Then why did Lincoln say "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it [...]"? That makes it sounds like it was about a lot more than slavery. Otherwise there wouldn't have been a war.
Yeah, tell me about it. I have yet to come across a website that can properly validate an e-mail address (according to the RFCs). Even gmail ultimately gets it wrong. I am guessing most server and client software out there also does it incorrectly. They all do some kind of ad-hoc, arbitrary parsing.
Luckily most places I have run into go accept +'s in addresses.
Wow! That new freshmeat.net page is awful compared to the well-done old one. The old one used to flow and fill the browser, as websites are supposed to do. The new one is rigid like a pamphlet. Very bad web design.
Vista is rock solid on solid hardware. Seriously. Vista is as reliable as Linux.
Until you use drivers, which have to be proprietary, third-party piles of crap. And if you intend on using your hardware, you can't go without them. Crappy drivers has been Window's main stability problem since XP.
For example, my wife's video driver crashes weekly on her brand new laptop running Vista. This requires a reboot after it happens. And she is running an up-to-date driver. I have never had any of the free Linux drivers -- which mostly come as part of the distribution -- crash on me. Same goes for the BSDs.
Yeah, it's not Vista's fault directly, but you can't use it without running into these crappy drivers. It's better than XP at not BSODing over a driver problem (I have yet to see a Vista BSOD), but its stability is still nothing like a good Linux or BSD system running free drivers.
Sooner or later, someone is going to come up with a better model to get me content I WANT to see without forcing me to wade through shit I've made it clear I don't want to be bothered with.
You're as anonymous as your credit card details allow you to be.
Then use anonymous Internet banking. There are a few implementations out there right now. I haven't used them myself, so I can't say if they are any good.
I have always wondered about how that works exactly. What happens if the author first distributes the work under a permissive license (BSD-style, cc-by, GFDL, etc), then submits the paper to a journal, doing the copyright transfer thing? Then the author still has freedom with his work thanks to the non-revocable license. Would a journal fall for that "trick"?
Anyone can distribute popular data very cheaply now-a-days. It happens all the time with new television episodes: there are generally only one or two unique video encodings of a single episode, and tens of thousands of people have it within a few hours of it hitting the net. Except for the the torrent trackers, this all happens entirely on consumer hardware.
Patches even have the advantage over the above example by being legal.
The company should first run a torrent tracker for the patch and remain in the torrent as a permanent seed. Then give very clear, explicit permission for anyone to be able to distribute the patch, and supply MD5 checksums of the patch on the official website. That way anyone can download a patch from any of the many mirrors that will inevitably go up, and verify the integrity with MD5. The company could even digitally sign patches too.
Except for the MD5/signature part, this is what Blizzard does successfully. Side note: because the torrent file contains hashes, one could potentially use the torrent file from Blizzard to verify the integrity of a mirror's patch, so an MD5 checksum would just be a convenience thing.
I was going to say "good riddance", but I was mixing them up with places like FilePlanet. I pictured that annoying situation where you want to download a 200kB file from them, but first you have to sign up for an account. So, you fill out a big form, check your e-mail, log in, click your way through several pages to the actual download, then get in a 40 minute queue. When you make it out of the queue you have 1 minute to start your download or else you have to get back in line and wait again. Awful.
FileFront looks like it didn't have that bullshit. Sad news then.
To get water and electricity, I have to go with only one company. No one else can provide that service. If they refuse to service me, I have to move.
Where I live, I have only one choice of broadband ISP. If my ISP ever decides not to give me service, I would have to move somewhere else to get broadband. As another example, my parents another state over also only have one choice, so it's the same situation for them.
Some places are a bit luckier and have a whopping two choices, like DSL vs. cable or something.
My ISP struck up a deal with my local government and so they are the only company allowed to provide me broadband. That's a government granted monopoly. The government says they are the only one who can sell broadband here. This is the reason why they shouldn't be allowed to cut people off just because they feel like it.
AT&T is a private company. Access to the service they provide is not a right.
AT&T is a government granted monopoly because another ISP can't come in and wire people up. Therefore, they are carefully regulated and don't have the same flexibility of a normal private company. There will probably be no other ISPs for a customer to go to instead, so they shouldn't be allowed to deny service to customers who pay taxes to the government that grants AT&T their monopoly.
Internet access should be treated as a utility like phones, water, sewage, gas, and electricity.
Slashdot Mirror
Then why did Lincoln say "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it [...]"? That makes it sounds like it was about a lot more than slavery. Otherwise there wouldn't have been a war.
Yeah, tell me about it. I have yet to come across a website that can properly validate an e-mail address (according to the RFCs). Even gmail ultimately gets it wrong. I am guessing most server and client software out there also does it incorrectly. They all do some kind of ad-hoc, arbitrary parsing.
Luckily most places I have run into go accept +'s in addresses.
I think that a craigs-list moderation style of X spam reports and you're cut off is the way to go.
Your proposal is vulnerable to a sybil attack. How do you know what votes to trust?
Wow! That new freshmeat.net page is awful compared to the well-done old one. The old one used to flow and fill the browser, as websites are supposed to do. The new one is rigid like a pamphlet. Very bad web design.
If there were someway to magically make illegal torrents go away, the TPB would cease to exist.
Bzztt! Wrong! If the "illegal" torrents were suddenly removed, only a mere 20% of TPB's torrents would go. 80% of the torrents are legal.
you can't recreate the original work from the checksum
If you could, that would be an amazing compression algorithm!
Vista is rock solid on solid hardware. Seriously. Vista is as reliable as Linux.
Until you use drivers, which have to be proprietary, third-party piles of crap. And if you intend on using your hardware, you can't go without them. Crappy drivers has been Window's main stability problem since XP.
For example, my wife's video driver crashes weekly on her brand new laptop running Vista. This requires a reboot after it happens. And she is running an up-to-date driver. I have never had any of the free Linux drivers -- which mostly come as part of the distribution -- crash on me. Same goes for the BSDs.
Yeah, it's not Vista's fault directly, but you can't use it without running into these crappy drivers. It's better than XP at not BSODing over a driver problem (I have yet to see a Vista BSOD), but its stability is still nothing like a good Linux or BSD system running free drivers.
Sooner or later, someone is going to come up with a better model to get me content I WANT to see without forcing me to wade through shit I've made it clear I don't want to be bothered with.
The Pirate Bay.
I don't remember who first said it, but this is my favorite: "If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color."
only americans are "free speech nazies" because they fail to understand the difference between censorship and limitations in speech
That's because there is no difference. There is no reason to ever limit speech.
HTML tidy immediately chops 60kB off of it. So that's 60kB that wasn't doing anything at all.
You're as anonymous as your credit card details allow you to be.
Then use anonymous Internet banking. There are a few implementations out there right now. I haven't used them myself, so I can't say if they are any good.
I have always wondered about how that works exactly. What happens if the author first distributes the work under a permissive license (BSD-style, cc-by, GFDL, etc), then submits the paper to a journal, doing the copyright transfer thing? Then the author still has freedom with his work thanks to the non-revocable license. Would a journal fall for that "trick"?
crap consumer routers have a nasty habit of dropping dead every 18 months
That's so true. Netgear and Linksys routers tend to die on me after a year or two. I got one once that died inside of 48 hours.
As in it was a work of art - not a commercial for toys.
Correct, the Saturday morning cartoon Watchmen was for selling toys.
quantum sex
That's how my wife always refers to it. :-(
Anyone can distribute popular data very cheaply now-a-days. It happens all the time with new television episodes: there are generally only one or two unique video encodings of a single episode, and tens of thousands of people have it within a few hours of it hitting the net. Except for the the torrent trackers, this all happens entirely on consumer hardware.
Patches even have the advantage over the above example by being legal.
The company should first run a torrent tracker for the patch and remain in the torrent as a permanent seed. Then give very clear, explicit permission for anyone to be able to distribute the patch, and supply MD5 checksums of the patch on the official website. That way anyone can download a patch from any of the many mirrors that will inevitably go up, and verify the integrity with MD5. The company could even digitally sign patches too.
Except for the MD5/signature part, this is what Blizzard does successfully. Side note: because the torrent file contains hashes, one could potentially use the torrent file from Blizzard to verify the integrity of a mirror's patch, so an MD5 checksum would just be a convenience thing.
I think you are mixing them up with FilePlanet, which isn't worth using.
I was going to say "good riddance", but I was mixing them up with places like FilePlanet. I pictured that annoying situation where you want to download a 200kB file from them, but first you have to sign up for an account. So, you fill out a big form, check your e-mail, log in, click your way through several pages to the actual download, then get in a 40 minute queue. When you make it out of the queue you have 1 minute to start your download or else you have to get back in line and wait again. Awful.
FileFront looks like it didn't have that bullshit. Sad news then.
Surfing Freenet today is like surfing the web around '94 or '95, but with no blink tags.
To get water and electricity, I have to go with only one company. No one else can provide that service. If they refuse to service me, I have to move.
Where I live, I have only one choice of broadband ISP. If my ISP ever decides not to give me service, I would have to move somewhere else to get broadband. As another example, my parents another state over also only have one choice, so it's the same situation for them.
Some places are a bit luckier and have a whopping two choices, like DSL vs. cable or something.
My ISP struck up a deal with my local government and so they are the only company allowed to provide me broadband. That's a government granted monopoly. The government says they are the only one who can sell broadband here. This is the reason why they shouldn't be allowed to cut people off just because they feel like it.
if Steam's servers are taken offline, access controls will be removed.
You would hope so. It's not guaranteed in any way.
As soon as your OS is used by more than 50 people
If we are going to make comparisons based on popularity don't forget that the most popular restaurant in the world is McDonald's.
AT&T is a private company. Access to the service they provide is not a right.
AT&T is a government granted monopoly because another ISP can't come in and wire people up. Therefore, they are carefully regulated and don't have the same flexibility of a normal private company. There will probably be no other ISPs for a customer to go to instead, so they shouldn't be allowed to deny service to customers who pay taxes to the government that grants AT&T their monopoly.
Internet access should be treated as a utility like phones, water, sewage, gas, and electricity.