If people start to charge in and use Linux without bothering to learn a few of the key fundamental differences between Linux and Windows, then there are two people who are to blame: the user who never bothered to learn, and the idiot who just threw an install disc at them and ran away. I honestly don't think a ten minute slideshow would be too much of a bother, and I wouldn't even have it run automatically. Just have it there in the home folder, and make sure people know about it. Even if only 5% of people look at it, that's 5% who might think twice before using their root password.
When it comes to things like this, educating the user is the only thing left to do. I don't think it's at all elitist to say that if people can't be bothered learning how to use their computers, they deserve what they get. Granted, with Linux, documentation in a newbie friendly format (i.e., not man pages) is lacking. What else is there to do though? The system itself is secure when it's used correctly, are we supposed to change the correct behavior to cater to the idiots who can't be bothered learning? Or should we tell them what they're doing wrong?
Mod parent up. I know he's AC, but the point he makes is still good: There is no amount of security that can protect your machine from a clueless user.
When you install a theme the normal way, you just drag the archive file - that is to say, no executeable parts, or any way to make the parts executeable - into the theme manager, and presto, it's installed and it asks if you want to apply it. This doesn't require root privilages because it installs to the user's personal themes folder within their home folder. When they do this, there's no way to sneak in a cron job (that's a scheduled task) or any other nasty automatically executing files. Installing from a.deb is usually unneccessary, and as this story proves, exposes your install to risk if you don't pay attention to what you're installing. In my opinion, Ubuntu, being the most newbie-visible Linux distro at the moment, has a responsibility to educate users on things like this. A PDF in their home folder, or a slide show that takes like ten minutes to go through, telling new users how Linux is different to Windows would work wonders, and take up virtually no space on the install disc. There's no excuse for there not being one.
As much as they'd like to abolish the idea of the first sale doctrine from our culture (or at least their products), it's not so much that they consider second hand purchasers to be criminals, but more that if the same CD key is used twice, there's no way to tell if that is due to piracy or resale without physically entering the home where it happens. On a semi-related note, if DLC keeps going the way it is, and if the first sale doctrine is rendered redundant, people should start campaigning the FTC (If I remember my acronyms of American overlord organisations right, that's the Federal Trade Commission, isn't it?) to force publishers to create a means of transferring the ownership of DLC. Ideally, any downloadable content you buy should be tied to your CD key, and people should be allowed to either directly pass their CD key on to someone else, or relinquish it for reuse, so a second hand buyer can use the key that came in the box.
An "invisibility cloak" these days doesn't just necessarily apply to the visible light spectrum. The cloak could be a thermal or radar "invisibility" cloak, leaving an object perfectly visible to the naked eye, but invisible on other scans. Penetrating thermal invisibility cloaks might end up more important, because camouflage can take care of visible light from overhead, it's the thermal that's the giveaway.
Under Australian law, it is illegal to import or even possess items refused classification. This also extends to items not yet classified, however not to those submitted to the ratings board and bearing that wonderful "this movie not yet rated" badge, like movie trailers do. If I were to publish a movie and never submit it for classification, it would be illegal to start selling it. If it were refused classification, I'd probably have to move out of the country if I wanted to keep my master copies.
Of course, all of this "law" business is rather redundant when the internet is taken into account. The developers of AvP know what will happen very well, and my guess is they'll quietly endorse it fully until our ratings board wakes up. People aren't going to order a copy of AvP, they're going to download it. Not just every Australian gamer who would have bought it, but every Australian gamer curious to see what got it banned. It's MASSIVE publicity for another game.
I'm unsure of my facts here, so by all means correct me, but I think I remember reading that GIMP was never originally intended to be a free Photoshop alternative. It started life as a very basic image editor, and it's been shaped by continual ad-hoc alterations into something we can call a Photoshop alternative. I wouldn't say it's a good enough Photoshop alternative for the really high end users who utilize Photoshop to it's full potential, but it's definitely more than enough for 99% of the Photoshop pirates who think they need it just to cut and paste Bush's head onto Hitler's body (a.k.a, 4chan regulars).
In my ignorance, I have to ask: What's so special about 139 and 445? What do they do normally, and why would blocking them help? No, I didn't RTFA. I'm too tired for this:P
I think for a real distilled view of the impact of piracy, we should ask the adult entertainment industry. They don't do concerts like musicians, or have big cinema releases like regular movies, so pretty much the only income of a porn studio comes from overpriced DVDs and licensed sex toys (as in ones made to mimic stars' body parts). My (obviously anecdotal) experience suggests that most of the pirates causing hollywood headaches are pretty avid consumers of porn, and given that they already pirate normal movies and music, I dare say they don't usually buy their porn either. If we could get some figures from the porn industry on just what impact piracy has had on them, then we could probably extrapolate that to the regular entertainment industry. Given that porn is still both plentiful and expensive, and I've actually seen the number of adult stores increase in the past few years, suggesting proffitability, I think the results of such a survey would be interesting to people on both sides of the copyright fence.
Astro Boy wasn't too bad, either... Not 100% accurate to the cartoon (seriously, WHY did they change how Toby died?! He should have been hit by a car!), but still a fairly good movie.
I've given up hope on the whole Valve making games for Linux thing. It's been talked about for years and nothing has ever come of it. If they were to do it, I'm sure their Linux efforts probably wouldn't extend further than a customised WINE based wrapper for their games. It's not like they're going to properly port six years of flagship products *cough* just the source engine *cough* for a minority OS.
I find it amazing that, in a system without data usage limits, 400MB is considered heavy. I work in an Optus shop in Australia, and we sell several different iPhone contracts, the highest of which comes with 2GB of data, and you can pin on another 1GB as an extra cost; I have seen people come into the shop to pay bills where they have exceeded the 3GB, month after month. I know this is just anecdotal, but it would suggest that usage limits encourage people to use all of what they pay for, and then some. Imposing limits on a previously limitless system, apart from angering customers, may actually increase traffic.
I heard of it when a friend gave me a disc and said "Here! It's an awesome sci-fi series, pity it got cancelled!" After watching the 13 or 14 episodes (I forget how many right now), I thought he'd played some sort of sick joke and was withholding the rest of the season from me.
Like all good series, it had it's tired patches. I stopped watching when the Ori came into it, I was just that sick of Daniel Jackson dooming the galaxy by angering godlike beings.
In every country where bit torrent is possible. It hasn't aired here in Australia yet (at least on free-to-air), so no harm no foul. I just saved myself a late night before work when it finally does air.
This seems to me to be like the old White Australia Policy of the 50s only worse. Instead of scaremongering about "yellow hordes" like our politicians did, the English ones are calmly portraying this as purely scientific. Australia is often criticised for our treatment of asylum seekers, and rightly so - if I had my way, the detention centers would have a strict time limit on them. Can't establish credentials in three years, off you go; don't care where. Currently, people are kept there for five or ten years, there are people dieing of old age in the centers. If we were to ever suggest such a scheme as DNA testing all would-be asylum seekers, I imagine the UN would have a few choice words for us. Among those would be "human rights violation".
On the contrary, they can bump the Linux ones' prices up just a little more because there's no Microsoft tax involved. The Windows ones might be more expensive, but they'd also have cost Best Buy more to get in stock.
Unschooling seems to me to be the home schooling equivalent of an educational theory known as "Free Market Education". In Free Market Education, students aren't restricted by compulsory learning units, and are instead encouraged to pursue whatever interests them. I make it sound pretty wishy-washy, but when I was at uni we did some extensive reading on the matter in my Futures class (a class specifically meant to study possible future trends in education and technology so we'd walk out of uni with relevant knowledge instead of skills and knowledge that were useful four years ago). Generally I think it's a nice ideal, but idealism seldom functions well in reality.
Every learner is different, and some people just aren't well suited toward math, for example. They'd benefit from a more linguistic or artistic education, and in a Free Market system, they'd not only be able to choose that from an early age, but they'd also be free to go back on that choice at any time. Within subjects this would mean that a student who struggles with arithmetic could jump ahead to algebra - I myself had a lot of trouble with math in primary school, but in high school, as soon as the math became more about concepts and problem solving than pure number crunching, I did quite well.
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If people start to charge in and use Linux without bothering to learn a few of the key fundamental differences between Linux and Windows, then there are two people who are to blame: the user who never bothered to learn, and the idiot who just threw an install disc at them and ran away. I honestly don't think a ten minute slideshow would be too much of a bother, and I wouldn't even have it run automatically. Just have it there in the home folder, and make sure people know about it. Even if only 5% of people look at it, that's 5% who might think twice before using their root password.
When it comes to things like this, educating the user is the only thing left to do. I don't think it's at all elitist to say that if people can't be bothered learning how to use their computers, they deserve what they get. Granted, with Linux, documentation in a newbie friendly format (i.e., not man pages) is lacking. What else is there to do though? The system itself is secure when it's used correctly, are we supposed to change the correct behavior to cater to the idiots who can't be bothered learning? Or should we tell them what they're doing wrong?
Mod parent up. I know he's AC, but the point he makes is still good: There is no amount of security that can protect your machine from a clueless user.
When you install a theme the normal way, you just drag the archive file - that is to say, no executeable parts, or any way to make the parts executeable - into the theme manager, and presto, it's installed and it asks if you want to apply it. This doesn't require root privilages because it installs to the user's personal themes folder within their home folder. When they do this, there's no way to sneak in a cron job (that's a scheduled task) or any other nasty automatically executing files. Installing from a .deb is usually unneccessary, and as this story proves, exposes your install to risk if you don't pay attention to what you're installing. In my opinion, Ubuntu, being the most newbie-visible Linux distro at the moment, has a responsibility to educate users on things like this. A PDF in their home folder, or a slide show that takes like ten minutes to go through, telling new users how Linux is different to Windows would work wonders, and take up virtually no space on the install disc. There's no excuse for there not being one.
As much as they'd like to abolish the idea of the first sale doctrine from our culture (or at least their products), it's not so much that they consider second hand purchasers to be criminals, but more that if the same CD key is used twice, there's no way to tell if that is due to piracy or resale without physically entering the home where it happens. On a semi-related note, if DLC keeps going the way it is, and if the first sale doctrine is rendered redundant, people should start campaigning the FTC (If I remember my acronyms of American overlord organisations right, that's the Federal Trade Commission, isn't it?) to force publishers to create a means of transferring the ownership of DLC. Ideally, any downloadable content you buy should be tied to your CD key, and people should be allowed to either directly pass their CD key on to someone else, or relinquish it for reuse, so a second hand buyer can use the key that came in the box.
An "invisibility cloak" these days doesn't just necessarily apply to the visible light spectrum. The cloak could be a thermal or radar "invisibility" cloak, leaving an object perfectly visible to the naked eye, but invisible on other scans. Penetrating thermal invisibility cloaks might end up more important, because camouflage can take care of visible light from overhead, it's the thermal that's the giveaway.
Under Australian law, it is illegal to import or even possess items refused classification. This also extends to items not yet classified, however not to those submitted to the ratings board and bearing that wonderful "this movie not yet rated" badge, like movie trailers do. If I were to publish a movie and never submit it for classification, it would be illegal to start selling it. If it were refused classification, I'd probably have to move out of the country if I wanted to keep my master copies.
Of course, all of this "law" business is rather redundant when the internet is taken into account. The developers of AvP know what will happen very well, and my guess is they'll quietly endorse it fully until our ratings board wakes up. People aren't going to order a copy of AvP, they're going to download it. Not just every Australian gamer who would have bought it, but every Australian gamer curious to see what got it banned. It's MASSIVE publicity for another game.
I'm flat out getting EIGHT megabits a second in this webforsaken country below the equator (guess which one!... Australia...).
I'm unsure of my facts here, so by all means correct me, but I think I remember reading that GIMP was never originally intended to be a free Photoshop alternative. It started life as a very basic image editor, and it's been shaped by continual ad-hoc alterations into something we can call a Photoshop alternative. I wouldn't say it's a good enough Photoshop alternative for the really high end users who utilize Photoshop to it's full potential, but it's definitely more than enough for 99% of the Photoshop pirates who think they need it just to cut and paste Bush's head onto Hitler's body (a.k.a, 4chan regulars).
In my ignorance, I have to ask: What's so special about 139 and 445? What do they do normally, and why would blocking them help? No, I didn't RTFA. I'm too tired for this :P
Wow... I've been playing with my calculator too much... I read "Err" not as the sound simliar to Uhh..., but as in Error...
I think for a real distilled view of the impact of piracy, we should ask the adult entertainment industry. They don't do concerts like musicians, or have big cinema releases like regular movies, so pretty much the only income of a porn studio comes from overpriced DVDs and licensed sex toys (as in ones made to mimic stars' body parts). My (obviously anecdotal) experience suggests that most of the pirates causing hollywood headaches are pretty avid consumers of porn, and given that they already pirate normal movies and music, I dare say they don't usually buy their porn either. If we could get some figures from the porn industry on just what impact piracy has had on them, then we could probably extrapolate that to the regular entertainment industry. Given that porn is still both plentiful and expensive, and I've actually seen the number of adult stores increase in the past few years, suggesting proffitability, I think the results of such a survey would be interesting to people on both sides of the copyright fence.
Astro Boy wasn't too bad, either... Not 100% accurate to the cartoon (seriously, WHY did they change how Toby died?! He should have been hit by a car!), but still a fairly good movie.
I'm curious, do the Mayan-speaking people of today still read and write Mayan text, or have they been swallowed up by the Roman alphabet too?
I've given up hope on the whole Valve making games for Linux thing. It's been talked about for years and nothing has ever come of it. If they were to do it, I'm sure their Linux efforts probably wouldn't extend further than a customised WINE based wrapper for their games. It's not like they're going to properly port six years of flagship products *cough* just the source engine *cough* for a minority OS.
Reception is generally quite good in Mackay, not so much when you get further out; particularly at the mine sites.
I find it amazing that, in a system without data usage limits, 400MB is considered heavy. I work in an Optus shop in Australia, and we sell several different iPhone contracts, the highest of which comes with 2GB of data, and you can pin on another 1GB as an extra cost; I have seen people come into the shop to pay bills where they have exceeded the 3GB, month after month. I know this is just anecdotal, but it would suggest that usage limits encourage people to use all of what they pay for, and then some. Imposing limits on a previously limitless system, apart from angering customers, may actually increase traffic.
I heard of it when a friend gave me a disc and said "Here! It's an awesome sci-fi series, pity it got cancelled!" After watching the 13 or 14 episodes (I forget how many right now), I thought he'd played some sort of sick joke and was withholding the rest of the season from me.
Like all good series, it had it's tired patches. I stopped watching when the Ori came into it, I was just that sick of Daniel Jackson dooming the galaxy by angering godlike beings.
In every country where bit torrent is possible. It hasn't aired here in Australia yet (at least on free-to-air), so no harm no foul. I just saved myself a late night before work when it finally does air.
Just wait until the next episode where they inadvertantly anger a powerful league/race/empire of beings who will dog their trail at every step.
This seems to me to be like the old White Australia Policy of the 50s only worse. Instead of scaremongering about "yellow hordes" like our politicians did, the English ones are calmly portraying this as purely scientific. Australia is often criticised for our treatment of asylum seekers, and rightly so - if I had my way, the detention centers would have a strict time limit on them. Can't establish credentials in three years, off you go; don't care where. Currently, people are kept there for five or ten years, there are people dieing of old age in the centers. If we were to ever suggest such a scheme as DNA testing all would-be asylum seekers, I imagine the UN would have a few choice words for us. Among those would be "human rights violation".
They claim all usual rights of ownership, but foist responsibilities back on the user.
The "blur" might be referring to speed. Like how some things are so fast all you see is a blur.
On the contrary, they can bump the Linux ones' prices up just a little more because there's no Microsoft tax involved. The Windows ones might be more expensive, but they'd also have cost Best Buy more to get in stock.
Unschooling seems to me to be the home schooling equivalent of an educational theory known as "Free Market Education". In Free Market Education, students aren't restricted by compulsory learning units, and are instead encouraged to pursue whatever interests them. I make it sound pretty wishy-washy, but when I was at uni we did some extensive reading on the matter in my Futures class (a class specifically meant to study possible future trends in education and technology so we'd walk out of uni with relevant knowledge instead of skills and knowledge that were useful four years ago). Generally I think it's a nice ideal, but idealism seldom functions well in reality.
Every learner is different, and some people just aren't well suited toward math, for example. They'd benefit from a more linguistic or artistic education, and in a Free Market system, they'd not only be able to choose that from an early age, but they'd also be free to go back on that choice at any time. Within subjects this would mean that a student who struggles with arithmetic could jump ahead to algebra - I myself had a lot of trouble with math in primary school, but in high school, as soon as the math became more about concepts and problem solving than pure number crunching, I did quite well.