I keep having to say this. Just because you are a victim does not mean that you deserve no blame. If you smoke 40 fags a day and die of cancer, it's your fault. If someone steals an axe from your garden shed because you didn't lock it properly and then uses it to murder someone, the fact remains that you -- albeit through negligence -- supplied the weapon. If a 15-year-and-364-day-old girl gets into an over-21s bar, and you take her home and have sex with her, you may be a victim of deception but you're still guilty of paedophilia (even by just one day). It's a little thing called taking responsibility for your own actions. I realise that ambulance-chasing lawyers have painted this concept as somewhat quaint and unfashionable; but such a situation can't last indefinitely, and the sooner it changes, the less it will hurt.
Playing the "Granny having to set up security software" card isn't really valid. Why isn't the software on Granny's computer secure-by-design in the first place? Allowing remote command execution without authentication is just wrong, and the little old ladies of the world should be mad as hell that anyone would let their computers get taken over in this way.
As for not shooting through human shields..... that's the only thing that makes human shields effective in the first place! Do you really suppose they would use such a tactic if it patently didn't work? If the only thing between a bullet and some evil guy is the two helpless women he's clutching in front of him, well, so be it! Aren't a few innocent civilians a fair price to pay to bring down a terrorist? If someone hijacks a plane, no mucking about - just blow the fucker to smithereens in mid-air. Suddenly you've removed most of the point of hijacking planes (although it must be said, you've certainly created a new potential DoS.....)
The thing is, if the EU does ever legalise software patents, any patents that may have been falsely granted (which is all pure-maths patents, which every EU member states' laws explicitly disallow) won't come into force automagically. Every EU nation implements the UN Declaration of Human Rights, one paragraph of which states that a newly-introduced law cannot be used retrospectively against any action which took place before the law was introduced. Making falsely-granted patents enforcible would require a constitutional change in every EU member state! The patent holders will have to re-apply for them. Meanwhile, anything that might have "infringed" them -- if not for the simple fact that they were bollocks in the first place -- is now prior art that can be used to block the original holders' reapplications.
It is, however, conceivable that Britain could be expelled from the EU at some time in the future -- which might affect the patentability of software in the UK. Our membership is predicated on the slim probability that Britain might join the Euro at some stage in future (read: if this would directly benefit London); and then it would definitely make sense for at least some countries to start pricing their oil in Euros rather than US dollars. This would get the European banks a share of the money that currently gets skimmed off by the US treasury (or, sometimes, by British businesses with large quantities of US$ bills) whenever any nation changes their money for dollars to buy oil. If some European country discovers some new, cheap energy source that would make the Continent less reliant on oil, then the benefit of Britain joining the Euro would be lessened. We'd be out on our sorry arses; and the Japanese would buy up this country lock, stock and barrel while the News of the World readers were still partying.
Just because they are victims, does not mean they are blameless. Anyone who hasn't been living in a cave knows this kind of shit is going on.
When a group of people borrow money from a bank, they are "jointly and severally liable" for the outstanding portion of the debt. If a husband and wife borrow £100 000, then the husband pays back his half, each of them is considered still to owe the bank £50 000. If the wife disappears of the face of the planet, well, the husband has 50 000 extra motivating factors to track her down.
Likewise, in some countries, junk food restaurants can be fined if their empty cartons are found littering the street. If a store hands out promotional leaflets and these are later found littering the public highway, the store and the manufacturers of the equipment advertised in the leaflet can be fined.
We should apply the same principle to spam, and make every link in the chain liable for the consequences -- not just the spammer. Any legitimate vendor using spam as a method of advertising should be hauled over the coals as an example to the rest of them. Any company whose shares are pumped-and-dumped should be tried as though they were accessary to the fraud. Any ISP whose equipment (including a user's compromised PC attached to one of their routers) figures in the path of a spam message, or even a response to a spam message, should be fined. The user whose PC got botnetted should be fined. And when the spammers are eventually caught, they should of course be held liable to compensate everyone who was fined for their actions -- with interest.
Maybe that way, somebody would actually be bothered to do something about the spam problem.
I'm sure there are ways of defeating that at the CAPTCHA server level. Generate a brand new image every time, and send it out along with a cookie. The cookie is a database key which refers to the CAPTCHA solution; the record also contains the timestamp when the image was generated and the IP address to which it was sent. (NOT the MD5 of the solution: anyone can generate an MD5 for any word and send that as the cookie contents with their word as the answer, effectively bypassing the image altogether.) The answer must not only be correct; it must also come from the same IP address that received the image, and within a reasonable time limit. IP addresses cannot be forged (or else the server would be speaking to the wrong client) and nor can timestamps (which come from the server anyway), so this ought to be fairly robust. Checking the referrer won't help, because referrers can be forged.
The CAPTCHA image and question themselves need some thought as well. Just having a person type some "distorted" text verbatim is a bit christian IMHO, because it's vulnerable to OCR. Insisting to change the order or capitalisation ("type this backwards in all lower case") would be a good start, but there are plenty more techniques involving pictures that only a human being will be able to use; and you can possibly even set a knowledge barrier (by using challenges that will be easy for people in your chosen field but not random idiots) to keep out undesirables.
It's more like a few cents a day than a few dollars. And they don't actually pay you anyway. There are enough desperate people in developing countries that it's a reasonable business model to rip them off like this.
This criticism keeps coming up, but it's a non sequitur. It's a bit like saying "We can't cure cancer, so there's no point in trying to cure minor infections". Or like saying "As long as there's even one miserable person in the world, nobody should be happy".
The OLPC is for people who already have access to food, water, shelter and so forth. There are plenty of other initiatives to provide more basic needs. Support those if you want to, but don't knock this project. It's got the potential to do great things.
"All the runes that you will find were written by the ancient giants of Gorfland. They are no use to you since most are simply cooking recipies" -- what game was that from?
Actually there is still some controversy regarding one of the oldest cookbooks ever found. There is a recipe which was once thought to be for flapjacks. However, another school of thought states that it is in fact a shortbread recipe. The debate is over the meaning of a phrase which was translated as "crushed grains". The original discoverers believed that this referred to rolled oats and when the recipe was carried out the result was indeed a passable flapjack. However, on another inspection it has been discovered that if flour is used for the "crushed grains" in the recipe, then a delicious shortbread results.
Perhaps the solution is non-discriminatory licencing of all patents. In other words, if X owns a patent, and they licence it to Y, then they should also be bound to licence it to anyone else upon exactlythe same terms -- or not licence it at all.
This is what often happens when you are starting with some evidence and trying to fit a story to it. Some more evidence comes to light, and you have to alter the story a little to fit in with the latest evidence. Then a bit more evidence comes to light, and you have to alter the story again. And so forth, and so on, rinse and repeat. Eventually the story has had so many twists and turns added to accommodate all the new evidence, that it ends up bearing no resemblance to the original.
At which point you can either throw out the story altogether and start again, or lose your temper with anyone who points out the flaws.
Dogs are interesting. The first dog was just a wolf; then some caveman threw a bone at it, and the wolf followed him around everywhere after that.
Canines are predators, they live and hunt in packs, they can learn from experience and their life expectancy spans several generations. (Humans, too, are all these, so it's not much surprise that we get on so well.) They also demonstrate something which resembles altruism. But there are no great dog philosophers..... so how did wolves discover that mutual co-operation is better than individual ruthlessness?
We know that humans have a built-in behaviour-control mechanism, which rewards certain behaviours with a precise metered dose of a heroin-like substance to produce a feelgood effect. This is hard-wired and carefully regulated. If we assume that humans are not the only animals to have such a mechanism, then it's entirely possible for natural selection to produce something which resembles altruism. A population where the behaviour-control system rewards behaviour which is beneficial to the survival of the population is much more likely to thrive than a population where the behaviour-control system rewards behaviour which is deleterious to the survival of the population. It just so happens that the survival of a population as a whole is generally better served by selflessness than by selfishness.
But "selfishness" and "selflessness" are, at the end of the day, human concepts; we invented them, and we rationalised, added meaning to fit the facts. All Nature knows about is what succeeds and what does not succeed. If (and it's difficult to see how because it looks so absurd) things had been different and selfish behaviour had been better for population survival, we would consider greed a virtue and would have found ways of rationalising that instead.
But that's the point. God made really heavy weather of it, performing a whole bunch of miracles to keep an ark afloat in order to protect a select few against an indiscriminate cull, when it would have been simpler for a truly omnipotent God just to do a selective cull in the first place. Well, you could argue that there's no simple or complex for an omnipotent being, but he's not exactly trying to impress anyone -- Noah and co. are righteous enough not to need it, and everybody else is going to be dead anyway.
And what's the deal with refraction? Did the refractive index of water change during / after the flood? How else could nothing cast a rainbow till afterward? I think we need to be told!
I used to use a simple script to I wrote to create an index.html page from a directory of photos. This worked surprisingly well; but then I discovered digikam, and now I wouldn't look back.
Well, maybe..... my ADSL router actually has support for dyndns.org built in. But there are other benefits which go along with a static IP address. It's usually a business-grade thing -- and that means no ports blocked, no transparent proxies, no usage limits and only 20:1 contention. Some residential-grade services have much worse contention ratios, up to 200:1. I wouldn't live without a static IP address; but then again, I just like "industrial" stuff!
Microsoft's greatest competitor is not the Open Source movement, nor any closed-source vendor (actually, they killed off all the closed-source competition long ago. Would you rather buy a £50 office suite and save £450 or pirate a £500 office suite and save £500? Exactly. Nobody has to pirate the £50 one, but piracy is still what killed the company). Microsoft's greatest competitor is old versions of Microsoft software.
Unlike a consumable product, or something which has moving parts and must eventually wear out, it's not possible to add built-in obsolescence to software. You can keep old software running forever by just replacing the hardware it's running on. As long as there is some way to read the original disc into the new machine, you can keep using it.
One tactic might be to try to stop you doing that using legal threats. But some countries' laws are weighted against the poor starving corporations; and so those greedy consumers get an unfair inalienable right to install any software they have acquired legitimately on any hardware they have acquired legitimately.
So Microsoft have to resort to the tactic of changing file formats. By making subtle changes to the Word.doc format with each successive version, they can ensure that documents saved out of this year's Word are unreadable by last year's Word. Of course, this year's Word has to be able to read last year's Word documents, so increasing the size of the software -- and also inflating minimum hardware requirements, as Word becomes ever more obese.
I give it about 10 years before Microsoft collapse under the weight of their own shit. The Rest of the World are slowly waking up to this vendor lock-in thing and aren't entirely happy about it -- after all, most industrial parts are available from a range of suppliers. Any M8 nut will screw onto any M8 bolt. But only Microsoft software can read.doc and.xls files. Interesting things are going to happen when users get stranded with large stashes of files whose readability is predicated upon payment of money to Microsoft..... especially when some of those users are governments and have the power to change laws.....
There are two ways to keep Granny safe on the internet;
(1) If you can get her a static IP address, get her a generic PC and install your favourite distribution of Linux. Customise it for her with a few simple desktop icons. Know the root password so you can login remotely and perform maintenance (or just eject the CD-ROM and scare the shit out of her -- I used to do that all the time in the office where I work).
Then kindly explain how whatever process you hypothesise caused God and all the raw materials of the Universe to exist, could not just as probably have caused a ready-created universe which did not require a God to exist?
The only "failure" is that the $100 Laptop is useless as a vehicle for selling proprietary software. Remember, Microsoft et al have a perverse take on an old saying that goes "Give a man a fish and he'll come back the next day for more fish. Teach a man to fish and you can sell him expensive proprietary bait for life."
Some -- and it just takes a few -- of the kids that get into using this thing are going to become programmers, and Open Source is all they're ever going to have known. That's what the closed-source people find scary. Even the likes of Microsoft know that Open Source is going to win in the end, because it is simply better. The difference is that if OLPC takes off, the final victory of Open Source will occur within their lifetimes.
And MSCEs will find out what it feels like to work hard for a qualification, and then find suddenly it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
Which is why I had this crazy idea: tie the value of currency hard to the kilowatt-hour. Unlike gold or silver, which have been the traditional standards for currency (hint: look at a few languages) but whose value is based on whims and caprices, energy is a hard-valued commodity. A kilowatt-hour is a kilowatt-hour is 3.6MJ however you try to look at it. (On the Continent, water heaters and central heating boilers are rated in kW rather than BTU/hr. A BTU is as much heat as it would take to make 0.454kg of water exactly 5/9 of a degree hotter, or about 1.055kJ, and seems to have been invented for the express purpose of preventing any easy comparisons between gas and electricity. Worcester and a few other makes are now using kilowatts too.)
Instead of taking a bunch of banknotes to the national central bank and coming out with a pocketful of silver or gold, you'd take anything that burns to the sociedade municipal de iluminação e tração and get credit on your electricity meter!
Filling kids' heads with absurd notions of god, the devil, hell &c. is just another form of child abuse -- and I really can't see that it's any less damaging than sexual molestation. At least if you've been subjected to physical violence of some description (including sexual violence), there's something solid that you can get a handle on and eventually learn to deal with. When the abuse has all been in the mind, it's that much harder to deal with.
You shouldn't. If you attend church even as a rationalist observer, you are still legitimising it.
Last time I got dragged into a christian ceremony was for my grandad's funeral. There are few times in my life I have ever really wanted to do serious physical violence to someone, but I really wanted to kick that vicar to a bloody pulp for the shit he spouted. The main reason I didn't do so wasn't respect for anyone present, but pure selfishness; I just didn't want to make a mess of my posh suit. Also, there was a borrowed tie folded up in the jacket pocket (it can ward off evil spirits just as well that way.....) that I didn't want to lose.
That just set my mind more firmly against christians. I'm never going to another christian event, ever. If that offends anyone, well, fuck them. I've come to the conclusion that it's fine to offend people if they deserve it.
Your typical n00b probably is running Ubuntu, which uses Exim by default and has comments throughout its config files (assuming Ubuntu haven't written a nice GUI config tool). And SSL isn't necessarily required; many ISPs still rely on POP3-before-SMTP. This method actually has an additional advantage: it doesn't work with Outlook Express, which always wants to send before retrieving, and so forces people to install a proper e-mail client.
If you mean this, it's not surprising. Closed-source tools cannot be assumed to provide any security at all. DBAN was not tested in that report, nor even a simple use of dd.
No, putting SMTP in MUTT isn't the way to do it -- it would break the UNIX design philosophy of "do one thing and do it well". Every UNIX-like system already has sendmail, or something like it -- a command that you can filter text through and have it sent via SMTP. No other program requires SMTP functionality, because there's already a perfectly good SMTP engine out there. If you don't like the original sendmail than you can replace it with qmail, or postfix, or exim, or whatever. They're all designed on purpose to fit the same interface. Even the main binary is called "sendmail". If a serious security problem is ever discovered with a particular SMTP engine which will take several days to fix, it can be "swapped out" and replaced with a whole 'nother sendmail-alike until a patch becomes available (or maybe not, if the sysadmin comes to prefer the replacement).
Contrast that with Windows, where there is much unnecessary duplication of functionality because every vendor believes that their secret, proprietary way of doing something is better than anyone else's way of doing the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I keep having to say this. Just because you are a victim does not mean that you deserve no blame. If you smoke 40 fags a day and die of cancer, it's your fault. If someone steals an axe from your garden shed because you didn't lock it properly and then uses it to murder someone, the fact remains that you -- albeit through negligence -- supplied the weapon. If a 15-year-and-364-day-old girl gets into an over-21s bar, and you take her home and have sex with her, you may be a victim of deception but you're still guilty of paedophilia (even by just one day). It's a little thing called taking responsibility for your own actions. I realise that ambulance-chasing lawyers have painted this concept as somewhat quaint and unfashionable; but such a situation can't last indefinitely, and the sooner it changes, the less it will hurt.
..... that's the only thing that makes human shields effective in the first place! Do you really suppose they would use such a tactic if it patently didn't work? If the only thing between a bullet and some evil guy is the two helpless women he's clutching in front of him, well, so be it! Aren't a few innocent civilians a fair price to pay to bring down a terrorist? If someone hijacks a plane, no mucking about - just blow the fucker to smithereens in mid-air. Suddenly you've removed most of the point of hijacking planes (although it must be said, you've certainly created a new potential DoS .....)
Playing the "Granny having to set up security software" card isn't really valid. Why isn't the software on Granny's computer secure-by-design in the first place? Allowing remote command execution without authentication is just wrong, and the little old ladies of the world should be mad as hell that anyone would let their computers get taken over in this way.
As for not shooting through human shields
Or forever.
The thing is, if the EU does ever legalise software patents, any patents that may have been falsely granted (which is all pure-maths patents, which every EU member states' laws explicitly disallow) won't come into force automagically. Every EU nation implements the UN Declaration of Human Rights, one paragraph of which states that a newly-introduced law cannot be used retrospectively against any action which took place before the law was introduced. Making falsely-granted patents enforcible would require a constitutional change in every EU member state! The patent holders will have to re-apply for them. Meanwhile, anything that might have "infringed" them -- if not for the simple fact that they were bollocks in the first place -- is now prior art that can be used to block the original holders' reapplications.
It is, however, conceivable that Britain could be expelled from the EU at some time in the future -- which might affect the patentability of software in the UK. Our membership is predicated on the slim probability that Britain might join the Euro at some stage in future (read: if this would directly benefit London); and then it would definitely make sense for at least some countries to start pricing their oil in Euros rather than US dollars. This would get the European banks a share of the money that currently gets skimmed off by the US treasury (or, sometimes, by British businesses with large quantities of US$ bills) whenever any nation changes their money for dollars to buy oil. If some European country discovers some new, cheap energy source that would make the Continent less reliant on oil, then the benefit of Britain joining the Euro would be lessened. We'd be out on our sorry arses; and the Japanese would buy up this country lock, stock and barrel while the News of the World readers were still partying.
Just because they are victims, does not mean they are blameless. Anyone who hasn't been living in a cave knows this kind of shit is going on.
When a group of people borrow money from a bank, they are "jointly and severally liable" for the outstanding portion of the debt. If a husband and wife borrow £100 000, then the husband pays back his half, each of them is considered still to owe the bank £50 000. If the wife disappears of the face of the planet, well, the husband has 50 000 extra motivating factors to track her down.
Likewise, in some countries, junk food restaurants can be fined if their empty cartons are found littering the street. If a store hands out promotional leaflets and these are later found littering the public highway, the store and the manufacturers of the equipment advertised in the leaflet can be fined.
We should apply the same principle to spam, and make every link in the chain liable for the consequences -- not just the spammer. Any legitimate vendor using spam as a method of advertising should be hauled over the coals as an example to the rest of them. Any company whose shares are pumped-and-dumped should be tried as though they were accessary to the fraud. Any ISP whose equipment (including a user's compromised PC attached to one of their routers) figures in the path of a spam message, or even a response to a spam message, should be fined. The user whose PC got botnetted should be fined. And when the spammers are eventually caught, they should of course be held liable to compensate everyone who was fined for their actions -- with interest.
Maybe that way, somebody would actually be bothered to do something about the spam problem.
I'm sure there are ways of defeating that at the CAPTCHA server level. Generate a brand new image every time, and send it out along with a cookie. The cookie is a database key which refers to the CAPTCHA solution; the record also contains the timestamp when the image was generated and the IP address to which it was sent. (NOT the MD5 of the solution: anyone can generate an MD5 for any word and send that as the cookie contents with their word as the answer, effectively bypassing the image altogether.) The answer must not only be correct; it must also come from the same IP address that received the image, and within a reasonable time limit. IP addresses cannot be forged (or else the server would be speaking to the wrong client) and nor can timestamps (which come from the server anyway), so this ought to be fairly robust. Checking the referrer won't help, because referrers can be forged.
The CAPTCHA image and question themselves need some thought as well. Just having a person type some "distorted" text verbatim is a bit christian IMHO, because it's vulnerable to OCR. Insisting to change the order or capitalisation ("type this backwards in all lower case") would be a good start, but there are plenty more techniques involving pictures that only a human being will be able to use; and you can possibly even set a knowledge barrier (by using challenges that will be easy for people in your chosen field but not random idiots) to keep out undesirables.
It's more like a few cents a day than a few dollars. And they don't actually pay you anyway. There are enough desperate people in developing countries that it's a reasonable business model to rip them off like this.
This criticism keeps coming up, but it's a non sequitur. It's a bit like saying "We can't cure cancer, so there's no point in trying to cure minor infections". Or like saying "As long as there's even one miserable person in the world, nobody should be happy".
The OLPC is for people who already have access to food, water, shelter and so forth. There are plenty of other initiatives to provide more basic needs. Support those if you want to, but don't knock this project. It's got the potential to do great things.
"All the runes that you will find were written by the ancient giants of Gorfland. They are no use to you since most are simply cooking recipies" -- what game was that from?
Actually there is still some controversy regarding one of the oldest cookbooks ever found. There is a recipe which was once thought to be for flapjacks. However, another school of thought states that it is in fact a shortbread recipe. The debate is over the meaning of a phrase which was translated as "crushed grains". The original discoverers believed that this referred to rolled oats and when the recipe was carried out the result was indeed a passable flapjack. However, on another inspection it has been discovered that if flour is used for the "crushed grains" in the recipe, then a delicious shortbread results.
Perhaps the solution is non-discriminatory licencing of all patents. In other words, if X owns a patent, and they licence it to Y, then they should also be bound to licence it to anyone else upon exactlythe same terms -- or not licence it at all.
No, but telling you you can't look at the data packets originating from a piece of hardware you own is a violation of common-law property rights.
This is what often happens when you are starting with some evidence and trying to fit a story to it. Some more evidence comes to light, and you have to alter the story a little to fit in with the latest evidence. Then a bit more evidence comes to light, and you have to alter the story again. And so forth, and so on, rinse and repeat. Eventually the story has had so many twists and turns added to accommodate all the new evidence, that it ends up bearing no resemblance to the original.
At which point you can either throw out the story altogether and start again, or lose your temper with anyone who points out the flaws.
Dogs are interesting. The first dog was just a wolf; then some caveman threw a bone at it, and the wolf followed him around everywhere after that.
..... so how did wolves discover that mutual co-operation is better than individual ruthlessness?
Canines are predators, they live and hunt in packs, they can learn from experience and their life expectancy spans several generations. (Humans, too, are all these, so it's not much surprise that we get on so well.) They also demonstrate something which resembles altruism. But there are no great dog philosophers
We know that humans have a built-in behaviour-control mechanism, which rewards certain behaviours with a precise metered dose of a heroin-like substance to produce a feelgood effect. This is hard-wired and carefully regulated. If we assume that humans are not the only animals to have such a mechanism, then it's entirely possible for natural selection to produce something which resembles altruism. A population where the behaviour-control system rewards behaviour which is beneficial to the survival of the population is much more likely to thrive than a population where the behaviour-control system rewards behaviour which is deleterious to the survival of the population. It just so happens that the survival of a population as a whole is generally better served by selflessness than by selfishness.
But "selfishness" and "selflessness" are, at the end of the day, human concepts; we invented them, and we rationalised, added meaning to fit the facts. All Nature knows about is what succeeds and what does not succeed. If (and it's difficult to see how because it looks so absurd) things had been different and selfish behaviour had been better for population survival, we would consider greed a virtue and would have found ways of rationalising that instead.
But that's the point. God made really heavy weather of it, performing a whole bunch of miracles to keep an ark afloat in order to protect a select few against an indiscriminate cull, when it would have been simpler for a truly omnipotent God just to do a selective cull in the first place. Well, you could argue that there's no simple or complex for an omnipotent being, but he's not exactly trying to impress anyone -- Noah and co. are righteous enough not to need it, and everybody else is going to be dead anyway.
And what's the deal with refraction? Did the refractive index of water change during / after the flood? How else could nothing cast a rainbow till afterward? I think we need to be told!
I used to use a simple script to I wrote to create an index.html page from a directory of photos. This worked surprisingly well; but then I discovered digikam, and now I wouldn't look back.
Well, maybe ..... my ADSL router actually has support for dyndns.org built in. But there are other benefits which go along with a static IP address. It's usually a business-grade thing -- and that means no ports blocked, no transparent proxies, no usage limits and only 20:1 contention. Some residential-grade services have much worse contention ratios, up to 200:1. I wouldn't live without a static IP address; but then again, I just like "industrial" stuff!
Microsoft's greatest competitor is not the Open Source movement, nor any closed-source vendor (actually, they killed off all the closed-source competition long ago. Would you rather buy a £50 office suite and save £450 or pirate a £500 office suite and save £500? Exactly. Nobody has to pirate the £50 one, but piracy is still what killed the company). Microsoft's greatest competitor is old versions of Microsoft software.
.doc format with each successive version, they can ensure that documents saved out of this year's Word are unreadable by last year's Word. Of course, this year's Word has to be able to read last year's Word documents, so increasing the size of the software -- and also inflating minimum hardware requirements, as Word becomes ever more obese.
.doc and .xls files. Interesting things are going to happen when users get stranded with large stashes of files whose readability is predicated upon payment of money to Microsoft ..... especially when some of those users are governments and have the power to change laws .....
Unlike a consumable product, or something which has moving parts and must eventually wear out, it's not possible to add built-in obsolescence to software. You can keep old software running forever by just replacing the hardware it's running on. As long as there is some way to read the original disc into the new machine, you can keep using it.
One tactic might be to try to stop you doing that using legal threats. But some countries' laws are weighted against the poor starving corporations; and so those greedy consumers get an unfair inalienable right to install any software they have acquired legitimately on any hardware they have acquired legitimately.
So Microsoft have to resort to the tactic of changing file formats. By making subtle changes to the Word
I give it about 10 years before Microsoft collapse under the weight of their own shit. The Rest of the World are slowly waking up to this vendor lock-in thing and aren't entirely happy about it -- after all, most industrial parts are available from a range of suppliers. Any M8 nut will screw onto any M8 bolt. But only Microsoft software can read
There are two ways to keep Granny safe on the internet;
(1) If you can get her a static IP address, get her a generic PC and install your favourite distribution of Linux. Customise it for her with a few simple desktop icons. Know the root password so you can login remotely and perform maintenance (or just eject the CD-ROM and scare the shit out of her -- I used to do that all the time in the office where I work).
(2) In all other cases, get her an Apple Mac.
Then kindly explain how whatever process you hypothesise caused God and all the raw materials of the Universe to exist, could not just as probably have caused a ready-created universe which did not require a God to exist?
The only "failure" is that the $100 Laptop is useless as a vehicle for selling proprietary software. Remember, Microsoft et al have a perverse take on an old saying that goes "Give a man a fish and he'll come back the next day for more fish. Teach a man to fish and you can sell him expensive proprietary bait for life."
Some -- and it just takes a few -- of the kids that get into using this thing are going to become programmers, and Open Source is all they're ever going to have known. That's what the closed-source people find scary. Even the likes of Microsoft know that Open Source is going to win in the end, because it is simply better. The difference is that if OLPC takes off, the final victory of Open Source will occur within their lifetimes.
And MSCEs will find out what it feels like to work hard for a qualification, and then find suddenly it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
If you had heard the stuff that he was saying, and it was about a member of your family, you would have wanted to do exactly the same.
Which is why I had this crazy idea: tie the value of currency hard to the kilowatt-hour. Unlike gold or silver, which have been the traditional standards for currency (hint: look at a few languages) but whose value is based on whims and caprices, energy is a hard-valued commodity. A kilowatt-hour is a kilowatt-hour is 3.6MJ however you try to look at it. (On the Continent, water heaters and central heating boilers are rated in kW rather than BTU/hr. A BTU is as much heat as it would take to make 0.454kg of water exactly 5/9 of a degree hotter, or about 1.055kJ, and seems to have been invented for the express purpose of preventing any easy comparisons between gas and electricity. Worcester and a few other makes are now using kilowatts too.)
Instead of taking a bunch of banknotes to the national central bank and coming out with a pocketful of silver or gold, you'd take anything that burns to the sociedade municipal de iluminação e tração and get credit on your electricity meter!
Filling kids' heads with absurd notions of god, the devil, hell &c. is just another form of child abuse -- and I really can't see that it's any less damaging than sexual molestation. At least if you've been subjected to physical violence of some description (including sexual violence), there's something solid that you can get a handle on and eventually learn to deal with. When the abuse has all been in the mind, it's that much harder to deal with.
You shouldn't. If you attend church even as a rationalist observer, you are still legitimising it.
.....) that I didn't want to lose.
Last time I got dragged into a christian ceremony was for my grandad's funeral. There are few times in my life I have ever really wanted to do serious physical violence to someone, but I really wanted to kick that vicar to a bloody pulp for the shit he spouted. The main reason I didn't do so wasn't respect for anyone present, but pure selfishness; I just didn't want to make a mess of my posh suit. Also, there was a borrowed tie folded up in the jacket pocket (it can ward off evil spirits just as well that way
That just set my mind more firmly against christians. I'm never going to another christian event, ever. If that offends anyone, well, fuck them. I've come to the conclusion that it's fine to offend people if they deserve it.
Your typical n00b probably is running Ubuntu, which uses Exim by default and has comments throughout its config files (assuming Ubuntu haven't written a nice GUI config tool). And SSL isn't necessarily required; many ISPs still rely on POP3-before-SMTP. This method actually has an additional advantage: it doesn't work with Outlook Express, which always wants to send before retrieving, and so forces people to install a proper e-mail client.
If you mean this, it's not surprising. Closed-source tools cannot be assumed to provide any security at all. DBAN was not tested in that report, nor even a simple use of dd.
No, putting SMTP in MUTT isn't the way to do it -- it would break the UNIX design philosophy of "do one thing and do it well". Every UNIX-like system already has sendmail, or something like it -- a command that you can filter text through and have it sent via SMTP. No other program requires SMTP functionality, because there's already a perfectly good SMTP engine out there. If you don't like the original sendmail than you can replace it with qmail, or postfix, or exim, or whatever. They're all designed on purpose to fit the same interface. Even the main binary is called "sendmail". If a serious security problem is ever discovered with a particular SMTP engine which will take several days to fix, it can be "swapped out" and replaced with a whole 'nother sendmail-alike until a patch becomes available (or maybe not, if the sysadmin comes to prefer the replacement).
Contrast that with Windows, where there is much unnecessary duplication of functionality because every vendor believes that their secret, proprietary way of doing something is better than anyone else's way of doing the same thing.