If you want to be considered authoritative anywhere outside your intranet, you need nameservers on two separate addresses {though they may refer to the same machine -- some small ISPs in the 1990s used to get away with that}. At least, that's what Nominet insist on. Your local NIC might be different.
Technical books, by their very nature, will never sell as many copies as, say, Harry Potter novels, or Terry Pratchett's Discworld or Jean M. Auel's caveman porn series.
The audience for technical books is essentially captive. They often have no choice except to buy that particular book -- perhaps because it is required reading for a course, or perhaps because it is the only authoritative reference on a subject.
And, yes, to some greater or lesser extent it's because we've shown willing to pay high prices in the past. The extent of the power which individuals may have over this, however, is questionable; since many of these books are going to be bought by businesses, libraries and other institutions.
Maybe not, but the case would never be allowed to get to court. An acquittal -- honestly the most likely outcome -- would mean chaos, with officially-legal home taping; a conviction would mean a different flavour of chaos, with police busting everybody right, left and centre -- and home taping would in all probability be legalised, just to stem the tide. That is more than the record companies would ever dare stand for; the suspect would be roughed up a little and the evidence would go astray. That's just SOP for the Met.!
No, their web hosting company did something wrong, and the Operating System vendor was mistakenly blamed for the problem. Your DNS hosting, web hosting, mail hosting and database hosting can all be carried out by different companies. You can also do any of them yourself, if you have a static IP address {though DNS is more tricky than the others, requiring two static IP addresses}. When your Philips radio {powered by electricity from Powergen, paid for with tokens bought in a 24 hour Spar supermarket} goes silent in the middle of a Charlotte Church record during the Terry Wogan Show, who do you call?
The BBC?
Charlotte Church's record label?
Powergen?
Philips?
Mind you, this Jerry Taylor guy sounds like he probably has trouble dealing with hall-and-landing light switches.
Um, no they didn't. 1970 was part of the 1960s. The 1970s began at midnight on 1 January 1971 and ended at 23:59 on 31 December 1980. There was no year zero.....
True, it's not explicitly allowed; but if anyone was ever prosecuted, they would have to go to court. And it's highly unlikely that out of a jury of twelve people, there won't be at least two who have at some stage taped an LP for the purpose of listening to it in their car. Hell, the judge probably has done it.
Just because something is illegal doesn't mean you won't get away with it.....
In this country, domain names always used to be big-endian {starting with the country}. For instance, uk.ac.aston.vax. E-mail addresses on our VAX system were written something like "CBS%UK.AC.ASTON.VAX::AJS" but I think that was a feature of the way VAX/VMS handled e-mail deliveries to other machines; other, UNIX systems used to use things like "ajs@uk.ac.aston.vax".
Both ways make sense, for different reasons. {And it's worth remembering that, on the Continent, it's common to write the street name before the house number in a physical address [e.g. Weteringschans 17]; though this is spoilt somewhat by the street invariably preceding the town.} It's the same with number representations. Little-endian gives you the units first, which is how you want to do addition and subtraction; but big-endian makes it easier to do rough comparisons and rounding.
It's much more fun to use a.png image for the empty pixel. Internet Explorer still can't display transparent PNGs properly -- they show up white against the background.
You have certain rights under the Law of the Land, which nobody can take away from you -- not even if you sign a contract in blood promising you won't do them. These include "Fair Dealing" {aka "fair use" in some jurisdictions}. Making a copy of a computer program in the memory of a computer for the purpose of running the program is fair dealing, and you don't need a licence for that.
Also, region-locking of movies is illegal in Mainland Europe, and might be found to be illegal in the UK {if the EU don't evict us first}.
I don't have a problem with that at all; and I don't think anyone else who seriously believes in the Four Freedoms would have a problem with it. If you believe in the Four Freedoms, and you believe that they apply absolutely and without qualification to every user past, present and future and to every piece of software ever written or to be written, then it follows that for anyone to deny anyone else any of the Four Freedoms, ever, is just downright wrong.
If you try to prevent me from studying a piece of software to satisfy my sense of morbid curiosity, then that is an act of violence. If you tell me I cannot make a copy of a piece of software to help my neighbour, then that is tantamount to you stealing from my neighbour. If you try to prevent me from adapting a piece of software to my own particular needs, then that constitutes you imposing your will on me -- which is a form of violence.
I would certainly go so far as to say that the use of reasonable force is justified in the pursuit of the Four Freedoms. The environmental protesters of the 1990s called for no harm to life, only property in the pursuit of their goals. I do not think it unreasonable to call for no harm to life or {real, tangible} property, only false, "intellectual property" in the pursuit of the Four Freedoms. By which I mean to say that holding a knife to someone's throat and demanding that they hand over the source code, however romantic that may sound, would not be reasonable force if there was a more benign way to obtain it {perhaps by decompilation, by non-destructively hacking into a file server, or by temporarily misappropriating a laptop with intent to return it}.
It's not about whether two wrongs make a right. It's about whether liberating proprietary software is even wrong. And clearly it isn't, because it should never have been proprietary in the first place.
Since this wouldn't be Slashdot without an analogy, I'll provide one.
If someone has locked a dog in their car on a hot day, and it is in serious distress, anyone has a legal right to break into that car to rescue the dog. Even if they have to cause some damage to the car, as long as they can show that it was no more than necessary then the law is on their side {and the owner can pay for repairs out of the money you will be saving on dog food, because they will be barred from keeping a dog in future}.
A restrictive EULA is like a locked car on a hot day, and the user so restricted is like a dog trapped in the car.
RMS also goes on to say that liberating software in the way vendors think of as "theft" probably won't be terribly effective, because the vendors will be in a position to suppress the use of the liberated code. What would be more effective would be for even just one country somewhere in the world to enshrine the Four Freedoms in law. And I do not believe that is too improbable.
The difference between tightly-integrated and flexible, modular construction is probably best illustrated by an analogy from another domain.
If you want a hi-fi system, there are two approaches you can take. Either you buy a ready-built system in a box; with a radio receiver, turntable, CD player, cassette decks and amplifier all in one package. You just connect the supplied loudspeakers, plug it into the mains and you're ready to listen. Or you can go for separate components: a radio receiver, turntable, CD player, cassette deck, amplifier and speakers, each in its own box requiring its own power supply and audio signal connections.
Now, with the all-in-one option, you're fine as long as it all keeps working perfectly. But then if, say, the cassette deck packs up and you have to take the thing in to be repaired, you lose the use of the entire system. With the separates, you can take any component {except the speakers or amplifier, obviously} in for repair and still have the use of the rest of the system.
There's no reason in principle why modular systems should be any more difficult to set up and use {especially since audio and mains connectors are standardised nowadays}; but "one box solution" vendors like to tout as an advantage the concept that you, the paying customer, might be too stupid to follow a set of simple instructions. It's also quite reasonable to assume that any piece of mechanical or electronic equipment will break down sooner or later.
Maybe he'll start a whole new distro using slightly-hacked versions of the GPL'ed *drake setup tools, but using.deb rather than.rpm as a package format. Mandrake was always let down by not having a big enough package repository, and it ended up diverging too far from Red Hat to use their RPMs.
They put their content up, with adverts. I read the content, but not the adverts. That is my right; they are my eyes, and I get to choose what I see with them. And if I can use some kind of tool somehow to determine in advance which bits I want to read and which bits I don't, and simply not bother fetching the "unwanted" bits from the server, so much the better.
If someone expects to get paid money just because I saw an advertisement, they're the one with the problem {unrealistic expectations}. Not me.
How do you figure I am being a parasite? I am never, ever going to buy the products being advertised anyway; so, if anything, I am saving the advertiser the cost of a wasted advertisement!
Capitalism and socialism are both means-oriented philosophies. That is, the means by which an end is achieved is considered more important than the end in itself. {This goes against the Principle of Equivalence, which states that "all means to the same end are equally valid"; its corollary is "means that are not equally valid serve different ends".}
To a capitalist or a socialist, obeying orders -- even if the intended aim is not achieved -- is considered more important than achieving aims.
If a high-ranking officer orders an NCO to lead troops to their certain death, but the NCO thinks on his feet and at the last minute finds a way to save the lives of his men and take the ground, he will be court-martialled and executed for gross insubordination. If the NCO instead leads his men to their death, he will be hailed posthumously as a hero, and the deaths recorded as tragic but necessary. Their deaths will not be considered the fault of the NCO for obeying orders, nor the HRO for issuing the orders, but the fault of the Enemy.
It would be better for an entire city's worth of innocent civilians to die in screaming agony, than for the law to be broken. If the law says property is more important than life, then property is more important than life. In fact, US law is quite explicit that is is OK to kill a human being in order to protect {real, physical} property. {UK law stops just shy of this. In some parts of Continental Europe, a shopkeeper must actually allow a hungry person to shoplift food, or face penalties.} Killing to protect false, "intellectual property" is surely the next logical extension of this principle. The DMCA is there to protect intellectual property, which is considered equal to physical property and thus to be protected from harmful pirates. Any damage done in the name of protecting intellectual property is surely the fault of the pirates against whom that property was being defended, and not the fault of the defenders.
That's the means-oriented view, anyway. If you take a more ends-oriented view like the filthy libertarians {disliked equally both by capitalists, for their perverse ideas about how some things can be more important than money, and by socialists for their ideas about the individual [individuals are an unhealthy concept] as an extreme case of a minority [minorities are to be protected]} then you probably think it is a little strange.....
There doesn't seem to be a market for a new CPU architecture.
One could make a blisteringly fast, ultra-RISC processor that completes every R-to-M instruction in one clock cycle {read the instruction from memory on the rising edge ["tick"], let the logic matrix outputs stabilise during the high period and write the result to memory on the falling edge ["tock"]} and every M-to-R or M-to-M in two {an extra tick is needed to read the operand from memory and the intervening tock is wasted; unless you can read on both edges, then M-to-R can be done in one cycle, with the logic matrix stabilising during the low period. M-to-M still takes two and might be better "faked" using two instructions; M-to-R followed by R-to-M, which would keep the instruction set simpler}. You could even do several R-to-R instructions in parallel, if you had more than one logic matrix {or a partitionable logic matrix} and a register bank designed so as to support multiple independent reads and writes. But such a machine wouldn't be at all architecture-compatible with anything else, and you would need effectively to run a kind of interpreter or emulator all the time to deal with the instruction sets of existing processors.
And that is what the modern Athlon-type processors do anyway: a RISC processor is emulating an old CISC processor. I personally have a sort of gut feeling that this is unnecessarily slow: code that was optimised for the "outward" CISC instruction set may not be truly optimal on the underlying RISC processor, since it might occasionally have to take a diversion to do something which the CISC instruction specification required, but which was not necessary in this particular instance {e.g. setting a flag which will never be read}. Saving even apparently just a few clock cycles in this way might well result in a performance gain, especially if it can be done in a heavily-used loop -- particularly somewhere like the kernel, libc or the shell.
However, every new processor architecture -- or, for that matter, every new way of using an existing processor architecture -- requires recompilation of existing software. In the Open Source world, that's somewhere between trivial and a non-issue. But in the Closed Source world, it's a showstopper.
Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates briefly saw Theo de Raadt in the Gents' toilets at an important computer show; Theo left the trough and walked away without washing his hands. A bit later, they saw him again and decided to take him to task over his indiscretion.
"At Microsoft, we always wash our hands when we've been to the toilet!" said Bill, smugly.
"I'm sure all the Linux developers wash and dry their hands when they've been to the toilet!" said Linus, determined to outdo Bill.
"Fuck off, the pair of you," said Theo, "OpenBSD people don't piss on their fingers!"
Then what do you propose as a way the companies that deliver the websites you visit and block ads from should cover the costs they have for serving their content to you, plus a little profit ?
Sorry, I don't buy that argument. Are you saying that someone, somewhere actually loses money if I don't see an advert? Well, fuck them then!
I do not buy products based on advertisements. Therefore I have no need of advertisements. I leave the room when the adverts are on the TV. I block adverts on the internet wherever possible, at the proxy server level. I have no compunction about any of this. I am the person who decides what I see, nobody else. Show me one advertisement, and you have thrown away your chance of ever receiving a penny from me.
A server-side script seeds the advert server and main page server with some random numbers which are used to generate a pair of encryption and decryption keys. Each advert on the page sets a cookie. The main page is mostly encrypted and hidden in s with display:none set. On the main page is a client-side script which waits for all the adverts to load; and uses their supplied cookie data to generate a decryption key, unscramble the page content and make it visible. If the user has not loaded all the advertisements on the page, they won't have the decryption key; only the encrypted content. The keys can be changed many times, as long as the advert and page servers are kept in sync.
If the above constitutes a patent application, I hereby claim it.
You really want to know this? O.K. Don't say you were not warned. I have rot-13 encoded it, just in case it gives anybody nightmares. I repeat: do not attempt to decode this if you are at all capable of being offended!
Betnavfzf juvpu orybat gb gur fnzr fcrpvrf {sbe vafgnapr, gur qbzrfgvp qbt naq gur jvyq jbys} pna cebqhpr bssfcevat pncnoyr bs oerrqvat.
Betnavfzf juvpu orybat gb qvssrerag fcrpvrf jvguva gur fnzr trahf {sbe vafgnapr, gur ubefr naq gur qbaxrl} pna cebqhpr bssfcevat, ohg gur bssfcevat ner vapncnoyr bs oerrqvat.
V guvax lbh pna jbex bhg gur erfg sbe lbhefrys.
Sorry, but you did ask. If you hadn't been an AC, I could have contacted you by another means.
I think an effective advert blocker might require about a dozen lines of perl, if you get your list of sites from a hash tied to an external database {initialised elsewhere} and launch it from inetd. Then just be a simple proxyserver; if the request does not m// any of the hash keys, open a socket, forward it to the rest of the world and return the response. Otherwise, last and exit with a locally-generated 404.
I might try this for my lunchtime programming challenge.....
The point is that science is objective and beyond the control of humans; politics is subjective and entirely within the control of humans. Science can provide answers to some political problems {and political will, or the lack thereof, can make or break scientific projects}, but no amount of political manoeuvring will ever change a scientific law.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to be considered authoritative anywhere outside your intranet, you need nameservers on two separate addresses {though they may refer to the same machine -- some small ISPs in the 1990s used to get away with that}. At least, that's what Nominet insist on. Your local NIC might be different.
Technical books, by their very nature, will never sell as many copies as, say, Harry Potter novels, or Terry Pratchett's Discworld or Jean M. Auel's caveman porn series.
The audience for technical books is essentially captive. They often have no choice except to buy that particular book -- perhaps because it is required reading for a course, or perhaps because it is the only authoritative reference on a subject.
And, yes, to some greater or lesser extent it's because we've shown willing to pay high prices in the past. The extent of the power which individuals may have over this, however, is questionable; since many of these books are going to be bought by businesses, libraries and other institutions.
Maybe not, but the case would never be allowed to get to court. An acquittal -- honestly the most likely outcome -- would mean chaos, with officially-legal home taping; a conviction would mean a different flavour of chaos, with police busting everybody right, left and centre -- and home taping would in all probability be legalised, just to stem the tide. That is more than the record companies would ever dare stand for; the suspect would be roughed up a little and the evidence would go astray. That's just SOP for the Met.!
Mmmmm ..... Tilda rice .....</homer_simpson>
Um, no they didn't. 1970 was part of the 1960s. The 1970s began at midnight on 1 January 1971 and ended at 23:59 on 31 December 1980. There was no year zero .....
True, it's not explicitly allowed; but if anyone was ever prosecuted, they would have to go to court. And it's highly unlikely that out of a jury of twelve people, there won't be at least two who have at some stage taped an LP for the purpose of listening to it in their car. Hell, the judge probably has done it.
.....
Just because something is illegal doesn't mean you won't get away with it
In this country, domain names always used to be big-endian {starting with the country}. For instance, uk.ac.aston.vax. E-mail addresses on our VAX system were written something like "CBS%UK.AC.ASTON.VAX::AJS" but I think that was a feature of the way VAX/VMS handled e-mail deliveries to other machines; other, UNIX systems used to use things like "ajs@uk.ac.aston.vax".
Both ways make sense, for different reasons. {And it's worth remembering that, on the Continent, it's common to write the street name before the house number in a physical address [e.g. Weteringschans 17]; though this is spoilt somewhat by the street invariably preceding the town.} It's the same with number representations. Little-endian gives you the units first, which is how you want to do addition and subtraction; but big-endian makes it easier to do rough comparisons and rounding.
It's much more fun to use a .png image for the empty pixel. Internet Explorer still can't display transparent PNGs properly -- they show up white against the background.
You have certain rights under the Law of the Land, which nobody can take away from you -- not even if you sign a contract in blood promising you won't do them. These include "Fair Dealing" {aka "fair use" in some jurisdictions}. Making a copy of a computer program in the memory of a computer for the purpose of running the program is fair dealing, and you don't need a licence for that.
Also, region-locking of movies is illegal in Mainland Europe, and might be found to be illegal in the UK {if the EU don't evict us first}.
I don't have a problem with that at all; and I don't think anyone else who seriously believes in the Four Freedoms would have a problem with it. If you believe in the Four Freedoms, and you believe that they apply absolutely and without qualification to every user past, present and future and to every piece of software ever written or to be written, then it follows that for anyone to deny anyone else any of the Four Freedoms, ever, is just downright wrong.
If you try to prevent me from studying a piece of software to satisfy my sense of morbid curiosity, then that is an act of violence. If you tell me I cannot make a copy of a piece of software to help my neighbour, then that is tantamount to you stealing from my neighbour. If you try to prevent me from adapting a piece of software to my own particular needs, then that constitutes you imposing your will on me -- which is a form of violence.
I would certainly go so far as to say that the use of reasonable force is justified in the pursuit of the Four Freedoms. The environmental protesters of the 1990s called for no harm to life, only property in the pursuit of their goals. I do not think it unreasonable to call for no harm to life or {real, tangible} property, only false, "intellectual property" in the pursuit of the Four Freedoms. By which I mean to say that holding a knife to someone's throat and demanding that they hand over the source code, however romantic that may sound, would not be reasonable force if there was a more benign way to obtain it {perhaps by decompilation, by non-destructively hacking into a file server, or by temporarily misappropriating a laptop with intent to return it}.
It's not about whether two wrongs make a right. It's about whether liberating proprietary software is even wrong. And clearly it isn't, because it should never have been proprietary in the first place.
Since this wouldn't be Slashdot without an analogy, I'll provide one.
If someone has locked a dog in their car on a hot day, and it is in serious distress, anyone has a legal right to break into that car to rescue the dog. Even if they have to cause some damage to the car, as long as they can show that it was no more than necessary then the law is on their side {and the owner can pay for repairs out of the money you will be saving on dog food, because they will be barred from keeping a dog in future}.
A restrictive EULA is like a locked car on a hot day, and the user so restricted is like a dog trapped in the car.
RMS also goes on to say that liberating software in the way vendors think of as "theft" probably won't be terribly effective, because the vendors will be in a position to suppress the use of the liberated code. What would be more effective would be for even just one country somewhere in the world to enshrine the Four Freedoms in law. And I do not believe that is too improbable.
That is categorically not an Apple ][ screenshot.
The difference between tightly-integrated and flexible, modular construction is probably best illustrated by an analogy from another domain.
If you want a hi-fi system, there are two approaches you can take. Either you buy a ready-built system in a box; with a radio receiver, turntable, CD player, cassette decks and amplifier all in one package. You just connect the supplied loudspeakers, plug it into the mains and you're ready to listen. Or you can go for separate components: a radio receiver, turntable, CD player, cassette deck, amplifier and speakers, each in its own box requiring its own power supply and audio signal connections.
Now, with the all-in-one option, you're fine as long as it all keeps working perfectly. But then if, say, the cassette deck packs up and you have to take the thing in to be repaired, you lose the use of the entire system. With the separates, you can take any component {except the speakers or amplifier, obviously} in for repair and still have the use of the rest of the system.
There's no reason in principle why modular systems should be any more difficult to set up and use {especially since audio and mains connectors are standardised nowadays}; but "one box solution" vendors like to tout as an advantage the concept that you, the paying customer, might be too stupid to follow a set of simple instructions. It's also quite reasonable to assume that any piece of mechanical or electronic equipment will break down sooner or later.
Maybe he'll start a whole new distro using slightly-hacked versions of the GPL'ed *drake setup tools, but using .deb rather than .rpm as a package format. Mandrake was always let down by not having a big enough package repository, and it ended up diverging too far from Red Hat to use their RPMs.
They put their content up, with adverts. I read the content, but not the adverts. That is my right; they are my eyes, and I get to choose what I see with them. And if I can use some kind of tool somehow to determine in advance which bits I want to read and which bits I don't, and simply not bother fetching the "unwanted" bits from the server, so much the better.
If someone expects to get paid money just because I saw an advertisement, they're the one with the problem {unrealistic expectations}. Not me.
How do you figure I am being a parasite? I am never, ever going to buy the products being advertised anyway; so, if anything, I am saving the advertiser the cost of a wasted advertisement!
Capitalism and socialism are both means-oriented philosophies. That is, the means by which an end is achieved is considered more important than the end in itself. {This goes against the Principle of Equivalence, which states that "all means to the same end are equally valid"; its corollary is "means that are not equally valid serve different ends".}
.....
To a capitalist or a socialist, obeying orders -- even if the intended aim is not achieved -- is considered more important than achieving aims.
If a high-ranking officer orders an NCO to lead troops to their certain death, but the NCO thinks on his feet and at the last minute finds a way to save the lives of his men and take the ground, he will be court-martialled and executed for gross insubordination. If the NCO instead leads his men to their death, he will be hailed posthumously as a hero, and the deaths recorded as tragic but necessary. Their deaths will not be considered the fault of the NCO for obeying orders, nor the HRO for issuing the orders, but the fault of the Enemy.
It would be better for an entire city's worth of innocent civilians to die in screaming agony, than for the law to be broken. If the law says property is more important than life, then property is more important than life. In fact, US law is quite explicit that is is OK to kill a human being in order to protect {real, physical} property. {UK law stops just shy of this. In some parts of Continental Europe, a shopkeeper must actually allow a hungry person to shoplift food, or face penalties.} Killing to protect false, "intellectual property" is surely the next logical extension of this principle. The DMCA is there to protect intellectual property, which is considered equal to physical property and thus to be protected from harmful pirates. Any damage done in the name of protecting intellectual property is surely the fault of the pirates against whom that property was being defended, and not the fault of the defenders.
That's the means-oriented view, anyway. If you take a more ends-oriented view like the filthy libertarians {disliked equally both by capitalists, for their perverse ideas about how some things can be more important than money, and by socialists for their ideas about the individual [individuals are an unhealthy concept] as an extreme case of a minority [minorities are to be protected]} then you probably think it is a little strange
There doesn't seem to be a market for a new CPU architecture.
One could make a blisteringly fast, ultra-RISC processor that completes every R-to-M instruction in one clock cycle {read the instruction from memory on the rising edge ["tick"], let the logic matrix outputs stabilise during the high period and write the result to memory on the falling edge ["tock"]} and every M-to-R or M-to-M in two {an extra tick is needed to read the operand from memory and the intervening tock is wasted; unless you can read on both edges, then M-to-R can be done in one cycle, with the logic matrix stabilising during the low period. M-to-M still takes two and might be better "faked" using two instructions; M-to-R followed by R-to-M, which would keep the instruction set simpler}. You could even do several R-to-R instructions in parallel, if you had more than one logic matrix {or a partitionable logic matrix} and a register bank designed so as to support multiple independent reads and writes. But such a machine wouldn't be at all architecture-compatible with anything else, and you would need effectively to run a kind of interpreter or emulator all the time to deal with the instruction sets of existing processors.
And that is what the modern Athlon-type processors do anyway: a RISC processor is emulating an old CISC processor. I personally have a sort of gut feeling that this is unnecessarily slow: code that was optimised for the "outward" CISC instruction set may not be truly optimal on the underlying RISC processor, since it might occasionally have to take a diversion to do something which the CISC instruction specification required, but which was not necessary in this particular instance {e.g. setting a flag which will never be read}. Saving even apparently just a few clock cycles in this way might well result in a performance gain, especially if it can be done in a heavily-used loop -- particularly somewhere like the kernel, libc or the shell.
However, every new processor architecture -- or, for that matter, every new way of using an existing processor architecture -- requires recompilation of existing software. In the Open Source world, that's somewhere between trivial and a non-issue. But in the Closed Source world, it's a showstopper.
Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates briefly saw Theo de Raadt in the Gents' toilets at an important computer show; Theo left the trough and walked away without washing his hands. A bit later, they saw him again and decided to take him to task over his indiscretion.
"At Microsoft, we always wash our hands when we've been to the toilet!" said Bill, smugly.
"I'm sure all the Linux developers wash and dry their hands when they've been to the toilet!" said Linus, determined to outdo Bill.
"Fuck off, the pair of you," said Theo, "OpenBSD people don't piss on their fingers!"
I do not buy products based on advertisements. Therefore I have no need of advertisements. I leave the room when the adverts are on the TV. I block adverts on the internet wherever possible, at the proxy server level. I have no compunction about any of this. I am the person who decides what I see, nobody else. Show me one advertisement, and you have thrown away your chance of ever receiving a penny from me.
A server-side script seeds the advert server and main page server with some random numbers which are used to generate a pair of encryption and decryption keys. Each advert on the page sets a cookie. The main page is mostly encrypted and hidden in s with display:none set. On the main page is a client-side script which waits for all the adverts to load; and uses their supplied cookie data to generate a decryption key, unscramble the page content and make it visible. If the user has not loaded all the advertisements on the page, they won't have the decryption key; only the encrypted content. The keys can be changed many times, as long as the advert and page servers are kept in sync.
If the above constitutes a patent application, I hereby claim it.
You really want to know this? O.K. Don't say you were not warned. I have rot-13 encoded it, just in case it gives anybody nightmares. I repeat: do not attempt to decode this if you are at all capable of being offended!
Betnavfzf juvpu orybat gb gur fnzr fcrpvrf {sbe vafgnapr, gur qbzrfgvp qbt naq gur jvyq jbys} pna cebqhpr bssfcevat pncnoyr bs oerrqvat.
Betnavfzf juvpu orybat gb qvssrerag fcrpvrf jvguva gur fnzr trahf {sbe vafgnapr, gur ubefr naq gur qbaxrl} pna cebqhpr bssfcevat, ohg gur bssfcevat ner vapncnoyr bs oerrqvat.
V guvax lbh pna jbex bhg gur erfg sbe lbhefrys.
Sorry, but you did ask. If you hadn't been an AC, I could have contacted you by another means.
I think an effective advert blocker might require about a dozen lines of perl, if you get your list of sites from a hash tied to an external database {initialised elsewhere} and launch it from inetd. Then just be a simple proxyserver; if the request does not m// any of the hash keys, open a socket, forward it to the rest of the world and return the response. Otherwise, last and exit with a locally-generated 404.
.....
I might try this for my lunchtime programming challenge
The point is that science is objective and beyond the control of humans; politics is subjective and entirely within the control of humans. Science can provide answers to some political problems {and political will, or the lack thereof, can make or break scientific projects}, but no amount of political manoeuvring will ever change a scientific law.