Aberrant means abnormal, atipical, anomalous. Being emotional for a fictious character is neither. Loosing sigh of reality is aberrant. Being emotional for something that is not real does not imply loosing sight of reality. A lot of people feel emotional for something that is fictional (crying for a movie is a non game related example). This is both normal and tipical.
Actually, not being able to feel emotional for something for the sole reason that it is not real may indicate fear of loosing control of ones emotions.
The RP case is more complex. RP is very much like acting. Good actors learn their character inside out and try as hard as they can to actually think and feel like it during the performace. They struggle to feel the emotions the character is feeling. Sometimes it does happen that they behave like the character for a minute or two after the performance is over. And the same happens to hard core role players. This does not mean they loose sight of reality.
In fact the opposite is true. Since you do not loose contact with reality, you risk reality to "overflow" into the role playing. Succesfully role playing a character that is either similar to you or similar to how you would like to be is extremelly difficult because reality tend to flood in the playing. That's a typical error of many new to RP. That's why the tipical advice is to start off with a character that is deeply different from both you (as you perceive you are) or your fantasized self (as you would like to be). Pick something totally extraneous and that you do not totally like, for your first RP character.
ARGH! Yes! I got it totally mixed up. Here's take 2
Fission is not an invention. It is well known and has been for several years. It's the nuclear reaction that forms the basis of A bombs and nuclear power plants. Early studies are credited to Enrico Fermi
In case you actually ment "fusion", that also is not an invention. And it also has been known for some time. It is the nuclear reaction that makes stars visible and that is used in the H bombs.
We also know that cold fusion is possible (while cold fission is not). It has been done for 20+ years. Both fission and cold fusion are controllable and eventually usable for something different than bombs. Fission is used in nuclear power plants. Cold fusion is not because very fiew of the currently possible tecnologies for controlled cold fusion are energy positive (that is, most of them actually consume energy instead of producing it). One very interesting research, that started in Canada, had several years of development in Italy and is now continuing in Japan (I think Mitsubishi is doing it, but am not sure) is in the use of controlled cold fusion to destroy the radioactive nuclear wastes produced in fission reactors commonly in use to produce steam and, from that, electricity.
I hope this now makes sense. Sorry for the confusion.
Who do you thinks going to get the credit when they finally invent fission? The person who thought it up or those that actually made it?
Fission is not an invention. It is well known and has been for several years. It's the nuclear reaction that forms the basis of A bombs and nuclear power plants. Early studies are credited to Enrico Fermi
In case you actually ment "fission", that also is not an invention. And it also has been known for some time. It is the nuclear reaction that makes stars visible and that is used in the H bombs.
We also know that cold fission is possible (while cold fusion is not). It has been done for 20+ years. Both fusion and cold fission are controllable and eventually usable for something different than bombs. Fusion is used in nuclear power plants. Cold fission is not because very fiew of the currently possible tecnologies for controlled cold fission are energy positive (that is, most of them actually consume energy instead of producing it). One very interesting research, that started in Canada, had several years of development in Italy and is now continuing in Japan (I think Mitsubishi is doing it, but am not sure) is in the use of controlled cold fusion to destroy the radioactive nuclear wastes produced in fusion reactors.
So I don't think it was a hoax, I think the guy really did it, found out that it was the worst mistake he'd ever made and is now trying to do damage control. Personally I wouldn't use any program from him, at the least he lied about the code and has proven himself untrustworthy.
I actually do think it was a hoax. Reza wanted us to believe the program would delete the home dir, but it actually does not. Blake C. blogged about this.
The real reason not to use programs from Reza is that he's not a very good programmer, as disassembly of the program proves. Also I ROTFLed at the typo in the licence that makes it total garbage.
Meanwhile you can go and see the updated official reply: he now say the program is going to be free and open sourced. It has become free effective NOW, and he posts a valid key to enable the program. It will become open after polishing the source (and he'd better do polish it or face even more shame).
But I understand that most cell phones in the USA are locked to the carrier. The user does not own them. They rent it from the carrier as part of the contract. And they are locked into that carrier (that is they only work with that specific SIM). You understand wrong... we own the phone, we just own the contract as well. They are usually locked, but most carriers will unlock the phone once your contracts run out.
I stand corrected, partially. So you do own the phone. Still you confirm that the phone is locked.
I'm not sure exactly how it works. When you say you own the phone do you mean you can buy the phone but not the connection? Or buy the connection but not the phone? How does the locking work? Does it start when you activate the connection with a given phone? If you have multiple phones can you swap the SIM out of one (for example when it gets broken or out of battery) and into another one? What about the opposite: can you have multiple SIMs and a single phone (like one number for work/daytime and another for personal/off time)?
This is counter intuitive, given that the USA have all the hipe in freedom, competition and anti trust. Fact is that for the cell phone market they are among the less liberal countries. What hype are you talking about? What does that have to do with our cell phone system??? I am sorry if we don't have as good of a cell phone system as most of the rest of the world! You sound like most of the other kool-aid drinkers who blame the us for everything, even condemning our cell phones. Get a hobby, stop worrying about the US, and start worrying about how you are going to pay for all those socialized services you guys have when there are more older than younger over there.
What? I did not mean to offend anyone! Maybe my english is not that good. I've just looked up "hype" and it is defined as "extravagant or intensive pubblicity or promotion". I did not intend it to imply the "extravagant" part of the dictionary definition. Maybe I would have expressed myself better by using "stress" or "prominence" or "importance" or something like that. Just wanted to say that freedom and competition are fundamental elements of the american culture/style (and if they are not, please do correct me). And despite this, the phone market is not handled liberally. I'm not condemning anything, just noting a fact. And I do not blame the US for everything as you say (are you trolling at me or are you just a bit too sensitive to something?). As for the problem of aging population, I do worry. But that is somewhat OT in this thread. Isn't it?
(one euro is just a bit more than a dollar) Thanks for clearing that up. American are too stupid to know the difference in exchange.
Are you overreacting again? What makes you think all readers here are americans? Did it ever occur to you that a lot of people around the world do have a strong perception of the value of a dollar and can say how much it is in their own currency, but do not know how much an euro is?
Where I live we also get the SIM from the carrier and the phone from the shops. Plus most carriers also sell you the phone, if you want to buy it from them (the phone comes conveniently set up to use with that specific carrier).
But I understand that most cell phones in the USA are locked to the carrier. The user does not own them. They rent it from the carrier as part of the contract. And they are locked into that carrier (that is they only work with that specific SIM).
This is counter intuitive, given that the USA have all the hipe in freedom, competition and anti trust. Fact is that for the cell phone market they are among the less liberal countries. Not only the phone handset market is mostly tied to the phone carrier market instead of being totally separated as it is in all europe and in most other countries, but even the contracts they commonly have use strongly anti competitive lock-in practices. Like binding you for a preset contract duration. This is explained with "setup costs". But fact is that those costs are actually minimal for the carrier (the handset, is the real cost).
Here I own my phone (or phones). And can mix and match SIM cards and handsets. It is actually pretty common when one is out of battery to just pull the SIM out of the phone and borrow a handset from a friend for just a single call (as long as she removes her SIM and I place mine in her phone, the cost of the call is mine and I'm only "consuming" her battery).
Also I can get a new phone number and SIM for as low as a dozen euros (one euro is just a bit more than a dollar), and it includes anywere between 70% and 100% of the price in prepaid traffic (depends on the current promotions). There's no tie-in: i can give up the number any time.
Traffic is actually pre-paid. So the only tie-in is the amount of pre-paid traffic I put in the SIM at any given time. I personally tend to pre-pay in 50 euros chunks. But I know people that only reload 8 or 10 euros at a time. A couple of years ago I was abroad for 3 weeks and I knew I was going to place and receive several calls to/from within that country. I figured that it yould be stupid to pay full international roaming fees. So I just purchased a SIM card for 8 euros and then reloaded it once with 10 extra euros or traffic. I spent 18 euros total and placed more than 15 euros worth of traffic. If I did that much traffic with international roaming fees it would have costed me trice or more.
Back on topic, here when the phone get stolen there's no problem with the traffic itself. I can lock-out the SIM in no time (just call the company, tell them your SIM was stolen with your phone and they'd disable the SIM in no time. Later, if you decide to stay with the same company you can have a replacement SIM for a small fee. It'll have the same number and also the remaining pre-paid credit. So what you actually do loose is the phone itself.
Would the fingerprinting be usefull? I'm not sure. There surely is some way to "reset" the phone. And the players in the stolen phone market will know how to do it even before the phones actually hits the shops. Therefore I'm not sure how much it'll protect you. It may be usefull if you want to "keep secrets" form friends/partners/coworkers. You could safely go to the bathroom and leave the phone on the table without them seeing your call history, your SMSs and stuff. But that's just as far as it can probably go.
Since you named WMWare, I think there's another option:
Install linux as host, then WMWare for linux and install Windows inside that.
Then use your fantasy.
You will probably be able to browse from the Linux host once the connection is up.
And failing that, you can still just use windows and avoid the reinstalls by saving a snap image of the virtual machine right past installation.
Sure, you'll loose all bookmarks and stuff as with a real reinstall.
But the reinstall process itself will be a blink (just a file copy).
Of course those links may be wrong. I'm no big expert. Surely they seem convincing.
Cisco not supporting something (relevent to their product line) means it wont become wildly used
This is sadly true. And that's probably a sign CISCO should either make an extremely strong public commitment into early availability (even before the standard is actually a standard) of new protocols or be ready to face antitrust the way MS is doing. Or both. And wether the aforementioned commitment is done making the platforms totally open or investing in-house for development that may never turn out to be required is not my problem (but I have an opinion).
New things happen on the edges.
Amen!
Five years is a very short period of time
True. I did not make that number. Just refused to comment. But since we are at it: I think that 10 to 15 years for the new generation mail infrastructure is more likely. And that's exactly one of the problems as many will not be willing to spend 4 or 5 years just for preliminary talks. They want spam killed now. And will, sadly, be happy with half baked (non)solutions.
Sorry if this is really OT but...
I just was curious to see if Eric Raymond had some post/opinion on this subject. I went and checked it out and...
Anybody noticed he's *completely disappeared* after posting "The Luxury of Ignorance: Part Deux" on february 29?
No more posts on his site. Neither in the writing section, nor in the blog. Cannot google out any reference to a travel or something. Nothing.
And looking at his back records, he's not used to being so silent for such a long time. Expecially not if we consider what's happened in this months. Not a word on MS vs. european antitrust. Nothing on latest SCO news. Nothing on the euro-patent issues.
You are only scratching the surface of the problem.
What do we expect:
Defining the expectations is a big task by itself. Those doing some serius work on it identifyed many many different requirements. And of course many of them are contradictory.
The fundamental problem is not authentication. A spammer can easily set up a valid domain name and use it to send email "from". The cost of this is minimal
Traceability. Autentication. Anonymous posting. Privacy. Each of these is a research task in and by itself. The cost of the domain is unrelated to the mail. The cost of mailing may be. There are proposals that follow exatcly that path. Receiving tons of mail (and storing it and sorting it out) is a cost. Sending mail, even bulk mail, generally costs close to nothing. They aim at reversing this. Put the cost on the sender instead of putting it on the receiver. This is just ONE of many possibilities (and a smart and promising one, IMO).
we could force people to pretty much always use their company's mailserver
IMO that's nonsense. Not even forcing people to use their provider mail server, is acceptable. As long as SMTP is the protocol, you need not have a mail server at all to send. The server is needed to receive. And one should not be forced to send from the server it uses to receive.
SASL or other solutions
SASL and similar solutions IMO just break the paradigm of SMTP. Beside being broken in many other respects too.
a mix of technical and legal solutions to kill spam.In other words, kill the root cause of the problem.
Making spam illegal is OK with me. Legally defining spam is not. Therefore I tend to be on the "keep the fucking law out of the net" side. But I agree that killing the cause of the problem is good. Unfortunatelly that cause may actually be SMTP itself.
True. But without NAT all the hosts that today are on reserved adress space (you only get collision on those) would just be off the internet. So do it. Disconnect all the hosts that have not a public IP or get public IPs for all the hosts. And then go VPN. I'm pretty sure you'll miss NAT as soon as you realize you are not going to get sufficient IPs.
Yes, I know. There are providers with routing that is not sufficiently transparent to let you VPN even between public IPs. But it's mostly broken configuration in their net. And... many of those would not be on business at all if they really had to get a public IP for everithing.
As I wrote: NAT is doing well in having many clients connected despite 32bit space. So well that the real solution (IPv6) deployment is affected.
Even if we could completely revamp SMTP, it still sits on top of TCP/IP (etc.)
Not exact. If we are revamping there's no need to sit on TCP. It may be TCP or UDP or something completely new. Or it may be even just be a non problem.
- If the protocol assumes a connection and does not depend on it being anything in particular (technically: if it's an appllication level protocol), than it'll sit on any connection oriented protocol. That's exactly what the ISO layering is supposed to mean.
- It is possible to design a completelly new connection layer protocol. TCP is having it's own problems. True most of these have been addressed with a handfull of extensions. Reno is good and Vegas is even better. But big speed*RTT links are still problematic. And links are going to become much faster and with possibly bigger RTTs. We should not abandon TCP. But maybe we could start thinking alternatives.
and there will still be ways to get around any protections we could add to SMTP.
There'll always be ways to get around anything, probably. Down this line of thinking there's no solution at all. But we may come to a point where getting around is not worth doing.
I think it will take some major overhauling of the Internet and its core protocols to solve this problem.
Ageed. That is exactly the point in my post. But if we take that lane, we may get extra benefits. Mail-ng need not just be mail. We may think messaging here, instead of mail. Mailing lists can be designed in upfront. And news too. Maybe even chatting and instant messaging. And did you notice people is now using SMTP to do what FTP was designed for (remember FTP supports push and even sidewise transfers, even if today it's mostly used in pull mode)?
And that means lots of work, lots of new equipment and lots of new applications, all at enormous expense.
Maybe. Maybe not. We should keep those possible consequences in mind. Lots of work in SW development may be a non problem (not for the F/OSS community, at least. I do not care what that means for an individual company that's not going to share). Lots of equipment I doubt. If we can sit on IP and care not what version of it is below us, than the routing infrastructure need not change. The firewalling/natting/tunneling part may need some fixes. But these are mostly SW and generally very close to the endpoints, not really a big deal if we are doing a revamp. Expenses? Again: SW upgrade at the endpoints is not a big cost. Not if you are on the sharing side of the fences. It is not zero (not for large companies with thousands of servers and more clients, for example). But it needn't cost more than any other SW upgrade.
none of it possible until all the protocols are reworked, let's say, five years from now
This sentence is the one I agree upon. That's what I worried about in my post. This may take time. And the problem is now so much urgent that people may be unwilling to wait. The worse that can happen is a partial solution. It would slow down a revamp (NAT slowing IPv6 is an example. And we risk the mail 'solution' is much worse than NAT is).
NAT both complicates and simplify matters. It depends. From the point of view of keeping people connected in a 32bit adress space it's doing a hell of a good job. From the point of view of IPv6 deployment... surely it did slow that down. But that's exactly because it's doing well. Of course there also are many other aspects to consider. But this is nother story.
I've been thinking about the problem. And have looked around for the different proposals. There's been a mailing list for ng mail with many interesting ruminations. But then it was sinked with spam:-(
IMO there main alternative is:
1) a solution compatible with original RFC (that is it does not rule out any sender that the original spec would permit)
2) a completely new and different system. Redesigned from scratch.
Obviously a solution is not a solution if it may have a false positive (block nonspam).
False negatives are just a matter of efficiency.
Methink option 1 is not possible. And this has the added bonus of giving us the chance for a visionary change. But it's unclear if we can afford the time it takes. As the problem is really becoming urgent (much more urgent than the 32bit limitation in IP adress space. Expecially because NAT is addressing it very well.)
There are MANY proposals that use SMTP and add up on the requirements actually ruling out cases that were originally legal. These I really think should be avoided. But I'm affraid that's were many will likely go because they are fast to deploy.
I still find VERY confusing is the way fuel consumption is reported. Gone is the familiar Miles/Gallon where bigger is better only to be replaced by Liters/100Km where smaller is better!
I was born with metric and do not understand Miles/Gallon (well, I do. Just not used to them). But I can relate very well as I was used to km/l (that's kilometres per litre) and still have problems figuring out the l/100km everybody is using now.
However I think there's a stronger reason than cospiracy. After all you are measuring a consumption and what you consume are the litres not the kilometres. So that's what should be at the numerator. Think it this way: how would you expess a cost instead of a consumption? Dollars per 100 miles would make much more sense than miles per dollar. Switch that to metric and consumption and what you get? Litres per 100 kilometres. Makes sense. Even if it doesn't figure.
> it will be painful for us to adjust to a lower standard of living
Maybe the most painfull part will be realizing that non US standard of living may not be lower at all.
Too many many americans live under the false assumption that *their* standard of living is the best of the world. It may be better than that of Egypt, maybe. But this doesn't make it the best.
And a big part of the difficulty is in realizing that there exists not such a beast as a 'best' standard of living. This is similar to what I call the 'coping with difference' problem.
Different != Worse
It's hard to get this concept. But it's fundamental too. Expecially because nearly all wars are actually based on that very false assumption (well, they really are routed in economics. But the justification common people is given by propaganda *is* based on that).
Never noticed how americans are always "saving" somenone from something? Doesn't that sound very much like ancient religion wars where people were killed to "save" them from false faith? Never read anything about burning someone to have her soul "saved"?
What is someone somewere was to say that americans should be "saved"?
Of course the US army is currently too powerfull for such a scenario. But what is the point in having a powerfull army? Prevent someone from attacking you (including those pretending to save you when you need not be saved), prevent someone to actually save you (assuming you need be saved), or attacking someone else for whatever reason (including saving them from whatever you think they need be saved from)?
IMO, in fact, we ALL, wherever we live, whatever we believe, have only two REAL enemies. Our own propaganda is one. Our own faith (not talking of religion here) is the other. And interestingly enought those two often cross-support each other.
Maybe this is a bit OT, but...
Sorry, no.
I cannot deduce where you live from that.
Except maybe that you do not live in my country as here there's no 5.1Mbit link I know of.
We got many DSL offers with speeds from slow 128k to fast 2Mbit (asymmetric links, these are DL speeds. UL speeds are less. Tipical 512 DL is 128 UL, for example). They're available in all cities and towns, even small ones. But not yet countrywide as most villages and all rural areas are not yet covered (they get 56k modem links). Costs vary widely and every second week there's a new offer from someone. That's where the hype and competition is right now. The 56k modem connections are for free (you only pay the local call as if it was a regular voice call. The cost than depends on what phone company is providing you the voice line you attached the modem to).
Then we have 10Mbit (symmetric) links. These are only available in big cities were optical wiring is already in place. That's what I have, for example, at a cost corresponding to something less than 80 USD a month at current rates. It used to be somewhat more than 60 USD a fiew years ago before the dollar lost value. Of course from my point of view the price never rose as I do not pay it in dollars. Costs are VAT and taxes inclusive. A voice phone line is included but outgoing calls are not and their cost depend on what kind of number I call. But I happen to just never place any outgoing voice call:-).
Therefore 5.1Mbit is just not a speed we can get, around here.
SOHO (Solar & Heliospheric Observatory) is a joint mission of ESA and NASA. The on board telescope has a coronograph: that is it masks out the sun central body to permit the study of the outer part of the Sun's atmosphere (that is known as the corona). This makes it also great for the observation of comets when they do a "very close to the sun" passage.
The home page is here and the Bradfield comet images are (for the moment) here .
Slashdot Mirror
Aberrant means abnormal, atipical, anomalous. Being emotional for a fictious character is neither. Loosing sigh of reality is aberrant. Being emotional for something that is not real does not imply loosing sight of reality. A lot of people feel emotional for something that is fictional (crying for a movie is a non game related example). This is both normal and tipical.
Actually, not being able to feel emotional for something for the sole reason that it is not real may indicate fear of loosing control of ones emotions.
The RP case is more complex. RP is very much like acting. Good actors learn their character inside out and try as hard as they can to actually think and feel like it during the performace. They struggle to feel the emotions the character is feeling. Sometimes it does happen that they behave like the character for a minute or two after the performance is over. And the same happens to hard core role players. This does not mean they loose sight of reality.
In fact the opposite is true. Since you do not loose contact with reality, you risk reality to "overflow" into the role playing. Succesfully role playing a character that is either similar to you or similar to how you would like to be is extremelly difficult because reality tend to flood in the playing. That's a typical error of many new to RP. That's why the tipical advice is to start off with a character that is deeply different from both you (as you perceive you are) or your fantasized self (as you would like to be). Pick something totally extraneous and that you do not totally like, for your first RP character.
Its a bar graph but its been online for a long ass time. I used it back when I use to play wow.
Unfortunatelly it is not precise nor up to date. In other words it's very inaccurate.
But Blizzard is probably hiding that sort of data on purpose.
It is not aberrant. It is the actual meaning of the RP in MMORPG.
It would be aberrant if you were unable to log out.
Gweihir reaction is totally appropriate: initial emotional involvement and subsequent ratonale analysis.
ARGH! Yes! I got it totally mixed up.
Here's take 2
Fission is not an invention. It is well known and has been for several years. It's the nuclear reaction that forms the basis of A bombs and nuclear power plants. Early studies are credited to Enrico Fermi
In case you actually ment "fusion", that also is not an invention. And it also has been known for some time. It is the nuclear reaction that makes stars visible and that is used in the H bombs.
We also know that cold fusion is possible (while cold fission is not). It has been done for 20+ years. Both fission and cold fusion are controllable and eventually usable for something different than bombs. Fission is used in nuclear power plants. Cold fusion is not because very fiew of the currently possible tecnologies for controlled cold fusion are energy positive (that is, most of them actually consume energy instead of producing it). One very interesting research, that started in Canada, had several years of development in Italy and is now continuing in Japan (I think Mitsubishi is doing it, but am not sure) is in the use of controlled cold fusion to destroy the radioactive nuclear wastes produced in fission reactors commonly in use to produce steam and, from that, electricity.
I hope this now makes sense. Sorry for the confusion.
Fission is not an invention. It is well known and has been for several years. It's the nuclear reaction that forms the basis of A bombs and nuclear power plants. Early studies are credited to Enrico Fermi
In case you actually ment "fission", that also is not an invention. And it also has been known for some time. It is the nuclear reaction that makes stars visible and that is used in the H bombs.
We also know that cold fission is possible (while cold fusion is not). It has been done for 20+ years. Both fusion and cold fission are controllable and eventually usable for something different than bombs. Fusion is used in nuclear power plants. Cold fission is not because very fiew of the currently possible tecnologies for controlled cold fission are energy positive (that is, most of them actually consume energy instead of producing it). One very interesting research, that started in Canada, had several years of development in Italy and is now continuing in Japan (I think Mitsubishi is doing it, but am not sure) is in the use of controlled cold fusion to destroy the radioactive nuclear wastes produced in fusion reactors.
I actually do think it was a hoax. Reza wanted us to believe the program would delete the home dir, but it actually does not. Blake C. blogged about this.
The real reason not to use programs from Reza is that he's not a very good programmer, as disassembly of the program proves. Also I ROTFLed at the typo in the licence that makes it total garbage.
Meanwhile you can go and see the updated official reply: he now say the program is going to be free and open sourced. It has become free effective NOW, and he posts a valid key to enable the program. It will become open after polishing the source (and he'd better do polish it or face even more shame).
I stand corrected, partially. So you do own the phone. Still you confirm that the phone is locked.
I'm not sure exactly how it works. When you say you own the phone do you mean you can buy the phone but not the connection? Or buy the connection but not the phone? How does the locking work? Does it start when you activate the connection with a given phone? If you have multiple phones can you swap the SIM out of one (for example when it gets broken or out of battery) and into another one? What about the opposite: can you have multiple SIMs and a single phone (like one number for work/daytime and another for personal/off time)?
This is counter intuitive, given that the USA have all the hipe in freedom, competition and anti trust. Fact is that for the cell phone market they are among the less liberal countries. What hype are you talking about? What does that have to do with our cell phone system??? I am sorry if we don't have as good of a cell phone system as most of the rest of the world! You sound like most of the other kool-aid drinkers who blame the us for everything, even condemning our cell phones. Get a hobby, stop worrying about the US, and start worrying about how you are going to pay for all those socialized services you guys have when there are more older than younger over there.What? I did not mean to offend anyone! Maybe my english is not that good. I've just looked up "hype" and it is defined as "extravagant or intensive pubblicity or promotion". I did not intend it to imply the "extravagant" part of the dictionary definition. Maybe I would have expressed myself better by using "stress" or "prominence" or "importance" or something like that. Just wanted to say that freedom and competition are fundamental elements of the american culture/style (and if they are not, please do correct me). And despite this, the phone market is not handled liberally. I'm not condemning anything, just noting a fact. And I do not blame the US for everything as you say (are you trolling at me or are you just a bit too sensitive to something?). As for the problem of aging population, I do worry. But that is somewhat OT in this thread. Isn't it?
(one euro is just a bit more than a dollar) Thanks for clearing that up. American are too stupid to know the difference in exchange.Are you overreacting again? What makes you think all readers here are americans? Did it ever occur to you that a lot of people around the world do have a strong perception of the value of a dollar and can say how much it is in their own currency, but do not know how much an euro is?
Where I live we also get the SIM from the carrier and the phone from the shops. Plus most carriers also sell you the phone, if you want to buy it from them (the phone comes conveniently set up to use with that specific carrier).
But I understand that most cell phones in the USA are locked to the carrier. The user does not own them. They rent it from the carrier as part of the contract. And they are locked into that carrier (that is they only work with that specific SIM).
This is counter intuitive, given that the USA have all the hipe in freedom, competition and anti trust. Fact is that for the cell phone market they are among the less liberal countries. Not only the phone handset market is mostly tied to the phone carrier market instead of being totally separated as it is in all europe and in most other countries, but even the contracts they commonly have use strongly anti competitive lock-in practices. Like binding you for a preset contract duration. This is explained with "setup costs". But fact is that those costs are actually minimal for the carrier (the handset, is the real cost).
Here I own my phone (or phones). And can mix and match SIM cards and handsets. It is actually pretty common when one is out of battery to just pull the SIM out of the phone and borrow a handset from a friend for just a single call (as long as she removes her SIM and I place mine in her phone, the cost of the call is mine and I'm only "consuming" her battery).
Also I can get a new phone number and SIM for as low as a dozen euros (one euro is just a bit more than a dollar), and it includes anywere between 70% and 100% of the price in prepaid traffic (depends on the current promotions). There's no tie-in: i can give up the number any time.
Traffic is actually pre-paid. So the only tie-in is the amount of pre-paid traffic I put in the SIM at any given time. I personally tend to pre-pay in 50 euros chunks. But I know people that only reload 8 or 10 euros at a time. A couple of years ago I was abroad for 3 weeks and I knew I was going to place and receive several calls to/from within that country. I figured that it yould be stupid to pay full international roaming fees. So I just purchased a SIM card for 8 euros and then reloaded it once with 10 extra euros or traffic. I spent 18 euros total and placed more than 15 euros worth of traffic. If I did that much traffic with international roaming fees it would have costed me trice or more.
Back on topic, here when the phone get stolen there's no problem with the traffic itself. I can lock-out the SIM in no time (just call the company, tell them your SIM was stolen with your phone and they'd disable the SIM in no time. Later, if you decide to stay with the same company you can have a replacement SIM for a small fee. It'll have the same number and also the remaining pre-paid credit. So what you actually do loose is the phone itself.
Would the fingerprinting be usefull? I'm not sure. There surely is some way to "reset" the phone. And the players in the stolen phone market will know how to do it even before the phones actually hits the shops. Therefore I'm not sure how much it'll protect you. It may be usefull if you want to "keep secrets" form friends/partners/coworkers. You could safely go to the bathroom and leave the phone on the table without them seeing your call history, your SMSs and stuff. But that's just as far as it can probably go.
Then use your fantasy.
You will probably be able to browse from the Linux host once the connection is up.
And failing that, you can still just use windows and avoid the reinstalls by saving a snap image of the virtual machine right past installation.
Sure, you'll loose all bookmarks and stuff as with a real reinstall.
But the reinstall process itself will be a blink (just a file copy).
HELO/EHLO wants a hostname, and usually one that can be resolved to the address that the connection is from
What about this ?
From (in SMTP), From, To, CC, etc in RFC822 expect either UUCP routes
What about this ?
Of course those links may be wrong. I'm no big expert. Surely they seem convincing.
Cisco not supporting something (relevent to their product line) means it wont become wildly used
This is sadly true. And that's probably a sign CISCO should either make an extremely strong public commitment into early availability (even before the standard is actually a standard) of new protocols or be ready to face antitrust the way MS is doing. Or both. And wether the aforementioned commitment is done making the platforms totally open or investing in-house for development that may never turn out to be required is not my problem (but I have an opinion).
New things happen on the edges.
Amen!
Five years is a very short period of time
True. I did not make that number. Just refused to comment. But since we are at it: I think that 10 to 15 years for the new generation mail infrastructure is more likely. And that's exactly one of the problems as many will not be willing to spend 4 or 5 years just for preliminary talks. They want spam killed now. And will, sadly, be happy with half baked (non)solutions.
Sorry if this is really OT but ... ...
I just was curious to see if Eric Raymond had some post/opinion on this subject. I went and checked it out and
Anybody noticed he's *completely disappeared* after posting "The Luxury of Ignorance: Part Deux" on february 29?
No more posts on his site. Neither in the writing section, nor in the blog. Cannot google out any reference to a travel or something. Nothing.
And looking at his back records, he's not used to being so silent for such a long time. Expecially not if we consider what's happened in this months. Not a word on MS vs. european antitrust. Nothing on latest SCO news. Nothing on the euro-patent issues.
Where's ESR?
You are only scratching the surface of the problem.
What do we expect:
Defining the expectations is a big task by itself. Those doing some serius work on it identifyed many many different requirements. And of course many of them are contradictory.
The fundamental problem is not authentication. A spammer can easily set up a valid domain name and use it to send email "from". The cost of this is minimal
Traceability. Autentication. Anonymous posting. Privacy. Each of these is a research task in and by itself. The cost of the domain is unrelated to the mail. The cost of mailing may be. There are proposals that follow exatcly that path. Receiving tons of mail (and storing it and sorting it out) is a cost. Sending mail, even bulk mail, generally costs close to nothing. They aim at reversing this. Put the cost on the sender instead of putting it on the receiver. This is just ONE of many possibilities (and a smart and promising one, IMO).
we could force people to pretty much always use their company's mailserver
IMO that's nonsense. Not even forcing people to use their provider mail server, is acceptable. As long as SMTP is the protocol, you need not have a mail server at all to send. The server is needed to receive. And one should not be forced to send from the server it uses to receive.
SASL or other solutions
SASL and similar solutions IMO just break the paradigm of SMTP. Beside being broken in many other respects too.
a mix of technical and legal solutions to kill spam.In other words, kill the root cause of the problem.
Making spam illegal is OK with me. Legally defining spam is not. Therefore I tend to be on the "keep the fucking law out of the net" side. But I agree that killing the cause of the problem is good. Unfortunatelly that cause may actually be SMTP itself.
What if the best it finds is not a good one? This is the question.
True. But without NAT all the hosts that today are on reserved adress space (you only get collision on those) would just be off the internet. So do it. Disconnect all the hosts that have not a public IP or get public IPs for all the hosts. And then go VPN. I'm pretty sure you'll miss NAT as soon as you realize you are not going to get sufficient IPs.
... many of those would not be on business at all if they really had to get a public IP for everithing.
Yes, I know. There are providers with routing that is not sufficiently transparent to let you VPN even between public IPs. But it's mostly broken configuration in their net. And
As I wrote: NAT is doing well in having many clients connected despite 32bit space. So well that the real solution (IPv6) deployment is affected.
Even if we could completely revamp SMTP, it still sits on top of TCP/IP (etc.)
Not exact. If we are revamping there's no need to sit on TCP. It may be TCP or UDP or something completely new. Or it may be even just be a non problem.
- If the protocol assumes a connection and does not depend on it being anything in particular (technically: if it's an appllication level protocol), than it'll sit on any connection oriented protocol. That's exactly what the ISO layering is supposed to mean.
- It is possible to design a completelly new connection layer protocol. TCP is having it's own problems. True most of these have been addressed with a handfull of extensions. Reno is good and Vegas is even better. But big speed*RTT links are still problematic. And links are going to become much faster and with possibly bigger RTTs. We should not abandon TCP. But maybe we could start thinking alternatives.
and there will still be ways to get around any protections we could add to SMTP.
There'll always be ways to get around anything, probably. Down this line of thinking there's no solution at all. But we may come to a point where getting around is not worth doing.
I think it will take some major overhauling of the Internet and its core protocols to solve this problem.
Ageed. That is exactly the point in my post. But if we take that lane, we may get extra benefits. Mail-ng need not just be mail. We may think messaging here, instead of mail. Mailing lists can be designed in upfront. And news too. Maybe even chatting and instant messaging. And did you notice people is now using SMTP to do what FTP was designed for (remember FTP supports push and even sidewise transfers, even if today it's mostly used in pull mode)?
And that means lots of work, lots of new equipment and lots of new applications, all at enormous expense.
Maybe. Maybe not. We should keep those possible consequences in mind. Lots of work in SW development may be a non problem (not for the F/OSS community, at least. I do not care what that means for an individual company that's not going to share). Lots of equipment I doubt. If we can sit on IP and care not what version of it is below us, than the routing infrastructure need not change. The firewalling/natting/tunneling part may need some fixes. But these are mostly SW and generally very close to the endpoints, not really a big deal if we are doing a revamp. Expenses? Again: SW upgrade at the endpoints is not a big cost. Not if you are on the sharing side of the fences. It is not zero (not for large companies with thousands of servers and more clients, for example). But it needn't cost more than any other SW upgrade.
none of it possible until all the protocols are reworked, let's say, five years from now
This sentence is the one I agree upon. That's what I worried about in my post. This may take time. And the problem is now so much urgent that people may be unwilling to wait. The worse that can happen is a partial solution. It would slow down a revamp (NAT slowing IPv6 is an example. And we risk the mail 'solution' is much worse than NAT is).
NAT both complicates and simplify matters. It depends. From the point of view of keeping people connected in a 32bit adress space it's doing a hell of a good job. From the point of view of IPv6 deployment ... surely it did slow that down. But that's exactly because it's doing well. Of course there also are many other aspects to consider. But this is nother story.
I've been thinking about the problem. And have looked around for the different proposals. There's been a mailing list for ng mail with many interesting ruminations. But then it was sinked with spam :-(
IMO there main alternative is:
1) a solution compatible with original RFC (that is it does not rule out any sender that the original spec would permit)
2) a completely new and different system. Redesigned from scratch.
Obviously a solution is not a solution if it may have a false positive (block nonspam).
False negatives are just a matter of efficiency.
Methink option 1 is not possible. And this has the added bonus of giving us the chance for a visionary change. But it's unclear if we can afford the time it takes. As the problem is really becoming urgent (much more urgent than the 32bit limitation in IP adress space. Expecially because NAT is addressing it very well.)
There are MANY proposals that use SMTP and add up on the requirements actually ruling out cases that were originally legal. These I really think should be avoided. But I'm affraid that's were many will likely go because they are fast to deploy.
I still find VERY confusing is the way fuel consumption is reported. Gone is the familiar Miles/Gallon where bigger is better only to be replaced by Liters/100Km where smaller is better!
I was born with metric and do not understand Miles/Gallon (well, I do. Just not used to them). But I can relate very well as I was used to km/l (that's kilometres per litre) and still have problems figuring out the l/100km everybody is using now.
However I think there's a stronger reason than cospiracy. After all you are measuring a consumption and what you consume are the litres not the kilometres. So that's what should be at the numerator. Think it this way: how would you expess a cost instead of a consumption? Dollars per 100 miles would make much more sense than miles per dollar. Switch that to metric and consumption and what you get? Litres per 100 kilometres. Makes sense. Even if it doesn't figure.
> it will be painful for us to adjust to a lower standard of living
Maybe the most painfull part will be realizing that non US standard of living may not be lower at all.
Too many many americans live under the false assumption that *their* standard of living is the best of the world. It may be better than that of Egypt, maybe. But this doesn't make it the best.
And a big part of the difficulty is in realizing that there exists not such a beast as a 'best' standard of living. This is similar to what I call the 'coping with difference' problem.
Different != Worse
It's hard to get this concept. But it's fundamental too. Expecially because nearly all wars are actually based on that very false assumption (well, they really are routed in economics. But the justification common people is given by propaganda *is* based on that).
Never noticed how americans are always "saving" somenone from something? Doesn't that sound very much like ancient religion wars where people were killed to "save" them from false faith? Never read anything about burning someone to have her soul "saved"?
What is someone somewere was to say that americans should be "saved"?
Of course the US army is currently too powerfull for such a scenario. But what is the point in having a powerfull army? Prevent someone from attacking you (including those pretending to save you when you need not be saved), prevent someone to actually save you (assuming you need be saved), or attacking someone else for whatever reason (including saving them from whatever you think they need be saved from)?
IMO, in fact, we ALL, wherever we live, whatever we believe, have only two REAL enemies. Our own propaganda is one. Our own faith (not talking of religion here) is the other. And interestingly enought those two often cross-support each other.
Peace, please.
> But that leaves me wondering; what can we do from here to help them there?
There's that little cut&paste bug in Mozilla he mentioned
Maybe this is a bit OT, but ...
:-).
Sorry, no.
I cannot deduce where you live from that.
Except maybe that you do not live in my country as here there's no 5.1Mbit link I know of.
We got many DSL offers with speeds from slow 128k to fast 2Mbit (asymmetric links, these are DL speeds. UL speeds are less. Tipical 512 DL is 128 UL, for example). They're available in all cities and towns, even small ones. But not yet countrywide as most villages and all rural areas are not yet covered (they get 56k modem links). Costs vary widely and every second week there's a new offer from someone. That's where the hype and competition is right now. The 56k modem connections are for free (you only pay the local call as if it was a regular voice call. The cost than depends on what phone company is providing you the voice line you attached the modem to).
Then we have 10Mbit (symmetric) links. These are only available in big cities were optical wiring is already in place. That's what I have, for example, at a cost corresponding to something less than 80 USD a month at current rates. It used to be somewhat more than 60 USD a fiew years ago before the dollar lost value. Of course from my point of view the price never rose as I do not pay it in dollars. Costs are VAT and taxes inclusive. A voice phone line is included but outgoing calls are not and their cost depend on what kind of number I call. But I happen to just never place any outgoing voice call
Therefore 5.1Mbit is just not a speed we can get, around here.
So. Can you guess where I live?
AFAIK that's already the name of a registered trademark (owned by Dolby).
Neither. It is a satellite.
SOHO (Solar & Heliospheric Observatory) is a joint mission of ESA and NASA. The on board telescope has a coronograph: that is it masks out the sun central body to permit the study of the outer part of the Sun's atmosphere (that is known as the corona). This makes it also great for the observation of comets when they do a "very close to the sun" passage.
The home page is here and the Bradfield comet images are (for the moment) here .