No, the regulations are non-existent, and not just overseas, either. Regulations - in the sense of laws, that is - are nearly non-existent in the USA, Canada, and Europe as well. Spammers spam with near-impunity in all those places. The worst thing that can happen - unless they have the bad luck of being in a state that has a spam law with teeth and an attorney general to match - is they get their service disconnected. In a day or two or three, they've bought another connection somewhere else.
I used to work for a large, well-known hosting company whose name is taken from a book of the Bible. They didn't have to many spammers or pr0n sites in their space when things were booming, but now they're among the worst for hosting spammers.
There are network providers all over the country that are as bad or worse. I recently ran across one that had a/21 bought from some other upstream, and after some digging it became obvious that this entire network provider was nothing but a front for providing bandwidth to spammers.
A lot of spam is sent through China by contract with network providers there, and through South Korea because it's the open proxy capitol of the world, and there is a very large and well organized spam ring operating in eastern Europe as well, and it seems soundly connected to US spammers. The spam business has gone international in a big way.
In none of those places, including the US and Canada, generally, is spam illegal, so it's never necessary to bribe any government official into looking the other way. It's just easier to pay off the ISP to look the other way in some countries, but again, that's pretty easy in a lot of places in North America too. When the economy goes down, pink contracts go up. Many companies and individuals will do just about anything to survive, and network providers are certainly no exception. For every one that will cut a spammer's connection as soon as they notice, there's another that will happily sell the spammer as much bandwidth and IP space as he wants. Then they pass that space on to some other unsuspecting customer, who finds that she can't send mail to a lot of places because that netblock is in every RBL - good, bad, or ugly - in the world.
As much as we rightly despise spammers, those who sheeld them and knowingly sell them bandwidth and colo space are just as bad.
Offtopic? I resent that! This was a troll. Or flamebait. Whatever. But a reference to Monty Python can't be called off-topic in a thread about TBL become a knight:-)
This response, however, is off-topic, which means it'll probably get modded as a troll or flamebait:-p
Of course, this will work if you can get some decent decaffeinated coffee. The stuff we have at work is just garbage.
Happily, about a month ago, my employer started buying Starbucks for our coffee machine instead of the industrial-grade coffee service junk. I was away on vacation when this happened, and was delighted to discover the change upon my return.
I'm sure you all probably want to bombard us with resumes now that you've learned we buy Starbucks, but sadly, all of our IT positions are filled at the moment (we do have non-IT positions open).
when was the last time you checked the exhaust system on your car
I check the mechanical condition of my car regularly and fix or have fixed anything that's wrong, thanks very much. I suspect that's true of a lot of computer tinkerers, too. People who are knowledgeable and competent in one technical area tend to be so in others. It comes from the fact that we tend to educate ourselves about things. That's how many of us got into IT in the first place.
However, your point that most people are willfully ignorant is spot-on. The information is out there, it's all over the place, and much of it is packaged in a form suitable for absorption by the computer-stupid and the just plain generally stupid, who together make up the majority of computer owners today, I'm convinced.
The car is a very good example of a complex device that is pretty good at taking care of itself, however. While onboard computers and trouble lights are not a substitute for regular scheduled and preventive maintenance, they are pretty good at telling you when something needs immediate attention. If the computer detects a sytsems problem that requires servicing, it will turn on the check engine light, and if you're the most car-stupid person in the world, you know that means you need to take your car to a mechanic and have it checked out.
Unfortunately, doing that on a computer is a lot harder, both because a general purpose computer is in many ways more complex than a car, the user interface to control it is far more complex (a car just has a bunch of switches and knobs, a steering wheel, and a few pedals and levers, and the steering wheel and pedals cover >80% of the function), computers are general purpose (imagine if your car was also a stove, a microwave oven, fishing equipment, a helicopter, and bowling shoes; trouble-shooting by software would be a lot harder), and each computer is different because of different installed apps and configurations.
The unTrustable Computing initiative is one potential solution: selling computers that can't install anything that doesn't bear the vendor's approval. Unfortunately, that really screws the value of a computer for those who have at least two neurons to rub together.
For many people, a network appliance - something that has always been a failure in the marketplace- would honestly be the best solution. It can send email, it can surf the web, can do IRC and other popular IMs. It can save your mails and such to an internal disk or to a compact flash card. It has a basic all-in-one program for word processing, spreadsheet, etc. You can't install software on it, everything loads out of ROM or from a read-only hard drive. However, consumers seem to resist something like this, even though it's the best answer to (relatively) secure computing for them. They want to install a bloated office app suite, a bunch of games, etc, even though they don't really need the office app suite and they'd be better off with a game console for gaming.
Various pundits keep predicting the downfall of the general-purpose, to be supplanted by a number of dedicated purpose computers. That's no closer to happening now than it was when the PC and the Mac were both young computers, because the marketplace - even the marketplace for whom it would be the best answer - continues to reject it.
I don't know what the answer is, I fear there isn't one. We will be stuck with the computer-stupid and the malware they unwittingly propagate for a long time to come. The best answer I've come up with so far is to recommend moving to a Mac for most people, or to Linux or *BSD for the clueful (although they usually never get infected anyway, so it doesn't matter if they move off of Windows or not), but that's only a bandaid on the problem, when the real - and hard to fix - problem is willful ignorance on the part of most computer owners.
Uh, yeah, you definitely work for an ISP, that sounds just like my experience. I spent several years as an ISP sysadmin and went through the same thing. The most clueless bunch were the staff at the embassy (not the one in D.C., this was overseas) of a certain south Asian country well-known as an export destination for US programming and help desk jobs. They were the epitome of cluelessness. They inspired me to make a twist on "You Give Love a Bad Name" that goes "Shot through the brain, and you're too lame. You give dumb a bad name."
Every virus or worm that came out, they would be among the first infected and either never cleaned it up or did so but got reinfected within a day or two. We had to filter all kinds of outbound stuff from their network out of self-defense. They were dumber than dumb, the absolute worst I've ever seen. Calling them up on the phone was useless, they were too stupid to even talk to. I left that country over a year ago and returned to the States, but I bet they still have Code Red and Nimda, and have since added MSBlast and who knows what else to the list.
That's not nicotine, it's one of the B vitamins. I don't recall the exact name anymore (haven't lived in Japan for over a year) but it's not nicotine. This has been discussed on/. before, some time ago. At any rate, the name of that particular B vitamin does begin with "nicotin."
To address the original poster's question, I'm semi-addicted to caffeine, but not to the point that I get headaches if I stop, and I often go without any caffeinated drinks from Friday afternoon until Monday morning.
If you're really heavily stuck on caffeine, though, a slow tapering off is the best way to do it. Since part of the thing with caffeine is the act of drinking coffee (just as with cigarettes, it's not just the nicotine addiction, but the physical act of smoking), so one approach (I haven't tried it, but it seems logical) is to start cutting the caffeine level in your coffee by mixing it with decaf. Start with mostly regular and a little decaf, and gradually increase until it's eventually all decaf.
If that's too much work, get some caffeine pills and figure out how many equal one cup of coffee. Start with a full load, then start backing down by one pill, and then another, until there's only one left. Then maybe to half a pill, or maybe just go cold turkey at that point.
Or, take two weeks of vacation and have yourself locked in a room with no access to coffee, just an Internet connection and a toilet, and have your meals passed through the door:-)
Say I work for a human rights orginization and I don't want to advertise I use crypto. I can't use GPL software then.
That is absolutely not true. There is nothing in the GPL that says you have to advertise the fact that you use GPLed software. Indeed, if you don' twant to advertise that you use crypto, using a GPLed crypto product is your best bet. If it's proprietary, you have no way of knowing what, and to whom, it might be advertising. If it's under the GPL, you can audit the source code, or pay someone to do so for you, and confirm that it's doing nothing untoward. Then you can build your binaries from that audited copy of the source and have reasonable confidence that your communications are secure.
Of course, if some dictatorship is intercepting your emails, it will be immediately obvious to them that you are using crypto, and whether it's Free or proprietary software won't change that. They won't know what you're saying, at least if it's strong crypto, but they'll know you're using it. That in itself is probably a crime in most dictatorships.
Now, even if you want to modify the crypto software for use in your own company, the GPL does not in any way hinder that. My employer uses a lot of GPLed software; indeed, we run our business on it. Some of it is modified to suit our purposes, some is not. GPLed software drives the services that we sell to our customers. We do not release any of our modifications, nor do we release our in-house software that integrates with and builds on the GPLed software. Is this in any theft, or a violation of the GPL? No.
The GPL requires you to use the GPL on any derivative works that you release, wether in binary or source form. No such requirement applies to derivative works that you only use internally. The FSF makes this point explicitly. We do not release any binaries; all of our software runs on our servers, and we use that software to provide a service to our customers. This violates neither the letter nor the spirit of the GPL.
The big difference between the GPL and the BSD license, and the talking point for lots of controversy, is that the GPL says you may do anything with this software except make it non-free, thus depriving others who came after you of the freedom which you were given. The BSD license requires only that you acknowledge the original author's copyright, and beyond that you can do anything, including fork it into a proprietary and released product. The pieces of Windows that came from BSD code are everyone's favorite example of this being done in practice.
Whether one chooses a BSD license or the GPL, neither is an impediment to having your software used by large companies. The GPL is just an impediment to them using it in a released proprietary project. Whether this is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing is a matter of opinion.
Umm, what's your point? I could mention the fact that if someone "steals" your GPLed software (by which I presume you mean they make a proprietary product out of it and sell it without providing source, since free software cannot be "stolen" in any other sense) that you then have legal remedies available under copyright law. However, the the point of discussion was "the end of free" as FUDded about by Lyons. How does someone "stealing" your GPLed project, even if they got away with it, in any way move us in the direction of "the end of free?"
Now, if you mean "What's to stop them from releasing a competing FLOSS software product based heavily or almost completely on my software which I released under the GPL?" The answer is "Well, nothing." If you don't want people to be able to do that, then don't release under GPL, or BSD license, or anything of the sort. Make your project closed source and release under a proprietary license.
Yeah, I had a girlfriend who was psycho like that, too. She didn't think I was messing around (and of course, I wasn't), she was just generally psycho. Her and a couple of her whack-job friends telephone stalked me for about a year after I ended the relationship.
Eventually, I just terminated my landline and only had a cell phone - a different one, with a number they didn't know. I also had to move. For a year, I lived in a place that actually belonged to my employer at the time, and it was in a different city. I had basically dropped off the face of the earth, and they lost track of me. I'm sure they would have kept on stalking me even longer, except they just couldn't find me. Well, they did once, about three years later, or so I believed from the odd messages that kept getting left on my answering machine when I wasn't home (had a landline again at that time), so I just canceled that number.
She wasn't in tech, though. There are psychos in every walk of life. Just gotta be careful who you get involved with.
Don't forget to talk about the short range of Brahmos, only 280 km. Sure, you could bring your ship in close and fire a supersonic Brahmos from no more (and probably less) than 280 km from the target, and it would quickly arrive and blow up something. And before you could escape, you'd have aircraft all over you and they'd blow your ass out of the water.
Kind of negates a lot of the advantage of the speed. The Tomahwak may take longer to get there, but because of its range, retaliatory strikes are difficult to make, and there is plenty of time to be prepared for them and attempt to defeat them.
Or viewed another way, the Brahmos may be plenty fast and plenty accurate and have a low radar signature, but you shoot you Brahmos at me and I'll shoot my Tomahawk at you. 20 minutes after the Brahmos fell in the ocean because it ran out of fuel, my Tomahawk will arrive at your location.
Also, they make no mention of air or submarine launch capabilities, something Tomahawks have long had. Only land and surface ship launches are mentioned in the Brahmos article. In view of its short range and limited launch options, I don't see Brahmos taking center stage away from the Tomahawk anytime soon.
The trouble is, no better dipshit has stepped forward to be a candidate, so he'll probably being going back for another four years.
And anyway, he killed a lot of terrorists, will no doubt kill a lot more before his term(s) as president end(s), and ousted Saddam Hussein, so he's not all bad.
Actually, it is clear. The law is against public nudity, and a nude photo taken in her home would not be public nudity. A nude photo taken in her front yard (at least if it didn't have a fence through which no one could see her) would be.
What's so backward about Lincoln's law? I'm not aware of anywhere in the United States where public nudity is legal, with the exception of nudist colonies and nude beaches. In the case of nude beaches, it's often not that they are legal, but that there is just no enforcement. My home town, San Diego, has a nude beach (Black's Beach), not by statute, but by remoteness (you have to go down high cliffs to get there, or walk in from the north or south) and tacit understanding that no one will be busted for public nudity there.
Walk across, say, your university campus naked and you will likely be busted.
She's not the only person to put photos of herself nude in a public place on her website, several other "net models" do/have done the same, but AFAIK she's the first one to be busted for it.
Your point about his posting AC is well taken, but it may be even worse than you think. He may have posted as AC out of a beliefe that/. karma is actually somehow worth something. The horror!
While it is true that the United States has accomplished an impressive amount of things in a relatively short period of time (less than 250 years), and among them one of the most impressive has been making the best and the brightest of other nations want to come and live here, and thus leapfrogging the rest of the world in science, technology, economic power, and good old butt-kicking military power (g), the contributions and accomplishments of Britain must not be forgotten.
The U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution were groundbreaking documents, stunningly radical in their time. However, the seeds of the US Constitution - the legal framework of the first modern democracy - hark back to the Magna Carta, which is about 500 years older and devised in Britain.
For more of what the Brits did right and others didn't do so right, take a look around the world at former colonies of various former colonial powers. The French were extent in Southeast Asia (then called Indochina) and a number of Pacific Islands, and in Africa. The British were in Hong Kong, India and what is now Pakistan, South Africa, Zimbabwe (Rhodesia at the time), and Singapore and Malaysia, among others.
They have left their colonies, as have the rest of the colonial powers. What the British also left behind was a strong legacy of the rule of law. That, more than anything else, is why Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Africa are quite prosperous, and several of there other former colonies are closing in rapidly on real prosperity, with Malaysia leading the way. Zimbabwe would have done well also, but the rule of law was replaced by the rule of thuggery after Mugabe let power go to his head and he turned out to be nothing but a dictator. That, is, however, a miss among many hits.
Compare that to the French legacy. Corruption was SOP in their colonies, and corruption and old-boy networks are what they left behind. Take a look at their former colonies today. Most are corrupt and poor.
And the Spanish. They were at least as bad as the French, maybe worse. All of their former colonies were corrupt and poor, and usually dictatorships, for a very long time. The emergence of democracies in South America is a pretty recent thing and has a lot to do with American influence. Mostly, they are still poor, and there's still a lot of corruption, but they have become more democratic and they are slowly working on the corruption part.
Don't sell the Brits short, they did a lot. Don't forget that the United States itself was a British colony before we told George III to get stuffed. Our legal system descends directly from the British legal system, and that strong respect for the rule of law is what held us together all these years to become the power we are today.
So let's lighten up on the Brit bashing. Go bash the French instead, they deserve it:-)
Umm, would you care to back that up with facts? For example, which states? Relevant section of law, if possible?
I am not aware of any state where anyone may marry under 16 (I'm not saying there aren't any, but I haven't heard of them), and even then you need your parents' permission unless you're an emancipated minor.
Oh, come on, mods! You give +5 funny to the Al Gore joke (not that it wasn't funny) and you have a first post with a Monty Python reference on an article about being a Knight (that's pronounced "Kuhniggit," mind you) modded at -1?
I never was 100% sure before now, but I at last realize that the mods really and truly are on crack. As your punishment, you must chop down the mightiest tree in the forest with...... well, I'm not going to tell you. Get your sorry butts down to the video store and rent (yes, rent, don't download) a copy of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and then complete that sentence for yourselves.
Well, I don' t have a Mac (will buy a Powerbook when Yahoo puts voice and webcam into the Mac client; are you listening Apple? Go put some pressure on Yahoo and you'll sell me a computer!), but if I were, I would choose Konqueror or Safari over Mozilla (especially) or Firebird, hands down. It's just a better browser, and offers a great combination of good features plus a finely-grained security model (best I've seen on that score).
If Safari is as good, I'd use it on Mac. If not, I'd use Konqureror. Firebird and Mozilla are also-rans in comparison, and of course Mac IE isn't even worth talking about.
Why is that if somebody produces crappy, bugridden, insecure code with a failure rate that would make a Yugo look good, people on/. and elsewhere will pounce on them mercilessly for the infraction, but when the crappy, bugridden code in question is a human language rather than a computer language and somebody points out that it's crap, they get called a grammar nazi or a spelling nazi? Certainly, I have never, in my years of reading/. seen anyone accused of being any sort of nazi for thinking that coding ought to be done to a high standard and calling that which was crap, crap. Indeed, people are regularly praised for doing so here, especially if the crap in question was written by a company up in Redmond. If the crap is open source, the criticism will usually be more muted, but still pretty harsh.
Do those of you who fling around those terms really think that code filled with syntactic and typographical errors of sufficient severity that if it weren't for the robustness of the compiler (the readers' brains, in this case) the code might be unintelligible? Why is that while most of us think of standards as a Good Thing and open standards as a Very Good Thing and standards compliance as an Extremely Good Thing, many of those same people will attack anyone who favors standards-compliance, or even the existence of standards, in human language as being some kind of nazi? (And I don't even get into how denigrating that is to the victims of the actual Nazis, and also to those so accused; do those of you who throw around that term really know what the Nazis were, or that Nazi parties still exist today? But I digress.)
Or are you just trying to figleaf your own shortcomings by attacking your betters?
That's a straw that even the mission scientists haven't yet grapsed at, and they already seeming to be reaching toward the box of straws marked "Too thin to be viewed even with an electron microscope."
Beagle 2 is toast.
Beagle 2 is either vaporized, or strewn across many kilometers of the Martian surface.
Beagle 2 is so dead it makes even BSD look radiantly healthy.
According to the article, the phones are provided to the contractors by the state. Those refusing to carry them "rejected the contract and returned the GPS phones they had been issued." The cost of equipment was never an issue, since the operators are not and were not being asked to pay for the equipment.
Three things that are important issues are, first, that the contract, as worded, would have required them to pay a higher insurance premium, but the state claims they have fixed that.
The next is the 30-minute response time, however, it's unclear if that means 30 minutes to respond and say "I'll plow" or 30 minutes to be at the assembly point. It may be the latter, sine the article states that no one has been turned away for showing up late, because the foremen knew they were just stuck in traffic (incidentally, if you are carrying the phone and are stuck in traffic on the way to the assembly point, the GPS phone can prove it for you, which could be a good thing from the plow operator's point of view).
Third is the issue of only getting paid for two hours minimum if they are called up for work. The example the article cites concerns a person who gets called in for an extra hour of work. Under the former system, that operator would be compensated for four hours of work. Under the new rules, the compensation would be only two hours. I can see where this would be a sticking point, because if it takes you more than 30 minutes from the time you are called to get to the assembly point and get the plow, and more than 30 minutes to get home again afterwards, at only two hours of compensation it's hardly worth your time to show up, yet if you don't show up you likely won't get called anymore. At four hours, that is unlikely to happen, and they probably even make a tidy profit out of it.
Now, some people might object to that, but look at it this way: you are on hourly pay and your employer calls you up on Satuday morning, when you may already have something else you'd rather do (catching up on all the sleep you didn't get during the work week, maybe) and asks if you could come in for an hour to do something really important and says they'll pay you two hours' wages to do it. However, it takes you 45 minutes to drive to work (I live in LA, where most people go that long or longer, probably also true for most other big cities) and another 45 to get back. This doesn't even take into account the time to get ready, and the lost opportunity of whatever else you had planned to do.
How interested would you be? Probably not much. You might do it, either because you had to or because it would just look bad if you didn't, but you wouldn't like it much. However, if they were putting four hours' pay on the table and you were sure you could do the extra work in no more than two, it would be a good deal for you. In the worst case - it actually takes you four hours to get the work done - well, you've still made an extra four hours' pay, which is a much bigger incentive than only two hours' pay.
The plow operators don't know which battles to choose here. They should forget the GPS thing, which is not unreasonable and could improve everyone's safety, and focus on the other points. Those matter a lot more.
15,000 watts sounds like a lot, I know (OK, it is a lot), but have you ever been close to a large pipe organ? They are *loud*! I truly doubt that 15,000 watts divided over 74 channels is excessive for the task. To do the job, they needed to not only reproduce the sound of the organ as closely as possible, but also reproduce the volume.
Let me put it to you from someone on the ISP sysadmin side of this discussion.
The vast majority of mail (>80%) coming out of SMTP servers sitting in dial-up and consumer DSL/cable pools is spam, and most of the rest is virus/worm/trojan.
If all ISPs blocked outbound port 25 traffic from their consumer pools (as responsible ones already do) and they all also refused inbound port 25 traffic from others' pools (as ones who are serious about controlling spam already do), the spam problem would be significantly diminished.
I believe you when you say their outbound mail host sucks and that's why you don't use it. Please, make sure that your employer knows this too. If they're paying the bills, they should know they're being ripped off. They may choose to change providers or move up to business-class service, or they may complain to the provider. If they're providing a significant amount of business, the ISP will have to listen and act to avoid losing an important corporate customer.
Speaking as someone who fights spam for a living, effective blocking requires a combination of techniques. You need to filter on sender (both envelope and From:), sender domain, sender IP, and content filters.
Your statement that whoever decided to block ftp or http was not all there completely misses the point, I think. If a site is known to spamvertise, blocking *all* traffic to/from that site is actually a pretty good idea. Why? Consider why spammers send spam: to generate traffic to a web site, an email address, a phone number, some way to contact that. Since they know any email address they use to spam probably won't last as long as fart in a room full of air purifiers, the contact link is usually URL, whether by domain name or IP address. If they spam and you put in a filter for that spam, they may never get that spam through again, but they may still get some buyers from among your (stupider) customers. However, if your policy is to block all traffic to/from that IP address, they get zero traffic and zero business from your netblock and you really hit them in the wallet.
Verio's idea is good, but someone dropped the ball on implemenation in this case by not checking the facts before blocking.
What I'd like to know, though, is why the author of the article uses an ISP as bad as Noos. They sound so bad they make even wanadoo.fr (gee, speaking of spam!) sound good in comparison. Someone at Verio apparently made a mistake, but if so many people at Noos weren't so incompetent (did the PHB character come from their, I wonder?) the situation probably could have been resolved in a day or two.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the regulations are non-existent, and not just overseas, either. Regulations - in the sense of laws, that is - are nearly non-existent in the USA, Canada, and Europe as well. Spammers spam with near-impunity in all those places. The worst thing that can happen - unless they have the bad luck of being in a state that has a spam law with teeth and an attorney general to match - is they get their service disconnected. In a day or two or three, they've bought another connection somewhere else.
/21 bought from some other upstream, and after some digging it became obvious that this entire network provider was nothing but a front for providing bandwidth to spammers.
I used to work for a large, well-known hosting company whose name is taken from a book of the Bible. They didn't have to many spammers or pr0n sites in their space when things were booming, but now they're among the worst for hosting spammers.
There are network providers all over the country that are as bad or worse. I recently ran across one that had a
A lot of spam is sent through China by contract with network providers there, and through South Korea because it's the open proxy capitol of the world, and there is a very large and well organized spam ring operating in eastern Europe as well, and it seems soundly connected to US spammers. The spam business has gone international in a big way.
In none of those places, including the US and Canada, generally, is spam illegal, so it's never necessary to bribe any government official into looking the other way. It's just easier to pay off the ISP to look the other way in some countries, but again, that's pretty easy in a lot of places in North America too. When the economy goes down, pink contracts go up. Many companies and individuals will do just about anything to survive, and network providers are certainly no exception. For every one that will cut a spammer's connection as soon as they notice, there's another that will happily sell the spammer as much bandwidth and IP space as he wants. Then they pass that space on to some other unsuspecting customer, who finds that she can't send mail to a lot of places because that netblock is in every RBL - good, bad, or ugly - in the world.
As much as we rightly despise spammers, those who sheeld them and knowingly sell them bandwidth and colo space are just as bad.
Offtopic? I resent that! This was a troll. Or flamebait. Whatever. But a reference to Monty Python can't be called off-topic in a thread about TBL become a knight :-)
:-p
This response, however, is off-topic, which means it'll probably get modded as a troll or flamebait
Of course, this will work if you can get some decent decaffeinated coffee. The stuff we have at work is just garbage.
Happily, about a month ago, my employer started buying Starbucks for our coffee machine instead of the industrial-grade coffee service junk. I was away on vacation when this happened, and was delighted to discover the change upon my return.
I'm sure you all probably want to bombard us with resumes now that you've learned we buy Starbucks, but sadly, all of our IT positions are filled at the moment (we do have non-IT positions open).
I check the mechanical condition of my car regularly and fix or have fixed anything that's wrong, thanks very much. I suspect that's true of a lot of computer tinkerers, too. People who are knowledgeable and competent in one technical area tend to be so in others. It comes from the fact that we tend to educate ourselves about things. That's how many of us got into IT in the first place.
However, your point that most people are willfully ignorant is spot-on. The information is out there, it's all over the place, and much of it is packaged in a form suitable for absorption by the computer-stupid and the just plain generally stupid, who together make up the majority of computer owners today, I'm convinced.
The car is a very good example of a complex device that is pretty good at taking care of itself, however. While onboard computers and trouble lights are not a substitute for regular scheduled and preventive maintenance, they are pretty good at telling you when something needs immediate attention. If the computer detects a sytsems problem that requires servicing, it will turn on the check engine light, and if you're the most car-stupid person in the world, you know that means you need to take your car to a mechanic and have it checked out.
Unfortunately, doing that on a computer is a lot harder, both because a general purpose computer is in many ways more complex than a car, the user interface to control it is far more complex (a car just has a bunch of switches and knobs, a steering wheel, and a few pedals and levers, and the steering wheel and pedals cover >80% of the function), computers are general purpose (imagine if your car was also a stove, a microwave oven, fishing equipment, a helicopter, and bowling shoes; trouble-shooting by software would be a lot harder), and each computer is different because of different installed apps and configurations.
The unTrustable Computing initiative is one potential solution: selling computers that can't install anything that doesn't bear the vendor's approval. Unfortunately, that really screws the value of a computer for those who have at least two neurons to rub together.
For many people, a network appliance - something that has always been a failure in the marketplace- would honestly be the best solution. It can send email, it can surf the web, can do IRC and other popular IMs. It can save your mails and such to an internal disk or to a compact flash card. It has a basic all-in-one program for word processing, spreadsheet, etc. You can't install software on it, everything loads out of ROM or from a read-only hard drive. However, consumers seem to resist something like this, even though it's the best answer to (relatively) secure computing for them. They want to install a bloated office app suite, a bunch of games, etc, even though they don't really need the office app suite and they'd be better off with a game console for gaming.
Various pundits keep predicting the downfall of the general-purpose, to be supplanted by a number of dedicated purpose computers. That's no closer to happening now than it was when the PC and the Mac were both young computers, because the marketplace - even the marketplace for whom it would be the best answer - continues to reject it.
I don't know what the answer is, I fear there isn't one. We will be stuck with the computer-stupid and the malware they unwittingly propagate for a long time to come. The best answer I've come up with so far is to recommend moving to a Mac for most people, or to Linux or *BSD for the clueful (although they usually never get infected anyway, so it doesn't matter if they move off of Windows or not), but that's only a bandaid on the problem, when the real - and hard to fix - problem is willful ignorance on the part of most computer owners.
Uh, yeah, you definitely work for an ISP, that sounds just like my experience. I spent several years as an ISP sysadmin and went through the same thing. The most clueless bunch were the staff at the embassy (not the one in D.C., this was overseas) of a certain south Asian country well-known as an export destination for US programming and help desk jobs. They were the epitome of cluelessness. They inspired me to make a twist on "You Give Love a Bad Name" that goes "Shot through the brain, and you're too lame. You give dumb a bad name."
Every virus or worm that came out, they would be among the first infected and either never cleaned it up or did so but got reinfected within a day or two. We had to filter all kinds of outbound stuff from their network out of self-defense. They were dumber than dumb, the absolute worst I've ever seen. Calling them up on the phone was useless, they were too stupid to even talk to. I left that country over a year ago and returned to the States, but I bet they still have Code Red and Nimda, and have since added MSBlast and who knows what else to the list.
That's not nicotine, it's one of the B vitamins. I don't recall the exact name anymore (haven't lived in Japan for over a year) but it's not nicotine. This has been discussed on /. before, some time ago. At any rate, the name of that particular B vitamin does begin with "nicotin."
:-)
To address the original poster's question, I'm semi-addicted to caffeine, but not to the point that I get headaches if I stop, and I often go without any caffeinated drinks from Friday afternoon until Monday morning.
If you're really heavily stuck on caffeine, though, a slow tapering off is the best way to do it. Since part of the thing with caffeine is the act of drinking coffee (just as with cigarettes, it's not just the nicotine addiction, but the physical act of smoking), so one approach (I haven't tried it, but it seems logical) is to start cutting the caffeine level in your coffee by mixing it with decaf. Start with mostly regular and a little decaf, and gradually increase until it's eventually all decaf.
If that's too much work, get some caffeine pills and figure out how many equal one cup of coffee. Start with a full load, then start backing down by one pill, and then another, until there's only one left. Then maybe to half a pill, or maybe just go cold turkey at that point.
Or, take two weeks of vacation and have yourself locked in a room with no access to coffee, just an Internet connection and a toilet, and have your meals passed through the door
That is absolutely not true. There is nothing in the GPL that says you have to advertise the fact that you use GPLed software. Indeed, if you don' twant to advertise that you use crypto, using a GPLed crypto product is your best bet. If it's proprietary, you have no way of knowing what, and to whom, it might be advertising. If it's under the GPL, you can audit the source code, or pay someone to do so for you, and confirm that it's doing nothing untoward. Then you can build your binaries from that audited copy of the source and have reasonable confidence that your communications are secure.
Of course, if some dictatorship is intercepting your emails, it will be immediately obvious to them that you are using crypto, and whether it's Free or proprietary software won't change that. They won't know what you're saying, at least if it's strong crypto, but they'll know you're using it. That in itself is probably a crime in most dictatorships.
Now, even if you want to modify the crypto software for use in your own company, the GPL does not in any way hinder that. My employer uses a lot of GPLed software; indeed, we run our business on it. Some of it is modified to suit our purposes, some is not. GPLed software drives the services that we sell to our customers. We do not release any of our modifications, nor do we release our in-house software that integrates with and builds on the GPLed software. Is this in any theft, or a violation of the GPL? No.
The GPL requires you to use the GPL on any derivative works that you release, wether in binary or source form. No such requirement applies to derivative works that you only use internally. The FSF makes this point explicitly. We do not release any binaries; all of our software runs on our servers, and we use that software to provide a service to our customers. This violates neither the letter nor the spirit of the GPL.
The big difference between the GPL and the BSD license, and the talking point for lots of controversy, is that the GPL says you may do anything with this software except make it non-free, thus depriving others who came after you of the freedom which you were given. The BSD license requires only that you acknowledge the original author's copyright, and beyond that you can do anything, including fork it into a proprietary and released product. The pieces of Windows that came from BSD code are everyone's favorite example of this being done in practice.
Whether one chooses a BSD license or the GPL, neither is an impediment to having your software used by large companies. The GPL is just an impediment to them using it in a released proprietary project. Whether this is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing is a matter of opinion.
Please remove your tinfoil hat and put down the crackpipe long enough to come down before you post.
Umm, what's your point? I could mention the fact that if someone "steals" your GPLed software (by which I presume you mean they make a proprietary product out of it and sell it without providing source, since free software cannot be "stolen" in any other sense) that you then have legal remedies available under copyright law. However, the the point of discussion was "the end of free" as FUDded about by Lyons. How does someone "stealing" your GPLed project, even if they got away with it, in any way move us in the direction of "the end of free?"
Now, if you mean "What's to stop them from releasing a competing FLOSS software product based heavily or almost completely on my software which I released under the GPL?" The answer is "Well, nothing." If you don't want people to be able to do that, then don't release under GPL, or BSD license, or anything of the sort. Make your project closed source and release under a proprietary license.
Yeah, I had a girlfriend who was psycho like that, too. She didn't think I was messing around (and of course, I wasn't), she was just generally psycho. Her and a couple of her whack-job friends telephone stalked me for about a year after I ended the relationship.
Eventually, I just terminated my landline and only had a cell phone - a different one, with a number they didn't know. I also had to move. For a year, I lived in a place that actually belonged to my employer at the time, and it was in a different city. I had basically dropped off the face of the earth, and they lost track of me. I'm sure they would have kept on stalking me even longer, except they just couldn't find me. Well, they did once, about three years later, or so I believed from the odd messages that kept getting left on my answering machine when I wasn't home (had a landline again at that time), so I just canceled that number.
She wasn't in tech, though. There are psychos in every walk of life. Just gotta be careful who you get involved with.
Don't forget to talk about the short range of Brahmos, only 280 km. Sure, you could bring your ship in close and fire a supersonic Brahmos from no more (and probably less) than 280 km from the target, and it would quickly arrive and blow up something. And before you could escape, you'd have aircraft all over you and they'd blow your ass out of the water.
Kind of negates a lot of the advantage of the speed. The Tomahwak may take longer to get there, but because of its range, retaliatory strikes are difficult to make, and there is plenty of time to be prepared for them and attempt to defeat them.
Or viewed another way, the Brahmos may be plenty fast and plenty accurate and have a low radar signature, but you shoot you Brahmos at me and I'll shoot my Tomahawk at you. 20 minutes after the Brahmos fell in the ocean because it ran out of fuel, my Tomahawk will arrive at your location.
Also, they make no mention of air or submarine launch capabilities, something Tomahawks have long had. Only land and surface ship launches are mentioned in the Brahmos article. In view of its short range and limited launch options, I don't see Brahmos taking center stage away from the Tomahawk anytime soon.
The trouble is, no better dipshit has stepped forward to be a candidate, so he'll probably being going back for another four years.
And anyway, he killed a lot of terrorists, will no doubt kill a lot more before his term(s) as president end(s), and ousted Saddam Hussein, so he's not all bad.
Actually, it is clear. The law is against public nudity, and a nude photo taken in her home would not be public nudity. A nude photo taken in her front yard (at least if it didn't have a fence through which no one could see her) would be.
What's so backward about Lincoln's law? I'm not aware of anywhere in the United States where public nudity is legal, with the exception of nudist colonies and nude beaches. In the case of nude beaches, it's often not that they are legal, but that there is just no enforcement. My home town, San Diego, has a nude beach (Black's Beach), not by statute, but by remoteness (you have to go down high cliffs to get there, or walk in from the north or south) and tacit understanding that no one will be busted for public nudity there.
Walk across, say, your university campus naked and you will likely be busted.
She's not the only person to put photos of herself nude in a public place on her website, several other "net models" do/have done the same, but AFAIK she's the first one to be busted for it.
Your point about his posting AC is well taken, but it may be even worse than you think. He may have posted as AC out of a beliefe that /. karma is actually somehow worth something. The horror!
:-)
While it is true that the United States has accomplished an impressive amount of things in a relatively short period of time (less than 250 years), and among them one of the most impressive has been making the best and the brightest of other nations want to come and live here, and thus leapfrogging the rest of the world in science, technology, economic power, and good old butt-kicking military power (g), the contributions and accomplishments of Britain must not be forgotten.
The U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution were groundbreaking documents, stunningly radical in their time. However, the seeds of the US Constitution - the legal framework of the first modern democracy - hark back to the Magna Carta, which is about 500 years older and devised in Britain.
For more of what the Brits did right and others didn't do so right, take a look around the world at former colonies of various former colonial powers. The French were extent in Southeast Asia (then called Indochina) and a number of Pacific Islands, and in Africa. The British were in Hong Kong, India and what is now Pakistan, South Africa, Zimbabwe (Rhodesia at the time), and Singapore and Malaysia, among others.
They have left their colonies, as have the rest of the colonial powers. What the British also left behind was a strong legacy of the rule of law. That, more than anything else, is why Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Africa are quite prosperous, and several of there other former colonies are closing in rapidly on real prosperity, with Malaysia leading the way. Zimbabwe would have done well also, but the rule of law was replaced by the rule of thuggery after Mugabe let power go to his head and he turned out to be nothing but a dictator. That, is, however, a miss among many hits.
Compare that to the French legacy. Corruption was SOP in their colonies, and corruption and old-boy networks are what they left behind. Take a look at their former colonies today. Most are corrupt and poor.
And the Spanish. They were at least as bad as the French, maybe worse. All of their former colonies were corrupt and poor, and usually dictatorships, for a very long time. The emergence of democracies in South America is a pretty recent thing and has a lot to do with American influence. Mostly, they are still poor, and there's still a lot of corruption, but they have become more democratic and they are slowly working on the corruption part.
Don't sell the Brits short, they did a lot. Don't forget that the United States itself was a British colony before we told George III to get stuffed. Our legal system descends directly from the British legal system, and that strong respect for the rule of law is what held us together all these years to become the power we are today.
So let's lighten up on the Brit bashing. Go bash the French instead, they deserve it
Umm, would you care to back that up with facts? For example, which states? Relevant section of law, if possible?
I am not aware of any state where anyone may marry under 16 (I'm not saying there aren't any, but I haven't heard of them), and even then you need your parents' permission unless you're an emancipated minor.
Oh, come on, mods! You give +5 funny to the Al Gore joke (not that it wasn't funny) and you have a first post with a Monty Python reference on an article about being a Knight (that's pronounced "Kuhniggit," mind you) modded at -1?
... well, I'm not going to tell you. Get your sorry butts down to the video store and rent (yes, rent, don't download) a copy of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and then complete that sentence for yourselves.
I never was 100% sure before now, but I at last realize that the mods really and truly are on crack. As your punishment, you must chop down the mightiest tree in the forest with...
Well, I don' t have a Mac (will buy a Powerbook when Yahoo puts voice and webcam into the Mac client; are you listening Apple? Go put some pressure on Yahoo and you'll sell me a computer!), but if I were, I would choose Konqueror or Safari over Mozilla (especially) or Firebird, hands down. It's just a better browser, and offers a great combination of good features plus a finely-grained security model (best I've seen on that score).
If Safari is as good, I'd use it on Mac. If not, I'd use Konqureror. Firebird and Mozilla are also-rans in comparison, and of course Mac IE isn't even worth talking about.
Ummm, can I ask a question here?
/. and elsewhere will pounce on them mercilessly for the infraction, but when the crappy, bugridden code in question is a human language rather than a computer language and somebody points out that it's crap, they get called a grammar nazi or a spelling nazi? Certainly, I have never, in my years of reading /. seen anyone accused of being any sort of nazi for thinking that coding ought to be done to a high standard and calling that which was crap, crap. Indeed, people are regularly praised for doing so here, especially if the crap in question was written by a company up in Redmond. If the crap is open source, the criticism will usually be more muted, but still pretty harsh.
Why is that if somebody produces crappy, bugridden, insecure code with a failure rate that would make a Yugo look good, people on
Do those of you who fling around those terms really think that code filled with syntactic and typographical errors of sufficient severity that if it weren't for the robustness of the compiler (the readers' brains, in this case) the code might be unintelligible? Why is that while most of us think of standards as a Good Thing and open standards as a Very Good Thing and standards compliance as an Extremely Good Thing, many of those same people will attack anyone who favors standards-compliance, or even the existence of standards, in human language as being some kind of nazi? (And I don't even get into how denigrating that is to the victims of the actual Nazis, and also to those so accused; do those of you who throw around that term really know what the Nazis were, or that Nazi parties still exist today? But I digress.)
Or are you just trying to figleaf your own shortcomings by attacking your betters?
That's a straw that even the mission scientists haven't yet grapsed at, and they already seeming to be reaching toward the box of straws marked "Too thin to be viewed even with an electron microscope."
Beagle 2 is toast.
Beagle 2 is either vaporized, or strewn across many kilometers of the Martian surface.
Beagle 2 is so dead it makes even BSD look radiantly healthy.
I doubt it. All they'd have to do to disable enemy email infrastructure is give them free copies of MS Exchange.
According to the article, the phones are provided to the contractors by the state. Those refusing to carry them "rejected the contract and returned the GPS phones they had been issued." The cost of equipment was never an issue, since the operators are not and were not being asked to pay for the equipment.
Three things that are important issues are, first, that the contract, as worded, would have required them to pay a higher insurance premium, but the state claims they have fixed that.
The next is the 30-minute response time, however, it's unclear if that means 30 minutes to respond and say "I'll plow" or 30 minutes to be at the assembly point. It may be the latter, sine the article states that no one has been turned away for showing up late, because the foremen knew they were just stuck in traffic (incidentally, if you are carrying the phone and are stuck in traffic on the way to the assembly point, the GPS phone can prove it for you, which could be a good thing from the plow operator's point of view).
Third is the issue of only getting paid for two hours minimum if they are called up for work. The example the article cites concerns a person who gets called in for an extra hour of work. Under the former system, that operator would be compensated for four hours of work. Under the new rules, the compensation would be only two hours. I can see where this would be a sticking point, because if it takes you more than 30 minutes from the time you are called to get to the assembly point and get the plow, and more than 30 minutes to get home again afterwards, at only two hours of compensation it's hardly worth your time to show up, yet if you don't show up you likely won't get called anymore. At four hours, that is unlikely to happen, and they probably even make a tidy profit out of it.
Now, some people might object to that, but look at it this way: you are on hourly pay and your employer calls you up on Satuday morning, when you may already have something else you'd rather do (catching up on all the sleep you didn't get during the work week, maybe) and asks if you could come in for an hour to do something really important and says they'll pay you two hours' wages to do it. However, it takes you 45 minutes to drive to work (I live in LA, where most people go that long or longer, probably also true for most other big cities) and another 45 to get back. This doesn't even take into account the time to get ready, and the lost opportunity of whatever else you had planned to do.
How interested would you be? Probably not much. You might do it, either because you had to or because it would just look bad if you didn't, but you wouldn't like it much. However, if they were putting four hours' pay on the table and you were sure you could do the extra work in no more than two, it would be a good deal for you. In the worst case - it actually takes you four hours to get the work done - well, you've still made an extra four hours' pay, which is a much bigger incentive than only two hours' pay.
The plow operators don't know which battles to choose here. They should forget the GPS thing, which is not unreasonable and could improve everyone's safety, and focus on the other points. Those matter a lot more.
15,000 watts sounds like a lot, I know (OK, it is a lot), but have you ever been close to a large pipe organ? They are *loud*! I truly doubt that 15,000 watts divided over 74 channels is excessive for the task. To do the job, they needed to not only reproduce the sound of the organ as closely as possible, but also reproduce the volume.
Let me put it to you from someone on the ISP sysadmin side of this discussion.
The vast majority of mail (>80%) coming out of SMTP servers sitting in dial-up and consumer DSL/cable pools is spam, and most of the rest is virus/worm/trojan.
If all ISPs blocked outbound port 25 traffic from their consumer pools (as responsible ones already do) and they all also refused inbound port 25 traffic from others' pools (as ones who are serious about controlling spam already do), the spam problem would be significantly diminished.
I believe you when you say their outbound mail host sucks and that's why you don't use it. Please, make sure that your employer knows this too. If they're paying the bills, they should know they're being ripped off. They may choose to change providers or move up to business-class service, or they may complain to the provider. If they're providing a significant amount of business, the ISP will have to listen and act to avoid losing an important corporate customer.
Speaking as someone who fights spam for a living, effective blocking requires a combination of techniques. You need to filter on sender (both envelope and From:), sender domain, sender IP, and content filters.
Your statement that whoever decided to block ftp or http was not all there completely misses the point, I think. If a site is known to spamvertise, blocking *all* traffic to/from that site is actually a pretty good idea. Why? Consider why spammers send spam: to generate traffic to a web site, an email address, a phone number, some way to contact that. Since they know any email address they use to spam probably won't last as long as fart in a room full of air purifiers, the contact link is usually URL, whether by domain name or IP address. If they spam and you put in a filter for that spam, they may never get that spam through again, but they may still get some buyers from among your (stupider) customers. However, if your policy is to block all traffic to/from that IP address, they get zero traffic and zero business from your netblock and you really hit them in the wallet.
Verio's idea is good, but someone dropped the ball on implemenation in this case by not checking the facts before blocking.
What I'd like to know, though, is why the author of the article uses an ISP as bad as Noos. They sound so bad they make even wanadoo.fr (gee, speaking of spam!) sound good in comparison. Someone at Verio apparently made a mistake, but if so many people at Noos weren't so incompetent (did the PHB character come from their, I wonder?) the situation probably could have been resolved in a day or two.
Now watch, somebody will mod you troll for having the audacity to be correct :-p