a tool.
You're missing the context of the first two sentences and hence the implied dig at reality: the multibutton mouse as the norm for other platforms has led to to a certain amount of laziness in UI design and some very unintuitive and inelegant bits of UI design (e.g. the Athena scrollbar, the way Windows uses right-click-hold, etc.) which has fed back into a standard of at least 2 buttons and a creeping arms race in mice buttons with abominations like the Logitech mice and trackballs that have 6, 7, or 8 buttons and need their own documentation and configuration software to use effectively. Apple and others have argued for a long time that the single button mouse as a norm forces UI designers to think more carefully about what they are doing.
If you look at prominent examples of GUI platforms with regards to their accessibility for new users and the general level of application UI design quality, there is some evidence for that view. CDE/Motif, which was built for systems with 3 full-fledged buttons, has had about a decade of uniformly clunky and unintuiitive applications and a desktop that most of its users never really learn. KDE and GNOME are marginally better and grew out of a user community where that third button was not always present or was inferior to the first two (i.e. a clickable scroll wheel.) Windows and its apps tend to be another step up, because it started with 2 buttons. MacOS has always had just the one click (plus the very second-class modifier-key-click combos) and that has forced an economy of UI design on Apple and on application developers.
That said, I think Apple is giving in to the inevitable here. Even if it is slightly harder to teach and even if it leads to a little less economy of UI design, the market has settled on a rough de facto consensus of 2 first-class buttons and one or more second-class buttons on one-handed pointing devices. Application designers don't want to be restricted to single buttons any more than poets want to be required to write perfect sonnets, heroic couplets, haiku, or limmericks.
In the US, Internet access providers have repeatedly been deemed to NOT be common carriers by regulators, courts, and the Congress. Network operators are responsible for the traffic coming from their networks, no matter how ignorant of that traffic they choose to be.
One solution for that might be (and frankly, I hope WILL BE eventually) for providers of open wireless systems to wrap their networks with very strict firewalls that severely restrict what users inside can do. VPN, SSH, and maybe HTTP/HTTPS. If the users want to do anythingmore arcane than web surfing, let them 'go home' virtually and work through a tunnel where the free wireless provider isn't going to be on the hook for generating evil traffic of whatever type.
If you don't have a viable plan to combat the ever-increasing volume of spam, then get out of the way and let those who do take action.
DDoS'ing spammers is not a viable plan
The fact that you are not familiar with viable plans does not mean that none such exist.
There is no excuse for any combination of mail server and client to be showing ANY individual user more than one or two pieces of spam a week unless the user really wants to see the spam. The reason so many people have worse is that they use cheaply operated mail systems and garbage mail clients. If more people accepted the fact that well-run mail systems can't sustainably provide free accounts and probably should cost more than raw connectivity, and that to some extent the same goes for mail clients, spammers' delivery rates to actual eyeballs could be so low that sending the stuff would be useless.
Read about the clean hands doctrine and get back with us.
Read up on the history of the Church[spit] of Scientology's lawsuits and of the lawsuits that were filed against MAPS in 2000 by spammers and get back with us.
One thing LRH got right: lawsuits under the US system are not all about who is right or about wins in court. They are often about which side can inflict the most damage on its opponent by careful strategic pursuit of the lawsuit.
All it really takes is one non-spammer targeted because some spammer figures out how to game the DDoS tool. Any company that thinks it can avoid targeting the wrong place when analyzing spam should examine the history of SpamCop, an operation that has been working hard for most of a decade to automatically analyze and report spam but which continues to have a small rate of mistargeting. For SC, that does nothing more serious than annoy abuse desks and occasionally put legitimate mail servers briefly on a blacklist that is only used by people who accept that risk. Launching an active attack against an innocent target is a whole different thing, and I'd *LOVE* to see the company trying this pounded into dust by the courts on behalf of some innocent victim.
Just to get the full disclosure thing out up front: I have known Steve Linford of Spamhaus professionally for almost a decade and was an employee of MAPS (Senior Consultant in their Consulting Services Group and later Director of Customer Operations) before their 2001 collapse. I've also been working with real-world mail systems and spam control since the early 90's. Whether those facts make me informed or biased or both is a judgment call...
Graham's description of what happened at MAPS is not just inaccurate, it is dead wrong and appears to have been invented to draw a sort of inherent lifecycle picture of blacklists. It makes a cute story, but it is a pure fantasy. Yes, MAPS had a period where their listings and escalations were not as careful as they should have been. That would have been 1999 or so. By mid-2000 MAPS was careful enough with listings that some of the more fanatical folks calling themselves 'anti-spammers' (see news.admin.net-abuse.email) were calling MAPS 'soft' and even accusing Paul Vixie of being in collusion with some of the entities MAPS refrained from listing. MAPS collapsed *financially* starting in early 2001 not because its users went away but because it was a non-profit organization with a very bubble-sensitive funding base. MAPS' lists were free of charge and open to all users at that time, so losing users would not have been a contributor to the *finanical* problems that pushed them into irrelevancy. On top of that, multiple *spammers* (not innocent victims) sued MAPS over listings and pursued those cases in ways that imposed huge legal costs on MAPS for suits that never really moved forward towards trial. In 2001 MAPS effectively committed suicide, settling all the cases by de-listing the plaintiffs, shedding most of its employees, and making the use of its lists available only to paying customers. There are still a lot of users of the MAPS lists and I understand those lists still manage to help stop spam for those customers, but it is off of Paul Graham's radar and a lot of the public spam discussion radar because it stopped offering any free services almost 4 years ago and it stopped doing anything that the larger and better funded spammers cared enough about to keep suing.
As for what Spamhaus is doing now that is having an impact on his mail, Graham is overstating the situation. The SBL listing details why the single IP address that Yahoo has assigned to his site was listed. It was being used for a 'store' for a longtime spammer. Yahoo uses a complex load-balancing system for hosting, so I can't say for sure when or how or why that address became the one that www.paulgraham.com resolves to, but now it does. The spammer's store now resolves to an address in the same/29 block, but when or why it moved thee is not obvious and the DNS TTL's and zone serial number indicate that it could be back on the listed address within an hour or so. The short version: Spamhaus listed a single address that was being used for a spammer's web store, the spammer's web store was moved to a different address, and Paul Graham's site was left in its place. That move may not have been in any way calculated by Yahoo, it may have been pure accident. This is not a case of Spamhaus listing all of Yahoo: that's not something they do. They listed a single IP address that was in use by a spammer, and is now in use by Paul Graham. The spammer's facilities remain at Yahoo on a different IP address.
You can make your own judgment on what that says about Yahoo.
Graham's description of the impact is worse. He claims that 'any filter relying on the SBL is now marking email with the url "paulgraham.com" as spam' and that is plainly false. Most mail servers that use the SBL use it as a classic DNSBL: mail coming from any IP address that is listed gets refused. Some mail server operators have chosen to take this a step further, and use tools like Spam Assassin 3.0 that look into the message data for URL's and resolve them to a server IP that is checked against th
Re:Apple Already Uses Intel-Intel Uses What Was Ap
on
Apple to Use Intel Chips?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
As far as I know, Apple has had no involvement in ARM.
As you appear to be completely ignorant of ARM's origins, why bother making such a statement?
See http://www.arm.com/aboutarm/milestones.html and scroll down to where ARM describes their origin as an independent company. ARM was initially a joint venture of Apple, Acorn, and VLSI. Selling off their shares of ARM was part of what kept Apple alive in the late 90's.
A more appropriate mod for the parent would be "Amusingly Psychotic and Ill-Informed" but I guess "Interesting" is as close as the moderation system gets...
Tarantella is the company that recognized that the entirety of the SCO IP was worth a whole lot less than Caldera was willing to pay for it, and so sold that pile of junk to fund ongoing development of a very real, very different, and very promising bit of innovative software. Software which is already a part of Sun's marketing pitch for the SunRay system as an alternative to PC's on every desktop. The idea that SCO is in any way involved here and "up to something" is tinfoil-hat territory. One need only look at where Tarantella's software is in the market and at what Sun has been trying to offer the market as alternatives to the Microsoft PC on every desk to understand this deal in full.
The worst risk isn't erasure or other obvious damage to *data*, but directed modification of code and configuration that *isn't* readily detected.
Windows systems are so widely vulnerable to worms because most people running Windows work all the time as a user with full administrative rights. Anything program that can get itself launched by the user can do anything it likes to the entire system without the user noticing.
Unix-based systems like MacOS X are a mixed bag, but in general people do not routinely work as 'root' but rather as less powerful users. In MacOS the administrative rights flag for an account is not the same as it is in Windows. It is not an always-on permission to do anything, it is a group membership that says the user is allowed to interactively approve administrative changes by typing his password into an approval dialog. For example, if you want to apply a system update, modify OS config, install an application in the standard world-accessible location (/Applications) , or do anything else that requires 'root' privileges, the process seeking to switch temporarily to 'root' has to go through a mediating system service that presents the request to the user (if the user is in the admin group) and requires the user to type in his password to approve the change. There remain some risks, and MANY applications install themselves in ways that open gaping holes in their own security (which can in turn compromise the system itself) but the path from 'unknown Java Applet' to 'owned box being used by Russian gangsters' even with a hole like the one Apple has taken so long to repair is not a clear one.
Apple uses Akamai for the store and the main site, so the load balancing tends to be a bit uneven: which actual machine you try to hit is dependent on where you are on the net, not which machine is least loaded. The DNS records have very short TTL's and probably switch as individual servers bog down, but that's not really enough to smooth out asymmetric loads. If one uses certain crap systems from Redmond, one don't get the benefit of that anyway because the broken name resolver never expires any records. In short:
1. People on different parts of the net would see variant availabilities, and if you have a lot of Mac folk on the same network as you (for example, if you use one of the Mac-specialist ISP's) you would be likely to all be headed for the same server and killing it.
2. People running some versions of Windows get poor results from sites using Akamai's DNS-based system because even though the A record is explicitly only supposed to be used for 1 minute, Windows ignores that in its DNS cache management.
FWIW, from a point downstream of Sprint and SBC (i.e. on a multihomed network with diverse OC-3's) yesterday I had no problem getting to the store or main sites at all aside from slowness. Neither ever timed out or sent back anything but a complete page all day, and I was checking for the changes at 30-45 minute intervals from about 11am EST on. The Apple Store was giving a 'down for redecorating' page when I tried it circa 1:30pm EST, but was happy to let me in for real by a little after 2pm.
Apple copied the Xerox GUI legitimately and openly, but they did copy it. Note that MS essentially won the Apple lawsuit by convincing a court that their copying (which they didn't really clearly admit to) was legitimate because of an overbroad license provided by Apple as a bribe for pre-launch development of the first MS software for the Mac. Apple got to say that Multiplan and MS-BASIC were available in early 1984, and MS got a free reign to show just how tasteless they were by what they copied and didn't copy from the Mac, and to show how virtuoso marketing can sell astounding amounts of garbage...
The/usr/sfw tree is relatively new, having appeared in Solaris 9. Sun also ships (and has been for some years, at least since the 02/02 release of Sol8) an extra CD full of pre-built open source tools that generally install under/opt/sfw. They also sponsor sunfreeware.com, a site that maintains a staggering collection of pre-built freeware packages for Solaris versions back to 2.5.
It took Magellan a couple-three years to go around the globe.
That's not quite true.
It will take a couple-three years to make the first round-trip to Mars. I fail to see the difference.
However, Magellan knew positively that there were many hospitable places (and found one particularly inhospitable place...) where people lived, without anywhere near that sort of time between known ports of call for food and repairs and a very good basis to believe that other havens existed. The Pacific was rather wider and emptier than expected, but not terribly so.
We know with absolute certainty that there is nowhere between here and Mars that a traveller can stop to forage, refill on potable water, or scavenge materials to patch up a damaged vehicle.
200 years ago, two months to cross the Atlantic wasn't unusual. That was 300 years after Columbus' passage, and 800 years after the first Norse passage.
I venture to guess that 200 years from now, travel to Mars (one way) will be done as quickly.
I suggest a couple of basic courses in physics and astronomy. I suspect that Hollywood (in partnership with some SF authors) has misled you.
This is very important. Slashdot periodically posts stories about RBLs that add people, but never remove them. As horrible as it is to think, I wonder if some sort of legislation (governmental, ICANN, or otherwise) is necessary to keep these systems fair.
There is a pair of ID's on DNSBL technical details and best practices which seems to me more than enough. Actual law would be hopelessly unenforced window-dressing (see the millions of spamming zombies around the USA? Every one is a federal felony in progress. Where's Johnny Ashcroft on that crime???) or (worse) an excuse for the worst elements of law enforcement(see above)to selectively harrass people who are really only engaging in free speech and protection of private property. Blacklists don't block mail, people using blacklists block mail. No one is forced to use any blacklist with a mail system they own or to buy services from a mail system that uses any specific blacklist. If you don't like the way your mail provider does spam filtering, find another provider or run your own mail.
I recently had Comcast shut down my port 25 access due to spam reports.
That's interesting, because Comcast claims that they recently cut off port 25 to ALL of their residential customers. That's for the best, given that they were completely unwilling to actually police their network for misuse in any serious and specific way. Are you sure you were not just part of that blanket closure?
The X implementations in commercial Unix-like systems are almost all based on the X11R6.x code base that is the descendant of the MIT code. X.org is the maintainer of that code base, enhanced by a merge of code from XF86 4.4.0RC2, i.e. XF86 just before the license change. The initialization of the current X.org code repository is described here
and the result of that merge was the release of X11R6.7 in April.
X.org did undergo a rather significant organizational revolution leading up to the import of the XFree86 code. They had seemed to be mostly dead for a couple of years, but in January the 'X.org foundation' was announced and they took off again. As with any corporate-born organization, they did up some slides and did a presentation.
In short: you had it a bit backwards. The 'official' X11 was a joint project (more or less...) that was pretty slow and closed for quite a while, slow and closed enough to make XF86 look dynamic and open. The various issues with XF86 (license, acceptance of patches, etc) triggered a rebirth of the X11R6 project, infused with XF86 code. Vendors of other non-Linux and non-x86 systems have nothing really to be concerned about, since they are effectively in control of X.org now as they were before.
Maybe you don't understand how this works. A relatively small number of network operators (ISP's and other businesses that get a lot of mail) drive enough queries against the Spamhaus lists that it is worthwhile for them to have a full copy locally. IF your mail provider is one such entity, they are almost cerainly already using Spamhaus' lists and so you are simply not getting all the spam aimed at you.
If it is not worthwhile for your mail provider to get a data feed from Spamhaus because their users don't get much spam, there is no cost for them to pass along.
You should also look at the Spamhaus price calculator. It tops out at $1.18 per year per user and in my opinion (based on experience with large email systems using DNSBL's) that range is unlikely to be one where a data feed makes any sense technically even if it were free, unless the users are being very heavily spammed on an ongoing basis. At the other end, with a million users, an ISP would have to figure out how to pass along less than 2 cents per year to each user.
Slashdot Mirror
Spoken like a true lawyer...
A lot of legally sound cases require more lawyer time to litigate than any contingency could pay for. For cases with total damages in the $10k area and/or where the most important part isn't monetary damages but injunctive relief, it is extremely hard to find a lawyer to take any but the simplest and surest of cases on contingency. In most places the Small Claims limit is so low (is is only $10k or higher in 6 states, and the median is $5k) that no lawyer who stands a chance of being worth having will bother.
True, but the post you are responding to does have a valid point. The "antibacterial" soaps have ingredients other than soaps and synthetic detergents (primarily triclosan) which have specific antimicrobial properties. Soap and synthetic detergents (commonly Sodium laureth sulfate in hand soap) are antibacterial in rather gross and non-specific ways: they bind both water and lipids, and so disrupt cell structure physically by breaking down cellular membranes. The greater toxicity of soaps to bacteria than the people they are stuck to is largely due to the fact that the human cells involved have more complex membranes and are generally already dead and hardened with protein, and they provide an armor of sorts. Immerse any living human cell in soapy water that would kill a bacterium, and the human cell will die just the same.
Triclosan is believed to be more toxic to microbes than people because it disrupts critical bacterial enzymes that humans simply do not have. The flip side of that is ugly: mutations in the genes coding those enzymes can result in Triclosan-resistent bacteria. So we are awash in Triclosan-containing soaps and even toothpaste which may be killing off some small increment more bacteria than if we didn't use it in soap, and flushing the stuff down our drains, some getting there by way of our guts. Is it killing off bacteria we want to keep around? Maybe. Is it creating an environmental pressure for the evolution of Triclosan-resistant bacteria? Definitely. This is a particularl;y bad thing because Triclosan is used in stronger concentrations in medical disinfecting. Pervading the environment with the stuff means that we have this huge breeding reservoir for a resistant strain, and we'll know it exists when it makes its way into hospitals that rely on Triclosan...
And the stuff might not be as human-safe as once thought. Ignoring the issue of effects on symbiotic bacteria, Triclosan may well disrupt some human enzymes, just not the obviously critical one it hits in bacteria. Anyone who claims a solid answer to that mystery is probably selling some variety of snake oil (either "long-acting toothpaste" or "detoxifying herbaceuticals" or "cutting board disinfectant" or "colon cleansing")
Defense perhaps, but not against a perceived attack from the tester. That rate (even if it was once every 7.5 seconds) isn't significant for a high-volume mail server. It MAY however be catching the outward appearance of a more subtle defense against a real nuisance for mail systems: spam.
Well-behaved SMTP senders (i.e. outbound MTA's) will need exactly one of the 16 IP's obtained from a mail exchanger resolution of yahoo.com to be up and accepting mail in order to get a message handed off swiftly enough that most people sending them mail won't notice any delay. Many senders of spam optimize for getting through as many addresses as fast as they can, without really caring about any single address. With the bulk of addresses sitting behind mail systems that can accept messages for them in 5 seconds all told, spammers who are largely squatting on resources whose owners are likely to kick them off at any moment and who need to hit as many targets as possible will not spend the 20-300 seconds it might take to find a working mail server for Yahoo.
Faking poor availability for exterior mail exchangers is an interesting trick, particularly for a huge mail system where DNS-based load balancing is a natural choice and you have a lot of unused IP address space that you can throw into service as decoys. I'm unconvinced that it is really a worthwhile trick, but I know from firsthand experience that for some domains, growing the number of fully functional mail exchangers grows how much spam the domain as a whole is offered. If you knock one of a set of generally symmetric members of a set of mail servers offline, only some of the spam ends up coming thru the other machines while all of the legit mail makes it in just fine, as long as the remaining machines can handle the load.
You forgot to mention the awkward wording and unbroken stream of grammatical errors. My daughter is entering 9th grade, and I'd be really disappointed if she wrote anything for school like that.
I think that overstates the situation. Multi-button mice have been available for the Mac since the 80's. Kensington and Logitech owe their existence to Apple making that possible in the OS but staying out of that aftermarket. The effect of Apple only selling one-button mice was more significant on developers, because apps had to work with a one-button mouse. From the very first Apple apps, the modifier-key(s)+click trick was used as an alternative to having more buttons and that is what 3rd-party multi-button mice posted as events for their other buttons by default. For nearly a decade, Apple has directly supported multi-button mice in the OS and with HI guidelines but has stayed out of that market themselves.
This is really more about marketing and ending misperceptions more than it is a real novelty. Supporting multi-button mice is not new for Apple, selling one with their name on it is. It ends the negative myth around the one-button mouse and drops that learning curve for Windows switchers from the insurmountable "Control-click is right-click" to "Here's your multi-button mouse with an Apple logo."
I don't think it even speaks to my point. That Apple makes heavy use of contextual menus in a few niche products (all of which I believe originated as outside products bought by Apple, FWIW) does not conflict with anything I wrote. Contextual menus are not intrinsically poor UI design and don't depend on multi-button mice. Contextual menus on MacOS as a system UI element date to MacOS 8.0 and had previously been implemented since System 6 by various 3rd-party apps.
And besides that, I'm perfectly aware that Apple is wildly inconsistent, particularly when viewed over a multi-year time frame. There probably isn't a page in the HIG they have not at some point violated directly in some piece of software, but the G is for Guidelines after all, not Holy Writ. I don't use the apps you cite, so I can't say whether they make wise use of contextual menus or not, but even if they don't that would not invalidate the principles of what 'wise use' is.
Okay, so maybe 'abomination' was a bit strong... I had the 7-button wireless trackball and was completely unimpressed with its design for use as a 3-button trackball: the 2 extra pairs of buttons force unergonomic design on the rest of the device, and unless you are doing something rather specialized where you really want a remote for a particular device or application that you use all the time, the ergonomic compromises outweigh the convenience. For a large fraction of users who lack the digital (old meaning...) dexterity of a musician or touch-typist or the specialized need, 7 buttons plus a poorly-placed trackball add up to a nuisance more than a tool.
You're missing the context of the first two sentences and hence the implied dig at reality: the multibutton mouse as the norm for other platforms has led to to a certain amount of laziness in UI design and some very unintuitive and inelegant bits of UI design (e.g. the Athena scrollbar, the way Windows uses right-click-hold, etc.) which has fed back into a standard of at least 2 buttons and a creeping arms race in mice buttons with abominations like the Logitech mice and trackballs that have 6, 7, or 8 buttons and need their own documentation and configuration software to use effectively. Apple and others have argued for a long time that the single button mouse as a norm forces UI designers to think more carefully about what they are doing.
If you look at prominent examples of GUI platforms with regards to their accessibility for new users and the general level of application UI design quality, there is some evidence for that view. CDE/Motif, which was built for systems with 3 full-fledged buttons, has had about a decade of uniformly clunky and unintuiitive applications and a desktop that most of its users never really learn. KDE and GNOME are marginally better and grew out of a user community where that third button was not always present or was inferior to the first two (i.e. a clickable scroll wheel.) Windows and its apps tend to be another step up, because it started with 2 buttons. MacOS has always had just the one click (plus the very second-class modifier-key-click combos) and that has forced an economy of UI design on Apple and on application developers.
That said, I think Apple is giving in to the inevitable here. Even if it is slightly harder to teach and even if it leads to a little less economy of UI design, the market has settled on a rough de facto consensus of 2 first-class buttons and one or more second-class buttons on one-handed pointing devices. Application designers don't want to be restricted to single buttons any more than poets want to be required to write perfect sonnets, heroic couplets, haiku, or limmericks.
In the US, Internet access providers have repeatedly been deemed to NOT be common carriers by regulators, courts, and the Congress. Network operators are responsible for the traffic coming from their networks, no matter how ignorant of that traffic they choose to be.
One solution for that might be (and frankly, I hope WILL BE eventually) for providers of open wireless systems to wrap their networks with very strict firewalls that severely restrict what users inside can do. VPN, SSH, and maybe HTTP/HTTPS. If the users want to do anythingmore arcane than web surfing, let them 'go home' virtually and work through a tunnel where the free wireless provider isn't going to be on the hook for generating evil traffic of whatever type.
There is no excuse for any combination of mail server and client to be showing ANY individual user more than one or two pieces of spam a week unless the user really wants to see the spam. The reason so many people have worse is that they use cheaply operated mail systems and garbage mail clients. If more people accepted the fact that well-run mail systems can't sustainably provide free accounts and probably should cost more than raw connectivity, and that to some extent the same goes for mail clients, spammers' delivery rates to actual eyeballs could be so low that sending the stuff would be useless.
Read up on the history of the Church[spit] of Scientology's lawsuits and of the lawsuits that were filed against MAPS in 2000 by spammers and get back with us.
One thing LRH got right: lawsuits under the US system are not all about who is right or about wins in court. They are often about which side can inflict the most damage on its opponent by careful strategic pursuit of the lawsuit.
All it really takes is one non-spammer targeted because some spammer figures out how to game the DDoS tool. Any company that thinks it can avoid targeting the wrong place when analyzing spam should examine the history of SpamCop, an operation that has been working hard for most of a decade to automatically analyze and report spam but which continues to have a small rate of mistargeting. For SC, that does nothing more serious than annoy abuse desks and occasionally put legitimate mail servers briefly on a blacklist that is only used by people who accept that risk. Launching an active attack against an innocent target is a whole different thing, and I'd *LOVE* to see the company trying this pounded into dust by the courts on behalf of some innocent victim.
Just to get the full disclosure thing out up front: I have known Steve Linford of Spamhaus professionally for almost a decade and was an employee of MAPS (Senior Consultant in their Consulting Services Group and later Director of Customer Operations) before their 2001 collapse. I've also been working with real-world mail systems and spam control since the early 90's. Whether those facts make me informed or biased or both is a judgment call...
Graham's description of what happened at MAPS is not just inaccurate, it is dead wrong and appears to have been invented to draw a sort of inherent lifecycle picture of blacklists. It makes a cute story, but it is a pure fantasy. Yes, MAPS had a period where their listings and escalations were not as careful as they should have been. That would have been 1999 or so. By mid-2000 MAPS was careful enough with listings that some of the more fanatical folks calling themselves 'anti-spammers' (see news.admin.net-abuse.email) were calling MAPS 'soft' and even accusing Paul Vixie of being in collusion with some of the entities MAPS refrained from listing. MAPS collapsed *financially* starting in early 2001 not because its users went away but because it was a non-profit organization with a very bubble-sensitive funding base. MAPS' lists were free of charge and open to all users at that time, so losing users would not have been a contributor to the *finanical* problems that pushed them into irrelevancy. On top of that, multiple *spammers* (not innocent victims) sued MAPS over listings and pursued those cases in ways that imposed huge legal costs on MAPS for suits that never really moved forward towards trial. In 2001 MAPS effectively committed suicide, settling all the cases by de-listing the plaintiffs, shedding most of its employees, and making the use of its lists available only to paying customers. There are still a lot of users of the MAPS lists and I understand those lists still manage to help stop spam for those customers, but it is off of Paul Graham's radar and a lot of the public spam discussion radar because it stopped offering any free services almost 4 years ago and it stopped doing anything that the larger and better funded spammers cared enough about to keep suing.
As for what Spamhaus is doing now that is having an impact on his mail, Graham is overstating the situation. The SBL listing details why the single IP address that Yahoo has assigned to his site was listed. It was being used for a 'store' for a longtime spammer. Yahoo uses a complex load-balancing system for hosting, so I can't say for sure when or how or why that address became the one that www.paulgraham.com resolves to, but now it does. The spammer's store now resolves to an address in the same /29 block, but when or why it moved thee is not obvious and the DNS TTL's and zone serial number indicate that it could be back on the listed address within an hour or so. The short version: Spamhaus listed a single address that was being used for a spammer's web store, the spammer's web store was moved to a different address, and Paul Graham's site was left in its place. That move may not have been in any way calculated by Yahoo, it may have been pure accident. This is not a case of Spamhaus listing all of Yahoo: that's not something they do. They listed a single IP address that was in use by a spammer, and is now in use by Paul Graham. The spammer's facilities remain at Yahoo on a different IP address.
You can make your own judgment on what that says about Yahoo.
Graham's description of the impact is worse. He claims that 'any filter relying on the SBL is now marking email with the url "paulgraham.com" as spam' and that is plainly false. Most mail servers that use the SBL use it as a classic DNSBL: mail coming from any IP address that is listed gets refused. Some mail server operators have chosen to take this a step further, and use tools like Spam Assassin 3.0 that look into the message data for URL's and resolve them to a server IP that is checked against th
As you appear to be completely ignorant of ARM's origins, why bother making such a statement?
See http://www.arm.com/aboutarm/milestones.html and scroll down to where ARM describes their origin as an independent company. ARM was initially a joint venture of Apple, Acorn, and VLSI. Selling off their shares of ARM was part of what kept Apple alive in the late 90's.
A more appropriate mod for the parent would be "Amusingly Psychotic and Ill-Informed" but I guess "Interesting" is as close as the moderation system gets...
Tarantella is the company that recognized that the entirety of the SCO IP was worth a whole lot less than Caldera was willing to pay for it, and so sold that pile of junk to fund ongoing development of a very real, very different, and very promising bit of innovative software. Software which is already a part of Sun's marketing pitch for the SunRay system as an alternative to PC's on every desktop. The idea that SCO is in any way involved here and "up to something" is tinfoil-hat territory. One need only look at where Tarantella's software is in the market and at what Sun has been trying to offer the market as alternatives to the Microsoft PC on every desk to understand this deal in full.
The worst risk isn't erasure or other obvious damage to *data*, but directed modification of code and configuration that *isn't* readily detected.
Windows systems are so widely vulnerable to worms because most people running Windows work all the time as a user with full administrative rights. Anything program that can get itself launched by the user can do anything it likes to the entire system without the user noticing.
Unix-based systems like MacOS X are a mixed bag, but in general people do not routinely work as 'root' but rather as less powerful users. In MacOS the administrative rights flag for an account is not the same as it is in Windows. It is not an always-on permission to do anything, it is a group membership that says the user is allowed to interactively approve administrative changes by typing his password into an approval dialog. For example, if you want to apply a system update, modify OS config, install an application in the standard world-accessible location (/Applications) , or do anything else that requires 'root' privileges, the process seeking to switch temporarily to 'root' has to go through a mediating system service that presents the request to the user (if the user is in the admin group) and requires the user to type in his password to approve the change. There remain some risks, and MANY applications install themselves in ways that open gaping holes in their own security (which can in turn compromise the system itself) but the path from 'unknown Java Applet' to 'owned box being used by Russian gangsters' even with a hole like the one Apple has taken so long to repair is not a clear one.
Apple uses Akamai for the store and the main site, so the load balancing tends to be a bit uneven: which actual machine you try to hit is dependent on where you are on the net, not which machine is least loaded. The DNS records have very short TTL's and probably switch as individual servers bog down, but that's not really enough to smooth out asymmetric loads. If one uses certain crap systems from Redmond, one don't get the benefit of that anyway because the broken name resolver never expires any records. In short:
1. People on different parts of the net would see variant availabilities, and if you have a lot of Mac folk on the same network as you (for example, if you use one of the Mac-specialist ISP's) you would be likely to all be headed for the same server and killing it.
2. People running some versions of Windows get poor results from sites using Akamai's DNS-based system because even though the A record is explicitly only supposed to be used for 1 minute, Windows ignores that in its DNS cache management.
FWIW, from a point downstream of Sprint and SBC (i.e. on a multihomed network with diverse OC-3's) yesterday I had no problem getting to the store or main sites at all aside from slowness. Neither ever timed out or sent back anything but a complete page all day, and I was checking for the changes at 30-45 minute intervals from about 11am EST on. The Apple Store was giving a 'down for redecorating' page when I tried it circa 1:30pm EST, but was happy to let me in for real by a little after 2pm.
That's not a correction, it's a side note.
Apple copied the Xerox GUI legitimately and openly, but they did copy it. Note that MS essentially won the Apple lawsuit by convincing a court that their copying (which they didn't really clearly admit to) was legitimate because of an overbroad license provided by Apple as a bribe for pre-launch development of the first MS software for the Mac. Apple got to say that Multiplan and MS-BASIC were available in early 1984, and MS got a free reign to show just how tasteless they were by what they copied and didn't copy from the Mac, and to show how virtuoso marketing can sell astounding amounts of garbage...
The /usr/sfw tree is relatively new, having appeared in Solaris 9. Sun also ships (and has been for some years, at least since the 02/02 release of Sol8) an extra CD full of pre-built open source tools that generally install under /opt/sfw. They also sponsor sunfreeware.com, a site that maintains a staggering collection of pre-built freeware packages for Solaris versions back to 2.5.
That's not quite true.
However, Magellan knew positively that there were many hospitable places (and found one particularly inhospitable place...) where people lived, without anywhere near that sort of time between known ports of call for food and repairs and a very good basis to believe that other havens existed. The Pacific was rather wider and emptier than expected, but not terribly so.
We know with absolute certainty that there is nowhere between here and Mars that a traveller can stop to forage, refill on potable water, or scavenge materials to patch up a damaged vehicle.
I suggest a couple of basic courses in physics and astronomy. I suspect that Hollywood (in partnership with some SF authors) has misled you.
That said, I agree that Van Allen is wrong.
What it actually looks and feels like to die on the surface of Mars, as compared to the vacuum of space or the surface of the Moon or wherever...
(someone had to say it)
That is a sure way to legislate that they charge everyone the same price and offer exactly one level of (lousy) service.
There is a pair of ID's on DNSBL technical details and best practices which seems to me more than enough. Actual law would be hopelessly unenforced window-dressing (see the millions of spamming zombies around the USA? Every one is a federal felony in progress. Where's Johnny Ashcroft on that crime???) or (worse) an excuse for the worst elements of law enforcement(see above)to selectively harrass people who are really only engaging in free speech and protection of private property. Blacklists don't block mail, people using blacklists block mail. No one is forced to use any blacklist with a mail system they own or to buy services from a mail system that uses any specific blacklist. If you don't like the way your mail provider does spam filtering, find another provider or run your own mail.
That's interesting, because Comcast claims that they recently cut off port 25 to ALL of their residential customers. That's for the best, given that they were completely unwilling to actually police their network for misuse in any serious and specific way. Are you sure you were not just part of that blanket closure?
The X implementations in commercial Unix-like systems are almost all based on the X11R6.x code base that is the descendant of the MIT code. X.org is the maintainer of that code base, enhanced by a merge of code from XF86 4.4.0RC2, i.e. XF86 just before the license change. The initialization of the current X.org code repository is described here and the result of that merge was the release of X11R6.7 in April.
X.org did undergo a rather significant organizational revolution leading up to the import of the XFree86 code. They had seemed to be mostly dead for a couple of years, but in January the 'X.org foundation' was announced and they took off again. As with any corporate-born organization, they did up some slides and did a presentation.
In short: you had it a bit backwards. The 'official' X11 was a joint project (more or less...) that was pretty slow and closed for quite a while, slow and closed enough to make XF86 look dynamic and open. The various issues with XF86 (license, acceptance of patches, etc) triggered a rebirth of the X11R6 project, infused with XF86 code. Vendors of other non-Linux and non-x86 systems have nothing really to be concerned about, since they are effectively in control of X.org now as they were before.
Maybe you don't understand how this works. A relatively small number of network operators (ISP's and other businesses that get a lot of mail) drive enough queries against the Spamhaus lists that it is worthwhile for them to have a full copy locally. IF your mail provider is one such entity, they are almost cerainly already using Spamhaus' lists and so you are simply not getting all the spam aimed at you. If it is not worthwhile for your mail provider to get a data feed from Spamhaus because their users don't get much spam, there is no cost for them to pass along.
You should also look at the Spamhaus price calculator. It tops out at $1.18 per year per user and in my opinion (based on experience with large email systems using DNSBL's) that range is unlikely to be one where a data feed makes any sense technically even if it were free, unless the users are being very heavily spammed on an ongoing basis. At the other end, with a million users, an ISP would have to figure out how to pass along less than 2 cents per year to each user.