Slashdot Mirror

The judge in this case, obviously, didn't have time to read this:

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2008/02/default-judgment-denied-in-atlantic-v.html

Chances of the judgement being overturned on appeal: 100%.

The $30M number is bogus, it includes a lot of other stuff.

This whole article is sourced from a blog called "Dead Men Working" which is focused on venting the frustrations diplomatic foreign service officers about their problems with getting security clearance from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security; coincidentally the group alleged to have lost the laptops. So take the article with a grain of salt.

Also, the blog reported yesterday that the laptops were all found and accounted for. So, really, nothing to see here.

The "Dead Men Working" blog is really interesting reading though. http://www.deadmenworking.blogspot.com/

I'd like to try Qt, I reall would. But I only have Visual C++ Express Edition available to me at home, and there seems to be conflicting information as to whether Qt will support VC++ Express.

First there were a bunch of postings indicating that it would.

But then, when you check the Qt download page, you're told that "Please note that the Open Source Edition of Qt will support the MinGW compiler".

So which is it?

There are some guides to getting it working, but they appear to involve strange nonstandard patches, and a whole bunch of manual configuration - frankly, it's all just too much damn work. I may only qualify as a hobbyist programmer at home, but my time is still precious.

The irony is that, because Visual C++ Express doesn't come with MFC, there appears to be a gap in the market for a C++ windowing library for hobbyist Windows programmers. And who knows, if I like Qt at home, I may end up recommending buying it at work.

You forget the main point of any realistic dystopian society: at least initially, you have to allow a few dissidents to "prove" that dissent is allowed and that the people are "free". All the while, the people in power are concentrating their power and limiting the media's right to cover dissent by uncovering dissidents and getting them canned, limiting which press have access to key government events, planting people in editorial/analyst/writer positions, bribing commentators, and outing confidential sources, undermining the credibility of the media and endangering the lives of dissenters. I could probably go on for several pages like this.

We can get away with criticism because we are relatively unimportant and unable to create a credible threat against the power structure, whether through force, through block voting, or through running for public office. Someone important criticizes the administration, though, and bad things happen....

No, that's not correct. It does "hurt the pirates" and for the good schemes it can be statistically proven to be true. The developers of, I think Heros, published some very interesting statistics on their experience with StarForce if you want to find the figures I'm thinking of, but I've seen similar stories repeated by other game devs.

Look. Very few high-budget games are released without DRM. I know this is an emotional issue for a lot of Slashdotters, but the number of people here assuming they're smarter than, well, almost every game publisher in the world is pretty sad to see. Do you really think they pay for expensive DRM systems over and over again if it loses them money? Even if you assume some of them are completely dysfunctional, we're not talking about a few publishers. We're talking about the vast majority.

DRM does work. It does not last forever, but it was never intended to anyway. The success of a PC video game DRM system is the time-to-crack. For good schemes this can be measured in months. For bad schemes it can be measured in days, or even be negative.

The majority of a copies of a game are sold within the months following its release. After a year, sales of a typical game are minimal and if you lose them, well, no big deal. So if your DRM scheme holds up 6 months, that's 6 months with no piracy. It's well understood in the industry that the DRM cracking problem comes from people who just don't want to pay for the game. Very few are pure hearted people who conscientiously want to make backups of their disks. Some of those people will never pay for the game, ever, and some of them will pay for the game when it becomes clear that a crack isn't coming out anytime soon (because they want to play the latest thing, with their friends, etc).

So, holding on for a few months can increase sales quite significantly. It's a simple economic equation - how much do you pay for the DRM vs how many extra sales do you get as various wannabe-pirates "time out" and decide to buy the game anyway?

Of course it's not 100% business, there's an emotional aspect to it as well. Consider a developer at Infinity Ward and his perspective:

On another PC related note, we pulled some disturbing numbers this past week about the amount of PC players currently playing Multiplayer (which was fantastic). What wasn't fantastic was the percentage of those numbers who were playing on stolen copies of the game on stolen / cracked CD keys of pirated copies (and that was only people playing online).

Not sure if I can share the exact numbers or percentage of PC players with you, but I'll check and see; if I can I'll update with them. As the amount of people who pirate PC games is astounding. It blows me away at the amount of people willing to steal games (or anything) simply because it's not physical or it's on the safety of the internet to do.

If you want to see what a good DRM system can achieve compare the piracy rates of console games vs PC games. Obviously due to its nature the PC versions will not get close to such low rates anytime soon, but the contrast is remarkable (I've read a game developer blog where they searched for torrents of their game for XBox 360 vs PC and the difference in number of torrents/downloaders was huge).

The thing is that fixed cameras are inefficient at tracking you, thats what the FIT team is for.
Also cameras dont complain so much when you record them

This is the link you want.

> Recognize that operating systems which are readily compromised by malware are broken and not acceptable for use.

Doesn't work: http://wearenixed.blogspot.com/2008/03/you-only-know-good-when-youve-seen-bad.html

HVDC transmission typically has 3% loss per 1000 km http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC#Advantages_of_HVDC_over_AC_transmission though this can be reduced at higher capacity: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/03/coast-to-coast.html

Note that the RIAA is no longer referring to MediaSentry as its "investigator", instead referring to it as a "contractor" or a "vendor". I wonder if they think that will make their legal problems go away.

You may remember that as the FCC was setting rules for the auction last summer, we urged the Commission to adopt four openness conditions. Further, we vowed to bid at least $4.6 billion in the auction if the Commission adopted all four rules. Even though the FCC ultimately agreed to only two of the conditions, which nullified our original pledge, we still believed it was important to demonstrate through action our commitment to a more open wireless world.

We're glad that we did... In turn, [raising the bid] helped increase the revenues raised for the U.S. Treasury, while making sure that the openness conditions would be applied to the ultimate licensee.

Thanks for the insightful comment. Your intelligent remarks restore my confidence in /. I don't know why your post was moderated as funny.

I tried my hand at this by authoring a TADS game and entering it in the annual IF competition. It turned out to be a lot harder than I originally thought.

One problem that I ran into was subject verb agreement between what the gaming system provides and what you provide. Another problem was in the combinatorial explosion of the interactive nature of the media. In non-interactive fiction, you know what has already happened in the story so you can reference those things while writing. In interactive fiction, the user may not have navigated to a particular room so you have to be careful when you need to refer to another place or event. I have blogged on this elsewhere.

It will -- and is already happening (ZFS on FUSE). What can't happen for licensing reason is ZFS in the Linux kernel, rather than as a userspace file system.

Naturally, performance will never be as good due to the additional overhead, but another FUSE filesystem driver, NTFS3g runs tolerably fine.

I wouldn't say that Slackware is difficult to install or maintain, but for someone doing it without prior knowledge and expecting something like anaconda, no, they'll have some reading to do first.

Probably the thing I find most interesting about Slackware is the BSD-style startup scripts. They are a good example of the subjective nature of what's difficult: simpler in structure, so they're easier to create & maintain. But they're not as automagic as the SysV variety.

I run Arch myself...seems like a similar philosophy, but with more fun stuff and a kickass package manager bolted on.

Gentoo is different in many ways, perhaps not worth comparing to Slack other than its age. But TBH I don't know much about Gentoo.

Check this out: http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2006/04/mind-map-of-linux-distributions.html

I had originally contemplated that this was the case however figured that due to my self declared war on spammers, they decided to spoof my email as the send bit. I am 100% sure I have not been hacked or any system compromised but it was really a crappy experience nonetheless. http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2008/04/spam-war-deepens-am-i-winning.html

-1, Redundant (and the original was better).

http://www.ngeo.com/adventure/0211/q_n_a.html
"At 15, Karl Stanley began building a sub from a length of steel pipe. Here's the crazy part: It worked."

http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/high-school-students-build-submarine.html
"High School Students Build Submarine"

Go for it.

Steve Ballmer, change agent

Jeez. I take a day off to do some meditating at Green Gulch Farm and come back to find Monkey Boy's mug glaring out from page one of the Journal and a story that says the Microhoo deal is turning into a full-blown clusterfuck. For a teaser of their story go here. Short version: Yahoo is trying to drag AOL and Google into the mess. Google figures it can skirt antitrust regulators by brokering an ad deal instead of doing an outright merger with Yahoo, which is too bad because wouldn't it be a great world if the biggest Internet company had a name like GooHoo? Meanwhile Time-Warner just wants someone, anyone, to take AOL off its hands. AOL should have been taken out back and euthanized years ago. It's a friggin zombie, still roaming the earth and stinking up the joint. Begone, foul site! Meanwhile the Borg wants its analog from the media world -- Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. -- to join Team Evil, and Rupe sees a chance to unload MySpace before it gets destroyed by Facebook. That anyway seems to be what's going on though who knows? I keep getting this mental image of all these bozos rushing around the top floor of a hotel, zipping in one door and out the other, like a skit from the Three Stooges. Or was it the Marx Brothers?

So I called Monkey Boy to find out what he's doing. It was early but I knew it was okay because he's totally one of these dudes who wakes up before dawn so he can get a jump on the day and start plotting more ways to cheapen and uglify the world for the rest of us. Sure enough he was on his treadmill in his workout room slopping down a bowl of corned beef hash with fried eggs while watching three television sets and two computer screens and memorizing everything. He's like, "You want to know the truth? Okay. Here's the thing. Somebody needed to come into this space and smash some shit together. Understand? I mean there's too many of these companies all doing the same thing, or variations on the same thing, and there's way too much overhang, and AOL shouldn't even fucking exist anymore and MySpace is ridiculous and we're all fighting for the same dollars and this shit has just got to stop and someone needed to toss a grenade into the pit and guess what, I'd rather be the one tossing the grenade than be the one trying to catch it and toss it to someone else before it explodes."

So I asked him how he figures the whole thing will play out and he's like, "Who knows, and who cares? But this shit needs to get shaken up. It's turning into a cesspool. The way we figure it if we stir up the pot at the very least we'll force some of these idiots into forming really stupid alliances or even better maybe they'll actually merge and mess each other up completely. If possible we'd love to push AOL deeper into Google. I'd glue AOL to Eric Schmidt's head if I could. But whatever happens, if we get stumped on Yahoo we'll get portrayed as the poor loser, shunned again, thwarted by some big alliance when really what we've done is forced our competitors to tie themselves into a big huge fucking knot. See the one thing we still have going for us here at Microsoft is that even though people make fun of us and deride us and call us clods, deep down they also still fear us. I mean they really, really fear us. And that fear is something we can use. I don't mean that we're bluffing, because we're not. We'll buy Yahoo, and we'll make the deal work. But if we don't get Yahoo that's okay too because the only way they can escape us is to make a deal that not only fucks them up but also fucks up one or more other players in the space. Geddit?"

So then I asked him why Vista sucks so bad and he says, "Who cares? We'll do another one but the desktop is dead. Office apps are dead. We'll milk them for another five years and we'll use Yahoo to generate ad revenue to get us through the next five or ten years but the real game is a decade

Having an MS Photo Editor that automagically syncs with "MS Flickr Live!" would be a great boon.

Windows Live Photo Gallery Updated, supports Flickr. Dated 18 Oct 2007.

Interestingly, google wasn't so happy when "google" made the Merriam-Webster dictionary as a verb. I think it's going to be interesting to see what their response to this will be.

Having read various chunks of the discussion, I'm still not sure where to put this, but I want to mention Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience and Iran , circa 1981 by Barry M. Rubin. Review at:

http://dubyaurb.blogspot.com/2007/04/paved-with-good-intentions-american.html

Short summary is that we contributed a whole lot to the mess, though the British probably did more to set the stage. There are still some moderates in Iran, but we have done everything we could to marginalize them to the point where they probably want the bomb, too, just to keep us away.

However, all things considered, I think we already have enough to worry about with the bombs that we already know about--even including the possibility of a rogue Israeli bomb. Given the current state of affairs, I'd say the Pakistani bombs are the most dangerous threats, and we should be trying to get *SOME* kind of leverage there. Our puppet there can't last much longer...

Yeah it's kind of sad that someone might actually think that.

Well, I said it because violent criminals have been released to make space for drug offenders. It's sad when a murderer or rapist serves less tyme in gaol than nonviolent drug offenders do. But that's what the US's fake War on Drugs has done.

Well if you haven't read the decision of Judge Neil V. Wake in Atlantic v. Howell yet, I commend it to your attention. Good work deserves to be recognized.

By the way, I have never claimed to be a "rational and intelligent" person. I just claimed to be right.

As to me as a "person", I'm just a regular guy, no more "rational" or "intelligent" than anyone else.

Only on my blog and p2pnet.net. I submitted it to Slashdot on March 26th, but it was rejected.

My stories, which are usually submitted under "yro" -- "Your Rights Online" -- sometimes go through mysterious voting patterns in Firehose. Sometimes I'll submit a story, it immediately starts ascending in the Firehose, and then all of a sudden it starts plummeting.

From a quick look on Google maps, it would seem that the distance between Cuba and nearest American soil (Key West) is slightly under 200km.

It would be possible to string up a wireless link, indeed the current record is 238 miles (383km - link ), so it is possible.

I think the bigger issue is the legality of doing this. The embargo on Cuba does not only apply to the governments, but to citizens of both countries. You setting up a wifi link is a violation of that embargo, and could get you in serious trouble.

The first link is, I believe, wrong. The debate with Doroshow on statutory damages is here: http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2008/05/transcript-of-march-28th-fordham-law_02.html How is it that no-one seems to have noticed there was no debate with Doroshow in the linked article?

First off, you seem to not know what that thread was about. I suggest that you read it before making any other comments that suggest that you haven't a clue as to what was discussed.

Secondly, his beliefs have changed significantly over time. It's just that the changes are viewed by his followers as still "in the spirit" of his previous views. If you would have been involved in that thread, or even had read it, you would have seen his position change significantly even in that short period of time.

You see, the problem with his opinions is that they are very context sensitive. He'll take a point of view that allows him to "win" an argument. Then later on, when that point of view works against him, he'll say that people misinterpreted him ignoring quotes and requests for explanation side stepping the issue by ignoring the issue itself.

Trust me, I've had conversation(s) with him before, and he completely ignores any questions that the answers would work against him. He'll even ignore further requests at answering the questions. It's extremely frustrating to have non-discussions that go like this:

Me: You said "quote 1" and now you say "quote 2". These contradict each other.
RMS: You're misquoting me. You're taking "quote 1" out of context.
Me: We were talking about x then and we are talking about x now. How is that taking it out of context?
RMS: --- talks about something else ---
Me: Please answer the question.
RMS: --- continues along another line ---
Me: Seriously, just answer the question.
RMS: ...

You get the point.

Third, this didn't have anything to do with Theo's moving or unmoving attitude. It had everything to do with RMS spreading FUD about OpenBSD then RMS coming on misc@ and picking a fight. He's done that before to the Subversion project among others.

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS6278881818.html
http://fitz.blogspot.com/2007/07/stallman-shoots-free-software-movement.html

Among others.

Fourthly, you're going to have to explain to me how the below describes a stable person (i.e. clicking links in posts helps):

http://openbsd.org/lyrics.html#43
"""
We are just plain tired of being lectured to by a man who is a lot like Naomi Campbell.

In 1998 when a United Airlines plane was waiting in the queue at Washington Dulles International Airport for take-off to New Orleans (where a Usenix conference was taking place), one man stood up from his seat, demanded that they stop waiting in the queue and be permitted to deplane. Even after orders from the crew and a pilot from the cockpit he refused to sit down. The plane exited the queue and returned to the airport gangway. Security personnel ran onto the plane and removed this man, Richard Stallman, from the plane. After Richard was removed from the plane, everyone else stayed onboard and continued their journey to New Orleans. A few OpenBSD developers were on that same plane, seated very closeby, so we have an accurate story of the events.

This is the man who presumes that he should preach to us about morality, freedom, and what is best for us. He believes it is his God-given role to tell us what is best for us, when he has shown that he takes actions which are not best for everyone. He prefers actions which he thinks are best for him -- and him alone -- and then lies to the public. Richard Stallman is no Spock.

We release our software in ways that are maximally free. We remove all restrictions on use and distribution, but leave a requirement to be known as the authors. We follow a pattern of free source code distribution that started in the mid-1980's in Berkeley, from before Richard Stallman had any powerful influence which he could use so falsely.

We have a development sub-tree called "ports". Our

...this hobby setup only cost a few bills: http://tuzen.blogspot.com/2008/03/practical-solar.html

My point is that a thread is a thread. If using multiple concurrent threads is harmful, so is using a single thread. Single threading is less harmful than multithreading but harmful nonetheless. The thread is the reason for every ill that ails computing, from the reliability crisis to the parallel programming crisis. There is a way to design and program computers that does not involve threads at all. It's called the non-algorithmic software model. This is the way we should have been doing it in the first place. To find out why algorithmic software (threading) is the work of the devil, read the articles at the links below:

Parallel Programming, Math and the Curse of the Algorithm
Why Software Is Bad and What We Can Do to Fix It
Nightmare on Core Street

150 years after Babbage and Lady Ada introduced the algorithmic computing model, it is time to change. The longer we wait to realize the folly of our ways, the worst our problems are going to get.

My point is that a thread is a thread. If using multiple concurrent threads is harmful, so is using a single thread. Single threading is less harmful than multithreading but harmful nonetheless. The thread is the reason for every ill that ails computing, from the reliability crisis to the parallel programming crisis. There is a way to design and program computers that does not involve threads at all. It's called the non-algorithmic software model. This is the way we should have been doing it in the first place. To find out why algorithmic software (threading) is the work of the devil, read the articles at the links below:

Parallel Programming, Math and the Curse of the Algorithm
Why Software Is Bad and What We Can Do to Fix It
Nightmare on Core Street

150 years after Babbage and Lady Ada introduced the algorithmic computing model, it is time to change. The longer we wait to realize the folly of our ways, the worst our problems are going to get.

universities. After all, as we recently discussed on Slashdot, in a story also posted by Soulskill, they sued an ISP in Ireland for not using Doug Jacobson's "Audible Magic" software.

like
University of Oregon,
Marshall University,
University of Maine Law School,
University of San Francisco Law School, and
Harvard University Law School.

like
University of Oregon,
Marshall University,
University of Maine Law School,
University of San Francisco Law School, and
Harvard University Law School.

like
University of Oregon,
Marshall University,
University of Maine Law School,
University of San Francisco Law School, and
Harvard University Law School.

like
University of Oregon,
Marshall University,
University of Maine Law School,
University of San Francisco Law School, and
Harvard University Law School.

like
University of Oregon,
Marshall University,
University of Maine Law School,
University of San Francisco Law School, and
Harvard University Law School.

Verified:
Jacobson's Deposition, Pages 5-7 - It says he sells packet monitoring software to universities, through his company Palisade Systems

I just love how obviously un-impartial this guy truly is (not to mention the well established ineptitude of his methodology and statements, which has been discussed on slashdot a number of times before).

http://illegalinstruction.blogspot.com/2007/02/ice-queen-shatters.html

The GUIs of Windows 98/2000 are essentially tweaks of what Windows 95 had. Now I happen to remember Windows 95 was explosively popular, which happened for a reason. It worked. Cloning what works isn't a bad thing at all, what the developers of GTK+ did is a bad thing. I'd take a clone of Windows 2000 over that god-awful mess any day of the week.

[Flash] used by YouTube to deliver huge quantities of crap video to people

YouTube have recently added MPEG-4 support though (done for the iphone, I beleive) :

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/04/download-youtube-videos-as-mp4-files.html

Canonical acts as sponsor of Ubuntu, and must necessarily get revenue somehow. This sells merchandising, training, technical support and so on. You can see it in https://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?products_id=134&osCsid=2ee3fca302a01aeae8344f649d4c57b6 or http://fabianperez.blogspot.com/2008/04/canonical-anuncia-curso-de-ubuntu.html in Spanish For ubuntu remains free, canonical should get money. Or as pay the salaries of programmers for example?