It's about time that the government steps in to protect us from the corporations and right-wing Christians who'd like to own our souls and shield us from all the "evil" pornography (fourth ring of hell reserved for Slashdotters?). I am a hard-core capitalist, but even I can recognize a market failure when I see one. Just as overfishing once lead to mass unemployment and starvation in the Northeast US, the greed of a few supercorporations (the likes of which were never conceived of by the founders of our nation) and the fiery rhetoric of a few rabid Christians have turned us into slaves of exploitative technology. And people are too stupid to provide a good market for anti-censorware products, so we're screwed. This research should set things right again.
While I don't expect you to find much support for this idea on Slashdot, I agree completely. Technology will always advance, and the TV you buy to replace your current one when it craps out will doubtlessly be marginally better than today's state-of-the-art. You might even have a wristwatch communicator in a couple years.
But, really, who cares? People still cry. Children go hungry and cold. Murderers roam free, friends betray, dictators massacre. If you want to take a selfish point of view, then consider whether a roll-up monitor will keep you warm as a lover's arms can. There is no love in stuff. Just stuff.
Just a correction on your Greek. That should read, "It is only fair that we contribute our share towards running it and take some of the crushing burden off of hoi WalMart-shopping, non-SUV-driving, non-alternative-remedy-using polloi."
It's great to hear that it's a progressive-scan player. My current DVD player is a Christian conservative-scan model, and it refuses to play a sizeable proportion of my video collection.
If I collected stuff with a balloon, I'd probably hold off on assuming its extra-terrestriality. Unless it's some kind of super space balloon, but I don't think we have those yet.
And what's with the repeated mention of the guy's Indian-ness? Can we try to keep the nationalism out of Science, please? (Oh, wait, I guess that would be "multiculturalism," since he's swarthy.) And what's with calling him "legendary?" That sounds almost like WWF (or whatever it's called these days).
In any case, this sounds like only so much limelight-grabbing. I'm placing my bet now on peer review punching a hole in this guy's metaphorical balloon.
Well, as a very first step, I would recommend against posting this to Slashdot. Let me explain with a little thought experiment. Presumably you are trying to "get the word out" about the Evil Corporate Spyware installed by your cable provider. Suppose you were to succeed, and almost every cable customer were to remove said software from his or her PC. Their demographics database would start to be pretty thin, and suddenly they can no longer use that information to defray some of the costs of running a broadband outfit. Best case, you get a rate hike. Worst case, the cable company goes out of business, and you're back on dialup (which, if you wanted to vote with your wallet against this kind of practice to discourage it, you could have done anyway). A better course of action would be to quietly uninstall everything the cable guy installed and keep it all under your hat.
If the installer for RealPlayer popped up with a dialog that said "I will crash your computer, and I will install spy-ware on your machine" when you tried to execute it, then nobody in their right mind would. Should we outlaw that too?
Now what reasonable person would expect this to be called a worm? The sysadmins are of course up in arms about any piece of software that threatens their delicate Windows networks. While I'm aware that most of the Slashdot audience consists of MS-certified admins fresh out of college, their lips adorned with sharp objects, I plead with readers to approach this with some sort of objectivity. Is any program that offers the ability to distribute itself to others now to be deemed a worm? That's hardly fair.
In fact, given that the GPL'd software that's touted so often on this site is propogated through a similar device, villainizing this program borders on hypocricy. I don't even understand why traditional "worms" are given that name. Someone sends you an unknown executable that happens to distribute itself to your contact list, and you run it without Googling first to find out what it is...who's to blame here? The program's function is well-known, so the informed user won't be surprised when he fires it up and it does exactly what it's supposed to do.
While this is great in the short term, in that it no doubt means lots of money and an improved image on Wall Street for Linux, I wonder if this is really such a good thing. IBM is basically just taking the blood and sweat of hard-working hackers like Linux Torvalds and Alvin Cox and making money off of it. While this behavior is technically legal, it clearly goes against the spirit of the GPL as defined by ERS. Furthermore, associating Linux with an "establishment" corporation like IBM could serve to tarnish the "outsider" image that has made Linux so popular among its core audience, 18-25 year old males. J. Average User is going to see choosing between Linux and Windows as choosing between IBM and Microsoft: six of one, half a dozen of the other. Given how hard it is to get "up and running" with Linux, they'll see no reason to abandon one Evil Corporation for another. I don't see how this can do anything but damage Linux's already dangerously small market share. Any thoughts?
This legislation served an important purpose in pointing some things out to those of us who go through our lives wearing pink-tinted glasses (I mean optimists, not gay people).
What it boils down to is that we anti-copyright crusaders have always maintained that digital "media" is just a bunch of 1's and 0's. A file is no more than a certain number, and how can one person or corporation own a number? To me, this has always been an extremely pursuasive argument. So now let's look at hacking over a network. What is it? Well, really it's just 1's and 0's being sent to your computer on the network. Some specific number, or series of numbers, is going to break your computer or make it impossible to use (DOS attack), but is the solution to outlaw that number altogether? In my opinion, the record industry shouldn't need this law, because all computer hacking should be legal.
How could this work, though? Well, first of all, TCP/IP has got to go. It doesn't have any authentication or security built in to it, and it's obvious that it's flawed. We need to redesign the Internet and the protocol it uses, not just to increase the address space as is being done in IP2, but to make hacking technically impossible. Then, legislation or no, we will finally all be safe.
Anyone with the skills to do something like this is going to be a professional programmer. They just don't have the time to work on projects that offer no chance for monetary reward.
Why are they wasting their time on this ancient technology? Serial is too slow to sync my damn Palm Pilot. I can't even imagine what it would be like to try and transfer 60GB of media files over it. These companies should just accept that USB is the way of the future (no extra power required either!) and get to work on something that stands a chance of selling.
most of the CDRWs I've tried only last about 30-40 rewrites before they start showing significant data dropouts (almost always at the start of a recording)
Sounds like you've reproduced the VHS experience accurately.
Here's the beach where we used to have barbecues in high school during the summer. Ocean breezes, train tracks, view of the prison...what could be nicer?
If you pan over two to the right, you can even see the store where the Asian guy would get pissed at us for buying charcoal.
Teraflops? Crays? Opterons for Pete's sakes?!? This article writeup barely manages to squeeze enough articles and conjunctions in among the marketing buzzwords to qualify it as English!
Meanwhile, the recession grows ever greater, and I'm in hock up to my loogies just keeping my family housed, shorn, and clod. The average geek doesn't give two shakes about Flopceratops when the stock market is in the pits and we're teetering on the brink of thermonucular war.
This is good news for long-time Mac fans. Back in the day ("the day" was 1994 or so, IIRC) we Mac users took seeking out the correct 68k or PPC binaries as a sign of our superiority to PC users. While Windozers happily downloaded software that would run on circa 1987 hardware, we enlightened ones could narrow our searches to programs specifically compiled for our platforms. We could even get "fat" binaries, and optionally remove the unneeded binary code using a small freeware app.
With OS X, I had hoped we would again have a situation where just using the Mac required that extra step of compatibility checking, setting us apart from the drooling masses of Gates-worshippers. Sadly, with the Classic compatibility layer, it did not come to pass. Hopefully this revelation will set things aright.
Assume that for every person, there is one package that, if he knew about it, he could use it to radically change his life, find real happiness, acquire great personal fortune, etc. What if he NEVER finds out about it, because he doesn't know what the nature of it is and he doesn't know what to look for? What if he NEVER finds it, because he silently downloads its package listing with an apt-get update but never looks at the description? His life has been impaired, possibly forever, out of ignorance.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't it tell you on the back of the box?
Jon Katz owned the Spider-Man vs. AOTC debate. I'd bet his take on this one would make a good read. Anyone know what became of him?
It's about time that the government steps in to protect us from the corporations and right-wing Christians who'd like to own our souls and shield us from all the "evil" pornography (fourth ring of hell reserved for Slashdotters?). I am a hard-core capitalist, but even I can recognize a market failure when I see one. Just as overfishing once lead to mass unemployment and starvation in the Northeast US, the greed of a few supercorporations (the likes of which were never conceived of by the founders of our nation) and the fiery rhetoric of a few rabid Christians have turned us into slaves of exploitative technology. And people are too stupid to provide a good market for anti-censorware products, so we're screwed. This research should set things right again.
While I don't expect you to find much support for this idea on Slashdot, I agree completely. Technology will always advance, and the TV you buy to replace your current one when it craps out will doubtlessly be marginally better than today's state-of-the-art. You might even have a wristwatch communicator in a couple years.
But, really, who cares? People still cry. Children go hungry and cold. Murderers roam free, friends betray, dictators massacre. If you want to take a selfish point of view, then consider whether a roll-up monitor will keep you warm as a lover's arms can. There is no love in stuff. Just stuff.
Just a correction on your Greek. That should read, "It is only fair that we contribute our share towards running it and take some of the crushing burden off of hoi WalMart-shopping, non-SUV-driving, non-alternative-remedy-using polloi."
I'd like to nominate this story Most Boring Slashdot Story Ever.
It's great to hear that it's a progressive-scan player. My current DVD player is a Christian conservative-scan model, and it refuses to play a sizeable proportion of my video collection.
If I collected stuff with a balloon, I'd probably hold off on assuming its extra-terrestriality. Unless it's some kind of super space balloon, but I don't think we have those yet.
And what's with the repeated mention of the guy's Indian-ness? Can we try to keep the nationalism out of Science, please? (Oh, wait, I guess that would be "multiculturalism," since he's swarthy.) And what's with calling him "legendary?" That sounds almost like WWF (or whatever it's called these days).
In any case, this sounds like only so much limelight-grabbing. I'm placing my bet now on peer review punching a hole in this guy's metaphorical balloon.
Well, as a very first step, I would recommend against posting this to Slashdot. Let me explain with a little thought experiment. Presumably you are trying to "get the word out" about the Evil Corporate Spyware installed by your cable provider. Suppose you were to succeed, and almost every cable customer were to remove said software from his or her PC. Their demographics database would start to be pretty thin, and suddenly they can no longer use that information to defray some of the costs of running a broadband outfit. Best case, you get a rate hike. Worst case, the cable company goes out of business, and you're back on dialup (which, if you wanted to vote with your wallet against this kind of practice to discourage it, you could have done anyway). A better course of action would be to quietly uninstall everything the cable guy installed and keep it all under your hat.
If the installer for RealPlayer popped up with a dialog that said "I will crash your computer, and I will install spy-ware on your machine" when you tried to execute it, then nobody in their right mind would. Should we outlaw that too?
Now what reasonable person would expect this to be called a worm? The sysadmins are of course up in arms about any piece of software that threatens their delicate Windows networks. While I'm aware that most of the Slashdot audience consists of MS-certified admins fresh out of college, their lips adorned with sharp objects, I plead with readers to approach this with some sort of objectivity. Is any program that offers the ability to distribute itself to others now to be deemed a worm? That's hardly fair.
In fact, given that the GPL'd software that's touted so often on this site is propogated through a similar device, villainizing this program borders on hypocricy. I don't even understand why traditional "worms" are given that name. Someone sends you an unknown executable that happens to distribute itself to your contact list, and you run it without Googling first to find out what it is...who's to blame here? The program's function is well-known, so the informed user won't be surprised when he fires it up and it does exactly what it's supposed to do.
Let's use some common sense here, please.
The best way to infect as many hosts as possible is to make sure you don't try to infect too many hosts? How Zen.
While this is great in the short term, in that it no doubt means lots of money and an improved image on Wall Street for Linux, I wonder if this is really such a good thing. IBM is basically just taking the blood and sweat of hard-working hackers like Linux Torvalds and Alvin Cox and making money off of it. While this behavior is technically legal, it clearly goes against the spirit of the GPL as defined by ERS. Furthermore, associating Linux with an "establishment" corporation like IBM could serve to tarnish the "outsider" image that has made Linux so popular among its core audience, 18-25 year old males. J. Average User is going to see choosing between Linux and Windows as choosing between IBM and Microsoft: six of one, half a dozen of the other. Given how hard it is to get "up and running" with Linux, they'll see no reason to abandon one Evil Corporation for another. I don't see how this can do anything but damage Linux's already dangerously small market share. Any thoughts?
You don't need a phone to get your car towed. Just park in the crip space.
How can they possibly control what I burn? Do they come into my house and install a coin slot on my CD-R drive?
The company also plans on introducing a service allowing you to brew coffee for only 30 cents a cup.
This legislation served an important purpose in pointing some things out to those of us who go through our lives wearing pink-tinted glasses (I mean optimists, not gay people).
What it boils down to is that we anti-copyright crusaders have always maintained that digital "media" is just a bunch of 1's and 0's. A file is no more than a certain number, and how can one person or corporation own a number? To me, this has always been an extremely pursuasive argument. So now let's look at hacking over a network. What is it? Well, really it's just 1's and 0's being sent to your computer on the network. Some specific number, or series of numbers, is going to break your computer or make it impossible to use (DOS attack), but is the solution to outlaw that number altogether? In my opinion, the record industry shouldn't need this law, because all computer hacking should be legal.
How could this work, though? Well, first of all, TCP/IP has got to go. It doesn't have any authentication or security built in to it, and it's obvious that it's flawed. We need to redesign the Internet and the protocol it uses, not just to increase the address space as is being done in IP2, but to make hacking technically impossible. Then, legislation or no, we will finally all be safe.
Anyone with the skills to do something like this is going to be a professional programmer. They just don't have the time to work on projects that offer no chance for monetary reward.
Why are they wasting their time on this ancient technology? Serial is too slow to sync my damn Palm Pilot. I can't even imagine what it would be like to try and transfer 60GB of media files over it. These companies should just accept that USB is the way of the future (no extra power required either!) and get to work on something that stands a chance of selling.
most of the CDRWs I've tried only last about 30-40 rewrites before they start showing significant data dropouts (almost always at the start of a recording)
Sounds like you've reproduced the VHS experience accurately.
I'd seen word that it was available earlier, but it wasn't available for me via Software Update until today.
Maybe your internet is broken.
Here's the beach where we used to have barbecues in high school during the summer. Ocean breezes, train tracks, view of the prison...what could be nicer?
If you pan over two to the right, you can even see the store where the Asian guy would get pissed at us for buying charcoal.
So many memories.
Teraflops? Crays? Opterons for Pete's sakes?!? This article writeup barely manages to squeeze enough articles and conjunctions in among the marketing buzzwords to qualify it as English!
Meanwhile, the recession grows ever greater, and I'm in hock up to my loogies just keeping my family housed, shorn, and clod. The average geek doesn't give two shakes about Flopceratops when the stock market is in the pits and we're teetering on the brink of thermonucular war.
This is good news for long-time Mac fans. Back in the day ("the day" was 1994 or so, IIRC) we Mac users took seeking out the correct 68k or PPC binaries as a sign of our superiority to PC users. While Windozers happily downloaded software that would run on circa 1987 hardware, we enlightened ones could narrow our searches to programs specifically compiled for our platforms. We could even get "fat" binaries, and optionally remove the unneeded binary code using a small freeware app.
With OS X, I had hoped we would again have a situation where just using the Mac required that extra step of compatibility checking, setting us apart from the drooling masses of Gates-worshippers. Sadly, with the Classic compatibility layer, it did not come to pass. Hopefully this revelation will set things aright.
Assume that for every person, there is one package that, if he knew about it, he could use it to radically change his life, find real happiness, acquire great personal fortune, etc. What if he NEVER finds out about it, because he doesn't know what the nature of it is and he doesn't know what to look for? What if he NEVER finds it, because he silently downloads its package listing with an apt-get update but never looks at the description? His life has been impaired, possibly forever, out of ignorance.
Okay, I'm sold, where's a mirror?
Wait, dselect does support women, right?
fp