I am visually imapired, and the biggest complaint I have about software, especially for Windows, is products that have their own hardcoded colors or widget sets. I set my Windows to be white on black, and you would be surprised at how many programs have hardcoded black text, and as a result show up as black on black. I have notified many vendors about problems like this. Even Mozilla has suffered from this. If there is any advice I can give you, it is that you *must* allow color customizatino of all things, either by using the OS/toolkit's theming, or by giving your own interface. This includes text areas, menus, radio buttons (I've seen black on black ones), check boxes,...
Are telemarketing calls from overseas covered?
Yes. Any telemarketers calling U.S. consumers are covered, regardless of where they are calling from. If a company within the U.S. solicits sales through an overseas professional telemarketer, that U.S. company is liable for any violations by the telemarketer. The FTC can initiate enforcement actions against such companies.
This is not discriminatory. And speaking of that, why does every
group, sect, division, race, gender, species, think that anything that
isn't designed with them in mind is discriminatory?
While I agree sites do not purposely use this authentication scheme in a way to thwart registration by blind and visually handicapped users, I disagree to your assertion that it is not discrimination. I would call it "passive discrimination," since there is no purposeful discriminatory behavior involved. As a legally blind individual, I must tell you that I find sites like these to be very annoying, especially when the letters are in a very poor contrast color scheme.
You ask why every group gets upset when they can't access something? Why did the United States have a civil rights movement? All people want equal rights to everything in this country, no matter what it is and who they are. Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and blind Americans all wish to have equal rights to the Internet. If you were in a boat that was affected in such a way, I guarentee that you would feel as these groups have felt.
...require that any customer that wants to
use my service and pay me for it must hop once on their left legg as a
way of verifying that they are in fact a biped and not a snake in a
human disguise (just go with it). . . this would clearly be
discriminatory against people missing their left legg. But that
doesn't mean that I am some how liable financially or legally!
Putting your misspelling of such simple words as "leg" and "somehow" aside, I believe you are incorrect here. Why do stores have handicapped parking? Why do stores have elevators? Why do stores have wheel-chair accessable bathrooms? They are required to. What you present above would be similar to you saying "All my customers have to be white." Not only is it discriminatory, I believe it also violates the ADA. I do not think you would win in court.
I don't believe Braille displays/terminals "show" pictures. Instead, they are more like screenreaders in the sense that they only "display" the pure text off the screen. Because the letters are in an image, the content is lost for both screenreaders and Braille terminals. Remember, the resolution on a Braille terminal is not very high. It is designed for text, and in Braille each character takes six "dots" (though I believe Braille terminals use eight).
I sent a server of mine from the midwest to Maryland via FedEx Ground for $20, including $2,000 insurance. It took about a week. I believe I got a tracking number. It worked out well. Just pack it well, and in original packaging if possible.
Impressive, seeing the movie came out in 1997 and Seti@Home was released May 17, 1999. I'm sure Jodie knew that Debian would have that package 2+ years later, though...
The best MIT hostname has to be 18.244.1.102, which is FUCK-THE-SKULL-OF-JESUS.MIT.EDU. Unfortunately, this host has also been the source of much IRC abuse on SlashNET in the past. It is my theory that MIT has a open naming policy, which seems like a rather bad idea to me.
Since all 3 of the other comments on this story are offtopic or trolls, I'll throw in something somewhat informational about the upcoming FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE.
First off, you can see the TODO list here. Stuff on this list is supposed to happen before release time.
Also, remember that even though this is -RELEASE, it is not -STABLE. FreeBSD 5.1 will not be part of any stable branch. It is still considered the developmental version. Despite that, it is pretty stable. I haven't seen my machine crash in quite a while.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation's All Good Things finale, Q plots out where Star Trek should have gone in future series after TNG:
"Exactly. For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options
you had never considered.
THAT is the exploration that awaits you: not
mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown
possibilities of existence."
If the people who made Star Trek could have pulled it off, what Q proposes could have been an amazingly cool show. For anybody who enjoyed Q, this would have brought a whole new spin to Star Trek and a new reason to tune in and watch. All that woudl be required is to think extremely far out of the box.
If Kazaa sued the RIAA because of this, I would assume that this would be interpreted as they (Kazaa) are responsible for enforcing the Acceptable Use Policy which also says unlawful transfers are not permitted. The RIAA could then sue them back and win this time.
Actually I've never used BitTorrent for warez or MP3s. I tried it once ages ago with some test file they had up back when it was first announced on Slashdot. It is a good idea, but I don't really see how it fits in with what I use the Internet for.
While I think Bit Torrent is a great idea, I don't think it will have a veryh good adoption cycle. As the article says, it is used for warez and such things, and has thusly been grouped in with the other 'P2P' clients. Many packet shapers, Universities, and so forth already filter Bit Torrent along with other P2P protocols like Kazaa, Gnutella, etc.
ipfw is basically a basic packet filter with a few things bodged on top of it (variable expansion, keeping state, etc) (
OK, that's a bit unfair, but it's what it *feels* like to use).
Okay, so you admit your own explanation is biased and wrong. That basically invalidates that "point" you made. Have you looked at the rework of ipfw which is in FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT and known as ipfw2?
pf is a built-from-the-ground-up total firewall solution
...which means it has some time before it is truely accepted by everyone. Both ipfilter and ipfw have been around for a long time and alraedy proven themselves to work well. In my opinion, pf still has a while to go before it proves itself to the extreme that the others have.
Essentially, if you want a router with a bit of filtering, ipfw will do you. If you want a serious firewall, go for pf. However, if you want a serious firewall, you should already be going with OpenBSD anyway
I don't choose my tool by the ease of configuration alone. I also choose my tool by its proven stability, flexibility, and how tightly integrated it is with the other things I am using. Since ipfw fits in all three of these categories, that is my tool. I also prefer FreeBSD over OpenBSD, though the reasons for that aren't really relevant to this conversation. I'll just summarize it by saying that I believe FreeBSD has much better leadership and downloadable ISOs in the same layout as the purchasable ISOs.
It seems like you totally missed my point I made in my comment above. My point was not "we should go with whichever is better." In fact, it was very different from that. My point was "we should merge the good from others into the existing good we have already." I don't want to switch tools, configuration file formats, and APIs. That was the point I was making. These things should not change. Switching or adding pf to my system will do all these things, along with increasing the size of my source tree just to give me a duplicate tool.
And in closing, a real network administrator wouldn't use OpenBSD for a firewall. They would use a hardware device designed from the ground up for the specific job of being a firewall. And no, this is not an argument that can be extended to pf vs. ipfw, since ipfw was also designed to be a firewalling tool, has been around longer, does a decent job already (especially with ipfw2), and so forth.
As I stated above, it is my opinion. I am not the dictator of development, and was merely pointing out what I thought would be more productive. My real concern is if pf ends up being lumped into the FreeBSD source tree, since it will add bloat by adding new interfaces for existing mechanisms.
I don't care what you do with your lamp, but is is my opinion that you could spend your time doing much more productive things. Besides, NetBSD likely already runs on your lamp.
It means that wheel reinvention should be kept to a minimum, especially inside the kernel. Both ipfilter and ipfw require some sort of kernel backend, and I am hedging my bets on them having different hooks. Adding pf seems like just another thing to learn. Why reinvent the tools we have just to add features to them if we can add the feature to the tool we already have? If I want a shovel with a steel handle, I don't make a brand new shovel. I take my already existing shovel and fit a new handle onto it. I'm afraid that FreeBSD's firewalling could go the way of Linux, where "firewall" means it could be ipfwadm, ipchains, or whatever they use today.
FreeBSD has already axed the NODEVFS option out of -CURRENT since it was no longer really necessary with the new devfs code. I don't see how having pf is any different, when the featureset of pf could just be merged back into ipfilter or ipfw instead.
PF is the Packet Filter used in the latest releases of OpenBSD. OpenBSD developed pf after a licensing dispute with Darren Reed basically resulted in him telling OpenBSD to go to hell.
FreeBSD, up to now, has had two different firewalling methods. First off, there is the natively developed ipfw tool, which recently got a renovation and is now ipfw2 in -CURRENT. The alternative to ipfw is Darren Reed's ipfilter, also known as just ipf. Both ipfw and ipfilter share similar capabilities, and it is generally user preference as to which one is used in FreeBSD.
Now, it seems somebody has made the effort to port yet another firewalling mechanism to FreeBSD, this time pf. The features it claims to have over ipfw are:
built-in variable expansion
built-in NAT and preventing NAT detection
table (a kind of very large blocks of address) support
packet normalization
state modulation
powerful state tracking
automatic rule optimization
queueing with ALTQ
load balancing with multiple routes
Presumably, some of these are rather desirable features. However, it is beyond me why FreeBSD needs yet another way to do firewalling when the interfaces and systems we have now already work well. It is my opinion that instead of porting something proprietary to OpenBSD like pf, time should have been spent either patching these features into ipfilter or ipfw to add functionality to an already accepted and loved firewalling mechanism. There is no reason FreeBSD needs to dig a deeper firewalling grave for itself like OpenBSD has done.
Or are we supposed to let the ignorant user "choose" to run every
executable e-mail attachment and do other dumb, dangerous things, just
for the fun of it?
Are the RIAA, MPAA, and Microsoft supposed to let everybody pirate the works they represent? TCPA/Palladium can be justified with the same attitude you expressed above. Your job, as a person with knowledge of computers, is to make the world safer for those who know nothing of computers. Either you educate them, or you help make the things they choose to use safer. You don't prohibit free choice, except for certain circumstances such as in a business atmosphere.
Second point, how many users do you think are going to be visiting
WindowsUpdate when they can't even tell the difference between Mozilla
and IE? The mother would be highly unlikely to do such a thing at all,
and most certainly not without assistance from the son.
This is not necessarily true. I've received e-mails before that prompt me to visit WindowsUpdate by clicking on a link. Maybe an ISP sends them out after a bug is found in Microsoft's TCP or NetBIOS implementations. You can never under-estimate the "word of mouth" factor. Friend A tells friend B to go to WindowsUpdate, who then tells friend C, who tehn tells your mom. WindowsUpdate isn't exactly hard to use. Click the boxes, accept the EULA, and wait for a reboot. However, I agree that your second point does have a limited set of validity.
Well sir, you're the one "bashing someone" by calling me "moron" and telling me to "get a clue". Apparently it isn't possible to type http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com in the Mozilla URL bar? Apparently it isn't possible to follow a link on a website or in an e-mail that takes you to WindowsUpdate? Please think before you lash out at me.
Slashdot Mirror
I am visually imapired, and the biggest complaint I have about software, especially for Windows, is products that have their own hardcoded colors or widget sets. ...
I set my Windows to be white on black, and you would be surprised at how many programs have hardcoded black text, and as a result show up as black on black. I have notified many vendors about problems like this. Even Mozilla has suffered from this.
If there is any advice I can give you, it is that you *must* allow color customizatino of all things, either by using the OS/toolkit's theming, or by giving your own interface.
This includes text areas, menus, radio buttons (I've seen black on black ones), check boxes,
La respuesta es simple. Usted necesita encontrar un babelfish y ponerlo en su oído.
I don't believe Braille displays/terminals "show" pictures. Instead, they are more like screenreaders in the sense that they only "display" the pure text off the screen. Because the letters are in an image, the content is lost for both screenreaders and Braille terminals. Remember, the resolution on a Braille terminal is not very high. It is designed for text, and in Braille each character takes six "dots" (though I believe Braille terminals use eight).
...and you work there. Speaking of which, why am I still paying to ship things FedEx? Why are you not getting me discounts?
I sent a server of mine from the midwest to Maryland via FedEx Ground for $20, including $2,000 insurance. It took about a week. I believe I got a tracking number. It worked out well. Just pack it well, and in original packaging if possible.
Looks like ASP.Net
8PM US Eastern Daylight Time is -0400. That puts the forum on Friday at 00:00 GMT (midnight). Adjust accordingly.
The forum is at 8PM Eastern Daylight Time (-0400). See SlashNET's website for details.
SlashNET's forum system automagically generates a logfile which we will make available.
Impressive, seeing the movie came out in 1997 and Seti@Home was released May 17, 1999. I'm sure Jodie knew that Debian would have that package 2+ years later, though...
The best MIT hostname has to be 18.244.1.102, which is FUCK-THE-SKULL-OF-JESUS.MIT.EDU. Unfortunately, this host has also been the source of much IRC abuse on SlashNET in the past. It is my theory that MIT has a open naming policy, which seems like a rather bad idea to me.
First off, you can see the TODO list here. Stuff on this list is supposed to happen before release time.
Also, remember that even though this is -RELEASE, it is not -STABLE. FreeBSD 5.1 will not be part of any stable branch. It is still considered the developmental version. Despite that, it is pretty stable. I haven't seen my machine crash in quite a while.
s/sinking ship/core breech/
If Kazaa sued the RIAA because of this, I would assume that this would be interpreted as they (Kazaa) are responsible for enforcing the Acceptable Use Policy which also says unlawful transfers are not permitted. The RIAA could then sue them back and win this time.
Actually I've never used BitTorrent for warez or MP3s. I tried it once ages ago with some test file they had up back when it was first announced on Slashdot. It is a good idea, but I don't really see how it fits in with what I use the Internet for.
While I think Bit Torrent is a great idea, I don't think it will have a veryh good adoption cycle. As the article says, it is used for warez and such things, and has thusly been grouped in with the other 'P2P' clients. Many packet shapers, Universities, and so forth already filter Bit Torrent along with other P2P protocols like Kazaa, Gnutella, etc.
It seems like you totally missed my point I made in my comment above. My point was not "we should go with whichever is better." In fact, it was very different from that. My point was "we should merge the good from others into the existing good we have already." I don't want to switch tools, configuration file formats, and APIs. That was the point I was making. These things should not change. Switching or adding pf to my system will do all these things, along with increasing the size of my source tree just to give me a duplicate tool.
And in closing, a real network administrator wouldn't use OpenBSD for a firewall. They would use a hardware device designed from the ground up for the specific job of being a firewall. And no, this is not an argument that can be extended to pf vs. ipfw, since ipfw was also designed to be a firewalling tool, has been around longer, does a decent job already (especially with ipfw2), and so forth.
I don't care what you do with your lamp, but is is my opinion that you could spend your time doing much more productive things. Besides, NetBSD likely already runs on your lamp.
FreeBSD has already axed the NODEVFS option out of -CURRENT since it was no longer really necessary with the new devfs code. I don't see how having pf is any different, when the featureset of pf could just be merged back into ipfilter or ipfw instead.
FreeBSD, up to now, has had two different firewalling methods. First off, there is the natively developed ipfw tool, which recently got a renovation and is now ipfw2 in -CURRENT. The alternative to ipfw is Darren Reed's ipfilter, also known as just ipf. Both ipfw and ipfilter share similar capabilities, and it is generally user preference as to which one is used in FreeBSD.
Now, it seems somebody has made the effort to port yet another firewalling mechanism to FreeBSD, this time pf. The features it claims to have over ipfw are:
Presumably, some of these are rather desirable features. However, it is beyond me why FreeBSD needs yet another way to do firewalling when the interfaces and systems we have now already work well. It is my opinion that instead of porting something proprietary to OpenBSD like pf, time should have been spent either patching these features into ipfilter or ipfw to add functionality to an already accepted and loved firewalling mechanism. There is no reason FreeBSD needs to dig a deeper firewalling grave for itself like OpenBSD has done.
Well sir, you're the one "bashing someone" by calling me "moron" and telling me to "get a clue". Apparently it isn't possible to type http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com in the Mozilla URL bar? Apparently it isn't possible to follow a link on a website or in an e-mail that takes you to WindowsUpdate? Please think before you lash out at me.