I have to agree with this. Rogers Video where I live has this sort of rating system on the back of all of their movies, and it's great. There are separate levels for violence/scariness, sex/nudity, drug/alcohol use, and coarse language.
It makes it easy to judge whether it's appropriate - and allows other people to have standards different than mine.
Why should you stop providing your "own" solution ? You didn't COPY it ! You didnt even know it existed !
And that hits the nail right on the head w.r.t. the problems with patents in general (although software patents, specifically, have more problems). Even if you don't copy, you can be denied the rights to your own invention.
Patents as they currently stand do not address the possibility of simultaneous invention - something which frequently happens in real life.
So although I am certainly a subscriber to the logic posed by the parent poster, as are most people on/. (or, at least those who post comments), I have yet to be able to come up with a substantial explanation for the vast divide between logic and the industry.
It's easy.
Change = unknown = bad.
Status quo = known = good.
Yeah, that's what you get when you try to fill out the form and have it posted before someone else does:)
I didn't know if users of email would put up with it or not, so I didn't check that one.
I definitely should have added my own option for consuming tons of extra bandwidth per spam, though - this thing would make the existing bandwidth use of spam look like a raindrop compared to the ocean...
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam (X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
They don't need to comply with the GPL. They based their code off of Wine when it was under the MIT license - with promises that they would give their code back to Wine.
Apparently, it didn't happen in a way satisfactory to the main Wine devs, and they changed the license to LGPL in response.
My primary system (LFS) has been 64-bit for quite some time. Pretty much no shocks, either.
The only things not working well for me in 64-bit are:
Flash - Yes, I know I can use a 32-bit compiled browser and install 32-bit Flash, but I don't want to:)
Wine - I've compiled it 32-bit, and everything works except sound:(
OpenOffice - but I'm running the 32-bit binary with no problems.
I even have 64-bit hardware accelerated video drivers (NVidia).
Now, 64-bit Windows is another story. I think it will be quite some time before everyone's apps are 64-bit - since no one can recompile the code and fix the various pointer problems.
I'd be interested to know whether you still dislike the significant whitespace, or have somehow come to like it. And if so, why?
The honest truth is that I don't even notice it. I use VIM, which handles Python whitespace admirably - although any other reasonably Python-aware editor would do (not to start a VIM vs. Emacs flamewar or anything). Actual Python code is written either spaces-only (usually) or tabs-only (more rare), so the dreaded mixed-spaces-and-tabs situation rarely occurs in practice. I've never had it happen to me, personally.
Thoughts of Python...
on
Dive Into Python
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I wasn't a Python Zealot(tm) until I tried it... in fact, just the opposite.
When I heard about the whitespace-is-significant, I had nightmarish flashbacks of MVS JCL (thoughts of which still cause me to twitch uncontrollably). As such, I refused to even look at Python seriously for quite some time.
However, that being said, once I actually did get over my (admitted) prejudice and gave it a serious test - it earned an official "WOW", something which few languages have ever done for me. Never mind that I was as productive while just learning Python as I am as an expert in any of the other languages I use regularly.
Now, I'm an official convert. Python gives you all the tools you need, but never forces you to use the wrong one for the job.
All I need to do now is find a shop that actually uses Python...
The third school would say to design for the competent user - assume the person knows more or less how to get around, and make doing day to day tasks quick and effective, if you know how to use the interface.
Newbies can activate an "easy to find" tutorial more that walks them through where to find things, and advanced users can always find things like gconf-editor and bash.
Hey, and the Holocaust was just a bunch of soldiers and police "doing their job" too!
I'm just pointing out the potential dangers of the "I was just following orders" chain of reasoning. If everyone just "goes along with it" and obeys orders/laws that they know are wrong, especially the police, truly disastrous consequences can result.
Not to defend the so-called "accuracy" of this report, but keep in mind that a vulnerability that allows remote (but unprivileged) access, and one that allows local privilege escalation can combine to create full-scale remote rooting - so it's not just limited to someone "climbing in through a window downstairs".
We have something similar to that here through our phone company (of all things), but it really doesn't work in practice.
Why?
Because the channels I want to watch are spread over a dozen or so packages, I'd end up spending *more* per month, and get just as much extra crap I *don't* want to watch - e.g. can't get the Sci Fi channel without getting Golf channel or BET in the same package.
This seems to be mostly because the packages aren't divided by similar interests (e.g. someone who likes Discovery channel might also like History channel), but by the content providers who decide which channels "should" be bundled together.
A la carte is the only way to go for me, but it seems like there are forces at work preventing it...
Actually, both are necessary. People can/will/may move to a new office suite when *both* of the following are true:
1. They can do everything they "need" to do, plus a few new things that "are better" (both of these are totally subjective, and vary from person to person).
2. They can bring all of their old documents with them, so there is no barrier to entry.
Conversion of old documents is *as* necessary as new features. People don't like losing all of their stuff. It's a huge disincentive to switching.
Now, totally *new* users, who don't have any old stuff to switch are another story...
Actually, not. In fact, exactly the opposite is happening now.
Joe Billionaire's status is not measured by philanthropy, but instead by acquisition and showcasing of said acquisitions. Joe has *no* motivation whatsoever to feed substantial wealth back into the bottom of the income chain, and instead keeps it in an offshore account.
So:
* Joe wants to increase his own bottom line, so he slashes jobs to increase corporate profits.
* The guy at the bottom of the chain (with no job) is broke, and so doesn't spend money.
* Corporate profits are down (because no one's buying anything), so Joe keeps slashing, preventing any money from getting back into the bottom.
* Repeat.
In essence, what's happening now is a cycle of starvation, that will probably end in one of two ways:
1. Everyone being poor except for a handful of the very rich - i.e. right back to the old "peasants and monarchy" system, and we all know how well *that* worked.
2. Armed rebellion by the poor - the old "orf with 'is 'ead" method of economic reform.
Actually, a gift culture mentality would work well for this instead; when your status in society is measured not by what you *acquire*, but by what you *give away*.
Sure, Joe Billionaire will still rake in his billions, but he'll feed it back into the bottom of the "income chain". Then what does the guy on the bottom do with his newfound wealth? *HE BUYS THINGS*, making all the Joe Billionaires more money, which feeds back into the bottom. Rinse, wash, repeat.
All we'd have to do is figure out how to switch the mentality of a culture.
Exactly. ESR is right on the money on this one. If I (as Joe Sixpack) have to worry about editing a text file with vi (or EMACS, just to prevent a flame-war), then you've already lost me.
The user interface for this should pretty much be:
1. Joe clicks the Print button. 2. CUPS says "You don't seem to have a printer set up, but I found this one on your network. Is this the one you want?". 3. Joe says "Yes, dammit!" 4. The document gets printed.
Notice the absence of "File | Add New Printer..." and a lengthy wizard.
This doesn't mean that CUPS *can't* have the funky text file with all the detailed configuration options for the ubergeek. In fact, for more complex networked situations, you *need* this level of configuration.
But for your average desktop use, definitely not. Joe should never need to know that there even *is* a configuration file, unless he chooses to make himself aware of it.
UI and engine tend to be completely separate in the Linux world, which in my view is *good design*. The problem is that, in the Open Source Community, we have lots of "engineers" and not too many "UI designers". Net effect: rock-solid, stable, highly functional programs with the *worst* UIs *ever*.
What Linux needs is a dedicated team of UI people (*not* graphic designers, but actual usability people) that you (as an engineer) could submit your rock-solid, fantastic engine to, and *they* would make the UI for it, so you don't have to.
Yes, but this is a simplistic solution that still won't work. Once programs obfuscate themselves as they run, someone's going to make an automated tool to de-obfuscate it - e.g. a custom VM that justs dump out the bytecode on the path of execution as it executes it to a file.
Automation just breeds counter-automation. It's an arms race, and I don't really think JITO (Just In Time Obfuscation) is the answer.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, I believe the only tools he claimed to have used were telnet and the ability to type the word "help".
Apparently, the server provides a great deal of "helpful" protocol documentation if asked nicely.
You mean that my Master's Degree in Scoobyology is worthless?!?!?!
DAMMIT!
If you want a good land/people ratio, try here:
Area:
9,984,670 sq km (land and water) OR
9,093,507 sq km (land only)
Population:
32,805,041 (no, that's not a typo)
I have to agree with this. Rogers Video where I live has this sort of rating system on the back of all of their movies, and it's great. There are separate levels for violence/scariness, sex/nudity, drug/alcohol use, and coarse language.
It makes it easy to judge whether it's appropriate - and allows other people to have standards different than mine.
And that hits the nail right on the head w.r.t. the problems with patents in general (although software patents, specifically, have more problems). Even if you don't copy, you can be denied the rights to your own invention.
Patents as they currently stand do not address the possibility of simultaneous invention - something which frequently happens in real life.
It's easy.
Change = unknown = bad.
Status quo = known = good.
Yeah, that's what you get when you try to fill out the form and have it posted before someone else does :)
I didn't know if users of email would put up with it or not, so I didn't check that one.
I definitely should have added my own option for consuming tons of extra bandwidth per spam, though - this thing would make the existing bandwidth use of spam look like a raindrop compared to the ocean...
Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
They don't need to comply with the GPL. They based their code off of Wine when it was under the MIT license - with promises that they would give their code back to Wine.
Apparently, it didn't happen in a way satisfactory to the main Wine devs, and they changed the license to LGPL in response.
My primary system (LFS) has been 64-bit for quite some time. Pretty much no shocks, either.
The only things not working well for me in 64-bit are:
I even have 64-bit hardware accelerated video drivers (NVidia).
Now, 64-bit Windows is another story. I think it will be quite some time before everyone's apps are 64-bit - since no one can recompile the code and fix the various pointer problems.
Agreed. If you don't know what a "double-double" is, you have some serious brushing up to do before you move here...
The honest truth is that I don't even notice it. I use VIM, which handles Python whitespace admirably - although any other reasonably Python-aware editor would do (not to start a VIM vs. Emacs flamewar or anything). Actual Python code is written either spaces-only (usually) or tabs-only (more rare), so the dreaded mixed-spaces-and-tabs situation rarely occurs in practice. I've never had it happen to me, personally.
I wasn't a Python Zealot(tm) until I tried it... in fact, just the opposite.
When I heard about the whitespace-is-significant, I had nightmarish flashbacks of MVS JCL (thoughts of which still cause me to twitch uncontrollably). As such, I refused to even look at Python seriously for quite some time.
However, that being said, once I actually did get over my (admitted) prejudice and gave it a serious test - it earned an official "WOW", something which few languages have ever done for me. Never mind that I was as productive while just learning Python as I am as an expert in any of the other languages I use regularly.
Now, I'm an official convert. Python gives you all the tools you need, but never forces you to use the wrong one for the job.
All I need to do now is find a shop that actually uses Python...
The third school would say to design for the competent user - assume the person knows more or less how to get around, and make doing day to day tasks quick and effective, if you know how to use the interface.
Newbies can activate an "easy to find" tutorial more that walks them through where to find things, and advanced users can always find things like gconf-editor and bash.
Hey, and the Holocaust was just a bunch of soldiers and police "doing their job" too!
I'm just pointing out the potential dangers of the "I was just following orders" chain of reasoning. If everyone just "goes along with it" and obeys orders/laws that they know are wrong, especially the police, truly disastrous consequences can result.
Not to defend the so-called "accuracy" of this report, but keep in mind that a vulnerability that allows remote (but unprivileged) access, and one that allows local privilege escalation can combine to create full-scale remote rooting - so it's not just limited to someone "climbing in through a window downstairs".
Definitely the truth. The problem is that (as I've found out with Wine), trying to get Windows games working is hitting a moving target.
Would it be easier to get a specific console (PS2, for example) emulator working perfectly under Linux, since the HW/etc. is stable and well known?
We have something similar to that here through our phone company (of all things), but it really doesn't work in practice.
Why?
Because the channels I want to watch are spread over a dozen or so packages, I'd end up spending *more* per month, and get just as much extra crap I *don't* want to watch - e.g. can't get the Sci Fi channel without getting Golf channel or BET in the same package.
This seems to be mostly because the packages aren't divided by similar interests (e.g. someone who likes Discovery channel might also like History channel), but by the content providers who decide which channels "should" be bundled together.
A la carte is the only way to go for me, but it seems like there are forces at work preventing it...
Actually, both are necessary. People can/will/may move to a new office suite when *both* of the following are true:
1. They can do everything they "need" to do, plus a few new things that "are better" (both of these are totally subjective, and vary from person to person).
2. They can bring all of their old documents with them, so there is no barrier to entry.
Conversion of old documents is *as* necessary as new features. People don't like losing all of their stuff. It's a huge disincentive to switching.
Now, totally *new* users, who don't have any old stuff to switch are another story...
Actually, not. In fact, exactly the opposite is happening now.
Joe Billionaire's status is not measured by philanthropy, but instead by acquisition and showcasing of said acquisitions. Joe has *no* motivation whatsoever to feed substantial wealth back into the bottom of the income chain, and instead keeps it in an offshore account.
So:
* Joe wants to increase his own bottom line, so he slashes jobs to increase corporate profits.
* The guy at the bottom of the chain (with no job) is broke, and so doesn't spend money.
* Corporate profits are down (because no one's buying anything), so Joe keeps slashing, preventing any money from getting back into the bottom.
* Repeat.
In essence, what's happening now is a cycle of starvation, that will probably end in one of two ways:
1. Everyone being poor except for a handful of the very rich - i.e. right back to the old "peasants and monarchy" system, and we all know how well *that* worked.
2. Armed rebellion by the poor - the old "orf with 'is 'ead" method of economic reform.
Actually, a gift culture mentality would work well for this instead; when your status in society is measured not by what you *acquire*, but by what you *give away*.
;)
Sure, Joe Billionaire will still rake in his billions, but he'll feed it back into the bottom of the "income chain". Then what does the guy on the bottom do with his newfound wealth? *HE BUYS THINGS*, making all the Joe Billionaires more money, which feeds back into the bottom. Rinse, wash, repeat.
All we'd have to do is figure out how to switch the mentality of a culture.
Sounds easy, eh?
Exactly. ESR is right on the money on this one. If I (as Joe Sixpack) have to worry about editing a text file with vi (or EMACS, just to prevent a flame-war), then you've already lost me.
The user interface for this should pretty much be:
1. Joe clicks the Print button.
2. CUPS says "You don't seem to have a printer set up, but I found this one on your network. Is this the one you want?".
3. Joe says "Yes, dammit!"
4. The document gets printed.
Notice the absence of "File | Add New Printer..." and a lengthy wizard.
This doesn't mean that CUPS *can't* have the funky text file with all the detailed configuration options for the ubergeek. In fact, for more complex networked situations, you *need* this level of configuration.
But for your average desktop use, definitely not. Joe should never need to know that there even *is* a configuration file, unless he chooses to make himself aware of it.
UI and engine tend to be completely separate in the Linux world, which in my view is *good design*. The problem is that, in the Open Source Community, we have lots of "engineers" and not too many "UI designers". Net effect: rock-solid, stable, highly functional programs with the *worst* UIs *ever*.
What Linux needs is a dedicated team of UI people (*not* graphic designers, but actual usability people) that you (as an engineer) could submit your rock-solid, fantastic engine to, and *they* would make the UI for it, so you don't have to.
I can just see the spammers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSEOs writing automated "moderator-bots" to vote their pages "interesting"...
Yes, but this is a simplistic solution that still won't work. Once programs obfuscate themselves as they run, someone's going to make an automated tool to de-obfuscate it - e.g. a custom VM that justs dump out the bytecode on the path of execution as it executes it to a file.
Automation just breeds counter-automation. It's an arms race, and I don't really think JITO (Just In Time Obfuscation) is the answer.