Well even in the absense of humans, I know there are several animals that are known to eat fermented berries and fruits that have fallen and naturally fermented.
I seem to also remember a report on some monkeys which ocasionally were known to eat certain other things, possibly even psilocybe mushrooms...been a while...I should dig out the reference.
If I were to do heroin, right now, for the first time (and it would be the first time). I could walk away without being addicted.
However, if I do it again, say a year from now, then I will be addicted.
This is what I am getting from what you are saying "Do it twice and your an addicted for life". I find this statment to be fairly shocking, since I my experience with other drugs, goes contrary to this, my (more than average but less than a medical professional) knowledge of pharmacology, and everything I have heard, run contrary to this.
This is not to say that addiction doesn't happen, and that its not real easy to become an addict. its also not to say that heroin isn't VERY addictive...and its not to say that some (poaasinly large) portion of addicts who has kicked it doesn't get cravings now and again.
It is just to say that the "do it a second time and you will never get rid of the cravings" statment is one that, if true, I find fascinating. However, at the same time, I very much doubt its veraity.
Check out "Getting High: A History of LSD" for the carey grant reference. Shows a picture of him on the cover of some big time magazine (was it people?) with a headline about his LSD use, along with one of the historians telling about it.
As for drug use throughout history...I could come up with a few references if I cared to dig them out. Certainly was a reference to the well known speakeasy and underground liquer production culture of the 1920s USA alcohol prohibition.
For more information, books on the subject should be very easy to find.
The DARE study? I would have to dig out that reference. In the meantime, I would highly recomend http://www.mapinc.org/
As for other animals use of drugs, I seem to remember a few scattered references here and there. More of a side point, I am not going to go reference hunting for it.
> Snorting coke and speed, and getting stoned
> every night after work impairs your function
> on THEIR TIME regardless if you did the drug on
> YOUR TIME.
So will going out to clubs, dancing, picking up chicks and staying up fucking them till 4 am and dragging as sinto work 4 hours later.
I have yet to see any employer that has a policy about whether or not employees are allowed to go out and pick up women (or men) when they have work the next day.
I wouldn't work for one that did, even though I don't engage in such activities.
I am at work for certain hours on certain days. What I do outside of those hours is my buisness. WHEN and only when it actually effects my work does my employer have a right to ask me to stop or to leave.
Personally, I have been a casual drug user for years. Little pot now and again, couple of times a week. Maybe the ocasionaly acid trip - over a weekend or something when I am not on call. I have NEVER allowed it to effect my work.
And no...I don't flip burgers, never have in fact (well not outside of my own kitchen). I much prefer spending my days writting code.
hmmm you know slashdot has prevented me from getting more work done than anything that ive done outside of work....
> You can use the needle once and get away with
> it, the second time you're hooked for life.
Really? I am sorry but I have never heard of this before. Why is heroin so different from all other drugs of addiction?
With everything else that I am fammilair with, like caffeine (which I had a nice addiction to for a while), when the withdrawl syndrome goes away, so does the craving.
Now...there may be a psycological craving. Afterall, it does feel good, but its hardly the same.
> I have known people, however, who used heroin
> on a daily basis after dinner while keeping on
> functioning as a normal social animal.
Very true. Addicts can function as normal human beings quite easily. Its extremely high drug prices and legality issues that usually present the most problems.
> As for "hard" drugs, I have a few tech friends
> who smoke marijuana, but that's the extent of
> it. Those same friends are scared of the hard
> stuff, because they know what it'll do to you.
Ya know...assuming its clean drug (ie it wasn't produced in someones bathtub and contains lots of impurities - or wasn't cut with some nasty stuff) - and even somtimes when it isn't. Drugs themselves arn't that harmful.
Its abuse that causes harm. Or rather overuse. You can use heroin, and not become addicted. Same for caffeine, alcohol, coke, anything.
Drugs don't "make people stupid", they don't make you smart either. Even the VERY FEW drugs like alcohol, MDMA, PCP, etc which are known to "kill brain cells" well the brain is redundant as hell. Only the most biased and conflicted of interest studies have ever shown measurable cognitive deficit.
The real trap is when you start using drugs all the time to the exclusion of other activities. Stop going to school. Stop having fun in other ways, start to feel you need the drug.
There are people who can maintain themselves and monitor their usage (much the way a scuba diver monitors the air in his tank, or a sky diver watches the altimeter), there are many who can't.
There are some people (I have known some) who will quit drugs, and then become just as addicted and allow their lives to be just as controlled by other things, like a church, or a woman.
As someone I know said "The high incidence of drug users who are losers is not because drugs make them loser, but rather, if your already a loser, you might as well be a high loser".
As for Heroin, valium and alcohol being a bad mix. Thats what harm reduction is all about. Teaching people enough information to use their drugs safely. Afterall, even among the more intelligent users, MOSt will never research their drugs first, unless the info is handed to them.
Actually most OTC cough medicine contains DXM - a dissasociative anasthetic (in the same class as ketamine). Did it once or twice. Real shitty high. Wouldn't do it again (plus there is evidence now of possible brain damage from excessive use)
Some people really love the stuff, I can't imagine why. It actually has a worst high than alcohol. ugh!
I dunno, even if I wasn't a social pot smoker, I wouldn't take a drug test for a job. Its not worth it.
Drug testing doesn't show current impairment. What I did last friday night, on my free time, when my pager was off, is MY TIME. It is not my employers time. They have NO RIGHT to criticize how I spend that time.
My drug use is between me and my doctor (who BTW has never raised any objections to pot smoking - and yes, he knows). If my employer can't respect my right to live the lifestyle which I choose to live, whatever it may be, then that means that they do not respect me as an adult member of society.
I refuse to work for an employer that can't respect that my time is MY TIME.
The places that I, and people I know, work (which, for me, includes a hospital) have the following policy (in my words):
"We will drug test, if we believe that a person has been using drugs ON THE JOB"
Other than that they don't test. When it comes to suspecting current impairment, during working hours, I am all for making sure people arn't high. But again - testing doesn't show current impairment. It shows evidence of use within the past 3-30 days (depending on the drug).
then of course there was the drug culture of the 70s....and the drug culture of the 60s....
Then there was the drug culture of the 50s, of course that was legal; Cary Grant was very public about the fact that he used LSD over 100.
Then of course there was thr 40s and the 30s...and who can forget the roaring 20s.
Drug use has gone on since the dawn of time. Humans (and yes, even some other animals) have been using drugs forever. Hell... bars are just another form of a "Drug den".
A recent study showed that students who graduate from the DARE program are more liklely to use drugs than kids who don't. We just need, as a culture, to face the fact that drugs are interesting, and no amount of "drugs are bad m'kay" is going to change that.
In every community there will always be drug use. Its not a problem, its a reality. It is part of human nature. It is something that just must be accepted. To fight it is to make it worst, its like struggling against quicksand.
Well thats more of a resource allocation issue than a security issue. In fact, process limits for users take car of the problem nicely.
And no, I am not defending them cuz I like BSD, I have exactly 1 account on a BSD system, and I know better than to form an opinion on an OS based on a box that has been the victem of some bad (too many roots spoiling the filesystem) administration.
I actually am a Linux user (Debian/GNU) myself. It would fall to the same "attack" without user process limiting set. (in fact, I am a programmer, so once or twice i accidently did it, or something similar, to my own machine because I was coding while overtired)
I know of no system where this will give elevated privilidges. All it will do is piss off the admin. It also requires a local account (and its hard to hide which account did it). Its also relativly easy to stop.
(as root kill -SIGSTOP -1; then see who did it, killall the procs, and kill -SIGCNT -1 v- note: I have only done this under linux; I don't know that its not relying on linux specific behaviour)
Once I had some proof that I knew how to admin a Unix system, I had no problem finding a job. In fact, after a year, I am still here.
We have been searching for more people, fairly fruitlessly since before I started working here. We have somethign like 2 midlevel and 1 senior admin slots open.
We have seen so few qualified applicants. One or two, but they never end up comming to work for us. At best we find people who might make good junior admins (we already have 2 of those...and I am one of them).
> but it is extremely rare to see acknowledgement
> of the underlying problem (Bad Guys Doing Bad
> Things In Secret
Please define "Bad Guys".
Terrorists maybe? You mean the people who are out there blowing things up and making a rukus because their people were screwed over by some government
Perhaps there would be less bombings if governments didn't go around pissing people off? You know doing things like supporting people loosing their homelands that they have inhabited for centuries? Or interfereing with other governments and people every time there is a buck to be made, or it fits "our needs".
That doesn't even matter, since echalon and the NSA arn't used for law enforcement. They are used to spy on everyone. They are used to gain advantage over other countries, or to serve the special interests of whoever controls the NSA.
Crime is easy to detect. Someone gets hurt, they either complain, or a dead body is found. Until that happens, there is nothing to do. Any crime that doesn't involve someone being killed or otherwise hurt, is not a crime anyway. (may be illegal...but the real crime is the fact that its illegal).
Whats more...none of this is even being used to "detect crime". Carnivore is (supposedly) just for monitoring individuals that are already under surveilence (which is suspect...since capturing email and or traffic can be done less intrusivly).
Echelon data isn't even available to law enforcement, only to the NSA and whoever the NSA sees advantage in filling in. Its mostly used for spying on foreign politicians and companies.
Frankly....crime is easy to detect. Either someone tells you about it, or you find a dead body. Those are the only crimes that I support the government looking into.
And finnally there are no "Bad Guys", only people. The world is not, and never has been, divided into "white hats and black hats", just people.
More important than finding the criminals is allowing the innocent to live their lives undisturbed and without fear of having every dirty little secret about themselves reviewed by others.
Putting a person under a microscope and examining their life should be done very carefully, in fact it should be considered as if it were itself a punishment and used with much caution.
There is just too much potential for abuse in these systems.
Its almost tempting to get together with some people and setup some machines in a few countries with shell scripts that do something like mail
some randomly sized, greater than 1k chuncks of/dev/urandom back and forth at regular intervals.
It almost sounds like a job for the Bavarian illuminati:)
I don't think they would even need to kill anyone. Seriously think about it...
How would you get PROOF of the NSA actually putting in back doors? Have you read Applied Cryptography? What did the NSA do when DES was being developed at IBM?
They stepped in. Saw that IBM had discovered some of the NSAs own cryptography secrets and offered to "help" with a few conditions. One of them being that they never release the data on how they pick their S-Boxes (as I remember - my copy of the book is at home) - They also had some influcence over
what S-Boxes were used in the standard.
So...there is no proof that the NSA weakened the protocol, or even broke it entirely with the S-Box changes. I would imagine that ANY such backdoors would be conducted in a similar manner...no need for anyone outside of the NSA to know the truth.
Even if it can be shown that the particular S-Boxes break the security (which has never been shown - no tyet anyway), thats not proof that the NSA backdoored it...just that maybe, at the time, they didn't know quite as much as they could have (the extent of their knowledge is unknown outside of the NSA)
Now that gets down to NSA agents. Only they will ever know the truth. Truth is, they are good at picking people that they can trust. I bet they do all sorts of background checks and it takesquite a while working for them before a person gets into the real secret stuff.
Now if an agent did come out with hard evidence...they would simply deny it and cover up. Discredit the person who is saying it... disgruntled ex-employee you know, or some such.
Well...Considering that I actually drove through Utica within the past 6 months (I have fammily about 40 mins south of Utica, on rt 12...).
I would have to say that there are more than a few hundred people there. Its actually a city (albeit a small one). I would guess more like 10,000 people or so.
> keeping them longer then 24 hours if
> you do not own the source media is.
Incorrect.
Distributing them and/or aquiring them through unaproved channels (like napster usually) is what is illegal. NOT POSSESSION.
In fact, once you have a copy, Fair Use applies. This means you may use it. (In fact I think this is the most glaring error in software. Copyright was only ever intended to give a monopoly on copying and distribution NOT use. In fact, the concept of "fair use" gives you directly the legal right to use it, once you have a copy).
You may not remember but several months back, there was an article where someone was getting sued over MP3 distribution (napster case or was it another - been so many at this point) and I remember the quote clearly:
"Lawyers on both sides of the case agree that fair use would apply, regardless of the legality of the distribution medium"
> btw, what do you mean by IP rights?
IP rights refer to trademark, copyright, and patent rights all together as a bundle. They are talked about as a bundle because it makes it easier, and it makes it seem like you are talking about property.
The reality is that "IP" has nothing to do with real property, legally or otherwise. ie when you buy something, it doesn't become "public domain" after so many years. Other people can't force you to licence it (for music, manditory licenceing exists). There is no "Fair Use" doctrine that applies to your car.
When people talk about charging you for IP...they mean licencing. And of course by licencing, they usually mean attaching more clauses beyond what copyright law explicitly gives them, to get you to give up your fair use rights.
> Claiming a right to a free service is absurd.
> Google is and remains an excellent, free,
> service. If it stops being free, or
> the quality starts to suffer -- stop using it!
Your missing my point,and thats my fault, I didn't express it fully.
Lets say that you offered Oil changes for free to anyone who wants to drive up to your house. You provide free oil, and a free oil filter.
Great service. Now, after a year or two of this, you decide that you are no longer going to change the oil filters, just change the oil. (of course changing the filter, as many people know, is part of a proper oil change).
You know what, thats fine, and you have EVERY RIGHT to do that. However, the people who are getting the change have the RIGHT to know that you have changed the service that you are giving them, and it is no longer what they expect.
When you provide a search engine, you are making the implict statment to the world that if they type in keywords or some search expression, your engine will use that expression and its own heuristics to find BEST MATCHES.
If you change your service to allo wBEST MATCHES to be "overridden" by corperate interest, then the public who uses it has a RIGHT to know that you are doing this, because you are no longer providing the service that they have come to expect from you.
It is WRONG to pretend to continue to provide a service, when you are not really providing it. This is a signifigant change in the type of service.
When you offer something to the community, be it for free or for pay, you are making a promise to provide THAT SERVICE. If you decide to discontinue offering it, thats fine. However offering a different service instead, without telling people, is trickery at best. It is just plain wrong.
Noone has a "Right" to use the service. They do, however, have a right to know WHAT is being offered to them.
The problem is that they appear to be doing what many companies do. They have realised that they can make profit easier by decreasing quality.
An alliance is one thing. However compromising the quality of a service in the process means that the community of people who use it suffers.
The community thus has a RIGHT to know that this is going on, so that they can make an informed decision on whether or not to continue the use of that service.
Such a story is wholly apropriate. Google should be contacted and asked if this was done purposfully or is coincidental, caused by some other tweak in its engine, or in yahoos pages.
> That great company will get bought out by Time
> Warner & Disney and you'll not only be exposed
> to ads again, but also have all the personal
> details about your porn viewing habits sold to
> anyone who cares to buy them.
This is the only thing about tivo that scares me.
What I want to know....
If I buy a Tivo, can I NOT get the service? Will it work if I never connect it to a phone line? What features will I lose if I do that?
If it will work that way...who knows, maybe I will buy one. Then again...I don't see much about tivo that couldn't be done with a a TV tuner and something to send a signal out to the TV (they make cards that do that still right?)
> You're forgetting that when business and
> copyright mix, the motive is always profit. Of
> course the lawsuits would be dropped if Napster
> proved to increase the profits of record
> producers. As much as I hate to say this, think
> business.
It is also about control. Remember the music industry almost has a monopoly. In fact, given that they are all banded together in the RIAA, I would say that it is a monopoly in every way except legal documents.
They have created a buisness model that is suited to the situation where they control the means of distribution. It is another "Broadcast" "One to many" medium.
The net is changing this slowly but surely. I think that they see a larger problem. Sure, in the short term, Napster may be able to increase profit for them. However in the long term, fostering this type of shareing may cause them to become completely obsolete.
Its not about short term profit, its about long term survival.
--Steve
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 2
I sit here and read this now in Massachussetts. I mention this only because it will tie in nicely with my response.
I love to post and I think I play the game of armchair diplomat or philosopher as well as most can. Its an enjoyable game indeed. I have read the works of Thoreau and secretly wish that I had the guts to stop paying taxes and allow them to cart me off to jail....secure in the knowledge that I am right and that matters most of all.
However, we must be realistic. The people don't care about freedom, and NEVER HAVE. Look at the history of my own state. Look at Boston.
Did the people care much for British rule? Are we truely better off on our own than under the British Monarchy? People talk of the "boston tea party" what was it? A bunch of men that Sam Adams got liquered up and convinced to dress up as indians and throw tea off a ship.
IF it wasn't for the fact that the tax was taking money from people, the philosophers would have been standing alone, there would have been no revolution. The people don't want freedom, they want comfort, they want the illusion of safety. They want to NOT have to think about all the big issues themselves.
It reminds me of Jack Nicholson's quote from Easy Rider "but don't ever tell them that they arn't free, or else they will get about to killing and maiming and whatever they have to just to show you how free they are" (anyone have the exact quote? its been a while since I saw the movie)
Form is more important than function. The masses are more happy with a comfortable and semi-believable fiction than with an honest yet uncomfortable truth.
Slashdot Mirror
Well even in the absense of humans, I know there are several animals that are known to eat fermented berries and fruits that have fallen and naturally fermented.
I seem to also remember a report on some monkeys which ocasionally were known to eat certain other things, possibly even psilocybe mushrooms...been a while...I should dig out the reference.
What you are saying....
If I were to do heroin, right now, for the first time (and it would be the first time). I could walk away without being addicted.
However, if I do it again, say a year from now, then I will be addicted.
This is what I am getting from what you are saying "Do it twice and your an addicted for life". I find this statment to be fairly shocking, since I my experience with other drugs, goes contrary to this, my (more than average but less than a medical professional) knowledge of pharmacology, and everything I have heard, run contrary to this.
This is not to say that addiction doesn't happen, and that its not real easy to become an addict. its also not to say that heroin isn't VERY addictive...and its not to say that some (poaasinly large) portion of addicts who has kicked it doesn't get cravings now and again.
It is just to say that the "do it a second time and you will never get rid of the cravings" statment is one that, if true, I find fascinating. However, at the same time, I very much doubt its veraity.
_Steve
Well....that really depends.
Just carring the pager doesn't mean that I am oncall. Unless I am specifically oncall, I can feel free to ignore any pages that come in.
Of course, other places do things differently. I feel sorry for people who are oncall all the time and have no real free tme of their own.
I don't mind provding 24/7 now and again (say every few weeks). I DO mind providing 24/365 support.
Well ok...which ones?
Check out "Getting High: A History of LSD" for the carey grant reference. Shows a picture of him on the cover of some big time magazine (was it people?) with a headline about his LSD use, along with one of the historians telling about it.
As for drug use throughout history...I could come up with a few references if I cared to dig them out. Certainly was a reference to the well known speakeasy and underground liquer production culture of the 1920s USA alcohol prohibition.
For more information, books on the subject should be very easy to find.
The DARE study? I would have to dig out that reference. In the meantime, I would highly recomend http://www.mapinc.org/
As for other animals use of drugs, I seem to remember a few scattered references here and there. More of a side point, I am not going to go reference hunting for it.
-Steve
> Snorting coke and speed, and getting stoned
> every night after work impairs your function
> on THEIR TIME regardless if you did the drug on
> YOUR TIME.
So will going out to clubs, dancing, picking up chicks and staying up fucking them till 4 am and dragging as sinto work 4 hours later.
I have yet to see any employer that has a policy about whether or not employees are allowed to go out and pick up women (or men) when they have work the next day.
I wouldn't work for one that did, even though I don't engage in such activities.
I am at work for certain hours on certain days. What I do outside of those hours is my buisness. WHEN and only when it actually effects my work does my employer have a right to ask me to stop or to leave.
Personally, I have been a casual drug user for years. Little pot now and again, couple of times a week. Maybe the ocasionaly acid trip - over a weekend or something when I am not on call. I have NEVER allowed it to effect my work.
And no...I don't flip burgers, never have in fact (well not outside of my own kitchen). I much prefer spending my days writting code.
hmmm you know slashdot has prevented me from getting more work done than anything that ive done outside of work....
> You can use the needle once and get away with
> it, the second time you're hooked for life.
Really? I am sorry but I have never heard of this before. Why is heroin so different from all other drugs of addiction?
With everything else that I am fammilair with, like caffeine (which I had a nice addiction to for a while), when the withdrawl syndrome goes away, so does the craving.
Now...there may be a psycological craving. Afterall, it does feel good, but its hardly the same.
> I have known people, however, who used heroin
> on a daily basis after dinner while keeping on
> functioning as a normal social animal.
Very true. Addicts can function as normal human beings quite easily. Its extremely high drug prices and legality issues that usually present the most problems.
-Steve
> As for "hard" drugs, I have a few tech friends
> who smoke marijuana, but that's the extent of
> it. Those same friends are scared of the hard
> stuff, because they know what it'll do to you.
Ya know...assuming its clean drug (ie it wasn't produced in someones bathtub and contains lots of impurities - or wasn't cut with some nasty stuff) - and even somtimes when it isn't. Drugs themselves arn't that harmful.
Its abuse that causes harm. Or rather overuse. You can use heroin, and not become addicted. Same for caffeine, alcohol, coke, anything.
Drugs don't "make people stupid", they don't make you smart either. Even the VERY FEW drugs like alcohol, MDMA, PCP, etc which are known to "kill brain cells" well the brain is redundant as hell. Only the most biased and conflicted of interest studies have ever shown measurable cognitive deficit.
The real trap is when you start using drugs all the time to the exclusion of other activities. Stop going to school. Stop having fun in other ways, start to feel you need the drug.
There are people who can maintain themselves and monitor their usage (much the way a scuba diver monitors the air in his tank, or a sky diver watches the altimeter), there are many who can't.
There are some people (I have known some) who will quit drugs, and then become just as addicted and allow their lives to be just as controlled by other things, like a church, or a woman.
As someone I know said "The high incidence of drug users who are losers is not because drugs make them loser, but rather, if your already a loser, you might as well be a high loser".
As for Heroin, valium and alcohol being a bad mix. Thats what harm reduction is all about. Teaching people enough information to use their drugs safely. Afterall, even among the more intelligent users, MOSt will never research their drugs first, unless the info is handed to them.
hmmmm define "food or drink"?
Cough Suryp is liquid and is drunk, is it a drink?
Beer is a drink, ok. What about whiskey (which is drunk in the same way as cough suryp...fast)
If I bake my pot into brownies...then thats not a drug anymore right? Or if I put my mushrooms on pizza?
Actually most OTC cough medicine contains DXM - a dissasociative anasthetic (in the same class as ketamine). Did it once or twice. Real shitty high. Wouldn't do it again (plus there is evidence now of possible brain damage from excessive use)
Some people really love the stuff, I can't imagine why. It actually has a worst high than alcohol. ugh!
I dunno, even if I wasn't a social pot smoker, I wouldn't take a drug test for a job. Its not worth it.
Drug testing doesn't show current impairment. What I did last friday night, on my free time, when my pager was off, is MY TIME. It is not my employers time. They have NO RIGHT to criticize how I spend that time.
My drug use is between me and my doctor (who BTW has never raised any objections to pot smoking - and yes, he knows). If my employer can't respect my right to live the lifestyle which I choose to live, whatever it may be, then that means that they do not respect me as an adult member of society.
I refuse to work for an employer that can't respect that my time is MY TIME.
The places that I, and people I know, work (which, for me, includes a hospital) have the following policy (in my words):
"We will drug test, if we believe that a person has been using drugs ON THE JOB"
Other than that they don't test. When it comes to suspecting current impairment, during working hours, I am all for making sure people arn't high. But again - testing doesn't show current impairment. It shows evidence of use within the past 3-30 days (depending on the drug).
then of course there was the drug culture of the 70s....and the drug culture of the 60s....
Then there was the drug culture of the 50s, of course that was legal; Cary Grant was very public about the fact that he used LSD over 100.
Then of course there was thr 40s and the 30s...and who can forget the roaring 20s.
Drug use has gone on since the dawn of time. Humans (and yes, even some other animals) have been using drugs forever. Hell... bars are just another form of a "Drug den".
A recent study showed that students who graduate from the DARE program are more liklely to use drugs than kids who don't. We just need, as a culture, to face the fact that drugs are interesting, and no amount of "drugs are bad m'kay" is going to change that.
In every community there will always be drug use. Its not a problem, its a reality. It is part of human nature. It is something that just must be accepted. To fight it is to make it worst, its like struggling against quicksand.
Well thats more of a resource allocation issue than a security issue. In fact, process limits for users take car of the problem nicely.
And no, I am not defending them cuz I like BSD, I have exactly 1 account on a BSD system, and I know better than to form an opinion on an OS based on a box that has been the victem of some bad (too many roots spoiling the filesystem) administration.
I actually am a Linux user (Debian/GNU) myself. It would fall to the same "attack" without user process limiting set. (in fact, I am a programmer, so once or twice i accidently did it, or something similar, to my own machine because I was coding while overtired)
I know of no system where this will give elevated privilidges. All it will do is piss off the admin. It also requires a local account (and its hard to hide which account did it). Its also relativly easy to stop.
(as root kill -SIGSTOP -1; then see who did it, killall the procs, and kill -SIGCNT -1 v- note: I have only done this under linux; I don't know that its not relying on linux specific behaviour)
-Steve
Once I had some proof that I knew how to admin a Unix system, I had no problem finding a job. In fact, after a year, I am still here.
We have been searching for more people, fairly fruitlessly since before I started working here. We have somethign like 2 midlevel and 1 senior admin slots open.
We have seen so few qualified applicants. One or two, but they never end up comming to work for us. At best we find people who might make good junior admins (we already have 2 of those...and I am one of them).
Yup....I know.
I did that, then I sent them a nasty respons
saying that they should never send me anything again.
It bounced...invalid return address.
I forwarded it to postmaster@microsoft.com with a note that they should kill whicver employee is sending out messages with invalid reply addresses.
Even though I went through their unsibscribe steps (in parallel to complaining) I was not removed.
It would be apropriate.
They once again sent me an "Update" email from their "Freedom To Innovate" (or was that annoy) people.
The last one that they sent me had an invalid reply-to. I was replying to tell them that I resent being added to an email list that I never asked for.
Whats worst... tI get this email today...AFTER
trying to get off the list, last time that they sent me one.
Microspam indeed.
-Steve
> but it is extremely rare to see acknowledgement
> of the underlying problem (Bad Guys Doing Bad
> Things In Secret
Please define "Bad Guys".
Terrorists maybe? You mean the people who are out there blowing things up and making a rukus because their people were screwed over by some government
Perhaps there would be less bombings if governments didn't go around pissing people off? You know doing things like supporting people loosing their homelands that they have inhabited for centuries? Or interfereing with other governments and people every time there is a buck to be made, or it fits "our needs".
That doesn't even matter, since echalon and the NSA arn't used for law enforcement. They are used to spy on everyone. They are used to gain advantage over other countries, or to serve the special interests of whoever controls the NSA.
Crime is easy to detect. Someone gets hurt, they either complain, or a dead body is found. Until that happens, there is nothing to do. Any crime that doesn't involve someone being killed or otherwise hurt, is not a crime anyway. (may be illegal...but the real crime is the fact that its illegal).
Whats more...none of this is even being used to "detect crime". Carnivore is (supposedly) just for monitoring individuals that are already under surveilence (which is suspect...since capturing email and or traffic can be done less intrusivly).
Echelon data isn't even available to law enforcement, only to the NSA and whoever the NSA sees advantage in filling in. Its mostly used for spying on foreign politicians and companies.
Frankly....crime is easy to detect. Either someone tells you about it, or you find a dead body. Those are the only crimes that I support the government looking into.
And finnally there are no "Bad Guys", only people. The world is not, and never has been, divided into "white hats and black hats", just people.
More important than finding the criminals is allowing the innocent to live their lives undisturbed and without fear of having every dirty little secret about themselves reviewed by others.
Putting a person under a microscope and examining their life should be done very carefully, in fact it should be considered as if it were itself a punishment and used with much caution.
There is just too much potential for abuse in these systems.
-Steve
Its almost tempting to get together with some people and setup some machines in a few countries with shell scripts that do something like mail /dev/urandom back and forth at regular intervals.
:)
some randomly sized, greater than 1k chuncks of
It almost sounds like a job for the Bavarian illuminati
-Steve
I don't think they would even need to kill anyone. Seriously think about it...
How would you get PROOF of the NSA actually putting in back doors? Have you read Applied Cryptography? What did the NSA do when DES was being developed at IBM?
They stepped in. Saw that IBM had discovered some of the NSAs own cryptography secrets and offered to "help" with a few conditions. One of them being that they never release the data on how they pick their S-Boxes (as I remember - my copy of the book is at home) - They also had some influcence over
what S-Boxes were used in the standard.
So...there is no proof that the NSA weakened the protocol, or even broke it entirely with the S-Box changes. I would imagine that ANY such backdoors would be conducted in a similar manner...no need for anyone outside of the NSA to know the truth.
Even if it can be shown that the particular S-Boxes break the security (which has never been shown - no tyet anyway), thats not proof that the NSA backdoored it...just that maybe, at the time, they didn't know quite as much as they could have (the extent of their knowledge is unknown outside of the NSA)
Now that gets down to NSA agents. Only they will ever know the truth. Truth is, they are good at picking people that they can trust. I bet they do all sorts of background checks and it takesquite a while working for them before a person gets into the real secret stuff.
Now if an agent did come out with hard evidence...they would simply deny it and cover up. Discredit the person who is saying it... disgruntled ex-employee you know, or some such.
-Steve
Well...Considering that I actually drove through Utica within the past 6 months (I have fammily about 40 mins south of Utica, on rt 12...).
I would have to say that there are more than a few hundred people there. Its actually a city (albeit a small one). I would guess more like 10,000 people or so.
--Steve
> keeping them longer then 24 hours if
> you do not own the source media is.
Incorrect.
Distributing them and/or aquiring them through unaproved channels (like napster usually) is what is illegal. NOT POSSESSION.
In fact, once you have a copy, Fair Use applies. This means you may use it. (In fact I think this is the most glaring error in software. Copyright was only ever intended to give a monopoly on copying and distribution NOT use. In fact, the concept of "fair use" gives you directly the legal right to use it, once you have a copy).
You may not remember but several months back, there was an article where someone was getting sued over MP3 distribution (napster case or was it another - been so many at this point) and I remember the quote clearly:
"Lawyers on both sides of the case agree that fair use would apply, regardless of the legality of the distribution medium"
> btw, what do you mean by IP rights?
IP rights refer to trademark, copyright, and patent rights all together as a bundle. They are talked about as a bundle because it makes it easier, and it makes it seem like you are talking about property.
The reality is that "IP" has nothing to do with real property, legally or otherwise. ie when you buy something, it doesn't become "public domain" after so many years. Other people can't force you to licence it (for music, manditory licenceing exists). There is no "Fair Use" doctrine that applies to your car.
When people talk about charging you for IP...they mean licencing. And of course by licencing, they usually mean attaching more clauses beyond what copyright law explicitly gives them, to get you to give up your fair use rights.
-Steve
> Claiming a right to a free service is absurd.
> Google is and remains an excellent, free,
> service. If it stops being free, or
> the quality starts to suffer -- stop using it!
Your missing my point,and thats my fault, I didn't express it fully.
Lets say that you offered Oil changes for free to anyone who wants to drive up to your house. You provide free oil, and a free oil filter.
Great service. Now, after a year or two of this, you decide that you are no longer going to change the oil filters, just change the oil. (of course changing the filter, as many people know, is part of a proper oil change).
You know what, thats fine, and you have EVERY RIGHT to do that. However, the people who are getting the change have the RIGHT to know that you have changed the service that you are giving them, and it is no longer what they expect.
When you provide a search engine, you are making the implict statment to the world that if they type in keywords or some search expression, your engine will use that expression and its own heuristics to find BEST MATCHES.
If you change your service to allo wBEST MATCHES to be "overridden" by corperate interest, then the public who uses it has a RIGHT to know that you are doing this, because you are no longer providing the service that they have come to expect from you.
It is WRONG to pretend to continue to provide a service, when you are not really providing it. This is a signifigant change in the type of service.
When you offer something to the community, be it for free or for pay, you are making a promise to provide THAT SERVICE. If you decide to discontinue offering it, thats fine. However offering a different service instead, without telling people, is trickery at best. It is just plain wrong.
Noone has a "Right" to use the service. They do, however, have a right to know WHAT is being offered to them.
--Steve
The problem is not the making of an alliance.
The problem is that they appear to be doing what many companies do. They have realised that they can make profit easier by decreasing quality.
An alliance is one thing. However compromising the quality of a service in the process means that the community of people who use it suffers.
The community thus has a RIGHT to know that this is going on, so that they can make an informed decision on whether or not to continue the use of that service.
Such a story is wholly apropriate. Google should be contacted and asked if this was done purposfully or is coincidental, caused by some other tweak in its engine, or in yahoos pages.
--Steve
> That great company will get bought out by Time
> Warner & Disney and you'll not only be exposed
> to ads again, but also have all the personal
> details about your porn viewing habits sold to
> anyone who cares to buy them.
This is the only thing about tivo that scares me.
What I want to know....
If I buy a Tivo, can I NOT get the service? Will it work if I never connect it to a phone line? What features will I lose if I do that?
If it will work that way...who knows, maybe I will buy one. Then again...I don't see much about tivo that couldn't be done with a a TV tuner and something to send a signal out to the TV (they make cards that do that still right?)
-Steve
> You're forgetting that when business and
> copyright mix, the motive is always profit. Of
> course the lawsuits would be dropped if Napster
> proved to increase the profits of record
> producers. As much as I hate to say this, think
> business.
It is also about control. Remember the music industry almost has a monopoly. In fact, given that they are all banded together in the RIAA, I would say that it is a monopoly in every way except legal documents.
They have created a buisness model that is suited to the situation where they control the means of distribution. It is another "Broadcast" "One to many" medium.
The net is changing this slowly but surely. I think that they see a larger problem. Sure, in the short term, Napster may be able to increase profit for them. However in the long term, fostering this type of shareing may cause them to become completely obsolete.
Its not about short term profit, its about long term survival.
--Steve
I sit here and read this now in Massachussetts. I mention this only because it will tie in nicely with my response.
I love to post and I think I play the game of armchair diplomat or philosopher as well as most can. Its an enjoyable game indeed. I have read the works of Thoreau and secretly wish that I had the guts to stop paying taxes and allow them to cart me off to jail....secure in the knowledge that I am right and that matters most of all.
However, we must be realistic. The people don't care about freedom, and NEVER HAVE. Look at the history of my own state. Look at Boston.
Did the people care much for British rule? Are we truely better off on our own than under the British Monarchy? People talk of the "boston tea party" what was it? A bunch of men that Sam Adams got liquered up and convinced to dress up as indians and throw tea off a ship.
IF it wasn't for the fact that the tax was taking money from people, the philosophers would have been standing alone, there would have been no revolution. The people don't want freedom, they want comfort, they want the illusion of safety. They want to NOT have to think about all the big issues themselves.
It reminds me of Jack Nicholson's quote from Easy Rider "but don't ever tell them that they arn't free, or else they will get about to killing and maiming and whatever they have to just to show you how free they are" (anyone have the exact quote? its been a while since I saw the movie)
Form is more important than function. The masses are more happy with a comfortable and semi-believable fiction than with an honest yet uncomfortable truth.