In one scene, a character looks at a giant robot with surprise and clearly says, in a heavy Japanese accent, "Gundam... Mark II?!", but in the subs, he says, "It's a Gundam?"
I haven't seen the series, so I don't know the context, but they may well have done that because in English, they felt that phrase was more appropriate.
One issue I have with fansubs is that their greatest strength --- accurate translations --- is also their greatest weakness. Japanese is not English. It's not just different words saying the same thing, it's saying a fundamentally different thing. To do a good translation, you may well need to rephrase an entire speech --- or even replace it with something completely different which conveys the same sense.
Example: Read Or Die, the TV. Good series (but gets weaker towards the end), but the version I had suffered from fansub syndrome. There's one speech I remember; one of the characters asks another one if they have another [noun] of paper. [noun] was a word that made no sense in the context; I forget exactly what it was. (Possibly gum.)
However, there was a footnote, visible for about two seconds so I had to pause the video to read it, that explained that [noun] was referring to a particular common item of a certain shape (a box of chewing gum?), and the characters were using that to refer to a cartridge of paper.
This is exactly the wrong way to do a translation! In that situation, what you do is to replace the slang term with an equivalent term in English. I'd have used brick, which is appropriate and fits, although it's not what the character actually said.
Planetes, which I'm currently working through (and is also very good), suffers from the same thing. They get a lot of the space terminology wrong, for a start. One of the characters has a nickname, Hachimaki (IIRC), which means headband, and this is explained (in a footnote) once. I would have thought it would be more appropriate to translate it each time, because that's what a Japanese audience would be hearing. Admittedly, though, the two main characters in the anime are supposed to be Japanese in a largely Western space station, so it may have made more sense to leave it --- it's not always cut and dried.
If you read some of the rest of the debate --- surprisingly good stuff, provided you skim it and don't get bogged down in the interminable speeches --- you'll realise that the statement was in the context of a debate on the Racial And Religious Hatred Bill, now undergoing reading for the second time. I'm not entirely sure why the hon. Gentleman saw fit to follow it up with a rather long lecture on Cumbrian history, that was only brought short by his running out of time and the Speaker cutting him off...
The first thing I tend to do is turn off the damn bell. I can tell when my input is not accepted just fine, thank you.
I like having feedback on things like tab completion not working, but I hate that hideous system beep too. My solution was to use xset the change the bell to a click --- it requires some fiddling with the parameters to find the right setting (it varies from machine to machine). But it's unobtrusive but effective, much less irritating, and I don't get death threats from my coworkers.
Re:I never quite understood SWT
on
Eclipse 3.1 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I couldn't really see the need for a third widget toolkit (AWT, Swing, SWT) specially after Sun got some sense and started using the community process to discuss and enhance Java. It always sounded to me like an IBMish NIH attack.
It's very simple. It works like this:
The AWT sucked. It sucked diseased dead goat through a straw. It was badly designed, badly conceptualised, badly supported, a pain to write for, limited, unexpandable, ugly (on all platforms), and was, in general, a really lousy idea. Even Sun admitted this eventually, which was why they threw it away and developed Swing.
Swing sucked. Not as badly as the AWT, but it still sucked; they'd progressed from goats to humans, and a healthy human at that, but sucking was still involved, as was the straw. Sun had given up on even trying achieving platform-independence using peered widgets, which meant that Swing had to render everything itself, duplicating OS functionality; which meant that it was still ugly on all platforms, but at least it was consistent. Unfortunately, this meant that it was huge and heavyweight. Behind the scenes, they'd fixed a whole bunch of things that meant that it was much less painful to program for, but it was still painful to use and deploy.
IBM invented SWT because they wanted a Java widget set that didn't suck. I'm not entirely certain they actually succeeded --- it's still slow and clunky unless you have a very fast machine --- but it's the best attempt so far. It actually achieves platform-independence successfully, which means that you get native look and feel on all devices, which is still quite hard to get used to. (Compare Linux Eclipse or Azureus with Windows. It's slightly scary how well it works.) The programming model seems to be more straightforward, too, although I'll admit I haven't coded for it. It does seem to be the least bad Java GUI toolkit around.
Man. Nice attempt, but it's too bad they're really, really wrong when it comes to their scores.
Yeah; I was amazed that they rubbished the N64 controller, which is amazingly simple, comfortable and ergonomic. They seemed to primarily deride it on the fact that you get the choice of using either the D-pad or the analogue stick, but not both --- which is missing the point entirely: since the N64's controller was the first controller with an analogue stick, there weren't any games that required you to use both at once. They're criticising it for not being something it wasn't required to be.
(I have a Game Cube now, and I still think the N64 controller is far more comfortable. The only thing I think is wrong with it is that the analogue stick didn't quite have enough traction on top; my thumb would keep slipping off playing high-stress games, as my hands got sweaty.)
He considered it, but he experienced an unacceptable performance loss when the 1s started getting stuck in the wires. 0s don't have that problem of course. No sharp edges.
If you line the 1s up lengthways, they slide down real easy. Just make sure that your way doesn't have any sharp kinks in it, or they may clog. Some people have had luck in soaking their 1s in water before transmission; it makes them easier to bend. However, wet ones have a tendency to stick together and they tend to come out the far end in clumps --- which is bad. Nothing makes a LAN game lag like soggy packets.
...is the simplest solution. I mean, these are students. She's in the highest risk category for having electronic devices stolen. Giving her a brand new, high-spec laptop is madness.
What does she want it for? Could she, for example, make do with a low-spec laptop worth a few hundred currency units of your choice, rigged up as a thin terminal to a higher-spec but secure machine somewhere else? This would be ideal for doing actual work; small and portable at the human end, large and capable (and backed up) at the machine end.
This way, the human end is undesireable and unlikely to be stolen. And if it is stolen, it's cheap to replace and all documents will be preserved.
Unfortunately I seem to be unable to figure out what I'm supposed to do with it. I'm running 2.3.0.2 Azureus, and there don't seem to be any obvious options dealing with magnet URIs... the closest is 'open location', and that plain doesn't work.
I took your first example and wrote it how I would write it.
Actually, you missed the point on that example; I should have been clearer.
What I was complaining about was that array elements share namespace with array methods. Which means that once you assign array["length"] to something, array.length doesn't return what you think it does! You can't have an element called 'push' and have access to the Array.push() routine at the same time. This is mind-boggling brain-damaged.
You can also do crazy stuff like you did there using object references as assignement in an array but what advantage would you have in doing such a thing?
Because nearly all real languages allow associative arrays where you can use any arbitrary object as the key. Javascript pretends its Array objects are associative arrays, which encourages you to believe that they work like associative arrays. They don't.
Javascript Arrays key all values by string. Any value, used as a key, gets converted to a string. This means that both my objects get turned into the same value --- "object {}", I believe --- and that's used as the key.
It gets worse. a[5] is actually equivalent to a["5"]. For a class whose main purpose is to store numeric indices, this is simply mad. Trying to do an index lookup requires doing string comparisons to find a match...
It never ceases to amaze me how people can do sometimes extensive work with JavaScript and still not spot what an elegant and powerful language it is.
a = new Array(); a["width"] = 1; a["breadth"] = 2; a["length"] = 3; alert(a.length());// Aaaaah!
b = new Array(); ob1 = new Object();// just a random object ob2 = new Object();// and another, different one b[ob1] = "This is ob1"; b[ob2] = "This is ob2"; alert(b[ob1]);// what do you think this says?
Javascript has a number of nice features; I can forgive it a lot for having real closures. However, it has a number of really, really brain-dead features, the above brokenness being the main ones that irritate me. I would not call it elegant.
It wasn't that bad. . . although Link was a cheap rip-off of Han Solo.
Somehow, Ocarina of Time seems different after I learnt that Link was a dumb, chauvinist bigot whose sole goal in life was to get inside Zelda's pants...
You were Thinking moving a biological arm in a flailing motion (yet controlled, they can stop and start) is LESS complex than learning to walk on them, at a neural processing level?
Hell, yeah. You fire nerves at random. After a while your brain learns particular patterns, both in which combinations of nerves make particular motions and also which nerves get fired in response to tell you what's happened --- major motor nerves are big, complex things, and have lots of feedback systems. Just moving your arm requires moving a number of muscles just the right amount, all in synchronisation.
Getting all this in sync is called coordination. It's nearly all learnt behaviour, and some of it has to be done consciously.
Same as, erm, a heart beating?
Heart muscle is an entirely different material, and is largely autonomous --- a heart doesn't need to be connected to the brain to beat. You can grow heart muscle in petri dishes, and once it reaches a certain level of development it starts to move of its own accord.
Stop thinking that being narrow minded and not seeing the whole puzzle makes you more intelligent.
Oh, ad hominem attacks, is it? Well, if we're descending to that level, stop thinking that being patronising and ungrammatical makes you know everything.
Seriously, that cartoon was awful. Abysmal. Abhorrent. Actively painful to watch. And that's just the As. We're not talking normally bad, here. It's not even Eye of Argon bad. Oh, no, this is Star Wars Christmas Special bad: if you watch them, you will regret it.
I found a collection of episodes on the 'net, and as a die-hard Zelda fan, downloaded them. I want that segment of my life back. The only thing I got out of the experience was a migraine.
Learn from my mistake. Do not watch those cartoons. Go and buy a copy of Ulysses 31 instead. Trust me.
But our brains have built in abilities, for instance, we do not learn to smell or process visual cues, or move our muscles.
Um, yeah, you do. You know all that random flailing that small babies do? Playing with their fingers? All that is to learn which nerves are hooked up to what. The major motor nerves are essentially wired up randomly, and the brain learns the mappings at 'run time'.
There are very few 'compile time' motor nerve mappings in humans, and most of these are handled in the brain stem --- true reflexes. I believe suckling behaviour is one of these.
What does hyperthreading have to do with it?
on
AMD Quad Cores, Oh My
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
most programs haven't even got the ability to hyperthread, so do we really need the extra cores?
This statement makes no sense. And, besides:
zcat foo.gz | bzip2 -c > foo.bz2
Look, ma! Code that will run twice as fast on a multiprocessor system!
For the next 10 years the market is going to be greater than 50% Non-HD.
Remember, too, that it's only really the US that's pushing HD --- most of the rest of the world simply doesn't care about it. Which means that if Nintendo want to sell the Revolution anywhere other than in the US market, they're going to have to target it primarily for standard TVs anyway.
Ha --- neither am I. I'd just assumed you were, so started talking to an American audience. That'll teach me to make blind assumptions.
I agree with you; the world is a very big place, and different people have different values. What works for the US (or, is currently failing to work) won't work elsewhere. As a member of the ex-British Empire, I look at places like Africa and the ghastly mess and see that as a direct consequence of what my ancestors did a hundred and fifty years ago. Not good.
One of the things that particularly annoys me is the kneejerk reaction that everything the Chinese government does is wrong and evil and they must be replaced as soon as possible. China is a vastly different culture and does things in a vastly different way; judging them by western standards really doesn't work. On the other hand... the Chinese government does do some really unpleasant things. There's a very fine line between not imposing your values on someone who doesn't want them, and not helping someone who needs help...
One T/F against a Calamari Cruiser. If the thing is far enough from its jump point (or waiting for something), you *can* take it out.
I once managed to knock 50% off the shields of a Star Destroyer by parking myself right behind it and holding down the fire key on my joystick. Unfortunately, at 50%, the Star Destroyer decided that it wanted to go somewhere, started turning, and swatted me out of the sky... do not taunt happy fun Star Destroyer.
Some of my favorite survival tricks in TF are quick and certain death in XvT
Hell, yeah. I couldn't even get past the Alliance training mission; my instincts had been so finely honed by TF that I couldn't dodge turbolaser fire any more.
No, that's the TIE fighters. If you've ever played Tie Fighter you'll know what I mean --- your basic TIE is designed to do exactly one job: to come screaming onto the screen and be blown away be the heroes. Actually trying to do anything useful in one --- like, say, surviving --- is quite tricky...
(This is not aimed specifically at you. You just happened to trigger a rant...)
Does anyone else feel that these are OUR RIGHTS to begin with and we should not let them be touched at all?
You have exactly one right: to die. Everything else is a privilege.
Take Amendment 7 of the Bill of Rights, which declares that you have a right to a trial by jury. Jury trials are expensive. That all has to be paid for, and that happens through taxes. Your taxes are paying for Arthur Andersen's trial --- and his are paying, in part, for yours.
Take Amendment 1. The big one. Free speech. If you allow free speech, you allow people to say whatever they like. This means that you have to put up with your neo-Nazi neighbour ranting about stoning the black lesbian Wiccan couple across the road. You don't have to listen... but you can't stop him talking. That's a very real cost, particularly when he can pick up the phone and call a thousand people who think just like him.
All the other privileges are the same. Amendment 4? "To be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects"? The amount of infrastructure that has to be put in place to actively hinder law enforcement --- another privilege --- is vast.
None of these 'rights' are automatic. They have to be paid for, every day, by everybody, on an ongoing basis.
Of course, these days, nobody wants to pay for anything any more. Lawyers are on TV advertising free compensation money (but nobody asks where it comes from). Tax avoidance is a national industry. It's easier to silence people than to choose not to listen.
And I think that the biggest reason for this is because people think these privileges are 'rights'. Rights are free. Rights don't have to be worked for. They just happen.
What you said, that they're your rights and you shouldn't let anyone touch them, is very telling. Your fundamental mindset is that these things are automatic, that the universe should somehow conspire to make it all happen; that God owes you Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
This is false.
The article is talking about censorship. When was the last time you worked to support free speech? Have you donated to the ACLU or the EFF? Have you written to your local politicians? Have you participated in any meaningful dialogue on the subject?
Me? I intend to put off exercising my one god-given right for as long as possible. In the mean time, I have work to do.
somebody running SMTP on a dialup could get repeated rejections until their mailer gives up, but that's pretty rare and they'd at least get a rejection message as opposed to a silent discard.
Yup; and they shouldn't be sending SMTP directly from dialup anyway. They should be sending to their ISP's server, which relays for them.
Spey has fairly straightforward blacklist support; you can match patterns against the sender/receiver tuples and chuck out connections if they match. (The whitelist works in the same way.) I hadn't thought about the configurable delay --- that's a rather good idea.
I have had one strange interaction with the University of Queensland mail server, which sent me the same message fifteen times, but I'm not sure that was Spey's fault.
Just yesterday I enabled Greylisting in OpenBSD spamd, and today I got 6 spams, compared with my usual 150. (per day).
Yeah, greylisting is superb as a first-pass filter. It's cheap, it's fast, it's completely automatic, and above all, it will reject the spam before you've even received it --- which means it's not taking up any bandwidth! If you have a spam problem, getting a greylister is the first thing to try.
As TFA says, check out greylisting.org for more information. This is also a good site. If you want a greylister, I strongly recommend Spey: it's an SMTP proxy that sits between your existing MTA and the outside world, and so will work on anything. I think it's particularly good because, er, I wrote it...
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't seen the series, so I don't know the context, but they may well have done that because in English, they felt that phrase was more appropriate.
One issue I have with fansubs is that their greatest strength --- accurate translations --- is also their greatest weakness. Japanese is not English. It's not just different words saying the same thing, it's saying a fundamentally different thing. To do a good translation, you may well need to rephrase an entire speech --- or even replace it with something completely different which conveys the same sense.
Example: Read Or Die, the TV. Good series (but gets weaker towards the end), but the version I had suffered from fansub syndrome. There's one speech I remember; one of the characters asks another one if they have another [noun] of paper. [noun] was a word that made no sense in the context; I forget exactly what it was. (Possibly gum.)
However, there was a footnote, visible for about two seconds so I had to pause the video to read it, that explained that [noun] was referring to a particular common item of a certain shape (a box of chewing gum?), and the characters were using that to refer to a cartridge of paper.
This is exactly the wrong way to do a translation! In that situation, what you do is to replace the slang term with an equivalent term in English. I'd have used brick, which is appropriate and fits, although it's not what the character actually said.
Planetes, which I'm currently working through (and is also very good), suffers from the same thing. They get a lot of the space terminology wrong, for a start. One of the characters has a nickname, Hachimaki (IIRC), which means headband, and this is explained (in a footnote) once. I would have thought it would be more appropriate to translate it each time, because that's what a Japanese audience would be hearing. Admittedly, though, the two main characters in the anime are supposed to be Japanese in a largely Western space station, so it may have made more sense to leave it --- it's not always cut and dried.
If you read some of the rest of the debate --- surprisingly good stuff, provided you skim it and don't get bogged down in the interminable speeches --- you'll realise that the statement was in the context of a debate on the Racial And Religious Hatred Bill, now undergoing reading for the second time. I'm not entirely sure why the hon. Gentleman saw fit to follow it up with a rather long lecture on Cumbrian history, that was only brought short by his running out of time and the Speaker cutting him off...
I like having feedback on things like tab completion not working, but I hate that hideous system beep too. My solution was to use xset the change the bell to a click --- it requires some fiddling with the parameters to find the right setting (it varies from machine to machine). But it's unobtrusive but effective, much less irritating, and I don't get death threats from my coworkers.
It's very simple. It works like this:
The AWT sucked. It sucked diseased dead goat through a straw. It was badly designed, badly conceptualised, badly supported, a pain to write for, limited, unexpandable, ugly (on all platforms), and was, in general, a really lousy idea. Even Sun admitted this eventually, which was why they threw it away and developed Swing.
Swing sucked. Not as badly as the AWT, but it still sucked; they'd progressed from goats to humans, and a healthy human at that, but sucking was still involved, as was the straw. Sun had given up on even trying achieving platform-independence using peered widgets, which meant that Swing had to render everything itself, duplicating OS functionality; which meant that it was still ugly on all platforms, but at least it was consistent. Unfortunately, this meant that it was huge and heavyweight. Behind the scenes, they'd fixed a whole bunch of things that meant that it was much less painful to program for, but it was still painful to use and deploy.
IBM invented SWT because they wanted a Java widget set that didn't suck. I'm not entirely certain they actually succeeded --- it's still slow and clunky unless you have a very fast machine --- but it's the best attempt so far. It actually achieves platform-independence successfully, which means that you get native look and feel on all devices, which is still quite hard to get used to. (Compare Linux Eclipse or Azureus with Windows. It's slightly scary how well it works.) The programming model seems to be more straightforward, too, although I'll admit I haven't coded for it. It does seem to be the least bad Java GUI toolkit around.
Yeah; I was amazed that they rubbished the N64 controller, which is amazingly simple, comfortable and ergonomic. They seemed to primarily deride it on the fact that you get the choice of using either the D-pad or the analogue stick, but not both --- which is missing the point entirely: since the N64's controller was the first controller with an analogue stick, there weren't any games that required you to use both at once. They're criticising it for not being something it wasn't required to be.
(I have a Game Cube now, and I still think the N64 controller is far more comfortable. The only thing I think is wrong with it is that the analogue stick didn't quite have enough traction on top; my thumb would keep slipping off playing high-stress games, as my hands got sweaty.)
If you line the 1s up lengthways, they slide down real easy. Just make sure that your way doesn't have any sharp kinks in it, or they may clog. Some people have had luck in soaking their 1s in water before transmission; it makes them easier to bend. However, wet ones have a tendency to stick together and they tend to come out the far end in clumps --- which is bad. Nothing makes a LAN game lag like soggy packets.
What does she want it for? Could she, for example, make do with a low-spec laptop worth a few hundred currency units of your choice, rigged up as a thin terminal to a higher-spec but secure machine somewhere else? This would be ideal for doing actual work; small and portable at the human end, large and capable (and backed up) at the machine end.
This way, the human end is undesireable and unlikely to be stolen. And if it is stolen, it's cheap to replace and all documents will be preserved.
A: The explosives blow things up. Rockets, however, blow things up.
50 cent is even less popular in the UK; here, he's only 27 pence.
I tried that; it just says: "Error --- no sources found for torrent" and gives up.
*shrug*
Unfortunately I seem to be unable to figure out what I'm supposed to do with it. I'm running 2.3.0.2 Azureus, and there don't seem to be any obvious options dealing with magnet URIs... the closest is 'open location', and that plain doesn't work.
What am I missing here?
Actually, you missed the point on that example; I should have been clearer.
What I was complaining about was that array elements share namespace with array methods. Which means that once you assign array["length"] to something, array.length doesn't return what you think it does! You can't have an element called 'push' and have access to the Array.push() routine at the same time. This is mind-boggling brain-damaged.
You can also do crazy stuff like you did there using object references as assignement in an array but what advantage would you have in doing such a thing?
Because nearly all real languages allow associative arrays where you can use any arbitrary object as the key. Javascript pretends its Array objects are associative arrays, which encourages you to believe that they work like associative arrays. They don't.
Javascript Arrays key all values by string. Any value, used as a key, gets converted to a string. This means that both my objects get turned into the same value --- "object {}", I believe --- and that's used as the key.
It gets worse. a[5] is actually equivalent to a["5"]. For a class whose main purpose is to store numeric indices, this is simply mad. Trying to do an index lookup requires doing string comparisons to find a match...
Javascript has a number of nice features; I can forgive it a lot for having real closures. However, it has a number of really, really brain-dead features, the above brokenness being the main ones that irritate me. I would not call it elegant.
Somehow, Ocarina of Time seems different after I learnt that Link was a dumb, chauvinist bigot whose sole goal in life was to get inside Zelda's pants...
And the catch phrases. *shudder*
Hell, yeah. You fire nerves at random. After a while your brain learns particular patterns, both in which combinations of nerves make particular motions and also which nerves get fired in response to tell you what's happened --- major motor nerves are big, complex things, and have lots of feedback systems. Just moving your arm requires moving a number of muscles just the right amount, all in synchronisation.
Getting all this in sync is called coordination. It's nearly all learnt behaviour, and some of it has to be done consciously.
Same as, erm, a heart beating?
Heart muscle is an entirely different material, and is largely autonomous --- a heart doesn't need to be connected to the brain to beat. You can grow heart muscle in petri dishes, and once it reaches a certain level of development it starts to move of its own accord.
Stop thinking that being narrow minded and not seeing the whole puzzle makes you more intelligent.
Oh, ad hominem attacks, is it? Well, if we're descending to that level, stop thinking that being patronising and ungrammatical makes you know everything.
Noooooooooooooooooo!
Seriously, that cartoon was awful. Abysmal. Abhorrent. Actively painful to watch. And that's just the As. We're not talking normally bad, here. It's not even Eye of Argon bad. Oh, no, this is Star Wars Christmas Special bad: if you watch them, you will regret it.
I found a collection of episodes on the 'net, and as a die-hard Zelda fan, downloaded them. I want that segment of my life back. The only thing I got out of the experience was a migraine.
Learn from my mistake. Do not watch those cartoons. Go and buy a copy of Ulysses 31 instead. Trust me.
Um, yeah, you do. You know all that random flailing that small babies do? Playing with their fingers? All that is to learn which nerves are hooked up to what. The major motor nerves are essentially wired up randomly, and the brain learns the mappings at 'run time'.
There are very few 'compile time' motor nerve mappings in humans, and most of these are handled in the brain stem --- true reflexes. I believe suckling behaviour is one of these.
This statement makes no sense. And, besides:
zcat foo.gz | bzip2 -c > foo.bz2
Look, ma! Code that will run twice as fast on a multiprocessor system!
Remember, too, that it's only really the US that's pushing HD --- most of the rest of the world simply doesn't care about it. Which means that if Nintendo want to sell the Revolution anywhere other than in the US market, they're going to have to target it primarily for standard TVs anyway.
Ha --- neither am I. I'd just assumed you were, so started talking to an American audience. That'll teach me to make blind assumptions.
I agree with you; the world is a very big place, and different people have different values. What works for the US (or, is currently failing to work) won't work elsewhere. As a member of the ex-British Empire, I look at places like Africa and the ghastly mess and see that as a direct consequence of what my ancestors did a hundred and fifty years ago. Not good.
One of the things that particularly annoys me is the kneejerk reaction that everything the Chinese government does is wrong and evil and they must be replaced as soon as possible. China is a vastly different culture and does things in a vastly different way; judging them by western standards really doesn't work. On the other hand... the Chinese government does do some really unpleasant things. There's a very fine line between not imposing your values on someone who doesn't want them, and not helping someone who needs help...
I once managed to knock 50% off the shields of a Star Destroyer by parking myself right behind it and holding down the fire key on my joystick. Unfortunately, at 50%, the Star Destroyer decided that it wanted to go somewhere, started turning, and swatted me out of the sky... do not taunt happy fun Star Destroyer.
Some of my favorite survival tricks in TF are quick and certain death in XvT
Hell, yeah. I couldn't even get past the Alliance training mission; my instincts had been so finely honed by TF that I couldn't dodge turbolaser fire any more.
"turbolaser cannon fodder"
No, that's the TIE fighters. If you've ever played Tie Fighter you'll know what I mean --- your basic TIE is designed to do exactly one job: to come screaming onto the screen and be blown away be the heroes. Actually trying to do anything useful in one --- like, say, surviving --- is quite tricky...
(This is not aimed specifically at you. You just happened to trigger a rant...)
Does anyone else feel that these are OUR RIGHTS to begin with and we should not let them be touched at all?
You have exactly one right: to die. Everything else is a privilege.
Take Amendment 7 of the Bill of Rights, which declares that you have a right to a trial by jury. Jury trials are expensive. That all has to be paid for, and that happens through taxes. Your taxes are paying for Arthur Andersen's trial --- and his are paying, in part, for yours.
Take Amendment 1. The big one. Free speech. If you allow free speech, you allow people to say whatever they like. This means that you have to put up with your neo-Nazi neighbour ranting about stoning the black lesbian Wiccan couple across the road. You don't have to listen... but you can't stop him talking. That's a very real cost, particularly when he can pick up the phone and call a thousand people who think just like him.
All the other privileges are the same. Amendment 4? "To be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects"? The amount of infrastructure that has to be put in place to actively hinder law enforcement --- another privilege --- is vast.
None of these 'rights' are automatic. They have to be paid for, every day, by everybody, on an ongoing basis.
Of course, these days, nobody wants to pay for anything any more. Lawyers are on TV advertising free compensation money (but nobody asks where it comes from). Tax avoidance is a national industry. It's easier to silence people than to choose not to listen.
And I think that the biggest reason for this is because people think these privileges are 'rights'. Rights are free. Rights don't have to be worked for. They just happen.
What you said, that they're your rights and you shouldn't let anyone touch them, is very telling. Your fundamental mindset is that these things are automatic, that the universe should somehow conspire to make it all happen; that God owes you Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
This is false.
The article is talking about censorship. When was the last time you worked to support free speech? Have you donated to the ACLU or the EFF? Have you written to your local politicians? Have you participated in any meaningful dialogue on the subject?
Me? I intend to put off exercising my one god-given right for as long as possible. In the mean time, I have work to do.
Yup; and they shouldn't be sending SMTP directly from dialup anyway. They should be sending to their ISP's server, which relays for them.
Spey has fairly straightforward blacklist support; you can match patterns against the sender/receiver tuples and chuck out connections if they match. (The whitelist works in the same way.) I hadn't thought about the configurable delay --- that's a rather good idea.
I have had one strange interaction with the University of Queensland mail server, which sent me the same message fifteen times, but I'm not sure that was Spey's fault.
Yeah, greylisting is superb as a first-pass filter. It's cheap, it's fast, it's completely automatic, and above all, it will reject the spam before you've even received it --- which means it's not taking up any bandwidth! If you have a spam problem, getting a greylister is the first thing to try.
As TFA says, check out greylisting.org for more information. This is also a good site. If you want a greylister, I strongly recommend Spey: it's an SMTP proxy that sits between your existing MTA and the outside world, and so will work on anything. I think it's particularly good because, er, I wrote it...