Silly silly silly.... no thats not exactly it. The fact is that people still buy CDs. The Capitalist pigs have always benefitted from one fact: The people don't care.
This is them making a very clever move actually. Not exactly backpeddling.... more a move of misdirection.
Its been said that people get exactly the government that they deserve, and the princible extends well past government. Those of us who decide to buy or not buy a CD based on our view of the record industry, that is, those of us who decide to engage in boycotts, are always far and few between. The average person wants a CD, and is going to buy it.
Everyone who has shitty internet access and wants music, still has to buy CDs. Everyone who wants to listen to music on the road and has no idea how to work a cdburner (or doesn't own one) guess what... they will continue to buy CDs.
Now being the slashdot crowd of mostly geeks and students, we probably know very few people who don't have souped up computers and whatnot. Sure even the most technically illeterate usually get a burned CD here and there from friends, but thats not the norm...most people that I know still buy CDs....and will buy CDs.
This is something much more insidious. Basically they stand to gain NOTHING from suing piddly file sharers. If you sign the paper, and get it noterized and send it in...thats a pain in your ass, will cost you a few bucks, and gives them a peice of paper saying you are guilty and will reform.
What would they get from sueing you? Seriously... for the vast majority of casses... the "5 nines" it will end up costing them more in lawyer time to sue you than its worth. Whats more they may not even win... so far the ONLY successfull prosecutions have been for file sharing, and then only for the big players, people who shared ALOT of files and helped others share (like the kazzaa "supernodes").
Youve undoubtedly seen the claims that they are sueing for thousands upon thousands per "infringement" and that would translate into MILLIONS just on the average file sharers computer.
Now do out the math... how many of those people seriously will EVER be able to pay that? More likely it would just ruin these people financially, with NO real benefit to the RIAA...in fact it would just give the anti-riaa people more ammo to go after them. If popular opinion chanhges against them, the nice congressment they purchased will forget their ties faster than Reagan forgot about the Contras.
So all in all, since it stands to profit them not at all, and the risk is high, how can they strengthen their position, anbd put this file sharing in check to hopefully rescue their business model?
Simple... Offer amnesty. It lets them bow out gracefully from their strong arm tactics. They don't WANT to have to sue all the people they are threatening to sue. However, they can't just back down either. So... they give the other side a chance to surrender.
Face it...they will sue a few people and try to make big examples of them, but they certainly don't want to do it accross the board. Anyone they do get, assuming the RIAA wins the cases (face it, they are going to cherrypick a few cases they are sure they can win... a loss for them would be catastrophic... as people would latch onto whatever technicallity or legal interpretation that allowed that one to pass, and it would be the basis for all future file sharing) and whoever they do make an example of is fucked.
All in all its just an outmoded buisness model trying to defend itself and getting nasty in its death throws. All in all, id say fuck them. Anyone who answers this call is just given them something to use in their PR.
How about I am sickend by the fact that there are people out there starving who would be happy to work for an honest days wage that would put a roof over their heads and food on the table, and yet assholes like this make a fucking MINT abusing the net and sending mail that nobody wants - and generally being dishonest whiney snots about it.
Nah a really good example would be the outlook worm that got infected by a file infector virus and then went on to carry it on to others.
Think about that for a min. Worm infects computer. Virus infects worm. Infected worm infects another computer, and the virus tags along for the ride, going on to infect that computer too.
Now look at the West Nile Virus. Mosquito gets infected with it, and becomes a carrier. The mosquito goes around biting people, and transmitting the virus as it goes.
I mean seriously... this is an organization started by RMS. Now I admit to being one of the first people to defend his ideas in alot of contexts but... we are talking about an organization founded by a person who for YEARS had an account with no password... not only that, but actually admitted to it.
These people woiuld easily give out accounts to anyone who could come up with a use that was in line with their goals and could make use of the account. Not only that, but they would give them root along with the account.
Now... they have somewhat mended their ways. RMS does have a password on his account and he doesn'tr go around advertising what it is... but remember...
it wasn't all that long ago that Firewalls were considered weird and having a guest account on your machines was the norm. Afterall the great part of the net was that this meant people on the other side of the globe could use CPU time on machines here while they are awake and we sleep and don't need the cycles.
I know that sounds stupid and weird... but there was a golden age when the net was small enough that few i fanybody actually felt they needed to care about security... real commune mentality.
As its grown up and the community has become too large to be really cohesive, it has aquired all of the problems of real large non-cohesive communities. Now people lock their doors at night. (some more than others).
Course I still know people in the city that don't lock their doors at night, or even most of the day.
Remember that the online world is an extension of the real one, not one unto itself. It falls to the same pitfalls of human appetite.
Go out into the country, outside the city... you will find a whole different culture. People don't lock their car doors... ever. People don't lock their house doors... ever.
Its liberating. Its nice. Its how we would all LOVE to live. I know I would at least.
However heres the thing... contrast that with the scenario of someone who wasn't burgled or who set the fire themselves and as such lost everything on purpose for the money.
I would bet dollars to donuts the stress would be different.
Or would it, I dunno, I supose I don't know much about what "Voice stress" really measures... but I can't imagine that a frauder and a real claim are going to be stressed in the same way.
> Since it downloads about 1000 images a night, I don't have to time to look > through them all. I could have questionable material on my computer right now.
I came to a realisation like this 2 years ago.
When I was 16 and surfing the net on my beefy apple ][gs, I used to lurk around suenet and download porn.
Of course the gs took around 5 mins to decode a jpg and show it... show it on its 320x200 256 color screen... so I had a bunch of porn, most of which I had seen, some I hand't.
I used to download the index images since my resolution was so poor, it gabve me more bang for my buck to get thumbnails (14.4 modem weeee)
So a while back I put the gs online, hooked up a crossover, and pushed a bunch of stuff to the PC...including the porn.
I start going through it and what do I find? One of those indexes had pictures of sone little girl posing. She looked to be about 9 or 10.
I had been storing a piece of kiddie porn for YEARS without even knowing it.
The thing is that its not really a free speech issue so much.
It could be a free speech issue. See here is the thing, you have the right to say whatever you want. You do not have the right to force me, or anyone else, to listen to you.
So if a spammer wants to pay some money, get a good net connection, and start spamming the world, nobody is going to care. Why?
Because simply anyone who doesn't want his spew can black list him by ip and the spam goes away for anyone who doesn't wish it, and anyone who wants his spew can still have it.
Spammers know this... so they don't do it. They purposefully jump around from ip to ip, they look for open relays to abuse, they do whatever they can to activly avoid any attempts to filter them
Even baysean filtering, look how now they put html comments and weird punctuation in the middle of words to try (sometimes, but not usually successfully) to get around peoples personal filters. (as beaysean filtering is only seldom done on a system wide basis).
This is the behaviour thats so offensive. They find an open relay and the abuse the hell out of it till everybody in the world blacklists it, and they shove so much crap through it that its useless to the legitimate users of the relay.
They forge return addresses, so mail gets stuck in mail queues and fills disk for days on end until the bounces expire. All in all they are a nuisence.
AGain, if they played by the simple rules and got themselves legitimate mail servers and sent their mail just like everyone else... then nobody would have a problem with them. People who didn't want to hear their spew could ignore their spew. People who didn't care, could still see it. No problem.
Now when it comes to it, I run my own mail servers and I do things right by free speech standards. I impliment greylisting, so maiul can certainly get in by anyone with a legitimate mail server. Then I apply a baysean filter to everything that just tags...and I let the users individually decide whether they want to filter on that tag or not.
Nope im quite willing to accept that GW knew nothing about 9/11 before it happened. You lose that bet. Its totally reasonable that he had no idea that a bunch o fpeople decided to crash planes into buildings on that day, and if they decide to do it again, no amount of security restructuring is going to catch it next time either.
As for JFK, great exampl of stupid decisions and making a big stink over nothing. Putting Nukes in cuba was the USSR just whipping out its dick to show the world how big it was...
The fact that JFK rose to the challenge to whip his out and challenge the USSR to a pissing contest doesn't speak highly of him in my mind. If he had done nothing, still nothing would have come of it, instead there was a huge non-event that made the papers and people touted the bigger dick as the hero.
But of course I supose it was important to continue the arms race with the USSR, and keep the entire world scared of being nuked, since that strategy worked so well for so long.
Frankly ive always felt that unless the cause for war is good enough for the commander in chief to pick up a gun and lead the troops off to battle in the name of truth and honor and whatever else he might be fighting for, then its not a good enough reason to send a single lowly infantryman.
But maybe I hold warmongers to too high of a standard? Ya know, thinking the onus should be on them to justify their actions, inisting they be truthfull in their assertions and even to back them up. You know, silly things like that.
I don't think leading the troops is too much to ask. Afterall, How can you give an order that would cause people to die if your not willing and ready to be counted among the dead?
Guess you could say I just think hes a yellow bellied coward more than anything. War is easy. Diplomacy I guess is pretty hard.
However it can only damage your reputation if it is public. The threatening letter is sent specifically to you by the party who is accusing you (or a duely authorized agent in their name) - it is not apublic declaration.
Now, if they published these letters on their website, or released the names of all the people that they were accusing to the local paper, that would fit.
Basically...if I ring your doorbell and when you answer I tell you "I think you are a souless satan worshipping ballbag" thats nothing (well maybe harrassment or tresspassing if I don't leave when you tell me to).
but if I go to your neibors door and when he answers I tell him you are a soulless satan worshipping ballbag...thats slander.
If I take an ad out in the paper and tell the readershoip that you are a soulless satan worshipping ballbag... thats libel.
Well I agrre sort of... except I wouldn't put it quite like that. The article, overall just didn't seem to really address the issue until the end. Lots of talk of GNU and linux ad nauseum.
Of course the thing about RMS is what he says is all litterally true and correct. Definitly, but alot of it is hardly relevant. It seems like in the quest to speak with precision, he spends entirely too much time making distinctions and splitting hairs. (which I supose is better than chewing on hairs, but last time I saw him he had a pretty short haircut so one assumes he doesn't do that so much now)
Anyway the message I got was "We try our best to not copy code that we legally don't have right to (with definite tone of "even though we resent having to do so"), but its bound to happen now and again, if it really did happen in Linux, then the Linux developers will find it and remove the offending code, and this will be a non-issue".
I didn't really get any feeling of "linux can go scew itself" aside from the fact that Linux isn't one of his projects so he really doesn't directly control it. (not that he actually controls much development anymore)
I used to do windows support for a living... now I generally refuse to help windows users (of course I just recently aquired my first windows machine in 6 years, which will cease to run windows as soon as the dual mode IBM wireless card in the T40 is supported under linux:) )
I learned a phrase then, and have learned it a few times since:
No good deed goes unpunished
Its sooo true. You help one guy with a windows problem, and someone else will have one for them, you help them, and you are garaunteed to be asked every question under the sun for the next 3 weeks by half the office.
Now heres the thing... most companies hire IT support. As a unix sysadmin, I am not paid for my ability to do windows support. So fine helping you once is nothing, maybe helping someone else is nothing too... one offs. However, once you get started it can easily snowball... and in fact, with systems as ubiquietous and problem-prone as windows boxes... it always does.
Now, I also used to fix HP laser printers... we have exactly 1 of these in the office. When asked, I happily look at it. I don't like supporting printers, and its not why I have my job, but as theres only 1 of them, and we have an issue that needs my attention maybe once in 6 months... theres no snowballing with this skill.
Well being that I took 5 years of french I like to say "Software libre" but mostly only because I can pronounce an "re" without reversing it, and it conveys the meaning since English adopted a bunch of words with this root a long time ago.
Probably the best English word, even if the connotations arn't always the best, is "Liberal Software", using liberal in the sense of "Freely permitted, not interfered with." (OED) even if it is a slightly archaic usage.
Or perhaps, also from the OED:
5. Of political opinions: Favourable to constitutional changes and legal or administrative reforms tending in the direction of freedom or democracy.
Which seems to translate very appropriatly (even if most americans seem rather ignorant of what the term has traditionally meant).
Its not so much that there is no better term in english than "free" by the standars of definition, its mostly a problem of connotation.
Play hardball... if the ISP is refusing to admit that their machines are hacked, then they must be doing this on purpose.
I would report to the FBI that the ISP is redirecting all traffic and running man in the middle attacks on you and their other customers and you have discovered it...
If it works, then that at least gets the ball rolling on the investigation and when they find out that the ISP is a hapless victem, then they will have the full attention of the ISP directly in dealing with the issue.
Read the paper. Spammers would figure it out eventually. What it buys is what they have to do to get around it.
It means they have to do retrys...that means spam runs take longer, especially since they have to run...then wait for a locally defined timeout, and run all those addresses again
AND they have to do it from the same IP.
This raises their bandwidth profile. It wastes their time... all in all... it raises their cost of doing buisness and cuts into their profit margins.
It means they will have to upgrade their tools again. It means they get headaches. And of course, the next step is to impliment spam traps that watch activity and see that a spammer is spamming, and promotes them to a blacklist before they can even retry. (oh gee 1000 new greylist triplets from 1 IP in under 5 mins? Set the timeouts for that IP to 12 hours)
Seriously man, im being mostly tounge in cheek. (mostly;) Its not that I don't like doctors, or don't respect them, its just that, ive worked at a hospital, ive dealt with you guys. Its impossible to work around alot of doctors for long without developing quite a sense of humor about them.
Frankly I think its how nurses (not that I was a nurse, I was in desktop support, so I had exposure pretty much across the board). Don't get me wrong, nurses have their quirks too, they are just as insane as you doctors.
Well theres only so much their union can do... if Nurses were to actually strike or stop working, people die.
If they slow or partially strike, only keeping people where they are needed absolutly to prevent that, then those few would be worked to death themselves.
Thats the real peroblem there, their hands are tied because the only people who can really be made to suffer by them are the patients, and thats exactly who they became nurses to help.
Of course then again, I supose if they really struck the doctos would just have to pick up the slack and do all the nurses functions. That would be poetic justice.
But ask any nurse and they can tell you what would happen if you left all the nurses chores up to doctors... people would die even faster:)
They put the money into that fund like that at those rates because the government says they HAVE to. If the government didn't say they HAD to, then sure there would be more money in the companies pockets to pay salaries, but whose to say they would actually pay you any more?
More than likely it would go into managements coffers or into their profit margins and not into actual employee salary.
Thats nto to say they wouldn't make salary somewhat higher, afterall, it would mean people would be operating without that cushion, so people would need to be paid more to make up for it.
of course, extra wages only really make up for that cushion if the empoyee has good personal money management skills and socks that money away for a rainy day. How many do that?
I am, for one, a Verizon customer right now and the only reasons I have to NOT shop arround is the cost of getting out of my contract and the hassle of changing phone numbers.
remove the latter and its just a,atter of cost, a matter that dissapears now and again.
Frankly I am saying fuck the cost. Just because they fought number portability, the very day it goes into effect I am swithcing carriers. And to a carrier that offers GMS phones too.
Such a pain in the ass as I am in europe now (I hate french keyboards btw) and I wish I could have had a phone here: it would have simplified things alot.
> and no this guy wasn't blowing smoke up my arse.. he said his programmers > told him that it couldn't be done.
Did you then tell him that his programmers are incompetent and he should probably not recruit programmers out of high school pascal courses?
Seriously, if he was being truthful, thats absolutly pathetic.
I can only see two possibilities here. Either his programmers are so incompetent as to be useless, or they are being so overworked with unreasonable deadlines and low staff that they are lieing through their teeth just to keep their heads above water. (I believe that is called "pushback":) )
Either way, hes got a major problem in that department.
How can a "user error" cause a crash. Software should do proper bounds checking and should act appropriately (which may mean giving and error message) no matter what input it is given.
About the only crash due to user error that I can imagine really being due to user error would be the user killing the proicess with killall or pkill or its moral equivalent.
Other than that, its just bad bounds checking and blaming it on user error is really bad form.
Part of the problem IMNSHO is the commodity desktop. There are so many machines and they are all cheap and its more important to get the work done than it is to make sure the crash doens't ever happen again.
On real systems, if the system crashes, crash dumps are sent off to the OS vendor and they track down the problem and fix it. I know, we have had to collect and send off crash dumps in the past.
Each round of that makes the system more stable.
Thats one of the advantages of Linux, and why there are some systems that don't crash (my linux boxes pretty much only crash when the power goes out, and the UPS battery drains). That is, that these OSs like Linuxs and BSD are used in real enviornments and there are people commited to fixing the problems... so even the lowly common desktop user reaps the benefits.
See there is the differnce.. Windows, even the "server" versions grew out of a desktop OS with a desktop way of doing things. "Oh the server crashed, well lets reboot and hope it doesn't happen again", whereas Linux and BSD come from the land of the server down to the desktop "Oh the server cashed? get DEC on the phone" or "Get out those crash dumps".
Sounds alot more like lack of a proper devlopment environment to me.
I mean its easy for it to happen. We had problems like this with our monitoring system (tho it was manic friday where someone would attemtp to impliment something before the weekend because of course, the weekend is when you want pages the least so you want to get anything that causes false pages fixed on friday to maximize enjoyment of the weekend)
Now we have development and test servers where things live BEFORE they go production. I never had any idea that it would help so much until we finnaly implimented it.
Of course the atheist answer would be that even the definition of religion is loaded because a relationship with a higher power assumes the exisytance of a higher power, and since there is no higher power, religion by that definition is impossible.
So there is no religion, and any claims of having a religion are like claims of being napoleon... nothing more than delusional fantasy.
However in recognizing something as a religion, one presumably would NOT be recognoizing something else as a religion. Which means defining what IS a recognizable religion. Which means creating a law with respect to the establishment of religion.
Sorry, you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you recognize ANYTHING as a religion then its the same as recognizing nothing at all, because it is a meaningless distinction.
Of course I am a boston dweller. Its dumb to live where hurricanes hit hard too. However by the time a hurricane gets up here it rarely does more than damage the coastal areas.
Worst I have ever seen was a couple of trees uplifted and deposited on the sidewalk. No biggie. Hardly any damage.
Hell... when hurricane bob came (which I hear was quite destructive in some places) I was sitting on my front porch watching the storm. Pretty tame stuff.
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Silly silly silly.... no thats not exactly it. The fact is that people still buy CDs. The Capitalist pigs have always benefitted from one fact: The people don't care.
This is them making a very clever move actually. Not exactly backpeddling.... more a move of misdirection.
Its been said that people get exactly the government that they deserve, and the princible extends well past government. Those of us who decide to buy or not buy a CD based on our view of the record industry, that is, those of us who decide to engage in boycotts, are always far and few between. The average person wants a CD, and is going to buy it.
Everyone who has shitty internet access and wants music, still has to buy CDs. Everyone who wants to listen to music on the road and has no idea how to work a cdburner (or doesn't own one) guess what... they will continue to buy CDs.
Now being the slashdot crowd of mostly geeks and students, we probably know very few people who don't have souped up computers and whatnot. Sure even the most technically illeterate usually get a burned CD here and there from friends, but thats not the norm...most people that I know still buy CDs....and will buy CDs.
This is something much more insidious. Basically they stand to gain NOTHING from suing piddly file sharers. If you sign the paper, and get it noterized and send it in...thats a pain in your ass, will cost you a few bucks, and gives them a peice of paper saying you are guilty and will reform.
What would they get from sueing you? Seriously... for the vast majority of casses... the "5 nines" it will end up costing them more in lawyer time to sue you than its worth. Whats more they may not even win... so far the ONLY successfull prosecutions have been for file sharing, and then only for the big players, people who shared ALOT of files and helped others share (like the kazzaa "supernodes").
Youve undoubtedly seen the claims that they are sueing for thousands upon thousands per "infringement" and that would translate into MILLIONS just on the average file sharers computer.
Now do out the math... how many of those people seriously will EVER be able to pay that? More likely it would just ruin these people financially, with NO real benefit to the RIAA...in fact it would just give the anti-riaa people more ammo to go after them. If popular opinion chanhges against them, the nice congressment they purchased will forget their ties faster than Reagan forgot about the Contras.
So all in all, since it stands to profit them not at all, and the risk is high, how can they strengthen their position, anbd put this file sharing in check to hopefully rescue their business model?
Simple... Offer amnesty. It lets them bow out gracefully from their strong arm tactics. They don't WANT to have to sue all the people they are threatening to sue. However, they can't just back down either. So... they give the other side a chance to surrender.
Face it...they will sue a few people and try to make big examples of them, but they certainly don't want to do it accross the board. Anyone they do get, assuming the RIAA wins the cases (face it, they are going to cherrypick a few cases they are sure they can win... a loss for them would be catastrophic... as people would latch onto whatever technicallity or legal interpretation that allowed that one to pass, and it would be the basis for all future file sharing) and whoever they do make an example of is fucked.
All in all its just an outmoded buisness model trying to defend itself and getting nasty in its death throws. All in all, id say fuck them. Anyone who answers this call is just given them something to use in their PR.
-Steve
How about I am sickend by the fact that there are people out there starving who would be happy to work for an honest days wage that would put a roof over their heads and food on the table, and yet assholes like this make a fucking MINT abusing the net and sending mail that nobody wants - and generally being dishonest whiney snots about it.
-Steve
Nah a really good example would be the outlook worm that got infected by a file infector virus and then went on to carry it on to others.
Think about that for a min. Worm infects computer. Virus infects worm. Infected worm infects another computer, and the virus tags along for the ride, going on to infect that computer too.
Now look at the West Nile Virus. Mosquito gets infected with it, and becomes a carrier. The mosquito goes around biting people, and transmitting the virus as it goes.
Neat eh?
-Steve
We are talking about the fsf here.
I mean seriously... this is an organization started by RMS. Now I admit to being one of the first people to defend his ideas in alot of contexts but... we are talking about an organization founded by a person who for YEARS had an account with no password... not only that, but actually admitted to it.
These people woiuld easily give out accounts to anyone who could come up with a use that was in line with their goals and could make use of the account. Not only that, but they would give them root along with the account.
Now... they have somewhat mended their ways. RMS does have a password on his account and he doesn'tr go around advertising what it is... but remember...
it wasn't all that long ago that Firewalls were considered weird and having a guest account on your machines was the norm. Afterall the great part of the net was that this meant people on the other side of the globe could use CPU time on machines here while they are awake and we sleep and don't need the cycles.
I know that sounds stupid and weird... but there was a golden age when the net was small enough that few i fanybody actually felt they needed to care about security... real commune mentality.
As its grown up and the community has become too large to be really cohesive, it has aquired all of the problems of real large non-cohesive communities. Now people lock their doors at night. (some more than others).
Course I still know people in the city that don't lock their doors at night, or even most of the day.
Remember that the online world is an extension of the real one, not one unto itself. It falls to the same pitfalls of human appetite.
Go out into the country, outside the city... you will find a whole different culture. People don't lock their car doors... ever. People don't lock their house doors... ever.
Its liberating. Its nice. Its how we would all LOVE to live. I know I would at least.
-Steve
However heres the thing... contrast that with the scenario of someone who wasn't burgled or who set the fire themselves and as such lost everything on purpose for the money.
I would bet dollars to donuts the stress would be different.
Or would it, I dunno, I supose I don't know much about what "Voice stress" really measures... but I can't imagine that a frauder and a real claim are going to be stressed in the same way.
-Steve
> Since it downloads about 1000 images a night, I don't have to time to look
> through them all. I could have questionable material on my computer right now.
I came to a realisation like this 2 years ago.
When I was 16 and surfing the net on my beefy apple ][gs, I used to lurk around suenet and download porn.
Of course the gs took around 5 mins to decode a jpg and show it... show it on its 320x200 256 color screen... so I had a bunch of porn, most of which I had seen, some I hand't.
I used to download the index images since my resolution was so poor, it gabve me more bang for my buck to get thumbnails (14.4 modem weeee)
So a while back I put the gs online, hooked up a crossover, and pushed a bunch of stuff to the PC...including the porn.
I start going through it and what do I find? One of those indexes had pictures of sone little girl posing. She looked to be about 9 or 10.
I had been storing a piece of kiddie porn for YEARS without even knowing it.
-Steve
The thing is that its not really a free speech issue so much.
It could be a free speech issue. See here is the thing, you have the right to say whatever you want. You do not have the right to force me, or anyone else, to listen to you.
So if a spammer wants to pay some money, get a good net connection, and start spamming the world, nobody is going to care. Why?
Because simply anyone who doesn't want his spew can black list him by ip and the spam goes away for anyone who doesn't wish it, and anyone who wants his spew can still have it.
Spammers know this... so they don't do it. They purposefully jump around from ip to ip, they look for open relays to abuse, they do whatever they can to activly avoid any attempts to filter them
Even baysean filtering, look how now they put html comments and weird punctuation in the middle of words to try (sometimes, but not usually successfully) to get around peoples personal filters. (as beaysean filtering is only seldom done on a system wide basis).
This is the behaviour thats so offensive. They find an open relay and the abuse the hell out of it till everybody in the world blacklists it, and they shove so much crap through it that its useless to the legitimate users of the relay.
They forge return addresses, so mail gets stuck in mail queues and fills disk for days on end until the bounces expire. All in all they are a nuisence.
AGain, if they played by the simple rules and got themselves legitimate mail servers and sent their mail just like everyone else... then nobody would have a problem with them. People who didn't want to hear their spew could ignore their spew. People who didn't care, could still see it. No problem.
Now when it comes to it, I run my own mail servers and I do things right by free speech standards. I impliment greylisting, so maiul can certainly get in by anyone with a legitimate mail server. Then I apply a baysean filter to everything that just tags...and I let the users individually decide whether they want to filter on that tag or not.
-Steve
Nope im quite willing to accept that GW knew nothing about 9/11 before it happened. You lose that bet. Its totally reasonable that he had no idea that a bunch o fpeople decided to crash planes into buildings on that day, and if they decide to do it again, no amount of security restructuring is going to catch it next time either.
As for JFK, great exampl of stupid decisions and making a big stink over nothing. Putting Nukes in cuba was the USSR just whipping out its dick to show the world how big it was...
The fact that JFK rose to the challenge to whip his out and challenge the USSR to a pissing contest doesn't speak highly of him in my mind. If he had done nothing, still nothing would have come of it, instead there was a huge non-event that made the papers and people touted the bigger dick as the hero.
But of course I supose it was important to continue the arms race with the USSR, and keep the entire world scared of being nuked, since that strategy worked so well for so long.
-Steve
Other than that its right.
Frankly ive always felt that unless the cause for war is good enough for the commander in chief to pick up a gun and lead the troops off to battle in the name of truth and honor and whatever else he might be fighting for, then its not a good enough reason to send a single lowly infantryman.
But maybe I hold warmongers to too high of a standard? Ya know, thinking the onus should be on them to justify their actions, inisting they be truthfull in their assertions and even to back them up. You know, silly things like that.
I don't think leading the troops is too much to ask. Afterall, How can you give an order that would cause people to die if your not willing and ready to be counted among the dead?
Guess you could say I just think hes a yellow bellied coward more than anything. War is easy. Diplomacy I guess is pretty hard.
-Steve
However it can only damage your reputation if it is public. The threatening letter is sent specifically to you by the party who is accusing you (or a duely authorized agent in their name) - it is not apublic declaration.
:)
Now, if they published these letters on their website, or released the names of all the people that they were accusing to the local paper, that would fit.
Basically...if I ring your doorbell and when you answer I tell you "I think you are a souless satan worshipping ballbag" thats nothing (well maybe harrassment or tresspassing if I don't leave when you tell me to).
but if I go to your neibors door and when he answers I tell him you are a soulless satan worshipping ballbag...thats slander.
If I take an ad out in the paper and tell the readershoip that you are a soulless satan worshipping ballbag... thats libel.
See?
-Steve
Well I agrre sort of... except I wouldn't put it quite like that. The article, overall just didn't seem to really address the issue until the end. Lots of talk of GNU and linux ad nauseum.
Of course the thing about RMS is what he says is all litterally true and correct. Definitly, but alot of it is hardly relevant. It seems like in the quest to speak with precision, he spends entirely too much time making distinctions and splitting hairs. (which I supose is better than chewing on hairs, but last time I saw him he had a pretty short haircut so one assumes he doesn't do that so much now)
Anyway the message I got was "We try our best to not copy code that we legally don't have right to (with definite tone of "even though we resent having to do so"), but its bound to happen now and again, if it really did happen in Linux, then the Linux developers will find it and remove the offending code, and this will be a non-issue".
I didn't really get any feeling of "linux can go scew itself" aside from the fact that Linux isn't one of his projects so he really doesn't directly control it. (not that he actually controls much development anymore)
-Steve
I learned a phrase then, and have learned it a few times since:
Its sooo true. You help one guy with a windows problem, and someone else will have one for them, you help them, and you are garaunteed to be asked every question under the sun for the next 3 weeks by half the office.
Now heres the thing... most companies hire IT support. As a unix sysadmin, I am not paid for my ability to do windows support. So fine helping you once is nothing, maybe helping someone else is nothing too... one offs. However, once you get started it can easily snowball... and in fact, with systems as ubiquietous and problem-prone as windows boxes... it always does.
Now, I also used to fix HP laser printers... we have exactly 1 of these in the office. When asked, I happily look at it. I don't like supporting printers, and its not why I have my job, but as theres only 1 of them, and we have an issue that needs my attention maybe once in 6 months... theres no snowballing with this skill.
-Steve
Probably the best English word, even if the connotations arn't always the best, is "Liberal Software", using liberal in the sense of "Freely permitted, not interfered with." (OED) even if it is a slightly archaic usage.
Or perhaps, also from the OED:
Which seems to translate very appropriatly (even if most americans seem rather ignorant of what the term has traditionally meant).
Its not so much that there is no better term in english than "free" by the standars of definition, its mostly a problem of connotation.
-Steve
Hmmm seeing your comment I am inspired...
Play hardball... if the ISP is refusing to admit that their machines are hacked, then they must be doing this on purpose.
I would report to the FBI that the ISP is redirecting all traffic and running man in the middle attacks on you and their other customers and you have discovered it...
If it works, then that at least gets the ball rolling on the investigation and when they find out that the ISP is a hapless victem, then they will have the full attention of the ISP directly in dealing with the issue.
Oh yea... and get a better ISP.
-Steve
not at all
Read the paper. Spammers would figure it out eventually. What it buys is what they have to do to get around it.
It means they have to do retrys...that means spam runs take longer, especially since they have to run...then wait for a locally defined timeout, and run all those addresses again
AND they have to do it from the same IP.
This raises their bandwidth profile. It wastes their time... all in all... it raises their cost of doing buisness and cuts into their profit margins.
It means they will have to upgrade their tools again. It means they get headaches. And of course, the next step is to impliment spam traps that watch activity and see that a spammer is spamming, and promotes them to a blacklist before they can even retry. (oh gee 1000 new greylist triplets from 1 IP in under 5 mins? Set the timeouts for that IP to 12 hours)
-Steve
Yes you sound exactly like a doctor.
;) Its not that I don't like doctors, or don't respect them, its just that, ive worked at a hospital, ive dealt with you guys. Its impossible to work around alot of doctors for long without developing quite a sense of humor about them.
Seriously man, im being mostly tounge in cheek. (mostly
Frankly I think its how nurses (not that I was a nurse, I was in desktop support, so I had exposure pretty much across the board). Don't get me wrong, nurses have their quirks too, they are just as insane as you doctors.
-Steve
Well theres only so much their union can do... if Nurses were to actually strike or stop working, people die.
:)
If they slow or partially strike, only keeping people where they are needed absolutly to prevent that, then those few would be worked to death themselves.
Thats the real peroblem there, their hands are tied because the only people who can really be made to suffer by them are the patients, and thats exactly who they became nurses to help.
Of course then again, I supose if they really struck the doctos would just have to pick up the slack and do all the nurses functions. That would be poetic justice.
But ask any nurse and they can tell you what would happen if you left all the nurses chores up to doctors... people would die even faster
-Steve
Would it have really "gone to you"?
They put the money into that fund like that at those rates because the government says they HAVE to. If the government didn't say they HAD to, then sure there would be more money in the companies pockets to pay salaries, but whose to say they would actually pay you any more?
More than likely it would go into managements coffers or into their profit margins and not into actual employee salary.
Thats nto to say they wouldn't make salary somewhat higher, afterall, it would mean people would be operating without that cushion, so people would need to be paid more to make up for it.
of course, extra wages only really make up for that cushion if the empoyee has good personal money management skills and socks that money away for a rainy day. How many do that?
-Steve
Simple, they don't want to lose customers
,atter of cost, a matter that dissapears now and again.
I am, for one, a Verizon customer right now and the only reasons I have to NOT shop arround is the cost of getting out of my contract and the hassle of changing phone numbers.
remove the latter and its just a
Frankly I am saying fuck the cost. Just because they fought number portability, the very day it goes into effect I am swithcing carriers. And to a carrier that offers GMS phones too.
Such a pain in the ass as I am in europe now (I hate french keyboards btw) and I wish I could have had a phone here: it would have simplified things alot.
-Steve
> and no this guy wasn't blowing smoke up my arse.. he said his programmers
:) )
> told him that it couldn't be done.
Did you then tell him that his programmers are incompetent and he should probably not recruit programmers out of high school pascal courses?
Seriously, if he was being truthful, thats absolutly pathetic.
I can only see two possibilities here. Either his programmers are so incompetent as to be useless, or they are being so overworked with unreasonable deadlines and low staff that they are lieing through their teeth just to keep their heads above water. (I believe that is called "pushback"
Either way, hes got a major problem in that department.
-Steve
Impossible.
How can a "user error" cause a crash. Software should do proper bounds checking and should act appropriately (which may mean giving and error message) no matter what input it is given.
About the only crash due to user error that I can imagine really being due to user error would be the user killing the proicess with killall or pkill or its moral equivalent.
Other than that, its just bad bounds checking and blaming it on user error is really bad form.
Part of the problem IMNSHO is the commodity desktop. There are so many machines and they are all cheap and its more important to get the work done than it is to make sure the crash doens't ever happen again.
On real systems, if the system crashes, crash dumps are sent off to the OS vendor and they track down the problem and fix it. I know, we have had to collect and send off crash dumps in the past.
Each round of that makes the system more stable.
Thats one of the advantages of Linux, and why there are some systems that don't crash (my linux boxes pretty much only crash when the power goes out, and the UPS battery drains). That is, that these OSs like Linuxs and BSD are used in real enviornments and there are people commited to fixing the problems... so even the lowly common desktop user reaps the benefits.
See there is the differnce.. Windows, even the "server" versions grew out of a desktop OS with a desktop way of doing things. "Oh the server crashed, well lets reboot and hope it doesn't happen again", whereas Linux and BSD come from the land of the server down to the desktop "Oh the server cashed? get DEC on the phone" or "Get out those crash dumps".
-Steve
Sounds alot more like lack of a proper devlopment environment to me.
I mean its easy for it to happen. We had problems like this with our monitoring system (tho it was manic friday where someone would attemtp to impliment something before the weekend because of course, the weekend is when you want pages the least so you want to get anything that causes false pages fixed on friday to maximize enjoyment of the weekend)
Now we have development and test servers where things live BEFORE they go production. I never had any idea that it would help so much until we finnaly implimented it.
-Steve
Of course the atheist answer would be that even the definition of religion is loaded because a relationship with a higher power assumes the exisytance of a higher power, and since there is no higher power, religion by that definition is impossible.
So there is no religion, and any claims of having a religion are like claims of being napoleon... nothing more than delusional fantasy.
-Steve
However in recognizing something as a religion, one presumably would NOT be recognoizing something else as a religion. Which means defining what IS a recognizable religion. Which means creating a law with respect to the establishment of religion.
Sorry, you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you recognize ANYTHING as a religion then its the same as recognizing nothing at all, because it is a meaningless distinction.
-Steve
Of course I am a boston dweller. Its dumb to live where hurricanes hit hard too. However by the time a hurricane gets up here it rarely does more than damage the coastal areas.
Worst I have ever seen was a couple of trees uplifted and deposited on the sidewalk. No biggie. Hardly any damage.
Hell... when hurricane bob came (which I hear was quite destructive in some places) I was sitting on my front porch watching the storm. Pretty tame stuff.
-Steve