Read the articles I was linking to -- it's safer than drinking that much water to find out. Also you've got to remember that she was probably a bit sodium-deficient anyway thanks to a trend against eating salt, in fact against eating anything, going around young women.
I've suffered a much milder form of the same thing myself, once. I did have a bit of amphetamine in my system, but that isn't the point: it was 31 degrees out, I was drinking a lot of low-mineral-content water and hadn't eaten for 24 hours. My head wasn't working, but not speed-kind not working; more like flu-kind not working. I had a raging thirst, but it seemed the more water I drank, the thirstier I got. I had to interrupt drinking to get a leak, and then I had to break off from pissing because I was thirsty.
Now, it still would have been 31 degrees, I still wouldn't have had any appetite, and the water still would have been nearly de-min, whether or not I had taken any drugs, but News of the World readers like easy solutions, not complex logic traps. As soon as I knew what was happening to me, I realised I could never face being used on an anti-drug poster -- not even dead. I owed it to the entire legalisation movement to get better, and quickly. I dissolved a teaspoonful of salt and a tablespoon of sugar in a glass of water. "This is either going to kill me or cure me," I said, in an attempt at some Famous Last Words; then I downed the strange-tasting mixture.
What can I say? I got better. Quickly. It cooled off that evening, and I got some proper food down me.
If I own a bar, club or restaurant, it is my property. If people want to smoke in there, then it is a matter between them and me and no-one else -- certainly not the government. If I choose not to allow people to smoke in there then that is my decision. If I choose to allow people to smoke in there, then that is my decision also. If people refuse to come in because I allow others to smoke in there, then that is their decision. If people choose to come in, knowing that smoking is permitted, then that is their decision -- and they take full responsibility for the consequences.
The only person who doesn't get to make a decision for themself in the whole thing is the smoker, who is chemically adicted to the poisonous drug nicotine and will get sick without it.
But corrugated paper is easier to recycle if you have a bloody great big cooking range to hand.....
Cardboard soaked with organic grease burns fairly cleanly, especially if it isn't the only thing drawing the fire. It's made from plants, so it's not going to add any more CO2 to the atmosphere. It reduces the amount of fossil fuels used for cooking. It reduces the need to transport used containers to recycling plants {which often uses as much or more energy than initial manufacture}.
Burning food packaging in the stoves used to cook the food seems to make perfect sense..... as long as the packaging is made with due regard for its secondary purpose {burning certain plastics in a cooking range would not be such a good idea}. You'll never have enough packaging to run on that alone, of course, but that's not quite the intention.
Leah Betts died of drinking too much water. She took an Ecstasy tablet while her {rabidly anti-some-drugs} dad was out -- then heard he was due back before she would wear off. Fearful of a bollocking on his early return, she drank several litres of water in a misguided attempt to counteract the effects of the drug. This caused an electrolyte imbalance, leading to multiple organ failure -- including the brain -- and eventual death.
Legal ecstasy tablets probably would include an information sheet detailing safe usage practicesm and this would never have happened. However, the government, breweries and the tobacco companies all would prefer for you to believe that she was killed by a tab of ecstasy.
I believe that everyone does have a right to a job -- actually, more of an obligation to get a job, do something socially necessary and pay some taxes while they're at it. If people are earning a living then they are not out committing crimes, and they don't need dole money. That means more public money can be spent on positive things like healthcare and education {maybe even free veterinary care}, as opposed to negative things like repairing vandalism and keeping people in prison. And we can be manufacturing goods in our own backyard, rather than relying on imports.
People have needs, and they are going to fulfil them one way or another. It's better that they should get the opportunity to do so in a socially acceptable way.
What we need is a new law that makes it illegal for hardware manufacturers to keep driver details secret. If you want to sell me a fancy wireless adaptor, graphics card, sound card or whatever, fine; but you have to give me all the information I need to write a driver for anything that I might want to interface to it.
It used to be so, back in the days when a printer came with a big thick manual explaining how to do various textual and graphical effects, even pulse timings and voltages for the interface. And everyone thought that information was part of the operating instructions. Sometime between then and now, it went sour; probably we didn't notice, but documentation went from hacker-friendly, to (non-hacker)-friendly, to non-(hacker-friendly). Nowadays, it seems printer manuals just say "plug in the USB cable and install the Windows software" -- and manufacturers are treating the important stuff like how to fire the second "red" nozzle down as though it were some sort of nuclear secret.
Well, it isn't. If you buy a piece of hardware you have every right to make use of that hardware, and if the manufacturer will not tell you how to do so then they are obstructing your enjoyment of your own property. At the very least, the owner of a particular device should -- by sole virtue of ownership -- be automatically privy to any "secret" it may contain; ideally, such information would be in the public domain by law.
And sod the whingeing about "competitors having access to your 'proprietary information'". Your competitors already pay people to reverse-engineer your products, and you will get access to their "proprietary information".
That's why I routinely flush the Word copy of my resume (for places that insist on it). No history switched on that I can see, but the damned file keeps growing!
Or you could save it as.rtf and change the extension to.doc. Almost nobody will notice the difference.
4. After installing a program, finding where it installed to would be like pulling teeth. Making a shortcut would be even worse.
Under Linux, commonly used programmes go in/usr/bin/ if they were installed from the distribution's own package manager, and/usr/local/bin/ if they were installed from the source.tar.gz file. That is just something you are expected to know.
Since/usr/bin/ and/usr/local/bin/ are both in most users' paths, just point your shortcut to the programme name and let the computer guess where the file is at.
6. I got a sync out of range message when I first tried running Mandrake. I left the monitor settings on default during install. This took hours to discover and fix.
Some monitors are pickier than others about sync rates.
If you don't give people the opportunity to make an honest living, they will make a dishonest one instead. It's called the human survival instinct. If you take a basically-law-abiding citizen, place some food in front of them and deprive them of the means to pay for that food, then, eventually, no matter what threats you make against them, that person is going to get hungry enough to think about stealing that food. Maybe even hungry enough to think about fighting for that food. Perhaps even desperate enough to think of killing someone for that food. It is a biological necessity and the human organism is hard-wired not to let itself die.
Now extrapolate that to the rest of the population whose jobs get exported overseas, and move it out from nice safe laboratory conditions into the mean city streets. Your only hope is that, by such times, there might not actually be enough oil left underground to make any petrol-bombs.
The people who wrote the US Constitution overlooked "It being preferable that people live by honest labour and pay taxes, rather than by crime; so Congress shall make no law which prejudices a citizen's right to earn an honest living for themself". At that time, when logistics were still primitive, it would have been all but inconceivable that so much work could be outsourced.
Also, bear in mind that in much of the third world, there are no such "expensive luxuries" as workers' rights, state pensions and health care, health and safety regulations, pollution control &c. Yet the West routinely imports goods manufactured in conditions that would be totally illegal in the destination country.
Maybe not a God-given right to a job, but every member of a civilised society has the human right to earn an honest living within that society. That is part of the definition of civilisation; a civilised society looks after its own from the cradle to the grave, and any society that does not do that is by definition not civilised.
That isn't actually as much as it sounds. 51kW for 100k people is only 510mW per person. Yeah, just over half a watt. Now if a person eats 2000 calories a day, that's 8320 kJ in 86400 seconds, or about 96 watts. Which gives us an efficiency of about half a percent.
Linux developers didn't start anything, they just copied Unix.
My bad. OK, Unix developers started optimistically..... Linus and co chose the same path. I'll give you that one.
What do you call having sixteen different distro package formats? Compatibility heaven?
I call it a non-issue. A good distribution will have all the packages you could wish for in its preferred format. If you're running Mandrake, look for Mandrake RPMs. If you're running Debian, look for.debs. If you can't find the package you want in your distribution's own format, use the source.tar.gz file, which is distribution-neutral. You can buy music on LP, CD, cassette or eight-track, or you can get the notes {source code} and play {compile} it on your own instrument; nobody is bothered about the idea that a cassette deck can't play LPs.
I guess you've never had to deal with some app that can't compile (or run) because you have the wrong version of GTK or QT or lib-whatever-1.0.23.56.123. Never, eh?
I've had stuff happen exactly like that trying to get KDE3 to run under Debian on a laptop. I knew what I was doing and got it fixed, but I could always just have installed Mandrake if I was more bothered about upgrading to KDE3 than staying with Debian.
The "given enough eyes all bugs are shallow" parrot line has been disproved enough times I can't believe people are still using it.
Probably because it's right more often than it's wrong, which is the definition of a good rule of thumb.
Yeah, I love having to recompile all my drivers whenever I upgrade my kernel.
Kernel compilation nowadays isn't the huge thing it once was -- it's now fairly well automated. The day when you can configure yourself a kernel based on autodetected and intelligently-suggested defaults, compile, link, install it and boot it all from the GUI surely can't be far off. But in practice, stock kernels run fine on most systems -- and the people who want to run custom kernels are customisers by nature.
Does "Higher aims" mean "we're just coding for the hell of it and we don't give a fuck about what we break"? Maybe that explains a lot.
No, I just mean thinking a little bigger now to save yourself trouble later. For instance, if you hard-limit yourself to a maximum of 256 elements in an array, you might not notice it at first..... but eventually you'll need 257, and suddenly you realise how much easier it would have been to allow for 65536 elements in the first place.
Linux is fast, easy to use, and has support from real people. Most "normal users" don't actually choose Windows, they get given it by default and have to put up with it.
Try this little thought experiment.
Suppose Microsoft suddenly and without warning release a brand new version of Windows. This new Windows offers you exactly the same functionality as your old Windows, including crashing: the only thing noteworthy about it is totally incompatible with all applications and data from the old version. Now imagine that your copy of Windows and all your old work have been irretrievably lost in a disk failure, and you will have to start again from scratch. GNU/Linux and Mac systems are still available unchanged.
Linux developers started by envisaging how a "perfect" computer would behave, if there were no inherent limitations, and went on to try to make real-life, limited hardware behave in as close a manner as possible to the ideal. So all storage devices try to emulate SCSI discs, and all printers try to emulate Postscript. It gives programmers on both sides of the interface an identifiable, acheivable and verifiable goal to aim for.
Windows developers simply built on layer after layer on a system they knew was imperfect, adding extensions willy-nilly as the need arose; effectively, adjusting the limits to match a constantly-evolving state of the art. The result is a compatibility nightmare. Things often don't work properly together for no obvious reason; the most likely cause is a logic trap triggered by a number of unconnected events occurring in the right order. And it's still easier just to put up with it than to try to do anything about it.
Furthermore, Open Source programmers know their work is going to be seen by many pairs of eyes around the world, take care to avoid stupid mistakes -- but accept that even if they are temporarily red-faced, the worst thing that can happen in the long run is that they get to learn from the experience. Closed-source programmers, believing that nobody will ever see their code, can take bigger liberties with their code.
By having higher limits to aim for, Linux developers have been less fazed by new developments; and it's my guess that 64-bit technology will be well established long before the 32-bit timestamp space limit hits home.
I call troll. Linux hardware compatibility is improving daily. And while Windows might claim to work with numerically more devices than Linux, the devices that do work with Linux work more reliably than they do with Windows. There are now graphical front ends for the fiddly set-up procedures; and thanks to the modular approcah of Linux, these tend to be consistent across devices -- Windows drivers, even from the same manufacturer, are very inconsistent.
That is sensible if you look at it from the point that human life is always more valuable than property. That means the life of the lowest scumsucker you can imagine is still worth more than the most expensive piece of property you can imagine.
If it were the other way around, and property could sometimes be considered more valuable than life, then there would be interminable dispute over the crossover point, which would accomplish little except to waste the courts' time.
At any rate, I prefer the idea that nobody can consider me inferior to a piece of property!
Re:A flashdrive that security will take away.
on
USB Swiss Army Knife
·
· Score: 0
Looks like drug parapherenalia to me, especially if the lighter stays lit without having to hold a trigger (a la Zippo; good for roasting hash before crumbling it into a joint. Also handy for tooting heroin; you need one hand to aim the straw towards the vapours, one hand to hold the aluminium foil above the heat source, and that doesn't leave you a hand to operate the heat source with). Or maybe they figure that having desirable / collectable lighters encourages people to smoke. Maybe it's a fire risk. Who knows?
Has a government ever banned something obviously desirable, because they figured they could make more money out of bribes and so forth with something being imported and sold illegally, than they could make out of value-added tax with it being legally available?
Re:What kind of idiot legislature...
on
USB Swiss Army Knife
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You think that's bad? In the UK, you can't even buy safety razor blades {eg. Gillette sensor type, which can't make a cut more than 1mm. deep without serious modding, the process of which is likely to cut you} if you're under 16, but you can be expelled from school for not shaving!
Clearly the law was meant to stop kids buying cut-throat razor blades, but it's still a bit idiotic. And if they want knives, they will just steal them.
What I'd like to see would be that legitimate SMTP servers insisted on SMTP AUTH. Any message not originating from a known authentication-enabled server could be blocked.
There are only 4 billion or so IP addresses. It takes one bit per address to say yea or nay -- that's 512MB. It's conceivable for a big, meaty server to keep that in RAM, so it wouldn't be unnnecessarily slow.
Actually, what this means is that something equivalent to the IP addresses of all those machines that aren't supposed to be running mail servers, would fit on a single CD-ROM. Hmmmm..... that is not an unrealistic proposition..... !
If you want to drive your car on the roads, it has to pass a roadworthiness test. If the brakes are defective, or the steering is not straight, or the clutch is slipping, or a light bulb is out, or any one of a long list of things are wrong with it, then it might cause a danger to others, so it is not allowed on the Queen's highway until you get it fixed. Nobody has a problem with that. If you want to drive a death trap, you have to do it on your own property where you aren't causing a hazard for other people.
I don't think it's inherently unreasonable to impose a "networthiness" test on PCs. OTOH, this should be done by a properly accountable body; otherwise it's not policing, just vigilantism. Insisting on specific items of closed-source commercial software, for instance, is unacceptable. Nobody should ever be forced to be tied to a particular software product: I should always remain free to write my own software as long as I am able to prove that it meets the regulations, just as I am free to build my own road-going vehicle as long as I can prove that it meets the regulations. I am also free to challenge the regulations through the democratic process. I'm saying regulate the ends, not the means, and have the regulators know for sure that we, the public, pay their wages.
The real, long-term solution will begin when all forms of unsolicited commercial advertising on the Internet are forbidden {no more spam, no more popups; not even banner ads unless the user chooses to see them}; and when software vendors are legally obliged to offer either a guarantee that their software will perform as stated and only as stated or the complete source code.
Freeserve already does that. Any traffic you send to any IP address on port 25 is diverted to Freeserve's SMTP server. I know this because I work for an ISP and was getting complaints about "our" SMTP server, I did tail -f/var/log/maillog and had the customer send an e-mail. Nothing, but he got a bounce message -- and it was nothing like the ones our sendmail generates -- so he must have got on to some server somewhere. Wasn't running any anti-virus software either. Made him change the server addresses from words to figures (so as to eliminate DNS from the equation) and try again. Same response, some SMTP server somewhere barfing. Had to bell Freeserve to find out what the hell was going on.
The "side effects" include that data written to one partition also gets written somewhere else in the other partition, and vice versa. Of course, the sector map only gets updated in the partition you deliberately wrote to, so the file won't appear in any directory listing in the other one -- and that space won't be marked as "occupied", so files in the second partition will be able to use it. Eventually, a file on the second partition will grow into the space occupied by a file from the first partition, and what you will end up with is a huge case of crosslinking.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the articles I was linking to -- it's safer than drinking that much water to find out. Also you've got to remember that she was probably a bit sodium-deficient anyway thanks to a trend against eating salt, in fact against eating anything, going around young women.
I've suffered a much milder form of the same thing myself, once. I did have a bit of amphetamine in my system, but that isn't the point: it was 31 degrees out, I was drinking a lot of low-mineral-content water and hadn't eaten for 24 hours. My head wasn't working, but not speed-kind not working; more like flu-kind not working. I had a raging thirst, but it seemed the more water I drank, the thirstier I got. I had to interrupt drinking to get a leak, and then I had to break off from pissing because I was thirsty.
Now, it still would have been 31 degrees, I still wouldn't have had any appetite, and the water still would have been nearly de-min, whether or not I had taken any drugs, but News of the World readers like easy solutions, not complex logic traps. As soon as I knew what was happening to me, I realised I could never face being used on an anti-drug poster -- not even dead. I owed it to the entire legalisation movement to get better, and quickly. I dissolved a teaspoonful of salt and a tablespoon of sugar in a glass of water. "This is either going to kill me or cure me," I said, in an attempt at some Famous Last Words; then I downed the strange-tasting mixture.
What can I say? I got better. Quickly. It cooled off that evening, and I got some proper food down me.
If I own a bar, club or restaurant, it is my property. If people want to smoke in there, then it is a matter between them and me and no-one else -- certainly not the government. If I choose not to allow people to smoke in there then that is my decision. If I choose to allow people to smoke in there, then that is my decision also. If people refuse to come in because I allow others to smoke in there, then that is their decision. If people choose to come in, knowing that smoking is permitted, then that is their decision -- and they take full responsibility for the consequences.
The only person who doesn't get to make a decision for themself in the whole thing is the smoker, who is chemically adicted to the poisonous drug nicotine and will get sick without it.
Oxygen is not flammable. It is an oxidising agent, which might induce spontaneous combustion in nearby flammable substances.
But corrugated paper is easier to recycle if you have a bloody great big cooking range to hand .....
..... as long as the packaging is made with due regard for its secondary purpose {burning certain plastics in a cooking range would not be such a good idea}. You'll never have enough packaging to run on that alone, of course, but that's not quite the intention.
Cardboard soaked with organic grease burns fairly cleanly, especially if it isn't the only thing drawing the fire. It's made from plants, so it's not going to add any more CO2 to the atmosphere. It reduces the amount of fossil fuels used for cooking. It reduces the need to transport used containers to recycling plants {which often uses as much or more energy than initial manufacture}.
Burning food packaging in the stoves used to cook the food seems to make perfect sense
Leah Betts died of drinking too much water. She took an Ecstasy tablet while her {rabidly anti-some-drugs} dad was out -- then heard he was due back before she would wear off. Fearful of a bollocking on his early return, she drank several litres of water in a misguided attempt to counteract the effects of the drug. This caused an electrolyte imbalance, leading to multiple organ failure -- including the brain -- and eventual death.
Legal ecstasy tablets probably would include an information sheet detailing safe usage practicesm and this would never have happened. However, the government, breweries and the tobacco companies all would prefer for you to believe that she was killed by a tab of ecstasy.
I believe that everyone does have a right to a job -- actually, more of an obligation to get a job, do something socially necessary and pay some taxes while they're at it. If people are earning a living then they are not out committing crimes, and they don't need dole money. That means more public money can be spent on positive things like healthcare and education {maybe even free veterinary care}, as opposed to negative things like repairing vandalism and keeping people in prison. And we can be manufacturing goods in our own backyard, rather than relying on imports.
People have needs, and they are going to fulfil them one way or another. It's better that they should get the opportunity to do so in a socially acceptable way.
What we need is a new law that makes it illegal for hardware manufacturers to keep driver details secret. If you want to sell me a fancy wireless adaptor, graphics card, sound card or whatever, fine; but you have to give me all the information I need to write a driver for anything that I might want to interface to it.
It used to be so, back in the days when a printer came with a big thick manual explaining how to do various textual and graphical effects, even pulse timings and voltages for the interface. And everyone thought that information was part of the operating instructions. Sometime between then and now, it went sour; probably we didn't notice, but documentation went from hacker-friendly, to (non-hacker)-friendly, to non-(hacker-friendly). Nowadays, it seems printer manuals just say "plug in the USB cable and install the Windows software" -- and manufacturers are treating the important stuff like how to fire the second "red" nozzle down as though it were some sort of nuclear secret.
Well, it isn't. If you buy a piece of hardware you have every right to make use of that hardware, and if the manufacturer will not tell you how to do so then they are obstructing your enjoyment of your own property. At the very least, the owner of a particular device should -- by sole virtue of ownership -- be automatically privy to any "secret" it may contain; ideally, such information would be in the public domain by law.
And sod the whingeing about "competitors having access to your 'proprietary information'". Your competitors already pay people to reverse-engineer your products, and you will get access to their "proprietary information".
Since
If you don't give people the opportunity to make an honest living, they will make a dishonest one instead. It's called the human survival instinct. If you take a basically-law-abiding citizen, place some food in front of them and deprive them of the means to pay for that food, then, eventually, no matter what threats you make against them, that person is going to get hungry enough to think about stealing that food. Maybe even hungry enough to think about fighting for that food. Perhaps even desperate enough to think of killing someone for that food. It is a biological necessity and the human organism is hard-wired not to let itself die.
Now extrapolate that to the rest of the population whose jobs get exported overseas, and move it out from nice safe laboratory conditions into the mean city streets. Your only hope is that, by such times, there might not actually be enough oil left underground to make any petrol-bombs.
The people who wrote the US Constitution overlooked "It being preferable that people live by honest labour and pay taxes, rather than by crime; so Congress shall make no law which prejudices a citizen's right to earn an honest living for themself". At that time, when logistics were still primitive, it would have been all but inconceivable that so much work could be outsourced.
Also, bear in mind that in much of the third world, there are no such "expensive luxuries" as workers' rights, state pensions and health care, health and safety regulations, pollution control &c. Yet the West routinely imports goods manufactured in conditions that would be totally illegal in the destination country.
Maybe not a God-given right to a job, but every member of a civilised society has the human right to earn an honest living within that society. That is part of the definition of civilisation; a civilised society looks after its own from the cradle to the grave, and any society that does not do that is by definition not civilised.
That isn't actually as much as it sounds. 51kW for 100k people is only 510mW per person. Yeah, just over half a watt. Now if a person eats 2000 calories a day, that's 8320 kJ in 86400 seconds, or about 96 watts. Which gives us an efficiency of about half a percent.
Linux is fast, easy to use, and has support from real people. Most "normal users" don't actually choose Windows, they get given it by default and have to put up with it.
Try this little thought experiment.
Suppose Microsoft suddenly and without warning release a brand new version of Windows. This new Windows offers you exactly the same functionality as your old Windows, including crashing: the only thing noteworthy about it is totally incompatible with all applications and data from the old version. Now imagine that your copy of Windows and all your old work have been irretrievably lost in a disk failure, and you will have to start again from scratch. GNU/Linux and Mac systems are still available unchanged.
Would you still choose Windows?
Linux developers started by envisaging how a "perfect" computer would behave, if there were no inherent limitations, and went on to try to make real-life, limited hardware behave in as close a manner as possible to the ideal. So all storage devices try to emulate SCSI discs, and all printers try to emulate Postscript. It gives programmers on both sides of the interface an identifiable, acheivable and verifiable goal to aim for.
Windows developers simply built on layer after layer on a system they knew was imperfect, adding extensions willy-nilly as the need arose; effectively, adjusting the limits to match a constantly-evolving state of the art. The result is a compatibility nightmare. Things often don't work properly together for no obvious reason; the most likely cause is a logic trap triggered by a number of unconnected events occurring in the right order. And it's still easier just to put up with it than to try to do anything about it.
Furthermore, Open Source programmers know their work is going to be seen by many pairs of eyes around the world, take care to avoid stupid mistakes -- but accept that even if they are temporarily red-faced, the worst thing that can happen in the long run is that they get to learn from the experience. Closed-source programmers, believing that nobody will ever see their code, can take bigger liberties with their code.
By having higher limits to aim for, Linux developers have been less fazed by new developments; and it's my guess that 64-bit technology will be well established long before the 32-bit timestamp space limit hits home.
I call troll. Linux hardware compatibility is improving daily. And while Windows might claim to work with numerically more devices than Linux, the devices that do work with Linux work more reliably than they do with Windows. There are now graphical front ends for the fiddly set-up procedures; and thanks to the modular approcah of Linux, these tend to be consistent across devices -- Windows drivers, even from the same manufacturer, are very inconsistent.
NO, the life of a criminal is NOT less valuable than your own. That is the point I was making.
That is sensible if you look at it from the point that human life is always more valuable than property. That means the life of the lowest scumsucker you can imagine is still worth more than the most expensive piece of property you can imagine.
If it were the other way around, and property could sometimes be considered more valuable than life, then there would be interminable dispute over the crossover point, which would accomplish little except to waste the courts' time.
At any rate, I prefer the idea that nobody can consider me inferior to a piece of property!
Looks like drug parapherenalia to me, especially if the lighter stays lit without having to hold a trigger (a la Zippo; good for roasting hash before crumbling it into a joint. Also handy for tooting heroin; you need one hand to aim the straw towards the vapours, one hand to hold the aluminium foil above the heat source, and that doesn't leave you a hand to operate the heat source with). Or maybe they figure that having desirable / collectable lighters encourages people to smoke. Maybe it's a fire risk. Who knows?
Has a government ever banned something obviously desirable, because they figured they could make more money out of bribes and so forth with something being imported and sold illegally, than they could make out of value-added tax with it being legally available?
You think that's bad? In the UK, you can't even buy safety razor blades {eg. Gillette sensor type, which can't make a cut more than 1mm. deep without serious modding, the process of which is likely to cut you} if you're under 16, but you can be expelled from school for not shaving!
Clearly the law was meant to stop kids buying cut-throat razor blades, but it's still a bit idiotic. And if they want knives, they will just steal them.
What I'd like to see would be that legitimate SMTP servers insisted on SMTP AUTH. Any message not originating from a known authentication-enabled server could be blocked.
..... that is not an unrealistic proposition ..... !
There are only 4 billion or so IP addresses. It takes one bit per address to say yea or nay -- that's 512MB. It's conceivable for a big, meaty server to keep that in RAM, so it wouldn't be unnnecessarily slow.
Actually, what this means is that something equivalent to the IP addresses of all those machines that aren't supposed to be running mail servers, would fit on a single CD-ROM. Hmmmm
If you want to drive your car on the roads, it has to pass a roadworthiness test. If the brakes are defective, or the steering is not straight, or the clutch is slipping, or a light bulb is out, or any one of a long list of things are wrong with it, then it might cause a danger to others, so it is not allowed on the Queen's highway until you get it fixed. Nobody has a problem with that. If you want to drive a death trap, you have to do it on your own property where you aren't causing a hazard for other people.
I don't think it's inherently unreasonable to impose a "networthiness" test on PCs. OTOH, this should be done by a properly accountable body; otherwise it's not policing, just vigilantism. Insisting on specific items of closed-source commercial software, for instance, is unacceptable. Nobody should ever be forced to be tied to a particular software product: I should always remain free to write my own software as long as I am able to prove that it meets the regulations, just as I am free to build my own road-going vehicle as long as I can prove that it meets the regulations. I am also free to challenge the regulations through the democratic process. I'm saying regulate the ends, not the means, and have the regulators know for sure that we, the public, pay their wages.
The real, long-term solution will begin when all forms of unsolicited commercial advertising on the Internet are forbidden {no more spam, no more popups; not even banner ads unless the user chooses to see them}; and when software vendors are legally obliged to offer either a guarantee that their software will perform as stated and only as stated or the complete source code.
Freeserve already does that. Any traffic you send to any IP address on port 25 is diverted to Freeserve's SMTP server. I know this because I work for an ISP and was getting complaints about "our" SMTP server, I did tail -f /var/log/maillog and had the customer send an e-mail. Nothing, but he got a bounce message -- and it was nothing like the ones our sendmail generates -- so he must have got on to some server somewhere. Wasn't running any anti-virus software either. Made him change the server addresses from words to figures (so as to eliminate DNS from the equation) and try again. Same response, some SMTP server somewhere barfing. Had to bell Freeserve to find out what the hell was going on.
The "side effects" include that data written to one partition also gets written somewhere else in the other partition, and vice versa. Of course, the sector map only gets updated in the partition you deliberately wrote to, so the file won't appear in any directory listing in the other one -- and that space won't be marked as "occupied", so files in the second partition will be able to use it. Eventually, a file on the second partition will grow into the space occupied by a file from the first partition, and what you will end up with is a huge case of crosslinking.