By your logic then, anthropology, cosmology, paleontology - heck, even astronomy - are a total waste of time, since "It might not be what it looks like." In fact, for that matter, the whole world might've been invented two minutes ago with all our memories intact - why bother with science at all? I'd rather just go fishing.
The reason science is not "a crutch for the weak mind" is because a fundamental question of good science is "what is the least amount of explaining I have to do to explain this phenomenon?" There are an infinite number of nondisprovable, evidenceless theories to explain any phenomenon - the creation of the world; the creation of species; even who makes the coffee in the office coffeepot.
All other, non-scientific belief systems are based upon some premise ("God created the heavens and the earth 6,000 years ago") and any evidence to the contrary is discarded, or the theory is made more ornamental to explain them ("Well, maybe God created the heavens and the earth 6,000 years ago and then made it look like it was 14 billion just to test our faith!")
Evolution as history is not a misapplication of science. As I've said, you can come up with an infinite number of nondisprovable theories about the creation of species, none of which have a whit of evidence. As a scientist, until I see some evidence for one of these theories, the only logical thing to do is assume things are as they appear: Life evolved slowly over billions of years.
What I really hate is when I'm writing some software, and working with something I've never used before, and the error message I get is "contact the software developer."
I'm left sitting there staring at the screen at 3 AM blankly thinking, "Heck, I *am* the software developer, and I have absolutely no idea what to do myself, much less if some helpless user contacted me..."
Oh well, at least I can't be in much closer contact with the developer...we're sitting in the same chair...:)
Well, first of all, being an insufferable prig is a specialty of mine, so I see no reason to change on just this issue.:)
More seriously, I started dodging the Fry's guy out of a total frustration about all things Fry's. The problem with Fry's is that in terms of "getting what I want right now," there isn't anyone comparable. I felt that Fry's had wasted so much of my time that I had to do something to "strike back at The Man.":)
My point with all of this "civil disobedience" is that, if I can simply walk past the checker, it's not an effective shoplifting detection device, because I rather expect shoplifters don't bother slowing down for them, either. All it does is waste everyone's time, and I'm very opposed to that. Also, I very strongly suspect that the point isn't as much to find shoplifters as it is to discourage collusion with cashiers (having a friend as a cashier who charges me $1 for a $100 item).
For the record, I do actually usually stop for the Best Buy guy, precisely because there isn't a line, and it's not significantly faster to go around him (and I don't feel like Best Buy has wasted the best years of my life). I do think the Best Buy guy is particularly unneeded, though, because they have an electronic shoplifting detection system. Again, I think the main goal isn't shoplifting but collusion. And surely the checkers must know that it's possible to simply walk around the receipt-checker, so why waste all your customers' time?
Fry's, on the other hand, usually has a line, and I'm not interested in waiting there for any amount of time for what is an obviously ineffective shoplifting protection mechanism. Not to mention that I've gotten totally sick of Fry's motto: "The More You Spend, the More We Make You Wait!" The problem is, if it's Saturday and I need a HD to replace one that failed in production, I don't have much choice but to go to Fry's. But I have come to view shopping at Fry's to be a sort of game, where the goal is to minimize the time wasted. For example, if they have two left on the shelf, they're actually out of stock, because, dollars to doughnuts those two have been bought and returned (and re-shrink-wrapped!) five times because they don't work.
As for more "invasive" security - I have no problem whatsoever with that. My problem is them wasting my time on something that is so obviously ineffective. Best Buy and Fry's both already have security cameras, and I am perfectly free to not shop there if I have a problem with that.
Oh, I'm sure that *do* charge OSDN funny money. I'd also guess that the business unit that is the smallest set of profit and loss accounting is OSDN. So, transferring funny money between OSDN sites doesn't improve OSDN's business unit profitiability. If OSDN doesn't achieve some level of profitability as a business unit, VA rings up the OSDN General Manager and says, "Your unit is unprofitable - do whatever it takes to make it profitable." In that analysis,/.'s house ads aren't going to prevent layoffs or simply pulling the plug. Or, they might be more "democratic" about it and simply tell every site in OSDN to lay off 25% of their people. Regardless, house ads don't help the/. crew keep their jobs long-term.
On the Fry's door nazis - I got fed up with them a long time ago. At some point, I decided Fry's had wasted enough of my time, and just walked around the six-person line of folks getting searched. The receipt-checker said, "Sir, can I check your receipt?" And I replied, "No, that's alright, I don't need that, today," and kept walking. When he didn't follow me out in into the parking lot, I made this my Fry's SOP. Most times they don't even ask, anymore - if they do, I politely decline without slowing down.
Now, the Best Buy Nazis are a lot more serious about it. They tend to be big, bouncer-types and take their job very seriously. I walked right past one of them the other month, and he said: "Sir, can I see your receipt?" I replied with my standard, "No, that's OK, I don't need that today," while continuing to walk. He followed me out into the parking lot (!): "Sir, I NEED to see your receipt." I kept walking. "No, I believe you're mistaken: You don't need to see my receipt." (A little Jedi-mind-trick action there). He stopped following, realizing the basic impotence of his position, and yelled at my back: "Well, you're NOT WELCOME here as a customer, anymore!"
I was so surprised I unfortunately did not put my purchase in my trunk and go back to speak to the manager, but I did call the manager when I got home. He wouldn't come out and say that I didn't need to get my receipt checked, but when I pressed and said, "I spend about $250 a month with you guys, would you rather have me walk through without showing my receipt, or would you rather have my money go somewhere else?" He replied, "Oh, we absolutely want your business!"
Anyway, bottom line, the Fry's receipt checkers are imminently ignorable. They don't have the right to detain you or search you. They could detain you until the police arrive if they suspect you're shoplifting, but they don't want to engage in that hassle (and a possible lawsuit) for the average customer.
I've seena lot of people say, "Hey, you guys are getting more traffic, doesn't that mean you're raking it in from more ads?"
It ain't that simple.
You've gotta sell those ads. And that's not so easy, anymore. If you don't sell an ad, serving the page is a cost, not a benefit.
"But wait!" you say. "There's ALWAYS an ad at the top, so they're clearly selling them all!" Nope. You know all those Think Geek ads? And the NewsForge ads? And all the other adds that point to things OSDN owns? Those are all "house" ads that/. is throwing in there to help out the corporate parent, but that don't actually bring in revenue.
So, if they're not selling the ads, now, more pageviews just results in more bandwidth costs, not more ad sales.
My first line-editor experience was on the Amiga, which shipped with both a line-editor and a screen editor back in the day. As one reviewer put it, though: Why ship both on the same disk? The only reason to ever us a line editor is to use it to write a screen editor!:)
There is a third option, which is what we were successfully able to do in World War II and its aftermath: Beat them until they beg for mercy and then help them with open and generous hearts.
Appeasement is not the answer; we must show strength, not weakness. Once they sue for peace, would should help them rebuild their lives. But between now and then a lot of people need to die to keep this type of thing from being a part of the nightly news instead of just a once-in-a-lifetime event.
First: Linus, unlike RMS, has never (to the best of my knowledge) insisted that even Linux be called Linux. Much less that something else that happens to contain Linux (say, RedHat or Debian) be called Debian/Linux. RMS has insisted that the GNU name be as infectious as the GNU license, and clearly the only reason he cares if we call it Linux or GNU/Linux is in order to promote his organization and his aims. You may agree that that is a noble goal, or not, but that's what he's done and it has alienated a lot of people.
Second: The problem with consensus is that you usually spend an awful lot of time talking and very little coding (as you found out). My experience in open source is that usually the amount of talking is inversely proportional to the amount of coding. Projects which have a lot of "developers" sign up early and spend a lot of time jabbering on the list about how things "should" be done tend to be stillborn. Projects that have two or three people working on them in obscurity until the core basically works tend to get a lot further. If you want your project to succeed, don't worry about consensus. Worry about code. Working code wins. Two megabytes of jabber trying to reach consensus just wastes hard drive space.
Well, yes, but that's because I *get* something for my ads: content. With ads I have the option of not viewing them: Simply don't go to sites that use them. I don't have that option with spam, because it comes to me.
Ads are a necessary evil under the current content-creation paradigm. Spam has no positive side effects.
While I can't claim to have read all of Mr. (Dr?) van Flandern's article, I did find his claims to sound intelligent and be intriguing. Having passed the first level of my crap detector (he didn't spend a lot of time complaining about persecution; he didn't use a a lot of caps; etc)., I decided to see if I could find anyone rebutting him.
This page contains a lot of links generally rebutting a lot of "fringe" claims on physics topics. He has A Whole Section devoted to Mr. van Flander's paper, in which he links to rebuttals by gravitational physicists of Mr. van Flander's ideas. The short answer from them seems to be "Tom van Flanders doesn't understand relativity very well."
If you haven't checked out the
Critical Dates link, it's fascinating (if somewhat repetitve) reading. Just think! Someone actually figured out that, on Tuesday, January 1, 29602, NTFS fails! I'm thinking, if you're stilling using NTFS in 27,000 years, you're probably gonna get what's coming to you.
I agree with the posters above that grabbing a binary RPM from an untrusted source isn't any better than grabbing source from an untrusted...uh...source.
Anyway, what hasn't been mentioned is something I've been thinking about around virii. I think a big part of the reason a Linux virus has been unable to get off the ground is because we basically don't pass around binaries. When was the last time you gave anyone a binary? When was the last time you received one? We've all gotten so used to "./configure; make install". Writing a virus that attacked autoconf source code would in theory be possible, but, again, the distribution vector isn't very good, because we don't even pass around the source code.
The way software gets distributed on Open-Source systems is, I tell a friend of mine, "Dude, check out this software...it's called Blady-blah. Just find it on freshmeat." Even more than the permissions system of Unixes, I think this reliance on compiling from the original source (because it's the easiest thing to do) is what keep virii out of the Linux swimming pool.
It's a picture of a sock monkey holding a bunch of bananas. Hence the "sock monkey wranglers" credit in the CREDITS file. It's just a JPEG, as far as I can tell.
There's another interesting point - it really seems to me that the competition to bum a few characters from DeCSS is arguably art. I'd say that the coders involved in this are involved in an artistic endeavor, and even could be considered to be making a political statement about how stupid the DMCA is on these matters.
Yes, it's true that there will be many copies, and many of them will be relatively "near" me on the Internet. However, it is not expected that all (or even most) data will be one hop away. Any data that is more than one hop away will end up being proxied (transferred) 1 time for each server. That's how anonymity is provided. If we're talking about really big files like MP3s, number one, that means that, as a Freenet node, I'm passing through a LOT of traffic to the people near me proxying through me. Number two, it means that, when I click "download," it's got to be actually downloaded and uploaded two or three times for the average case. If one of those links in the middle has a 56k (or reboots in the middle), it's gonna be a REALLY slow process.
Akamai caches, yes, and so does Freenet. But Akamai doesn't proxy your download through three other peers.
You then finish, "Freenet doesn't do a very good job of this because it doesn't take network speeds into acocount...But it will be quite simple to add support for that and will be done after a few more releases." Yes, and, if you do that, it'll become a backbone network, because all clients will "want" to connect to the few fast peers. If I'm the RIAA, I just DMCA notice all those fast peers' ISPs on the same day, and the network falls over.
Regardless of specific attacks, my point is that Freenet (or any P2P) is, by definition, going to be more complex (and hence more expensive) than a simple, centralized system, and will therefor only be used when the primary overriding concern is trying to hide who is distributing the content, not for people who want to put up family pictures.
I'm quite aware of how ALL the P2P systems work, especially freenet. I'd love to see any particular criticisms you have beyond an outright dismissal of my arguments because I "don't understand." My statements about Freenet are accurate and true; if I request a document from Freenet, unless a node one hop away has it, there are going to be multiple proxy copies made to service it. To quote from the document you link to, "The data is returned from d via e and b back to a, which sends it back to the user." That's essentially a full download to e, a full download to b, and a full download to a. If any one of those guys is on a 56k modem, it's gonna suck.
To reiterate - P2P, by definition, requires more complexity, bandwidth and expense than a simple centralized system. My argument is that, like crypto, the extra hassle and complexity will mean that people will only use P2P when it is more effective than cheaper and simpler alternatives. The only times that will be the case is if you are trying to avoid detection as the distributor of the data.
As an aside, I very strongly doubt that Freenet would survive a concentrated DMCA attack. Each document has a uniquely identifiable string. If I'm the RIAA, I log onto Freenet with a hacked client. I do a search. The server one hop away says "Here ya go." As the RIAA, I don't know if that server proxied it or is storing it. And it doesn't matter. I send out a DMCA notice to the guy who owns the server (I know is IP and the time he was on, so I can do this via is ISP, who will cooperate, because he doesn't care). The guy who owns the server now has "actual knowledge" that copyrighted material is moving through his system. He can either block it (have his Freenet server not respond to requests for that), or simply drop out of Freenet. If he does neither, the RIAA DMCA notices his ISP, which simply pulls the plug on him, because they don't care (and he's prolly violating their terms of service by running a server, anyhow).
I think something like Freenet can only work if most of the documents on it are the kinds of things people will risk going to jail for. I don't see most people risking going to jail for free MP3s.
News flash: Napster doesn't use the ID3 tag in computing the MD5 sum. Nor the ID3v2. You'd have to alter the music, itself.
A much more viable attack is to write a client that lies about the MD5 sum, anyway. There are two basic ways to do this:
1) Write a client that always lies with the same MD5 or from a small set. This would be automatically defeated, because someone would complain about one of those MD5s, and then all songs represented would be blocked.
2) Write a client that lies with a different, random MD5. This is easy to defeat simply by having Napster not share any MD5 it's only seen once. This provides a little chicken and egg problem, but I think it's much less of an issue for the useability of the system than what's been proposed.
Yes. This sucks, because it effectively ends unsigned band distribution on Napster. It's even worse than you describe - an unethical competitor of Naspter's could put up Mariah Carey's music as "Mirah," intentionally. Mariah's record company would complain, and that would be the end of Mirah on Napster.
The irony here is that Napster's LYING about the jtechnical challenges of MD5 sum blocking is what led to this. They've maintained MANY, MANY times (in sworn declarations, even) that MD5 sum blocking is impossible. The above link has their VP of Engineering, Eddie Kessler, stating "Given the large universe of MD5 checksums, it is impossible for Napster to monitor the checksums when we process thousands of new files a second. Napster's service would be rendered unusable under such conditions." But now, it's suddenly possible to block based on a TEXT SEARCH, which is much more computationally intensive than an MD5 sum compare? Can you say "perjury," boys and girls?
Anyway, I'm just amused by the fact that they're being hoist on their own petard. If they hadn't protested overmuch that MD5 was impossible, and just done it, they might've been able to keep it going for the indies. But text compares are gonna kill the service - once they get 50,000 bands in there (and millions of track names), EVERY file you try to share will match SOMETHING.
What you say is true, but it's not the issue. You can design the multi-threaded sensitivity properly, you can implement to the best of your ability, but, eventually, someone IS going to do the equivilant of *0 = 1, and your program is going to dump core. Even if it's just a typo. Believe me, I know, I founded the Freeamp project, and it is multithreaded to hell and back, and it has been a nightmare to get all the crash bugs out of it.
The problem is, that, under Linux, if you load the resultant core file (from any multithreaded program) into GDB, it often dumps core. Which isn't very useful.
The end result of this is that you can have a dual PIII-800 workstation, running the very latest in tools, with a highly trained developer, doing a friggin' binary search through the code with printfs trying to figure out where the stomped pointer is coming from.
Believe me, you do this a few time and you're gonna start thinking that a language that does memory management for you probably wouldn't be such a bad idea, either.
My OT rant - RedHat/Cygnus (leader of the gdb effort) needs to get this fixed. Quite frankly, it's hard to take Linux as a serious development platform when multithreaded debugging is twenty years back. Support the developers, first, and everything else will follow.
Has more to do with practicality. Microsoft will sell you an upgrade, but that upgrade will, upon install, verify that the thing you're upgrading is there. Have you ever had the experience of trying to reinstall the latest version of Office when you're running an upgrade of an upgrade of an upgrade...? What a nightmare. You've got to install all the old stuff, first, THEN upgrade them all...
The key point is that there is no easy way for the record company to verify that you own the Vinyl before they sell you the CD at a discount. It's also worth noting that, because record companies in particular are so inefficient, a big chunk of the cost of the CD is in manufacturing and distribution, so I don't know how much they really could cut the cost, anyhow.
In the specific case of Vinyl->CD (or VHS->DVD), there is a valid argument that you're buying something new; that the digital copy is significantly better than the analog. It is perfectly legal for you to make a CD from your Vinyl; you just don't want to because the quality would suck. Therefore, it is arguable that you don't own the CD version of The White Album
A better example is CD -> MP3. This is simply a media transfer. While the RIAA likes to imply that you do not have the right to do this, clearly, under copyright law, you do. The record companies would love to sell you all your music again, of course, and certainly, as a service, that might be something people would be interested in (although clearly not for the $3.50/song encrypted BS they're pusing, now).
I work for EMusic.com, and we've thought about this a lot, as you might imagine. Our opinion is that you have the right to transfer formats and make copies all day long, as long as you don't share them with someone else. When you purchase a song from us, you've got the right to put a copy on your computer, a copy on your Nomad, a copy on your computer at work, and a copy on your car. There's no way you can listen to all those at once, so it's no big deal. What you're not allowed to do is share it.
Similarly, if you own a CD with a song we offer on it, it's perfectly OK for you to rip the MP3 from the CD and not buy it from us. Or, if you'd like, we'll sell you the MP3. For some people (especially our subscribers), that may be easier than ripping their collections.
Anyway, don't let the [MP|RI]AA snow you about your rights. You do have substantial purchase rights over the music you buy. The music industry (unlike the software industry, which you hold up as a paragon of virtue) does not have EULAs, or license agreements. When you buy an album, you still are getting something you retain rights to. Ditto with a movie. I agree that it'd be cool if they'd offer, for example, a suplemental DVD to go with your VHS old copy, for less than the whole DVD copy of a movie. But clearly the market for that would be small.
Not that I read German, or anything, I'm just guessing that the "Privatsphäre und Datenschutz" is a privacy policy, and that when they have a section like "Was sind 'Cookies'?", they're not talking about receipe swapping.
The/. crew didn't have something to do with these awards, did they? Seems like the folks giving them out didn't even look at the sites...;)
The one about playing Russian Roulette with an automatic we used to jokingly refer to as Polish Roulette. Never figured anyone would be stupid enough to actually do it, though...
I will say, I wish they had links to the actual news stories. Been reading urban legends too long not to want to see evidence:)
My main complaint about the Audrey:
on
The Rise Of QNX
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· Score: 2
Where they heck is the ethernet on that thing? They claim it's aimed at couples with two palms who want to be able to sync, control their schedules and browse the web from their coffee table. It's got a built-in 56k modem. HELLO? How many couples do you know like that that still use 56k modems?
I wish the home electronics manufacturers would at least start shipping with the option of an ethernet port that configs offa DHCP...
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By your logic then, anthropology, cosmology, paleontology - heck, even astronomy - are a total waste of time, since "It might not be what it looks like." In fact, for that matter, the whole world might've been invented two minutes ago with all our memories intact - why bother with science at all? I'd rather just go fishing.
The reason science is not "a crutch for the weak mind" is because a fundamental question of good science is "what is the least amount of explaining I have to do to explain this phenomenon?" There are an infinite number of nondisprovable, evidenceless theories to explain any phenomenon - the creation of the world; the creation of species; even who makes the coffee in the office coffeepot.
All other, non-scientific belief systems are based upon some premise ("God created the heavens and the earth 6,000 years ago") and any evidence to the contrary is discarded, or the theory is made more ornamental to explain them ("Well, maybe God created the heavens and the earth 6,000 years ago and then made it look like it was 14 billion just to test our faith!")
Evolution as history is not a misapplication of science. As I've said, you can come up with an infinite number of nondisprovable theories about the creation of species, none of which have a whit of evidence. As a scientist, until I see some evidence for one of these theories, the only logical thing to do is assume things are as they appear: Life evolved slowly over billions of years.
To do otherwise would be weak-minded.
What I really hate is when I'm writing some software, and working with something I've never used before, and the error message I get is "contact the software developer."
I'm left sitting there staring at the screen at 3 AM blankly thinking, "Heck, I *am* the software developer, and I have absolutely no idea what to do myself, much less if some helpless user contacted me..."
Oh well, at least I can't be in much closer contact with the developer...we're sitting in the same chair...:)
Dagum it. Where's "-1, Gullible" when you need it?
Well, first of all, being an insufferable prig is a specialty of mine, so I see no reason to change on just this issue. :)
:)
More seriously, I started dodging the Fry's guy out of a total frustration about all things Fry's. The problem with Fry's is that in terms of "getting what I want right now," there isn't anyone comparable. I felt that Fry's had wasted so much of my time that I had to do something to "strike back at The Man."
My point with all of this "civil disobedience" is that, if I can simply walk past the checker, it's not an effective shoplifting detection device, because I rather expect shoplifters don't bother slowing down for them, either. All it does is waste everyone's time, and I'm very opposed to that. Also, I very strongly suspect that the point isn't as much to find shoplifters as it is to discourage collusion with cashiers (having a friend as a cashier who charges me $1 for a $100 item).
For the record, I do actually usually stop for the Best Buy guy, precisely because there isn't a line, and it's not significantly faster to go around him (and I don't feel like Best Buy has wasted the best years of my life). I do think the Best Buy guy is particularly unneeded, though, because they have an electronic shoplifting detection system. Again, I think the main goal isn't shoplifting but collusion. And surely the checkers must know that it's possible to simply walk around the receipt-checker, so why waste all your customers' time?
Fry's, on the other hand, usually has a line, and I'm not interested in waiting there for any amount of time for what is an obviously ineffective shoplifting protection mechanism. Not to mention that I've gotten totally sick of Fry's motto: "The More You Spend, the More We Make You Wait!" The problem is, if it's Saturday and I need a HD to replace one that failed in production, I don't have much choice but to go to Fry's. But I have come to view shopping at Fry's to be a sort of game, where the goal is to minimize the time wasted. For example, if they have two left on the shelf, they're actually out of stock, because, dollars to doughnuts those two have been bought and returned (and re-shrink-wrapped!) five times because they don't work.
As for more "invasive" security - I have no problem whatsoever with that. My problem is them wasting my time on something that is so obviously ineffective. Best Buy and Fry's both already have security cameras, and I am perfectly free to not shop there if I have a problem with that.
Oh, I'm sure that *do* charge OSDN funny money. I'd also guess that the business unit that is the smallest set of profit and loss accounting is OSDN. So, transferring funny money between OSDN sites doesn't improve OSDN's business unit profitiability. If OSDN doesn't achieve some level of profitability as a business unit, VA rings up the OSDN General Manager and says, "Your unit is unprofitable - do whatever it takes to make it profitable." In that analysis, /.'s house ads aren't going to prevent layoffs or simply pulling the plug. Or, they might be more "democratic" about it and simply tell every site in OSDN to lay off 25% of their people. Regardless, house ads don't help the /. crew keep their jobs long-term.
Now, the Best Buy Nazis are a lot more serious about it. They tend to be big, bouncer-types and take their job very seriously. I walked right past one of them the other month, and he said: "Sir, can I see your receipt?" I replied with my standard, "No, that's OK, I don't need that today," while continuing to walk. He followed me out into the parking lot (!): "Sir, I NEED to see your receipt." I kept walking. "No, I believe you're mistaken: You don't need to see my receipt." (A little Jedi-mind-trick action there). He stopped following, realizing the basic impotence of his position, and yelled at my back: "Well, you're NOT WELCOME here as a customer, anymore!"
I was so surprised I unfortunately did not put my purchase in my trunk and go back to speak to the manager, but I did call the manager when I got home. He wouldn't come out and say that I didn't need to get my receipt checked, but when I pressed and said, "I spend about $250 a month with you guys, would you rather have me walk through without showing my receipt, or would you rather have my money go somewhere else?" He replied, "Oh, we absolutely want your business!"
Anyway, bottom line, the Fry's receipt checkers are imminently ignorable. They don't have the right to detain you or search you. They could detain you until the police arrive if they suspect you're shoplifting, but they don't want to engage in that hassle (and a possible lawsuit) for the average customer.
It ain't that simple.
You've gotta sell those ads. And that's not so easy, anymore. If you don't sell an ad, serving the page is a cost, not a benefit.
"But wait!" you say. "There's ALWAYS an ad at the top, so they're clearly selling them all!" Nope. You know all those Think Geek ads? And the NewsForge ads? And all the other adds that point to things OSDN owns? Those are all "house" ads that
So, if they're not selling the ads, now, more pageviews just results in more bandwidth costs, not more ad sales.
My first line-editor experience was on the Amiga, which shipped with both a line-editor and a screen editor back in the day. As one reviewer put it, though: Why ship both on the same disk? The only reason to ever us a line editor is to use it to write a screen editor! :)
Appeasement is not the answer; we must show strength, not weakness. Once they sue for peace, would should help them rebuild their lives. But between now and then a lot of people need to die to keep this type of thing from being a part of the nightly news instead of just a once-in-a-lifetime event.
Second: The problem with consensus is that you usually spend an awful lot of time talking and very little coding (as you found out). My experience in open source is that usually the amount of talking is inversely proportional to the amount of coding. Projects which have a lot of "developers" sign up early and spend a lot of time jabbering on the list about how things "should" be done tend to be stillborn. Projects that have two or three people working on them in obscurity until the core basically works tend to get a lot further. If you want your project to succeed, don't worry about consensus. Worry about code. Working code wins. Two megabytes of jabber trying to reach consensus just wastes hard drive space.
Ads are a necessary evil under the current content-creation paradigm. Spam has no positive side effects.
This page contains a lot of links generally rebutting a lot of "fringe" claims on physics topics. He has A Whole Section devoted to Mr. van Flander's paper, in which he links to rebuttals by gravitational physicists of Mr. van Flander's ideas. The short answer from them seems to be "Tom van Flanders doesn't understand relativity very well."
If you haven't checked out the Critical Dates link, it's fascinating (if somewhat repetitve) reading. Just think! Someone actually figured out that, on Tuesday, January 1, 29602, NTFS fails! I'm thinking, if you're stilling using NTFS in 27,000 years, you're probably gonna get what's coming to you.
Anyway, what hasn't been mentioned is something I've been thinking about around virii. I think a big part of the reason a Linux virus has been unable to get off the ground is because we basically don't pass around binaries. When was the last time you gave anyone a binary? When was the last time you received one? We've all gotten so used to "./configure; make install". Writing a virus that attacked autoconf source code would in theory be possible, but, again, the distribution vector isn't very good, because we don't even pass around the source code.
The way software gets distributed on Open-Source systems is, I tell a friend of mine, "Dude, check out this software...it's called Blady-blah. Just find it on freshmeat." Even more than the permissions system of Unixes, I think this reliance on compiling from the original source (because it's the easiest thing to do) is what keep virii out of the Linux swimming pool.
It's a picture of a sock monkey holding a bunch of bananas. Hence the "sock monkey wranglers" credit in the CREDITS file. It's just a JPEG, as far as I can tell.
There's another interesting point - it really seems to me that the competition to bum a few characters from DeCSS is arguably art. I'd say that the coders involved in this are involved in an artistic endeavor, and even could be considered to be making a political statement about how stupid the DMCA is on these matters.
Akamai caches, yes, and so does Freenet. But Akamai doesn't proxy your download through three other peers.
You then finish, "Freenet doesn't do a very good job of this because it doesn't take network speeds into acocount...But it will be quite simple to add support for that and will be done after a few more releases." Yes, and, if you do that, it'll become a backbone network, because all clients will "want" to connect to the few fast peers. If I'm the RIAA, I just DMCA notice all those fast peers' ISPs on the same day, and the network falls over.
Regardless of specific attacks, my point is that Freenet (or any P2P) is, by definition, going to be more complex (and hence more expensive) than a simple, centralized system, and will therefor only be used when the primary overriding concern is trying to hide who is distributing the content, not for people who want to put up family pictures.
To reiterate - P2P, by definition, requires more complexity, bandwidth and expense than a simple centralized system. My argument is that, like crypto, the extra hassle and complexity will mean that people will only use P2P when it is more effective than cheaper and simpler alternatives. The only times that will be the case is if you are trying to avoid detection as the distributor of the data.
As an aside, I very strongly doubt that Freenet would survive a concentrated DMCA attack. Each document has a uniquely identifiable string. If I'm the RIAA, I log onto Freenet with a hacked client. I do a search. The server one hop away says "Here ya go." As the RIAA, I don't know if that server proxied it or is storing it. And it doesn't matter. I send out a DMCA notice to the guy who owns the server (I know is IP and the time he was on, so I can do this via is ISP, who will cooperate, because he doesn't care). The guy who owns the server now has "actual knowledge" that copyrighted material is moving through his system. He can either block it (have his Freenet server not respond to requests for that), or simply drop out of Freenet. If he does neither, the RIAA DMCA notices his ISP, which simply pulls the plug on him, because they don't care (and he's prolly violating their terms of service by running a server, anyhow).
I think something like Freenet can only work if most of the documents on it are the kinds of things people will risk going to jail for. I don't see most people risking going to jail for free MP3s.
A much more viable attack is to write a client that lies about the MD5 sum, anyway. There are two basic ways to do this:
1) Write a client that always lies with the same MD5 or from a small set. This would be automatically defeated, because someone would complain about one of those MD5s, and then all songs represented would be blocked.
2) Write a client that lies with a different, random MD5. This is easy to defeat simply by having Napster not share any MD5 it's only seen once. This provides a little chicken and egg problem, but I think it's much less of an issue for the useability of the system than what's been proposed.
The irony here is that Napster's LYING about the jtechnical challenges of MD5 sum blocking is what led to this. They've maintained MANY, MANY times (in sworn declarations, even) that MD5 sum blocking is impossible. The above link has their VP of Engineering, Eddie Kessler, stating "Given the large universe of MD5 checksums, it is impossible for Napster to monitor the checksums when we process thousands of new files a second. Napster's service would be rendered unusable under such conditions." But now, it's suddenly possible to block based on a TEXT SEARCH, which is much more computationally intensive than an MD5 sum compare? Can you say "perjury," boys and girls?
Anyway, I'm just amused by the fact that they're being hoist on their own petard. If they hadn't protested overmuch that MD5 was impossible, and just done it, they might've been able to keep it going for the indies. But text compares are gonna kill the service - once they get 50,000 bands in there (and millions of track names), EVERY file you try to share will match SOMETHING.
The problem is, that, under Linux, if you load the resultant core file (from any multithreaded program) into GDB, it often dumps core. Which isn't very useful.
The end result of this is that you can have a dual PIII-800 workstation, running the very latest in tools, with a highly trained developer, doing a friggin' binary search through the code with printfs trying to figure out where the stomped pointer is coming from.
Believe me, you do this a few time and you're gonna start thinking that a language that does memory management for you probably wouldn't be such a bad idea, either.
My OT rant - RedHat/Cygnus (leader of the gdb effort) needs to get this fixed. Quite frankly, it's hard to take Linux as a serious development platform when multithreaded debugging is twenty years back. Support the developers, first, and everything else will follow.
The key point is that there is no easy way for the record company to verify that you own the Vinyl before they sell you the CD at a discount. It's also worth noting that, because record companies in particular are so inefficient, a big chunk of the cost of the CD is in manufacturing and distribution, so I don't know how much they really could cut the cost, anyhow.
In the specific case of Vinyl->CD (or VHS->DVD), there is a valid argument that you're buying something new; that the digital copy is significantly better than the analog. It is perfectly legal for you to make a CD from your Vinyl; you just don't want to because the quality would suck. Therefore, it is arguable that you don't own the CD version of The White Album
A better example is CD -> MP3. This is simply a media transfer. While the RIAA likes to imply that you do not have the right to do this, clearly, under copyright law, you do. The record companies would love to sell you all your music again, of course, and certainly, as a service, that might be something people would be interested in (although clearly not for the $3.50/song encrypted BS they're pusing, now).
I work for EMusic.com, and we've thought about this a lot, as you might imagine. Our opinion is that you have the right to transfer formats and make copies all day long, as long as you don't share them with someone else. When you purchase a song from us, you've got the right to put a copy on your computer, a copy on your Nomad, a copy on your computer at work, and a copy on your car. There's no way you can listen to all those at once, so it's no big deal. What you're not allowed to do is share it.
Similarly, if you own a CD with a song we offer on it, it's perfectly OK for you to rip the MP3 from the CD and not buy it from us. Or, if you'd like, we'll sell you the MP3. For some people (especially our subscribers), that may be easier than ripping their collections.
Anyway, don't let the [MP|RI]AA snow you about your rights. You do have substantial purchase rights over the music you buy. The music industry (unlike the software industry, which you hold up as a paragon of virtue) does not have EULAs, or license agreements. When you buy an album, you still are getting something you retain rights to. Ditto with a movie. I agree that it'd be cool if they'd offer, for example, a suplemental DVD to go with your VHS old copy, for less than the whole DVD copy of a movie. But clearly the market for that would be small.
Not that I read German, or anything, I'm just guessing that the "Privatsphäre und Datenschutz" is a privacy policy, and that when they have a section like "Was sind 'Cookies'?", they're not talking about receipe swapping.
The /. crew didn't have something to do with these awards, did they? Seems like the folks giving them out didn't even look at the sites...;)
I will say, I wish they had links to the actual news stories. Been reading urban legends too long not to want to see evidence :)
I wish the home electronics manufacturers would at least start shipping with the option of an ethernet port that configs offa DHCP...