Parent is absolutely right. Railing against people who are trading your software is like yelling at people who put your song on a mix tape -- it's self defeating. The media trading ecosystem has always existed for as long as there has been media, and always will, so fighting that war is to be defeated before you begin.
However, if you were to clear the unwarranted resentment from your eyes, you might realise that sites like The Pirate Bay give you unprecedented *access* to this ecosystem. Thousands of transactions that used to happen in private are now happening in a way you can discover and participate in. You can capitalise on this -- you can insert yourself into this ecosystem and try to lure buyers for your product and accessories (or even T-shirts), or simply make a moral plea. You never could have done this 20 years ago. All of the trading would have gone on behind your back, instead.
Technology has put you in a superior position to what you had before -- you just don't realise it yet. And you won't be able to take advantage of it if you treat the participants as criminals.
[quote]Your design decisions could leave one to think that you are deliberately trying to keep the disabled out of the workforce and dependent on charity.[/quote]
What would be their motivation for doing this? Maybe I'm just a know-nothing 'tab', but I think your disability has twisted your mind a little bit.
But you probably spelled "sphinx" correctly. It was the extra creativity of fucking it up to "sphynx" that got this one noticed. Remember, it's not accuracy that gets you on Slashdot, it's the ability to distort and misinterpret a story so it will generate the most page views that counts. Because nothing gets a story more page views than an erroneous 'y'?
The subject line was incorrect, not misleading. There is a difference. Since you obviously are perfectly aware of whether or not you own slashdot, the implication that you do in the title could not possibly have been intended to mislead you. It was just a fuckup on the part of the sender.
Whether or not it's spam is another question -- annoying link pleading is not spam. Even form letters are not necessarily spam. But massively automated annoying form letter link pleading to the point that the things plugged into form letter fields seem to bear no relation to reality, probably do signify that this guy's crossed the line. But I don't think Hazelton's proven it.
"$10,000 speakers"
Everyone who listens to my Bang & Olufsen speakers is blown away by their incredible quality. Yes, they are pricy. But everyone who has listened to them has told me they are the best speakers they've ever heard.
Sometimes, you really do get what you pay for. If you think this proves anything, I suggest you do a little experiment. The next ten people who come to your house, instead of telling them how expensive and well-built your speakers are, tell them that you only paid a couple hundred dollars for those speakers, because the manufacturer had to get rid of them *fast*, and that you're not sure why. Then come back and tell how many of them said they were the best speakers they've ever heard.
Kind of like saying, 'The enemy has 281,474,976,710,656 rounds of ammunition, so in short, they can't damage our troops.' No, it's like saying: "We have 281,474,976,710,656 rounds of ammunition, so in short, we'll not lose due to lack of ammunition - provided the ammunition won't become unusable at some point." With all due respect, I don't think so. If the overuse of 'tinyurl' aliasing might present a stability problem, then it isn't our ammunition. It's theirs.
That's 281,474,976,710,656 different unique names that can point to somewhere on the web. Even if each eight-character shrunken name was assigned permanently then it is difficult to see how you could ever run out of names.
So in short the answer is that these name shortening services are not going to damage the web - provided the links they provide are permanent. Kind of like saying, 'The enemy has 281,474,976,710,656 rounds of ammunition, so in short, they can't damage our troops.'
He's derided Einstein-Cartan theory on specious grounds
Lately, in the (rather rarefied) physics community, Lubos really is used as a sort of contrary guide - if Lubos doesn't like it, you might be on the right track. And those aren't specious grounds at all. I know you were joking, but if there's any truth to that, it doesn't make the physics community look very good.
I live in Canada, never in my life have I heard of *anyone* being arrested or prosecuted for sharing media files for personal use. For business use, yes. For resale, yes. But does anyone have an example of any case of a personal, noncommercial use leading to a formal charge? From where I live, and probably most other Canadians, this is the RCMP saying, 'We are now officially not going to do what we've informally never been doing in the first place.' Perhaps to send a message to certain lobbying groups which are applying pressure? Or perhaps even to send a message to the current Canadian government, which is more friendly to big media companies than the preceding one. That message being, 'Don't go passing any laws that we don't see any way to enforce.'
"Instead of troubling yourself with the invconvenience of hiding your secrets, why don't you put them in this nice simple little lockbox we've made for you? And here's your key. Copies? No, I didn't make any copies. Scout's honour!"
That whole 'Not.' thing isn't considered a cool way to end a sentence anymore by most people. It seems to have gone the way of 'Psyche.' I kinda wish it hadn't, because I like it, but I don't make these decisions. I don't know who does, but there it is.
Actually, in response to your question I tested out my theory (I have a dummy account just for such purposes --shhhh) and it turns out that I didn't really understand Facebook, either. It goes pretty far, just not as far as I just claimed. If you mark 'Photos tagged of you' as private, then people looking at *your* profile will not get a link to see photos uploaded and tagged with your name by your friends. And of course -- if your whole profile is friends-only, even when people see your tags in your friends' photos, they will not be able to click your name and see your profile unless they are also on your friends list. You can also remove any tags to yourself on Facebook, and once removed, they cannot be restored, not even by the person who owns the picture. (This happens to my photos all the time -- women especially tend to be very picky about which photos of them get tags and which not.)
But that is all just about links: whoever can actually see your photos themselves is in fact entirely determined by the privacy settings of whoever uploads them, not by who is tagged in them. Basically, there was a rather prominent privacy option that I misinterpreted to restrict the photos themselves when actually it only restricts any linkage between your Facebook profile/identity and those photos. Sorry -- my bad. I'm glad you pressed me on it -- as this is good to know.
I think one of the big issues with the development of the social networking sites is that it's not always the person's decision to be featured on facebook - I don't have an account on facebook/myspace/etc, and yet I know there are numerous photos of me, labelled as such, on those sites, because I associate with people who do use them. It's not a big deal at the moment (the photos are only linked in the most tenous of ways, and none of them are particularly dodgy), but there is a potential there - even if someone isn't actually actively participating in such sites, there is likely to be information on them there. You're not on Facebook -- this is why you don't understand how it works, but you have recourse here. You can join Facebook, maintain a very small friends list, and set your profile to be unreadable by anybody else. Then you can change your privacy settings so that photos tagged of you are only visible to those on your friends list. This affects even photos tagged of you taken by other people. That way even if one of your friends decides to make their profile public, any photos they tag of you submit to YOUR privacy settings, not theirs. And since they can always see their own photos, they probably will not even notice that you have restricted their material to YOUR friends list. You don't even have to log in to maintain this privacy barrier -- any future photos that are tagged with your name submit to the same privacy settings. You can even go in and tag the photos with your own name yourself so that they WILL submit to your privacy settings.
Facebook is not like Myspace -- it's very much better thought through, and much more private by default. In fact I find them to be completely opposite in their core approaches. People who say Facebook/Myspace in one breath generally don't get it.
The point is a hard network disconnect causes driver responses and all sorts of other noise. Most network issues DON'T involve the plug being pulled, You can have plenty of network based issues without pulling the plug, killing the file sharing process on the remote machine is a good option for testing These are good points.
and process crashes are also far more common in enterprises than someone pulling the plug on the network. Can't agree with you there. You may have an extraordinary stable network connection, but there are a *whole lot* of people who don't. Where I live now until a few months ago the connection would go down (as in terminate, with effects exactly like pulling the plug) whenever the phone would ring. (I checked out the filter situation several times, they were fine.) And I have seen plenty of other people with wonky internet connections in their homes that go down (not slow down, GO down) at a moments notice, with exactly the same effect on the Tiger Finder as pulling the plug, if network shares are active. Filesharing processes going down on the server in mid-copy is in comparison something that I have almost never encountered. You're comparing process crashes versus lost connections *in enterprise* -- but you need to include the whole end-to-end in your assessment. Flaky connections happen to home users every day, and they *will* kill the Finder before it gets a chance to execute any buggy post-filemoving code -- at least they would before Leopard solved that problem and revealed another.
Now that the Leopard Finder's network issues are fixed this bug is much more of a potential issue for the average user than it used to be -- at least the average users who know about command-copy.
The Finder crashed and relaunched, leaving an orphaned Spotlight search window which forever hung there in an unusable state.
If the finder crashed, then why would you expect your test to be replicating this failure mode?
Try killing the file sharing process on the other side instead of just killing the network connection. Sure. But that's not the point that I was trying to make. What's more likely that, the remote filesharing process will go down, or that something will go wrong with the network connection along the way? The latter seems to me the far more likely situation -- which is why this bug has barely ever been remarked up by the rank-and-file Mac-using population -- precisely because the Finder rarely survives long enough to encounter it. The 'failure mode' itself would be in comparison an exceedingly rare event, is what I was trying to get across.
On OS X Tiger. I tried doing a move (command-drag) to an AppleShare IP volume I had mounted, and then pulling my ethernet jack in mid copy. Got the beachball of death. Could no longer eject my CD. The right side of my menu bar stopped responding to clicks. The Finder crashed and relaunched, leaving an orphaned Spotlight search window which forever hung there in an unusable state. Pretty much everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, short of a kernel panic, EXCEPT the original file was right there where I left it -- no data was lost.
Perhaps in pre-Leopard versions of OS X, the Finder was just too flaky for anyone to get as far as discovering this bug? After all, if your Finder tends to crash and hang-requiring-a-force-quit whenever you pull a volume mid-copy (especially network volumes, which face it are the only place this is at all likely to happen accidentally) -- then it's not going to get as far as remembering to fuck you over in the way its buggy programming dictates.
Leopard's Finder doesn't hang on network problems; therefore it is free to happily and incorrectly erase your data.
If I *ever* used command-copy, I think I would prefer the old behaviour, but seeing as there is NO GOOD REASON to ever use this modifier key, I don't much care. Didn't anyone else have a moment of pause in contemplation of executing a volume-to-volume move, thinking, yeah... yknow what? I just don't trust hard drives THAT much. I want to verify that the copy looks kosher before I pull the trigger on the delete. This is the way I've always felt about that function. This is not to excuse Apple for fucking it up -- I'm just saying that this bug is extremly, extremely obscure in my view, though quite potentially destructive.
Oh and by the way, for those of you constantly complaining that copying a folder COMPLETELY replaces the contents of the one with the same name... if you only knew, how much time I have spent over the years digging through unexpectedly 'merged' folders on Windows systems to separate out the intended wheat from the should-have-been-deleted chaff, you would realise that this is simply a matter of habit and of taste. There are way more instances when I want a folder to replace another completely, then to have them merged. When you know what your OS is going to do then there is no problem (and the Mac OS has NEVER wavered from its approach, and I'd like to remind you that drawing an analogy from the file behaviour, what happens with folders in the Mac OS is exactly what you would intuitively expect to happen had you not been trained on a conflicting system).
If the Mac swiched to the Windows/LINUX way now, I would end up wasting a WHOLE lot of my time picking merged folders back apart. For the sake of something which, to me, makes no intuitive sense, anyway. YMMV.
it's not illegal to build a structure within which people get bad or no cell phone reception. did you think you could press charges or sue the owner of the next building you walked into where you got bad reception? No. I didn't say anything about what should be or could be illegal. I merely stated that I don't see a difference between the two situations. Intentionally installing a jammer should probably be no more legal or illegal than intentionally surrounding your customers with a Faraday Cage. If you must know I think they should both probably be legal, although walking around with a jammer in your pocket passive-aggressively fucking with other people's equipment is also quite a demonstration of one's obsessive-compulsive assholity.
I think some talkers might instinctively talk louder because the mic piece picks up a lot of the surrounding noise too.
As opposed to the ears of the people one might converse with in person, which are obviously fitted with sophisticated cyborg frequency filters? Well yes actually. We can and do filter out ambient noise. Just not when we hear it on our phones?
I don't think you can have it both ways. And I think the reason people talk louder on cel phones is because they aren't hearing themselves very well on the earpieces, because of self-volume-suppression designed to prevent feedback. It's an instinctive response to the reduced *signal* that the *talker* is hearing, not to the *noise* that he imagines the *listener* might be hearing.
All jamming cell phone signals does is annoy customers, and cause potentially dangerous situations in case of an emergency. That is exactly why it is illegal. Remember that emergency responders might need to use phones, too. Also, many public radio systems in the US broadcast somewhere in the 800MHz range if I recall correctly. You certainly wouldn't want to jam those. If that's the case, then somebody better tell all the cell phone users and emergency responders to stop interfering with the public radio system...
It may be illegal in the USA to actively jam cell-phone signals, but as far as I know, there's no law prohibiting someone from passively jamming signals; see: Faraday Cage [wikipedia.org] Seriously, what's the difference? Jamming is jamming. Is there some way to 'passively' have a Faraday Cage installed in your establishment? I don't get how you can passively jam a signal.
I was eating out last weekend and a man on his cell phone was pacing around with a bluetooth device trying to give directions to somebody else who was on their way to the restaurant. All of the things that were annoying about the situation could have easily been solved without anybody being annoyed. Yes how annoying that somebody was trying to talk on the phone near you when clearly your desire was to have oral sex in an uninterrupted fashion. 87
I think some talkers might instinctively talk louder because the mic piece picks up a lot of the surrounding noise too. As opposed to the ears of the people one might converse with in person, which are obviously fitted with sophisticated cyborg frequency filters?
Slashdot Mirror
Parent is absolutely right. Railing against people who are trading your software is like yelling at people who put your song on a mix tape -- it's self defeating. The media trading ecosystem has always existed for as long as there has been media, and always will, so fighting that war is to be defeated before you begin. However, if you were to clear the unwarranted resentment from your eyes, you might realise that sites like The Pirate Bay give you unprecedented *access* to this ecosystem. Thousands of transactions that used to happen in private are now happening in a way you can discover and participate in. You can capitalise on this -- you can insert yourself into this ecosystem and try to lure buyers for your product and accessories (or even T-shirts), or simply make a moral plea. You never could have done this 20 years ago. All of the trading would have gone on behind your back, instead. Technology has put you in a superior position to what you had before -- you just don't realise it yet. And you won't be able to take advantage of it if you treat the participants as criminals.
[quote]Your design decisions could leave one to think that you are deliberately trying to keep the disabled out of the workforce and dependent on charity.[/quote] What would be their motivation for doing this? Maybe I'm just a know-nothing 'tab', but I think your disability has twisted your mind a little bit.
I refuse to believe you until you've done a double blind test. Just kidding. It sounds like your setup is pretty sweet.
The subject line was incorrect, not misleading. There is a difference. Since you obviously are perfectly aware of whether or not you own slashdot, the implication that you do in the title could not possibly have been intended to mislead you. It was just a fuckup on the part of the sender. Whether or not it's spam is another question -- annoying link pleading is not spam. Even form letters are not necessarily spam. But massively automated annoying form letter link pleading to the point that the things plugged into form letter fields seem to bear no relation to reality, probably do signify that this guy's crossed the line. But I don't think Hazelton's proven it.
"Never admit to malice that could easily be excused as indifference."
I live in Canada, never in my life have I heard of *anyone* being arrested or prosecuted for sharing media files for personal use. For business use, yes. For resale, yes. But does anyone have an example of any case of a personal, noncommercial use leading to a formal charge? From where I live, and probably most other Canadians, this is the RCMP saying, 'We are now officially not going to do what we've informally never been doing in the first place.' Perhaps to send a message to certain lobbying groups which are applying pressure? Or perhaps even to send a message to the current Canadian government, which is more friendly to big media companies than the preceding one. That message being, 'Don't go passing any laws that we don't see any way to enforce.'
"Instead of troubling yourself with the invconvenience of hiding your secrets, why don't you put them in this nice simple little lockbox we've made for you? And here's your key. Copies? No, I didn't make any copies. Scout's honour!"
That whole 'Not.' thing isn't considered a cool way to end a sentence anymore by most people. It seems to have gone the way of 'Psyche.' I kinda wish it hadn't, because I like it, but I don't make these decisions. I don't know who does, but there it is.
But that is all just about links: whoever can actually see your photos themselves is in fact entirely determined by the privacy settings of whoever uploads them, not by who is tagged in them. Basically, there was a rather prominent privacy option that I misinterpreted to restrict the photos themselves when actually it only restricts any linkage between your Facebook profile/identity and those photos. Sorry -- my bad. I'm glad you pressed me on it -- as this is good to know.
On OS X Tiger. I tried doing a move (command-drag) to an AppleShare IP volume I had mounted, and then pulling my ethernet jack in mid copy. Got the beachball of death. Could no longer eject my CD. The right side of my menu bar stopped responding to clicks. The Finder crashed and relaunched, leaving an orphaned Spotlight search window which forever hung there in an unusable state. Pretty much everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, short of a kernel panic, EXCEPT the original file was right there where I left it -- no data was lost. Perhaps in pre-Leopard versions of OS X, the Finder was just too flaky for anyone to get as far as discovering this bug? After all, if your Finder tends to crash and hang-requiring-a-force-quit whenever you pull a volume mid-copy (especially network volumes, which face it are the only place this is at all likely to happen accidentally) -- then it's not going to get as far as remembering to fuck you over in the way its buggy programming dictates. Leopard's Finder doesn't hang on network problems; therefore it is free to happily and incorrectly erase your data. If I *ever* used command-copy, I think I would prefer the old behaviour, but seeing as there is NO GOOD REASON to ever use this modifier key, I don't much care. Didn't anyone else have a moment of pause in contemplation of executing a volume-to-volume move, thinking, yeah ... yknow what? I just don't trust hard drives THAT much. I want to verify that the copy looks kosher before I pull the trigger on the delete. This is the way I've always felt about that function. This is not to excuse Apple for fucking it up -- I'm just saying that this bug is extremly, extremely obscure in my view, though quite potentially destructive.
Oh and by the way, for those of you constantly complaining that copying a folder COMPLETELY replaces the contents of the one with the same name ... if you only knew, how much time I have spent over the years digging through unexpectedly 'merged' folders on Windows systems to separate out the intended wheat from the should-have-been-deleted chaff, you would realise that this is simply a matter of habit and of taste. There are way more instances when I want a folder to replace another completely, then to have them merged. When you know what your OS is going to do then there is no problem (and the Mac OS has NEVER wavered from its approach, and I'd like to remind you that drawing an analogy from the file behaviour, what happens with folders in the Mac OS is exactly what you would intuitively expect to happen had you not been trained on a conflicting system).
If the Mac swiched to the Windows/LINUX way now, I would end up wasting a WHOLE lot of my time picking merged folders back apart. For the sake of something which, to me, makes no intuitive sense, anyway. YMMV.