When my unit goes on manuevers one of the things we do for realism in training is to make sure we get rid of our TRASH in a secure manner. The enemy or potential enemy can find out a million things about you just by going through your trash. Unclassified systems will contain more information about our habits, tendencies, and personalities than any classified computer.
I'd prefer to just destroy all the disk drives and let the schools buy brand new ones. They'd probably like that better anyway, instead of losing work because that 5 year old disk died on them in the middle of a paper.
An interesting anecdote to the publication of one of Haydn's works (which applies to most composers during the baroque and later periods of popular music): Haydn's newest piece was anticipated with great expectation. His publisher was taking pre-orders on the score while Haydn finished it up. Imagine that? A score?! Sheet music? WhatdoyoumeanIgotta play this stuff to listen to it? *Teen cocks head ala RCA dog*
Imagine, no CD's, records, tapes, broadcasts. People (although probably only the wealthier class) actually got all excited about a new score coming out. They went out and bought the paper copy, brought it home, learned, practiced, and played it. That was pretty much the only method of reproduction that existed. If you wanted to hear a performance you'd have to go to one. You as a listener didn't control when and where the performances happened, so if you wanted music on demand, you had to play it.
"Damnit, Gustav, didn't I tell you to stop turning those pages so loudly."
Contrast this simpler form of music on demand to today's digital streaming, napster, cd's, Direct TV, DVD's etc. These days you have access to thousands of hours of music at the touch of a button, from anywhere, while you're jogging, driving, sitting, or studying. Where are we going? Obviously consumption of music has risen each year since CD's where introduced. Since Napster came along, CD sales have increased over 50%. I'm sure the average music collection of Americans has grown considerably as well, both in pirated and legal works.
I pondered all this while listening to music and enjoying myself. It was easy, I sat there and listened. Imagine how long it would have taken me to write Bach's Passion of Matthew? It's a lot easier to listen to it than to write it, or play it. Playing it would require me to study it, Bach, and other performances by Bach devoteés. I would probably have to learn other pieces by Bach first, study technique, history... wow. That's years of preparation, careful dissection, and practice. It is certainly easier to listen to it.
But music is big business there days. "What is going to sell?" the Sony execs ask. Creation is falling on fewer and fewer shoulders all the time. Symphonies around the country have been failing at an alarming rate. Pop music, never a bastion of creative integrity has gone from hiding pre-fabbed bands, keeping the secret that Milli Vanilli didn't actually, write, sing or produce their own songs, to just doing it right there on the TV for millions to see. Who cares if they have talent. They look good, they can dance... the corporate interests will take care of the slick packaging.
Does it matter that it's not quality, that it doesn't demand back from you? No, I'd rather just sit here and consume and consume.
Does it make you wonder why America is the fattest country on the planet? Is it also why we're the hungriest as well?
I have to say that since I switched to GNU/Linux as a desktop about a year ago (although used it as server OS since 95), I've never been so bored. I actually use it as a tool. When was the last time you got excited about a hammer rather than what you are building. Frankly, what windows users forget is that they spend most of their time installing/deinstalling software, trying to hack the registry, perusing Windows Update, troubleshooting, testing, saving settings AGAIN, rebooting, crashing, etc.
I spend almost no time at all these days on that kind of stuff. I fire up star office and write my docs, spreadsheets, etc, glimmer to code php, mozilla to browse (sure it's not perfect, I've been using it since about 1 and half years ago and man does it blow netscape 4.x out of the water), and gnapster, licq, irc (pick one), xmms to play mp3/ogg files, gimp for graphics (can't stand photoshop anymore), and on and on and on. When was the last time you had over a month uptime on a workstation? a workstation!?
Yawn. Booorrring. No, I'd rather troubleshoot my hammer, screwdriver, than build a cool add-on to my house. Man, nothing beats hacking the screwdriver registry all day instead of actually doing real work.
So, back to work I go... damn the MAN!! I'd rather screw around with the windows registry and break stuff all day than do actual work. I ain't got that excuse anymore.
Mean time between failures typically means the average time between two failures given a large/infinite pool of machines/widgets.
Humans have a mean time between failures of something like 900 years. That means for every 900/man years lived on Earth, someone dies (somebody correct me if I'm wrong on that number). Humans however have a Mean Time to Failure of about 72 years. That's the average time a human lives before failing.
My point exactly. Don't they just pay Oracle to manage everything? Oracle is a company that has some VERY high end cool stuff for large businesses. They know very well what is their product, ERP's and large database applications for companies like Boeing, GM, and the like.
Larry Elison wakes up every morning and asks himself what is his product and who is his client. He does not waver... and that is why he is successful. If their database got outsourced they'd have no problems... why? Because their database isn't their product. Their product runs on top of their database. Their ability to write applications customized for large corporations and their wealth of apps is what at THIS moment keeping them ahead of the Free/Liberty Software world.
GPL'ing your code only makes sense if you don't derive the majority of your revenue from selling software licenses. But the GPL makes huge sense for companies for whom software is overhead (stuff that doesn't directly bring in money).
For example, you sell widgets, but you thought ahead and created a widget design, inventory, and shipping system. It helps you be more efficient, but it also costs you a lot of money to develop and maintain. Companies are starting to outsource their applications to the world, and are finding out that it's cheaper, and other's who are interested contribute back. In the end they get better software.
Competition? It's not an issue, because again, they compete selling widgets, not writing software. Many company owners are realizing that software development was taking them away from their core competency and are looking to GPL.
Now, say I'm a company that has done some deep wizardry in speech recognition. We wrote it. It works and people are going to pay us big bucks for it. It would follow that said software would NOT be a good candidate for the GPL.
Just re-read the Cathedral and the Bazaar. It spells it all out plain and simple. GPL: good for a lot of things - Still room for pay-license software.
Squid proxy's got an amazingly simple way to do this right now. There are two maintained sites that are listed below in the update script. These are community generated lists with blocked and unblocked lists. For example, if you have a URL with the word documentation, the porn filter will block it as it contains "cum." So, all you have to do is add "documentation" to the unblock text file and make sure it gets parsed before the blocked file. This results in "documentation" being passed through but instances of "cum" get blocked.
Anyway, these lists are constantly being maintained by the community to keep up with sites and fixing URL's that get blocked incorrectly.
The next step might be analyzing other URL's with potentially inappropriate content. We use webalizer. You can track the top URL's visited and see if they are appropriate for your sensibilities. If not, just add 'em to your block file. Simple, and there is no interaction with the users. Get a bunch of hits on some obscure porn or warez site that any 13 year old is bound to find, you notice it and in the time it takes that same 13 year old to get his rocks off, you've blocked the site.
With Squid, you can throw up a nice polite error message when a person hits a blocked URL. Chances are, if it's porn, he won't ask for help from the administrator. If it's a URL that's blocked unfairly, it's a simple matter of just adding the blocked URL to the unblocked filter and the problem is resolved.
Let's not forget that it's us the administrators that run the show here. If a site is legitimate and a person can't get to important information it's up to a human to resolve it. Last I checked we still ran the show. As easy as it is to forget, people are actually reasonable and any adequately educated librarian is going to understand the difference between a 35 year old woman looking for information on breast cancer and a 13 year old (no offense to 13 year olds... it's just that I was 13 once) with a smirk on his face saying he needs to find information on breast cancer for his mom...yeah, his mom... with a snickering entourage behind him.
Anyway, if you want porn, or warez, or hate groups get your own computer and ISP and have at it... it's a free world... as in speech not beer.
#set the execute bit on this file and run it as a cron job weekly or monthly.
#create a custom blocked and unblocked file so it doesn't get overwritten
#by updates
#get the file
lynx -dump http://www.ineparnet.com.br/orso/noporn.txt >/etc/squid/noporn.txt
lynx -dump http://www.ineparnet.com.br/orso/porn.txt >/etc/squid/porn.txt
lynx -dump http://www.hklc.com/squidblock/datafiles/squidbloc k.tgz >/etc/squid/squidblock.gz
# cd into the directory and untar it.
cd/etc/squid
tar xvfz squidblock.gz
# remove any you dont want
#eg.
#rm/etc/squid/games.block.txt
#cat/etc/squid/*.block.txt >/etc/squid/block.txt
#cat/etc/squid/*.unblock.txt >/etc/squid/unblock.txt
#restart squid
#- debian version
#/etc/init.d/squid restart
#- redhat version /etc/rc.d/init.d/squid restart
Geez, who gives a rip about hair color...
on
Frankenstein Time
·
· Score: 1
Geez, who gives a rip about hair color... 'side those things go in and out of fashion, so there's your reintroduced genetic diversity... albeit generations of similarly configured humans...
awww man, damn, why did I have to be born in the 70's... with these grafted bellbottoms and the disco ball for a head.
Dad says, "Disco ball??!! Why in my day we were grafted with tweed suits and hawaiian shirts. Well, son, if you wait until the 90's it'll come back into fashion... so buck up. At least you don't have your mother's bee hive."
Of course the amazing thing is that the thing we use most TODAY to affect children in utero is abortion. Forget genetically modifying them, we usually just kill them, and usually not for reasons of birth defects or hair color.
We've got a long way to go, but who knows maybe we'll figure it out someday. Meanwhile, I'll take my disco ball and bellbottoms thank you very much and be happy to at least be alive.
I used to wonder about why there should be rules of engagement until I was issued this book during Officer Training. War is horrible, but as we have demonstrated time and again, we will continue to wage it. In order to extricate our sorry asses from it, we need to be able to trust each just enough to render an end to such a conflict.
From US ARMY (field manual) FM-27-10.
Ruses of war are legitimate so long as they do not involve treachery or perfidy on the part of the belligerent resorting to them. They are, however, forbidden if they contravene any generally accepted rule.
The line of demarcation between legitimate ruses and forbidden acts of perfidy is sometimes indistinct, but the following examples indicate the correct principles. It would be an improper practice to secure an advantage of the enemy by deliberate lying or misleading conduct which involves a breach of faith, or when there is a moral obligation to speak the truth. For example, it is improper to feign surrender so as to secure an advantage over the opposing belligerent thereby. So similarly, to broadcast to the enemy that an armistice had been agreed upon when such is not the case would be treacherous. On the other hand, it is a perfectly proper ruse to summon a force to surrender on the ground that it is surrounded and thereby induce such surrender with a small force.
Treacherous or perfidious conduct in war is forbidden because it destroys the basis for a restoration of peace short of the complete annihilation of one belligerent by the other.
While I was living in Europe, I was confronted with an interesting dilemma with regard to Military Service. In most European countries there is some form of mandatory military service... even Switzerland. Is this freedom?
In the US, we have no mandatory military service, yet there is a higher proportion of minorities serving in the US military than in the civilian sector. There are are also some startling numbers showing the disproportionate numbers of casualties among minorities during wartime. Are some of us more equal than others?
So it ends up being 6 of 1 and half a dozen of another. In most European countries everyone is subjected to the same treatment. Everyone's freedom is trampled a bit by the government. They have equality, but less freedom. In the US, we have the freedom to join or not join the military, but we have less equality.
Perhaps Mr. Katz's rantings would have made more sense when framed thusly between equality and freedom.
Well, here's food for thought. If we eliminated all the physical flaws in humanity, then where would we find our heroes?
Simple example. We all like Stephen Hawking, right? He's suffering right? From his book, A Brief History of Time, A Reader's Companion, he reveals how little he would have done with his life if he had not gotten sick. He was brilliant, brash, and unmotivated. It wasn't until he realized that he might only have a few years left that he got busy. Funny how it's dragged on for all these years, almost like somebody's wringing all that good research out of him.
Now, tell me honestly, if his mother had had the ability to "weed" him out before birth to spare him a horrible twisted existence, wouldn't it have been a huge disservice to our understanding of the very nature of the universe.
The only problem with applying the law of nature (natural selection) to humanity IMHO, is that we end up being way too complex in terms of what is considered a trait of survival and what is not. Physical stamina, sperm count, fertility, or physical constitution don't matter as much as they once did. Today, some things like patience, empathy, mental strength and kindness are actual survival traits as we move forward from brutish physical definitions of what made a human worthy, to more abstracted and and enlightened definitions. The really interesting thing about life today is that greatness comes from some unexpected and tough places.
Now this Princeton guy is certainly no Hitler. He's the educated person of moral conscience, and good intentions that Hitler quoted to get well meaning people to sign on to his ideology. He doesn't want people to suffer. That's noble (truly), but to me more constitutes curing the disease by killing the patient.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, that's funny. I've got several books from the middle 1800's and although pretty beaten up, are still very much readable.
Contrast that to ANY digital media or digital format.
Well, whatever books become they've got to be portable, not need batteries, be easy on the eyes, and last hundreds of years.
Hmm, sounds like a book to me *shrug*
I'd prefer to just destroy all the disk drives and let the schools buy brand new ones. They'd probably like that better anyway, instead of losing work because that 5 year old disk died on them in the middle of a paper.
*wave* hi JonKatz
An interesting anecdote to the publication of one of Haydn's works (which applies to most composers during the baroque and later periods of popular music): Haydn's newest piece was anticipated with great expectation. His publisher was taking pre-orders on the score while Haydn finished it up. Imagine that? A score?! Sheet music? WhatdoyoumeanIgotta play this stuff to listen to it? *Teen cocks head ala RCA dog*
Imagine, no CD's, records, tapes, broadcasts. People (although probably only the wealthier class) actually got all excited about a new score coming out. They went out and bought the paper copy, brought it home, learned, practiced, and played it. That was pretty much the only method of reproduction that existed. If you wanted to hear a performance you'd have to go to one. You as a listener didn't control when and where the performances happened, so if you wanted music on demand, you had to play it.
"Damnit, Gustav, didn't I tell you to stop turning those pages so loudly."
Contrast this simpler form of music on demand to today's digital streaming, napster, cd's, Direct TV, DVD's etc. These days you have access to thousands of hours of music at the touch of a button, from anywhere, while you're jogging, driving, sitting, or studying. Where are we going? Obviously consumption of music has risen each year since CD's where introduced. Since Napster came along, CD sales have increased over 50%. I'm sure the average music collection of Americans has grown considerably as well, both in pirated and legal works.
I pondered all this while listening to music and enjoying myself. It was easy, I sat there and listened. Imagine how long it would have taken me to write Bach's Passion of Matthew? It's a lot easier to listen to it than to write it, or play it. Playing it would require me to study it, Bach, and other performances by Bach devoteés. I would probably have to learn other pieces by Bach first, study technique, history... wow. That's years of preparation, careful dissection, and practice. It is certainly easier to listen to it.
But music is big business there days. "What is going to sell?" the Sony execs ask. Creation is falling on fewer and fewer shoulders all the time. Symphonies around the country have been failing at an alarming rate. Pop music, never a bastion of creative integrity has gone from hiding pre-fabbed bands, keeping the secret that Milli Vanilli didn't actually, write, sing or produce their own songs, to just doing it right there on the TV for millions to see. Who cares if they have talent. They look good, they can dance... the corporate interests will take care of the slick packaging.
Does it matter that it's not quality, that it doesn't demand back from you? No, I'd rather just sit here and consume and consume.
Does it make you wonder why America is the fattest country on the planet? Is it also why we're the hungriest as well?
I have to say that since I switched to GNU/Linux as a desktop about a year ago (although used it as server OS since 95), I've never been so bored. I actually use it as a tool. When was the last time you got excited about a hammer rather than what you are building. Frankly, what windows users forget is that they spend most of their time installing/deinstalling software, trying to hack the registry, perusing Windows Update, troubleshooting, testing, saving settings AGAIN, rebooting, crashing, etc.
I spend almost no time at all these days on that kind of stuff. I fire up star office and write my docs, spreadsheets, etc, glimmer to code php, mozilla to browse (sure it's not perfect, I've been using it since about 1 and half years ago and man does it blow netscape 4.x out of the water), and gnapster, licq, irc (pick one), xmms to play mp3/ogg files, gimp for graphics (can't stand photoshop anymore), and on and on and on. When was the last time you had over a month uptime on a workstation? a workstation!?
Yawn. Booorrring. No, I'd rather troubleshoot my hammer, screwdriver, than build a cool add-on to my house. Man, nothing beats hacking the screwdriver registry all day instead of actually doing real work.
So, back to work I go... damn the MAN!! I'd rather screw around with the windows registry and break stuff all day than do actual work. I ain't got that excuse anymore.
Humans have a mean time between failures of something like 900 years. That means for every 900/man years lived on Earth, someone dies (somebody correct me if I'm wrong on that number). Humans however have a Mean Time to Failure of about 72 years. That's the average time a human lives before failing.
My point exactly. Don't they just pay Oracle to manage everything? Oracle is a company that has some VERY high end cool stuff for large businesses. They know very well what is their product, ERP's and large database applications for companies like Boeing, GM, and the like.
Larry Elison wakes up every morning and asks himself what is his product and who is his client. He does not waver... and that is why he is successful. If their database got outsourced they'd have no problems... why? Because their database isn't their product. Their product runs on top of their database. Their ability to write applications customized for large corporations and their wealth of apps is what at THIS moment keeping them ahead of the Free/Liberty Software world.
However, just give us a few more years.
GPL'ing your code only makes sense if you don't derive the majority of your revenue from selling software licenses. But the GPL makes huge sense for companies for whom software is overhead (stuff that doesn't directly bring in money).
For example, you sell widgets, but you thought ahead and created a widget design, inventory, and shipping system. It helps you be more efficient, but it also costs you a lot of money to develop and maintain. Companies are starting to outsource their applications to the world, and are finding out that it's cheaper, and other's who are interested contribute back. In the end they get better software.
Competition? It's not an issue, because again, they compete selling widgets, not writing software. Many company owners are realizing that software development was taking them away from their core competency and are looking to GPL.
Now, say I'm a company that has done some deep wizardry in speech recognition. We wrote it. It works and people are going to pay us big bucks for it. It would follow that said software would NOT be a good candidate for the GPL.
Just re-read the Cathedral and the Bazaar. It spells it all out plain and simple. GPL: good for a lot of things - Still room for pay-license software.
Squid proxy's got an amazingly simple way to do this right now. There are two maintained sites that are listed below in the update script. These are community generated lists with blocked and unblocked lists. For example, if you have a URL with the word documentation, the porn filter will block it as it contains "cum." So, all you have to do is add "documentation" to the unblock text file and make sure it gets parsed before the blocked file. This results in "documentation" being passed through but instances of "cum" get blocked.
Anyway, these lists are constantly being maintained by the community to keep up with sites and fixing URL's that get blocked incorrectly.
The next step might be analyzing other URL's with potentially inappropriate content. We use webalizer. You can track the top URL's visited and see if they are appropriate for your sensibilities. If not, just add 'em to your block file. Simple, and there is no interaction with the users. Get a bunch of hits on some obscure porn or warez site that any 13 year old is bound to find, you notice it and in the time it takes that same 13 year old to get his rocks off, you've blocked the site.
With Squid, you can throw up a nice polite error message when a person hits a blocked URL. Chances are, if it's porn, he won't ask for help from the administrator. If it's a URL that's blocked unfairly, it's a simple matter of just adding the blocked URL to the unblocked filter and the problem is resolved.
Let's not forget that it's us the administrators that run the show here. If a site is legitimate and a person can't get to important information it's up to a human to resolve it. Last I checked we still ran the show. As easy as it is to forget, people are actually reasonable and any adequately educated librarian is going to understand the difference between a 35 year old woman looking for information on breast cancer and a 13 year old (no offense to 13 year olds... it's just that I was 13 once) with a smirk on his face saying he needs to find information on breast cancer for his mom...yeah, his mom... with a snickering entourage behind him.
Anyway, if you want porn, or warez, or hate groups get your own computer and ISP and have at it... it's a free world... as in speech not beer.
#set the execute bit on this file and run it as a cron job weekly or monthly.#create a custom blocked and unblocked file so it doesn't get overwritten
#by updates
#get the file
lynx -dump http://www.ineparnet.com.br/orso/noporn.txt >
lynx -dump http://www.ineparnet.com.br/orso/porn.txt >
lynx -dump http://www.hklc.com/squidblock/datafiles/squidblo
# cd into the directory and untar it.
cd
tar xvfz squidblock.gz
# remove any you dont want
#eg.
#rm
#cat
#cat
#restart squid
#- debian version
#/etc/init.d/squid restart
#- redhat version
awww man, damn, why did I have to be born in the 70's... with these grafted bellbottoms and the disco ball for a head.
Dad says, "Disco ball??!! Why in my day we were grafted with tweed suits and hawaiian shirts. Well, son, if you wait until the 90's it'll come back into fashion... so buck up. At least you don't have your mother's bee hive."
Of course the amazing thing is that the thing we use most TODAY to affect children in utero is abortion. Forget genetically modifying them, we usually just kill them, and usually not for reasons of birth defects or hair color.
We've got a long way to go, but who knows maybe we'll figure it out someday. Meanwhile, I'll take my disco ball and bellbottoms thank you very much and be happy to at least be alive.
I used to wonder about why there should be rules of engagement until I was issued this book during Officer Training. War is horrible, but as we have demonstrated time and again, we will continue to wage it. In order to extricate our sorry asses from it, we need to be able to trust each just enough to render an end to such a conflict.
From US ARMY (field manual) FM-27-10.Ruses of war are legitimate so long as they do not involve treachery or perfidy on the part of the belligerent resorting to them. They are, however, forbidden if they contravene any generally accepted rule.
The line of demarcation between legitimate ruses and forbidden acts of perfidy is sometimes indistinct, but the following examples indicate the correct principles. It would be an improper practice to secure an advantage of the enemy by deliberate lying or misleading conduct which involves a breach of faith, or when there is a moral obligation to speak the truth. For example, it is improper to feign surrender so as to secure an advantage over the opposing belligerent thereby. So similarly, to broadcast to the enemy that an armistice had been agreed upon when such is not the case would be treacherous. On the other hand, it is a perfectly proper ruse to summon a force to surrender on the ground that it is surrounded and thereby induce such surrender with a small force.
Treacherous or perfidious conduct in war is forbidden because it destroys the basis for a restoration of peace short of the complete annihilation of one belligerent by the other.
Checkout: http://www.adtdl.army.m il/cgi-bin/atdl.dll/fm/27-10/toc.htmhttp://www.adtdl.army.m il/cgi-bin/atdl.dll/fm/27-10/Ch2.htm
While I was living in Europe, I was confronted with an interesting dilemma with regard to Military Service. In most European countries there is some form of mandatory military service... even Switzerland. Is this freedom?
In the US, we have no mandatory military service, yet there is a higher proportion of minorities serving in the US military than in the civilian sector. There are are also some startling numbers showing the disproportionate numbers of casualties among minorities during wartime. Are some of us more equal than others?
So it ends up being 6 of 1 and half a dozen of another. In most European countries everyone is subjected to the same treatment. Everyone's freedom is trampled a bit by the government. They have equality, but less freedom. In the US, we have the freedom to join or not join the military, but we have less equality.
Perhaps Mr. Katz's rantings would have made more sense when framed thusly between equality and freedom.
Well, here's food for thought. If we eliminated all the physical flaws in humanity, then where would we find our heroes?
Simple example. We all like Stephen Hawking, right? He's suffering right? From his book, A Brief History of Time, A Reader's Companion, he reveals how little he would have done with his life if he had not gotten sick. He was brilliant, brash, and unmotivated. It wasn't until he realized that he might only have a few years left that he got busy. Funny how it's dragged on for all these years, almost like somebody's wringing all that good research out of him.
Now, tell me honestly, if his mother had had the ability to "weed" him out before birth to spare him a horrible twisted existence, wouldn't it have been a huge disservice to our understanding of the very nature of the universe.
The only problem with applying the law of nature (natural selection) to humanity IMHO, is that we end up being way too complex in terms of what is considered a trait of survival and what is not. Physical stamina, sperm count, fertility, or physical constitution don't matter as much as they once did. Today, some things like patience, empathy, mental strength and kindness are actual survival traits as we move forward from brutish physical definitions of what made a human worthy, to more abstracted and and enlightened definitions. The really interesting thing about life today is that greatness comes from some unexpected and tough places.
Now this Princeton guy is certainly no Hitler. He's the educated person of moral conscience, and good intentions that Hitler quoted to get well meaning people to sign on to his ideology. He doesn't want people to suffer. That's noble (truly), but to me more constitutes curing the disease by killing the patient.