Re: [Discuss] RMS

As has often been noted before, the law is an ass! On 9/24/19 12:20 PM, Rich Braun wrote: Seth Gordon wrote:That's what we have when we define everything from taking a leak in a woods where, unknown to you, a child was watching, to jumping out from behind bushes and raping an 80 year old

[Discuss] Accusations are not "facts". And they are disputed.

On 9/23/19 2:46 PM, Seth Gordon wrote: But these debate does not seem apposite to the simple question of whether or not Minsky (based on the facts that nobody seems to be disputing) committed sexual assault at all. I take issue with your assertion that nobody seems to be disputing "the facts".

Re: [Discuss] RMS

I think Thomas Lord's rebuttal of Thomas Bushnell's article is well worth reading. (See https://twitter.com/thomas_lord/status/1174433645110513664). From Lord's comments: "One remarkable thing about the FSF at that time, when we worked out of dinky spare offices on the campus of

Re: [Discuss] RMS in the news

I've known RMS since the 1970s when we were both regular attendees at the MIT Folk Dance Club. His Aspergers has always made him a difficult person to deal with. You say you "wonder if he would have done the same call out with a male professor in the same situation". I'm pretty sure that

Re: [Discuss] [ OT] Google- GoDaddy registre renovation nightmare loop

Hi Julian. In your email you write that the email was from "seccuresrever.net". GoDaddy is the registrant of the domain "secureserver.net", not "seccuresrever.net". If you copied and pasted this domain name from the email you received into this email, then it seems that you were tricked into

Re: [Discuss] Fidelity voice-recognition security?

And how, exactly, do they distinguish between your voice and someone playing back a recording of your voice? The big problem is that this discussion reaches only a very small subset of their customers - the techies. To have any effect, the stupidity of this feature needs to be broadcast to

Re: [Discuss] Question regarding parking at MIT for BLU meetings

Where can I find out what the new parking restrictions are? In particular, is the Hayward Lot now off limits? On 11/15/17 7:58 PM, John Abreau wrote: We've had unusually low turnout at the past couple of BLU meetings, and I'm wondering how much of it is due to the changes in MIT's parking

Re: [Discuss] AT eliminating copper phone lines

According to the FCC (https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/porting-keeping-your-phone-number-when-you-change-providers) porting "can be done between wireline, IP and wireless providers". The only circumstances under which you can't port your phone number, again according to the FCC, are

Re: [Discuss] GNU xargs trick

Very cool! I've used xargs for many years, but I never knew about the -I or -P options. Are they only in the GNU implementation, or have they been ported to other platforms? Mark Rosenthal On 4/27/16 10:25 AM, Rich Pieri wrote: There is a trick to GNU xargs that lets you easily

Re: [Discuss] What was once old is new again...

On 2/18/16 12:27 AM, Bill Horne wrote: Bill, who thinks that loading FOCAL from paper tape is the true test of computer wizardry! I never used FOCAL, but I frequently loaded EDU20 from paper tape. EDU20 was the version of DEC's PDP-8 multi-user BASIC that ran without a mass storage device.

Re: [Discuss] Consumer's Union attempts to end robocalls [OT]

Could we please change the Subject line to "Consumer's Union attempts to end robocalls"? Every time I see "CU attempts to end robocalls" the subject line, I think we're talking about the venerable Unix utility 'cu', and I wonder what clever technique someone's come up with to use a modem

Re: [Discuss] Stallman stubborn

LPF was the League for Programming Freedom. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_for_Programming_Freedom. Mark Rosenthal On 11/12/15 1:38 PM, Derek Martin wrote: I can't parse LPF ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org

[Discuss] Stallman stubborn

About Stallman being "stubborn", I think that's a good thing, or at least a necessary thing. He is, after all, the founder of a movement that has had worldwide impact. And founders of movements are, more often than not, stubborn and difficult to deal with. In its obituary for Betty Friedan,

Re: [Discuss] Fwd: Hey FCC, Don't Lock Down Our Wi-Fi Routers | WIRED

Unfortunately, Torvalds despises GPLv3, so the Linux kernel and anything else he has copyright on will stay with GPLv2. Mark Rosenthal On 10/5/15 1:33 PM, Bill Bogstad wrote: On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 1:00 PM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote: From: Discuss

Re: [Discuss] Most common (or Most important) privacy leaks

If you're going to tell us all about how the originating company is stiffing you, at least tell us the company's name so we can steer clear of them. Mark Rosenthal On 2/20/15 10:23 PM, Peter Olson wrote: I've been mugged three times, but not recently. The first time was in Cambridge,

Re: [Discuss] Insync vs Google Drive client

On 2/11/15 7:51 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote: they openly state they provide it to the government, and they scan peoples content for anything they suspect being illegal (child porn and copyright infringement top the list) and they turn their own users in to law enforcement. I don't doubt

[Discuss] Looking for WiFi router with certain characteristics

Apologies to Lewis Carroll. I'm afraid the following doesn't scan as well as his version: The time has come, my router said, to talk of many things. Of 802.11 ac and n and g and b, And why Cisco updates without permission. And the safety of ASUS settings. :-) It's long past

Re: [Discuss] Looking for WiFi router with certain characteristics

What exactly is meant by Access Point nowadays? I ask because the thing I knew as an Access Pointin the early 2000s was a simple-minded device that sold for $25. This was before routers incorporated WiFi, so my router had 4 RJ-45 LAN ethernet ports and one WAN port. In order to do WiFi, I

[Discuss] Verizon getting out of being regulated by coercing customers to switch from copper to FIOS

On 7/24/14 10:51 PM, Bill Bogstad wrote: On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 5:12 PM, Tom Metro tmetro+...@gmail.com wrote: Bill Bogstad wrote: VZ for land lines (and even FIOS) is at least somewhat a regulated monopoly. ...you could get the appropriate state regulatory agency involved on your side. My

Re: [Discuss] SSD drives vs. Mechanical drives

On 5/5/14 11:47 AM, Richard Pieri wrote: Kent Borg wrote: - Flash can die with no warning and no recourse. Any medium can fail with no warning. Good backups have always been the go-to recourse for these occurrences. While it's true that any medium can fail with no warning, if your data's on

Re: [Discuss] Why use Linux?

Hi Micky. If you're going to mention Linux and the FSF, it might be best if you were to call it GNU/Linux rather than Linux and explain why the FSF (and Stallman in particular) prefers GNU/Linux to simply Linux. (See What's in a Name? https://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html, Linux and the

Re: [Discuss] Why use Linux?

A few years back, I wrote an article for O'Reilly about something I'd noticed starting in the 1980s. Unix (and later Linux) had grown in the direction of readable (i.e. ASCII) file formats, where MS-DOS had grown in the direction of unreadable formats. I think this is related to what you're

Re: [Discuss] Why use Linux?

On 2/11/2014 7:37 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote: Trust in the transparency and benevolence of Oracle, Apple, and Microsoft is a slogan I don't foresee catching on anytime soon. Actually, I /can/ see it catching on - as a sarcastic slogan promoting Linux! Mark

Re: [Discuss] 4K monitors

Actually, they did the transition from 1600x1200 to 1920x1080 in two steps. I went from a 1600x1200 (UXGA) screen to a 1920x1200 (WUXGA) screen on 15 laptops, and I agree that the increase in width wasn't a really big deal for me. Then they dropped from 1920x1200 (WUXGA) to 1920x1080 (FHD),

Re: [Discuss] what news do you read?

On 12/10/2013 10:26 AM, Eric Chadbourne wrote: I usually start my day with a cup of coffee and read through about a half dozen sites before starting work. The technical websites I go to generally keep me happy. The general news websites do not. I hate the design. I hate the writing. I am

Re: [Discuss] why don't web hosts scan their sites?

On 11/18/2013 1:35 PM, Richard Pieri wrote: As a more serious take on the topic, hosting providers are -- or are supposed to be -- common carriers. They can't scan users' content. If they did that then they'd cease being common carriers and they'd lose their safe harbor and Good Samaritan

[Discuss] Mass. outlawed independent contractors in software and other creative professions in 2004

The cracking down on companies using contractors instead of employees is another case of state legislators discriminating against software developers and other professions that create intellectual property. People who create intellectual property often want to be independent contractors.

Re: [Discuss] Comcast's IPv6 deployment

FWIW, I just emailed the nanog.org website administrator to ask if he could restore that file. I'll let you know if I get a response. Mark Rosenthal m...@arlsoft.com mailto:m...@arlsoft.com On 5/15/2013 11:48 PM, John Abreau wrote: I tried fetching that with wget, and the RAM file just

Re: [Discuss] Comcast's IPv6 deployment

To: MBR m...@arlsoft.com CC: webmas...@nanog.org Mark, Thanks for your message. I am copying the missing files over right now. Looks like we may need to tweak the site code to make them visible. If you urgently need to view the file you can find it here: http://old.nanog.org/RealMedia

Re: [Discuss] [OT] Smart Phones

On 3/1/2013 10:42 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote: In the old days they had a single landline in a house shared by all members of the family, and parents could snoop. Today, with text messaging the device is portable so while their parents can check on the bills and usage, they can't see anything

[Discuss] GPL and code linkages

A question came up on another mailing list dealing with Drupal and PHP that raised questions in my mind about the GPL. discuss@blu.org seemed more likely to have members knowledgeable about GPL issues, so I'm asking my questions here. I thought I understood the GPL until I read a posting

Re: [Discuss] Issuing the 'sync' command more than once (and a tangent on how not to run a high-tech company)

On 6/19/2012 3:11 PM, Derek Martin wrote: On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 at 12:59:44PM -0400, MBR wrote: On 6/12/2012 11:22 PM, Jack Coats wrote: In old SunOS days, we could issue the 'sync' command, twice, to ensure all system buffers had been written to disk. You could experiment to see if issuing

[Discuss] Issuing the 'sync' command more than once (and a tangent on how not to run a high-tech company)

On 6/12/2012 11:22 PM, Jack Coats wrote: In old SunOS days, we could issue the 'sync' command, twice, to ensure all system buffers had been written to disk. You could experiment to see if issuing it occasionally in your script helps. Or issue it outside the script, even in a chron might help.

Re: [Discuss] Issuing the 'sync' command more than once (and a tangent on how not to run a high-tech company)

I'm not disagreeing with you on that. When I worked at Fortune, standard procedure was to type: sync sync sync halt Even though the OS guys knew that typing 'sync', waiting about 5 seconds, then typing 'halt' was really all that was necessary, most of the programmers writing

Re: [Discuss] Issuing the 'sync' command more than once (and a tangent on how not to run a high-tech company)

Exactly. But as I was looking it up, I was surprised to find the warning in the sync(2) manpage that, although modern Linuxes now wait till the write is complete before the system call returns, it's still not safe to power down immediately because the data may be in the drive's on-board cache

Re: [Discuss] Versioning File Systems

Other operating systems in existence at the time Unix was being designed required you to call different system calls depending on what device you were trying to do I/O to. And some operating systems knew about file types and defined the complete set of file types you could deal with - e.g.

Re: [Discuss] Versioning File Systems

One of the possible changes you might make to your codebase is to delete or rename a file. Git will track that. In a versioning filesystem, doesn't that cause all the versions of the file to get deleted or renamed? Mark On 5/4/2012 4:46 PM, Jerry Feldman wrote: On 05/04/2012 09:18 AM,

Re: [Discuss] Very slow system, no idle, but nothing running

I can definitely vouch for Jerry's statement, you cannot remove ALL cat hair from a years old laptop keyboard. Ever. A few weeks ago the x key on my keyboard became intermittent. For most people, this is merely a problem. For us Emacs users, an intermittent x key is an unmitigated disaster!

Re: [Discuss] web file download

On 2/29/2012 6:41 AM, Westcott IV, John wrote: As a web developer you may also want to consider use something Live HTTP Headers for firefox as it will give you the headers going to the server and coming back to the client without having to set up a full trace. I recently started using HttpFox

Re: [Discuss] web file download

I don't know what happened to the rest of my sentence, but what I was trying to say was: I recently started using HttpFox instead of Live HTTP Headers with Firefox. It shows you the content of the reply as well as the headers. Mark On 2/29/2012 12:20 PM, MBR wrote: On 2/29/2012 6:41

Re: [Discuss] Old computers Re: (OT) Steve Jobs 1955-2011

On 10/8/2011 11:42 AM, Rich Braun wrote: Jerry Feldman mentioned an old computer: My first home computer was an Apple II (1978). What Jobs saw back then was that a desktop computer could be useful to real people. At the time, there were a few hobby computers. I almost bought a MITS Altair The

Re: [Discuss] The America Invents Act

On 9/28/2011 2:13 PM, Hsuan-Yeh Chang wrote: Thanks for challenging my point of view by attacking my profession. Does this mean that Derek guessed right and you really are a lawyer, not a software engineer? I'm not implying that you're not welcome here, but since most participants here are

[Discuss] What do typical Linux users do WRT protecting their systems from malware

Although I've done software development under various flavors of Unix since 1980, I haven't done much administration on anything Unix-like in a long time. And for the past decade or so I've used laptops running some flavor of Windows. Currently I'm still on XP. Having just installed Ubuntu

Re: [Discuss] What do typical Linux users do WRT protecting their systems from malware

:28 PM, MBR wrote: There's a general belief that Macs aren't targeted as much as Windows systems are. Also, the fact that you're generally not logged in as root limits the potential damage. More the latter than the former. There *is* Macintosh malware out there, but unlike Windows malware

Re: [Discuss] What do typical Linux users do WRT protecting their systems from malware

On 7/20/2011 8:01 PM, Richard Pieri wrote: Macintosh is a much harder target than Windows/NT simply because of the OS architecture. Similarly, Linux is a harder target than Windows for reasons similar to Macintosh. Besides the fact that users generally aren't logged in as root, what other

Re: [Discuss] How do you deal with domain transfer problems?

ICANN policy at http://www.icann.org/en/transfers/policy-12jul04.htm states: The Registrar of Record may deny a transfer request only in the following specific instances: . . . 8. A domain name is in the first 60 days of an initial registration period.

Re: How do hard drives handle bad blocks nowadays?

Thanks a lot for your very informative response. I'll have to read through the man-pages for hdparm and smartctl. Mark On 4/3/2011 5:57 PM, Chuck Anderson wrote: On Sun, Apr 03, 2011 at 05:00:27PM -0400, MBR wrote: It's now two decades later, and I'm trying to understand what's changed

Re: drupal on linux?

On 2/16/2011 3:47 PM, Eric Chadbourne wrote: I suspect most users of Wordpress and Drupal don't need that feature. They only have production. I personally just do it manually. My laptop is dev, and there's a test and prod on my server. Easy enough for a few not heavily trafficked sites.

Re: No-cost web hosting for home business

That's great until you have to get your data back out. I recently had to move a client from Google Sites to a more traditional server environment. It wasn't that hard for me because I've been a Unix developer for decades, and I'm pretty proficient with Emacs. So I spent some quality time

Re: keyboard trends

On 1/18/2011 3:35 PM, Tom Metro wrote F-keys on laptops have had a second function to control the hardware, such as changing the display brightness, when used with an Fn modifier key. Newer HP laptops reverse the logic of the Fn modifier key, such that you have to press the modifier to get the