I agree. However, MySpace cannot be used as evidence.
I have talked publicly about doing unususal things. My friends and I used to talk about the best way to dispose of a body while looking around the sporting goods section of Wally World. Does that mean a cop can begin an investigation?
What if he finds a body nearby that was disposed of in a creative manner with no other evidence? What would the trial be like? Just because they heard me talking about body disposal and they found a body, does that mean I'm guilty?
Here's another example: Lets say I'm unpopular in school. To boost my reputation, I decide to blog about how I burned down a house. I got most of the details from $local_news and just made the rest up.
Now, they always leave out details. Let'say I fill in $accelerant from last month's CSI. Just so happens that the real criminal got the idea from the same place.
They have your claim, they have you knowing an unpublished detail. Will I be convicted?
What if I have a pic of me testing a gravity bong with tobacco. Should my school (assuming I'm at least 18) be able to suspend me?
What about if I post a chat log of me talking about BSDM with a 14yo girl? Just because there is text containing the claim that she is 14 does not, in fact, mean that she is 14...or even a girl. Should that open the door for a child-sex investigation?
The internet is, in part, about the dissemination of fact. That was it's original intent; to share facts and information. However, the internet has become, in large part, a medium of entertainment.
Who is to say that my blog is not a work of fiction?
Do cops troll Hollywood movies looking for people discharging firearms within city limits?
Then why should they troll MySpace looking for, and opening investigations on, stuff that may or may not be true?
On a side note, I keep waiting for someone busted on Perverted Justice to claim that they had a reasonable expectation that the "girl" they were chatting with was, in fact, a guy. I mean, cmon! Does anyone really believe that 14yo supermodels are hanging out in Yahoo! incest and animal-sex chat rooms?
I have no problems with police patrolling a beat. If they see someone doing something illegal, they should intervene.
However, I don't thing cops should be allowed to troll for crimes in a public space.
If you are lawfully walking down the street, should a cop be able to come up to you and give you a "white glove" inspection? Take your ID, call in to check for any warrants, call your ISP to check for bittorrent traffic, ask your boss if any equipment has come up missing, call the DMV to make sure your car is properly licensed, and check with the IRS to ensure you don't owe taxes?
When they pull up your blog, how many bad things will they find?
Also, what seperates truth from fiction? How do they know that I didn't read about a recent arson attack and decide to write some fiction placing myself at the scene?
There is an old adage: IRC. Where the men are men, the women are men, and the 14 year-old girls are FBI agents.
My point? Not everyone is completely honest online.
So, is my blogging about doing a 13yo Thai ladyboy truth? Is it sufficent grounds to start an investigation?
If you threaten to investigate everything that everyone says that *might* be illegal, then how is that different from placing restrictions on my First Amendment rights?
I find it hard to believe that OSX video drivers have no system to display apps without stretching.
In the Control Panel of both Nvidia and ATI drivers, there is a setting that will allow a 1024*768 game to run with the other pixels blocked out. The other 256*256 pixels become a border around the actual game. That way, everything looks OK and not all stretched out.
This is very useful considering most LCDs are 1280*1024 and most games are designed to play at *real* resolutions; i.e. 1280*960.
I'm thinking that the real potential here is for true team-based games.
Team A could share a table while Team B is at another table. The composite output from both tables could be fed, after a small time delay, to a projector for an audience.
Or, in real-life, soldiers in the field could be tracked via GPS and plotted on this table. When they contact the enemy, triangulation could pinpoint the location of the bad guys on the display. A General could then, via touching and dragging, issue commands to his units to quickly flank and overwhelm the enemy position.
>>To get 360 level graphics, you need something on the order of a Radeon 1900XT.
No, you just need a $400 X-Box360 and a $2000 TV. So, for $2500, you get a console that plays Oblivion pretty good. Or, you can get a kick-ass PC that plays Oblivion pretty good and allows for tons of free mods and dev tools.
Not only that, but being sick is a good thing. Every cold you get makes your body a little bit stronger. Unless you are washing your hands with infected chicken blood while eating cow brains in Alabama and having unprotected sex with prostitutes in Kenya, a little sniffle probably won't kill you.
And if, by some chance, a common cold does kill you. Rest assured that you will be talked about on CNN for weeks. Meanwhile, your loss of weak genes from the pool actually did some good for the rest of us.
I think the third parties will rely on plain stupidity. I can't tell you the number of times I have services a computer with the WinXP firewall, Norton Firewall, and Mcaafe Firewall all installed and running. Not to mention multiple antivirus programs running.
People are stupid. Even if the fromt of the WinVis box *screams* anti-virus included, people will still be lured into grabbing Nortom Internet Security Suite for $99.95 as well. They just can't help it.
The best open source of free software? The pirate bay. Closely followed by iso hunt.
But, fear not my dear Stallman! Be assured that Debian dot org is also on my list. It rates right after eMule, Kazaa, IRC, usenet, most abandonware sites, MAME stuff, any shareware I can dig up, and asking my neighbor to borrow his office disc.
Not knowing much about processor design, I'm going to talk out my ass here for a second; bear with me.
First off, not every core needs to be as powerful as a AMD or Intel core. There are some problems that are easier to solve using a lot of low-power cores vice one or two uber cores.
You could also reduce the memory bandwidth to each core. You could keep a fairly powerful core, while only feeding each core a limited bandwidth.
You could also completely change the idea behind how the proc works. Maybe they can interleave access to memory on a time-slot-based system. Or they could be building a lot of cache on die.
There is a big difference between being designed hard and becoming had due to lack of direction.
The internet was supposed to be a fault tolerant network for sending launch codes. However, recent outages have shown that the internet quickly chokes after the loss of a few key routers/links.
The internet was desiged to be easy to control..mil people could access.mil addresses..edu people could access.edu addresses..mil and.edu shared the same infrastructure, but could not directly access each other.
Better striation of the internet can only bennifit us all. Think of it as a dewy-decimal system for the web. It may not be perfect, but it's better than what we have.
You want it to be hard to filter. I understand your reasoning. But you are suffering from a serious delusion: The internet is your hammer and everything you see is a nail.
Your answer to government filtering is not a "wild west" web. The answer for government filtering is better government. Unplug and run for something.
Don't be happy just to sit in your computer room and surf annonymously, get out and tell people you have a right to access information.
How many years did the homosexual community live underground?
Were they happier then, or now?
If you had 100,000 geeks move to some small town in Alabama, you could create a geek city.
Just as gays/lesbians can walk unmolested in SanFran, geeks could walk unmolested in WhereEverTheFuckistan.
But, no, you'll be happy to sit and read about zip guns and a-bombs over FreeNet. Meanwhile, everything will continue to get worse.
I've thought long and hard about that too. It really is a complicated problem. How many customers from how many countries does one need before registering a.com?
Should Microsoft be allowed a.com?
Should Slashdot?
How about me? Should I be allowed to run a.org? Why or why not?/. grew out of a blog. It was CTs personal site where people began to e-mail him stuff to post. Eventually, it grew into this. At what point should Rob have been allowed to register a.org?
Once he started selling ads, should he have lost the.org designation? After all,/. is part of a for-profit company; OSDN.
Amazon.com should be disbanded.
Amazon.co.ca would buy/sell in Canada,.co.uk would buy/sell in the UK, and.co.us could buy/sell in the US.
>>likewise if there was a.safe, the implication would be that anything other than.safe TLDs contained 'unsafe' content
That does not nescessarily follow. The only thing one could assume should a.safe domain be implemented is that anything in.safe should be, well, safe. It's not saying that microsoft.com is pr0n, just that microsoft.safe is not pr0n.
>>With.xxx, does anyone really think that all the porn sites in the world are suddenly going to drop their high traffic URLs in favour of the.xxx equivalents?
Hence the need for a controlled domain. If one tried to register a.safe domain, he/she would need to submit the content for review by the registrar. This would be similar to how movies and games are rated.
>>Define porn. If you can see the hole, it is probably porn. Start there and work backwards. Next, I'd say that any shaved genetalia probably qualify. Anything involving multiple partners touching each other's genetalia is a good candidate as well.
Boobies are not porn. No matter how hard you try, they just aren't. However, if they are being used for a fetish, they probably qualify. Guy eating cereal while lactating woman fills the bowl? Probably porn.
Feet are probably not porn no matter how hard you try and make it so.
Stuffed animals humping are also probably not porn.
The Bible is probably not porn but most of the stuff on assm.asstr.org probably is.
>>What do you do with hybrid sites? That's pretty easy. Host pornographic images on a server in the.xxx domain. I could still hit an article about fetishes on WP, without worrying about some kid in the library seeing some chick pissing on a guy.
This would even work for things like playboy.com. They can keep their domain and still allow articles to be unfiltered. If some accesses an adult area, the images are piped from playboy.xxx which is easy enough to block.
It really is the wrong way to think about it. It'd be better if there was a.safe domain.
My company pays a lot of money for filtering software. On top of that, we fire dozens of employees a year for doing shit they shouldn't online. Most of those are porn-related. It would be so nice if I could just block everything, then allow.safe domains.
There should be a better catagorization of the internet. We should purge all.com/net/org and never allow them to be used again. We should enforce the use of country domains. Slashdot.org should be slashdot.or.us. Or maybe, since they advertise, they should be moved to a.co.us instead.
You need to figure in the cost of replacing the PCs. You have to shut down the user, back up his data, remove the old PC, install the new PC, and import his old data.
Then, you spend an hour or so getting his Outlook to "look right". Or you spend a few minutes explaining why that file he hid away in some god forsaken directory is now gone forever.
I just went through this. We help the users back up their data during the day. At night, we install the new and remove the old. The next morning, we step the user through login and initial setup. Then, the user has three days to identify problems. After that, the user needs to open a ticket with the hell desk and wait his turn; usually a few days.
Multiply this by 1500 users.
Replacing 1500 computers is, at best, a month-long job. We are in month 3 now and just winding down.
Do you really want to shut down each department in an enterprise for 3~5 days every year? It would ripple through the company worse like the rolling blackouts in Cali a few years back.
Better to have an update every few years and minimize the impact.
On top of that, you can use the "down" years to refresh your servers and baseline the new systems.
So, cycle 1 is for users.
Cycle 2 is for servers.
Cycle 3 is for routers/switches/WAN connections.
You can also manage your manpower by the cycles. We hire more highschoolers in cycle 1. We get MCSEs and RHCEs in cycle 2. Cycle 3 is CCNPs. Once the bulk of the rollout is done, we lay off the chaff and decide which wheat we will keep.
Another concern is that a company does not buy a computer for a year. They buy something for 3 years. While I'd like to say we could save money by picking up some $500 whitebox computers, I can't. We'd be buying them every year. As it stands now, we buy the top-of-the-line Dell every 3 years. We may pay $5000 per box, but at least we get something that will still be usable in 3 to 5 years. Not to mention 24/7 support.
On top of all that, company software changes regularly. We may go through a few iterations of Office. Maybe one or two versions of Visio. May even get several versions of AutoCAD in the lifetime of one of our desktops.
Let's say I'm doing a refresh today. Should I buy a middle-of-the-road PC and save money? What if, in a year, we upgrade AutoCAD? And, just for the sake of making my argument better, let's say AC2007 requires Vista. Now, by saving $1000 on a lower-end PC, I've put myself out of the Vista upgrade path. Now I need to go back and get more RAM and a better video card.
I think, for most enterprise applications, going with top-of-the-line is the only option.
Oh, one other way to look at it:
A mid-range PC is $1500.
Let's buy 1000 of those. We have spent $1.5M.
If you add another $1000 for a kick-ass PC, you still only spend $2.5M.
That's chump change to a enterprise. Especially because they'll spread that over a 3-year contract.
This is a perfect reason why people should be happy with what they have.
This guy had a great distro. A lot of people cut their teeth on it. A lot more used it religously. He had a great user base.
But, could he be happy? No! He *needed* to go public. He *needed* the money so that he could grow his company. He *needed* money to compete with RedHat and MS in the global market for server domination.
Look, I have no pity for you. You saw RedHat (and a lot of others) get rich in the late 90s. You wanted a slice. You knew that you were taking a risk.
Now, when you are the boss and you decide to let a Board of Directors come in and run things, you are no longer the boss.
That kinda defeats the purpose of starting your own company, doesn't it?
On the up side, just wait a few years. By then, Debian will be looking for a new project manager.
Oh, and if, by some chance, you read this, know that I really do hope things get better for you.
As an Alabama resident (or, former resident), I can tell you that Bama is fucked! For instance, it is illegal to sell sex toys in Alabama. It is also illegal to sell hard-core pornography.
If you come to Alabama, and want to cum in Alabama, bring your copy of Juggs or a pocket pussy with you; you won't find that here.
Also, be wary of fucking your girl in the ass here. If she decided to file charges, you could spend several years in jail.
A friend of mine was 17. He asked his 16yo girl to go down on him. A few days later, he broke up with her. The next day, she had him arrested for forcable sodomy and statutory rape. He spent 6 months in jail awaiting trial and then spent 2 years in prison.
At trial, he was forbidden from releasing details about the act. His lawyer could not disclose the girl's age. He also couldn't disclose the fact that she went down on him willingly. The prosicutor constantly refered to the girl as a "little girl" and never mentioned that it was a blowjob.
After the trial, everyone in the jury thought this 17yo man had fucked a 3yo girl in the ass.
Long story short; don't ever go to Alabama.
And that's why we need to stop allowing local communities to decide what's right and wrong. You cannot, in a free society, allow a bunch of bible-thunping hicks to decide what is obscene.
Something like this happened to a friend of mine. We were in the military, living on-base in an overseas location. He was probably into some bad shit; we all were back then. Before we knew it was bad we were portscanning and mailbombing people just because it was "fun". Anyway...
So, he gets charged with some violation of some regulation. They come in and seize two desktops, a laptop, a printer, a monitor, KVM, and anything else computer related. They even took the keyboard and mouse. They took his fucking CD player because it "could be used to hold a data CD". Well, the data was protected with some kind of encryption. I don't know if he used PGP or MagicFolders; but something to obfuscate the data was in-place.
After 4 months, we still hadn't heard anything from the cops. We started calling the lawyers trying to find out what was happening. They basicly responded that the case was on-hold pending collection of evidince.
Well, 14 months later, he was scheduled to move to another base. They refused to let him because they still had him "under investigation". 20 months later, they refused to let him leave the military (his contract had expired) because he was under investigation.
They ended up not allowing him to be promoted, not allowing him to move, not allowing him to get out for just over 6 years. All because he wouldn't give up his key.
26 months *after* he should have been allowed to leave the military, they ordered him to go to Kuait. They also ordered him to take a bunch of Anthrax shots. He refused the shots (they have done some pretty bad things to people) and they gave him a dishonorable discharge a few weeks later.
The shit of it? The commander promised that they would hold on to his computers till they can read the data. She promised that she'd have her best guys look at it every year till they figured it out. She promised that when they found what they were looking for, they'd find him and lock him up in a military prison.
The point is that no one should be allowed to tease the public with knowledge contained in secret tomes only the few can access. If you are going to talk to someone on a subject, then talk to them as an equal. Don't tell them that the boogyman is around the corner. If they ask, show them the actual threat. Let them decide. Don't just try and instill fear.
Would you be satisfied if a neighbor was sent to prison without a public trial? If you ask, the police could just say, "If you only knew what we know, you'd want him in prison too."
That's what the WP is doing here. They tell people to be afraid without showing the full truth. The internet is a bad place, but don't try and scare people with secret knowledge.
Here's what I hate about news. It's all about alluding to something powerful and blinding the users with innuendo.
Stop mincing your words and just say it. Stop telling people about "some website" where "evil hackers" can "point and click" to crack your passwords. Just fucking say Rainbow Crack.
It really fucking gets my goat when someone claims to have secret knowledge. What harm could have come from just saying Metasploit or Rainbow Crack? The evil doers already know. Give JoeUser actual knowledge and let him decide for himself.
Stop pretending that you know something and the public can't be trusted with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. However, MySpace cannot be used as evidence.
I have talked publicly about doing unususal things. My friends and I used to talk about the best way to dispose of a body while looking around the sporting goods section of Wally World. Does that mean a cop can begin an investigation?
What if he finds a body nearby that was disposed of in a creative manner with no other evidence? What would the trial be like? Just because they heard me talking about body disposal and they found a body, does that mean I'm guilty?
Here's another example: Lets say I'm unpopular in school. To boost my reputation, I decide to blog about how I burned down a house. I got most of the details from $local_news and just made the rest up.
Now, they always leave out details. Let'say I fill in $accelerant from last month's CSI. Just so happens that the real criminal got the idea from the same place.
They have your claim, they have you knowing an unpublished detail. Will I be convicted?
What if I have a pic of me testing a gravity bong with tobacco. Should my school (assuming I'm at least 18) be able to suspend me?
What about if I post a chat log of me talking about BSDM with a 14yo girl? Just because there is text containing the claim that she is 14 does not, in fact, mean that she is 14...or even a girl. Should that open the door for a child-sex investigation?
The internet is, in part, about the dissemination of fact. That was it's original intent; to share facts and information. However, the internet has become, in large part, a medium of entertainment.
Who is to say that my blog is not a work of fiction?
Do cops troll Hollywood movies looking for people discharging firearms within city limits?
Then why should they troll MySpace looking for, and opening investigations on, stuff that may or may not be true?
On a side note, I keep waiting for someone busted on Perverted Justice to claim that they had a reasonable expectation that the "girl" they were chatting with was, in fact, a guy. I mean, cmon! Does anyone really believe that 14yo supermodels are hanging out in Yahoo! incest and animal-sex chat rooms?
I have no problems with police patrolling a beat. If they see someone doing something illegal, they should intervene.
However, I don't thing cops should be allowed to troll for crimes in a public space.
If you are lawfully walking down the street, should a cop be able to come up to you and give you a "white glove" inspection? Take your ID, call in to check for any warrants, call your ISP to check for bittorrent traffic, ask your boss if any equipment has come up missing, call the DMV to make sure your car is properly licensed, and check with the IRS to ensure you don't owe taxes?
When they pull up your blog, how many bad things will they find?
Also, what seperates truth from fiction? How do they know that I didn't read about a recent arson attack and decide to write some fiction placing myself at the scene?
There is an old adage: IRC. Where the men are men, the women are men, and the 14 year-old girls are FBI agents.
My point? Not everyone is completely honest online.
So, is my blogging about doing a 13yo Thai ladyboy truth? Is it sufficent grounds to start an investigation?
If you threaten to investigate everything that everyone says that *might* be illegal, then how is that different from placing restrictions on my First Amendment rights?
I find it hard to believe that OSX video drivers have no system to display apps without stretching.
In the Control Panel of both Nvidia and ATI drivers, there is a setting that will allow a 1024*768 game to run with the other pixels blocked out. The other 256*256 pixels become a border around the actual game. That way, everything looks OK and not all stretched out.
This is very useful considering most LCDs are 1280*1024 and most games are designed to play at *real* resolutions; i.e. 1280*960.
I'm thinking that the real potential here is for true team-based games.
Team A could share a table while Team B is at another table. The composite output from both tables could be fed, after a small time delay, to a projector for an audience.
Or, in real-life, soldiers in the field could be tracked via GPS and plotted on this table. When they contact the enemy, triangulation could pinpoint the location of the bad guys on the display. A General could then, via touching and dragging, issue commands to his units to quickly flank and overwhelm the enemy position.
>>To get 360 level graphics, you need something on the order of a Radeon 1900XT.
No, you just need a $400 X-Box360 and a $2000 TV. So, for $2500, you get a console that plays Oblivion pretty good. Or, you can get a kick-ass PC that plays Oblivion pretty good and allows for tons of free mods and dev tools.
Not only that, but being sick is a good thing. Every cold you get makes your body a little bit stronger. Unless you are washing your hands with infected chicken blood while eating cow brains in Alabama and having unprotected sex with prostitutes in Kenya, a little sniffle probably won't kill you.
And if, by some chance, a common cold does kill you. Rest assured that you will be talked about on CNN for weeks. Meanwhile, your loss of weak genes from the pool actually did some good for the rest of us.
I think the third parties will rely on plain stupidity. I can't tell you the number of times I have services a computer with the WinXP firewall, Norton Firewall, and Mcaafe Firewall all installed and running. Not to mention multiple antivirus programs running.
People are stupid. Even if the fromt of the WinVis box *screams* anti-virus included, people will still be lured into grabbing Nortom Internet Security Suite for $99.95 as well. They just can't help it.
The best open source of free software? The pirate bay. Closely followed by iso hunt.
But, fear not my dear Stallman! Be assured that Debian dot org is also on my list. It rates right after eMule, Kazaa, IRC, usenet, most abandonware sites, MAME stuff, any shareware I can dig up, and asking my neighbor to borrow his office disc.
Not knowing much about processor design, I'm going to talk out my ass here for a second; bear with me.
First off, not every core needs to be as powerful as a AMD or Intel core. There are some problems that are easier to solve using a lot of low-power cores vice one or two uber cores.
You could also reduce the memory bandwidth to each core. You could keep a fairly powerful core, while only feeding each core a limited bandwidth.
You could also completely change the idea behind how the proc works. Maybe they can interleave access to memory on a time-slot-based system. Or they could be building a lot of cache on die.
Reread my comment. I specifically mention the Bible and alt.sex.stories.
I'll agree. Another good one is this: Porn is anything you lose interest in after you cum.
Maybe slashdot.safe.co.us?
/. should technically be blocked as a discussion site.
Although,
There is a big difference between being designed hard and becoming had due to lack of direction.
.mil people could access .mil addresses. .edu people could access .edu addresses. .mil and .edu shared the same infrastructure, but could not directly access each other.
The internet was supposed to be a fault tolerant network for sending launch codes. However, recent outages have shown that the internet quickly chokes after the loss of a few key routers/links.
The internet was desiged to be easy to control.
Better striation of the internet can only bennifit us all. Think of it as a dewy-decimal system for the web. It may not be perfect, but it's better than what we have.
You want it to be hard to filter. I understand your reasoning. But you are suffering from a serious delusion: The internet is your hammer and everything you see is a nail.
Your answer to government filtering is not a "wild west" web. The answer for government filtering is better government. Unplug and run for something.
Don't be happy just to sit in your computer room and surf annonymously, get out and tell people you have a right to access information.
How many years did the homosexual community live underground?
Were they happier then, or now?
If you had 100,000 geeks move to some small town in Alabama, you could create a geek city.
Just as gays/lesbians can walk unmolested in SanFran, geeks could walk unmolested in WhereEverTheFuckistan.
But, no, you'll be happy to sit and read about zip guns and a-bombs over FreeNet. Meanwhile, everything will continue to get worse.
I've thought long and hard about that too. It really is a complicated problem. How many customers from how many countries does one need before registering a .com?
.com?
.org? Why or why not? /. grew out of a blog. It was CTs personal site where people began to e-mail him stuff to post. Eventually, it grew into this. At what point should Rob have been allowed to register a .org?
.org designation? After all, /. is part of a for-profit company; OSDN.
.co.uk would buy/sell in the UK, and .co.us could buy/sell in the US.
Should Microsoft be allowed a
Should Slashdot?
How about me? Should I be allowed to run a
Once he started selling ads, should he have lost the
Amazon.com should be disbanded.
Amazon.co.ca would buy/sell in Canada,
It's that fucking simple.
>>likewise if there was a .safe, the implication would be that anything other than .safe TLDs contained 'unsafe' content
.safe domain be implemented is that anything in .safe should be, well, safe. It's not saying that microsoft.com is pr0n, just that microsoft.safe is not pr0n.
.xxx, does anyone really think that all the porn sites in the world are suddenly going to drop their high traffic URLs in favour of the .xxx equivalents?
.safe domain, he/she would need to submit the content for review by the registrar. This would be similar to how movies and games are rated.
That does not nescessarily follow. The only thing one could assume should a
>>With
Hence the need for a controlled domain. If one tried to register a
>>Define porn.
.xxx domain. I could still hit an article about fetishes on WP, without worrying about some kid in the library seeing some chick pissing on a guy.
If you can see the hole, it is probably porn. Start there and work backwards. Next, I'd say that any shaved genetalia probably qualify. Anything involving multiple partners touching each other's genetalia is a good candidate as well.
Boobies are not porn. No matter how hard you try, they just aren't. However, if they are being used for a fetish, they probably qualify. Guy eating cereal while lactating woman fills the bowl? Probably porn.
Feet are probably not porn no matter how hard you try and make it so.
Stuffed animals humping are also probably not porn.
The Bible is probably not porn but most of the stuff on assm.asstr.org probably is.
>>What do you do with hybrid sites?
That's pretty easy. Host pornographic images on a server in the
This would even work for things like playboy.com. They can keep their domain and still allow articles to be unfiltered. If some accesses an adult area, the images are piped from playboy.xxx which is easy enough to block.
It really is the wrong way to think about it. It'd be better if there was a .safe domain.
.safe domains.
.com/net/org and never allow them to be used again. We should enforce the use of country domains. Slashdot.org should be slashdot.or.us. Or maybe, since they advertise, they should be moved to a .co.us instead.
My company pays a lot of money for filtering software. On top of that, we fire dozens of employees a year for doing shit they shouldn't online. Most of those are porn-related. It would be so nice if I could just block everything, then allow
There should be a better catagorization of the internet. We should purge all
You need to figure in the cost of replacing the PCs. You have to shut down the user, back up his data, remove the old PC, install the new PC, and import his old data.
Then, you spend an hour or so getting his Outlook to "look right". Or you spend a few minutes explaining why that file he hid away in some god forsaken directory is now gone forever.
I just went through this. We help the users back up their data during the day. At night, we install the new and remove the old. The next morning, we step the user through login and initial setup. Then, the user has three days to identify problems. After that, the user needs to open a ticket with the hell desk and wait his turn; usually a few days.
Multiply this by 1500 users.
Replacing 1500 computers is, at best, a month-long job. We are in month 3 now and just winding down.
Do you really want to shut down each department in an enterprise for 3~5 days every year? It would ripple through the company worse like the rolling blackouts in Cali a few years back.
Better to have an update every few years and minimize the impact.
On top of that, you can use the "down" years to refresh your servers and baseline the new systems.
So, cycle 1 is for users.
Cycle 2 is for servers.
Cycle 3 is for routers/switches/WAN connections.
You can also manage your manpower by the cycles. We hire more highschoolers in cycle 1. We get MCSEs and RHCEs in cycle 2. Cycle 3 is CCNPs. Once the bulk of the rollout is done, we lay off the chaff and decide which wheat we will keep.
Another concern is that a company does not buy a computer for a year. They buy something for 3 years. While I'd like to say we could save money by picking up some $500 whitebox computers, I can't. We'd be buying them every year. As it stands now, we buy the top-of-the-line Dell every 3 years. We may pay $5000 per box, but at least we get something that will still be usable in 3 to 5 years. Not to mention 24/7 support.
On top of all that, company software changes regularly. We may go through a few iterations of Office. Maybe one or two versions of Visio. May even get several versions of AutoCAD in the lifetime of one of our desktops.
Let's say I'm doing a refresh today. Should I buy a middle-of-the-road PC and save money? What if, in a year, we upgrade AutoCAD? And, just for the sake of making my argument better, let's say AC2007 requires Vista. Now, by saving $1000 on a lower-end PC, I've put myself out of the Vista upgrade path. Now I need to go back and get more RAM and a better video card.
I think, for most enterprise applications, going with top-of-the-line is the only option.
Oh, one other way to look at it:
A mid-range PC is $1500.
Let's buy 1000 of those. We have spent $1.5M.
If you add another $1000 for a kick-ass PC, you still only spend $2.5M.
That's chump change to a enterprise. Especially because they'll spread that over a 3-year contract.
This is a perfect reason why people should be happy with what they have.
This guy had a great distro. A lot of people cut their teeth on it. A lot more used it religously. He had a great user base.
But, could he be happy? No! He *needed* to go public. He *needed* the money so that he could grow his company. He *needed* money to compete with RedHat and MS in the global market for server domination.
Look, I have no pity for you. You saw RedHat (and a lot of others) get rich in the late 90s. You wanted a slice. You knew that you were taking a risk.
Now, when you are the boss and you decide to let a Board of Directors come in and run things, you are no longer the boss.
That kinda defeats the purpose of starting your own company, doesn't it?
On the up side, just wait a few years. By then, Debian will be looking for a new project manager.
Oh, and if, by some chance, you read this, know that I really do hope things get better for you.
As an Alabama resident (or, former resident), I can tell you that Bama is fucked! For instance, it is illegal to sell sex toys in Alabama. It is also illegal to sell hard-core pornography.
If you come to Alabama, and want to cum in Alabama, bring your copy of Juggs or a pocket pussy with you; you won't find that here.
Also, be wary of fucking your girl in the ass here. If she decided to file charges, you could spend several years in jail.
A friend of mine was 17. He asked his 16yo girl to go down on him. A few days later, he broke up with her. The next day, she had him arrested for forcable sodomy and statutory rape. He spent 6 months in jail awaiting trial and then spent 2 years in prison.
At trial, he was forbidden from releasing details about the act. His lawyer could not disclose the girl's age. He also couldn't disclose the fact that she went down on him willingly. The prosicutor constantly refered to the girl as a "little girl" and never mentioned that it was a blowjob.
After the trial, everyone in the jury thought this 17yo man had fucked a 3yo girl in the ass.
Long story short; don't ever go to Alabama.
And that's why we need to stop allowing local communities to decide what's right and wrong. You cannot, in a free society, allow a bunch of bible-thunping hicks to decide what is obscene.
Something like this happened to a friend of mine. We were in the military, living on-base in an overseas location. He was probably into some bad shit; we all were back then. Before we knew it was bad we were portscanning and mailbombing people just because it was "fun". Anyway...
So, he gets charged with some violation of some regulation. They come in and seize two desktops, a laptop, a printer, a monitor, KVM, and anything else computer related. They even took the keyboard and mouse. They took his fucking CD player because it "could be used to hold a data CD". Well, the data was protected with some kind of encryption. I don't know if he used PGP or MagicFolders; but something to obfuscate the data was in-place.
After 4 months, we still hadn't heard anything from the cops. We started calling the lawyers trying to find out what was happening. They basicly responded that the case was on-hold pending collection of evidince.
Well, 14 months later, he was scheduled to move to another base. They refused to let him because they still had him "under investigation". 20 months later, they refused to let him leave the military (his contract had expired) because he was under investigation.
They ended up not allowing him to be promoted, not allowing him to move, not allowing him to get out for just over 6 years. All because he wouldn't give up his key.
26 months *after* he should have been allowed to leave the military, they ordered him to go to Kuait. They also ordered him to take a bunch of Anthrax shots. He refused the shots (they have done some pretty bad things to people) and they gave him a dishonorable discharge a few weeks later.
The shit of it? The commander promised that they would hold on to his computers till they can read the data. She promised that she'd have her best guys look at it every year till they figured it out. She promised that when they found what they were looking for, they'd find him and lock him up in a military prison.
The point is that no one should be allowed to tease the public with knowledge contained in secret tomes only the few can access. If you are going to talk to someone on a subject, then talk to them as an equal. Don't tell them that the boogyman is around the corner. If they ask, show them the actual threat. Let them decide. Don't just try and instill fear.
Would you be satisfied if a neighbor was sent to prison without a public trial? If you ask, the police could just say, "If you only knew what we know, you'd want him in prison too."
That's what the WP is doing here. They tell people to be afraid without showing the full truth. The internet is a bad place, but don't try and scare people with secret knowledge.
I doubt most SKs read the Washington Post. Those who do are probably smart enough to Google for the tools.
Here's what I hate about news. It's all about alluding to something powerful and blinding the users with innuendo.
Stop mincing your words and just say it. Stop telling people about "some website" where "evil hackers" can "point and click" to crack your passwords. Just fucking say Rainbow Crack.
It really fucking gets my goat when someone claims to have secret knowledge. What harm could have come from just saying Metasploit or Rainbow Crack? The evil doers already know. Give JoeUser actual knowledge and let him decide for himself.
Stop pretending that you know something and the public can't be trusted with it.