So let me get this straight, this guy is arguing that because he's read a lot about first generation Apple products being buggy, they are not doing as good of a job as everyone else? And he has no numbers to back this up? And we're just supposed to assume he's right?
Apple products get more press coverage. They are high profile and do a better job attracting the press than most other manufacturers. They also tend to be more cutting edge than is average and since many users want OS X and there is only one practical source of hardware that runs OS X, people care about their releases. Thus, when there is a problem, everyone hears about it. Does that mean they have more problems? Independent reviews of their hardware reliability put them at or near the top of the heap. This is despite releasing more "cutting edge" features that can't benefit from the mistakes of others. I've heard it said they update their product line less often, which may mitigate this somewhat. Still, from what I've seen their products, first rev or otherwise are no worse than anyone else's. I don't buy first rev cars, or other expensive, engineering heavy, devices. I usually don't do the same with computers, from any manufacturer. Basically, I just don't see any evidence that Apple is worse (or even as bad) as the average.
Those aren't proper analogies to begin with, but when you add the fourth item, "I'm a criminal so we may as well ignore my civil rights." it becomes pretty obvious, doesn't it?
How are these not proper analogies? You argued since you, in particular, are not making use of a right, there is no problem if the government takes it away.
How about a better analogy, some hoodlums are shooting out your windows with a BB gun on a regular basis, so you invite a police to patrol outside your house at night.
Or maybe, some hoodlums are shooting BB guns on a regular basis, so the police without your approval and without a court warrant set up surveillance inside your house.
Remember this is violating the separation of powers, is unsupervised, and was not asked for (I don't remember a referendum).
Exactly what the terrorists hiding in Saudi Arabia were doing.
Saudi Arabia is easy to monitor. It is a different situation in the US where you can buy a one time use, disposable cell phone at gas stations.
The government has shown no way in which this is effective. During the last test 13 out of 13 times agents were able to bring a bomb aboard a plane. They were able to sneak an AR-15 assault rifle on for crissakes. Some guy from Texas accidentally brought a huge hunting knife on board. Most of the US coastline is unguarded. Most shipping containers entering the US are completely ignored. Their methods are ineffective at catching "terrorists" but great for making it seem like they're doing something while scaring the general public.
But it doesn't matter, because terrorists are not a significant threat. Where is the benefit? We stop another 911 and save a few thousand lives at the cost of breaking the fundamental principals of our government and turning the US into another China? The US government, without checks and balances and no longer bound by the constitution is a much greater threat to both US citizens and the world than Islamic militants could ever dream of being.
...you can't even recognize the benefits here, you're like a one sided scale.
I can see instances where restriction of civil rights might be necessary. Like in a real war, against a nation of similar power. That is not the case here. There is no real benefit to all of the surveillance and absolutely, positively no benefit at all to surveillance without judicial oversight. You're repeatedly failed to address this point. You've said that you don't care if someone looks over your shoulder since you're not doing anything wrong. What then is the executive branch's objection to the judicial and legislative branches looking over their shoulder? The answer is the same one it has been repeatedly in our history. They are doing something wrong.
so how does the OS distinguish between malware vs non-malware?
It does not, per se. It gives the user the information they need to decide what is malware, while at the same time providing the granularity of control the user needs in order to do what they want.
The granularity of control on Windows right now is pathetic. Generally, software can either do everything or nothing, the least amount of granularity possible.
Worse, due to architectural decisions, poor coding, and an unmaintainable codebase, Windows often allows others to bypass even that gross level of control and install and run software without the approval of the end user.
Finally, the UI in Windows does a horrible job of giving users the information they need to decide what is and is not malware. It does not warn me when something wants to read my e-mail address book. It does not warn me when something starts modifying my.doc files for the first time. It does not even provide me with adequate information to distinguish between data and programs.
Now I know some people will object on the grounds that other OS's don't take care of this either. The reason for this is that other OS's don't have a malware problem so the market is not demanding a solution.
If the user is dumb enough to click install w/o knowing fully what he/she is doing (about 90% of how all malwares are installed these days)...
First, most malware by the numbers is installed in an automated fashion without any user interaction. I don't know where you got the idea that user interaction was required for 90%, when it is actually more like 35%. Second, users aren't being dumb, for the most part. They aren't given the information they need to make a decision, or the control they need to have a system that is both usable and secure. Just add a "run but don't let it fuck my system in the ass" option for running software by default and much of the problem would go away. You can blame the end users when malware is a trojan and when the OS informs and empowers them.
Are you not actually reading what I'm typing? That must be it. There is no monopoly unless your local people cause it to be so.
Assuming this is true (which it isn't as several people have pointed out) it doesn't matter. It is still the government which is just as constrained by the constitution as the federal government. It is the state and federal courts that have not done their job and stopped the unconstitutional action.
Which "special privileges" are you referring to?
Eminent domain right of ways, 200 billion dollars in federal subsidy just for "last mile" connections in the most recent few years, and immunity to prosecution for many crimes, supposedly in exchange for impartially carrying data.
The several competing providers who have chosen to set up in my area are trying very hard to win me over, always offering better deals and counter-deals on bandwidth.
I've lived in three of the ten largest cities in the US during the last decade. I live right next to one of the largest hubs of the internet now. I've never had a choice of more than one cable company offering bundled with their service and one phone company offering bundled with their service. Theoretically the law requires the phone company to allow competition on their lines, but realistically it is not enforced and the one time I tried to get such a service the company I was working with gave up, because they did not have enough money to fight the necessary court battles since the authorities would not enforce the laws. If you actually have competition where you are, great, but the vast majority of the US does not and in light of that we cannot expect competitive pressures to act to solve this issue.
No, I think your previous implication that anyone, like me, that thinks it's OK to adjust prices based on what you're actually having to do to carry traffic to/from thousands of networks is also comfortable being a racist is... exactly an ad hominem attack
No, its called an analogy. You draw a parallel between two things to demonstrate why since one is agreed to be wrong, the other is also wrong. You demonstrated no way in which these are not parallel, and thus have failed to address the point at all.
I don't think you're really understanding what "extortion" means. Recognizing that a third party is routing an enormous portion of their traffic over your finite network, and making a lot of money doing so, does make talking to that user about traffic optimization a very legitimate objective.
Recognizing that your customers paid you to deliver the traffic, but you can threaten the content provides with intentionally breaking their service and not their competitors is exactly extortion. If the postal system decided to start slowing down mail between Netflix and their customers, unless Netflix paid an additional fee (already having paid postage), then that is extortion. Gee, you'd hate to have Blockbuster take over because their mail goes through faster, wouldn't you? People will start going to them if it takes three weeks to turn around a DVD instead of a few days. The shipping is already paid for. The postal system isn't recognizing that DVDs are more fragile, or need to cost more to ship. Otherwise; Blockbuster would suffer equally. They're recognizing that they can hurt a company and the company is vulnerable to extortion. The same goes for these ISPs. Google traffic is no different than other traffic. They can already charge different prices for different traffic. No. They just noticed Google is vulnerable to extortion.
Google is not a customer of my ISP...
True, the end users are the customers and so are the peering networks. The customers paid for the traffic. The peers paid (or bartered) for the traffic. This is just double charging because they can because the market cannot act effectively with dozens of intermediary customers.
Proof of your "pennies on the dollar" claim, please.
Here is the first article article Google returned (it tallies the government subsidy for last mile infrastructure at 200 billion), but it is just scratching the surface of the total subsidies in confiscated land and core internet lines. It not hard to find thousands of similar tales. It's not not like this is a secret or anything. This is pretty well documented public knowledge.
Also, the government doesn't actually DO anything like you suggest. They have contractors do it.
I see, so if the government pays someone else to kick me out of my home and move troops in for free room and board it is not unconstitutional. What an interesting and moronic assertion.
Over time, such things pay for themselves, and selling "used" wires for less than the cost of installation sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Brand new, never lit fiber is not "used." It does not "pay for itself" at all. It is the government giving money and special privileges (including a police enforced monopoly) to certain companies that are now (as usual) breaking their end of the deal. This is a tired theme in US history. The government makes a deal with private industry "for the good of the people." The private industry becomes wealthy and then bribes the government so they no longer have to keep their half of the bargain.
You've also failed to address every other point I made in my previous post. Give it up already.
So, unless you can show me where the government is taking money from taxpayers and giving it directly to ISPs, you're just blowin' smoke.
Please. The federal government paid for laying most of the fiber that makes up the backbone, which they then sold to network carriers for pennies on the dollar. That is a subsidy.
hen you're talking about it in the wrong venue. This is a discussion about federal legislation, and that has nothing to do with you local zoning rules.
Ahh, but the local and state governments enforce the monopoly and the federal government then provides special privileges, both of which together make the actions of these ISPs de facto censorship. I don't care which part of the government is responsible for which act, only the end result, which I notice you don't deny.
If you're trying to actually make any sort of rhetorical headway, here, you might consider pulling your head out of your ass.
You think ad hominem attacks are going to make me consider your arguments more seriously?
Looking at your IP traffic and noticing that a substantial part of your overhead is going into packets to/from a particular third party's network (say, eBay), or that certain kinds of traffic involve longer handshakes/keep-alives, or require more round trips because of regular losses in some router upstream...
They aren't banning price discrimination based upon traffic characteristics, just upon the originator. If they want to negotiate traffic characteristics into their peering contracts, nothing is stopping them, but handling it differently depending upon whether they get a kickback from someone who is not even their customer, well that is just extortion. You're very mistaken about this. They are not doing what you claim, they are looking for who has the money (Google, MS, eBay) and going after those who have more need, not those with particular traffic types. Don't try to josh me, we sell them the tools they're using to try to bill QoS.
You pay your typical residential ISP to get you onto their network, not to provide any particular, exact flavor of peering to any specific other network in a particular way.
No. I pay them to impartially transmit and receive whatever data I decide, without regard for who it is to or from or what is in the packet. That is what a common carrier is obligated to do.
Let's take an example. Verizon and Google seem to be popular. Let's say Google is hosted with AT&T. So now we have Verizon's customers using their bandwidth to access Google on AT&T's network, and not getting any money for it. This in and of itself is false. The customers pay for the access, and if they didn't use it for Google then they would use it elsewhere. Since AT&T is the funnel for the traffic from all other ISPs, they charge Google a large amount. It seems like everyone got their money -- AT&T from Google and Verizon from its customers.
You're making several mistakes. One, in this case it would not necessarily be Verizon charging, but lets say Bob's ISP which is a customer of a customer of a customer of Verizon. Second, they aren't charging for bandwidth (they already have a peering arrangement with their upstream provider, which has one with another which has one with another which has one with Verizon which has one with AT&T). What they are charging for is for not artificially slowing down or throwing away some of the packets going between Google and their end users. This technically probably violates their peering agreement, but it is much more likely that all the ISPs will form a cartel and profit together than it is that they will require compliance. Third, because of the vast number of intermediaries the free market is very slow to react and because most instantiations of "Bob's ISP" are geographical monopolies enforced by the government's granting access to public right of ways, there is no free market action at all at the endpoint.
The problem with your proposed solution is that it presupposes both a free market (which does not exist) and that ISPs will not collude to gouge users (which they probably will).
In the case being discussed, the content of your blog (your speech) or the content of some streaming media spooling off of a small company's server (as opposed to, say, AOL's or Google's) have nothing to do with it. Censorship isn't even part of the discussion. What's being talked about is who pays for the bandwidth being used. That's it.
So it is alright for them to charge quadruple to black people? How about increasing prices five orders of magnitude for anyone not a member of the republican party? After all the end user can always switch ISPs. it's not like police are arresting people who try to set up their own ISP using the same public right of ways... oh wait, yes they are.
Censoring based upon content or speaker is still censorship.
If a little mom-and-pop web site starts getting a ton of traffic from a Slashdotting, do you really think that their monthly costs don't go up? Who should pay for that... the ISP providing their pipe? How are they causing the Slashdotting?
People pay for bandwidth in both directions so, both parties are paying for it in this case, as it should be. The site is uploading more, so they pay more. The end users are downloading more, so they pay for that, if they are not doing it in lieu of other traffic. You're mistaking the fact that most end users buy a surplus for them not having to pay. This is incorrect.
This isn't about censorship, it's about the economic realities of the fact that huge IP pipes aren't a natural occuring resource - they're mostly built and run by private companies.
Please. This is about finding more sources of revenue and ways to differentiate in the market. ISPs and other network providers should charge what it costs for data impartially, regardless of how rich or poor or how dependent upon network service the originator of the packet is. Anything else voids their common carrier status. A packet is a packet. Charging more to not artificially slow down one and not for another because you know your customer's customer's customer really needs them to go through in a timely fashion is just extortion.
But why should you be able to dictate to some other ISP how much of your traffic they should have to carry, and at what price?
Because in exchange for that impartial service my tax dollars subsidize their pipes. Because in exchange for that impartial service we give them immunity for prosecution for all the libel, death threats, and child porn they transmit and publish. Because in exchange for that impartial service the police arrest anyone who tries to compete with them, granting them a geographical monopoly.
If you don't like the price they charge, you change carriers.
I'd be happy to, but it is illegal for another carrier to run lines to my house.
then become your own carrier
See above.
Arguing that the free market will sort it out makes absolutely no sense in a market with government enforced monopolies, where the ISPs are subsidized with tax dollars and special laws. Would you like proof. It costs me less money to buy cable TV and cable internet as a package than it does to just buy cable Internet. I cannot buy a DSL line without also buying an expensive and unneeded phone line. In a free market, that neither would be the case because competition would force companies to offer what users want. That has not happened over the last 5+ years this has been the case.
There is a big difference between China's government controlling speech and a US company choosing to to transmit speech by another.
...Except when that company has been granted special rights and geographical monopoly enforced by the police for acting as an agent of the government. Our tax dollars fund them. Our police arrest their competition. Our laws exempt them from prosecution for certain crimes. And now, the only thing they were asked in return (to carry data impartially) they want to stop doing. Fine. But make sure they pay back the money with which we subsidized their infrastructure. Make sure the public right of ways are opened to any and all competitors. Make sure they are prosecuted for any libel, threats, child porn, etc. they transmit and publish. Otherwise, it is government censorship, just using a third party.
Freedom of speech is violated when there are legal consequences from government for saying what you think. This is not that. We had freedom of speech before the internet even existed, I don't see how we're losing it with a tiered system.
Technology changes and with it free speech issues. For example, as the printing press became the medium of choice, would you consider it a free speech issue if the government required a license to sell printing presses? What if they refused licenses to anyone who sold to black people? Would that constitute denying black people their freedom of speech? I assert that it does, as the press sellers, restricted by government sanctions, are acting as their agents by proxy.
If I run telephone lines through the public right of ways to the houses of people who agree to be my customers, the police arrest me. They don't arrest the cable company and they don't arrest the phone company and in most places that counts as the government enforcing them as monopolies. If then, these government enforced monopolies restrict free speech, they are in some way at least acting as agents of the government.
t trivializes TRUE abuses and suspensions of human rights, and clouds the issue in people's minds.
I don't think anyone would compare these to the more severe civil rights abuses also occurring. Rather, I think, there is more danger of ignoring the abuses with the classic fallacy of "at least we're not as bad as..."
"So what if we restrict many kinds of free speech, we're still not as bad as China," is no justification at all, but it is often cited anyway.
When people don't understand what something is, they can't make intelligent decisions about it.
Which is why we need more discussion of this issue and why it is a civil rights abuse, rather than less.
Only the government can "censor" anyone. ISPs routinely "censor" content, and have no restrictions on doing so.
You're mistaken. The government and agents acting on their behalf can censor. ISPs are not just private companies. They are private companies subsidized by taxpayer dollars, granted special immunity for breaking certain laws, and who are granted monopolies in geographical regions enforced by the government using the police.
In most localities only one phone and one cable company are granted the right to run lines to your house through the public right of ways upon which the telephone poles and underground cables are placed. The police stop anyone else from doing so, thus limiting you to only one or two possible ISPs. Thus the government is censoring you if those companies do, by denying you the option of going with another provider supplied by the free market.
ISPs are granted special privileges for acting as impartial carriers of data. They are not prosecuted, despite the fact that they violate copyright law, transfer child pornography, publish libel, publish trade secrets, publish threats, etc. This is because they just impartially move data for the good of the country (acting as agents of the government) and are thus not responsible for what data they move. Now, however, they want to take responsibility for what data they are moving in order to extort money from those who are more reliant upon them. I think they should be allowed to do so, just as soon as anyone can string last mile wire and as soon as they lose their common carrier immunities.
The government employing a private company, granted special privileges, and whose competition is arrested by the police is not a legal way for the government to do an end-run around the constitution. ISPs are clearly acting as government agencies and as such are subject to constitutional limitations.
Really, having a package repository is the best currently available solution for mitigating the risk of trojans.
I actually think mandatory access controls, is better, right now. In truth, I don't trust that everything in a repository has been thoroughly audited enough for trojans. Further, using MAC, jails, VMs, or the like simultaneously protects against exploitable vulnerabilities. It also grants more granularity to what levels of trust are granted. I might want to run photoshop, but I also might not want to give it network access, or access to modify my kernel.
That and giving options of the sort "Do you want this program to alter your existing files? Do you want to grant this program network access?" would make it difficult for trojans to do any damage. (On the other hand, we can consider anything in the package repository to be trusted, or at least to have reasonable access defaults.)
Agreed. The level of trust can be set to defaults based upon the number of sources who claim it has been audited, etc. with the most restrictive defaults applied to new software from unknown, or untrustworthy sources. Several projects have this implemented to some degree, but the usability and integration into the OS UI has not yet been done well (that I've seen).
Of course, that would require a restructuring of UNIX privileges into a four-tier system. Or, to maintain backwards compatibility, we could make many new groups and assign each program to a group.
Most current implementations use a group/priviledge paradigm, but separated from traditional privileges and applied at the "VM" layer.
Third-party checking of software that's not available in the package repository is a logistic nightmare. The reason that those packages aren't in the repository are stability issues, userbase issues, and manpower issues.
I don't think it is reasonable to expect that all software will always be able to be kept in the same centralized repository going forward. Rather, I anticipate multiple repositories maintained by different groups, peer-to-peer storage, and other sources of software. Certification of software via checksum or something more robust can be done by the developer as well as by any auditors. Further, there will still be plenty of closed source software, with no outside auditors for any popular desktop system, so binary installs and management needs to be accounted for.
Right now I do IM binaries to people and I do regularly transfer software via portable drives and LANs. I don't want to have to have to re-download software from a repository for every machine, especially given licensing concerns and the fact that software availability is never guaranteed going forward. I don't think losing this functionality is acceptable or necessary going forward. Rather, I think said functionality can be merged with a package manager so that regardless of the source, software can contain a reference to an authoritative repository, be automatically updated, and it can be done with increased, not decreased security.
There was violence before TV and Games and Movies. There were farm boys who grew up in peaceful farms that never heard a shot fired in anger or had a punch thrown whom grew up to be Soldiers.
This is true, but I don't think any reasonable person can believe that people cannot be trained and conditioned to be more violent. The army's basic training was designed to address the fact that most soldiers, given a gun and sent to war, would intentionally miss their targets rather than shoot another human being. Since then, the rates of intentionally missing the enemy have dropped drastically.
The reporter (or more likely editor) is a PC fool whom doesn't realize the simple basic truth. Violent Video games save us from wayyyyyy more random acts of violence then they do encourage them.
I don't think it is foolish to believe that violent video games encourage more violence than they prevent. I think it is foolish to believe they do either without some real, objective scientific studies. From what I've seen I'd tend to say there is little or no proof to support the belief they encourage violence, but I'm open to evidence to the contrary
Mind you, no matter the truth, I don't see any justification for banning or restricting them. Eating red meat probably encourages violence. Ditto for alcohol. That is what freedom is all about. Making choices for yourself and accepting responsibility for your actions. So you beat up a guy because you drank too much whiskey and played GTA. Great, it's still your fault, since you chose to do those things in the first place.
I guess too many of these folks are naive and really believe everything is sunshine and lollypops and don't understand the dark sides we all have.
I'd agree with this, but I think it is important to understand the nature of the human mind. We react in layers, to physical pain, emotions, and reasoned thinking. Violence is a possible reaction, but it is not "dark" per se, but rather survival oriented. We mostly act violently (or are driven to do so) when we are threatened, but violence is rarely the best solution to modern threats. The important thing is teaching people to recognize their violent emotions and the sources of them and to respond with the best solution to the underlying problem, rather than just reacting emotionally all the time. I think some of the problems exacerbated by video games and television is that they do often teach the lesson that it is appropriate to react emotively and try to make people idolize characters who basically act like large, violent, emotional infants.
Thus, I mostly agree with you that people are violent by nature and I believe that video games and the like should be the choice of each individual. I disagree with you that video games are likely to reduce violent behavior or that there is any proof of that hypothesis.
That's what I look for, too, when choosing target platforms for deploying trojans on.
In the beginning of my previous post I wrote, "It seems like I often hear, we don't like people to do this, so we make it hard. Usability (or the lack thereof) should not be a tool for making people do what you want them to." Here you are advocating doing that, for yet another issue. You know a great way to solve the trojan problem? Never turn the computer on, heck don't even put it together.
I like to find the "best" solution to a problem; the one that is scalable, makes logical sense, does not introduce new problems, and actually solves all of the problem. Avoiding problems by making computers less functional is not the "best" solution. If you read my description of an ideal package management and deployment format you'd note it included integration with MAC or jails. This is because of the potential of trojans, spyware, malware, etc. You'll also notice it included tie in to certifications and checksums. This also alleviates said problem, by allowing for automated defaults based upon third party evaluations. Trojans aren't the biggest threat to a system today, but they are a significant one and one that can be all but completely mitigated, if people are motivated to do that. Unfortunately, too many people like you would rather advocate making computers less functional and harder to use under the assumption that it will make them more secure. Well guess what, you're right. Your favorite OS will be a lot more secure, but no one will be using it because it sucks. They'll be using something functional, even if they have to sacrifice security.
The above statement is totally and completely false.
I'm just stating what I recall as a user of the above. I don't know how it was configured or why, but it certainly was.
Tens of thousands of geographically dispersed enterprises that run Exchange in mixed environments would disagree with you. I know admins at plenty of Exchange server shops besides mine, and none of them have ever experienced "instability" due to serving mail via POP and IMAP. By the way, if you could describe the nature of the instability, I would perhaps be more inclined to believe your reports. What happens, exactly?
The machine is still up, but it serves no mail. Mail is silently dropped into nowhere. A reboot is the only fix that seems to work.
Nice straw man.
I don't think you know what a "straw man argument" is. It is a weak argument proposed and attributed to one's opponent, and then discredited. For example, I might write, "many proponents of Microsoft will argue that Microsoft was innovative when they created DOS, but those people are wrong since MS bought DOS from another company." It is putting words in your opponents mouth and then discrediting those words.
A Google for "linux pop problems" yields more than 13 million hits.
Hmm, actually given that MS has about 30% share by servers numbers, I suspect that would suggest the opposite what you intended it to support. Not that such a loose count is really meaningful, but you can certainly find plenty of people asking about similar problems with a more refined search.
Just for serendipity, the exchange server here dies again today. It just locked up for no real reason with no config changes. It is unrelated to the configuration we were discussing, but still an interesting coincidence.
Fortunately, Apple was kind enough to open source Darwin, but it didn't need to, and it choose not to open source the Aqua UI and the Finder shell.
Kind enough? Apple wasn't kind, they just recognize the value of the open source model. By contributing changes back, they maintain more parity with other software developers using the same or very similar code. Thus, they can pull in more changes and improvements others make, more easily.
I could be mistaken, but I don't think they would have been able to do this had Darwin been based on GPL'ed software.
The GPL certainly is a barrier to some usages, which is probably why Apple chose to use mostly BSD licensed software, and license much code they develop with a similar license.
That said, the BSDs are great projects (as are public domain projects like SQLite) and I wouldn't want to see them disappear. I believe that the core focus of the OSS community should be on GPL'ed software (because "embrace and extend" does in fact happen), but there's definitely an argument and a place for BSD-style licenses.
If I was starting a new project in a new area, I'd likely pick GPL for the license, with one exception. If I was building a core architectural feature, like a new form of networking or filesystem, and I wanted that to be as widely adopted as possible, I'd go with a BSD style license. Sometimes you want Apple and Microsoft to integrate your code, even if it means they will maintain their own closed source version. ZeroConf is a good example. By licensing their implementation with a FreeBSD style license, Apple got printer manufacturers on board and made it a killer feature. This is much more palatable than a GPL license to them and even MS will probably have to integrate the code eventually or suffer comparisons about how hard it is to setup LAN networking and device discovery compared to other OS's.
The thing I do not like about the LSB is that it seems to be pampering too much to the desires of the closed source application suppliers who only ship binaries not source.
I disagree, not that they are doing it, but that they shouldn't be doing it. It seems like I often hear, we don't like people to do this, so we make it hard. Usability (or the lack thereof) should not be a tool for making people do what you want them to. It should be simple to distribute source if you want and simple to distribute only a binary and it should be simple to build and install and upgrade as the user desires.
I really haven't seen an application installation and management solution I like for all general purpose uses and I think this sort of intentional lack of functionality does a lot more harm than good. What I'd really like to see is an implementation of OpenStep for packages that works well for everything and that is integrated with a package management system that allows the user to find/add/update software from a single location, and which also integrates with both versioning and MAC or jails and possibly certifications.
I want to be able to grab a program from anywhere, the web, an e-mail, IM from a friend, or by looking in my package manager. I want to specify what that software can do on my machine, and I want my computer to keep it up-to-date for me, but let me roll back to a previous version if I need to. Further, I want my machine to checksum and look at certification for a program and easily display to me some indication of how trustworthy that software is.
I really feel this is a niche that needs to be filled. Several OS's and distro have a piece of the solution, but none of them have all of it. I'd much rather the community solves this and standardizes before Microsoft implements their own system, with the same stated goals, but which makes users accustomed to more lock-in and makes developers more dependent upon MS.
I have no idea what you're talking about with running "only" Exchange. IMAP & POP3 are just protocol stacks that run as part of a functioning Exchange server.
I mean running an exchange server without POP and IMAP enabled.
From what you say, it sounds like you're trying to sync two mail servers using IMAP... WTF? Neither IMAP or POP3 as protocols were designed for that at all.
Not at all, older versions of the exchange server used to have separate mailboxes for users connecting via exchange and POP.
Why not just connect directly to the Exchange server via IMAP? Store everything there (clustering if you want/need to deal with those hassles).
This is, indeed, what we tried, but no one can seem to keep the server stable in this configuration. Thus, in multiple enterprises with multiple admins the end solution turns out to be running separate servers for Windows and non-Windows clients.
It sounds like kown a bunch of *NIX admins who try to run an Exchange server with little or no training, and don't understand at all how Exchange is architected.
This has been with quite a few different admins. Right now we have a bunch of Windows only guys who don't seem to understand anything else. Since most of us in engineering (75% of the whole company) don't use Windows and need tools unavailable in Windows they end up trying to hack together solutions or we just end up running our own servers while they manage a few dozen Windows workstations for the corporate headquarters.
I guess you experience just does not jive with that of mine or of people I know. "Exchange server pop problems" yields about 7 million hits in Google, so I don't think I'm alone.
Have you tried Foxit? It seems to be a favorite of many. Also, I've heard the Adobe reader works acceptably if you strip out all of the default plug-ins enabled.
Umm, OS X is unusable for me, precisely because it does not have a centralized mechanism for user-specified colors.
In my experience, if you use one of the customization tools, you can more universally modify OS X than pretty much any other OS, as so few programs use custom UI sets.
In particular, every application and its brother feels free to just go ahead and use Evil Blinding White Backgrounds, and there's nothing you can do about it.
I find this is true in almost every OS, although their are certainly plenty of programs that do allow you to customize editing windows. As far as PDFs are concerned, that is not at all their purpose. PDFs are for documents a creator wants presented exactly in some manner. For general information with user customizable display, a mark up like HTML should be used.
I have to have low-contrast with a dark background and lighter foreground. Otherwise I get bad headaches after a few minutes.
Try the "Universal Access" preference pane. It allows you to specify high and low contrast settings for people with visual disabilities and even includes a contrast slider bar that applies to all programs using the standard display APIs. I'm not sure how useful it will be for you, since most everyone I know needs higher contrast, not lower. Maybe you should adjust that in your monitor settings, since most will adjust from no contrast on up to anything you want.
I'm tired of this canard that the only people who use OSS products are those who have some ideological connection to it...
This is called a "straw man argument." I never claimed people use OSS only for ideological reasons. Nor did I claim that OSS is not superior for many uses. What I said was that I look at what I want to get done and then evaluate the tools based upon how well they will allow me to do that. The previous poster was arguing that if a tool is not OSS it should not be evaluated, since they seem to feel that being OSS is the only criteria that matters. I think that is foolish, given my purpose and the only purpose for which that validation method is not foolish is if your primary goal is promote OSS.
I don't have a problem with someone not using Linux. The BSD's, OpenSolaris, Minix, and other OS (including Syllable, Haiku, and other hobby OS') are all great, and a good chunk of people use them every day to "get work done, to communicate, to create".
Sure people all use different OS's (both open and closed source) for different tasks. If you read this thread you'd see that I earlier mentioned that I use Linux, OpenBSD, and OS X daily, as well as NetBSD and Windows on occasion. I use the OS and other software best suited to my task. I think evaluating every OS you can for functionality, or even for ideas to add to other OS's is great. Heck, here at work we've copied features we need from Linux and added them to OpenBSD a number of times.
The opposite of that, however, is when you refuse to even look at alternative OS's to the point where you advocate we should not even discuss the feature set of OS's here on Slashdot. I don't care if you only use Windows or you only use BeOS. When you are xenophobic to the point that you go out of your way to complain that others are discussing the features of another OS, unless your primary purpose is to use that OS, somehow, then you're being foolish. That is what the previous poster was advocating.
PDF is a lousy choice if the user needs to be able to view it onscreen... Ordinarily? Plain text.
Sigh, that is not really an option. If I need to send a scientific whitepaper, including graphs and diagrams, etc. plaintext is not really an option. If I need to send a professional looking manual, plaintext is not an option. It just does not have enough features. You make valid complaints that PDF is misused for documents that don't need it, and this is true. At the same time, however, all of your complaints actually about PDF are complaints about the tools you are using, not the format itself.
I noticed you had no option for YOU to go deal with the mom beater.
Unless this is direct action, then it is a subset of vigilantism. Maybe your mom is just using you as unwitting muscle for her extortion scam. Give me $100 or I'll tell my son to beat you up.
To me, that is a better option, or even better than THAT, is that your mom gets the training and the tools needed to protect herself.
Except by its very nature there is no witness to a spam attack, so any retaliation will have to be after the fact. If you're in a cyber-cafe and watch a guy actually send out spam, go ahead and kick him in the nuts. Be my guest. Anything short of that, however, and you're acting on hearsay.
With this SPAM deal, people getting spammed opt out automatically, and in large numbers, that's it, all it does is speed up the process and further protect against a backlash from the scumbag spam scammers.
Provided the e-mail listed is a real opt-out address. If, however, it is your mom's e-mail address then you just helped automatically DDoS her. Why don't you think the police just open each spam and go bust the people whose product is being advertised? The answer is because they have no proof it actually originated with that company and it would be pathetically easy to frame someone. The same goes for this system.
There is nothing illogical or unethical about it that I can see, and it doesn't even come close to being a vigilante effort, it is pure self defense.
In the same sense that rigging a shotgun to automatically shoot anyone stepping onto your front porch is "self-defense" against the guy who painted graffiti your door last week. The problem is, you don't know if the guy getting shot is the mailman, the vandal, or some guy the vandal told to go knock on your door.
Only real spam in real people's inboxes gets reacted to, so there ya go. And "your competitor" you are going to poison the system with?
Okay you're obviously not comprehending so let me try this again in small words. Suppose I run Bob's TV Shop. I'm competing with Sally's Video Emporium. I decide it will be fun to take out Sally's online presence and the e-mail she uses to communicate with customers. So I go on the right IRC channel, buy an hour on a botnet, and send spam that says if you don't buy from Sally, she'll get her congressperson dad to raise taxes. It doesn't matter what the message says, so long as it is not effective advertising and it is clearly spam. Then, I use Sally's e-mail address as the opt-out address.
Now you and your friends automated network detect this spam and responds by sending thousands of messages to Sally. Her mail becomes useless. Her customers can't reach her. They then try the competition, me. Worse, assuming Sally eventually gets real help and talks to her ISP, your automated system's attack gets added to the DDoS signature database and I can later send you spam from myself without the response opt-out messages ever reaching me (assuming Sally and I have the same local ISP). I get to take out a competitor at the same time as I inoculate my ISP against your system.
The net total for me, I make money and steal customers and take out an innocent competitor using your automated system. And you think this is a good idea?
We need to get rid of this bogus institutionalized and brainwashed politically correct weenieism in our society, you ARE allowed self defense, at least in the US anyway...
And you are exactly the reason why some people feel we should no longer have that right, because they abuse it and react violently without the facts. Self defense is shooting the guy about to shoot you. This is legal. Self-defense is not going over to the guy's house who someone told you was the guy who stole your stereo and shooting in the windows. You don't know who sent spam. You don't know if the opt-out address is valid. Thus, reacting predictably and in an automated fashion against anyone whose e-mail address is listed as an opt-out address in spam is bound to lead to abuse. It's like a vigilante organization having a publicly editable hit list. It is dumb.
This bill and bills like it are a horrible idea. The power and success of the Internet is that it's lightly regulated and robustly competitive, especially for hosting services.
The internet's success comes from the fact that network operators are given special privileges to act like common carriers and with it are required to act as impartial carriers of data. They are now trying to form a cartel and bypass that requirement of impartiality.
If some ISP wants to charge extra or restrict access to some Internet application how do you think their customers will behave?
Given that their customers are other network carriers in this instance who want to do the same thing to gouge money from the successful, I suspect they'll agree to collude and form a cartel.
Either way the individual customers and overall market should decide prices and services NOT the Federal Government.
The federal government should not decide prices, but if network operators want all of the privileges afforded to common carriers, they should have to impartially carry data like common carriers, not charge extra for not intentionally slowing things down for people who aren't even their direct customers.
An analogy might be, what if the law said only one package shipping companies could operate in a given geographic region, to avoid confusion (only one phone and one cable company is given access to the last mile public right of ways in most places). So one company took over for each state. All fine and good. They agree to impartially carry the packages in return for immunity to prosecution for accidentally transporting drugs or guns or child porn, since they just move anything without looking. They all agree to carry one another's packages, some paying the other a small fee, but basically it all working out. Then the company in California decides, hey, why don't we make sure packages coming from Ford motors are delayed in our shipping room an extra week unless they pay us an additional fee. Its not like they can stop using us, we're 18 customers away from them. The market can't respond effectively through so many intermediaries. They are no longer behaving impartially, so why shouldn't they be held accountable for what they are shipping? And what about the other shippers? Will they cancel their relationships with this one, or will they make a deal and all start doing the same as a way to get more money? My bet is the latter.
I'm all for the free market working things out, but this is nowhere near a free market situation at this point. When anyone can string up lines on the telephone poles and run wires to all the houses, then we'll be getting close. Most end users have no choice, or very little choice. They can go with the monopoly cable company or the monopoly phone company, both of whom only bundle their service with their other service. Hell, it is cheaper for me to buy cable TV + cable internet than it is to just buy cable internet. That doesn't exactly sound like something the free market would produce?
If you want the Feds to give everyone the same access everywhere and for the same price (such as was done with phone, mail, and electrical service) then you penalize the rational consumers and promote things like urban sprawl and government sponsored (universal access) monopolies.
The government is already enforcing monopolies on cable and telephone lines, which are the only "last mile" connection available to most users. Claiming then, that you should not regulate the behaviors of those monopolies is just plain foolish.
I predict this leads to wider adoption of usage caps and bandwidth charges on broadband services. If they can't charge the site owners, they'll start charging the users.
There are two things wrong with your theory. The first is that this legislation squashing their attempt at extorting more money will motivate anything. They are already charging what the market will bear, not what it costs them. Most broadband services are bundled with Cable TV, or regular telephone service, on which the provider has a local monopoly (in most areas). It's not like they have tight margins or anything. They want as much as they can get, but don't need any more money to survive.
Secondly, most services already have usage/bandwidth caps. They are just invisible ones enforced under their usage terms where they force "resource hogs" to upgrade to a business account or be shut off. The last thing most of the broadband providers want is for this to be visible and clear-cut to the end user. Then people could easily compare services and prices and pay for what they needed. No they make more money with the current "we won't tell you what you're buying" approach.
Slashdot Mirror
So let me get this straight, this guy is arguing that because he's read a lot about first generation Apple products being buggy, they are not doing as good of a job as everyone else? And he has no numbers to back this up? And we're just supposed to assume he's right?
Apple products get more press coverage. They are high profile and do a better job attracting the press than most other manufacturers. They also tend to be more cutting edge than is average and since many users want OS X and there is only one practical source of hardware that runs OS X, people care about their releases. Thus, when there is a problem, everyone hears about it. Does that mean they have more problems? Independent reviews of their hardware reliability put them at or near the top of the heap. This is despite releasing more "cutting edge" features that can't benefit from the mistakes of others. I've heard it said they update their product line less often, which may mitigate this somewhat. Still, from what I've seen their products, first rev or otherwise are no worse than anyone else's. I don't buy first rev cars, or other expensive, engineering heavy, devices. I usually don't do the same with computers, from any manufacturer. Basically, I just don't see any evidence that Apple is worse (or even as bad) as the average.
Those aren't proper analogies to begin with, but when you add the fourth item, "I'm a criminal so we may as well ignore my civil rights." it becomes pretty obvious, doesn't it?
How are these not proper analogies? You argued since you, in particular, are not making use of a right, there is no problem if the government takes it away.
How about a better analogy, some hoodlums are shooting out your windows with a BB gun on a regular basis, so you invite a police to patrol outside your house at night.
Or maybe, some hoodlums are shooting BB guns on a regular basis, so the police without your approval and without a court warrant set up surveillance inside your house.
Remember this is violating the separation of powers, is unsupervised, and was not asked for (I don't remember a referendum).
Exactly what the terrorists hiding in Saudi Arabia were doing.
Saudi Arabia is easy to monitor. It is a different situation in the US where you can buy a one time use, disposable cell phone at gas stations.
The government has shown no way in which this is effective. During the last test 13 out of 13 times agents were able to bring a bomb aboard a plane. They were able to sneak an AR-15 assault rifle on for crissakes. Some guy from Texas accidentally brought a huge hunting knife on board. Most of the US coastline is unguarded. Most shipping containers entering the US are completely ignored. Their methods are ineffective at catching "terrorists" but great for making it seem like they're doing something while scaring the general public.
But it doesn't matter, because terrorists are not a significant threat. Where is the benefit? We stop another 911 and save a few thousand lives at the cost of breaking the fundamental principals of our government and turning the US into another China? The US government, without checks and balances and no longer bound by the constitution is a much greater threat to both US citizens and the world than Islamic militants could ever dream of being.
I can see instances where restriction of civil rights might be necessary. Like in a real war, against a nation of similar power. That is not the case here. There is no real benefit to all of the surveillance and absolutely, positively no benefit at all to surveillance without judicial oversight. You're repeatedly failed to address this point. You've said that you don't care if someone looks over your shoulder since you're not doing anything wrong. What then is the executive branch's objection to the judicial and legislative branches looking over their shoulder? The answer is the same one it has been repeatedly in our history. They are doing something wrong.
so how does the OS distinguish between malware vs non-malware?
It does not, per se. It gives the user the information they need to decide what is malware, while at the same time providing the granularity of control the user needs in order to do what they want.
The granularity of control on Windows right now is pathetic. Generally, software can either do everything or nothing, the least amount of granularity possible.
Worse, due to architectural decisions, poor coding, and an unmaintainable codebase, Windows often allows others to bypass even that gross level of control and install and run software without the approval of the end user.
Finally, the UI in Windows does a horrible job of giving users the information they need to decide what is and is not malware. It does not warn me when something wants to read my e-mail address book. It does not warn me when something starts modifying my .doc files for the first time. It does not even provide me with adequate information to distinguish between data and programs.
Now I know some people will object on the grounds that other OS's don't take care of this either. The reason for this is that other OS's don't have a malware problem so the market is not demanding a solution.
If the user is dumb enough to click install w/o knowing fully what he/she is doing (about 90% of how all malwares are installed these days)...
First, most malware by the numbers is installed in an automated fashion without any user interaction. I don't know where you got the idea that user interaction was required for 90%, when it is actually more like 35%. Second, users aren't being dumb, for the most part. They aren't given the information they need to make a decision, or the control they need to have a system that is both usable and secure. Just add a "run but don't let it fuck my system in the ass" option for running software by default and much of the problem would go away. You can blame the end users when malware is a trojan and when the OS informs and empowers them.Are you not actually reading what I'm typing? That must be it. There is no monopoly unless your local people cause it to be so.
Assuming this is true (which it isn't as several people have pointed out) it doesn't matter. It is still the government which is just as constrained by the constitution as the federal government. It is the state and federal courts that have not done their job and stopped the unconstitutional action.
Which "special privileges" are you referring to?
Eminent domain right of ways, 200 billion dollars in federal subsidy just for "last mile" connections in the most recent few years, and immunity to prosecution for many crimes, supposedly in exchange for impartially carrying data.
The several competing providers who have chosen to set up in my area are trying very hard to win me over, always offering better deals and counter-deals on bandwidth.
I've lived in three of the ten largest cities in the US during the last decade. I live right next to one of the largest hubs of the internet now. I've never had a choice of more than one cable company offering bundled with their service and one phone company offering bundled with their service. Theoretically the law requires the phone company to allow competition on their lines, but realistically it is not enforced and the one time I tried to get such a service the company I was working with gave up, because they did not have enough money to fight the necessary court battles since the authorities would not enforce the laws. If you actually have competition where you are, great, but the vast majority of the US does not and in light of that we cannot expect competitive pressures to act to solve this issue.
No, I think your previous implication that anyone, like me, that thinks it's OK to adjust prices based on what you're actually having to do to carry traffic to/from thousands of networks is also comfortable being a racist is... exactly an ad hominem attack
No, its called an analogy. You draw a parallel between two things to demonstrate why since one is agreed to be wrong, the other is also wrong. You demonstrated no way in which these are not parallel, and thus have failed to address the point at all.
I don't think you're really understanding what "extortion" means. Recognizing that a third party is routing an enormous portion of their traffic over your finite network, and making a lot of money doing so, does make talking to that user about traffic optimization a very legitimate objective.
Recognizing that your customers paid you to deliver the traffic, but you can threaten the content provides with intentionally breaking their service and not their competitors is exactly extortion. If the postal system decided to start slowing down mail between Netflix and their customers, unless Netflix paid an additional fee (already having paid postage), then that is extortion. Gee, you'd hate to have Blockbuster take over because their mail goes through faster, wouldn't you? People will start going to them if it takes three weeks to turn around a DVD instead of a few days. The shipping is already paid for. The postal system isn't recognizing that DVDs are more fragile, or need to cost more to ship. Otherwise; Blockbuster would suffer equally. They're recognizing that they can hurt a company and the company is vulnerable to extortion. The same goes for these ISPs. Google traffic is no different than other traffic. They can already charge different prices for different traffic. No. They just noticed Google is vulnerable to extortion.
Google is not a customer of my ISP...
True, the end users are the customers and so are the peering networks. The customers paid for the traffic. The peers paid (or bartered) for the traffic. This is just double charging because they can because the market cannot act effectively with dozens of intermediary customers.
A common carrier like UPS, you mean?
Yes. They can discriminate based up
Proof of your "pennies on the dollar" claim, please.
Here is the first article article Google returned (it tallies the government subsidy for last mile infrastructure at 200 billion), but it is just scratching the surface of the total subsidies in confiscated land and core internet lines. It not hard to find thousands of similar tales. It's not not like this is a secret or anything. This is pretty well documented public knowledge.
Also, the government doesn't actually DO anything like you suggest. They have contractors do it.
I see, so if the government pays someone else to kick me out of my home and move troops in for free room and board it is not unconstitutional. What an interesting and moronic assertion.
Over time, such things pay for themselves, and selling "used" wires for less than the cost of installation sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Brand new, never lit fiber is not "used." It does not "pay for itself" at all. It is the government giving money and special privileges (including a police enforced monopoly) to certain companies that are now (as usual) breaking their end of the deal. This is a tired theme in US history. The government makes a deal with private industry "for the good of the people." The private industry becomes wealthy and then bribes the government so they no longer have to keep their half of the bargain.
You've also failed to address every other point I made in my previous post. Give it up already.
So, unless you can show me where the government is taking money from taxpayers and giving it directly to ISPs, you're just blowin' smoke.
Please. The federal government paid for laying most of the fiber that makes up the backbone, which they then sold to network carriers for pennies on the dollar. That is a subsidy.
hen you're talking about it in the wrong venue. This is a discussion about federal legislation, and that has nothing to do with you local zoning rules.
Ahh, but the local and state governments enforce the monopoly and the federal government then provides special privileges, both of which together make the actions of these ISPs de facto censorship. I don't care which part of the government is responsible for which act, only the end result, which I notice you don't deny.
If you're trying to actually make any sort of rhetorical headway, here, you might consider pulling your head out of your ass.
You think ad hominem attacks are going to make me consider your arguments more seriously?
Looking at your IP traffic and noticing that a substantial part of your overhead is going into packets to/from a particular third party's network (say, eBay), or that certain kinds of traffic involve longer handshakes/keep-alives, or require more round trips because of regular losses in some router upstream...
They aren't banning price discrimination based upon traffic characteristics, just upon the originator. If they want to negotiate traffic characteristics into their peering contracts, nothing is stopping them, but handling it differently depending upon whether they get a kickback from someone who is not even their customer, well that is just extortion. You're very mistaken about this. They are not doing what you claim, they are looking for who has the money (Google, MS, eBay) and going after those who have more need, not those with particular traffic types. Don't try to josh me, we sell them the tools they're using to try to bill QoS.
You pay your typical residential ISP to get you onto their network, not to provide any particular, exact flavor of peering to any specific other network in a particular way.
No. I pay them to impartially transmit and receive whatever data I decide, without regard for who it is to or from or what is in the packet. That is what a common carrier is obligated to do.
Let's take an example. Verizon and Google seem to be popular. Let's say Google is hosted with AT&T. So now we have Verizon's customers using their bandwidth to access Google on AT&T's network, and not getting any money for it. This in and of itself is false. The customers pay for the access, and if they didn't use it for Google then they would use it elsewhere. Since AT&T is the funnel for the traffic from all other ISPs, they charge Google a large amount. It seems like everyone got their money -- AT&T from Google and Verizon from its customers.
You're making several mistakes. One, in this case it would not necessarily be Verizon charging, but lets say Bob's ISP which is a customer of a customer of a customer of Verizon. Second, they aren't charging for bandwidth (they already have a peering arrangement with their upstream provider, which has one with another which has one with another which has one with Verizon which has one with AT&T). What they are charging for is for not artificially slowing down or throwing away some of the packets going between Google and their end users. This technically probably violates their peering agreement, but it is much more likely that all the ISPs will form a cartel and profit together than it is that they will require compliance. Third, because of the vast number of intermediaries the free market is very slow to react and because most instantiations of "Bob's ISP" are geographical monopolies enforced by the government's granting access to public right of ways, there is no free market action at all at the endpoint.
The problem with your proposed solution is that it presupposes both a free market (which does not exist) and that ISPs will not collude to gouge users (which they probably will).
In the case being discussed, the content of your blog (your speech) or the content of some streaming media spooling off of a small company's server (as opposed to, say, AOL's or Google's) have nothing to do with it. Censorship isn't even part of the discussion. What's being talked about is who pays for the bandwidth being used. That's it.
So it is alright for them to charge quadruple to black people? How about increasing prices five orders of magnitude for anyone not a member of the republican party? After all the end user can always switch ISPs. it's not like police are arresting people who try to set up their own ISP using the same public right of ways... oh wait, yes they are.
Censoring based upon content or speaker is still censorship.
If a little mom-and-pop web site starts getting a ton of traffic from a Slashdotting, do you really think that their monthly costs don't go up? Who should pay for that... the ISP providing their pipe? How are they causing the Slashdotting?
People pay for bandwidth in both directions so, both parties are paying for it in this case, as it should be. The site is uploading more, so they pay more. The end users are downloading more, so they pay for that, if they are not doing it in lieu of other traffic. You're mistaking the fact that most end users buy a surplus for them not having to pay. This is incorrect.
This isn't about censorship, it's about the economic realities of the fact that huge IP pipes aren't a natural occuring resource - they're mostly built and run by private companies.
Please. This is about finding more sources of revenue and ways to differentiate in the market. ISPs and other network providers should charge what it costs for data impartially, regardless of how rich or poor or how dependent upon network service the originator of the packet is. Anything else voids their common carrier status. A packet is a packet. Charging more to not artificially slow down one and not for another because you know your customer's customer's customer really needs them to go through in a timely fashion is just extortion.
But why should you be able to dictate to some other ISP how much of your traffic they should have to carry, and at what price?
Because in exchange for that impartial service my tax dollars subsidize their pipes. Because in exchange for that impartial service we give them immunity for prosecution for all the libel, death threats, and child porn they transmit and publish. Because in exchange for that impartial service the police arrest anyone who tries to compete with them, granting them a geographical monopoly.
If you don't like the price they charge, you change carriers.
I'd be happy to, but it is illegal for another carrier to run lines to my house.
then become your own carrier
See above.
Arguing that the free market will sort it out makes absolutely no sense in a market with government enforced monopolies, where the ISPs are subsidized with tax dollars and special laws. Would you like proof. It costs me less money to buy cable TV and cable internet as a package than it does to just buy cable Internet. I cannot buy a DSL line without also buying an expensive and unneeded phone line. In a free market, that neither would be the case because competition would force companies to offer what users want. That has not happened over the last 5+ years this has been the case.
There is a big difference between China's government controlling speech and a US company choosing to to transmit speech by another.
...Except when that company has been granted special rights and geographical monopoly enforced by the police for acting as an agent of the government. Our tax dollars fund them. Our police arrest their competition. Our laws exempt them from prosecution for certain crimes. And now, the only thing they were asked in return (to carry data impartially) they want to stop doing. Fine. But make sure they pay back the money with which we subsidized their infrastructure. Make sure the public right of ways are opened to any and all competitors. Make sure they are prosecuted for any libel, threats, child porn, etc. they transmit and publish. Otherwise, it is government censorship, just using a third party.
Freedom of speech is violated when there are legal consequences from government for saying what you think. This is not that. We had freedom of speech before the internet even existed, I don't see how we're losing it with a tiered system.
Technology changes and with it free speech issues. For example, as the printing press became the medium of choice, would you consider it a free speech issue if the government required a license to sell printing presses? What if they refused licenses to anyone who sold to black people? Would that constitute denying black people their freedom of speech? I assert that it does, as the press sellers, restricted by government sanctions, are acting as their agents by proxy.
If I run telephone lines through the public right of ways to the houses of people who agree to be my customers, the police arrest me. They don't arrest the cable company and they don't arrest the phone company and in most places that counts as the government enforcing them as monopolies. If then, these government enforced monopolies restrict free speech, they are in some way at least acting as agents of the government.
t trivializes TRUE abuses and suspensions of human rights, and clouds the issue in people's minds.
I don't think anyone would compare these to the more severe civil rights abuses also occurring. Rather, I think, there is more danger of ignoring the abuses with the classic fallacy of "at least we're not as bad as..."
"So what if we restrict many kinds of free speech, we're still not as bad as China," is no justification at all, but it is often cited anyway.
When people don't understand what something is, they can't make intelligent decisions about it.
Which is why we need more discussion of this issue and why it is a civil rights abuse, rather than less.
Only the government can "censor" anyone. ISPs routinely "censor" content, and have no restrictions on doing so.
You're mistaken. The government and agents acting on their behalf can censor. ISPs are not just private companies. They are private companies subsidized by taxpayer dollars, granted special immunity for breaking certain laws, and who are granted monopolies in geographical regions enforced by the government using the police.
In most localities only one phone and one cable company are granted the right to run lines to your house through the public right of ways upon which the telephone poles and underground cables are placed. The police stop anyone else from doing so, thus limiting you to only one or two possible ISPs. Thus the government is censoring you if those companies do, by denying you the option of going with another provider supplied by the free market.
ISPs are granted special privileges for acting as impartial carriers of data. They are not prosecuted, despite the fact that they violate copyright law, transfer child pornography, publish libel, publish trade secrets, publish threats, etc. This is because they just impartially move data for the good of the country (acting as agents of the government) and are thus not responsible for what data they move. Now, however, they want to take responsibility for what data they are moving in order to extort money from those who are more reliant upon them. I think they should be allowed to do so, just as soon as anyone can string last mile wire and as soon as they lose their common carrier immunities.
The government employing a private company, granted special privileges, and whose competition is arrested by the police is not a legal way for the government to do an end-run around the constitution. ISPs are clearly acting as government agencies and as such are subject to constitutional limitations.
Really, having a package repository is the best currently available solution for mitigating the risk of trojans.
I actually think mandatory access controls, is better, right now. In truth, I don't trust that everything in a repository has been thoroughly audited enough for trojans. Further, using MAC, jails, VMs, or the like simultaneously protects against exploitable vulnerabilities. It also grants more granularity to what levels of trust are granted. I might want to run photoshop, but I also might not want to give it network access, or access to modify my kernel.
That and giving options of the sort "Do you want this program to alter your existing files? Do you want to grant this program network access?" would make it difficult for trojans to do any damage. (On the other hand, we can consider anything in the package repository to be trusted, or at least to have reasonable access defaults.)
Agreed. The level of trust can be set to defaults based upon the number of sources who claim it has been audited, etc. with the most restrictive defaults applied to new software from unknown, or untrustworthy sources. Several projects have this implemented to some degree, but the usability and integration into the OS UI has not yet been done well (that I've seen).
Of course, that would require a restructuring of UNIX privileges into a four-tier system. Or, to maintain backwards compatibility, we could make many new groups and assign each program to a group.
Most current implementations use a group/priviledge paradigm, but separated from traditional privileges and applied at the "VM" layer.
Third-party checking of software that's not available in the package repository is a logistic nightmare. The reason that those packages aren't in the repository are stability issues, userbase issues, and manpower issues.
I don't think it is reasonable to expect that all software will always be able to be kept in the same centralized repository going forward. Rather, I anticipate multiple repositories maintained by different groups, peer-to-peer storage, and other sources of software. Certification of software via checksum or something more robust can be done by the developer as well as by any auditors. Further, there will still be plenty of closed source software, with no outside auditors for any popular desktop system, so binary installs and management needs to be accounted for.
Right now I do IM binaries to people and I do regularly transfer software via portable drives and LANs. I don't want to have to have to re-download software from a repository for every machine, especially given licensing concerns and the fact that software availability is never guaranteed going forward. I don't think losing this functionality is acceptable or necessary going forward. Rather, I think said functionality can be merged with a package manager so that regardless of the source, software can contain a reference to an authoritative repository, be automatically updated, and it can be done with increased, not decreased security.
There was violence before TV and Games and Movies. There were farm boys who grew up in peaceful farms that never heard a shot fired in anger or had a punch thrown whom grew up to be Soldiers.
This is true, but I don't think any reasonable person can believe that people cannot be trained and conditioned to be more violent. The army's basic training was designed to address the fact that most soldiers, given a gun and sent to war, would intentionally miss their targets rather than shoot another human being. Since then, the rates of intentionally missing the enemy have dropped drastically.
The reporter (or more likely editor) is a PC fool whom doesn't realize the simple basic truth. Violent Video games save us from wayyyyyy more random acts of violence then they do encourage them.
I don't think it is foolish to believe that violent video games encourage more violence than they prevent. I think it is foolish to believe they do either without some real, objective scientific studies. From what I've seen I'd tend to say there is little or no proof to support the belief they encourage violence, but I'm open to evidence to the contrary
Mind you, no matter the truth, I don't see any justification for banning or restricting them. Eating red meat probably encourages violence. Ditto for alcohol. That is what freedom is all about. Making choices for yourself and accepting responsibility for your actions. So you beat up a guy because you drank too much whiskey and played GTA. Great, it's still your fault, since you chose to do those things in the first place.
I guess too many of these folks are naive and really believe everything is sunshine and lollypops and don't understand the dark sides we all have.
I'd agree with this, but I think it is important to understand the nature of the human mind. We react in layers, to physical pain, emotions, and reasoned thinking. Violence is a possible reaction, but it is not "dark" per se, but rather survival oriented. We mostly act violently (or are driven to do so) when we are threatened, but violence is rarely the best solution to modern threats. The important thing is teaching people to recognize their violent emotions and the sources of them and to respond with the best solution to the underlying problem, rather than just reacting emotionally all the time. I think some of the problems exacerbated by video games and television is that they do often teach the lesson that it is appropriate to react emotively and try to make people idolize characters who basically act like large, violent, emotional infants.
Thus, I mostly agree with you that people are violent by nature and I believe that video games and the like should be the choice of each individual. I disagree with you that video games are likely to reduce violent behavior or that there is any proof of that hypothesis.
That's what I look for, too, when choosing target platforms for deploying trojans on.
In the beginning of my previous post I wrote, "It seems like I often hear, we don't like people to do this, so we make it hard. Usability (or the lack thereof) should not be a tool for making people do what you want them to." Here you are advocating doing that, for yet another issue. You know a great way to solve the trojan problem? Never turn the computer on, heck don't even put it together.
I like to find the "best" solution to a problem; the one that is scalable, makes logical sense, does not introduce new problems, and actually solves all of the problem. Avoiding problems by making computers less functional is not the "best" solution. If you read my description of an ideal package management and deployment format you'd note it included integration with MAC or jails. This is because of the potential of trojans, spyware, malware, etc. You'll also notice it included tie in to certifications and checksums. This also alleviates said problem, by allowing for automated defaults based upon third party evaluations. Trojans aren't the biggest threat to a system today, but they are a significant one and one that can be all but completely mitigated, if people are motivated to do that. Unfortunately, too many people like you would rather advocate making computers less functional and harder to use under the assumption that it will make them more secure. Well guess what, you're right. Your favorite OS will be a lot more secure, but no one will be using it because it sucks. They'll be using something functional, even if they have to sacrifice security.
The above statement is totally and completely false.
I'm just stating what I recall as a user of the above. I don't know how it was configured or why, but it certainly was.
Tens of thousands of geographically dispersed enterprises that run Exchange in mixed environments would disagree with you. I know admins at plenty of Exchange server shops besides mine, and none of them have ever experienced "instability" due to serving mail via POP and IMAP. By the way, if you could describe the nature of the instability, I would perhaps be more inclined to believe your reports. What happens, exactly?
The machine is still up, but it serves no mail. Mail is silently dropped into nowhere. A reboot is the only fix that seems to work.
Nice straw man.
I don't think you know what a "straw man argument" is. It is a weak argument proposed and attributed to one's opponent, and then discredited. For example, I might write, "many proponents of Microsoft will argue that Microsoft was innovative when they created DOS, but those people are wrong since MS bought DOS from another company." It is putting words in your opponents mouth and then discrediting those words.
A Google for "linux pop problems" yields more than 13 million hits.
Hmm, actually given that MS has about 30% share by servers numbers, I suspect that would suggest the opposite what you intended it to support. Not that such a loose count is really meaningful, but you can certainly find plenty of people asking about similar problems with a more refined search.
Just for serendipity, the exchange server here dies again today. It just locked up for no real reason with no config changes. It is unrelated to the configuration we were discussing, but still an interesting coincidence.
Fortunately, Apple was kind enough to open source Darwin, but it didn't need to, and it choose not to open source the Aqua UI and the Finder shell.
Kind enough? Apple wasn't kind, they just recognize the value of the open source model. By contributing changes back, they maintain more parity with other software developers using the same or very similar code. Thus, they can pull in more changes and improvements others make, more easily.
I could be mistaken, but I don't think they would have been able to do this had Darwin been based on GPL'ed software.
The GPL certainly is a barrier to some usages, which is probably why Apple chose to use mostly BSD licensed software, and license much code they develop with a similar license.
That said, the BSDs are great projects (as are public domain projects like SQLite) and I wouldn't want to see them disappear. I believe that the core focus of the OSS community should be on GPL'ed software (because "embrace and extend" does in fact happen), but there's definitely an argument and a place for BSD-style licenses.
If I was starting a new project in a new area, I'd likely pick GPL for the license, with one exception. If I was building a core architectural feature, like a new form of networking or filesystem, and I wanted that to be as widely adopted as possible, I'd go with a BSD style license. Sometimes you want Apple and Microsoft to integrate your code, even if it means they will maintain their own closed source version. ZeroConf is a good example. By licensing their implementation with a FreeBSD style license, Apple got printer manufacturers on board and made it a killer feature. This is much more palatable than a GPL license to them and even MS will probably have to integrate the code eventually or suffer comparisons about how hard it is to setup LAN networking and device discovery compared to other OS's.
The thing I do not like about the LSB is that it seems to be pampering too much to the desires of the closed source application suppliers who only ship binaries not source.
I disagree, not that they are doing it, but that they shouldn't be doing it. It seems like I often hear, we don't like people to do this, so we make it hard. Usability (or the lack thereof) should not be a tool for making people do what you want them to. It should be simple to distribute source if you want and simple to distribute only a binary and it should be simple to build and install and upgrade as the user desires.
I really haven't seen an application installation and management solution I like for all general purpose uses and I think this sort of intentional lack of functionality does a lot more harm than good. What I'd really like to see is an implementation of OpenStep for packages that works well for everything and that is integrated with a package management system that allows the user to find/add/update software from a single location, and which also integrates with both versioning and MAC or jails and possibly certifications.
I want to be able to grab a program from anywhere, the web, an e-mail, IM from a friend, or by looking in my package manager. I want to specify what that software can do on my machine, and I want my computer to keep it up-to-date for me, but let me roll back to a previous version if I need to. Further, I want my machine to checksum and look at certification for a program and easily display to me some indication of how trustworthy that software is.
I really feel this is a niche that needs to be filled. Several OS's and distro have a piece of the solution, but none of them have all of it. I'd much rather the community solves this and standardizes before Microsoft implements their own system, with the same stated goals, but which makes users accustomed to more lock-in and makes developers more dependent upon MS.
I have no idea what you're talking about with running "only" Exchange. IMAP & POP3 are just protocol stacks that run as part of a functioning Exchange server.
I mean running an exchange server without POP and IMAP enabled.
From what you say, it sounds like you're trying to sync two mail servers using IMAP... WTF? Neither IMAP or POP3 as protocols were designed for that at all.
Not at all, older versions of the exchange server used to have separate mailboxes for users connecting via exchange and POP.
Why not just connect directly to the Exchange server via IMAP? Store everything there (clustering if you want/need to deal with those hassles).
This is, indeed, what we tried, but no one can seem to keep the server stable in this configuration. Thus, in multiple enterprises with multiple admins the end solution turns out to be running separate servers for Windows and non-Windows clients.
It sounds like kown a bunch of *NIX admins who try to run an Exchange server with little or no training, and don't understand at all how Exchange is architected.
This has been with quite a few different admins. Right now we have a bunch of Windows only guys who don't seem to understand anything else. Since most of us in engineering (75% of the whole company) don't use Windows and need tools unavailable in Windows they end up trying to hack together solutions or we just end up running our own servers while they manage a few dozen Windows workstations for the corporate headquarters.
I guess you experience just does not jive with that of mine or of people I know. "Exchange server pop problems" yields about 7 million hits in Google, so I don't think I'm alone.
I don't remember the names of all of them.
Have you tried Foxit? It seems to be a favorite of many. Also, I've heard the Adobe reader works acceptably if you strip out all of the default plug-ins enabled.
Umm, OS X is unusable for me, precisely because it does not have a centralized mechanism for user-specified colors.
In my experience, if you use one of the customization tools, you can more universally modify OS X than pretty much any other OS, as so few programs use custom UI sets.
In particular, every application and its brother feels free to just go ahead and use Evil Blinding White Backgrounds, and there's nothing you can do about it.
I find this is true in almost every OS, although their are certainly plenty of programs that do allow you to customize editing windows. As far as PDFs are concerned, that is not at all their purpose. PDFs are for documents a creator wants presented exactly in some manner. For general information with user customizable display, a mark up like HTML should be used.
I have to have low-contrast with a dark background and lighter foreground. Otherwise I get bad headaches after a few minutes.
Try the "Universal Access" preference pane. It allows you to specify high and low contrast settings for people with visual disabilities and even includes a contrast slider bar that applies to all programs using the standard display APIs. I'm not sure how useful it will be for you, since most everyone I know needs higher contrast, not lower. Maybe you should adjust that in your monitor settings, since most will adjust from no contrast on up to anything you want.
I'm tired of this canard that the only people who use OSS products are those who have some ideological connection to it...
This is called a "straw man argument." I never claimed people use OSS only for ideological reasons. Nor did I claim that OSS is not superior for many uses. What I said was that I look at what I want to get done and then evaluate the tools based upon how well they will allow me to do that. The previous poster was arguing that if a tool is not OSS it should not be evaluated, since they seem to feel that being OSS is the only criteria that matters. I think that is foolish, given my purpose and the only purpose for which that validation method is not foolish is if your primary goal is promote OSS.
I don't have a problem with someone not using Linux. The BSD's, OpenSolaris, Minix, and other OS (including Syllable, Haiku, and other hobby OS') are all great, and a good chunk of people use them every day to "get work done, to communicate, to create".
Sure people all use different OS's (both open and closed source) for different tasks. If you read this thread you'd see that I earlier mentioned that I use Linux, OpenBSD, and OS X daily, as well as NetBSD and Windows on occasion. I use the OS and other software best suited to my task. I think evaluating every OS you can for functionality, or even for ideas to add to other OS's is great. Heck, here at work we've copied features we need from Linux and added them to OpenBSD a number of times.
The opposite of that, however, is when you refuse to even look at alternative OS's to the point where you advocate we should not even discuss the feature set of OS's here on Slashdot. I don't care if you only use Windows or you only use BeOS. When you are xenophobic to the point that you go out of your way to complain that others are discussing the features of another OS, unless your primary purpose is to use that OS, somehow, then you're being foolish. That is what the previous poster was advocating.
PDF is a lousy choice if the user needs to be able to view it onscreen... Ordinarily? Plain text.
Sigh, that is not really an option. If I need to send a scientific whitepaper, including graphs and diagrams, etc. plaintext is not really an option. If I need to send a professional looking manual, plaintext is not an option. It just does not have enough features. You make valid complaints that PDF is misused for documents that don't need it, and this is true. At the same time, however, all of your complaints actually about PDF are complaints about the tools you are using, not the format itself.
I noticed you had no option for YOU to go deal with the mom beater.
Unless this is direct action, then it is a subset of vigilantism. Maybe your mom is just using you as unwitting muscle for her extortion scam. Give me $100 or I'll tell my son to beat you up.
To me, that is a better option, or even better than THAT, is that your mom gets the training and the tools needed to protect herself.
Except by its very nature there is no witness to a spam attack, so any retaliation will have to be after the fact. If you're in a cyber-cafe and watch a guy actually send out spam, go ahead and kick him in the nuts. Be my guest. Anything short of that, however, and you're acting on hearsay.
With this SPAM deal, people getting spammed opt out automatically, and in large numbers, that's it, all it does is speed up the process and further protect against a backlash from the scumbag spam scammers.
Provided the e-mail listed is a real opt-out address. If, however, it is your mom's e-mail address then you just helped automatically DDoS her. Why don't you think the police just open each spam and go bust the people whose product is being advertised? The answer is because they have no proof it actually originated with that company and it would be pathetically easy to frame someone. The same goes for this system.
There is nothing illogical or unethical about it that I can see, and it doesn't even come close to being a vigilante effort, it is pure self defense.
In the same sense that rigging a shotgun to automatically shoot anyone stepping onto your front porch is "self-defense" against the guy who painted graffiti your door last week. The problem is, you don't know if the guy getting shot is the mailman, the vandal, or some guy the vandal told to go knock on your door.
Only real spam in real people's inboxes gets reacted to, so there ya go. And "your competitor" you are going to poison the system with?
Okay you're obviously not comprehending so let me try this again in small words. Suppose I run Bob's TV Shop. I'm competing with Sally's Video Emporium. I decide it will be fun to take out Sally's online presence and the e-mail she uses to communicate with customers. So I go on the right IRC channel, buy an hour on a botnet, and send spam that says if you don't buy from Sally, she'll get her congressperson dad to raise taxes. It doesn't matter what the message says, so long as it is not effective advertising and it is clearly spam. Then, I use Sally's e-mail address as the opt-out address.
Now you and your friends automated network detect this spam and responds by sending thousands of messages to Sally. Her mail becomes useless. Her customers can't reach her. They then try the competition, me. Worse, assuming Sally eventually gets real help and talks to her ISP, your automated system's attack gets added to the DDoS signature database and I can later send you spam from myself without the response opt-out messages ever reaching me (assuming Sally and I have the same local ISP). I get to take out a competitor at the same time as I inoculate my ISP against your system.
The net total for me, I make money and steal customers and take out an innocent competitor using your automated system. And you think this is a good idea?
We need to get rid of this bogus institutionalized and brainwashed politically correct weenieism in our society, you ARE allowed self defense, at least in the US anyway...
And you are exactly the reason why some people feel we should no longer have that right, because they abuse it and react violently without the facts. Self defense is shooting the guy about to shoot you. This is legal. Self-defense is not going over to the guy's house who someone told you was the guy who stole your stereo and shooting in the windows. You don't know who sent spam. You don't know if the opt-out address is valid. Thus, reacting predictably and in an automated fashion against anyone whose e-mail address is listed as an opt-out address in spam is bound to lead to abuse. It's like a vigilante organization having a publicly editable hit list. It is dumb.
This bill and bills like it are a horrible idea. The power and success of the Internet is that it's lightly regulated and robustly competitive, especially for hosting services.
The internet's success comes from the fact that network operators are given special privileges to act like common carriers and with it are required to act as impartial carriers of data. They are now trying to form a cartel and bypass that requirement of impartiality.
If some ISP wants to charge extra or restrict access to some Internet application how do you think their customers will behave?
Given that their customers are other network carriers in this instance who want to do the same thing to gouge money from the successful, I suspect they'll agree to collude and form a cartel.
Either way the individual customers and overall market should decide prices and services NOT the Federal Government.
The federal government should not decide prices, but if network operators want all of the privileges afforded to common carriers, they should have to impartially carry data like common carriers, not charge extra for not intentionally slowing things down for people who aren't even their direct customers.
An analogy might be, what if the law said only one package shipping companies could operate in a given geographic region, to avoid confusion (only one phone and one cable company is given access to the last mile public right of ways in most places). So one company took over for each state. All fine and good. They agree to impartially carry the packages in return for immunity to prosecution for accidentally transporting drugs or guns or child porn, since they just move anything without looking. They all agree to carry one another's packages, some paying the other a small fee, but basically it all working out. Then the company in California decides, hey, why don't we make sure packages coming from Ford motors are delayed in our shipping room an extra week unless they pay us an additional fee. Its not like they can stop using us, we're 18 customers away from them. The market can't respond effectively through so many intermediaries. They are no longer behaving impartially, so why shouldn't they be held accountable for what they are shipping? And what about the other shippers? Will they cancel their relationships with this one, or will they make a deal and all start doing the same as a way to get more money? My bet is the latter.
I'm all for the free market working things out, but this is nowhere near a free market situation at this point. When anyone can string up lines on the telephone poles and run wires to all the houses, then we'll be getting close. Most end users have no choice, or very little choice. They can go with the monopoly cable company or the monopoly phone company, both of whom only bundle their service with their other service. Hell, it is cheaper for me to buy cable TV + cable internet than it is to just buy cable internet. That doesn't exactly sound like something the free market would produce?
If you want the Feds to give everyone the same access everywhere and for the same price (such as was done with phone, mail, and electrical service) then you penalize the rational consumers and promote things like urban sprawl and government sponsored (universal access) monopolies.
The government is already enforcing monopolies on cable and telephone lines, which are the only "last mile" connection available to most users. Claiming then, that you should not regulate the behaviors of those monopolies is just plain foolish.
I predict this leads to wider adoption of usage caps and bandwidth charges on broadband services. If they can't charge the site owners, they'll start charging the users.
There are two things wrong with your theory. The first is that this legislation squashing their attempt at extorting more money will motivate anything. They are already charging what the market will bear, not what it costs them. Most broadband services are bundled with Cable TV, or regular telephone service, on which the provider has a local monopoly (in most areas). It's not like they have tight margins or anything. They want as much as they can get, but don't need any more money to survive.
Secondly, most services already have usage/bandwidth caps. They are just invisible ones enforced under their usage terms where they force "resource hogs" to upgrade to a business account or be shut off. The last thing most of the broadband providers want is for this to be visible and clear-cut to the end user. Then people could easily compare services and prices and pay for what they needed. No they make more money with the current "we won't tell you what you're buying" approach.