The "hypocrites" are the ones who complain about the problems of a community-edited site while actively contributing to the problem so they can complain more. Of course a community site isn't going to work if a significant portion of its members are actively subverting it. Banning repeat offenders isn't such a bad idea.
I've never felt that Gates gives freely. There always seems to be strings attached, like the computers he sent to African schools, that come complete with Windows 2000.
Yes, they are. Because the main issue is that many sites host PHP from untrusted users, and don't have time to go through every script with a fine-toothed comb. Assuming that the people who write PHP scripts are capable of using proper coding practices is kind of like assuming that your teenager always tells the truth. In rare cases, it might be true, but you're an idiot if you believe it.
The City of Calgary, Canada, is under investigation by the Auditor General for awarding contracts without competition, just as the Quebec government is now.
This seems to miss the point. A society that was truly just would actually consider on a case-by-case basis whether it was in the public interest to enforce each infraction of the law. In many cases, the harm to the public is negligible or non-existant, or the law was broken as a form of protest against a law that is generally seen to be unfair (e.g. the American DMCA). If all these cases were summarily determined to be infraction without considering the public interest, society would become a tyranny of law, a place where all that matters is that the rules are absolute.
There are countless examples of the heroes that are created by such a society, and they date back throughout human existence. While they have been exaggerated to the point of legend, the message is clear: Any attempt to make the law absolute will result in overwhelming revolt by citizens, and a government that need fight for its existence in the face of overwhelming support of an outlaw.
It's time to throw in the towel and start a new tool and markup language.
Or maybe spend long enough on a single version to make something stable. The "new" tool and markup language has been done plenty before. SGML wasn't good enough, so then came HTML, then HTML wasn't good enough, so there was XML. Apparently now XML isn't good enough, so we need SuperMegaMarkUpLanguage. It's funny, but software projects actually require time to mature. There needs to be a phase of "hmm this almost works, except..." instead of "these really minor annoyances are no good, gotta start over."
Of course, when "almost works" ecomes "barely works", or "minor annoyance" becomes "we need someone on-call to deal with this", I can see the need for a rewrite. Maybe I'm not much with XML, but it seems to be in the "almost works" category. Certainly, I would rather see XML reworked than wait for SMMLUL, and Microsoft's fucked-up interpretation of it.
Perl::Gtk, tcl/tk, need I say more? I was writing "multiplatform apps" from a single codebase a decade ago, and I'm sure many out there beat me to it by at least that much more.
I'm actually not that interested in availability of things online. It is ridiculous to claim that the entertainment industry doesn't lose anything due to P2P sharing. On the other hand, seeing the industry target people who have nothing to do with the original seeding of copyrighted material and sue them for everything they have and will have for several years makes me want to violate their copyright, just to piss them off. I've actually downloaded things just to seed them, and not actually to watch or play.
I could be happy with the lack of availability of copyrighted material on BitTorrent if we could get there without giving into every demand of the copyright lobbyists. Really, I wouldn't mind going to Blockbuster to rent things if DRM provisions in copyright law were struck down. In my mind, this is the way things have always been: I can go to a Public Library and borrow copyrighted material. I can copy some or all of this material, and keep it for myself. In the early 90's, me and my fellow students would borrow CDs from the library and copy them to a cassette tape. No one ever complained about this; no one threatened to sue us for doing so. A levy was introduced on blank cassette tapes and life went on.
But then MP3s got popular and it was easier to simply download them. Sure, we were told it was wrong, but the alternative was just a pain in the ass. Why rip the CDs when somebody has already done it? And, what happened? iTunes was born. The music industry was finally forced to give us music in the format we wanted, not because we were patient and waited for them to provide the MP3s without DRM, but because the music industry recognized that the free product, unlawfully obtained, was superior in convenience. Given that the profits of ITMS in the last while have been well into the billions per year, clearly this distribution model works, and the music industry avoided obsolescence by adapting.
Now we're seeing the same thing in the movie industry. While it's taken an extra decade for the average user to have the relative bandwidth:content ratio that makes online music distribution convenient, we're there. The movie industry would do well to learn a lesson from their counterparts in the music industry and pull themselves back onto the cliff they're heading over. Refusal to provide movies in a convenient, DRM-free format will only force people to go elsewhere for the same thing.
The DarkNets are not that important. There will always be closed rings who distribute over secure connections. The number of people who are actually members of these rings are very few. So yes, take away the public distribution, but provide a reasonable alternative. And stop suing people already.
It's certainly not as clear that the open source people are the "good guys" as it used to be. There are certainly examples of poorly documented, managed and/or tested OSS apps. Infighting among developers causes specifications to become unstable as a power struggle determines what will ultimately prevail. Just because it's open doesn't mean it's good. Likewise, the balance of power is no longer solely with Microsoft. The fact that proprietary solutions will be considered is not a threat to OSS, nor a guarantee that Microsoft will be chosen. Finally, proprietary solutions often use OSS projects if it is beneficial (not GPL, but that's not the issue here).
There is a tendency to react to an off-color joke or complaint that appears online more harshly than to the same comment made in a cafeteria or company picnic.
And rightly so, as there's a few more people on the interwebs than at a company picnic or in the company cafeteria. Companies are usually very vigilant about protecting their public image, and it doesn't get much more public than online. Parent AC post is correct; you won't get in trouble if you follow those guidelines.
To use the Packet Forensics box, a law enforcement or intelligence agency would have to install it inside an ISP, and persuade one of the Certificate Authorities — using money, blackmail or legal process — to issue a fake certificate for the targeted website. Then they could capture your username and password, and be able to see whatever transactions you make online.
This is kind of an important paragraph too. Sure, it's possible to make an appliance that does that, but it is not as simple as the FBI (or any other three-letter organization) buying the boxes. There's a serious legal/technical issue that needs to be overcome as well. Sure, warrantless wiretapping might make some of this possible, but to legally force a Certificate Authority to issue a fake certificate? No Certificate Authority worth anything would undermine their integrity in this fashion, and any law that would force them to do so in certain circumstances is effectively giving the government the right to commit forgery in the name of justice. Such a law would be the pinnacle of hypocrisy. Don't get me wrong; I don't underestimate the erosion of freedom in the United States, but I'm having a hard time believing that any government would act with such impunity. I was unable to find any example of a law enforcement agency using forged documents to entrap a suspect, probably because such evidence would not hold up in any court that truly represented justice.
The great firewall can work both ways. I experimented for a time with simply banning all asian netblocks at my firewall. If China refuses to play nice, everyone else can simply ignore them.
DRM == Censorship. The DMCA gives legal protection to DRM, which effectively gives creators a right they did not previously have, the right to censor criticisms of their work. By making it a crime to take even the smallest portion of a copy, it is no longer possible to create satire, compilations, essays and many other works that were previously allowed under copyright laws. If that's not abridging my Free Speech rights, then I don't know what is.
It irritates me to no end that the open source community will frequently scream bloody murder over a GPL violation, then turn around and say stuff like this "isn't evil."
Yeah, well too bad. You need to work on your self-righteousness. Piracy is not evil in the face of laws that take away our Free Speech rights. It is definitely unlawful, but that's the nature of moral action when laws dictate amoral or immoral behavior.
a futile attempt to stay the "cloud computing" fad. The best effort is something that people would actually want to use, and through using, makes them more security conscious.
I'd call it a bit more than a fad right now. eePCs are very common and cheap devices, and everyone I know who has one is very happy with it. They don't need the raw horsepower that a gamer or developer do, and the price is right. Plus, they run Linux. While the whole "network computing" thing was a fad in the late nineties, there was very little in the line of network services. Now there's YouTube, Facebook, Google Apps, Windows Live and Lord knows what else. Further, most people have a home network now, having more than a single device attached to the Internet. It was a fad in the nineties because the time wasn't right. I think the time is right now.
Our copyright laws are MORE restrictive than the US.
No, because the DMCA prevents fair-dealing, period. While the law allows for it, you must admit to a criminal act to make the defense. As to format shifting being illegal, it is not a criminal offense in Canada to take private copies of pretty much anything you get your hands on. I'm really not that worried about the cops busting into my house while I rip my DVDs to my hard drive. In the USA, OTOH...
Your point about educators is well taken, however. While I may not have any issues as a private citizen, it is true that many educators do shy away "just in case" because of the well-known bloodthirst of organizations like the CRIA. Anything that improves the quality of education is fine by me.
I wouldn't even worry about that. Canadian copyright law is plenty liberal, and if the Conservatives get their way, fair-dealing will be a moot point, just as it is in the USA.
Slashdot Mirror
The "hypocrites" are the ones who complain about the problems of a community-edited site while actively contributing to the problem so they can complain more. Of course a community site isn't going to work if a significant portion of its members are actively subverting it. Banning repeat offenders isn't such a bad idea.
Question 1. "Have you ever broken the law?"
Yea, I want to take a polygraph test even if I'm innocent.
I've never felt that Gates gives freely. There always seems to be strings attached, like the computers he sent to African schools, that come complete with Windows 2000.
Yes, they are. Because the main issue is that many sites host PHP from untrusted users, and don't have time to go through every script with a fine-toothed comb. Assuming that the people who write PHP scripts are capable of using proper coding practices is kind of like assuming that your teenager always tells the truth. In rare cases, it might be true, but you're an idiot if you believe it.
The City of Calgary, Canada, is under investigation by the Auditor General for awarding contracts without competition, just as the Quebec government is now.
This seems to miss the point. A society that was truly just would actually consider on a case-by-case basis whether it was in the public interest to enforce each infraction of the law. In many cases, the harm to the public is negligible or non-existant, or the law was broken as a form of protest against a law that is generally seen to be unfair (e.g. the American DMCA). If all these cases were summarily determined to be infraction without considering the public interest, society would become a tyranny of law, a place where all that matters is that the rules are absolute.
There are countless examples of the heroes that are created by such a society, and they date back throughout human existence. While they have been exaggerated to the point of legend, the message is clear: Any attempt to make the law absolute will result in overwhelming revolt by citizens, and a government that need fight for its existence in the face of overwhelming support of an outlaw.
int main(int argc, char **argv) { printf("w00t!\n"); double_contracting_rate(); return 0; }
The enforcement. Which was the reason for my shudder.
I decided it wasn't even worth the download...
Note some of the text in the sample video "Possible Yield violation by Landcar_XXXXX". Are we seriously going to leave policing to an AI? /shudders
Learning Perl today is gunning for a job as a maintenance programmer.
Or a Unix SysAdmin. Assuming the breed doesn't die out :-S
It's time to throw in the towel and start a new tool and markup language.
Or maybe spend long enough on a single version to make something stable. The "new" tool and markup language has been done plenty before. SGML wasn't good enough, so then came HTML, then HTML wasn't good enough, so there was XML. Apparently now XML isn't good enough, so we need SuperMegaMarkUpLanguage. It's funny, but software projects actually require time to mature. There needs to be a phase of "hmm this almost works, except..." instead of "these really minor annoyances are no good, gotta start over."
Of course, when "almost works" ecomes "barely works", or "minor annoyance" becomes "we need someone on-call to deal with this", I can see the need for a rewrite. Maybe I'm not much with XML, but it seems to be in the "almost works" category. Certainly, I would rather see XML reworked than wait for SMMLUL, and Microsoft's fucked-up interpretation of it.
This is the pinnacle of 3rd-grade hackers now? Nope, they just don't make them like they used to.
Perl::Gtk, tcl/tk, need I say more? I was writing "multiplatform apps" from a single codebase a decade ago, and I'm sure many out there beat me to it by at least that much more.
I'm actually not that interested in availability of things online. It is ridiculous to claim that the entertainment industry doesn't lose anything due to P2P sharing. On the other hand, seeing the industry target people who have nothing to do with the original seeding of copyrighted material and sue them for everything they have and will have for several years makes me want to violate their copyright, just to piss them off. I've actually downloaded things just to seed them, and not actually to watch or play.
I could be happy with the lack of availability of copyrighted material on BitTorrent if we could get there without giving into every demand of the copyright lobbyists. Really, I wouldn't mind going to Blockbuster to rent things if DRM provisions in copyright law were struck down. In my mind, this is the way things have always been: I can go to a Public Library and borrow copyrighted material. I can copy some or all of this material, and keep it for myself. In the early 90's, me and my fellow students would borrow CDs from the library and copy them to a cassette tape. No one ever complained about this; no one threatened to sue us for doing so. A levy was introduced on blank cassette tapes and life went on.
But then MP3s got popular and it was easier to simply download them. Sure, we were told it was wrong, but the alternative was just a pain in the ass. Why rip the CDs when somebody has already done it? And, what happened? iTunes was born. The music industry was finally forced to give us music in the format we wanted, not because we were patient and waited for them to provide the MP3s without DRM, but because the music industry recognized that the free product, unlawfully obtained, was superior in convenience. Given that the profits of ITMS in the last while have been well into the billions per year, clearly this distribution model works, and the music industry avoided obsolescence by adapting.
Now we're seeing the same thing in the movie industry. While it's taken an extra decade for the average user to have the relative bandwidth:content ratio that makes online music distribution convenient, we're there. The movie industry would do well to learn a lesson from their counterparts in the music industry and pull themselves back onto the cliff they're heading over. Refusal to provide movies in a convenient, DRM-free format will only force people to go elsewhere for the same thing.
The DarkNets are not that important. There will always be closed rings who distribute over secure connections. The number of people who are actually members of these rings are very few. So yes, take away the public distribution, but provide a reasonable alternative. And stop suing people already.
It's certainly not as clear that the open source people are the "good guys" as it used to be. There are certainly examples of poorly documented, managed and/or tested OSS apps. Infighting among developers causes specifications to become unstable as a power struggle determines what will ultimately prevail. Just because it's open doesn't mean it's good. Likewise, the balance of power is no longer solely with Microsoft. The fact that proprietary solutions will be considered is not a threat to OSS, nor a guarantee that Microsoft will be chosen. Finally, proprietary solutions often use OSS projects if it is beneficial (not GPL, but that's not the issue here).
There is a tendency to react to an off-color joke or complaint that appears online more harshly than to the same comment made in a cafeteria or company picnic.
And rightly so, as there's a few more people on the interwebs than at a company picnic or in the company cafeteria. Companies are usually very vigilant about protecting their public image, and it doesn't get much more public than online. Parent AC post is correct; you won't get in trouble if you follow those guidelines.
To use the Packet Forensics box, a law enforcement or intelligence agency would have to install it inside an ISP, and persuade one of the Certificate Authorities — using money, blackmail or legal process — to issue a fake certificate for the targeted website. Then they could capture your username and password, and be able to see whatever transactions you make online.
This is kind of an important paragraph too. Sure, it's possible to make an appliance that does that, but it is not as simple as the FBI (or any other three-letter organization) buying the boxes. There's a serious legal/technical issue that needs to be overcome as well. Sure, warrantless wiretapping might make some of this possible, but to legally force a Certificate Authority to issue a fake certificate? No Certificate Authority worth anything would undermine their integrity in this fashion, and any law that would force them to do so in certain circumstances is effectively giving the government the right to commit forgery in the name of justice. Such a law would be the pinnacle of hypocrisy. Don't get me wrong; I don't underestimate the erosion of freedom in the United States, but I'm having a hard time believing that any government would act with such impunity. I was unable to find any example of a law enforcement agency using forged documents to entrap a suspect, probably because such evidence would not hold up in any court that truly represented justice.
Absolutely none, assuming you are still using Lynx :-D
The great firewall can work both ways. I experimented for a time with simply banning all asian netblocks at my firewall. If China refuses to play nice, everyone else can simply ignore them.
DRM == Censorship. The DMCA gives legal protection to DRM, which effectively gives creators a right they did not previously have, the right to censor criticisms of their work. By making it a crime to take even the smallest portion of a copy, it is no longer possible to create satire, compilations, essays and many other works that were previously allowed under copyright laws. If that's not abridging my Free Speech rights, then I don't know what is.
It irritates me to no end that the open source community will frequently scream bloody murder over a GPL violation, then turn around and say stuff like this "isn't evil."
Yeah, well too bad. You need to work on your self-righteousness. Piracy is not evil in the face of laws that take away our Free Speech rights. It is definitely unlawful, but that's the nature of moral action when laws dictate amoral or immoral behavior.
a futile attempt to stay the "cloud computing" fad. The best effort is something that people would actually want to use, and through using, makes them more security conscious.
I'd call it a bit more than a fad right now. eePCs are very common and cheap devices, and everyone I know who has one is very happy with it. They don't need the raw horsepower that a gamer or developer do, and the price is right. Plus, they run Linux. While the whole "network computing" thing was a fad in the late nineties, there was very little in the line of network services. Now there's YouTube, Facebook, Google Apps, Windows Live and Lord knows what else. Further, most people have a home network now, having more than a single device attached to the Internet. It was a fad in the nineties because the time wasn't right. I think the time is right now.
Our copyright laws are MORE restrictive than the US.
No, because the DMCA prevents fair-dealing, period. While the law allows for it, you must admit to a criminal act to make the defense. As to format shifting being illegal, it is not a criminal offense in Canada to take private copies of pretty much anything you get your hands on. I'm really not that worried about the cops busting into my house while I rip my DVDs to my hard drive. In the USA, OTOH...
Your point about educators is well taken, however. While I may not have any issues as a private citizen, it is true that many educators do shy away "just in case" because of the well-known bloodthirst of organizations like the CRIA. Anything that improves the quality of education is fine by me.
I wouldn't even worry about that. Canadian copyright law is plenty liberal, and if the Conservatives get their way, fair-dealing will be a moot point, just as it is in the USA.