...IF the judges in cases involving the MPAA remember that, in order to get this proposed law defeated in California, the MPAA essentially admitted that it lies and falsifies information in the course of a piracy investigation >:)
I can see the court transcript now:
Judge: And how, exactly, were you able to obtain this evidence?
**AA: Your honor, we lied and falsified information, but everything we tell you is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth...honest.
Judge: Riiiiiiiiight.....
I've used propylene glycol in my cars for years (Sierra or Prestone Low Tox). The only problem I've had is finding a hydrometer to check my mixture of antifreeze and water, since IIRC, propylene glycol has a slightly different S.G. than ethylene glycol.
I have one additional worry. Since Bush has said that terrorist suspects go to Guantanamo (or other, similar prisons) and do not have to be given a criminal trial according to U.S. law, then how many people arrested due to evidence collected by the warrantless wiretapping will ever see a court?
I'm not convinced that we are (yet) so far gone that a violent overthrow is the only solution. But perhaps it is time for some civil disobedience to challenge the laws that have been passed lately.
I do this too, and it's not a bad idea if all you want to do is create a throw-away account for blocking spam. But like another poster said a few comments earlier, if you are trying to make it more difficult for others to trace your on-line identity back to yourself, owning your own domain may not help much unless you lied about your identity when registering the domain name.
For example, even though I'm using a pseudonym on/. and I've opted to hide my e-mail address, anyone who cares could research my domain name to find out who I really am.
Not to mention the money spent on additional mail servers and hard drive space to handle the load of all the incoming spam.
I used to work at a rather small ISP (~50K users) that had two iPlanet servers to store and deliver customer e-mail and five FreeBSD/sendmail servers to filter and process incoming e-mail. When the spammers would kick off a campaign, they would essentially DoS our sendmail farm. The load averages on those servers would shoot to 20+ (anything over 1 meant the servers were working hard) and legitimate e-mails would be delayed by an hour or more. We blacklisted anything we could, but the only thing we did that really helped was throw more servers into the farm.
An angle of 135 degrees between torso and thighs puts you halfway to lying down flat on your back.
Only if you obtain the 135 degree angle while keeping your thighs parallel to the floor. Right now, I am sitting near the forward edge of my chair, with my knees pointing towards the floor and my feet crossed on the floor, almost directly under my butt. My back? It's perpendicular to the floor, even though I'm pretty close to 135 degrees between my spine and thighs. It looks something like this:
O
|__
|
\
\
/
/
Okay, the ASCII art sucks, but you get the idea:)
If you've ever used the kneeling chairs that I first saw in the early '80s, it's approximating that sitting position in a regular office chair by angling the seat downwards in the front with your legs tucked back under you body below the seat. The good thing is that, unlike the kneeling chairs I've used in the past, this doesn't hurt your shins.
I worked in a government office from 1987 to 1988 as a high-school work study student. As part of my "inprocessing" I was required to do something that will probably sound familiar to anyone who is now or ever was in the military: a vow to uphold the Constitution and to defend the U.S. against all enemies foreign and domestic. Newt Gingrich and the current Republican administration (and I say that as someone who typically leans towards conservative politics) is sounding more and more like a domestic enemy. I'm not sure the Dems would be any better, but people, we have got to vote for candidates that respect the Constitution and the principles upon which the U.S. was founded.
If we don't, the terrorists will have won just as surely as if they had acquired enough nuclear weapons to remove the U.S. from the face of the earth.
One of the huge problems that OSS faces is the attitude that if a user (non-developer) wants a feature, then he should work on it himself.
I don't see this as a problem. Since a lot of OSS software is both "free as in speech" and "free as in beer", why is it wrong to ask you to contribute something back to the community if you see a need that hasn't been filled yet?
OSS developers only seem to want to work on "pet projects" that are "fun" to code, not projects that are "boring" or seen as "difficult" or "of no interest to the developers"
And your point is? IMHO, the average FOSS developer is orders of magnitude more passionate about their project(s) than the average for-hire code monkey. Would you rather work on something that stimulates your intellect and improves your knowledge or the same tedious crap you've been doing for the last ten years in your cubicle at work? If you aren't getting a monetary reward to work on a project, then what's wrong with working on something that you find interesting? A lot of really good sofware has resulted from a small group of developers working on a problem of mutual interest: the Linux kernel itself, Apache, Asterisk, MySQL, Perl, Postfix, etc., etc., etc.
OSS programmers must take the time to provide features which the market, which primarily consists of non-developers, wants
Once again, why? If you are talking about a business project, then yes, the developer *must* take the customers' needs into consideration, or the business will bust. But while a number of FOSS projects have become commercially successful, many, many more are still maintained by people who aren't working on the projects for profit, but rather because they want to. And if I am working on something because I want to, rather than because I have to, then I can develop whatever features I want because it isn't money that motivates me. If no one uses it, it doesn't really matter because I don't need to make a profit to continue a hobby.
This is basic economics: provide the market with the goods it wants, or get run out of business.
Yes, except that in many cases, we are talking about projects that were created and are maintained for personal satisfaction. It's rather difficult to be run out of business when, technically, you aren't even in the business.
But don't you think the folks at FreeGeek doing sort of a disservice to those they give computers to? Linux is not the easiest to learn, and once it is learned the skills are only applicable to less than 5 percent of all computers.
No, I don't.
easy != worthwhile and popular != best
I altered my career path about six or seven years ago because of a few words of wisdom a mentor spoke to me. At the time I was an AS/400 computer operator, and my career goal was to be an AS/400 programmer. One day, this particular mentor mentioned in passing that if I learn the AS/400, then I know the AS/400 and that's it. But, if I learn Unix, however, I had skills that were applicable in any number of jobs, because Unix variants are found in a number of machines, from IBM RS/6000 mainframes Solaris servers to the all-but-obsolete PC's that FreeGeek is giving away.
Fast-forward a few years...I am now employed as a Unix system administrator, making twice as much money as I was when I was given the advice to learn Unix. By your logic, this advice was poor, and the mentor did me a disservice by suggesting that I learn an arguably difficult operating system that is "used by less than 5 percent of all computers"...even though I am now financially comfortable (I'm not rich, but I'm not hurting, either) and I have a job I love.
Point taken. My argument is flawed, so allow me to modify it slightly.
Suppose rather than Dell with an OEM agreement, I run a small computer shop selling custom PCs. I buy components to match a customer's needs and budget, build them a smoking machine, buy Windows in volume from a (legit) mail-order warehouse, and install the OS on these custom computers. I've never struck an OEM arrangement with Microsoft because I am a small operator, and because I build high-end PCs, the OS is a small portion of the total price of the computer. Am I in violation of copyright law? Have I violated Microsoft's EULA? If so, I don't see how. And I don't see how this is fundamentally different to the MPAA vs. the iPod business.
Just as installing the OS is incidental to the primary business of selling high-end custom computers in the example above, ripping a DVD to an iPod is incidental to the sale of the iPod in the business in this article. The business is selling an iPod bundled with a DVD. Having the DVD ripped to the iPod already is a gimmick to give him/her an edge over competing iPod vendors in that area--it is not the primary business model, nor is it depriving the MPAA or any of the artists involved in the production of the DVD of any revenue, since the DVD is included in each sale.
Great thesis statement, now support your position.
The point is, the MPAA is *still* getting their royalty from the sale of the DVD--which *may* be a sale they would not have otherwise received (i.e., they are potentially receiving more money than they would have if the iPod vendor were not in business). The iPod vendor is making money on the time and labor taken to move the bits from the DVD to the iPod, not on distributing a copyrighted work without providing royalties to the artists (including the MPAA) who created the work. I fail to see how this activity is copyright infringement, and I fail to see how this activity is harming anyone involved in producing the DVD.
If the iPod vendor had bought a single DVD of all of the works being transferred and was using them as masters from which to produce multiple copies on iPods, I could see the point. But in this case, the MPAA is cutting off its nose to spite its face. They are getting paid, so what's the problem?
Umm...what's the difference between this vendor distributing an iPod preloaded with movies (DVD included) and, for example, Dell selling me a PC preloaded with Windows (install CD included)? In either case, someone (the iPod retailer in the first case, Dell in the second) is "making money" by providing me with a device I want preloaded with copyrighted material (that they assume) I want.
Good grief...if the vendor *purchased* the frigging DVDs and supplies them to customer, then how exactly has the MPAA or any of the artists responsible for said movies been harmed by this activity?!?!?!?!
Because Image Stream http://www.imagestream.com/ already makes a REALLY capable Intel-based router, which is derived from Slackware, I believe. A lot of our Cisco gear is being phased out by the Image Stream products, since the Image Stream gear performs so much better, and is easier to manage. However, at my previous place of employment (also an ISP, but a much bigger one) we used exclusively Cisco equipment, and God help you if you tried to bring *anything* Linux into that environment:/
You are exactly right--you can get a much better router for (1/10th) the price by using something like the Image Stream routers, but most PHB's have heard of Cisco, whereas they haven't heard of Image Stream...and just as in the Microsoft vs. Linux battle for corporate acceptance, most PHB's have more faith in what they've heard of before, even if it's inferior in every other way. I'm lucky to have a really open-minded, intelligent supervisor where I'm at now, and that's one of the reasons I left the old job for this one.
I can only answer points one and two in your post, since I have no experience whatsoever with SEC.
E-mail? Sometimes, but not so much anymore, IME. ISP and other sys admins *are* using a number of e-mail filters, and yes, there are a number of good, free (as in speech *and* as in beer) e-mail filters. One of the more popular is clamav http://www.clamav.net/. At an ISP where I used to work, we had a Sendmail farm that ran clamav, mimedefang, a number of custom perl scripts, sieve http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3028.txt and maybe a few other things to filter our e-mail, and *still* our clients complained about spam (but not about too much e-mail virii).
Exploits in the OS? Yep, more often than not. So why don't ISP's filter incoming traffic? There are a number of answers to this question. First, a lot of sys admins take an ideological approach--"I am providing you with a pipe to the internet. Filtering this pipe is your responsibility; not mine." IMHO, this is kind of like saying "The internet was founded on open principles, and therefore, *all* mail servers should be open relays." It's nice, warm, fuzzy, lets-gather-round-the-campfire-and-sing-kumbaya idea, but it just doesn't work in real life. Second, there is a legal/liability reason. If I, as an ISP, start filtering traffic, then sooner or later some stupid schmuck is going to take me to court because something slipped through the filters and infected his machine. I may win, but the legal battle still wastes my time and my resources. So, instead, a number of ISP's cop out and provide no filtering. Third, and this is the big reason, most common networking equipment simply hasn't got the CPU to handle a bunch of filters. A Cisco 3640 on my network, for example, shows it only has a 100MHz processor--how much filtering do you think it can do without impacting throughput? An AS5300 on my network is only 150MHz. So most ISPs apply access lists very sparingly, since trying to firewall an entire ISP on a router will crater your router in short order. Fourth, the only way to effectively block with an access list is to block either a specific IP address (dynamic IP addressing, anyone?) or to block by port. Yes, you can tell your Cisco iron to drop all incoming traffic on ports 135-139, but this only works to a point. A lot of malware uses high-numbered ports ( >1024, IIRC), which are used at random for *any* network traffic. So yes, you can drop all traffic on port 3127 for example, but when you start filtering too many high-numbered ports, you begin impacting legitimate traffic as well.
In a nutshell, if you are a sys admin for a small business with a reasonably beefy SOHO router, it's pretty easy to filter for legitimate traffic at your edge. But it doesn't scale. Just because you can do it for 100-1,000 employees doesn't mean you can do it for 10,000 or 100,000 (or more) customers.
Yeah, but if the PHB can't make the numbers add up to a plus mark, then I don't get my paycheck every other Friday, so I think I'll cut him a little slack.
When you read webmail, the emails that you read are in fact stored on your hard drive, in your web browsers cache, at least temporarily.
Not necessarily. First, you can set the cache size to 0, which as far as I can tell prevents Mozilla/Firefox from writing to the cache. Second, on a *nix box at least, you can tell Mozilla only (there doesn't seem to be a way to do this in Firefox AFAIK) to write the cache to/dev/null. I did both, until I started using Firefox; now I just use a cache size of 0. However, there *may* still be data in your swap files, depending upon how many processes are running and how much memory you have on your system.
Finally, how much data is written to your hard drive if you are reading web mail while running Knoppix or DSL from a CD-ROM?:D
I think amateur guitarists would rather just sit in an empty room playing with themselves than dream of being in a big-name band like Korn
Eh...no. As an amateur musician (guitar, bass, and sometimes vocals) I'd rather polish my skills so I can move closer to the reality of being in a big-name band like Korn. Even if it never happens, my personal choice is that it's better to have tried and failed than to wonder "what if?" for the rest of my life. If you believe otherwise, that's cool, too.
Fender Strat = 1399. PS2 + Guitar Hero + 40" DLP HDTV is about the same. Take your choice.
Where did you come up with $1399? Sure, the Eric Clapton signature Strat I've drooled over for years is something like that, but I've got two Fender Strats (and no, I don't mean "Squire by Fender"), the most expensive of which was only $450 http://www.zzounds.com/item--FEN130169. Granted, one was made in Japan, the other was made in Mexico, so they aren't the premium "American Series" strats, but they are still really nice guitars, and I can always install American Series pickups to make them even nicer (in fact, I *did* in the Japanese Strat). So, given the choice of a real-world Strat for under $500 or a video game for $1399, I'll take the Strat. YMMV, though.
Dude, did you actually read what I said, or did you only read a few words and jump to conclusions?
What I said, restated for the slow:
One data point (the glacier with which I am familiar) does not necessarily correlate with what is happening to the world at large, so take the information I am presenting with a grain of salt. That said, the glacier with which I am familiar has indeed retreated a substantial amount in the last 17 years. This may or may not be indicative of trends on a global scale, and even if it is indicative of world wide trends, that doesn't prove anything about global warming, since other factors--such as average yearly precipitation--also affect whether a glacier grows or shrinks (yes, Virginia, it is entirely possible to have a glacier shrink due to reduced snowfall in the winter despite colder than average temperatures).
2) I'm from Anchorage, Alaska, so I'm biased, but my $0.02 (or equivalent in other currency) is a resounding "abso-freakin-lutely!" (especially since it was a toasty 5 degrees F. this morning...)
3) Hmmm...good question. I can only relate to one glacier that's relatively close to home, and, as another/. poster had in his signature, "the plural of anecdote is not data" but here goes, anyway.
I moved to Alaska in 1989. The municipality of Anchorage spent I-don't-know-how-many-million dollars to build a visitor center at Portage Glacier right around the time I arrived here, because Portage Glacier was a really stunning sight and a local tourist attraction. Fast forward to the early to mid '90s (three to five years later, IIRC), and you could no longer see Portage Glacier from the visitor center, because it had retreated behind the mountain upon which it rests. By 2000-ish, you had to take a ride on the ferries that operate on Portage Lake to see the glacier any more. So, for this glacier at least, even if you compare winter now to summer then, the glacier has absolutely, positively, beyond any argument retreated.
When a musician records a song that will be released by one of the record labels, there is a clause in the contract with the musician that states something to the effect that "all of the sounds, samples, etc. incorporated in this work are either solely the property of the recording artist or have been properly licensed by the legitimate owner(s) of such sounds, samples, etc."
This way, if I record a song that uses a snippet from a movie or from another song without having permission to use said snippet, then if^H^Hwhen the record label gets sued, they present the contract that I signed showing that they have done their due diligence (or whatever; IANAL) and that any copyright infringement is strictly my problem.
Seems to me that Google/YouTube could include a clause like that in the upload form for videos they host...
Whoa, there big fella...this uppity Yank didn't mean to ruffle any English feathers.
Like the post *I* responded to, my post was intended to be taken in jest, not literally, and certainly not to get anyone excited. My apologies if it was taken to be an American flexing of the muscles.
You are correct, the War of 1812 was *not* about independence as much as it was about trade embargoes and boundary skirmishes along the border with Canada.
However, it can be argued that there were some tensions between the two countries because England still tended to view us Yanks as Colonials rather than a sovereign nation, and therefore, the U.S. was asserting its independence to some degree in the War of 1812. And I'd hardly call boarding American ships, impressing sailors into service in the Royal Navy and confiscating cargo from our merchant ships--some of the grievances that led to the war--"basically leaving [us] alone."
Slashdot Mirror
... IF the judges in cases involving the MPAA remember that, in order to get this proposed law defeated in California, the MPAA essentially admitted that it lies and falsifies information in the course of a piracy investigation >:)
I can see the court transcript now: Judge: And how, exactly, were you able to obtain this evidence? **AA: Your honor, we lied and falsified information, but everything we tell you is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth...honest. Judge: Riiiiiiiiight.....
I've used propylene glycol in my cars for years (Sierra or Prestone Low Tox). The only problem I've had is finding a hydrometer to check my mixture of antifreeze and water, since IIRC, propylene glycol has a slightly different S.G. than ethylene glycol.
I have one additional worry. Since Bush has said that terrorist suspects go to Guantanamo (or other, similar prisons) and do not have to be given a criminal trial according to U.S. law, then how many people arrested due to evidence collected by the warrantless wiretapping will ever see a court?
That is something I really think is scary...
How much blood did Ghandi or MLK spill?
I'm not convinced that we are (yet) so far gone that a violent overthrow is the only solution. But perhaps it is time for some civil disobedience to challenge the laws that have been passed lately.
I do this too, and it's not a bad idea if all you want to do is create a throw-away account for blocking spam. But like another poster said a few comments earlier, if you are trying to make it more difficult for others to trace your on-line identity back to yourself, owning your own domain may not help much unless you lied about your identity when registering the domain name.
/. and I've opted to hide my e-mail address, anyone who cares could research my domain name to find out who I really am.
For example, even though I'm using a pseudonym on
Not to mention the money spent on additional mail servers and hard drive space to handle the load of all the incoming spam.
I used to work at a rather small ISP (~50K users) that had two iPlanet servers to store and deliver customer e-mail and five FreeBSD/sendmail servers to filter and process incoming e-mail. When the spammers would kick off a campaign, they would essentially DoS our sendmail farm. The load averages on those servers would shoot to 20+ (anything over 1 meant the servers were working hard) and legitimate e-mails would be delayed by an hour or more. We blacklisted anything we could, but the only thing we did that really helped was throw more servers into the farm.
Only if you obtain the 135 degree angle while keeping your thighs parallel to the floor. Right now, I am sitting near the forward edge of my chair, with my knees pointing towards the floor and my feet crossed on the floor, almost directly under my butt. My back? It's perpendicular to the floor, even though I'm pretty close to 135 degrees between my spine and thighs. It looks something like this:
O
|__
|
\
\
/
/
Okay, the ASCII art sucks, but you get the idea
If you've ever used the kneeling chairs that I first saw in the early '80s, it's approximating that sitting position in a regular office chair by angling the seat downwards in the front with your legs tucked back under you body below the seat. The good thing is that, unlike the kneeling chairs I've used in the past, this doesn't hurt your shins.
I worked in a government office from 1987 to 1988 as a high-school work study student. As part of my "inprocessing" I was required to do something that will probably sound familiar to anyone who is now or ever was in the military: a vow to uphold the Constitution and to defend the U.S. against all enemies foreign and domestic. Newt Gingrich and the current Republican administration (and I say that as someone who typically leans towards conservative politics) is sounding more and more like a domestic enemy. I'm not sure the Dems would be any better, but people, we have got to vote for candidates that respect the Constitution and the principles upon which the U.S. was founded.
If we don't, the terrorists will have won just as surely as if they had acquired enough nuclear weapons to remove the U.S. from the face of the earth.
And don't forget the z bugs reported but silently swept under the carpet in the hope that no one would discover them.
I don't see this as a problem. Since a lot of OSS software is both "free as in speech" and "free as in beer", why is it wrong to ask you to contribute something back to the community if you see a need that hasn't been filled yet?
And your point is? IMHO, the average FOSS developer is orders of magnitude more passionate about their project(s) than the average for-hire code monkey. Would you rather work on something that stimulates your intellect and improves your knowledge or the same tedious crap you've been doing for the last ten years in your cubicle at work? If you aren't getting a monetary reward to work on a project, then what's wrong with working on something that you find interesting? A lot of really good sofware has resulted from a small group of developers working on a problem of mutual interest: the Linux kernel itself, Apache, Asterisk, MySQL, Perl, Postfix, etc., etc., etc.
Once again, why? If you are talking about a business project, then yes, the developer *must* take the customers' needs into consideration, or the business will bust. But while a number of FOSS projects have become commercially successful, many, many more are still maintained by people who aren't working on the projects for profit, but rather because they want to. And if I am working on something because I want to, rather than because I have to, then I can develop whatever features I want because it isn't money that motivates me. If no one uses it, it doesn't really matter because I don't need to make a profit to continue a hobby.
Yes, except that in many cases, we are talking about projects that were created and are maintained for personal satisfaction. It's rather difficult to be run out of business when, technically, you aren't even in the business.
No, I don't.
easy != worthwhile and popular != best
I altered my career path about six or seven years ago because of a few words of wisdom a mentor spoke to me. At the time I was an AS/400 computer operator, and my career goal was to be an AS/400 programmer. One day, this particular mentor mentioned in passing that if I learn the AS/400, then I know the AS/400 and that's it. But, if I learn Unix, however, I had skills that were applicable in any number of jobs, because Unix variants are found in a number of machines, from IBM RS/6000 mainframes Solaris servers to the all-but-obsolete PC's that FreeGeek is giving away.
Fast-forward a few years...I am now employed as a Unix system administrator, making twice as much money as I was when I was given the advice to learn Unix. By your logic, this advice was poor, and the mentor did me a disservice by suggesting that I learn an arguably difficult operating system that is "used by less than 5 percent of all computers"...even though I am now financially comfortable (I'm not rich, but I'm not hurting, either) and I have a job I love.
Point taken. My argument is flawed, so allow me to modify it slightly.
Suppose rather than Dell with an OEM agreement, I run a small computer shop selling custom PCs. I buy components to match a customer's needs and budget, build them a smoking machine, buy Windows in volume from a (legit) mail-order warehouse, and install the OS on these custom computers. I've never struck an OEM arrangement with Microsoft because I am a small operator, and because I build high-end PCs, the OS is a small portion of the total price of the computer. Am I in violation of copyright law? Have I violated Microsoft's EULA? If so, I don't see how. And I don't see how this is fundamentally different to the MPAA vs. the iPod business.
Just as installing the OS is incidental to the primary business of selling high-end custom computers in the example above, ripping a DVD to an iPod is incidental to the sale of the iPod in the business in this article. The business is selling an iPod bundled with a DVD. Having the DVD ripped to the iPod already is a gimmick to give him/her an edge over competing iPod vendors in that area--it is not the primary business model, nor is it depriving the MPAA or any of the artists involved in the production of the DVD of any revenue, since the DVD is included in each sale.
Great thesis statement, now support your position.
The point is, the MPAA is *still* getting their royalty from the sale of the DVD--which *may* be a sale they would not have otherwise received (i.e., they are potentially receiving more money than they would have if the iPod vendor were not in business). The iPod vendor is making money on the time and labor taken to move the bits from the DVD to the iPod, not on distributing a copyrighted work without providing royalties to the artists (including the MPAA) who created the work. I fail to see how this activity is copyright infringement, and I fail to see how this activity is harming anyone involved in producing the DVD.
If the iPod vendor had bought a single DVD of all of the works being transferred and was using them as masters from which to produce multiple copies on iPods, I could see the point. But in this case, the MPAA is cutting off its nose to spite its face. They are getting paid, so what's the problem?
Umm...what's the difference between this vendor distributing an iPod preloaded with movies (DVD included) and, for example, Dell selling me a PC preloaded with Windows (install CD included)? In either case, someone (the iPod retailer in the first case, Dell in the second) is "making money" by providing me with a device I want preloaded with copyrighted material (that they assume) I want.
Good grief...if the vendor *purchased* the frigging DVDs and supplies them to customer, then how exactly has the MPAA or any of the artists responsible for said movies been harmed by this activity?!?!?!?!
Because Image Stream http://www.imagestream.com/ already makes a REALLY capable Intel-based router, which is derived from Slackware, I believe. A lot of our Cisco gear is being phased out by the Image Stream products, since the Image Stream gear performs so much better, and is easier to manage. However, at my previous place of employment (also an ISP, but a much bigger one) we used exclusively Cisco equipment, and God help you if you tried to bring *anything* Linux into that environment
You are exactly right--you can get a much better router for (1/10th) the price by using something like the Image Stream routers, but most PHB's have heard of Cisco, whereas they haven't heard of Image Stream...and just as in the Microsoft vs. Linux battle for corporate acceptance, most PHB's have more faith in what they've heard of before, even if it's inferior in every other way. I'm lucky to have a really open-minded, intelligent supervisor where I'm at now, and that's one of the reasons I left the old job for this one.
I can only answer points one and two in your post, since I have no experience whatsoever with SEC.
E-mail? Sometimes, but not so much anymore, IME. ISP and other sys admins *are* using a number of e-mail filters, and yes, there are a number of good, free (as in speech *and* as in beer) e-mail filters. One of the more popular is clamav http://www.clamav.net/. At an ISP where I used to work, we had a Sendmail farm that ran clamav, mimedefang, a number of custom perl scripts, sieve http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3028.txt and maybe a few other things to filter our e-mail, and *still* our clients complained about spam (but not about too much e-mail virii).
Exploits in the OS? Yep, more often than not. So why don't ISP's filter incoming traffic? There are a number of answers to this question. First, a lot of sys admins take an ideological approach--"I am providing you with a pipe to the internet. Filtering this pipe is your responsibility; not mine." IMHO, this is kind of like saying "The internet was founded on open principles, and therefore, *all* mail servers should be open relays." It's nice, warm, fuzzy, lets-gather-round-the-campfire-and-sing-kumbaya idea, but it just doesn't work in real life. Second, there is a legal/liability reason. If I, as an ISP, start filtering traffic, then sooner or later some stupid schmuck is going to take me to court because something slipped through the filters and infected his machine. I may win, but the legal battle still wastes my time and my resources. So, instead, a number of ISP's cop out and provide no filtering. Third, and this is the big reason, most common networking equipment simply hasn't got the CPU to handle a bunch of filters. A Cisco 3640 on my network, for example, shows it only has a 100MHz processor--how much filtering do you think it can do without impacting throughput? An AS5300 on my network is only 150MHz. So most ISPs apply access lists very sparingly, since trying to firewall an entire ISP on a router will crater your router in short order. Fourth, the only way to effectively block with an access list is to block either a specific IP address (dynamic IP addressing, anyone?) or to block by port. Yes, you can tell your Cisco iron to drop all incoming traffic on ports 135-139, but this only works to a point. A lot of malware uses high-numbered ports ( >1024, IIRC), which are used at random for *any* network traffic. So yes, you can drop all traffic on port 3127 for example, but when you start filtering too many high-numbered ports, you begin impacting legitimate traffic as well.
In a nutshell, if you are a sys admin for a small business with a reasonably beefy SOHO router, it's pretty easy to filter for legitimate traffic at your edge. But it doesn't scale. Just because you can do it for 100-1,000 employees doesn't mean you can do it for 10,000 or 100,000 (or more) customers.
On the plus side, if Sprint can't complete a phone call reliably, your friends will never receive the GPS update of your location, either.
Yeah, but if the PHB can't make the numbers add up to a plus mark, then I don't get my paycheck every other Friday, so I think I'll cut him a little slack.
Not necessarily. First, you can set the cache size to 0, which as far as I can tell prevents Mozilla/Firefox from writing to the cache. Second, on a *nix box at least, you can tell Mozilla only (there doesn't seem to be a way to do this in Firefox AFAIK) to write the cache to
Finally, how much data is written to your hard drive if you are reading web mail while running Knoppix or DSL from a CD-ROM?
Eh...no. As an amateur musician (guitar, bass, and sometimes vocals) I'd rather polish my skills so I can move closer to the reality of being in a big-name band like Korn. Even if it never happens, my personal choice is that it's better to have tried and failed than to wonder "what if?" for the rest of my life. If you believe otherwise, that's cool, too.
Where did you come up with $1399? Sure, the Eric Clapton signature Strat I've drooled over for years is something like that, but I've got two Fender Strats (and no, I don't mean "Squire by Fender"), the most expensive of which was only $450 http://www.zzounds.com/item--FEN130169. Granted, one was made in Japan, the other was made in Mexico, so they aren't the premium "American Series" strats, but they are still really nice guitars, and I can always install American Series pickups to make them even nicer (in fact, I *did* in the Japanese Strat). So, given the choice of a real-world Strat for under $500 or a video game for $1399, I'll take the Strat. YMMV, though.
Oh....Ummm....I apologize, then. Profusely :)
Dude, did you actually read what I said, or did you only read a few words and jump to conclusions?
What I said, restated for the slow: One data point (the glacier with which I am familiar) does not necessarily correlate with what is happening to the world at large, so take the information I am presenting with a grain of salt. That said, the glacier with which I am familiar has indeed retreated a substantial amount in the last 17 years. This may or may not be indicative of trends on a global scale, and even if it is indicative of world wide trends, that doesn't prove anything about global warming, since other factors--such as average yearly precipitation--also affect whether a glacier grows or shrinks (yes, Virginia, it is entirely possible to have a glacier shrink due to reduced snowfall in the winter despite colder than average temperatures).
<rolls eyes>
1) Good point; I concur :)
/. poster had in his signature, "the plural of anecdote is not data" but here goes, anyway.
2) I'm from Anchorage, Alaska, so I'm biased, but my $0.02 (or equivalent in other currency) is a resounding "abso-freakin-lutely!" (especially since it was a toasty 5 degrees F. this morning...)
3) Hmmm...good question. I can only relate to one glacier that's relatively close to home, and, as another
I moved to Alaska in 1989. The municipality of Anchorage spent I-don't-know-how-many-million dollars to build a visitor center at Portage Glacier right around the time I arrived here, because Portage Glacier was a really stunning sight and a local tourist attraction. Fast forward to the early to mid '90s (three to five years later, IIRC), and you could no longer see Portage Glacier from the visitor center, because it had retreated behind the mountain upon which it rests. By 2000-ish, you had to take a ride on the ferries that operate on Portage Lake to see the glacier any more. So, for this glacier at least, even if you compare winter now to summer then, the glacier has absolutely, positively, beyond any argument retreated.
When a musician records a song that will be released by one of the record labels, there is a clause in the contract with the musician that states something to the effect that "all of the sounds, samples, etc. incorporated in this work are either solely the property of the recording artist or have been properly licensed by the legitimate owner(s) of such sounds, samples, etc."
This way, if I record a song that uses a snippet from a movie or from another song without having permission to use said snippet, then if^H^Hwhen the record label gets sued, they present the contract that I signed showing that they have done their due diligence (or whatever; IANAL) and that any copyright infringement is strictly my problem.
Seems to me that Google/YouTube could include a clause like that in the upload form for videos they host...
Whoa, there big fella...this uppity Yank didn't mean to ruffle any English feathers.
Like the post *I* responded to, my post was intended to be taken in jest, not literally, and certainly not to get anyone excited. My apologies if it was taken to be an American flexing of the muscles.
You are correct, the War of 1812 was *not* about independence as much as it was about trade embargoes and boundary skirmishes along the border with Canada.
However, it can be argued that there were some tensions between the two countries because England still tended to view us Yanks as Colonials rather than a sovereign nation, and therefore, the U.S. was asserting its independence to some degree in the War of 1812. And I'd hardly call boarding American ships, impressing sailors into service in the Royal Navy and confiscating cargo from our merchant ships--some of the grievances that led to the war--"basically leaving [us] alone."