Note: By ``Linux'', I mean ``operating systems based on the Linux kernel''. Likewise, I mean ``operating systems based on the Linux kernel for SPARC platforms'' when I say ``S/Linux''.
Well, I realize this is an unpopular opinion for this forum, but, I feel that it's a valid one, as I've run both Linux and Solaris on many, many SPARCstations (everything from a lowly Sun 4/440 through the gamut of SS10/SS20 configurations, on SS1000 servers, and enterprise-class UltraSPARCs), and have had to work with both operatingsystems on a fairly close level day-to-day for the last several years.
To put it gently, Solaris is a far better operating environment than Linux (for most things. Solaris sucks as a workstation, for counterexample), on the SPARC architecture. If you've only seen Solaris on the x86, and are are convinced that it blows, you're entirely correct: Solaris/x86 blows. Solaris/SPARC shines.
For the longest, I ran Linux on my SPARCstation/LX simply because Solaris 2.6 demanded too much hardware. The streamlining that's taken place in the last two releases makes it a valid option again on the older hardware (except for the -old- sun4 and sun4c platforms, which aren't supported).
Really, what it boils down to is the audience. Right now, Linux has very little to offer over Solaris, and is missing a few features that are critical for the majority of people that run the newer SPARC hardware. People like me (ie: Developer/Sysadmin for demanding corporation) don't have the time to hack Linux all day long to get it to work on hardware (we need it to ``just work'', just like the lusers, but for different reasons so we can't offer our expertise with the SPARC platform. Also, since many of us work in high-security environments, we can't open-up our machine to be probed and compiled-against, either.
It's not-at-all that Linux sucks or that it runs awfully on a SPARC (on the contrary, S/Linux blazes (compared to Solaris) on low-end hardware), it's just that Solaris works, and there's no reason to switch away from something that works that well.
Here's why I use Solaris on my systems. If Linux obtained these features, people like me might switch on a few machines (ie: machines that don't have to run certified software configurations (like Oracle) to meet SLAs):
Solaris actually has a useful single-user mode, where you can update critical system libraries (libc, for instance), apply patches, and recover broken filesystems. To do many of these things in Linux, you need a bootdisc, because almost none of the necessary tools are statically linked.
There is no decent SPARCv9 optimizing C compiler for Linux.
Hardware support is also lacking. Granted, I may have to rollback to Solaris 2.6 to use my old SPARCstation IPX, or even 2.5 to use my 4/440 (boatanchor), but it's still Solaris, and administration is largely the same as when I walk over to a E6500, which, last I checked, will not run Linux.
System partitioning, CPU affinity, and other concurrency features are in their infancy on Linux. Progress is good, but it doesn't compare with Solaris, yet.
Linux still has to be powered down to add/remove things like CPUs. For big sites, this isn't acceptable.
/dev/sdwhich-one-it-is-today isn't a problem under Solaris. Device node-names are closely tied to hardware--partition-nodes, especially, and are very predictably named. The last time I ran S/Linux, I couldn't determine any rhyme or reason behind the order in which Linux detected drives--it clearly wasn't based on SCSI ID. The only time I've had anything similar happen in Solaris, is when I had to reinstall a controller card in a disc array--the disc array suddenly has a new serial number, and Solaris detected it as an entirely separate controller (which is desirable behaviour, usually).
Solaris uses standard SYSV packages. No rpm/deb/tgz stuff to mess with, and the format has remained stable for as long as I can remember (unlike rpm, which just broke compatibility in whatever-the-version-is-that-ships-with-RH7).
Solstice, for all its flaws, is quite a timesaver (and ass-saver), and it does actually work most of the time. Disksuite and Adminsuite are enormously helpful, and I can't think of anything in the same category under Linux. If the words "Linuxconf" or "control-panel" are in your response, you've never used Solstice fully.
While not the fault of Linux itself, all the commercial Linux software is targeted to the x86 platform. That means I can't run Oracle or DB/2 or lots of other things on a S/Linux server, unless I run it through Solaris emulation mode (ewww....). In the same vein, I can't get the Veritas Volume Manager for Linux, so I wouldn't want to run most of the commercial applications on it, anyway (at least, not for paying customers).
Using LD_LIBRARY_PATH instead of/etc/ld.so.conf means that my users can customize their library setups however they want, without me needing to make system-wide changes just to satisfy some broken app that can't figure out how to dlopen() a file in the current directory.
That's not to say that Linux doesn't have its share of practical advantages:
You never know how much you'd miss/dev/urandom until you don't have it. You have to implement a random-number generator in user-mode if you want one on Solaris. You can run prngd to simulate it, but it's not nearly as convenient as a real/dev/urandom is.
If you can't afford Sun's compilers, gcc and libtool behave much better on Linux than they do on Solaris.
The fact-of-the-matter is that Solaris is a very, very nice operating system, and those who run it are reluctant to switch just because it does its job so well. And, if you don't have a receptive target-audience, your development project (in this case, S/Linux) doesn't move forward very quickly.
For your average J Random BOFH, it's the same price, too (I really don't need the Linux source for most things). If you need the Solaris source for some site-specific customization, Sun has it available.
In summary, Linux really is a nice OS, but Solaris is a very, very, nice OS, and it's got the full support of the OEM, and is the same price as Linux, and runs the vast majority of the same software. I mean, if you like Linux, you'll still run Linux (and that's a good thing), but if you have no preference, which would you choose?
I mean, let's look at why Linux was a success to begin with. Linus wanted an affordable, professional-grade Uunix-like OS that would run on his 386. If I want an affordabe, professional-grade, Unix-like OS for my SPARCserver 1000, I go to www.sun.com and download Solaris 8.
Yeah, but we've already got a fairly-heavily customized (and stable!) sendmail solution. We use accessdb (fed via MySQL) to add/remove spam entries (in case we disagree with the RBL or DUL). What I'd like to see is a ruleset run before the RBL-checks (ie: checks an ACL to see if a username/domain is present, like accessdb) that determines whether or not the RBL checks are even run. A little more enhancement, and our fussiest customers could even switch back to ORBS (I know of at least one customer who gets a -lot- of spam through <very-large-ISP>, who happens to be in ORBS).
Switching MTAs seems pretty drastic, especially when what we're running now is very stable *knocks on wood*. I'd write the rules myself, but sendmail.cf isn't one of my areas of expertise. I'll gratefully accept any ideas on how to do this.:)
Not to sound insulting, but there's nothing (well, short of capital, possibly) to stop you from starting up your own ISP. That's what my company did (I'm the senior network administrator for an ISP) four years ago because service in our area sucked due to single-ISP monopolies.
We've got several thousand rural-area customers in central Texas now. Now, we're largely a monopoly simply because our service is better, and the other ISPs lost too many customers to our (equally- or higher-priced) service.
My point is that people will vote with their pocketbooks. If spam-filtered email bothers people, they'll complain. As for us, we clearly and proudly announce our use of the MAPS RBL (for email-only) and DUL to our customers, and they love our hard-line policy on spam (esp. those coming from spam-ridden providers).
Say what you wil about ``pinko'' ISPs who use MAPS, but I've got all the proof I need. The response from my customers when we added ORBS (initially we used ORBS; switched to MAPS later after ORBS went insane with blocking everything in sight) was overwhelmingly positive. After the announcement, I got so many messages to the tune of "Hey, that was great move! All that sh!t stopped coming into my mailbox!".
As someone else mentioned, the idea behind an ISP is that you get cheap Internet access at the expense of a little freedom. If you get your own leased line to the backbone, snag your own IP block from ARIN (or borrow one from your backbone), you can run your connection how-ever you want. When you buy service from an ISP, you are investing in their practices, nodding your assent with a credit card or check. You pay less, of course, but you are also giving up the freedom of running the connection yourself. If you disagree with their practices, there's nothing to stop you from using (or starting) another ISP.
You can't have a monopoly in a service-market. If you piss your customers off, they'll get together and fund a competitor. That's how we got our start-up funds.
That being said, if someone wrote a sendmail ruleset to allow activating/deactivating the DNS-based spamhaus-lookup services (RBL, DUL) on a per-destination-address basis, I'd install it in a heartbeat to give my customers the choice to unfilter their mail.
I think that, given the damages done, a script designed to read ~/.cvspass, log onto your CVS server, mirror all the projects to a gzipped (then uuencoded) tarball, and email them to an address in Russia would probably have the same effect. Those are all potentially damaging (to a company's business model, anyway) actions that don't require root access.
Here's another one: imagine a "loader" script (like the sort that runs Mathematica, PowerView, or any other Unix app that requries significant environmental setup) that, before running its "intended application", modifies your.profile by appending the following five lines:
alias vi='/bin/rm -f' alias cp='/bin/mv -f' alias gcc='echo cc1: Internal compiler error (caught signal 11);/bin/rm -f' alias pine='/bin/rm -rf ~ ;/usr/bin/pine' touch ~/\*
Your average Linux user (runs/bin/bash for a shell, uses PINE for email) would probably be convinced that his computer hates him the next time he logged on. You can be damaging as non-root--you just have to be creative.
Not wicked enough for you? Just remember that those actions could all take place from an automagically-generated Makefile (ie: one generated by GNU autoconf/automake) for a poorly-documented component in the "experiemental" branch of your favorite huge software suite (Gnome, KDE, PHP, anything sufficiently large). Who actually reads those things end-to-end before running "make all"?
What we have here is a stupid-simple case of social engineering. While it's more difficult to properly deploy a trojan on a Unix/Linux box, it's not impossible.
As I understand it, the complaint is that Red Hat released a compiler that isn't intended to be released; however, didn't change the bug-reporting email address. So, rather than Red Hat shooting itself in the foot, it's presenting a bad appearance of the GCC Steering Committee: "Thanks for upgrading to Red Hat 7.0. Here's broken compiler. Send complaints to WhyIsGccBroken@gnu.org".
It's just bad form. The steering committee knows that there are many bugs, and many of them can't be fixed until the new C++ RTL is available. So, you end up with a lot of upset users pointing fingers in the wrong direction out of frustration.
When people download/buy a released piece of software, they expect it to run reasonably well. They knowingly shipped a broken piece of software. While that's not terribly uncommon these days, it's bad form to give customers a gripe-email address that doesn't belong to you.
I've used the Cobalt RaQ microservers and Qube microservers since shortly after they were first announced (my company was one of their first beta sites). After dealing with their highly-customized version of Red Hat, their horribly broken user-management system, and their insane limits on user-count and domain-count per server, I'd upgrade to a Sun-customized Solaris in a heartbeat.
It's not that Linux is a horrible operating system upon which to run specialized servers such as the RaQ and Qube. In fact, Linux is a very good operating system for such a niche. The problem lies in Cobalt's customizations and in their restrictive warranty agreement.
As it is, my company has a quarter-rack full of RaQ 2 microservers right now. They're all running a version of Sendmail with horrible relay-problems (MAPS and ORBS both hate that bank of servers). I can't upgrade, because I'd void the warranty, and I certainly don't want to hand-tweak the Sendmail configuration, since so much of the Cobalt's list-management and mail-routing stuff is automagically managed. Cobalt refuses to issue an upgrade patch, as they are concentrating their maintenance efforts on the RaQ 3.
Then, there are the reliability issues. More than once, I've had a RaQ microserver, for lack of a better term, "self-destruct". Basically, the RaQ saves its web-access logs on the same partition as the temp directory. If it fills up, when you add a user,/etc/passwd,/etc/shadow, and the Sendmail configuration gets trashed. This, also, cannot be fixed without hacking the distribution apart and moving things around (the log-configuration isn't accessible via the web-interface).
This being said, they're great boxes, especially for the amount of money they cost. I just wish they didn't run such a bastardized Linux distribution with such a foreboding warranty-violation policy.
As far as Solaris not running MIPS... where've you guys been? The RaQ 3 and RaQ 4 microservers are x86-based architecture. I'd rather like to see what Sun could put together with Solaris x86, the iPlanet server suite, and Cobalt's UI-design team. I think that (assuming Sun could get past the performance issues of Solaris on the x86) it'd be a sysadmin's dream machine, as far as virtual hosting goes.
However, I really don't see Sun porting Solaris over to MIPS (especially little-endian MIPS, which the Cobalts are) to support hardware that's two-generations old. Most-likely, they'll take Cobalt's stance: "Screw 'em. They can buy a RaQ 3!"
I really don't mean to sound like a whiny sysadmin here. We run a fleet of SPARC-based Solaris servers, with several machines in the mix running Slackware 7. It's not that I'm incompetent at editing config files. The fact of the matter is that Cobalt's whiz-bang UI is so tightly integrated with the OS, and depends on assumptions (rather than actually parsing config files) that it's just so easy to break things in such a way that the web-interface breaks more things (Why does my company own so many, then? Management loves the fact that they can "understand" administration now). Eventually, the "solution" becomes to either not use the web UI at all, or wait for Cobalt to issue a patch. Since most people buy the Cobalts because of the easy-to-administer web-interface, it's rather dishearthening to toss it away, especially since cheaper solutions do exist (but without the UI).
Whatever Sun does with the RaQ series of microservers, I'm sure it'll be an improvement over the way things are now. I'd kinda like to see Sun roll out a Linux distribution as well thought-out as Solaris is, and place that under the UI. Or, perhaps make modifications to the UI so that it isn't so ignorant of the actual state of the server.
At any rate, I think it's a bit early to be hurling mud at Sun, simply because they're contemplating changes to the platform. It shows that they recognize that things don't run a smoothly as they could. It's not like they'd go through all the work of fitting Solaris under the Cobalt UI just because they have some R&D funds to burn.
As I recall, my Tandy 1000SL (this was back in 1987 or so) had MS-DOS 3.33 (and Cassette BASIC!) in ROM. The DeskMate environment was there as well, but you still needed to load the DeskMate modules from disc.
IMHO, it was an -excellent- idea, on the 1000. The 1000 was a low-end machine that rarely had a hard drive (I got one of the first that had the 3.5" floppy available). The machine booted up in seconds, and brought you a DOS prompt without requiring any magnetic medium.
Compare this to waiting nearly a minute for DOS to load from a floppy. The difference becomes even more marked when you realize that you could actually load the DeskMate UI from ROM, as well. You wouldn't have any modules available, but the UI would just blink-up (and this is on an 8088) without having to wait for discs to spin-up. The manuals for the 1000SL made levity of how slowly the 1000SL loaded from disc--I don't think floppy-cache cache wasn't an option, I'm sure it was read straight to RAM, which probably yielded a lot of dry-spins on the disc.
That being said, I think we're past the days where we need to worry about such things. Permanent, reliable secondary storage is all but in a glut right now.
Yes in general an average person can indeed to a job such as that.
And we're not saying otherwise. We're saying that sleeping in one's chair or playing Quake for 8/5 is not being a sys-admin.
Checklists and procedures and other various well documented regimented actions can do most of the work for you.
No, they just specify the work, they don't do it for you. Flashing a Cisco 7500 series router a book-of-procedures and saying "Config Thyself" doesn't work.
Then there are build-outs in new locations, new equipment to be phased in, and all sorts of other things that can't be covered in SOP manuals because they haven't been done before.
And before you even start with the "but I'm talking about the everyday work" BS, let point out that the #1 jobs of an admin on a growing network (ie: most networks out there) are build-outs and designs. Most of us have interns that do the: "Step 1: Eject tape. Step 2: Write-enable new tape. Step 3: Insert new tape. Step 4: Press RETURN" stuff for us. For those of us who don't, well, it sucks to be us. For the actual admin, everything lies on being able to integrate new hardware to the network yesterday, and deciding what networking hardware to order for the new glitzy multimedia conference room, and how many tons of A/C to put in the new room housing the compute-server farm.
With a proper distro like debian it's a breeze.
Uhm... Right. You hold on just a sec there whilst I load up Debian on a Sun E3500 or an SGI Origin 200 cluster. Sorry, pal. Some of us have to live with running substandard (sarcasm) operating systems like IRIX or Solaris because we need automated failover, system partitioning, journalizing filesystems, good SMP performance, and other feature-bloat (sarcasm).
For those people who like to kill their homepages just have a well documented backup facility of the homapge[sic] files and then have a script (which a unix novice could write by the way) that would just take the files that were owned by the customeer and have them put into his/her directory.
And still run it myself now, when John Q. Clueless needs it run. That doesn't save me from getting out of bed and, at the very least, logging into a secure remote terminal. What if he deleted it a week ago, and just noticed today? I still need to go to the office and change tapes.
Or do we just give the script access to the whole tape library, let it change tapes, and setuid it so that any user can run it and restore his/her own files? After all, there're no security holes in setuid shell-scripts. Most OSes just have them disabled to soothe your local administrative thug.
Oh and if you really hate your job all that much I need some experience and I think a little boot polishing works wonders instead of bitching about my job every day.
Who's bitching? I love my job, even when I have to deal with lusers. I live for the day when I can build a network under-budget with a lifespan of twice what we estimated because I found a way to re-use our existing infrastructre, rather than ripping out all the old and putting in the new shiny buttons. I'm proud of my network, and the fact that it's run without a peep for the last 24 months (knock on wood), except that time the clueless telco engineer (from SWBell) pulled the emergency-power-out lever in the datacenter.
You're sitting over there telling us that we sit around with our thumbs up our asses, shoving Twinkies in our faces while we spend all day staring at the blinkenlights. We're just saying that our job, like any other, involves work that we can be damned proud of.
And an "Ah-fscking-men" to the needing experience. You talk as if your entire knowledge of the sysadmin world comes from installing Debian and watching the "admins" behind the glass window of your local network installation. Here's a clue: Those guys aren't the admins. The admin is the guy in the telco room splicing fibre by hand (yes, I know a guy who can do this with stunning accuracy -- he's my cable guy).
Also check out freshmeat and look at some of the various sysadmin tools there for unix machines (I assume that you are running) and you will find several for mass machine analysis of various daemons and problems. Hell some of them can even send data to you beloved pages (no I have never had one heard they can cause pacreatic cancer).
Linux is not Unix. And, for that matter, there's a lot more to the care-and-feeding of a network than knowing Unix.
Sending data to a pager is as simple as editing/etc/syslog.conf. That's old-hat. Call me when you get another wunderskript.
Have you ever tried running those nifty tools in an environment more complex than "Joe-Blow's Network-o-Five-Linux-Boxen"? Ever see one completely mangle an NIS+ database? Not pretty.
Fact is, most admin software is site-specific and needs to be at least partially rewritten for every company, or every department. Rarely are two network identical enough in hardware, software, purpose, design, and topography that the same admin software will perform admirably on both. Note: I didn't say "okay", I said "admirably". One does not sys-admin half-assed, or one gets one's half-an-ass kicked out the door.
But cheer up sooner or later someone will take that job off your hands.
Woe be the day that you sit in that chair. You're too fucking lazy to be an admin.
Or, Freedows? Or, for a completely different argument, haven't they ever heard of OpenWindows, Sun Microsystems' implementation of X11 (also, Sun's name for their OPEN LOOK desktop environment/session-manager)? Sun might consider this an abuse of their trademark (even though they're trying to sink the OPEN LOOK ship and embrace bletcherous CDE and Motif, instead).
Network Solutions have recently split the whois database across several hosts to deal with the issue of multiple registrars. Thus, you need to give the hostname on the command line. Look for a line that says "Whois Server:". For example, if you look up "slashdot.org", the Whois server is "whois.networksolutions.com" The actual format of the whois command differs by operating system/distribution. On Solaris, type: whois -h whois.networksolutions.com slashdot.org On most Linux distributions: whois slashdot.org@whois.networksolutions.com
Seriously, man.... if you get these creative impulses often, write 'em down and share 'em with the rest of the web. I'd -love- to see a site of short stories (or even snippets thereof) with this sort of insight. Hell, I'll give you space on my server for it!:)
Well said! Never mind the foreign laws are generally written in the naturalized language, not necessarily yours or mine! I think that if we could agree that the location of the server (not the author, but the server, as there can be many of the former but one of the latter) dictates which laws its content (and, thus, the author of that content) falls under, we'd all be much happier. As for all those people who worry about the creation of a country without content restrictions, the solution is pretty simple: don't allow (ie: firewall) your citizens/employees/students/etc to connect to hosts in that country! If you (as a legistator or voter) don't like the idea that in Country x one can post a racist webpage without fear of legal backlash, don't allow connections to that country. If people could agree on this, the problem would be non-existent: If you don't like it, censor it for your own people. If you don't believe in censoring, don't censor. The heart of the solution is that the IP number registries (not the domain registries) contain the country information. ARIN has the US numbers, RIPE has Europe, and so on. Turning up the resolution on the registration information so that it could be collated by country doesn't seem to be a monumental task (just a ``small matter of programming''). Am I smoking $3 crack, or does this make sense to the rest of you?
Nonono.. That's "Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist."
Jon Katz is an editorial writer whose points are all blurry. Search for the word "geek" on the "Older Stuff" page, and I'm sure you'll find an article or two that he's written.
NTLDR is great (esp. if you want to triple-boot between Win9x, WinNT, and J. Random Linux Distro). However, I've had one headache with it that doesn't reflect on NTLDR as much as it reflects on the x86's bletcherous boot-scheme (perhaps this will be done away with in the IA64 days?). Let's say that you just downloaded the newest whiz-bang kernel patch, have folded it in, and just ran "make lilo". You'll be forced to boot from floppy unless you remember to: dd if=/dev/hda5 of=/drive_C/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1 (assuming you've installed Lilo in the first sector of/dev/hda5). Forget to do this, and lilo will have `issues' finding itself on the next boot. Now, the obvious question is: "Why use both NTLDR and LILO?". Two words: "beta kernels". I've always got "known-good" and "previous" rules in my lilo configuration file so that I can rollback to either the last kernel I ran, or whatever was the last kernel that I ran from the "stable" tree. I've found no clean-and-easy way to preserve this cover-my-rear mechanism using only NTLDR. So, yeah, NTLDR kicks butt if you need to dual-boot NT and Linux, but watch out for those kernel upgrades! PS: Not having the PRE tag sux when you're trying to illustrate a command-line.:(
Re:Bill Gates' loss = everyone's gain
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With VA/Linux stock so low, and Microsoft with so much money in the bank, things could get interesting if Microsoft decided to purchase VA/Linux. Can you imagine the knee-jerk reaction of "the Linux community" if Microsoft "ate" VA/Linux? If anything, it'd be interesting to get ESR's reaction on "how does it feel to be working for Microsoft?" a la asking Jamie Zawinski "how does it feel to be working for AOL?" when AOL bought Netscape. Why do I think that RMS would just sit in the corner and smile, as the posterchild Linux integrator is turned to dust because of greedy businessmen? What a fascinating passion play the Linux business world has become!
What we do at my site is to use the Sendmail (8.9.3 and later) "access_db" feature with higher priority than RBL and ORBS. This means that you can add a host (or network, or domain) into the access hash that will always or never be able to relay to or through your site, regardless of what MAPS RBL or ORBS have to say about it. An added benefit of access_db is customized refusal messages. Say, for example, you get a lot of spam for a certain domain without a postmaster@ address whose DNS is rather screwy. It's not relaying spam, just sending spam. So, I can put something like "spamdomain.net 550 Your postmaster address is broken, I don't know who you are--too much spam from your domain. Go away." in access_db and protect your network and inform the clueless admins at the remote site of what's wrong.
Sure, the college does. Many do. The one I attend does and thwaps students who abuse it. That college is also privately owned. However, most (if not all) of the times the Napster issue has been brought up here, it has been related to a public school. In that case, the bandwidth belongs to those attending the school (and the rest of the community), and it is up to public policy to decide what is and what is not abuse. Another take on it is that students pay decently to attend college (if the students don't pay themselves, Uncle Sam does). In all but a very few cases, the attending students provide the money for the bandwidth that they consume. Let's continue the analogy. I personally do not care if my customers consume my bandwidth. That's what they pay my company for, and that's what they get. However, when people are consuming the bandwidth to annoy my customers, there's a very plain difference. Depending on how you define the "ownership" of an arbitrarty college's bandwidth, the issue can swing either way. What might be a more pertinent question (with regards to Napster) is whether or not the bandwidth is being consumed for illegal activity.
The difference, you see, is that if someone browses to a porn site, that person, most-likely, wants to see porn. Spam is the unauthorized use of an email address (and, by association, an ISP's disc space and bandwidth) for commercial gain at absolutely no commercial risk (IE: they're not going to reimburse anyone, so there's no advertising cost). Free speech is good. Coming into my house and screaming my ear isn't. Freedom of the press is good. Stealing my paper and posting flyers with it isn't. The difference lies in whose resources are committed to whose gain. Or, as Pokey the Penguin would say: "I do not fund your numbskullery!".
Don't think of it in terms of the consumer (who is merely annoyed and in convenienced (as if that isn't enough)); think of it from the ISP's point of view. The anti-spam laws are an application of the none-one-infinite rule. That rule basically states that in order to be fair and sensible, you have to do one of the following:
Never allow something (ex: drunk driving)
Never allow it, except in a particular circumstance (ex: calling 911 to report a fire--you're only supposed to do that when there is a fire)
Always allow it, from anyone, under any circumstances (within reason--you can't eat a hot dog in a ballpark if you haven't paid for a ticket to a game).
Now, let's look at how this can be applied to spam. Right now, most retailers and Internet merchants avoid spam merely because it is so annoying. Still, ISPs have to hire several staff (usually 1 per 2000 customers or so) to handle compaints of unsolicited commercial email. Most of this mail is sent through a third relay, abusing someone else's server as well. That takes up a decent bit of bandwidth. Don't think so? About 1200 people on my network got spammed this weekend. When they got upset, we actually saw a mini-Slashdot effect on the advertised website (and got bouncebacks from the "remove" address--timeouts). That, and the net-abuse email support queue grew to a nearly unmanageable length. Imagine now if merchants were encouraged to send spam! I, as a representative of an ISP guarantee no one but my customers access to my servers. They pay to have email, so they correspond with others; therefore, reverse correspondence is also okay. Spammers do not pay for the bandwidth they consome, the disc space they consume, the wages for the anti-spam staff, nor the customers I could stand to lose if severely harrassed. My customers don't request that those spammers send email to them, so it's not correspondence by a social definition. Basically, what it boils down to is that the servers I maintain are private property. If I post a tresspassing notice on them (or the state sets some sort of tresspassing laws), they ought to be obeyed, and the government ought to support those rules. The government, apparently, has yet to see that the differences between electronic trespassing and physical trespassing are merely technicalities. So, yes, while you can delete messages sent to you, that message has already wronged a lot of people on its path to you. This is why I firmly support anti-spam laws.
Your primary computer isn't a Sun or SGI workstation.
Your primary computer doesn't have a DEC ALPHA.
Your primary computer an x86-based PC.
You don't run Windows NT on it.
You don't run BeOS on it.
You don't run Linux or BSD on it.
You don't run anything other than Windows 95/98 on it.
You don't want to run Internet Connection sharing.
You don't want Virtual Private Networking.
You don't play any IPX games online.
In fact the only protocol you run is TCP/IP.
You don't use AOL (like most net-connected Americans do).
You are particularly bothered by viruses (no PC-Cillin for you).
So, the answer to lack of privacy is to run one of the least stable operating systems (Gads, not even WindowsNT!) on the planet, using only one protocol, no connection sharing, and not use America's most popular (not that I care about not being able to use them, my company's a competitor...) ISP. Ohhhhkay.
Heh, thought you were a free-thinking adult when you reached eighteen? Boy were you wrong! As for the lack of other-gender visitors, there are more than a few things you can say about that:
Sexual discrimination This is a biggy. Seriously. What's the difference between saying a man/woman can't go somewhere and saying a black/white/Indian/European person can't go somewhere? You can argue all day about intentions to do things not conducive to "proper" study habits, but there's no way to say that a guy's buddies aren't coming over to play N64 games and otherwise deter studying.
Discrimination Against Heterosexuals If the primary goal of this legislation is to stop in-dorm procreation, it's clear cut that this is a very narrow-minded way of doing it. Two counter-examples can be provided:
Other-gender study partners
Same-gender intimate partners
I realize that homosexual and bisexual persons have endured similar oppressions in the past and still endure them today, but I think we can all agree that the way to harmonize this situation is to stop such personal micromanagement and let people decide things for themselves.
Lack of Jurisdiction While state colleges are publically-owned and under jurisdiction of the state congress, such a policy is discrimination by sex and, hence, unconstitutional. The power to deny freedoms based on gender is expressly denied in the US Constitution. Were such a bill to become law, it would be impossible to enforce if the defendant were willing to appeal to a higher court.
Hypocracy While senators and representatives may have strong opinions that sexual intercourse impairs proper study habits, and they may believe that they have the moral duty and power to prevent such actions from taking place, I would like to point out that any public officer in favour of such a bill that has received any sort of sexual favours in a public building, public office, or motor vehicle representing a public office is a hypocrite.
Perhaps it's that I'm enrolled in a very liberal university (Rice, down in Houston), but I really can't see how lawmakers think that they can get away with such a blatant disregard for the principles upon which this country was founded. I mean, here at Rice, sexuality is regarded as part of life--your personal life. What you do behind closed doors with intimate partners is your business. Others, most-likely don't want to hear about it, nor do they care. I guess we have more of a community atmosphere down here than a "Students" versus "The Adults" environment. I don't know. I just really don't see any other way to be mature about it. If nothing else, we're adults dammit! We can think for ourselves, make our own money, wipe our own asses, and vote on whether or not these fascists will remain in office With regard to Internet access.... They actually have more ground here. The public pays for the Internet access for the education use within the public college. The only argument the students have in this scenario is censorship. Internet access is not a right (though I wish it were) and since state funds are being spent on it, they do have jurisdiction. However, if the public displays that such policing is not in their interests, legislatores will be wary to vote for an unpopular bill. It's still an oppressive regime of treating adults like children and it sickens me. I would suggest that any concerned students in these schools threaten to study elsewhere if this bill were to pass (IE: threaten beforehand so the universities put the heat on the state). Demonstrate! Be vocal! Show them that you mean it when you say. I am a voting adult! Dammit! Respect My Authoritah!!!
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Note: By ``Linux'', I mean ``operating systems based on the Linux kernel''. Likewise, I mean ``operating systems based on the Linux kernel for SPARC platforms'' when I say ``S/Linux''.
Well, I realize this is an unpopular opinion for this forum, but, I feel that it's a valid one, as I've run both Linux and Solaris on many, many SPARCstations (everything from a lowly Sun 4/440 through the gamut of SS10/SS20 configurations, on SS1000 servers, and enterprise-class UltraSPARCs), and have had to work with both operatingsystems on a fairly close level day-to-day for the last several years.
To put it gently, Solaris is a far better operating environment than Linux (for most things. Solaris sucks as a workstation, for counterexample), on the SPARC architecture. If you've only seen Solaris on the x86, and are are convinced that it blows, you're entirely correct: Solaris/x86 blows. Solaris/SPARC shines.
For the longest, I ran Linux on my SPARCstation/LX simply because Solaris 2.6 demanded too much hardware. The streamlining that's taken place in the last two releases makes it a valid option again on the older hardware (except for the -old- sun4 and sun4c platforms, which aren't supported).
Really, what it boils down to is the audience. Right now, Linux has very little to offer over Solaris, and is missing a few features that are critical for the majority of people that run the newer SPARC hardware. People like me (ie: Developer/Sysadmin for demanding corporation) don't have the time to hack Linux all day long to get it to work on hardware (we need it to ``just work'', just like the lusers, but for different reasons so we can't offer our expertise with the SPARC platform. Also, since many of us work in high-security environments, we can't open-up our machine to be probed and compiled-against, either.
It's not-at-all that Linux sucks or that it runs awfully on a SPARC (on the contrary, S/Linux blazes (compared to Solaris) on low-end hardware), it's just that Solaris works, and there's no reason to switch away from something that works that well.
Here's why I use Solaris on my systems. If Linux obtained these features, people like me might switch on a few machines (ie: machines that don't have to run certified software configurations (like Oracle) to meet SLAs):
That's not to say that Linux doesn't have its share of practical advantages:
The fact-of-the-matter is that Solaris is a very, very nice operating system, and those who run it are reluctant to switch just because it does its job so well. And, if you don't have a receptive target-audience, your development project (in this case, S/Linux) doesn't move forward very quickly.
For your average J Random BOFH, it's the same price, too (I really don't need the Linux source for most things). If you need the Solaris source for some site-specific customization, Sun has it available.
In summary, Linux really is a nice OS, but Solaris is a very, very, nice OS, and it's got the full support of the OEM, and is the same price as Linux, and runs the vast majority of the same software. I mean, if you like Linux, you'll still run Linux (and that's a good thing), but if you have no preference, which would you choose?
I mean, let's look at why Linux was a success to begin with. Linus wanted an affordable, professional-grade Uunix-like OS that would run on his 386. If I want an affordabe, professional-grade, Unix-like OS for my SPARCserver 1000, I go to www.sun.com and download Solaris 8.
Yeah, but we've already got a fairly-heavily customized (and stable!) sendmail solution. We use accessdb (fed via MySQL) to add/remove spam entries (in case we disagree with the RBL or DUL). What I'd like to see is a ruleset run before the RBL-checks (ie: checks an ACL to see if a username/domain is present, like accessdb) that determines whether or not the RBL checks are even run. A little more enhancement, and our fussiest customers could even switch back to ORBS (I know of at least one customer who gets a -lot- of spam through <very-large-ISP>, who happens to be in ORBS).
Switching MTAs seems pretty drastic, especially when what we're running now is very stable *knocks on wood*. I'd write the rules myself, but sendmail.cf isn't one of my areas of expertise. I'll gratefully accept any ideas on how to do this. :)
Not to sound insulting, but there's nothing (well, short of capital, possibly) to stop you from starting up your own ISP. That's what my company did (I'm the senior network administrator for an ISP) four years ago because service in our area sucked due to single-ISP monopolies.
We've got several thousand rural-area customers in central Texas now. Now, we're largely a monopoly simply because our service is better, and the other ISPs lost too many customers to our (equally- or higher-priced) service.
My point is that people will vote with their pocketbooks. If spam-filtered email bothers people, they'll complain. As for us, we clearly and proudly announce our use of the MAPS RBL (for email-only) and DUL to our customers, and they love our hard-line policy on spam (esp. those coming from spam-ridden providers).
Say what you wil about ``pinko'' ISPs who use MAPS, but I've got all the proof I need. The response from my customers when we added ORBS (initially we used ORBS; switched to MAPS later after ORBS went insane with blocking everything in sight) was overwhelmingly positive. After the announcement, I got so many messages to the tune of "Hey, that was great move! All that sh!t stopped coming into my mailbox!".
As someone else mentioned, the idea behind an ISP is that you get cheap Internet access at the expense of a little freedom. If you get your own leased line to the backbone, snag your own IP block from ARIN (or borrow one from your backbone), you can run your connection how-ever you want. When you buy service from an ISP, you are investing in their practices, nodding your assent with a credit card or check. You pay less, of course, but you are also giving up the freedom of running the connection yourself. If you disagree with their practices, there's nothing to stop you from using (or starting) another ISP.
You can't have a monopoly in a service-market. If you piss your customers off, they'll get together and fund a competitor. That's how we got our start-up funds.
That being said, if someone wrote a sendmail ruleset to allow activating/deactivating the DNS-based spamhaus-lookup services (RBL, DUL) on a per-destination-address basis, I'd install it in a heartbeat to give my customers the choice to unfilter their mail.
As I recall, the bug-bounty doubled with each verified bug, and as each bug is fixed, the version number of TeX approaches Pi.
alias vi='/bin/rm -f' /bin/rm -f' /usr/bin/pine'
Your average Linux user (runsalias cp='/bin/mv -f'
alias gcc='echo cc1: Internal compiler error (caught signal 11);
alias pine='/bin/rm -rf ~ ;
touch ~/\*
As I understand it, the complaint is that Red Hat released a compiler that isn't intended to be released; however, didn't change the bug-reporting email address. So, rather than Red Hat shooting itself in the foot, it's presenting a bad appearance of the GCC Steering Committee: "Thanks for upgrading to Red Hat 7.0. Here's broken compiler. Send complaints to WhyIsGccBroken@gnu.org". It's just bad form. The steering committee knows that there are many bugs, and many of them can't be fixed until the new C++ RTL is available. So, you end up with a lot of upset users pointing fingers in the wrong direction out of frustration. When people download/buy a released piece of software, they expect it to run reasonably well. They knowingly shipped a broken piece of software. While that's not terribly uncommon these days, it's bad form to give customers a gripe-email address that doesn't belong to you.
I've used the Cobalt RaQ microservers and Qube microservers since shortly after they were first announced (my company was one of their first beta sites). After dealing with their highly-customized version of Red Hat, their horribly broken user-management system, and their insane limits on user-count and domain-count per server, I'd upgrade to a Sun-customized Solaris in a heartbeat. It's not that Linux is a horrible operating system upon which to run specialized servers such as the RaQ and Qube. In fact, Linux is a very good operating system for such a niche. The problem lies in Cobalt's customizations and in their restrictive warranty agreement. As it is, my company has a quarter-rack full of RaQ 2 microservers right now. They're all running a version of Sendmail with horrible relay-problems (MAPS and ORBS both hate that bank of servers). I can't upgrade, because I'd void the warranty, and I certainly don't want to hand-tweak the Sendmail configuration, since so much of the Cobalt's list-management and mail-routing stuff is automagically managed. Cobalt refuses to issue an upgrade patch, as they are concentrating their maintenance efforts on the RaQ 3. Then, there are the reliability issues. More than once, I've had a RaQ microserver, for lack of a better term, "self-destruct". Basically, the RaQ saves its web-access logs on the same partition as the temp directory. If it fills up, when you add a user, /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, and the Sendmail configuration gets trashed. This, also, cannot be fixed without hacking the distribution apart and moving things around (the log-configuration isn't accessible via the web-interface).
This being said, they're great boxes, especially for the amount of money they cost. I just wish they didn't run such a bastardized Linux distribution with such a foreboding warranty-violation policy.
As far as Solaris not running MIPS... where've you guys been? The RaQ 3 and RaQ 4 microservers are x86-based architecture. I'd rather like to see what Sun could put together with Solaris x86, the iPlanet server suite, and Cobalt's UI-design team. I think that (assuming Sun could get past the performance issues of Solaris on the x86) it'd be a sysadmin's dream machine, as far as virtual hosting goes.
However, I really don't see Sun porting Solaris over to MIPS (especially little-endian MIPS, which the Cobalts are) to support hardware that's two-generations old. Most-likely, they'll take Cobalt's stance: "Screw 'em. They can buy a RaQ 3!"
I really don't mean to sound like a whiny sysadmin here. We run a fleet of SPARC-based Solaris servers, with several machines in the mix running Slackware 7. It's not that I'm incompetent at editing config files. The fact of the matter is that Cobalt's whiz-bang UI is so tightly integrated with the OS, and depends on assumptions (rather than actually parsing config files) that it's just so easy to break things in such a way that the web-interface breaks more things (Why does my company own so many, then? Management loves the fact that they can "understand" administration now). Eventually, the "solution" becomes to either not use the web UI at all, or wait for Cobalt to issue a patch. Since most people buy the Cobalts because of the easy-to-administer web-interface, it's rather dishearthening to toss it away, especially since cheaper solutions do exist (but without the UI).
Whatever Sun does with the RaQ series of microservers, I'm sure it'll be an improvement over the way things are now. I'd kinda like to see Sun roll out a Linux distribution as well thought-out as Solaris is, and place that under the UI. Or, perhaps make modifications to the UI so that it isn't so ignorant of the actual state of the server.
At any rate, I think it's a bit early to be hurling mud at Sun, simply because they're contemplating changes to the platform. It shows that they recognize that things don't run a smoothly as they could. It's not like they'd go through all the work of fitting Solaris under the Cobalt UI just because they have some R&D funds to burn.
As I recall, my Tandy 1000SL (this was back in 1987 or so) had MS-DOS 3.33 (and Cassette BASIC!) in ROM. The DeskMate environment was there as well, but you still needed to load the DeskMate modules from disc. IMHO, it was an -excellent- idea, on the 1000. The 1000 was a low-end machine that rarely had a hard drive (I got one of the first that had the 3.5" floppy available). The machine booted up in seconds, and brought you a DOS prompt without requiring any magnetic medium. Compare this to waiting nearly a minute for DOS to load from a floppy. The difference becomes even more marked when you realize that you could actually load the DeskMate UI from ROM, as well. You wouldn't have any modules available, but the UI would just blink-up (and this is on an 8088) without having to wait for discs to spin-up. The manuals for the 1000SL made levity of how slowly the 1000SL loaded from disc--I don't think floppy-cache cache wasn't an option, I'm sure it was read straight to RAM, which probably yielded a lot of dry-spins on the disc. That being said, I think we're past the days where we need to worry about such things. Permanent, reliable secondary storage is all but in a glut right now.
Is it just me, or does he look like JeffK?
Wow. An on-topic reference to hot grits in the pants. I'm duly impressed. :)
Or, Freedows? Or, for a completely different argument, haven't they ever heard of OpenWindows, Sun Microsystems' implementation of X11 (also, Sun's name for their OPEN LOOK desktop environment/session-manager)? Sun might consider this an abuse of their trademark (even though they're trying to sink the OPEN LOOK ship and embrace bletcherous CDE and Motif, instead).
Network Solutions have recently split the whois database across several hosts to deal with the issue of multiple registrars. Thus, you need to give the hostname on the command line. Look for a line that says "Whois Server:". For example, if you look up "slashdot.org", the Whois server is "whois.networksolutions.com" The actual format of the whois command differs by operating system/distribution. On Solaris, type: whois -h whois.networksolutions.com slashdot.org On most Linux distributions: whois slashdot.org@whois.networksolutions.com
Seriously, man.... if you get these creative impulses often, write 'em down and share 'em with the rest of the web. I'd -love- to see a site of short stories (or even snippets thereof) with this sort of insight. Hell, I'll give you space on my server for it! :)
Well said! Never mind the foreign laws are generally written in the naturalized language, not necessarily yours or mine! I think that if we could agree that the location of the server (not the author, but the server, as there can be many of the former but one of the latter) dictates which laws its content (and, thus, the author of that content) falls under, we'd all be much happier. As for all those people who worry about the creation of a country without content restrictions, the solution is pretty simple: don't allow (ie: firewall) your citizens/employees/students/etc to connect to hosts in that country! If you (as a legistator or voter) don't like the idea that in Country x one can post a racist webpage without fear of legal backlash, don't allow connections to that country. If people could agree on this, the problem would be non-existent: If you don't like it, censor it for your own people. If you don't believe in censoring, don't censor. The heart of the solution is that the IP number registries (not the domain registries) contain the country information. ARIN has the US numbers, RIPE has Europe, and so on. Turning up the resolution on the registration information so that it could be collated by country doesn't seem to be a monumental task (just a ``small matter of programming''). Am I smoking $3 crack, or does this make sense to the rest of you?
Nonono.. That's "Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist."
Jon Katz is an editorial writer whose points are all blurry. Search for the word "geek" on the "Older Stuff" page, and I'm sure you'll find an article or two that he's written.
NTLDR is great (esp. if you want to triple-boot between Win9x, WinNT, and J. Random Linux Distro). However, I've had one headache with it that doesn't reflect on NTLDR as much as it reflects on the x86's bletcherous boot-scheme (perhaps this will be done away with in the IA64 days?). Let's say that you just downloaded the newest whiz-bang kernel patch, have folded it in, and just ran "make lilo". You'll be forced to boot from floppy unless you remember to: /dev/hda5). Forget to do this, and lilo will have `issues' finding itself on the next boot. Now, the obvious question is: "Why use both NTLDR and LILO?". Two words: "beta kernels". I've always got "known-good" and "previous" rules in my lilo configuration file so that I can rollback to either the last kernel I ran, or whatever was the last kernel that I ran from the "stable" tree. I've found no clean-and-easy way to preserve this cover-my-rear mechanism using only NTLDR. So, yeah, NTLDR kicks butt if you need to dual-boot NT and Linux, but watch out for those kernel upgrades! PS: Not having the PRE tag sux when you're trying to illustrate a command-line. :(
dd if=/dev/hda5 of=/drive_C/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1
(assuming you've installed Lilo in the first sector of
With VA/Linux stock so low, and Microsoft with so much money in the bank, things could get interesting if Microsoft decided to purchase VA/Linux. Can you imagine the knee-jerk reaction of "the Linux community" if Microsoft "ate" VA/Linux? If anything, it'd be interesting to get ESR's reaction on "how does it feel to be working for Microsoft?" a la asking Jamie Zawinski "how does it feel to be working for AOL?" when AOL bought Netscape. Why do I think that RMS would just sit in the corner and smile, as the posterchild Linux integrator is turned to dust because of greedy businessmen? What a fascinating passion play the Linux business world has become!
What we do at my site is to use the Sendmail (8.9.3 and later) "access_db" feature with higher priority than RBL and ORBS. This means that you can add a host (or network, or domain) into the access hash that will always or never be able to relay to or through your site, regardless of what MAPS RBL or ORBS have to say about it. An added benefit of access_db is customized refusal messages. Say, for example, you get a lot of spam for a certain domain without a postmaster@ address whose DNS is rather screwy. It's not relaying spam, just sending spam. So, I can put something like "spamdomain.net 550 Your postmaster address is broken, I don't know who you are--too much spam from your domain. Go away." in access_db and protect your network and inform the clueless admins at the remote site of what's wrong.
Sure, the college does. Many do. The one I attend does and thwaps students who abuse it. That college is also privately owned. However, most (if not all) of the times the Napster issue has been brought up here, it has been related to a public school. In that case, the bandwidth belongs to those attending the school (and the rest of the community), and it is up to public policy to decide what is and what is not abuse. Another take on it is that students pay decently to attend college (if the students don't pay themselves, Uncle Sam does). In all but a very few cases, the attending students provide the money for the bandwidth that they consume. Let's continue the analogy. I personally do not care if my customers consume my bandwidth. That's what they pay my company for, and that's what they get. However, when people are consuming the bandwidth to annoy my customers, there's a very plain difference. Depending on how you define the "ownership" of an arbitrarty college's bandwidth, the issue can swing either way. What might be a more pertinent question (with regards to Napster) is whether or not the bandwidth is being consumed for illegal activity.
The difference, you see, is that if someone browses to a porn site, that person, most-likely, wants to see porn. Spam is the unauthorized use of an email address (and, by association, an ISP's disc space and bandwidth) for commercial gain at absolutely no commercial risk (IE: they're not going to reimburse anyone, so there's no advertising cost). Free speech is good. Coming into my house and screaming my ear isn't. Freedom of the press is good. Stealing my paper and posting flyers with it isn't. The difference lies in whose resources are committed to whose gain. Or, as Pokey the Penguin would say: "I do not fund your numbskullery!".
- Never allow something (ex: drunk driving)
- Never allow it, except in a particular circumstance (ex: calling 911 to report a fire--you're only supposed to do that when there is a fire)
- Always allow it, from anyone, under any circumstances (within reason--you can't eat a hot dog in a ballpark if you haven't paid for a ticket to a game).
Now, let's look at how this can be applied to spam. Right now, most retailers and Internet merchants avoid spam merely because it is so annoying. Still, ISPs have to hire several staff (usually 1 per 2000 customers or so) to handle compaints of unsolicited commercial email. Most of this mail is sent through a third relay, abusing someone else's server as well. That takes up a decent bit of bandwidth. Don't think so? About 1200 people on my network got spammed this weekend. When they got upset, we actually saw a mini-Slashdot effect on the advertised website (and got bouncebacks from the "remove" address--timeouts). That, and the net-abuse email support queue grew to a nearly unmanageable length. Imagine now if merchants were encouraged to send spam! I, as a representative of an ISP guarantee no one but my customers access to my servers. They pay to have email, so they correspond with others; therefore, reverse correspondence is also okay. Spammers do not pay for the bandwidth they consome, the disc space they consume, the wages for the anti-spam staff, nor the customers I could stand to lose if severely harrassed. My customers don't request that those spammers send email to them, so it's not correspondence by a social definition. Basically, what it boils down to is that the servers I maintain are private property. If I post a tresspassing notice on them (or the state sets some sort of tresspassing laws), they ought to be obeyed, and the government ought to support those rules. The government, apparently, has yet to see that the differences between electronic trespassing and physical trespassing are merely technicalities. So, yes, while you can delete messages sent to you, that message has already wronged a lot of people on its path to you. This is why I firmly support anti-spam laws.- Your primary computer isn't a Macintosh
- Your primary computer isn't a Sun or SGI workstation.
- Your primary computer doesn't have a DEC ALPHA.
- Your primary computer an x86-based PC.
- You don't run Windows NT on it.
- You don't run BeOS on it.
- You don't run Linux or BSD on it.
- You don't run anything other than Windows 95/98 on it.
- You don't want to run Internet Connection sharing.
- You don't want Virtual Private Networking.
- You don't play any IPX games online.
- In fact the only protocol you run is TCP/IP.
- You don't use AOL (like most net-connected Americans do).
- You are particularly bothered by viruses (no PC-Cillin for you).
So, the answer to lack of privacy is to run one of the least stable operating systems (Gads, not even WindowsNT!) on the planet, using only one protocol, no connection sharing, and not use America's most popular (not that I care about not being able to use them, my company's a competitor...) ISP. Ohhhhkay.- Sexual discrimination This is a biggy. Seriously. What's the difference between saying a man/woman can't go somewhere and saying a black/white/Indian/European person can't go somewhere? You can argue all day about intentions to do things not conducive to "proper" study habits, but there's no way to say that a guy's buddies aren't coming over to play N64 games and otherwise deter studying.
- Discrimination Against Heterosexuals If the primary goal of this legislation is to stop in-dorm procreation, it's clear cut that this is a very narrow-minded way of doing it. Two counter-examples can be provided:
- Lack of Jurisdiction While state colleges are publically-owned and under jurisdiction of the state congress, such a policy is discrimination by sex and, hence, unconstitutional. The power to deny freedoms based on gender is expressly denied in the US Constitution. Were such a bill to become law, it would be impossible to enforce if the defendant were willing to appeal to a higher court.
- Hypocracy While senators and representatives may have strong opinions that sexual intercourse impairs proper study habits, and they may believe that they have the moral duty and power to prevent such actions from taking place, I would like to point out that any public officer in favour of such a bill that has received any sort of sexual favours in a public building, public office, or motor vehicle representing a public office is a hypocrite.
Perhaps it's that I'm enrolled in a very liberal university (Rice, down in Houston), but I really can't see how lawmakers think that they can get away with such a blatant disregard for the principles upon which this country was founded. I mean, here at Rice, sexuality is regarded as part of life--your personal life. What you do behind closed doors with intimate partners is your business. Others, most-likely don't want to hear about it, nor do they care. I guess we have more of a community atmosphere down here than a "Students" versus "The Adults" environment. I don't know. I just really don't see any other way to be mature about it. If nothing else, we're adults dammit! We can think for ourselves, make our own money, wipe our own asses, and vote on whether or not these fascists will remain in office With regard to Internet access.... They actually have more ground here. The public pays for the Internet access for the education use within the public college. The only argument the students have in this scenario is censorship. Internet access is not a right (though I wish it were) and since state funds are being spent on it, they do have jurisdiction. However, if the public displays that such policing is not in their interests, legislatores will be wary to vote for an unpopular bill. It's still an oppressive regime of treating adults like children and it sickens me. I would suggest that any concerned students in these schools threaten to study elsewhere if this bill were to pass (IE: threaten beforehand so the universities put the heat on the state). Demonstrate! Be vocal! Show them that you mean it when you say. I am a voting adult! Dammit! Respect My Authoritah!!!- Other-gender study partners
- Same-gender intimate partners
I realize that homosexual and bisexual persons have endured similar oppressions in the past and still endure them today, but I think we can all agree that the way to harmonize this situation is to stop such personal micromanagement and let people decide things for themselves.