Anonymous free speech is one of the cornerstones of our democracy.
Sometimes people have things to say that the government doesn't want anyone to hear.
For them to be able to say it, they need to feel safe from reprisals.
People being able to post stuff on the net through an open wireless access point is one way that one can say something important without fear of official retribution.
For example, one could blow the whistle, anonymously, on a crime that has been committed by a government official. Reports of such official crime, for example presidential employees wiretapping the opposing political party, have already been enough to cause a regime change in the U.S. - most slashdotters are too young to remember but Dubya is old enough.
Most methods of internet access (such as all those AOL CDs) leave audit trails. They may not be able to prevent people from posting to the net, but they can track them down and either imprison or kill the posters afterwards, and to a large extent, the knowledge of that possibility is enough to prevent many people from speaking out.
So let me suggest that a good way to ensure a free and fair presidential election in 2004 would be to remove the password from your wireless access point.
I used analog earlier this evening to check my server logs to see how people were finding
Is This the America I Love?. I've had the page up for over a year, but since the election I have felt a renewed sense of urgency to get people to read it.
America just makes me sick now. The worst part is nobody seems to see the Injustice of it all. Are you all Blind? Have you not seen the greatly exaggerated and proposterous veil that has been strewn upon America?
Something is indeed wrong. I've sensed it, and to this day haven't been able to find the words to describe what it was, but I have to say something. Why? Because I have a fucking voice, and I will fucking spread it, because that's what America USED to be all about. Now? Now it's nothing, not even a shadow of it's former self. I'd literally rather live in Canada right now, because despite what people thing of Canada, it's pretty cool.
and so on.
Look at the bottom of the guy's post where he gives a link with the text "This is what inspired me to finally say something".
I've worried about the potential for backlash by saying what I did in such a public way, and further to be making such an effort to get people to read it.
But if I was able to get even one person to speak out as this fellow said I did, well that makes it all worthwhile.
There's lots of people who posted to the K5 discussion who don't agree with what I said, but that doesn't bother me so much. I'm very pleased to have opened up so much debate. People are talking about these issues that might not have otherwise.
People need to talk about this stuff, or we will end up in a great deal more trouble than we are already in.
And there were some fairly intelligent points raised at K5 that seem to poke holes in my argument. That's OK too, because I have answers to their objections, and will be able to make some small revisions to my original piece that should ultimately make it stronger and more convincing. So in the end those who found fault with my essay have done me a favor.
Finally, in the little while between posting the above and being just about to post this, my copy of the essay has received 102 page views referred from this slashdot discussion.
I'm very glad of that - prior to posting at K5, the essay was getting about 300 page views a month. So far this month (just a few days into the month) my copy has got 594 page views, and I imagine the K5 post got many times that.
Are you liable if you accidentally leave your car unlocked and it is used to commit a crime?
I asked my wife about this just now. She's from Newfoundland, the easternmost province of Canada. She says that leaving your keys in your car is a criminal offence if your car is stolen. That is, not just the car theif, but the negligent owner are both charged.
The car doesn't have to be actually used in a crime.
She gave me the specific example of how her next-door neighbor in the town of Fortune left her keys in her car parked on her driveway. The car was stolen by some joyriders and driven over a cliff. The neighbor was charged for leaving the keys in the car.
I leave it up to you to debate whether that was appropriate or not, but it makes a certain sense to me.
However, if your network is buttoned-down so no one can crack your hosts, but you provide free anonymous internet access to anyone who might happen to be in the neighborhood, I don't see how that could legitimately be considered negligence.
Instead, I see that as providing a valuable public service, for example to enable those working for legitimate political change to communicate among themselves without fear of reprisal.
That's not terrorism - at least not if what the folks are doing anonymously on the Internet is planning to win an election that would remove a despotic regime from office.
No, that's one of the basic principles upon which our great nation was founded.
Anonymous pamphleteering, for example, was one of the popular ways of promoting patriotic causes in the early days of the union.
It's been done elsewhere. I understand the British put a price on Jonathan Swift's head for writing A Modest Proposal.
But I wanted it to be read more widely than was happening with it on my own little homepage so I posted
a copy at Kuro5hin. An advantage of the K5 version is that it enabled followup discussion.
Here's the intro:
I just feel the need to write right now. Something has gone terribly wrong with the country I was raised to love. The good things that America stands for are being trampled into the dirt by those charged with the burden of protecting them.
I was raised to be a patriotic American. I grew up a military brat - my father was a proud officer of the United States Navy, who served in the Vietnam War. When I was young, I was always told that my father was fighting to preserve the freedoms that were guaranteed us by the United States Constitution.
In the first grade, I attended a school run by the U.S. Navy in Gaeta, Italy, where my father was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Springfield. Each day when we started school we sang patriotic songs and said the Pledge of Allegiance. We were told that America stood for freedom and democracy and justice.
You should thoroughly test your new kernel before putting it into production. Even if the kernel works well for everyone else, you could personally discover a new bug. You could save yourself a lot of pain by testing first, as well as help the kernel developers.
A while back I wrote a couple articles on Linux kernel testing:
The Open Source Development Lab kindly provides Japanese translations
here.
(The articles are under the GNU Free Documentation License. I would be quite stoked if you copied or translated them. There are articles on other quality topics
here.)
Actually, hypoglycemia is often not caused so much by a lack of carbs, but by being overweight.
And the right thing to do to fight it is to eat more protein, not eat more carbs.
I found this explanation in the book "Fit or Fat" a few years ago, which emphasizes weight loss through aerobic exercises. It works well, if one is disciplined enough. I just was never able to be disciplined enough.
One of the reasons I took up the Protein Power diet is that a friend of my wife's was advised be her physician to keep beef jerky on hand to quell her hypoglycemia.
If one is going to eat carbs to quell hypoglycemia, it is best to consume complex carbohydrates. I found that if I ate a big plate of pasta in the mid-afternoon I did OK - but if I forgot, I would have an attack. And it's really devastating, I got worse than a smack junkie who's missed his fix until I can have some fruit juice.
The advantage to me of the low-carb, high protein diet is that I just don't have to remember much of anything. I don't really feel that I am dieting, I really feel that I have permanently changed my eating habits. The hypoglycemia just don't happen.
I think I was well on my way to insulin resistance, mainly as a result of being so overweight.
I try to have different passwords at each website, but of course that is unmanageable. I have no trust in Microsoft Passport, and while I think Sun is more honorable in what they are doing here, I think such information as my online identity is too important to trust even to them.
I think the best solution is to store one's passwords under hard encryption, and keep the physical storage medium in a safe - a physical metal box with a combination lock - when not in use.
I'm not using it yet, but at some point I'd like to get a Palm or Handspring Visor just so I can use
Keyring for PalmOS (formerly GNU Keyring).
An alternative would be to put compact flash readers on all my machines and use a compact flash card.
Finally, there is WiebeTech's
FireWire KeyChain, which stores up to 1 GB of data in a tiny package convienent to hold your metal keys and keep in your pocket.
The advantage of the PalmOS keychain is that it requires no software or hardware support on the computers it is used with, and it can be quickly moved from computer to computer. The advantage of compact flash and WiebeTech's product is that software support can pop the password onto the clipboard for you for convenient pasting into your browser.
One more thing... would I need a static IP to operate the server? I can get a domain name from dynodns.
My net connection is kinda primitive out here in the Maine sticks.
I can pay $70 a month for static IP dedicated dialup, which I think is excessive, but at some point I might have to do that. But I imagine most people who might want to run personal servers wouldn't want to pay to have static IP's.
So would this mean I can run the server on my home linux box, and store all my private information only on my own machine, in my own house, so that websites would query the server I am operating when I want to log in?
If so, then I might have some enthusiasm for it, and I imagine lots of others would as well.
If my identity data is to be stored by some commercial service, even a Liberty Alliance member, I'm afraid I have no plans to participate.
I won't use any website that requires me to sign up for Passport. I've done a lot of Windows development the last couple years, and I can well imagine it would be to my benefit to pay for M$' developer program, but my understanding is that it requires Passport to participate, so I won't have any part of it.
Even if I had my own personal server storing my identity, you can bet I will configure my firewall so it will only accept queries from sites I consciously want to have the information.
I stopped salting my food right about the time that my grandfather was told to eliminate sodium because of his high blood pressure. That was when I was a teenager.
I noticed then that he had a real hard time with it, and used lots of salt substitues and so on, but never seemed satisfied by them. I had the idea that I would do a lot better if I cut out salt when I was young rather than waiting to get old and already having high blood pressure.
For a long time food seemed tasteless to me but now my taste is much more sensitive. My wife likes lots of salt and the food she cooks often seems excessively salty to me. On the otherhand she complains that I don't put any salt in the food I cook!
I don't make much of a conscious effort to avoid salt, for example I still like pickles and eat a lot of canned tomato products, which have a lot of salt. I just don't ever salt my food.
I will try as you suggest and see how it works.
As for getting my kidneys tested, I plan to get a full physical sometime soon, my wife has been urging me to do so as I haven't had a physical in almost ten years.
I have often heard advice that one should drink lots of water, especially on diets.
I have always thought it very odd that some people have to make an effort to drink more water.
I don't know why, but I have been thirsty all my life. Even since I was a small child. I constantly crave water. So I drink it, gallons per day. That's where the Coca Cola I mentioned above comes in. I also pee with great frequency.
It happens that one of the warning signs of diabetes is uncontrollable thirst. I've been tested a number of times for diabetes and have been found to be normal.
The last time I had my blood sugar checked I brought up my hypoglycemia with the nurse who tested me, and she said to eat a good lunch and have a couple snacks in the afternoon, which helps when I remember it but never made the problem go away. The only thing that did help was to increase the amount of protein in my diet and (ironically) reducing the carbohydrates.
I am never without a beverage at hand. Unfortunately, this is often coffee which I know is bad for me, especially in the quantity I drink it (2 or 3 pots a day). But I drink lots of pure water too. (Note that I was drinking just as much coffee before I started losing weight - I weighed 250 for about seven years.)
Many people on diets drink artificially sweetened sodas, but I find artificial sweeteners to taste foul. Nowadays when I'm out driving or something and stop into a convenience store for something to drink, I buy a mineral water.
I recently discovered some flavored but completely unsweetened carbonated waters from Poland Springs. They are flavored with the essential oils of various fruits and berries, like mandarin orange and raspberry.
A similar diet to Atkins, but probably not so radical, is
Protein Power. I've been on this for a few months, but haven't been completely faithful to it.
I've lost fifteen pounds, and am still losing weight. I also have stopped having attacks of hypoglycemia, which used to happen almost every day.
The diet emphasizes low carbohydrate (max 30 grams a day - I can eat half an english muffin a day, and that's about it), and moderately high protein, but really emphasizes eating lots more vegetables.
They don't pretend that it's balanced nutrition, and explicitly say that one must take vitamin and mineral supplements, which I do.
Once I lose all the weight I want, I can increase the amount of carbo I eat, but I don't think I ever want to go back to the level of carbohydrate intake I used to have - a couple of cans of Coca Cola Classic a day along with a heaping plate of spaghetti.
I've tried low-fat diets before and never had any luck with them. Neither have I been able to lose weight purely from exercising since I've been in my 30's (worked in my early 20's though). But I feel better enough with the Protein Power diet that I have started bicycling again for the first time in several years (but I haven't bicycled so much that my weight loss can be attributed to exercise yet).
I weigh 235 pounds, down from 250. My aim is to weigh 180. I'm 5'11".
Xandros has NOT distribute anything via money to anyone YET. So, there is no GPL violation YET.
I can't comment on Xandros in particular because I haven't checked it out, but it is not necessary to charge money for distributing something to have a GPL violation.
Even giving away something for free is a GPL violation if you don't provide source.
However, my understanding is that you don't have to give away the source up-front, you only have to provide a written offer to provide the source for some number of years. You're allowed to charge a nominal amount of money for the distribution media.
But note that even if there is some delay you have to distribute the exact source for everything you distribute in binary form, even "beta tests".
Sometimes Unix apps are ported to windows by using the Cygwin DLL, and then given away for free, even with all the source code. But the Cygwin people are always very careful to ensure that people who do this provide the source code to the same version of the Cygwin DLL they link with; they have to give the source away themselves, it is not sufficient to provide a hyperlink to Cygwin's website.
I used to be an Apple employee, and Apple used to have this program called "Loan to Own". It started in the days when most people couldn't afford to own their own home computers, so Apple would give a once-in-a-lifetime tremendous discount for the purchase of a computer by its employees, so they and their families could use them at home.
When I got my Mac 8500/150 in 1996, it was nearly the fastest personal computer money could buy. I used to say widely that it was about half the speed of a Cray 1 supercomputer that cost something like a $million back in 1980. I think the retail price at the time was like $3k.
For the longest time the only upgrade I put in Pishi was 64 MB of RAM, added to the original 32. There are 8 memory slots in here, it will take 1 GB. It is still possible to buy RAM for this box, although it's a little more expensive than today's PC memory.
I used it to bring work home, and later for consulting, for quite a long time. The last paid consulting work I did on her was in the spring of 2001.
In the middle of that job, I finally upgraded, and got a PowerLogix PowerPC G4 CPU upgrade card, as well as some more RAM.
I still have the original 2 MB of video RAM, but I'm thinking of upgrading to the maximum of 4 MB. I could put in a video card, but there are only three PCI slots.
Finally, I bought an Adaptec 29160N Ultra160 SCSI host bus adapter.
I put Mac OS X on it using Ryan Rempel's
XPostFacto, and it works OK but is not really fast enough for production work. When I got a contract to do some OS X work I got a 700 Mhz G3 iBook which is really sweet.
The only reason I would want a G4 laptop is so I can do AltiVec programming, but for that I can use my old Mac, it's just not that fast. I'd also like a dual G4 machine to do SMP kernel coding.
What has given Pishi new life, though, was to install Linux on it. It's my main desktop machine, where I do all my web browsing and email. I have a much faster PC that runs Windows 2000 and Slackware, but I have been doing a lot of windows programming this last year so I can't leave it in Linux.
Pishi is running Debian 3.0 (woody) with kernel 2.4.19. And it works just fine.
Besides the increased video ram (so I can run 32-bit at the resolution I use) I'd also like to get an Ultra160 hard drive. The Adaptec card is running a SCSI-II hard drive I've had for years, which has my linux installation. There's only 2 GB on the drive, so I can't really use it for a fileserver, and it gets unresponsive if there's a lot of swapping. If I got a 40 GB Ultra160 drive and maybe some more ram, I could easily get five more years out of this machine.
My Mac is named after my cat Pishi. I say in the above web page about the machine that my parents are looking after her. They eventually brought her to me in Maine, and she was with me for a few months, but sadly she passed away from cancer. I named the machine Pishi because she used to like to sit on top of my monitor a lot back when I was doing a lot of BeOS programming.
Oh, one more thing - the BeOS won't boot with the PowerLogix card. But I understand it will boot with a Newer Technology G3 card. I'm hoping it will also boot with a Newer G4 card. Newer Tech is out of business but it's still possible to buy their cards, even brand new.
Because the
W3C HTML Validator uses the GET method for its form submission, I can post hyperlinks that will run the validator on each of their webpages.
And addresses, in case you need to send a process server or wish to register a complaint in person:
PayPal, Inc.
1840 Embarcadero Rd.
Palo Alto, CA 943030
PayPal, Inc.
11128 John Galt Blvd.
Omaha, NE 68137
I signed up for paypal because it was the only way someone who had something I wanted to buy would accept payment. But I wouldn't allow them access to my checking account. They won't let you spend more than $250 through their service unless you allow them direct access to your checking account.
After reading PayPalWarning.com, I decided that I never would use them again.
I was unaware until recently that by giving PayPal access to your checking account, you forgo the liability protections that a credit card vendor is required to give you.
So if you pay a lot of money through paypal for some merchandise you never receive, you basically have no legal recourse - you're screwed. If you had paid with a credit card, you could dispute the charge with your credit card company and they'd have to give you your money back.
I think I'll call Craig when I get up and ask him to delete my account.
I also recommend the Feynman Lectures if you want to actually understand the material. I think they're very readable. You will need to know some differential and integral calculus to be able to understand them, but you will need those for any real physics textbook - Newton invented calculus in order to study physics.
Finally, Richard Rhodes'
The Making of the Atomic Bomb is just an astounding book. It's a history of physics from the 20's or so up through the 50's. It really communicates the feelings of the times.
After reading it I found myself saying "I could do that" and finally got it together to go back to school and finish my Physics degree - I should have graduated in '86 but didn't graduate until '93.
Telescope makers and opticians use pitch for polishing glass.
I have a page about telescope making that should give you some jumping off points, but I haven't yet got to the polishing stage of the mirror I'm working on.
One reason for using pitch is that you can press a mirror into it and get a very close fit. Another is that if the mirror is not perfectly spherical, the pitch will flex as the mirror moves across it. And finally, the polishing abrasive (ferrous oxide or cerium oxide) will set in the pitch and have a planing action rather than rolling around and chipping little flakes off as in ordinary grinding.
Pitch is nasty stuff to work with. It takes a lot of practice before a novice telescope maker can make a pitch lap they're happy with.
Thanks, and thanks to the guy who suggested ssh and talk. Both of these would work.
Probably ssh and talk would get me started the quickest.
Where to find books that are Free as in Freedom
on
Free as in Books?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You can find quite a few books that are published under a variety of licenses such as the GNU Free Documentation License at
The Assayer.
The most popular
subjects there are "Science, Math and Computing" with 289 titles. There are quite a few other subjects covered there too.
The Assayer is more than just a list of books though - it has reader-contributed reviews. For example,
here is the entry for
DocBook: The Definitive Guide by Norman Walsh
(available at
www.docbook.org). There is a review at the bottom of the entry page.
I'm writing a Free book, although it is at a very early draft stage.
The ZooLib Cookbook is a tutorial for the
ZooLib
cross-platform application framework.
If your firewall blocks a site like 2600's, use a Google search
like this one and then click one of Google's
Cached links.
Google stores the text of pages (but not the graphics) when it spiders a site, and makes them available to you, in case, uh, "the site is down". Yeah, that's it.
It's pretty handy to use when someone has yanked a page that turned out to be embarrassing.
Unfortunately the page with the announcement at 2600 was just put up and is apparently not yet available in Google's cache, but will be at some point.
According to the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between SDPC and Microsoft, the US company will invest 6.2 billion yuan (US$750 million) in three years in education and training, academic research and co-operation, hardware manufacturing outsourcing, support in software outsourcing and strategic investments in local software companies.
That doesn't sound like play-money being "invested" in giveaways of software licenses that don't actually cost Microsoft anything.
A concern I have is that Microsoft may expose Chinese students to their "shared source initiative", which could poison their ability to contribute to Free Software.
But I found this paragraph especially intriguing:
Fang Xingdong, author of the famous book "Who Will Challenge the Hegemony of Microsoft," said Microsoft still needs to solve the problems of high prices and security to achieve long-term development.
I know I would be very interested to read an English translation of Mr. Fang's book, as would many in the West! Maybe Red Hat could sponsor a translation?
I think with IBM investing in the Chinese Linux market, to the point of funding the education of Chinese kernel programmers by publishing articles like the ones Zhaoway is writing, we don't have much to worry from Microsoft.
These and the other
articles
at the
Linux Quality Database are all so far published under the GNU Free Documentation License. I was quite excited when the OSDL first mirrored the original english versions and then provided the Japanese translations.
I would personally be quite stoked if anyone translated any of the articles to other languages. There is also an article on web server application testing as well as one on C++ programming. I have more planned and invite others to contribute articles that have the general aim of improving the quality of Free Software.
I'm a very ardent supporter of Free Software in concept. However, while there are many excellent examples of high quality Free Software products, there are even more that are of very poor quality, and the confusing patchwork produced by integrating this jumble into a typical Linux installation leaves a great deal to be desired.
I'm very impressed with the work of the kernel developers, but when I first joined the linux-kernel mailing list to resolve a bug when I started testing the 2.3 kernels a few months before 2.4 shipped, I found the process of reporting a bug and making sure it got fixed quite intimidating. I think it takes more intestinal fortitude than most people who might otherwise want to help the developers are likely to have.
My original concept was to provide a powerful bug database to enable end users to conveniently file more useful and informative bug reports, combined with sophisticated search facilities to aid the kernel developers in looking up bug reports.
For example, one might be able to search by the values of kernel.config file entries as well as hardware that is or isn't present in the user's system. This isn't something you can do with bugzilla, although possibly it could be extended to do so.
Unfortunately the dot-com crash happened and I had to bust my ass just to survive so I haven't got anywhere with the bug database yet.
But I also had the idea of using the site to educate other programmers, testers and users about how they can improve the quality of all Free Software, not just the kernel. So I started writing articles on various topics as they occured to me and posting them in the
articles section. All my articles are under the GNU Free Documentation license.
The Open Source Development Lab
mirrors a couple of them and I'm quite stoked to report has made
Japanese translations.
I invite others to contribute articles or advice, and of course since the articles are under the GFDL you are welcome to republish them elsewhere or include them in distributions of Linux or other software.
That last one was posted just night before last, and while it may seem a little off-topic, member function pointers provided a neat and simple solution to a severe performance problem I was having recently. The KDE, AbiWord and Mozilla folks would likely find it helpful. It's not quite finished yet though.
I think it's important to take personal responsibility for improving software quality. Rather than griping about Microsoft, your managers or your coworkers, strive to write better code yourself, educate your coworkers (for example by writing articles like I do), and stand up for yourself when the management attempts to bully you into writing bad code.
Don't just try hard. That's like pushing against a stone wall. Learn better practices, and also reflect upon past experiences in your own work and that of others to understand what works well and what doesn't.
In the last couple of years I have found that adopting unit testing and automated functional testing, as well as frequent use of assertions has enormously improved the quality of my own work.
They have also improved my productivity and made my experience of developing it much more pleasant. It's also impressed my clients because my code works so much better than that developed by their own programmers in house, so that despite their urgency to get code into production yesterday, they have been very supportive of my automated testing strategy and my high personal standards for quality - and they are starting to adopt some of what I do into their own process.
The best book I have found for teaching automated testing is John Lakos'
Large Scale C++ Software Design. While much of it is of course C++ specific, the majority of it applies to any language.
One important thing to understand is that programs that have a rat's nest of dependencies between modules are difficult if not impossible to unit test - Lakos details methods to quantify, understand and manage dependencies within a program, not only to aid testing, but to enable module reuse (so modules can be used in other programs without dragging everything else along), aiding comprehension by developers and speeding build times.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes people have things to say that the government doesn't want anyone to hear.
For them to be able to say it, they need to feel safe from reprisals.
People being able to post stuff on the net through an open wireless access point is one way that one can say something important without fear of official retribution.
For example, one could blow the whistle, anonymously, on a crime that has been committed by a government official. Reports of such official crime, for example presidential employees wiretapping the opposing political party, have already been enough to cause a regime change in the U.S. - most slashdotters are too young to remember but Dubya is old enough.
Most methods of internet access (such as all those AOL CDs) leave audit trails. They may not be able to prevent people from posting to the net, but they can track them down and either imprison or kill the posters afterwards, and to a large extent, the knowledge of that possibility is enough to prevent many people from speaking out.
So let me suggest that a good way to ensure a free and fair presidential election in 2004 would be to remove the password from your wireless access point.
Thank you for your attention.
One of the referring pages I found listed in my log is I've held it in too long: I am no longer Proud to be an American. wherein the poster says:
and so on.Look at the bottom of the guy's post where he gives a link with the text "This is what inspired me to finally say something".
I've worried about the potential for backlash by saying what I did in such a public way, and further to be making such an effort to get people to read it.
But if I was able to get even one person to speak out as this fellow said I did, well that makes it all worthwhile.
There's lots of people who posted to the K5 discussion who don't agree with what I said, but that doesn't bother me so much. I'm very pleased to have opened up so much debate. People are talking about these issues that might not have otherwise.
People need to talk about this stuff, or we will end up in a great deal more trouble than we are already in.
And there were some fairly intelligent points raised at K5 that seem to poke holes in my argument. That's OK too, because I have answers to their objections, and will be able to make some small revisions to my original piece that should ultimately make it stronger and more convincing. So in the end those who found fault with my essay have done me a favor.
Finally, in the little while between posting the above and being just about to post this, my copy of the essay has received 102 page views referred from this slashdot discussion.
I'm very glad of that - prior to posting at K5, the essay was getting about 300 page views a month. So far this month (just a few days into the month) my copy has got 594 page views, and I imagine the K5 post got many times that.
The car doesn't have to be actually used in a crime.
She gave me the specific example of how her next-door neighbor in the town of Fortune left her keys in her car parked on her driveway. The car was stolen by some joyriders and driven over a cliff. The neighbor was charged for leaving the keys in the car.
I leave it up to you to debate whether that was appropriate or not, but it makes a certain sense to me.
However, if your network is buttoned-down so no one can crack your hosts, but you provide free anonymous internet access to anyone who might happen to be in the neighborhood, I don't see how that could legitimately be considered negligence.
Instead, I see that as providing a valuable public service, for example to enable those working for legitimate political change to communicate among themselves without fear of reprisal.
That's not terrorism - at least not if what the folks are doing anonymously on the Internet is planning to win an election that would remove a despotic regime from office.
No, that's one of the basic principles upon which our great nation was founded.
Anonymous pamphleteering, for example, was one of the popular ways of promoting patriotic causes in the early days of the union.
It's been done elsewhere. I understand the British put a price on Jonathan Swift's head for writing A Modest Proposal.
But I wanted it to be read more widely than was happening with it on my own little homepage so I posted a copy at Kuro5hin. An advantage of the K5 version is that it enabled followup discussion.
Here's the intro:
Thank you for your attention.I'm very proud of my business. I've been consulting full time since April '98. GoingWare was incorporated in March 2000.
Besides, GoingWare has built up a reputation for quality software development.
And lots of links to its page from people grateful for all the articles I have written.
So anwer me this:
Why do all you trolls have it in for me so much? I only try to be helpful, but you post the most vile stuff.
I've only ever posted anonymously here a couple times. I always use my real name. Why don't you?
A while back I wrote a couple articles on Linux kernel testing:
-
Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel
-
Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel
The Open Source Development Lab kindly provides Japanese translations here.(The articles are under the GNU Free Documentation License. I would be quite stoked if you copied or translated them. There are articles on other quality topics here.)
And the right thing to do to fight it is to eat more protein, not eat more carbs.
I found this explanation in the book "Fit or Fat" a few years ago, which emphasizes weight loss through aerobic exercises. It works well, if one is disciplined enough. I just was never able to be disciplined enough.
One of the reasons I took up the Protein Power diet is that a friend of my wife's was advised be her physician to keep beef jerky on hand to quell her hypoglycemia.
If one is going to eat carbs to quell hypoglycemia, it is best to consume complex carbohydrates. I found that if I ate a big plate of pasta in the mid-afternoon I did OK - but if I forgot, I would have an attack. And it's really devastating, I got worse than a smack junkie who's missed his fix until I can have some fruit juice.
The advantage to me of the low-carb, high protein diet is that I just don't have to remember much of anything. I don't really feel that I am dieting, I really feel that I have permanently changed my eating habits. The hypoglycemia just don't happen.
I think I was well on my way to insulin resistance, mainly as a result of being so overweight.
I think the best solution is to store one's passwords under hard encryption, and keep the physical storage medium in a safe - a physical metal box with a combination lock - when not in use.
I'm not using it yet, but at some point I'd like to get a Palm or Handspring Visor just so I can use Keyring for PalmOS (formerly GNU Keyring).
An alternative would be to put compact flash readers on all my machines and use a compact flash card.
Finally, there is WiebeTech's FireWire KeyChain, which stores up to 1 GB of data in a tiny package convienent to hold your metal keys and keep in your pocket.
The advantage of the PalmOS keychain is that it requires no software or hardware support on the computers it is used with, and it can be quickly moved from computer to computer. The advantage of compact flash and WiebeTech's product is that software support can pop the password onto the clipboard for you for convenient pasting into your browser.
My net connection is kinda primitive out here in the Maine sticks.
I can pay $70 a month for static IP dedicated dialup, which I think is excessive, but at some point I might have to do that. But I imagine most people who might want to run personal servers wouldn't want to pay to have static IP's.
If so, then I might have some enthusiasm for it, and I imagine lots of others would as well.
If my identity data is to be stored by some commercial service, even a Liberty Alliance member, I'm afraid I have no plans to participate.
I won't use any website that requires me to sign up for Passport. I've done a lot of Windows development the last couple years, and I can well imagine it would be to my benefit to pay for M$' developer program, but my understanding is that it requires Passport to participate, so I won't have any part of it.
Even if I had my own personal server storing my identity, you can bet I will configure my firewall so it will only accept queries from sites I consciously want to have the information.
I noticed then that he had a real hard time with it, and used lots of salt substitues and so on, but never seemed satisfied by them. I had the idea that I would do a lot better if I cut out salt when I was young rather than waiting to get old and already having high blood pressure.
For a long time food seemed tasteless to me but now my taste is much more sensitive. My wife likes lots of salt and the food she cooks often seems excessively salty to me. On the otherhand she complains that I don't put any salt in the food I cook!
I don't make much of a conscious effort to avoid salt, for example I still like pickles and eat a lot of canned tomato products, which have a lot of salt. I just don't ever salt my food.
I will try as you suggest and see how it works.
As for getting my kidneys tested, I plan to get a full physical sometime soon, my wife has been urging me to do so as I haven't had a physical in almost ten years.
I have always thought it very odd that some people have to make an effort to drink more water.
I don't know why, but I have been thirsty all my life. Even since I was a small child. I constantly crave water. So I drink it, gallons per day. That's where the Coca Cola I mentioned above comes in. I also pee with great frequency.
It happens that one of the warning signs of diabetes is uncontrollable thirst. I've been tested a number of times for diabetes and have been found to be normal.
The last time I had my blood sugar checked I brought up my hypoglycemia with the nurse who tested me, and she said to eat a good lunch and have a couple snacks in the afternoon, which helps when I remember it but never made the problem go away. The only thing that did help was to increase the amount of protein in my diet and (ironically) reducing the carbohydrates.
I am never without a beverage at hand. Unfortunately, this is often coffee which I know is bad for me, especially in the quantity I drink it (2 or 3 pots a day). But I drink lots of pure water too. (Note that I was drinking just as much coffee before I started losing weight - I weighed 250 for about seven years.)
Many people on diets drink artificially sweetened sodas, but I find artificial sweeteners to taste foul. Nowadays when I'm out driving or something and stop into a convenience store for something to drink, I buy a mineral water.
I recently discovered some flavored but completely unsweetened carbonated waters from Poland Springs. They are flavored with the essential oils of various fruits and berries, like mandarin orange and raspberry.
I've lost fifteen pounds, and am still losing weight. I also have stopped having attacks of hypoglycemia, which used to happen almost every day.
The diet emphasizes low carbohydrate (max 30 grams a day - I can eat half an english muffin a day, and that's about it), and moderately high protein, but really emphasizes eating lots more vegetables.
They don't pretend that it's balanced nutrition, and explicitly say that one must take vitamin and mineral supplements, which I do.
Once I lose all the weight I want, I can increase the amount of carbo I eat, but I don't think I ever want to go back to the level of carbohydrate intake I used to have - a couple of cans of Coca Cola Classic a day along with a heaping plate of spaghetti.
I've tried low-fat diets before and never had any luck with them. Neither have I been able to lose weight purely from exercising since I've been in my 30's (worked in my early 20's though). But I feel better enough with the Protein Power diet that I have started bicycling again for the first time in several years (but I haven't bicycled so much that my weight loss can be attributed to exercise yet).
I weigh 235 pounds, down from 250. My aim is to weigh 180. I'm 5'11".
Even giving away something for free is a GPL violation if you don't provide source.
However, my understanding is that you don't have to give away the source up-front, you only have to provide a written offer to provide the source for some number of years. You're allowed to charge a nominal amount of money for the distribution media.
But note that even if there is some delay you have to distribute the exact source for everything you distribute in binary form, even "beta tests".
Sometimes Unix apps are ported to windows by using the Cygwin DLL, and then given away for free, even with all the source code. But the Cygwin people are always very careful to ensure that people who do this provide the source code to the same version of the Cygwin DLL they link with; they have to give the source away themselves, it is not sufficient to provide a hyperlink to Cygwin's website.
When I got my Mac 8500/150 in 1996, it was nearly the fastest personal computer money could buy. I used to say widely that it was about half the speed of a Cray 1 supercomputer that cost something like a $million back in 1980. I think the retail price at the time was like $3k.
For the longest time the only upgrade I put in Pishi was 64 MB of RAM, added to the original 32. There are 8 memory slots in here, it will take 1 GB. It is still possible to buy RAM for this box, although it's a little more expensive than today's PC memory.
I used it to bring work home, and later for consulting, for quite a long time. The last paid consulting work I did on her was in the spring of 2001.
In the middle of that job, I finally upgraded, and got a PowerLogix PowerPC G4 CPU upgrade card, as well as some more RAM.
I still have the original 2 MB of video RAM, but I'm thinking of upgrading to the maximum of 4 MB. I could put in a video card, but there are only three PCI slots.
Finally, I bought an Adaptec 29160N Ultra160 SCSI host bus adapter.
I put Mac OS X on it using Ryan Rempel's XPostFacto, and it works OK but is not really fast enough for production work. When I got a contract to do some OS X work I got a 700 Mhz G3 iBook which is really sweet.
The only reason I would want a G4 laptop is so I can do AltiVec programming, but for that I can use my old Mac, it's just not that fast. I'd also like a dual G4 machine to do SMP kernel coding.
What has given Pishi new life, though, was to install Linux on it. It's my main desktop machine, where I do all my web browsing and email. I have a much faster PC that runs Windows 2000 and Slackware, but I have been doing a lot of windows programming this last year so I can't leave it in Linux.
Pishi is running Debian 3.0 (woody) with kernel 2.4.19. And it works just fine.
Besides the increased video ram (so I can run 32-bit at the resolution I use) I'd also like to get an Ultra160 hard drive. The Adaptec card is running a SCSI-II hard drive I've had for years, which has my linux installation. There's only 2 GB on the drive, so I can't really use it for a fileserver, and it gets unresponsive if there's a lot of swapping. If I got a 40 GB Ultra160 drive and maybe some more ram, I could easily get five more years out of this machine.
My Mac is named after my cat Pishi. I say in the above web page about the machine that my parents are looking after her. They eventually brought her to me in Maine, and she was with me for a few months, but sadly she passed away from cancer. I named the machine Pishi because she used to like to sit on top of my monitor a lot back when I was doing a lot of BeOS programming.
Oh, one more thing - the BeOS won't boot with the PowerLogix card. But I understand it will boot with a Newer Technology G3 card. I'm hoping it will also boot with a Newer G4 card. Newer Tech is out of business but it's still possible to buy their cards, even brand new.
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Validate www.softwarechoice.org
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Validate sincerechoice.com
Well, I think it's clear who stands for open standards and interoperability.If you'd like to know more about how to use validators to make your websites interoperable, read my article Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications.
Thank you for your attention.
If you're unhappy with PayPal, PayPalWarning.com lists a bunch of phone numbers. Call (877) 672-9725 if you want to reach them toll free.
Here's a bunch of known paypal numbers:
(402) 935-2000 / (402) 935-2001 / (402) 935-2062 / (402) 935-2258 [this is Craig, complaints resolution manager] / (402) 935-7733 / (402) 537-5740 (fax) / (650) 251-1100 / (888) 221-1161 / (800) 836-1859 / (877) 672-9725 / (866) 272-9725
And addresses, in case you need to send a process server or wish to register a complaint in person:
PayPal, Inc.
1840 Embarcadero Rd.
Palo Alto, CA 943030
PayPal, Inc.
11128 John Galt Blvd.
Omaha, NE 68137
I signed up for paypal because it was the only way someone who had something I wanted to buy would accept payment. But I wouldn't allow them access to my checking account. They won't let you spend more than $250 through their service unless you allow them direct access to your checking account.
After reading PayPalWarning.com, I decided that I never would use them again.
I was unaware until recently that by giving PayPal access to your checking account, you forgo the liability protections that a credit card vendor is required to give you.
So if you pay a lot of money through paypal for some merchandise you never receive, you basically have no legal recourse - you're screwed. If you had paid with a credit card, you could dispute the charge with your credit card company and they'd have to give you your money back.
I think I'll call Craig when I get up and ask him to delete my account.
In part it's a history of physics from World War II onward, in part it's a look into one physicists love of the subject.
I found it inspiring.
I have a B.A. in Physics from UC Santa Cruz.
I also recommend the Feynman Lectures if you want to actually understand the material. I think they're very readable. You will need to know some differential and integral calculus to be able to understand them, but you will need those for any real physics textbook - Newton invented calculus in order to study physics.
Finally, Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb is just an astounding book. It's a history of physics from the 20's or so up through the 50's. It really communicates the feelings of the times.
After reading it I found myself saying "I could do that" and finally got it together to go back to school and finish my Physics degree - I should have graduated in '86 but didn't graduate until '93.
I have a page about telescope making that should give you some jumping off points, but I haven't yet got to the polishing stage of the mirror I'm working on.
One reason for using pitch is that you can press a mirror into it and get a very close fit. Another is that if the mirror is not perfectly spherical, the pitch will flex as the mirror moves across it. And finally, the polishing abrasive (ferrous oxide or cerium oxide) will set in the pitch and have a planing action rather than rolling around and chipping little flakes off as in ordinary grinding.
Pitch is nasty stuff to work with. It takes a lot of practice before a novice telescope maker can make a pitch lap they're happy with.
Probably ssh and talk would get me started the quickest.
The most popular subjects there are "Science, Math and Computing" with 289 titles. There are quite a few other subjects covered there too.
The Assayer is more than just a list of books though - it has reader-contributed reviews. For example, here is the entry for DocBook: The Definitive Guide by Norman Walsh (available at www.docbook.org). There is a review at the bottom of the entry page.
I'm writing a Free book, although it is at a very early draft stage. The ZooLib Cookbook is a tutorial for the ZooLib cross-platform application framework.
I'm also slowly creating a copylefted collection of articles on software quality at the Linux Quality Database.
Google stores the text of pages (but not the graphics) when it spiders a site, and makes them available to you, in case, uh, "the site is down". Yeah, that's it.
It's pretty handy to use when someone has yanked a page that turned out to be embarrassing.
Unfortunately the page with the announcement at 2600 was just put up and is apparently not yet available in Google's cache, but will be at some point.
Another alternative is to use The Anonymizer. Here is 2600's announcement of Ford's surrender, which you should be able to read unless your firewall blocks the anonymizer too.
A concern I have is that Microsoft may expose Chinese students to their "shared source initiative", which could poison their ability to contribute to Free Software.
But I found this paragraph especially intriguing:
I know I would be very interested to read an English translation of Mr. Fang's book, as would many in the West! Maybe Red Hat could sponsor a translation?-
Playing with Linux RAID
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The physical layout of the ext2 filesystem
I think with IBM investing in the Chinese Linux market, to the point of funding the education of Chinese kernel programmers by publishing articles like the ones Zhaoway is writing, we don't have much to worry from Microsoft.Also, the Open Source Development Lab's Japan Development Center was kind enough to recently translate a couple of my Linux kernel testing articles into Japanese:
- Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel
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Japanese -
English
- Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel
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Japanese
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English
These and the other articles at the Linux Quality Database are all so far published under the GNU Free Documentation License. I was quite excited when the OSDL first mirrored the original english versions and then provided the Japanese translations.I would personally be quite stoked if anyone translated any of the articles to other languages. There is also an article on web server application testing as well as one on C++ programming. I have more planned and invite others to contribute articles that have the general aim of improving the quality of Free Software.
I'm very impressed with the work of the kernel developers, but when I first joined the linux-kernel mailing list to resolve a bug when I started testing the 2.3 kernels a few months before 2.4 shipped, I found the process of reporting a bug and making sure it got fixed quite intimidating. I think it takes more intestinal fortitude than most people who might otherwise want to help the developers are likely to have.
That's why I started The Linux Quality Database.
My original concept was to provide a powerful bug database to enable end users to conveniently file more useful and informative bug reports, combined with sophisticated search facilities to aid the kernel developers in looking up bug reports.
For example, one might be able to search by the values of kernel .config file entries as well as hardware that is or isn't present in the user's system. This isn't something you can do with bugzilla, although possibly it could be extended to do so.
Unfortunately the dot-com crash happened and I had to bust my ass just to survive so I haven't got anywhere with the bug database yet.
But I also had the idea of using the site to educate other programmers, testers and users about how they can improve the quality of all Free Software, not just the kernel. So I started writing articles on various topics as they occured to me and posting them in the articles section. All my articles are under the GNU Free Documentation license. The Open Source Development Lab mirrors a couple of them and I'm quite stoked to report has made Japanese translations.
I invite others to contribute articles or advice, and of course since the articles are under the GFDL you are welcome to republish them elsewhere or include them in distributions of Linux or other software.
The articles available so far are:
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Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel
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Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel
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Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications
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Pointers to C++ Member Functions
That last one was posted just night before last, and while it may seem a little off-topic, member function pointers provided a neat and simple solution to a severe performance problem I was having recently. The KDE, AbiWord and Mozilla folks would likely find it helpful. It's not quite finished yet though.I think it's important to take personal responsibility for improving software quality. Rather than griping about Microsoft, your managers or your coworkers, strive to write better code yourself, educate your coworkers (for example by writing articles like I do), and stand up for yourself when the management attempts to bully you into writing bad code.
Don't just try hard. That's like pushing against a stone wall. Learn better practices, and also reflect upon past experiences in your own work and that of others to understand what works well and what doesn't.
In the last couple of years I have found that adopting unit testing and automated functional testing, as well as frequent use of assertions has enormously improved the quality of my own work.
They have also improved my productivity and made my experience of developing it much more pleasant. It's also impressed my clients because my code works so much better than that developed by their own programmers in house, so that despite their urgency to get code into production yesterday, they have been very supportive of my automated testing strategy and my high personal standards for quality - and they are starting to adopt some of what I do into their own process.
The best book I have found for teaching automated testing is John Lakos' Large Scale C++ Software Design. While much of it is of course C++ specific, the majority of it applies to any language.
One important thing to understand is that programs that have a rat's nest of dependencies between modules are difficult if not impossible to unit test - Lakos details methods to quantify, understand and manage dependencies within a program, not only to aid testing, but to enable module reuse (so modules can be used in other programs without dragging everything else along), aiding comprehension by developers and speeding build times.