mogse

This is in response to A Solution to Global Warming

Hello, i stumbled upon your article through Google news. And it's good and reflects the thoughts of most of the industrialized world.

As you say, people the majority will choose whichever energy is cheapest and most convenient. Those who already feel guilty will now feel more guilty, and those who didn't care will either be enlightened, or, more likely, still won't care.


I read in another article that there exits clean coal energy, but it of course comes at a cost, capturing the carbon emissions of a coal power plant comes at a penalty of 30-40% lower efficiency.

Implementing this on any coal power plant would be stupid though, it would make the energy more expensive.


There is a very simple solution which would work today, carbon tax. Because it's simply cheaper to pollute and not care about the environment. If there was carbon tax, green alternatives would become cheaper (relatively speaking) and hence competitive. All very simple, addressing the core of the problem.

This is in answer to prisoner23's story about his friend Dave and his frustration in achieving his dreams.

At the very root of Dave's problem lies Dave's lack of understanding of the meaning of the word freedom. There is a problem when people have different and conflicting views on what free or freedom is. Your's and Dave's very use of the word freedom demonstrates in itself why Dave failed.

To draw from the discussions and philosophies of the free software community, and what Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project and the free software foundation, believes is the essence of free software

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1).
• Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Richard Stallman believes that Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. And that you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer. Whereas others will believe that freedom is having free will to decide whether or not to buy and drink the beer.

You cannot buy beer from a large multi-nation brewery and expect to receive a copy of their recipe and brew your own beer of your own improved recipe, which is what Richard Stallmans and the GNU Project believes is freedom.

In stark contrast to Richard Stallmans view on freedom, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, has in the past publicly attacked this very requirement to give freedom to your customers by saying that it is a cancer destroying the intellectual property value of everything it touches.


So in essence the only freedom you received from the brewery (and Microsoft) was the freedom of choice. The freedom to choose whether or not to buy and drink their beer (or software), a freedom which is often hampered by lack of choice due to monopoly. Most people are perfectly happy with this very minimal freedom and will not complain because they don't realize they lack the choice as it doesn't yet exist.

And even if the brewery did provide you with their recipe to brew and improve to make your own beer, the question is, should you be free to withhold the recipe from your buyers? Or should you be forced to include a full recipe with every can of beer sold?

So essentially true freedom can never be attained because it does not exist, there are only different views on what freedom is.

And as a result, Dave never realized that the the freedom to withdraw from society and to not pay taxes was never given to him in the first place. He failed to communicate his view on freedom to the people around him. The society Dave lived in had a very different view of freedom from what Dave thought of as freedom, so Dave's dream failed and Dave became very frustrated with his inability to achieve his dream in the society he lived in and ended up as failure. A frustrated, lost and broken man.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_%28philosophy%29

What Dave probably should have done is to either work on his communication skills or find a place where his views on freedom and his need for self-sufficiency is shared by the society around him. Poor people in small communities in developing countries would probably have been a good choice where he could even have attained success and high stature in the community if he had been accepted into their community.

Or, if those two options do not suite Dave, he probably should have tried very hard to go somewhere where no one else lives and no one desires to live, perhaps a remote island, a desert, the moon, or even Mars or Venus.


Also, it is worth considering why Dave's lack of understanding and his inability to communicate his needs to the society around him, perhaps, as mentioned in another article on your blog, he is just an ill-educated slave of society struck by pure luck on the lottery. Not educated enough to articulate himself and understand the people around him, his attempts were bound to fail.


Or perhaps he could be a successful person who has not realized that he is suffering from an undiagnosed Attentive Hyperactive Disability Disorder, ADHD. He is frustrated by his inability to communicate and function in society as well as society's failure to identify his disorder and is thereby lost and broken. This is a disorder which it is estimated that 10% of the male population and 4% of the female population have.


To quote an article:

Although individuals with [AD/HD] can be very successful in life, without identification and proper treatment, AD/HD may have serious consequences, including school failure, family stress and disruption, depression, problems with relationships, substance abuse, delinquency, risk for accidental injuries and job failure. Early identification and treatment are extremely important.

The symptoms are:

AD/HD predominantly inattentive type: (AD/HD-I)

• Fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes.
• Has difficulty sustaining attention.
• Does not appear to listen.
• Struggles to follow through on instructions.
• Has difficulty with organization.
• Avoids or dislikes tasks requiring sustained mental effort.
• Loses things.
• Is easily distracted.
• Is forgetful in daily activities.

AD/HD predominantly hyperactive-impulsive type: (AD/HD-HI)

• Fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in chair.
• Has difficulty remaining seated.
• Runs about or climbs excessively.
• Difficulty engaging in activities quietly.
• Acts as if driven by a motor.
• Talks excessively.
• Blurts out answers before questions have been completed.
• Difficulty waiting or taking turns.
• Interrupts or intrudes upon others.

If any of these feel familiar i would strongly urge you to continue your reading through the links provided below regarding AD/HD.


PS. I would like to apologize if i crossed a line when criticizing Dave who is most likely a real person or based on one. Communicating criticism in a way that is well received is extremely hard and requires deep knowledge of the person in question which it is not possible to gain over the Internet.


See also:

The definition of freedom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_%28philosophy%29

Richard Stallmans and the GNU Project's freedom.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

The conflicting views of free as in beer vs free as in speech
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_Libre

Ballmer Calls Linux "A Cancer"
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/01/1658258

Beer which you are free to brew and improve:
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,68144,00.html

Information about AD/HD
http://www.help4adhd.org/en/about/what/WWK1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADHD
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=adhd

Hello, i'm going to take up a rant something that many people are bugging me about, port ranges.

From what i see there's 2 scenaries where you'd need them:
* scenario 1: you only have 1 public ip but you have multiple computers
* scenario 2: you are under the impression that using a port range will "increase security" (what's up with that?)

In scenario 1, i'm pretty sure you can fix the issue by setting the local port range in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range (i have no need for portranges personally, so i haven't bothered with this, it's usage seems obvious though).

In scenario 2 i think you're misguided. You could use iptables locally to match (outgoing packets only, although this might be enough) and this would give you better security (unless you can't trust iptables). Also, using a small port range increases the chance of data connection hijacking, although there chance of this is pretty large in other cases aswell, http://www.google.com/search?q=data+connection+hijacking .


And from a programmers perspective, i have found no easy way to code port range, you have to guess what ports are free, although you can to keep track of which ports your own application uses it's a mess to do this, and if you guessed a port which was in use, you have to brute force your way through the jungle of used ports to find a port not in use. The kernel does this MUCH more effectively. Although this overhead is problably not so in a bigger picture.

However some people need this anyways, and zubov has implemented this guess and brute force approach in drftpd CVS. There should be an implementation that uses the kernel's anonymous ports (listen on port 0 and kernel will do the work for you) and it's the approach i'll be using. :)


If you think drftpd already has port range support, it does, but it's ugly, it implements keeping track of used ports, guessing, but not bruteforcing. Since it's ugly it might leak ports over time but this has not been reported by anyone.

First i start off with the reason most of you are reading

DrFTPD

I just commited symlinks, I added a few more testcases since my last entry, + i actually tested that it works in running drftpd. :) I usually just write it and I can see that it works, also i write testcases that if they pass, i'm pretty sure it's working. Doing manual testing sucks.

This is one major step towards 1.2, and also something my co-siteops have been bugging me about, next would be to make SectionInterfaces automatically create symlinks for dated sections. Mounteable virtual filesystems also would be nice, f.e. /SECTIONS/0DAY would be a symlink to 0DAY's current dir. Saves the work of maintaing the symlink entry in the filelist, and if you want to keep the symlink there, you can link it to /SECTIONS/0DAY instead of /0DAY/0925.

Slowness

Was going to go out to local nightclub, anyway, wouldn't accept by creditcard (uhm, it's not a credit card, money is drawn directly from the account, what's the correct english word for this?), and the ATM was closed, oh well it was very dead anyway, tomorrow looks a lot more promising!

Hmm, this is turning into a changelog more than a blog, i blame zubov for this since he's the one who pointed out that blogs were useless and waste of time to read blogs. And then he spends all day on IRC, talk about double standards! Bleh! :D


Comments!

DrFTPD

Yay, i just wrote code for symlinks that passes a symlink testcase i wrote. If that sounds strange to you, i'm doing test-driven programming.

mogio

I just got a mail with a patch for mogio which is used and distributed with DrFTPD, it's first user outside of drftpd, hooray! :P The patch, which is very minor, is for compiling on Mac OS X. Contributions are always fun! :)

Personal

And on a personal note i've caught a cold and I currently have a fever, which is giving me a bit more free time, which seems to be clearing off now.

As you see i started a blog. I was planning on rolling my own blog on mog.se, which I problably still will do if my blogging experiences turns out good. Hopefully moving all blog data over won't be too much of a hassle, or if livejournal seems really really good, i might opt for not integrating with my personal homepage, which is fairly unlikely. ;)

I was reading http://slashdot.org as usual, and saw a post about a presentation of livejournal's backend, very impressive, looks like it's even more complex than impressive too. I'm glad DrFTPD doesn't need to scale to that many users. ;)

Anyway, the speed is horrible, i read their status page and it looks like some of their newly ordered hardware hasn't arrived for 5 weeks, of which i won't talk about more here cause you can read it all here: http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_maintenance/

I've been picking up DrFTPD coding today after almost 1½ month of hiatus (you can see whether I or any of the other developers are working or not on the drftpd-commits mailing list). I'm working on a new SlaveSelectionManager, which will improve support for mixed speed on slaves, using faster ones for incoming and slower ones for archiving. This task also implies working on SectionManager and Archive, since they will have to be improved aswell to support this. SectionManager doesn't need improving as much as it needs fixing, I never really had time to complete it, but it has worked fairly well so far. Config format (java.util.Properties) is a maintenance nightmare which will need replacing as soon as we find something better that is equally easy to use. :)

I'm very satisfied with the huge number of plugins that's been popping up lately, keep up the good work everyone. Many i would classify as useless, but oh so funny, very rewarding, great to see these niches filled. I'm also pondering setting up gforge (sourceforge fork) to support these projects, providing them with CVS, FRS (File Release System), forum, wiki, doc manager, etc., etc.


Post some comments and maybe you'll get me to post again soon!