This e-mail is confidential and solely for the use of the intended
recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, you are obligated to
kill yourself and others who might have seen it immediately. Thank you.
I've got a book called "Auto Repair for Dummies" which I picked up in the early 80's. Prior art can kill a patent, but I'm not sure about a trademark. In any case, they were hardly the first to use it.
The above act is Public Law 99-508. You can find more information at http://thomas.loc.gov/. The relevant portion of the abstract reads:
"Amends the Federal criminal code to extend the prohibition against the unauthorized interception of communications to specified types of electronic communications. Prohibits unauthorized access to an electronic communications system in order to obtain or alter information contained in such system."
If anything, you could take the position that intercepting e-mail would violate the above act. It might at least buy you some time while your employer grumbles about lawyers.
"Not all automobiles are blue" is not a theory in this case anyway: It's an observation, i.e. a fact, and non-falsifiable. It also has no predictive value. If your theory is "All automobiles are blue", you can predict, "the next automobile that passes me will be blue"; if it's "not all automobiles are blue" == "some automobiles are not blue", you can't predict what color the next automobile will be.
Proving a theory false and negating it does not get you a new true theory. You simply have the fact that disproved your theory in the first place and nothing more.
True enough; I realized this after I posted. Evolution is a fact (observed in numerous cases); natural selection is the theory of how evolution occurs, nowadays taken with a healthy side-helping of genetics, which was not known to Darwin.
Well, actually, salt-water and brackish fish would die in fresh water. But there are much, much bigger problems for cretinists, er, creationists.
The Bible says that every living substance not on the Ark (I wish I had a dollar for each time they said they found that friggin' thing) was destroyed. So, there are several conclusions which must be drawn:
1) Someone on the ark had AIDS, influenza, bubonic plague, ebola, hemmoragic E. coli, and a host of other nasty diseases for that year, unless you want to believe in a second, undocumented Creation. Plus they managed to stock all fresh and salt water fish, mollusks, and other invertibrates.
2) The only people on the Ark were Noah, his wife, their three sons, and their three wives. The sons all got their genes from their parents, so the five of them only count as two individual from a genetic diversity standpoint. This is a stupifyingly-low amount of genetic diversity. Not to mention the stupidity of two of every "kind" of animal (a few more, in some cases). One fact we know today is that some animal species which have been pushed to the edge of extinction are very hard to save (some species of tigers, for example) because there is not enough genetic diversity, and there are way more than two of them.
3) According to the literal interpretation of the chronology in the Bible, the world is 6000 years old, and the flood occurs some 1800 or so years after creation. This leaves only some 4200 years for four couples (assuming Noah could still get it up, and he was way old; if you believe the Bible, people back then lived nearly a thousand years) to repopulate the entire Earth. Worse yet: It's pretty well established that all the various races we see today already existed 4000 years ago. The Chinese and the Eqyptians were around, Eurpoeans and Africans certainly were too. How do you account for that, when there's not that much genetic diversity to start with? You'd need an amazingly high mutation rate. Essentially you'd have to assume some super-rapid evolution...
I theorize that all automobiles are blue. But I just saw one that isn't blue, so it must be a true theory (by your "logic") that all automobiles are the complimentary color orange.
Sorry, doesn't work, except maybe in Kansas. Take your own advice.
(Another example for the slow-witted: If you proved evolution to be false, this would not somehow prove creationism to be true.)
Horse + donkey. Almost always sterile, with one or two known exceptions.
You don't see half man/half ape hybrids for two reasons: 1) Man is an ape, in a technical sense. 2) The DNA is not compatible enough.
Orangutans are supposedly the closest to human in a genetic sense. If you would like to volunteer for an experiment, please specify your sex and a suitable orangutan of the opposite sex will be provided for you.
If it's someone outside of their network relaying off of them, it should probably not have happened in the first place.
Exactly. If you intentionally run an open relay, you are implictly authorizing access to everyone.
There's very little in the way of excuses for running an open mail relay any more
Also true. I doubt this ISP was intentionally running an open relay. They probably got hit with the quoting exploit that's in a lot of pre-8.9 sendmails (or could be any number of other sendmail exploits). ORBS has a good list of them.
1) Get your kernel from one of the standard sources, i.e. kernel.org or a mirror.
2) Verify the PGP signature.
Then, at least, you know you are running a real release, the same one hundreds of thousands of other people are running, and not one that someone has subsequently hacked.
The other question is: How do we know the real release wasn't hacked? Short of looking yourself, there are many other people using the same code, including developers, and also people who analyze the patches to summarize changes. Even if a trojan patch did slip Linus' attention, it would be discovered very quickly and removed quicker.
(And yeah, it's the Greeks, but which ones? The Trojans were Greek too, weren't they?)
People never seem to remember the important lesson of the original Trojan horse. The Trojans left this nice horse statue as a gift, and the suckers (can't remember who the Trojans were at war with) take it inside their secured area. Later that night, the Trojans hidden inside the horse jump out and kill them.
The lesson: Look inside the friggin' horse, you stupid idiots! And THAT is something you can do with open source that you cannot do with closed, proprietary software.
Do you really think USPS delivers everywhere? In some areas, they'll deliver to your door; in others, you need a mailbox along the road; and in very rural areas, you have to go to into town and pick up your mail at the post office. Why? Population density. Higher population density means less travel, which reduces costs. In other words, they don't deliver the unprofitable routes now.
The Constitution only gives Congress the power to "establish Post Offices"; it does not mandate that it must continue to do so. It also does grant this as an exclusive power. Presumably (aside from other federal laws) states or individuals could establish their own post offices. Whether or not this would be recognized by USPS (or presently be legal, but laws can be changed) is another matter entirely. Also presumably, the establishment of a post office could simply be a licensing issue.
Priority Mail is one of the great points of the USPS. For $3.20 you can get a flat-rate envelope, load it down with as much as it can hold, and you'll still pay just $3.20 (the price of 2 lbs). And Priority Mail is guranteed to arrive in 2-3 business days of shipment, within the United States
Priority mail is NOT guaranteed to arrive in 2-3 days, and for good reason. And sure, you can load the envelope with as much as it can hold, just so long as it doesn't hold more than 2 lbs. Also keep in mind that you can't actually mail a package weighing more than (I think) a pound yourself: You have to physically hand it over to a postal employee, just in case you are the next Unabomber.
My own wild-ass guess is: There are three main costs in delivering mail. The first is the cost of picking up the mail by the local office. The second is the cost of delivering the mail by the local office. The third is the cost of moving it between local offices. Of these three, I would expect the first two to be more or less constant. The one which is highly variable is the interoffice delivery. It may be cross-town or cross-country.
The question is (and I think neither one of us know the answer): How much is interoffice delivery vs. local delivery? You guess that interoffice delivery is a small percentage, even with long-distance mail. I can't agree. A lot of mail gets shipped around by truck, and some of it goes by air. It depends on how far it has to go.
The hitch, of course, is that once you have differing rates to different places, it gets harder to figure out how much postage you need, or to buy it for that matter. Back when letters cost six CENTS (or less), a flat rate made somewhat more sense. Now that we're at 550% of that level, we're getting closer to where having distance-based rates make more sense. But it need not be metered by the mile. Split the country into, say, five zones: East, Midwest, Plains, West, Hawaii/Alaska. For simplicities, the borders run along state borders (no state splitting). Then the simplest rate scheme would be to have intrazone and interzone rates, with intrazone being cheaper. Or have different rates to each zone. Still simple, and probably close enough for government work.
BTW, my understanding is that first class postage subsidizes bulk rate to some extent. Can anyone else confirm or refute this?
Well, fact is that the USPS is now a private company, and has been for a while. It's no longer directly controlled by the Gov't.
What ARE you talking about? You realize their web site is at www.usps.gov, right? It says:
As the governing body of the U.S. Postal Service, the Board of Governors is
comparable to a board of directors of a private corporation. The Board includes nine Governors who are appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate.
As in, not a private corporation, and in directly controlled by the government (presidential appointees).
You really think that if there were "competition" I could still get a letter from D.C. to California in 3 days for only 33 cents? Riiiiight.
I sure hope not. Why should it cost to mail a letter across town as it does to mail to Alaska or Hawaii or even just to the other coast? What airline would sell flat-rate tickets to anywhere?
The USPS Priority Mail commericials on TV really piss me off, because they are very deceptive. They compare FedEx 2-day vs. UPS 2-day vs Priority Mail 2-3 days. FedEx and UPS guarantee 2-day delivery. USPS doesn't even guarantee 3-day delivery. I'm not sure delivery is guaranteed at all.
I will use Priority Mail occasionally, but not if I want it to get there in two days. If it's under two pounds and I'm not picky about when it gets there, I'll use Priority Mail. Otherwise I'll stick with FedEx for something small and fast and UPS for something big. Last thing I ordered that got shipped Priority Mail took four weekdays. I've had other things take a full week. The local disgruntled postal employee left a delivery notice today for a package that should be delivered somewhere down the road (right suite, wrong building, duh). I've had the wrong mail delivered to my mail box fairly often, and I don't want to think how much of my mail has been delivered to the wrong house.
Legally, FedEx and UPS and other carriers are excluded from being in the letter delivery business. There have been occasions where the USPS has fined companies for using those carriers for delivering non-urgent mail, to the tune of what they think they would have paid using USPS.
I say, privatize USPS: Sell stock to the public over a period 10 years or so. At the very least, they have a lot of assets: Post offices, delivery vehicles, sorters, mail readers, etc. Repeal any laws that give USPS special powers so that other companies are free to compete.
Are you implying that no one has the right to e-mail you sales offers?
It's not like they're writing people to get them to buy RedHat 6.0; that would be clear-cut spamming (advertising their product for sale). This is an offer to let developers in the IPO and buy some cheap stock. RedHat makes no more nor less money whether or not the invited people take them up on the offer or not. If the public doesn't buy the stock, the underwriter does. From RedHat's perspective, the stock is going to be sold at the IPO price and they get the money, regardless of who buys it. This is basically a gift. You get to buy in at the IPO price, which most people can't do. If you believe the price will go up (and IPOs are rigged so that the price WILL go up; the underwriters want to make a profit off the stock), buy some, hold it for awhile (a month or you probably won't be allowed to particate in other IPOs in the future; E-trade's policy), and sell it.
And if RedHat actually did make more money by giving away these stock invitations to developers, then I'd consider it spam, too. But they won't. It's a gift.
Slashdot Mirror
This e-mail is confidential and solely for the use of the intended
recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, you are obligated to
kill yourself and others who might have seen it immediately. Thank you.
Take your own advice (above). RBL is also exported as a BGP feed, so it affects your routing, if you subscribe to it, and this affects ALL IP traffic.
I've got a book called "Auto Repair for Dummies" which I picked up in the early 80's. Prior art can kill a patent, but I'm not sure about a trademark. In any case, they were hardly the first to use it.
University of Georgia Department of English. Old, throwaway 486s as X terminals, with a central application server. (Disclaimer: not my project)
I suggest breaking up Bill Gates instead. The various pieces could serve the following roles:
Head: PR and marketing
Legs: distribution
Arms: licensing
Arse: research and development
(That, and I'd like to see file format and API specs published.)
Apple has some patent on Firewire, and is requiring a per port fee for all devices.
The above act is Public Law 99-508. You can find more information at http://thomas.loc.gov/. The relevant portion of the abstract reads:
"Amends the Federal criminal code to extend the prohibition against the unauthorized interception of communications to specified types of electronic communications. Prohibits unauthorized access to an electronic communications system in order to obtain or alter information contained in such system."
If anything, you could take the position that intercepting e-mail would violate the above act. It might at least buy you some time while your employer grumbles about lawyers.
"Not all automobiles are blue" is not a theory in this case anyway: It's an observation, i.e. a fact, and non-falsifiable. It also has no predictive value. If your theory is "All automobiles are blue", you can predict, "the next automobile that passes me will be blue"; if it's "not all automobiles are blue" == "some automobiles are not blue", you can't predict what color the next automobile will be.
Proving a theory false and negating it does not get you a new true theory. You simply have the fact that disproved your theory in the first place and nothing more.
True enough; I realized this after I posted. Evolution is a fact (observed in numerous cases); natural selection is the theory of how evolution occurs, nowadays taken with a healthy side-helping of genetics, which was not known to Darwin.
In that case, you have a fact (a non-blue automobile exists), not a theory.
Well, actually, salt-water and brackish fish would die in fresh water. But there are much, much bigger problems for cretinists, er, creationists.
The Bible says that every living substance not on the Ark (I wish I had a dollar for each time they said they found that friggin' thing) was destroyed. So, there are several conclusions which must be drawn:
1) Someone on the ark had AIDS, influenza, bubonic plague, ebola, hemmoragic E. coli, and a host of other nasty diseases for that year, unless you want to believe in a second, undocumented Creation. Plus they managed to stock all fresh and salt water fish, mollusks, and other invertibrates.
2) The only people on the Ark were Noah, his wife, their three sons, and their three wives. The sons all got their genes from their parents, so the five of them only count as two individual from a genetic diversity standpoint. This is a stupifyingly-low amount of genetic diversity. Not to mention the stupidity of two of every "kind" of animal (a few more, in some cases). One fact we know today is that some animal species which have been pushed to the edge of extinction are very hard to save (some species of tigers, for example) because there is not enough genetic diversity, and there are way more than two of them.
3) According to the literal interpretation of the chronology in the Bible, the world is 6000 years old, and the flood occurs some 1800 or so years after creation. This leaves only some 4200 years for four couples (assuming Noah could still get it up, and he was way old; if you believe the Bible, people back then lived nearly a thousand years) to repopulate the entire Earth. Worse yet: It's pretty well established that all the various races we see today already existed 4000 years ago. The Chinese and the Eqyptians were around, Eurpoeans and Africans certainly were too. How do you account for that, when there's not that much genetic diversity to start with? You'd need an amazingly high mutation rate. Essentially you'd have to assume some super-rapid evolution...
Hmmm.
I theorize that all automobiles are blue. But I just saw one that isn't blue, so it must be a true theory (by your "logic") that all automobiles are the complimentary color orange.
Sorry, doesn't work, except maybe in Kansas. Take your own advice.
(Another example for the slow-witted: If you proved evolution to be false, this would not somehow prove creationism to be true.)
Horse + donkey. Almost always sterile, with one or two known exceptions.
You don't see half man/half ape hybrids for two reasons: 1) Man is an ape, in a technical sense. 2) The DNA is not compatible enough.
Orangutans are supposedly the closest to human in a genetic sense. If you would like to volunteer for an experiment, please specify your sex and a suitable orangutan of the opposite sex will be provided for you.
If teaching evolution can destroy their faith, then their faith must suck pretty bad.
(And of course, evolution is just a theory, in the same way that gravitation is just a theory. Theories can't be proven true, only proven false.)
Apparently they are only devolving there. Must be that flat countryside that does something to their perspective.
Next on the Kansas legislative agenda: Round Earth is a myth.
Exactly. If you intentionally run an open relay, you are implictly authorizing access to everyone.
Also true. I doubt this ISP was intentionally running an open relay. They probably got hit with the quoting exploit that's in a lot of pre-8.9 sendmails (or could be any number of other sendmail exploits). ORBS has a good list of them.
Which is an argument for:
1) Get your kernel from one of the standard sources, i.e. kernel.org or a mirror.
2) Verify the PGP signature.
Then, at least, you know you are running a real release, the same one hundreds of thousands of other people are running, and not one that someone has subsequently hacked.
The other question is: How do we know the real release wasn't hacked? Short of looking yourself, there are many other people using the same code, including developers, and also people who analyze the patches to summarize changes. Even if a trojan patch did slip Linus' attention, it would be discovered very quickly and removed quicker.
(And yeah, it's the Greeks, but which ones? The Trojans were Greek too, weren't they?)
People never seem to remember the important lesson of the original Trojan horse. The Trojans left this nice horse statue as a gift, and the suckers (can't remember who the Trojans were at war with) take it inside their secured area. Later that night, the Trojans hidden inside the horse jump out and kill them.
The lesson: Look inside the friggin' horse, you stupid idiots! And THAT is something you can do with open source that you cannot do with closed, proprietary software.
It probably was true in 1780 when there were 13 states and postage was less than a nickel. It's not necessarily true today.
I think most of the answers here are: Who cares?
Do you really think USPS delivers everywhere? In some areas, they'll deliver to your door; in others, you need a mailbox along the road; and in very rural areas, you have to go to into town and pick up your mail at the post office. Why? Population density. Higher population density means less travel, which reduces costs. In other words, they don't deliver the unprofitable routes now.
The Constitution only gives Congress the power to "establish Post Offices"; it does not mandate that it must continue to do so. It also does grant this as an exclusive power. Presumably (aside from other federal laws) states or individuals could establish their own post offices. Whether or not this would be recognized by USPS (or presently be legal, but laws can be changed) is another matter entirely. Also presumably, the establishment of a post office could simply be a licensing issue.
Priority mail is NOT guaranteed to arrive in 2-3 days, and for good reason. And sure, you can load the envelope with as much as it can hold, just so long as it doesn't hold more than 2 lbs. Also keep in mind that you can't actually mail a package weighing more than (I think) a pound yourself: You have to physically hand it over to a postal employee, just in case you are the next Unabomber.
My own wild-ass guess is: There are three main costs in delivering mail. The first is the cost of picking up the mail by the local office. The second is the cost of delivering the mail by the local office. The third is the cost of moving it between local offices. Of these three, I would expect the first two to be more or less constant. The one which is highly variable is the interoffice delivery. It may be cross-town or cross-country.
The question is (and I think neither one of us know the answer): How much is interoffice delivery vs. local delivery? You guess that interoffice delivery is a small percentage, even with long-distance mail. I can't agree. A lot of mail gets shipped around by truck, and some of it goes by air. It depends on how far it has to go.
The hitch, of course, is that once you have differing rates to different places, it gets harder to figure out how much postage you need, or to buy it for that matter. Back when letters cost six CENTS (or less), a flat rate made somewhat more sense. Now that we're at 550% of that level, we're getting closer to where having distance-based rates make more sense. But it need not be metered by the mile. Split the country into, say, five zones: East, Midwest, Plains, West, Hawaii/Alaska. For simplicities, the borders run along state borders (no state splitting). Then the simplest rate scheme would be to have intrazone and interzone rates, with intrazone being cheaper. Or have different rates to each zone. Still simple, and probably close enough for government work.
BTW, my understanding is that first class postage subsidizes bulk rate to some extent. Can anyone else confirm or refute this?
What ARE you talking about? You realize their web site is at www.usps.gov, right? It says:
As in, not a private corporation, and in directly controlled by the government (presidential appointees).You really think that if there were "competition" I could still get a letter from D.C. to California in 3 days for only 33 cents? Riiiiight.
I sure hope not. Why should it cost to mail a letter across town as it does to mail to Alaska or Hawaii or even just to the other coast? What airline would sell flat-rate tickets to anywhere?
The USPS Priority Mail commericials on TV really piss me off, because they are very deceptive. They compare FedEx 2-day vs. UPS 2-day vs Priority Mail 2-3 days. FedEx and UPS guarantee 2-day delivery. USPS doesn't even guarantee 3-day delivery. I'm not sure delivery is guaranteed at all.
I will use Priority Mail occasionally, but not if I want it to get there in two days. If it's under two pounds and I'm not picky about when it gets there, I'll use Priority Mail. Otherwise I'll stick with FedEx for something small and fast and UPS for something big. Last thing I ordered that got shipped Priority Mail took four weekdays. I've had other things take a full week. The local disgruntled postal employee left a delivery notice today for a package that should be delivered somewhere down the road (right suite, wrong building, duh). I've had the wrong mail delivered to my mail box fairly often, and I don't want to think how much of my mail has been delivered to the wrong house.
Legally, FedEx and UPS and other carriers are excluded from being in the letter delivery business. There have been occasions where the USPS has fined companies for using those carriers for delivering non-urgent mail, to the tune of what they think they would have paid using USPS.
I say, privatize USPS: Sell stock to the public over a period 10 years or so. At the very least, they have a lot of assets: Post offices, delivery vehicles, sorters, mail readers, etc. Repeal any laws that give USPS special powers so that other companies are free to compete.
Are you implying that no one has the right to e-mail you sales offers?
It's not like they're writing people to get them to buy RedHat 6.0; that would be clear-cut spamming (advertising their product for sale). This is an offer to let developers in the IPO and buy some cheap stock. RedHat makes no more nor less money whether or not the invited people take them up on the offer or not. If the public doesn't buy the stock, the underwriter does. From RedHat's perspective, the stock is going to be sold at the IPO price and they get the money, regardless of who buys it. This is basically a gift. You get to buy in at the IPO price, which most people can't do. If you believe the price will go up (and IPOs are rigged so that the price WILL go up; the underwriters want to make a profit off the stock), buy some, hold it for awhile (a month or you probably won't be allowed to particate in other IPOs in the future; E-trade's policy), and sell it.
And if RedHat actually did make more money by giving away these stock invitations to developers, then I'd consider it spam, too. But they won't. It's a gift.