There is a real tension between civil liberties and physical safety, no matter what Ben Franklin said;
I'll agree with that, but your next statement is completely unrelated, and doesn't follow from the first. Your essay reads like Bush's speeches, as if you've been given a shuffled deck of cards with slogans printed on them, and are reading them in random order.
... we have enemies who want to slaughter us wholesale, and the freedoms available to them in this country are enabling them to do so.
No, we have leaders telling us that there are enemies that want to slaughter us. We have leaders who promised proof of this, but later withdrew that promise. All we know is that airplanes crashed into buildings, but the FBI was able to produce a list of the perpetrators including details about how they got into the country within days of the attacks, and they did all this without the powers granted by the Patriot Act.
Yet we're supposed to believe that this Act is necessary to fight the terrorism conspiracies that the administration promised to prove to us were happening, but later reneged on that promise.
In this context, the USA Patriot Act is a reasonable compromise, despite the newspeak name.
Show me a reason to believe it. Just stating it over and over is not sufficient.
The freedoms it sacrifices are non-essential (yes, there is such a thing),
Again, show me why I should believe it.
...and yet it has a fighting chance of being effective. It represents a sweet-spot in the freedom/safety trade-off.
Given that the FBI was able to trace the perps of 9/11 without the help of the Patriot Act, why should I believe this? Everyone keeps trying to reassure me that if I am innocent, I have nothing to worry about. Pardon me, but I find that anything but reassuring.
Since when does "It's about money" excuse stupidity and legal bullying? I know, I know, -1 Redundant for me....
Are they trashing freedom-of-speech? FUCK NO.
No? Apple threatened a party with a lawsuit if they didn't retract what was said, even though nothing that was said was illegal in any way. What is trashing freedom of speech if not this?
Software Vendors have those agreements so they can actually make money off of the shit they make. Duh.
So of they put a clause in the license agreement for OSX 10.2 that says by using the software, you agree to pay them $100/mo for the privilege, you'll have no problem with that, and gladly will fork over your CC number so they can automate the charges. Right? I mean, just like you said, they put those licenses out there so they can make money off the software...
MacFixIt handled the situation very maturely but anyone here invoking "freedom of speech" rights for this particular case is merely making a devious use of one of our most cherished inallienable rights, and such behaviour can easily become one day its most threatening enemy.
Yeah, I've heard that one before, and it still doesn't wash. You cannot protect your rights by refraining from exercising them when it bothers the Powers That Be. Those are the times when you should be exercising your rights simply because you CAN.
You seem to think everyone runs *BSD and doesn't use Outlook, and base your conclusions on that. Oh yeah, you mentioned in passing that the Outlook-running crowd, whose NAT devices will not protect them, or the rest of the Internet, need some extra "forms of filtering". But when it came time to feel superior, you ignored the fact that you're an abberation, you don't run Outlook, unlike most everybody else with a Windows PC.
The inexpensive "Internet gateway" hubs from Best Buy or Fry's - at least the ones I have looked at - have a setting to assign one of the hosts on the LAN side as the default host, the one that gets traffic not associated with any other host. Netgear and Lynksys are preset to assign this to the first DHCP client. So it isn't true for many people other than YOU, that NAT protects them, or that it is forced to discard unknown packets because it can't guess where to send them. "Home network" NAT devices certainly can, and often do pass incoming traffic. Things like Diablo and ICQ would not work correctly if these devices didn't "guess" what to do with unsolicited traffic. With both the Netgear and Linksys devices, I had to take extra steps to make sure that incoming port 80 traffic did not pass to the default host. They only blocked port 139.
In the end, almost everything you said is either factually ioncorect, or just does not follow logically from your initial statements disagreeing with my remarks. And I didn't say WD-40, I said 10W40 which does in fact, resemble Teryaki glaze. You can't even get a trivial non-issue right, what makes you think you're convincing anyone that you have a grasp of the relevant stuff?
They say NAT, but let's not forget that most NAT implementations are sold, at least in part, as firewall solutions.
And you should never buy a serious security product that advertises NAT in this manner. NAT is not a firewall technology. It does the opposite of what a firewall does. NAT enables communication where it is otherwise impossible. Firewalls prevent communication where it would otherwise be possible. These are two diametrically opposed design goals.
I want a firewall, and NAT makes a very good firewall. The last thing I want is to have to make all of my machines internet-safe.
Before you embarass yourself again, get a clue. The firewalling properties you perceive in NAT are an illusion, a side-effect of its primary function. NAT makes communication possible where it was not possible before. This is the opposite of what a firewall is designed to do, which is to make communication impossible where it would otherwise have been able to take place.
NAT offers no protection against the very things you become vulnerable to by not bothering to harden your machines (trojans can communicate with the outside via NAT as well as your legit apps can).
NAT is not a firewall substitute, anymore than Teryaki glaze is a substitute for 10W40. They look kind of the same, but on a fundamental level, they are quite different.
And I can honestly say that Microsoft hasn't harmed me, hasn't stifled my innovation and basically has had little to no impact on me.
If that's so, you're the exception, not the rule, among computer users. Although, I don't think you've given a frank appraisal of how Microsoft can constrain your computing experience. If I may make such a bad pun, the peripheral effects on the market are pretty obvious to anyone who has tried to get commodity hardware working on other OS besides Microsoft's, or to get support for their hardware - or even their internet connection - when it is not running Windows.
But that's neither here nor there, because:
. I was part of management for a major computer manufacturer and one of the decisions that we had to make regarded the shipment of systems with no OS or a custom OS installed. From a cost perspective, it simply was too expensive to delete Windows from our configurations and create a special process for the small number of orders that required no OS. It wasn't a contract requirement, it wasn't Microsoft leaning on us to ship Windows, it was economics plain and simple. To knock $40 off the cost of a system and ship with no OS cost well over $40 to implement on such a small volume of computers.
As management, you're admitting that you guys couldn't even figure out how to do NOTHING without it costing over $40.00 not to do it? THis is so telling of how management thinks totally ass-backwards. Why are you trying to delete Windows from the configuration??? Did it ever occur to you, JUST DON'T ADD IT?!?!? (and you claim that you've not been damaged - you're BRAIN DAMAGED!!).
Oh, and the company is still in business. And, in a sea of red ink, actually made a profit last quarter.
Oh how late 90's of you. Please tell me: I'm supposed to take whatever else you have to say seriously, because.... ????
I'm sick of hearing all of this anti-Americanism on Slashdot.
Then stop reading it.
Every post I read seems to be something along the lines of "Where's the proof?" or "What's next, America shutting down dissident sites?"
Well, where IS the proof? It was promised before the campaign started, then the promise was withdrawn. And, what IS next? These are legitimate questions.
Well, I'll have you know, we're in a war here.
So I'm told.
The rules have been changed.
That much is obvious. There are questions as to whether it is justified, and even as to whether it is legal.
It's like those people who shout "We must bring Usama back and try him in our courts!" That's absolutely ridiculous. We didn't try Hitler, nor would we have even considered it if we captured him.
How do you know that? Hitler shot himself. The Nazis that managed to be captured were tried. What makes you think Hitler wouldn't have been tried as well?
It's wartime, the rules are changed.
You said that before. Funny thing about propaganda is that the people who spread it don't think of it in that way.
Somalia is just as bad, if not WORSE than Iraq in its harboring and promotion of international terrorists.
How do you know this? Do you believe it because important men on TV say it is so? Can you point to Somalia on a map? Who are the principal political forces within Somalia, and which ones should we hold responsible for harboring or supporting terrorists?
Remember, this is a war. Your peacetime rules don't apply, so don't pretend to think that they do.
You continue to repeat yourself over and over, but that does not change the fact that Congress has not declared war on any nation, nor is there much provision in the Constitution for declaring war on a person, or on a group of persons, or on an organization, or on an ideology. This "war" on terrorism is a war in name only, like the "war" on drugs, the "war" on poverty, the "war" on cancer, and so on.
Let me ask you something: In light of the Bush administration repeatedly stressing to the public that the "war" on terrorism will never come to a decisive conclusion, that it will take a concerted effort for an indefinite period of time; given that the new laws authorizing drastic curtailment of due process, habeas corpus and other legal protections, co-mingling of domestic law enforcement and overseas intelligence operations and other unprecedented actions that were not even considered in the wake of Pearl Harbor, were passed with no meaningful debate, with few if any dissenting votes, at a time when public feedback was hampered by the extraordinary anthrax infestations; given that, in this country and others going back to antiquity, the overwhelming tendency of those in power is to accumulate more and not relinquish it easily, and that even a cursory examination of the history of the world validates this conclusion with example after example; in light of all these things, do you really expect me to accept that it is unreasonable to even raise a question about what the hell is going on?
On some systems (like Solaris),/usr is considered read-only and shareable for the use of diskless clients. This is where/opt comes in. It keeps optional software not intended to be shared, out of the shareable/usr tree. Simple as that.
Mosfet sez, at the end of his article:
Second of all a few angry people questioned my qualifications to make the above commentary, and one person even called me a novice!
Perhaps this is because he made a novice-level comment:
I asked around and it seems they don't want to manage the user's PATH variable, which tells Linux where it's programs are.
I don't think I need to point out the glaring newbie goof here. Well, maybe I do: the shell makes use of PATH, not Linux, not Solaris, not Windows. PATH has nothing at all to do with Linux.
I am not a Linux fan-boy, so I have no idea who Mosfet is, aside from this article where he sounds like a novice ranting about nothing important. Yeah, RH is bloated. Who'd have guessed?
The going theory for a long time is that we HAVE to support the Saudis because all of the alternatives possible in Saudi Arabia are so much worse than the Al Saud family that it would be a terrible event for 1) America 2) Western Civilization as a whole if they were to fall from power.
What is wrong with "Western Civilization" that makes its well-being dependent on who is in charge of a non-Western nation?
I'll offer a delegation from my 2nd level domain, so for example, the domain that was taken from "j d sallen" can be replaced with the one I am offering: vivendiuniversalsucks.thekindbud.com.
Someone who is more enterprising than myself could set up some more 3rd level delegations, like vivendiuniversalsucks.mydick.com, vivendiuniversalsucks.greencanalwater.com, vivendiuniversalsucks.theyjustsuckperiod.com, and so on...
WIPO and ICANN have no authority over 3rd level delegations, as far as I know. But that might be an interesting battle if they were to try to take away a domain that was used in this way.
Corporate dominance of public discourse is not a new problem.
That's right, terrorism is the new problem, and all this talk of corporate dominance is just distracting us from the real challenge: terrorismsucks.com!
Re:Salons review..
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Even Microsoft knows that you must first get the rope around their neck, before pulling the noose tight.
Chances are, they'll tell you that they are not authorized to transport biohazardous material, and will give you the 800 number for the Dept. of Transportation.
Slashdot Mirror
Not if it was losing money hand over fist.
There is a real tension between civil liberties and physical safety, no matter what Ben Franklin said;
... we have enemies who want to slaughter us wholesale, and the freedoms available to them in this country are enabling them to do so.
...and yet it has a fighting chance of being effective. It represents a sweet-spot in the freedom/safety trade-off.
I'll agree with that, but your next statement is completely unrelated, and doesn't follow from the first. Your essay reads like Bush's speeches, as if you've been given a shuffled deck of cards with slogans printed on them, and are reading them in random order.
No, we have leaders telling us that there are enemies that want to slaughter us. We have leaders who promised proof of this, but later withdrew that promise. All we know is that airplanes crashed into buildings, but the FBI was able to produce a list of the perpetrators including details about how they got into the country within days of the attacks, and they did all this without the powers granted by the Patriot Act.
Yet we're supposed to believe that this Act is necessary to fight the terrorism conspiracies that the administration promised to prove to us were happening, but later reneged on that promise.
In this context, the USA Patriot Act is a reasonable compromise, despite the newspeak name.
Show me a reason to believe it. Just stating it over and over is not sufficient.
The freedoms it sacrifices are non-essential (yes, there is such a thing),
Again, show me why I should believe it.
Given that the FBI was able to trace the perps of 9/11 without the help of the Patriot Act, why should I believe this? Everyone keeps trying to reassure me that if I am innocent, I have nothing to worry about. Pardon me, but I find that anything but reassuring.
Are they dumb? NO. It's about money.
Since when does "It's about money" excuse stupidity and legal bullying? I know, I know, -1 Redundant for me....
Are they trashing freedom-of-speech? FUCK NO.
No? Apple threatened a party with a lawsuit if they didn't retract what was said, even though nothing that was said was illegal in any way. What is trashing freedom of speech if not this?
Software Vendors have those agreements so they can actually make money off of the shit they make. Duh.
So of they put a clause in the license agreement for OSX 10.2 that says by using the software, you agree to pay them $100/mo for the privilege, you'll have no problem with that, and gladly will fork over your CC number so they can automate the charges. Right? I mean, just like you said, they put those licenses out there so they can make money off the software...
MacFixIt handled the situation very maturely but anyone here invoking "freedom of speech" rights for this particular case is merely making a devious use of one of our most cherished inallienable rights, and such behaviour can easily become one day its most threatening enemy.
Yeah, I've heard that one before, and it still doesn't wash. You cannot protect your rights by refraining from exercising them when it bothers the Powers That Be. Those are the times when you should be exercising your rights simply because you CAN.
You seem to think everyone runs *BSD and doesn't use Outlook, and base your conclusions on that. Oh yeah, you mentioned in passing that the Outlook-running crowd, whose NAT devices will not protect them, or the rest of the Internet, need some extra "forms of filtering". But when it came time to feel superior, you ignored the fact that you're an abberation, you don't run Outlook, unlike most everybody else with a Windows PC.
The inexpensive "Internet gateway" hubs from Best Buy or Fry's - at least the ones I have looked at - have a setting to assign one of the hosts on the LAN side as the default host, the one that gets traffic not associated with any other host. Netgear and Lynksys are preset to assign this to the first DHCP client. So it isn't true for many people other than YOU, that NAT protects them, or that it is forced to discard unknown packets because it can't guess where to send them. "Home network" NAT devices certainly can, and often do pass incoming traffic. Things like Diablo and ICQ would not work correctly if these devices didn't "guess" what to do with unsolicited traffic. With both the Netgear and Linksys devices, I had to take extra steps to make sure that incoming port 80 traffic did not pass to the default host. They only blocked port 139.
In the end, almost everything you said is either factually ioncorect, or just does not follow logically from your initial statements disagreeing with my remarks. And I didn't say WD-40, I said 10W40 which does in fact, resemble Teryaki glaze. You can't even get a trivial non-issue right, what makes you think you're convincing anyone that you have a grasp of the relevant stuff?
Fuck, I wonder how much this person gets paid, an easy job, easy money, and you don't have to know shit about what you're talking about.
Prolly 'bout as much as CmdrTaco....
They say NAT, but let's not forget that most NAT implementations are sold, at least in part, as firewall solutions.
And you should never buy a serious security product that advertises NAT in this manner. NAT is not a firewall technology. It does the opposite of what a firewall does. NAT enables communication where it is otherwise impossible. Firewalls prevent communication where it would otherwise be possible. These are two diametrically opposed design goals.
Repeat after me:
NAT is not a firewall technology.
NAT is not a firewall technology.
NAT is not a firewall technology.
This is very easy to demonstrate, with two questions and answers:
Q. What does a firewall do?
A. It prevents communication where it was otherwise possible
Q. What does NAT do?
A. It enables communication where it was otherwise not possible
Repeat after me:
NAT is not a firewall technology.
NAT is not a firewall technology.
NAT is not a firewall technology.
I want a firewall, and NAT makes a very good firewall. The last thing I want is to have to make all of my machines internet-safe.
Before you embarass yourself again, get a clue. The firewalling properties you perceive in NAT are an illusion, a side-effect of its primary function. NAT makes communication possible where it was not possible before. This is the opposite of what a firewall is designed to do, which is to make communication impossible where it would otherwise have been able to take place.
NAT offers no protection against the very things you become vulnerable to by not bothering to harden your machines (trojans can communicate with the outside via NAT as well as your legit apps can).
NAT is not a firewall substitute, anymore than Teryaki glaze is a substitute for 10W40. They look kind of the same, but on a fundamental level, they are quite different.
...and he would have the opportunity to use his celebrity to advance his ideology.
Not to mention his comedy career.
Yo, moderator!!! That post was FUNNY, not INTERESTING. Get out more often, or something!
:)
(I bet you used them all up by now, didn't you! Don't worry, someone else will
After all, they're saying that these poor schools just don't know how to spend the money, so we'll pick for them.
But they really don't know how. Look at all those Macs, clearly these people have misspent money in the past.
And I can honestly say that Microsoft hasn't harmed me, hasn't stifled my innovation and basically has had little to no impact on me.
If that's so, you're the exception, not the rule, among computer users. Although, I don't think you've given a frank appraisal of how Microsoft can constrain your computing experience. If I may make such a bad pun, the peripheral effects on the market are pretty obvious to anyone who has tried to get commodity hardware working on other OS besides Microsoft's, or to get support for their hardware - or even their internet connection - when it is not running Windows.
But that's neither here nor there, because:
. I was part of management for a major computer manufacturer and one of the decisions that we had to make regarded the shipment of systems with no OS or a custom OS installed. From a cost perspective, it simply was too expensive to delete Windows from our configurations and create a special process for the small number of orders that required no OS. It wasn't a contract requirement, it wasn't Microsoft leaning on us to ship Windows, it was economics plain and simple. To knock $40 off the cost of a system and ship with no OS cost well over $40 to implement on such a small volume of computers.
As management, you're admitting that you guys couldn't even figure out how to do NOTHING without it costing over $40.00 not to do it? THis is so telling of how management thinks totally ass-backwards. Why are you trying to delete Windows from the configuration??? Did it ever occur to you, JUST DON'T ADD IT?!?!? (and you claim that you've not been damaged - you're BRAIN DAMAGED!!).
Oh, and the company is still in business. And, in a sea of red ink, actually made a profit last quarter.
Oh how late 90's of you. Please tell me: I'm supposed to take whatever else you have to say seriously, because.... ????
I can hardly think of any industry where you pay 90% full price of a product and you see really no tangible "product".
Really? Nothing at all comes to mind?
Nathan P. Wilkerson
OpenSRS Reseller -- Hosting -- Colocation
Still can't think of anything? Here's a hint: domain name registration
That was TNT, not TNN, that was "involved" with the first Babylon5 spinoff "Crusade."
Milk is to become more white, infants are to become more young, and dirt is to become more filthy.
I'm sick of hearing all of this anti-Americanism on Slashdot.
Then stop reading it.
Every post I read seems to be something along the lines of "Where's the proof?" or "What's next, America shutting down dissident sites?"
Well, where IS the proof? It was promised before the campaign started, then the promise was withdrawn. And, what IS next? These are legitimate questions.
Well, I'll have you know, we're in a war here.
So I'm told.
The rules have been changed.
That much is obvious. There are questions as to whether it is justified, and even as to whether it is legal.
It's like those people who shout "We must bring Usama back and try him in our courts!" That's absolutely ridiculous. We didn't try Hitler, nor would we have even considered it if we captured him.
How do you know that? Hitler shot himself. The Nazis that managed to be captured were tried. What makes you think Hitler wouldn't have been tried as well?
It's wartime, the rules are changed.
You said that before. Funny thing about propaganda is that the people who spread it don't think of it in that way.
Somalia is just as bad, if not WORSE than Iraq in its harboring and promotion of international terrorists.
How do you know this? Do you believe it because important men on TV say it is so? Can you point to Somalia on a map? Who are the principal political forces within Somalia, and which ones should we hold responsible for harboring or supporting terrorists?
Remember, this is a war. Your peacetime rules don't apply, so don't pretend to think that they do.
You continue to repeat yourself over and over, but that does not change the fact that Congress has not declared war on any nation, nor is there much provision in the Constitution for declaring war on a person, or on a group of persons, or on an organization, or on an ideology. This "war" on terrorism is a war in name only, like the "war" on drugs, the "war" on poverty, the "war" on cancer, and so on.
Let me ask you something: In light of the Bush administration repeatedly stressing to the public that the "war" on terrorism will never come to a decisive conclusion, that it will take a concerted effort for an indefinite period of time; given that the new laws authorizing drastic curtailment of due process, habeas corpus and other legal protections, co-mingling of domestic law enforcement and overseas intelligence operations and other unprecedented actions that were not even considered in the wake of Pearl Harbor, were passed with no meaningful debate, with few if any dissenting votes, at a time when public feedback was hampered by the extraordinary anthrax infestations; given that, in this country and others going back to antiquity, the overwhelming tendency of those in power is to accumulate more and not relinquish it easily, and that even a cursory examination of the history of the world validates this conclusion with example after example; in light of all these things, do you really expect me to accept that it is unreasonable to even raise a question about what the hell is going on?
On some systems (like Solaris), /usr is considered read-only and shareable for the use of diskless clients. This is where /opt comes in. It keeps optional software not intended to be shared, out of the shareable /usr tree. Simple as that.
Mosfet sez, at the end of his article:
Second of all a few angry people questioned my qualifications to make the above commentary, and one person even called me a novice!
Perhaps this is because he made a novice-level comment:
I asked around and it seems they don't want to manage the user's PATH variable, which tells Linux where it's programs are.
I don't think I need to point out the glaring newbie goof here. Well, maybe I do: the shell makes use of PATH, not Linux, not Solaris, not Windows. PATH has nothing at all to do with Linux.
I am not a Linux fan-boy, so I have no idea who Mosfet is, aside from this article where he sounds like a novice ranting about nothing important. Yeah, RH is bloated. Who'd have guessed?
The going theory for a long time is that we HAVE to support the Saudis because all of the alternatives possible in Saudi Arabia are so much worse than the Al Saud family that it would be a terrible event for 1) America 2) Western Civilization as a whole if they were to fall from power.
What is wrong with "Western Civilization" that makes its well-being dependent on who is in charge of a non-Western nation?
You can't find the phone without a lightbulb. DUH!!
I wonder if the Sept 11 events have thrown people off so much that they see problems where they would not have seen them before.
I'll offer a delegation from my 2nd level domain, so for example, the domain that was taken from "j d sallen" can be replaced with the one I am offering: vivendiuniversalsucks.thekindbud.com.
Someone who is more enterprising than myself could set up some more 3rd level delegations, like vivendiuniversalsucks.mydick.com, vivendiuniversalsucks.greencanalwater.com, vivendiuniversalsucks.theyjustsuckperiod.com, and so on...
WIPO and ICANN have no authority over 3rd level delegations, as far as I know. But that might be an interesting battle if they were to try to take away a domain that was used in this way.
Corporate dominance of public discourse is not a new problem.
That's right, terrorism is the new problem, and all this talk of corporate dominance is just distracting us from the real challenge: terrorismsucks.com!
Even Microsoft knows that you must first get the rope around their neck, before pulling the noose tight.
Chances are, they'll tell you that they are not authorized to transport biohazardous material, and will give you the 800 number for the Dept. of Transportation.